Welcome to the The Confab, the term derives from "confidential talk", which was commonly used in the Prohibition Era for meetings and conversations that took place in the smoky, rule-breaking speakeasies of that time.
The informal, privacy focused and clandestine nature of Ungovernable Misfits lends itself to these discussions. So, grab a seat and a stiff drink from the concealed bar, listen and revel in the conversation.
On this episode, host of Rock Paper Bitcoin and writer of Risk Fundamentals, Fundamentals joins Max for a coffee to discuss bitcoin, bears and bravery.
SHOW DISCUSSION
Fundamentals, an actuary turned Bitcoiner, discusses his journey from a disillusioned career in traditional finance to embracing Bitcoin as a means of regaining personal sovereignty. He shares his frustrations with the corruption and lack of integrity in the actuarial profession, and how discovering Bitcoin has given him the conviction to take risks and fight for his beliefs. Fundamentals emphasizes the importance of using Bitcoin as a tool to improve one's life, rather than just hoarding it, and the need for individuals to discover how to live on hard money.
- TWITTER: https://x.com/BBrianPaul
- ROCK PAPER BITCOIN: https://episodes.fm/1686471174/episode/Mzc5NzA3MDgtODE0Zi00N2I0LWI5NzItYjdjZjRlMjYwZmRi
- BLOG: https://risk-fundamentals.ghost.io/
- PERSONAL PODCAST: https://episodes.fm/aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWRpYS5yc3MuY29tL2Z1bmRhbWVudGFscy9mZWVkLnhtbA
IMPORTANT LINKS
SHOW SPONSORS
FOUNDATION
https://foundation.xyz/ungovernable
Foundation builds Bitcoin-centric tools that empower you to reclaim your digital sovereignty.
As a sovereign computing company, Foundation is the antithesis of today’s tech conglomerates. Returning to cypherpunk principles, they build open source technology that “can’t be evil”.
Thank you Foundation Devices for sponsoring the show!
Use code: Ungovernable for $10 off of your purchase
CAKE WALLET
https://cakewallet.com
Cake Wallet is an open-source, non-custodial wallet available on Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux.
Features:
- Built-in Exchange: Swap easily between Bitcoin and Monero.
- User-Friendly: Simple interface for all users.
Monero Users:
- Batch Transactions: Send multiple payments at once.
- Faster Syncing: Optimized syncing via specified restore heights
- Proxy Support: Enhance privacy with proxy node options.
Bitcoin Users:
- Coin Control: Manage your transactions effectively.
- Silent Payments: Static bitcoin addresses
- Batch Transactions: Streamline your payment process.
Thank you Cake Wallet for sponsoring the show!
VALUE FOR VALUE
Thanks for listening you Ungovernable Misfits, we appreciate your continued support and hope you enjoy the shows.
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TIME:
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(00:03:39) THANK YOU CAKE WALLET
(00:05:24) THANK YOU FOUNDATION
(00:06:47) Early Morning Math with Fundamentals
(00:11:39) Rock Paper Bitcoin Podcast
(00:13:36) In 1974, Two Autists Had an Actuary Baby...
(00:15:30) The Grind: 1996-2024
(00:30:37) You Actually Have To Outrun The Bear
(00:37:12) There Is No Institutional Adoption
(00:43:00) It's About Individual Adoption
(00:51:11) To Have Conviction
(01:02:30) Fighting For Your Life
[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin.
[00:00:16] Unknown:
Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking 0. Welcome back to another Comfab episode. This episode is with fundamentals. But before we dive into it, I'm gonna read through the top boost from the last episode with Oscar Mery from fountain. Tone wrecker with 10,000 sats. Great to get these updates from Oscar at fountain. Still playing with how my RSS hosted music under Tone wrecker tracks. Functions differently from what is under Paul Birkin on Wave Lake at Henry with 5,000 sats. I would never have heard of Ungovernable Misfits were it not on fountain and Pies' relentless mushroom rocket and strong arms, 420 sat boosts.
And where would I be without poignant imagery of subway guy, vaginal blood farts, and Max's crusty feet haunting my subconscious. Probably not trying to wipe my mind with doctor Glenn doctor Glenn Maranji. Cheers, guys. Bleeding edge stuff. Jadki with 5,000 sats. Canary reviews dot I o. I don't know what that is, so I'm not endorsing it or anything. Tread carefully. Blazer with 1,000 sats. Can't think of a clever or witty boost. Good show, though. FOMO, Medtronic, exclamation mark. Abel or a I b l e, with 801 sats. Without Fountain, I wouldn't know about Uncoverable Misfits, so I'll always be grateful for that.
Keep the hard work going, brother Max. Bitcoin Boomer 12. Fascinating episode. I'm listening on Fountain when possible, but sometimes it's good to see the speakers as well. So I have to still use Spotify sometimes. I don't find Nosta very easy or useful, but I just keep going because I know it will get better, and I will get better. Oscar explains stuff really well. Bhrex8. Great content and useful info. Wartime. Good rip. Been a fan of fountain since the beginning, and it was amazing when I heard them switching to use Noster. The new mashup is fire.
Pies at the Pleb. Biz, mushroom, American flag, gun, film, strong-arm, salute, British flag, plus, great British flag, equals, shit. Oh, I actually probably agreed to be honest, mate. User, 872-49965. New Beyond fountain. Already think it's the future. Welcome, mate. And finally, Shadrach, boosting 70 sats a minute. Thank you, mate. Much appreciated. Thank you to everyone who's been supporting the show with boosts, Pay NIM support, Lightning, XMR chat, and all the other ways that people have been helping this show grow Before we start, I just wanna say a quick thank you to our sponsors I'll start with K Qualit, our new sponsors.
It took me a long time trying to sift through and find people that ungovernable misfits would work with. It might sound like it's easy, but there's a lot of scammy bullshit in the space. There's lending and thieving and everything else that goes along with it. And to find a company that just builds and ships without all the bullshit is tough. Cakewallet have been around for a long time, and you can use them on pretty much every platform. You can use them on your iPhone or Android device. Or for desktop, you can use them on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The UX is clean and simple. Literally, any idiot can use this, myself included. But under the hood, it's pretty powerful. You can connect this to your Bitcoin and Monero nodes. You can use silent payments. You can exchange within the wallet. And for those of you who actually use your Bitcoin, you can buy gift cards to pay for petrol, groceries, or anything else you might need. If you care about your privacy, security, and actually building this circular economy we all talk about, I'd suggest checking Cake Wallet out. Go to cakewallet.com. For Android, you can download the APK, or otherwise visit the App Store.
And if you have any questions, you can reach out to me, and I'll be having Seth and some of the other team members on the show very soon. Check them out at cakewallet.com. And finally, a huge thank you to Foundation. We wouldn't be where we are without them. They have been supporting us for years now and helped us grow. I had someone whinge in the comments that I had said the best hardware wallet, that it was definitive. Apparently, that's legacy. So I'll rephrase it a little bit. I think, and most of the people that I respect think that foundation make the best hardware device.
The passport is fully open source. It's beautifully designed. It's piss easy to use. Literally, anybody can use this thing without having to read a 1,000,000 guides just to send a transaction. It has all the features that anyone could really need. And if you really struggle, you can pay an extra $99 and have Bitcoin q and a hold your hand through the setup process. You can even have help setting up a multisig. This is the hardware that I suggest to all my friends and family. And if you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.xyzed, and you can use the code Ungovernable for a discount.
If you have any questions, you can reach out to me. Enjoy the show. Early early morning for mister Fundamentals.
[00:06:52] Unknown:
This is pretty normal, actually. Is it? I'm just it's normal. It's not like I'm used to waking up, making some coffee, and then doing math for a couple hours.
[00:07:03] Unknown:
Is that your routine, is it? I'm sure John's told me that. Yeah. He said something like, yeah. You get up, and then you, like, go and sun your balls while doing maths equations.
[00:07:13] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, the balls normally aren't part of the math. I wish they were, but, Listen, you're too too too camp, I assume. I do go outside. I mean, if if the weather permits, I try to be outside in the morning, you know, with the sunrise. It is dark here. Like, I just went out to walk my dog before before we ripped and there are stars still out there. Really bright. Pretty amazing, actually.
[00:07:36] Unknown:
It's, Pennsylvania, you're right, isn't it? Yeah. The same place that old Johnny D is lurking.
[00:07:45] Unknown:
Yep. We're sort of on, opposite sides of the state.
[00:07:49] Unknown:
Probably for the best. That's funny.
[00:07:54] Unknown:
We've been trying to we've been trying to get him to come to some like, we go to the middle the smack dab middle of the state to have, like, some events. We're working on him. Everybody loves John. You know? Oh, I'm too busy. Can't do it. I mean, he'd he really is he's busier than we are. He is
[00:08:12] Unknown:
now particularly busy. It's impossible to actually get a hold of him now. Just screens my calls and gets on with more important business.
[00:08:22] Unknown:
I could see it. Yeah. You've done your maths already, or am I interrupting that? Well, so this would be a day where I'll just do it later. You know? Okay. This time, it's so it's a little odd to just wake up and get right on a podcast, but, it's fun. It's fun. So I've been, you know, really looking forward to talking to you. Yeah. We've never spoken before. Yeah. We've never really talked. No. I,
[00:08:49] Unknown:
I fucking hate texting. Mhmm. Although I do it a lot in all, like, the Telegram groups and, like, organizing our government misfits, I actually fucking hate it. So for me, having a conversation on a messaging app doesn't do anything. Like, I don't feel like, oh, I know that person at all or I've got anything from it. It just, like, stresses me out. So for me, like, having a conversation like this and getting to know people is by far the best way. It's interesting. Lurking in all the gone. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I must be, like, really retarded because I
[00:09:23] Unknown:
I I can feel like best friends with somebody after a text.
[00:09:30] Unknown:
Well, you probably can read and write, which probably helps.
[00:09:34] Unknown:
I think I'm so autistic. Like, I'd stick up so fucking autistic that I just I end up in this world where this idealized world where we're just, like, fucking awesome. Like, oh my god. I mean, there's so many people understand me. This is insane.
[00:09:51] Unknown:
You're in the right place with your autism.
[00:09:54] Unknown:
We are surrounded by fucking autism. Look. If a text doesn't end with some kind of, like, horrible horrible argument, I feel like I was understood. Winning. Yeah. You know? So, yeah, I I, like, love I love Telegram. I just love it. The voice notes are good, but no one really likes them. Yeah. I will say if you really if you're really trying to get somebody to understand you, it's not great. Yeah. Like, if you're not gonna be happy until you get, like, confirmation that they actually know what you said, it's not a great medium. No. It is especially when you cannot read or write properly, it's, it's fucking
[00:10:34] Unknown:
it's fucking horrific. So, yeah. No. I thought it'd be good to just catch up with you. Like, our paths cross a lot in different groups, and I don't listen to a huge amount of pods, but I caught you on, the bugle the other day. I was chuckling away, and I thought, that's Alright. I hadn't I really don't know how that thing went because,
[00:10:55] Unknown:
you know, there there's nobody willing to stand by their own identity to give me feedback on it, you know. Those guys are their characters and they were shitting on they were shitting on me for 2 hours and, you
[00:11:09] Unknown:
know, it's just that was that was a hard one to walk away from and say, oh, that went really well. But I had a I mean, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. It was good. It was good. I only listened to half of it because I, I was at the gym, and then I listened to, like, the first half. And I was like, I'm actually not training here. I'm just, like, chuckling away and just, like, fucking around. I was like, no. I need to put some music on now. But, no. It was good. First half was a good half. You should finish it. Okay. That was definitely,
[00:11:33] Unknown:
I thought for for myself, like, where's where were you where would you get my best part of the first half?
[00:11:39] Unknown:
And you do your rock paper Bitcoin podcast as well with Business Cat, don't you? Yep. How many episodes are you doing on that? Is it, like, a weekly thing? Or We do every other week.
[00:11:50] Unknown:
So we just we just let released episode 49, so we got our big 50 coming up. Oh, nice. Celebrating? Yeah. I mean, we're just gonna know we're gonna note the number. I think we're gonna act. We actually have a plan. We have a plan for look. So we never have a plan. So this is we'll do something a little special. Nice. And what do you cover on,
[00:12:13] Unknown:
rock paper bitcoin? Is it just like general? Is it news or is it like not that bitcoin related or It's really strange.
[00:12:19] Unknown:
The best way I could describe it is is just like a continual conversation with Business Cat and I. So Okay. Every 2 weeks, we just catch up, and everybody sort of just catches up on where we are. But we are like I mean, I feel like we're taking people through our journey kinda like you are with where you are professionally. I you know, I'm going through some I went through something very similar and, like, the first 30 episodes of the show were me explaining that that's about to happen. Like, I'm about to lose my job, and I'm gonna have, you know, figure out figure out this post fiat thing. And, you know, business cat is in his rabbit hole around, like, the geomagnetic pole shift and things like that. And so it's sort of you know, we're just having a conversation about where we are in our lives, and, it's people have, people have decided that they like that.
[00:13:08] Unknown:
It's very different vibe to, like, something that's too structured and feels, just not real, basically. So I think they always make for the best pods. The, move away from fear and you getting fired, what happened there? Again, just from John, he was like, oh, you were x finance similar to, like, Ben Gunn sort of thing and then had left. But I don't I don't really know the story. So what happened with that? Yeah. Okay. So, the story begins on a sunny day in 1974.
[00:13:40] Unknown:
A baby was born. That was me. Born to 2 autistic parents. So I I mean, okay, so I was always a square peg in a round hole. The way I describe myself somehow surviving in like the tradfi in the normal world was, you know that meme of big bird on the death star? This is me at work today and it's it's like yeah it's like big bird it's like a bunch of you know soldiers following Darth Vader and then there's big bird you know just sticks out. So I was trained to be something called an actuary. I don't know if you have any idea what's going on. Accountant, isn't it? Yeah. An actuary is an accountant. So ideally, right, like the way the, the way a police report would describe an actuary.
I'd say an accountant that deals with uncertain outcomes. So they're so they're under so they traditionally work in fields like insurance where probabilities Yeah. You're accounting for things like cash flows, but you don't know when they're gonna happen because you don't know when people are going to die, etcetera. Mhmm. So we call them contingent outcomes. Okay. So so I was trained to be an actuary, and I was internally, my own autistic way, actually believed that, you know, they did some idealized version of this. And I thought I was gonna save the world with my ability to understand, you know, financial systems that are probabilistic.
And, so, like, you know, my career, you know, started in the nineties. You know, I just I kept getting really bored, you know, more and more bored with it. I got very disillusioned because I saw the majority of actuaries actually didn't do what I just described. They were big. What what you end up doing as an accountant is, or what an accountant typically gets paid to do is to set assumptions and then sign their name to say these are the assumptions that, we're comfortable with. And they're usually they're usually assumptions that make a company look better than they are. When it comes to what an actuary does, we look at companies' liabilities. So, like, imagine a pension, you know, a UK pension scheme as they call it there. Right? An actuary would say, it's well funded or it's not well funded. They would understand, you know, how long it's gonna have to pay its claims for. They would look at the amount of money that's in there and say, based on certain assumptions, yes or no, they're solvent.
And so it could be that it could be that the plan is solvent if you assume an 11% interest rate. Mhmm. But if you assume a 7% interest rate, it's not solvent. Now, without getting into what like, why a lower discount rate means higher liability, We lived through in the last 2 years why raising rates lowered like the long term value of bonds to the point where it became problematic for banks, right? So, it does the same thing for liabilities as it does for assets. Higher interest rates means lower asset values, lower liabilities. Right? So actuary will want to, tell a company that they can assume a very high discount rate so that their liabilities look low. Right?
And even today, they're signing off on 8, 9 percent 8, 9 percent interest rates even today when, you know, the rates were as high as they'd ever been, and, you know, we're talking 5%. So I guess that was that was all to say that it's very corrupt in a way that even, like, lay lay people who understand financial markets, like, I think Bitcoiners are, I'm actually really impressed in general. Like, the average Bitcoiner knows more than, like, the 95th percentile of person I worked with for 30 years, but they don't understand this basic thing I'm talking about. And Mhmm. An actuary basically gets paid till I I would say, almost a lie about what the future holds in a way that no one's gonna realize or figure out. You know, that was a glaring example. People do understand interest rates, but there are, like, a there are dozens of other assumptions that go in that can lever that could lever the value of liabilities.
[00:18:02] Unknown:
Presumably, like, you're in that job, and Ben's talked to me about this before. You start thinking differently. You start thinking, well, that's not true. Well, hold on a second. No. We should be accounting for this and that. And, actually, what we're saying is not truthful, and it's not right. And it's very frustrating, especially as someone who cares about these things. Like, to just go along with something that you know is wrong, it, like, just feels horrible. But when you start bringing it up, people aren't very happy about that. Like, if you start in that culture saying, good morning. Just to let you know that we are lying. That is our job is to lie and that we are gonna cause a huge amount of problems, and what we're doing is wrong. No one's gonna be like, yeah. Do you know what? I haven't thought about that. Let's talk about it. Let's see if we can change. Like, presumably, you either go along with it even though you work that out, and a little bit of you dies inside, but you take the money and you carry on or or you, you know, you leave.
[00:19:03] Unknown:
Yeah. And I I would say, oh my god. I mean, I listen to I listen to Ben's conversations very, very intently. I it's one of the few times I really felt like I was watching a TV show about my life in a certain way. Right? But even, like, what he experienced was just a like, he was he experienced that with a bunch of people he expected to be criminals, and it was not, what I experienced was a slight step beyond that where I saw all of society accepting it. So these guys wouldn't just these guys don't just tell the like the CIO of a bank what the assumption is. You understand? They're testifying in court cases as expert witnesses.
They're negotiating on behalf of gigantic unions. They're in charge of government agencies. And so I'm also watching the entire world go along with it and trust them and then watching all their financial systems get destroyed. Right? So, look, in the last 30 years, watched Social Security, Medicare, pensions, life insurance. Like, you watch all of these financial systems get destroyed under totally under the guise of how they were being advised. Mhmm. And so to me, it wasn't just that they were shit. It I got just as angry as the lemmings who trusted them, which really made me unpopular. Like I like to say I was the most I was the most hated actuary on the face of this earth.
There was an anonymous there was an anonymous message board that, you know, I was part of. I've told the story on our podcast but like I was just a maniac, an unhinged maniac expressing my hatred and exposing all the all the shit.
[00:20:56] Unknown:
But you gotta do it. Right? I imagine that just kills your soul otherwise. I I say you've gotta do it. You can know what you know, and you can just bury your head in the sand and go into work in the mornings. And you're gonna fucking hate yourself. Like, yeah, I see it all the time. I see people who are in those type of roles going into London. They kinda know what they're doing is, like, wrong, and they they kind of hate themselves a bit, and they end up with cocaine problems and hooker problems and a lot of other problems where they just spend the money that they're earning on stuff to try and forget that they're actually a piece of shit. They can't take the step to go fuck this. I'm leaving. It's bullshit.
[00:21:39] Unknown:
They have acting problems. It really is what it is. It's like it's really hard. It requires I mean, it really requires you act a certain way even if you're hiding in plain sight as a rebel. Right? You can only do like, you're still there, and you can't escape yourself. You know, I was embarrassed to say I was an actuary for a really long time, and I think it's been decades where I didn't even say this is what I did for a living. And it wasn't until I got sacked, right, and I started thinking about what I do and what I what kind of what I am is that I started telling people that that's actually my profession because I'm no longer well, no I'm no longer working for them. Right? I'm sort of on my own observing the financial systems that I'm observing now, and I am I'm okay saying that I'm doing it as an actuary, my own idealized version of what it was. It's almost like I survived it. It didn't get killed out of me in 30 years somehow.
Somehow finding Bitcoin and approaching the world the way I do and the way we do has kept this little pilot light alive. And I think in some way, I was supposed to survive to be able to look at the world through my lens and through, you know, through what I was trained to do. But it's interesting already sorry, mate. I don't I don't I never shut the fuck up. I think you know this. Business guys told me his like, our wives listen to the show, and his wife's primary issue is how many times I interrupt him. My wife's primary issue is how many times I interrupt him. What's his?
He was mad. Business Scats is like the coolest fucking dude ever. He has no issues. You know? He just like, him and I, we just go on and do it. But our we listen to our wives. Like, they're the we feel like they're the only ones who even listen. But they both say it's me who always interrupts. That's our running joke.
[00:23:35] Unknown:
So sorry, man. I guess, I'm that's No. No. That's cool. It's cool. It's hard when you, when you don't have video. You know? Sometimes you just have, like, a pause and then you both go at the same time. But, I was gonna say, were you already involved in Bitcoin during that time leading up to you getting fired from your work? Was it something that was already on your mind, or was this something you Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So here's I'll say now
[00:24:03] Unknown:
we've covered 1974. Let's, cover let's start at 2020. I think 20 so I started working in 1996, and, you know, I can almost say I never really added any value for 25 years. It's not that I didn't try, but, the closest I came to ever adding value anywhere was in, like, the mid 2000s. I started looking at pensions in a we started pioneering this thing that ended up getting called liability driven investments, which was blamed for the 2022 Bank of England bailout. But I didn't really add any value, in my opinion. You know, I was trying. I tried to I learned a lot, but it's very hard to add value when you have all these people in the way that are really you you have rules that disincentivize value. You have people that just want to keep their jobs. It's very hard to actually do that. In 2020, when the markets were going out of, like, completely haywire, you might recall.
I didn't I wasn't in Bitcoin yet, but I was doing my particular job, which my particular job at the time was explaining the performance of a very, very complicated, like, insanely complicated options system. And in 2020, like, nothing was making sense. Like, in February that month of February, nothing was making sense at all. And, you know, we were I was up till, like, midnight, 1 AM every day because we had to send some we had to send a report to our chief investment officer. So every night, like, I was just up by my computer with this disturbing feeling that nothing made sense.
And I did I I I did end up figuring something out that I converted into a trade I basically converted into a program for our company that ended up making in a very low effort, like, about $50,000,000 a year. And after about a year, once I proved that that worked, I started getting a little uppity about, like, I didn't ask for any I didn't ask for, like, pay or promotion or anything like that. I just asked to focus on this thing because it had the potential to actually be much more. It had the potential to, you know, bring in 100 of 1,000,000 to 1,000,000 of dollars a year. And there's something really stupid that anybody could have figured out, but it just happened to be I would happen to be the autistic one that spent enough time on it. So, you know, I started really battling with the company about focusing on doing this. And so anytime they anytime I got shit about a project that wasn't this, I did basically told them I didn't give a shit, you know?
Why am I like, you know, there's, like, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars that all I have, you know, all I have to do is spend, like, 10 hours, you know, like, we don't have to call a bank. We don't have to make any deals. We don't have to do any weird balance sheet shit. It's literally you have to get me to want to do this for 10 hours. And then, you know and so I started getting, you know, I started getting angry. And, you know, one of the one of the things I was counting on was that the greed would eventually like, I wouldn't I wouldn't lose my job. At some point, they would look in the mirror and say, well, we do we do need this money.
[00:27:15] Unknown:
Yeah. You would think someone would go, a $100,000,000
[00:27:18] Unknown:
sounds quite nice. Like Yeah. Yeah. Because give give it a go. This was this was validated. This is, like, validated. We actually like, we were a large insurance company in the S and P 500, and we paid a $50,000,000 dividend to ourselves based on this program. Like this is legit. So once I realized, I kind of, I kind of figured it was too late for them once they did that. Right. They can't, they can't stop now. Right. And so it really actually brings up a lot of questions I have now about, like, why is it that companies don't care about making money, and things like that. But that that's essentially how we got to the point where I got sacked
[00:27:59] Unknown:
in, May of this year. Yeah. And so they were just like, look. Stop going on about it. We don't care about the money. You gotta pipe down. You were like, fuck off. Don't tell me to do anything else. This is the most important. Well, if I'm being honest, I thought that
[00:28:14] Unknown:
you know, I thought that this was more important, yes, than anything else they had going on. And, I thought it should be the only thing I focused on. I thought it should be the only thing I spent my time on. And that, like, I didn't even wanna be told like, being told to do to, work on anything else, it was, like, insulting. And so their attitude basically became, look, dude, we could do this without you. So, like, we could just let you go. And and I'm like, you think you can, but you cannot. You can do 50,000,000 without me. No problem. Right? You'll you'll fuck it up, but you can do it, but you're not gonna go any further. And so then now we're we're 5 and a half months into that game of chicken right
[00:28:59] Unknown:
now. And this is presumably not something and this is not a game you can play
[00:29:04] Unknown:
without their backing or without Yeah. Actually, the only reason I was able to do this is because well, yeah. I mean, it's their it's their fucked up 10 years of decision making that enabled this to exist. So Okay. It's definitely possible that there are other companies that I could do this for, but at the you know, for the last five and a half months, that thought has never entered my mind. I've only really thought about adding value. Like, I don't care. I just don't care about that industry. I mean, I know the day is going to come and I might have to go back to fee at work, and that might be the case, but I'm not thinking about it right now. Like, I really have been focused on trying to figure out Bitcoin, trying to figure out who I can add value to here. And I've been very, like, I've been very busy and consumed with it.
I think a lot of people after 5 and a half months would be losing their mind. You know. Maybe spending 5 hours a day on math is losing my mind, but you know there's a re there's a reason my brain wants to do it, you know. Like, I do it until I want to puke and there's a reason, you know, so this is like this is so my process is I do what my brain tells me to do, right? I don't like want to do what a boss tells me to do. I usually think their judgment's bad, stupid. I do what my brain tells me to do and my brain's telling me to study math and try to help try to understand the financial system of Bitcoin, like, as an actuary and find some leverage points that I can add value. Yeah. Well, it's certainly an interesting skill to bring into
[00:30:36] Unknown:
the Bitcoin world. Because you said earlier, you're like, you know, you're impressed with the knowledge that the average Bitcoiner has and that it's that it's above that sort of 95% of people in the traditional financial world. But I would say, often, what I see is overconfident people repeating things they don't really understand to sound smart.
[00:31:01] Unknown:
Personally, I find it quite frustrating. I feel that people are a lot more cocksure than they should be. See my face right now. I would yeah. What was your face? I wish you could see my face right now because yeah. I'm just like no. Totally agree. Like, so, so good. It's so true, dude. Like, I it's so there's something weird that happens the second you get paid. You become a retard. So if I were to sort, like, the Bitcoiners that don't get paid with the ones that do, right, the ones that aren't getting paid to make like to under at least to understand anything are miles ahead of those that those that do. Once you start getting paid, it's weird. Why does this happen? That all of a sudden you start making all the bad decisions that all the fiat people made and people that you before you were getting paid to do this, you were making fun of all those people. Mhmm. And now you're getting paid. Your your a company is paying you, right, to do essentially the same things. This is what you mean, right? Like like the second I got a sniff of like these public companies, these mining companies, these, you know, pretty much any of these companies that exist. It's like they're no they're all of a sudden they've gone backwards.
[00:32:16] Unknown:
They've gone right back to fiat mindset. It certainly feels like that. But even on a deeper level than that, I just find and I found this myself, so I'm not, like, pointing fingers where I can't point them at myself. But, like, early days coming into Bitcoin, thinking, oh, I really understand the traditional financial system so much better than everyone else. And, like, I'm I'm so much further ahead of everybody else, and I've got this whole thing mapped out. And I know what's gonna happen with interest rates. I know what's gonna happen with, you know, just like everything. I have this delusion of grandeur maybe where I thought, well, because I've worked out this Bitcoin thing, and because I've been directionally correct when I've been borrowing and buying property and timing things historically, that I'm some sort of genius.
The further in time we go forward, the more I realize, no. You are a retard. I'm back to, no. I'm a retard. Yeah. Bitcoin's good. It's probably gonna do well. But outside of that, shut the fuck up. When I reflect on it, I'm like, you don't fucking know what you're talking about, mate. You know a little bit of something, but really actually have a guess where interest rates are gonna go. Really actually have a guess what's gonna happen in the next 6 months. And I can fucking guarantee you I'll be wrong.
[00:33:34] Unknown:
Yeah. So just because you know more than somebody else doesn't make doesn't mean you're ready to be responsible for a giant pot of money. Right? And, really, the reason you know more than them is because they just have tumors on their brain. Right? They have they have lesions that are just not that that are keeping them from understanding very basic things. Right? It's not even that your average Bitcoiner has some superior understanding of things. It's like there's this old expression, you don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the other guy. That's true for bar conversations. Right? And it's true for, like, building a general worldview for yourself. Right? It's definitely not true for, like, being responsible now for money. Like, you actually have to outrun the bear at that point. Right?
So I think a lot of guys develop a sense of themselves by, you know, real you know, there's a certain power from realizing that the emperor has no clothes. Right? Once you're over that, I still think take you know, that doesn't necessarily mean we're ready to this doesn't mean we're ready to manage some kind of big money. I think you see all these they're like little man children running around blowing up companies. You know?
[00:34:48] Unknown:
All the people of influence tend to be pretty retarded, and they tend to have, ulterior motives. There's an arrogance that goes with it, which I just find a real turn off. And, as you said, it is often talking to the people who don't get heard, who have got something interesting to say. You know, they've got something new to say. They're thinking about things a little bit differently. And it's also that, like, first year, 2 years, 3 years of being involved in Bitcoin where it really, really grips you. And you're just like, woah. This thing's amazing. And then you can quite easily get lost by just listening to Waffle, the same old Waffle. I'm saying there are all these different guys who get on all these stages, and it starts to, be less interesting.
[00:35:37] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I've now become, I think, pretty hated in this space now because, like Oh, really? Yeah. Because I've I've we had our big Bitcoin meetup last night. It was really we have a great meetup in Philly, and, Alan Farrington was there. I mean, you know, it's that kind of a meetup, right, where, like Mhmm. You know, you might have some somebody like that come. And so we also get all the, like, we get all, like, the Fiat simpies that Mhmm. You know, wanna talk about NGU and all that shit. Right? And I had a there's there's a guy. He's, he's very well known. I think he sits on board to some of these companies that we're talking about. Mhmm. I would even say I would even say that he's knowledgeable. Yes.
However, I actually think I forced a tear out of his eye last night because he was he was asking me he was asking me how I felt about institutional adoption, and I just, like, looked at him dead in the eye and I was like, it's not happening. There is no institutional adoption. I feel very strongly about this. I wrote a paper about it a year ago called HODLing as a Human Action, and it's about, like, how Bitcoin is is uniquely human. And it was back then, like, why it was institutional adoption was never really, I thought it was never gonna work. I recently reread the paper, and I was like, yeah, this kind of holds up. I still feel this way now. And I swear I felt I forced a tear out of the guy's eye, and I could feel him getting, like, super angry at me. Like, why won't you just shut the fuck up? And that's like this is part of my role. Like, I was born I was born to be this guy.
You know? It just is what it is.
[00:37:13] Unknown:
When you say you don't believe institutional adoption is gonna happen, do you Anytime soon. Class
[00:37:20] Unknown:
ETFs and those kind of things as institutional adoption? I do. But what people think is gonna happen with them is that, companies are gonna allocate, like, 5% of their pensions. Like, people think that there's gonna be 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars coming in through the ETFs, through institutions. That's not happening in the near future, in my opinion. I'll start with why I think it's uniquely individual first, right, which is that I think, first of all, buying not buying anyone buys Bitcoin. Right? Anybody everybody buys Bitcoin. Institutions, individuals, they all buy Bitcoin. Mhmm. We may see institutions coming in buying Bitcoin, and then you guys will all be like, hey, I remember that confab episode of that fucking prick said it wasn't gonna happen.
And that's fine, but, that's fine. I was told last night that I looked like Peter McCormack, and I almost wanted to punch this guy in the face. I couldn't believe it. That's not fine. That was not fine. Anyway, companies are not like people. Okay? People are unreasonable. People individuals can be ungovernable if they want to. Right? You have people individuals doing all kinds of unreasonable shit all over the world. Right? And one of them is HODLing Bitcoin. Right? I mean, it's incredibly it's an incredibly unreasonable thing to do. In fact, it's probably illegal. And when I say it's probably illegal, I mean, like, if somebody ever if a trustee ever figures out that he is in charge of a portfolio that has Bitcoin in it, that despite there being no explicit law, that trustee will feel to himself that he must remove it in order to be legally on solid ground.
Right? So any institution with a trustee isn't right now going to be you know, they're they're they're on automatic sell, right, if they figure out there's any Bitcoin exposure. It's very hard for 2 people to agree on HODLing Bitcoin. Right? It's a lot harder than 1. Okay? 1 person can be very unreasonable. 2 people, you're gonna get a little more reasonable. And the bigger the company, the more reasonable you have to be. The more governance you have to get approval from. And, you know, even a even a board that one day is psychotic enough to say, yes, we see why this is important and we're going to do this.
3 months later, if Bitcoin goes down by 20%, that Bitcoin will all be gone. They won't stay. They won't huddle. There's no company that is going to huddle through a 10 year period no matter what happens through 80% drawdowns. MicroStrategy worked the way it did because that one dude was the company. He happened to be his company. And that guy, I could tell you, I mean, I just did a whole, It's not an entire episode, but the majority of the episode was around why he's not one of us. And I had a very strong reaction to his his appearance on Saba Dean's podcast about it really I think he pulled the mask off. He pulled the mask off and really told us he's, you know, he's sucking JPMorgan's dick.
Right? Mhmm. And he's the most capable. Like he is an individual. I think in the paper I wrote, I covered Elon, you know, so, like, you know, you can have an individual who doesn't really fully get it. But an institution, there's just so many reasons why they're never gonna hang on to that Bitcoin. Right? And even with the ETF, they're not holding Bitcoin. Right? Knut Spadholme's quote, MicroStrategy doesn't hold any Bitcoin. Some guy does. Right? El Salvador doesn't hold any Bitcoin. Some guy does. I I would tend to think that there might have been a time where Michael Sailor was on an individual journey with Bitcoin.
You know? He, you know, he relinquished being the CEO of the company. Like, it started to cost him shit to really hold his Bitcoin, but he never held his keys. And, we just released an episode called gulp limit. Like, I think you have to be whole you have to be responsible for your own net worth up to some scare gulp limit for it to have that effect on you where you're where you're like, it gives you the fucking money power, and you're no longer interested in what a bank cares about. Mhmm. And if you're not holding your own keys, you're not sovereign, you're not pushing yourself to the limits of your own sovereignty. You're probably just very comfortable and you just end up in an NGU world. Right.
I forgot what the original question was, but I feel like that was the oh, yeah. Why institutions and instant yeah. So it's like you're relying on boards, committees. You're relying on people who have no connection to this Bitcoin whatsoever.
[00:42:03] Unknown:
Right? I've never worked in that kind of environment, so it's difficult for me to really wrap my head around it. But I imagine what you're saying is it's like when you have huge boards and groups of people, getting anything done is probably quite difficult. There's all these, like, internal rules and politics and bullshit that just means making any changes is probably quite hard, especially one that is considered possibly reckless. And, yeah, you may have, like, 1 person or 2 people in a board meeting who are saying, no. We're Bitcoiners. We understand this. Like, we have our entire net worth in this. We fully think this is the best thing that we could have our money in, but they're not the ones that are gonna be listened to. And like you say, when there is this drawdown, everyone will turn around and be like, right. I fucking told you, sell this shit. Let's buy some other nonsense. So I think I understand what you mean. I don't really care either way. I think Yeah. It would be nice to see more individuals hold it. Like, where I wanna see people hold it is builders and plumbers and general people who have, like, normal jobs who are struggling.
Cash is being phased out. It's getting harder for people to just get by. They're being squeezed from every angle. And there are people who would understand, because they're used to, like, keep some cash somewhere, don't have that through the books. People on that human level, I think, understand it, and they need it. And so that's where I'd like to see the growth because it's still only a very, very, very small percentage of people. Like, I don't talk to anyone about Bitcoin anymore. I just have given up with it, like, in normal fiat world. Like, even if people ask me, like, if I'm at the gym or I'm doing whatever, if someone asks me what I do, I would never tell them what I do. Maybe 1% or 2% of people that I know hold a little bit and
[00:44:01] Unknown:
the rest, like, wouldn't even consider it. Yeah. And it's it's really just I think it's comfort and not understanding how much you do need it. You know? People just don't understand how how much they need a money that can't be taken from them, and they don't it's not just about holding on your money. Right? It's about living a life of being subject. This is I don't know. I mean, I feel like most people just are perfectly fine subjecting themselves, but that's fine. You know, that is fine for them. But there's a there's a lot of people that just don't wanna do that that are are like, fuck fuck that. And you know what? Why should should somebody have to be poor because they don't wanna listen to some shithead prioritize what they do with their life? I mean, I don't think that's the way the world evolved. Right? I just don't I don't think that's how we evolved at all. I think it's a mistake. It's an error that's gone out of control.
And whether you believe it's divine or lucky, I think Bitcoin came to fix this error.
[00:45:04] Unknown:
It does definitely feel like if ever it's been needed if ever there's a time where I've looked around and been like, fuck. People need this thing.
[00:45:14] Unknown:
Like, it's now. Good people who know that they're being subjected to lesser men need it. Mhmm. They know they need it. I think that's what it comes down to. Right? We don't need it. Everybody in the world doesn't need it. It'd be nice, but it's not I mean, everybody in the world is honestly, it's like, I feel like that I think this whole scaling issue just gets brought up as an excuse to, you know, it's yet another reason why people don't accept limitations. Accepting limitations is why it works the way it does for the 1,000 or a 100000 people that really, truly need it. Like, I actually, I feel like these people are such jerk offs. These, like, these scalers. You know? It's just to get another reason to start a company. It's just, you know, they got a bunch of funding, and they need to do something with it. So let's use this line that, oh, well, the whole world needs it. You know? Though, if Bitcoin has failed, if we can't give it to the entire world, it drives me fucking crazy.
[00:46:10] Unknown:
Side chains and all these different, yeah, all these projects to make some extra money. I I I agree. Like, I use on chain most of the time. It costs you, I mean, fucking, like, a few pennies to send on chain at the moment. Yeah. There are spikes sometimes. Lightning sort of works okay sometimes when you need it. If there is, particularly high fees, it's like it's fine. And this whole there's gonna be, like, a flood of people any day now, whether it's institutions or it's some country where there's a problem or whatever the narrative is of the day is never usually right. What I kind of see is just more people who are using it use it more often. Like, there's a massive difference now how much I use like, every single day, I use Bitcoin multiple times a day. But when I first was involved, I'd make, like, one transaction in a year or 2. And then it kept scaling up and up and up and up. And, actually, if I think about it, like, how many transactions are made in a day through, like, me and Ungovernable Misfits?
100. Wow. We've got 100 of payments going through Lightning, the podcasting 2.0 stuff, responding back to messages, going through Nosta, organizing the clothing. We buy all our VPNs and storage and hosting and virtual machines and air, all the shit that we use. All of it is paid in Bitcoin the whole way through. And so maybe it's not necessarily a case of, like, you need more and more and more people. Maybe it's just that it gets better and better and more used, and the networks of people, like within the mesh to Dell, of people who accept Bitcoin for goods and services grows.
[00:48:00] Unknown:
That's just as good. I think so. I like, I think that people who don't use Bitcoin are just eventually look no different from institutions. I think it's you know what I mean? Like, they're if you're not using it you know, this thing came up last night in this meetup too, and I I grabbed the microphone and kinda just made everybody feel badly in the room. But this question came up. It was posed to Alan, and I could see I could see Alan getting he got annoyed with it. But this question was asked that, like, oh, you have, Michael Saylor and all these Winklevii and all these people.
And he basically is, like, if we fast forward to the year 2048 and, you know, 99% of the Bitcoin is already allocated, he said, is it even is it even Freedom Money anymore? And, you know, as opposed to Alan, like, it's like a fireside chat type format, and, he gave an answer. He looked super annoyed with it, and, I asked for the mic and basically said that I hated the framing of this question. All due respect to the guy that asked it, but I hated the framing that it's about what Michael Saylor cares about or people like that. Because, like, those people who say don't use your Bitcoin. Right? They're never gonna dictate whether or not Bitcoin is free to money or not. They don't get to say the same way, like, that Bitmain just because they were the most powerful company at the time got to determine what Bitcoin was. Right?
It's everybody else that gets to say. I feel like the people that do need to use it are always gonna be they're gonna do it and they're gonna be the best at it. So I think there's from being good at it and from the people who don't use it being bad at it, you know, that's a big advantage to those who use it. And then there is this other obvious point that we're not just gonna wake up in 2048 where, you know, we're all rich, blah blah blah. Right? You have to get there. And, like, the idea that anyone's gonna get there without using the majority of the Bitcoin that they've stacked is incredibly naive. It's just incredibly naive Mhmm. To think that you're not gonna touch
[00:50:02] Unknown:
like, that you're not gonna need to use it. Right? What a Pollyanna ish view of the world you must have. Well, I think people put their lives on hold as well. I I spoke to was it Zach I was talking to about this? Might have been. We're saying about, you know, I've sold the majority of my stack because I've made the plunge to go full time with this podcast. And I wanna make sure while I'm doing that, the family eats good quality food. I've got myself a gym membership. Like Yeah. Trying to live a life where I'm not just waiting for the price to go up to some magical number.
Okay. Now I can live. Because I sort of did that for a while. Like, I I worked multiple jobs. I, like, crammed doing all this stuff into the evenings. I started to not enjoy what I was doing because I was doing way too much and always had that pressure. I was always waiting, like, oh, I won't buy what I need today because, you know, Bitcoin could 10 x, and then, oh, you know, this £100 that I was gonna spend on that, you know, that's a 1,000. And, you know, always doing this kind of, like, calculation the whole time. You know, just thinking about starting businesses, thinking about going full time with a pod, and it was always going around in my head. And I always was like, no. You know, just hold on another 6 months. Just hold on another year. At the same time, like, literally having, like, crippling panic attacks pulling over on the side of the road, thinking I'm having a fucking heart attack. And then just accepting that, like, no. No. This is all worth it. And it's not. Like, especially when you have kids, you realize, like, I'm not gonna have a heart attack and leave them without dad. Like, I'm not gonna be that fucking retard.
I'm gonna spend some Bitcoin. I have to.
[00:51:43] Unknown:
Yeah. I and it's funny. Most people, like, just to get them to wait another month before they get the their new phone, you know, you know, the current money doesn't incentivize people waiting. Right? So, like, yes. If you go full blown, if you're fully on on bitcoin, you can go to the other side of the spectrum where it's like you just you got a Fred Flintstone car that you're half carrying. Right?
[00:52:13] Unknown:
You know, I a car anymore. I sold that. I've got a bicycle now.
[00:52:17] Unknown:
But, like, you could get to the point. Right? You just you know, you can you can get to that point, but the thing is you you get to find that point for yourself, I think, is the bottom line. Whereas without Bitcoin, you don't get you're you're stuck with, washing machines that don't work after a year. You know, you're just you're you're stuck with toxic food. You're just stuck with all that shit. You don't have anything you don't have anything to say about it. So at the very least, you get to put yourself on a spectrum and discover where, you know, the kind of person you are and how you want to live.
And if you, you know, even if you have a stack of Bitcoin, but you believe you should never sell it because, oh my god, I don't wanna pay, a $100,000 for a cup of coffee because that's the math people do in their heads. Mhmm. Yep. Oh, man. That's the most expensive cup of coffee I ever had in my life. You know, I'm never gonna do that again. It's it's, like, it's it's we're so early, dude. Like, it's we're we're so early that we don't even really know how to live in this world. That's you know, that is why I created rock paper Bitcoin. It's, before it was a podcast, it was a paper that I wrote to try to sort all this shit out. I realized, like, bitcoin really broke me.
I'm older than most people in the space, so I have a lot of things to unlearn.
[00:53:38] Unknown:
You can't be older than John. Yeah. I am older than John. Fucking hell. You are old. He's very old. Yeah. Wow. Okay. You're a wise old man.
[00:53:48] Unknown:
I am. Well, I well, I am a wise old man, and I do think I bring that's I think that's something I do I do bring to the space is a little bit of wisdom, but also it shattered my world to realize how much is wrong in my worldview. So how, like, how am I supposed to trust that I really should spend hours and hours and hours in certain rabbit holes, right, if I know my worldview is wrong? So to, you know, like, to me, that's not a good foundation for confident action, right? I created this thing called Rock Paper Bitcoin. There's a way of looking at the world, maybe like in the show notes or whatever. But, like, it was that and that's how we that that was the the genesis of the podcast was we're both like, okay. What the fuck do we do now? We don't know how to live. And in general, people it's it's not it's not a slight. It's like we have not discovered how to live on hard money. You know, we've gone through enough generations without it that we don't know how to do it and it has to be rediscovered and it's ugly. It's like watching somebody learn to play the violin. It's like sounds like shit
[00:54:51] Unknown:
until it until it's beautiful. Yeah. That's a good point. And the other point is, you know, when people say, oh, you should never sell your Bitcoin, At the same time, they'll say, like I don't even know the numbers. I can't remember now, but, like, annualized return on Bitcoin is x and you know? But you should never sell it. And you think, well, if it does continue as it has and if you are right with your projections, then, you know, slicing off a few percent every year just to, like, make sure that you have some health and, like, you're not fucking miserable would still make sense because you're still gonna be in a very, very good spot. It's still like basic money management that anyone should be able to do. Just never, never sell. Unless you're in, like, a extremely well paid job, and you already have everything that you need, and there's absolutely no need for you to use Bitcoin for any reason, then, you know, I kinda get it. Whatever. That's fine. But, you know, for most of us, we're not in that position.
[00:55:51] Unknown:
To get out of that job, you're gonna need to use your Bitcoin. So, like and that's Exactly. You know? Like, I would have never been able to put up the fight that I did that got me fired, which I considered that an accomplishment. So I, you know, I got my outcome was because of a fight that I put up, and I put that fight up knowing that I was gonna be okay. Yeah. I mean, people say and this is the thing that drove me crazy about what Saylor said. Bitcoin is a nonperforming asset. Are you fucking crazy? Like, it gave you know, knowing what I have gave me the strength to do what, honestly, 99.9% of the world was absolutely unwilling to do and will prostitute themselves before they do the step that they would take to leave their subjugation.
Right? I mean, how how could that be a nonperforming asset when it literally is this is the thing I'm relying on? You know, it's it's mere existence is what makes my family feel like this is okay that we can do this. You know, you have to live day to day in this world. Right? It's just like an oxymoron that, you know, it's like, you know, Karen 2 2 episodes ago, you know, who was talking about the ketamine trips. Oh, what a result. Yeah. Well, it's like we we live in a disassociated world where you have, like, people talking to people, giving advice.
Mhmm. They're not giving advice to that person. They're giving advice to, like, some person that lives in an alternate universe. Somebody who owns bitcoin doesn't want fiat advice. Okay? It's good fiat advice. Don't sell your investments. Okay? But it's really bad bitcoin advice that don't use your bitcoin. Alright? It's bad. Right? It's like what the to me, it's nefarious. It's like the only reason he would say that is because, yeah, we don't he doesn't want me to ruin his little n g u game. It's the only reason he would give me that bad advice knowing nothing else about the guy. It's almost like we have this collect there's like a collected cult that just doesn't want to upset that apple cart. Right? Totally focused on price, but it's pretty obvious for anyone with a soul to see how wrong that how, like, wrong headed all that is.
Bitcoin's a really powerful tool. You use it whether you spend it or not. Just having it, just knowing you have it, it's like brandishing a gun. Right? It's like knowing you have the gun means, okay, I can go into a dangerous neighborhood with a little bit, you know, Like, you're using it. Whether or not you pull a trigger or you pull it out, you're using it. You're using the fact that you have it. Yeah. It gives you a a confidence, and it gives you an option You have with your job. It's like it gives you the option
[00:58:27] Unknown:
to do what you believe is right and to have that fight. Having that as just like a cushion where you can take a few risks where you need to and make the decisions you need to, and you have just something to fall back on is really powerful because you end up acting completely differently. You don't nod along to things that you otherwise would because you feel you have to. You think differently. It changes the whole changes your whole life, the the way you think, the way you move, the way you interact with other people.
[00:58:55] Unknown:
Well, yeah, because you're not asking you're you're, you know, you're in charge. That's the key. It's just you're in charge of yourself. Right? So you're not walking around asking other people to tell you how to think about things. You do have to be willing to pull that trigger, though. You know, you could larp yourself into a very damaging situation. You could probably larp yourself into a worse slavery than you were in to begin with. If you walk around and so in the business world, in the corporate world, at least in finance, the correct adaptation is to walk around like you don't care about money. And so people do that. People do a pretty good job of acting like they don't give a shit about money. I think if Ben is listening, he's nodding his head. He's like, yeah, dude. Totally. I mean, if there's There's a book Liar's Poker, I think it is. It's like the first Michael, the guy that wrote The Big Short. I forgot his name. Michael Lewis. Michael Murray? No. Michael Murray is the guy. Yeah. Michael Lewis wrote it and it was about his time at, Solomon Brothers mortgage desk.
Anyway, first paragraph, he's like number one rule is nobody talks about money and you act like you don't give a shit about money. But they very much do. You know what I mean? Like they very, very, very much do. But you have to be you have to walk around, like, I don't care if I get fired. I don't care. You know? That's the act. Right? Mhmm. But unless you're really willing to walk away, unless you're really willing to pull that trigger, you know, you become a slave to that act. But, like, the people with the power know you're full shit. Mhmm. It's yeah. You know, so you're, like, in a almost in a worse situation than you were in if you were just, like, thank you, sir. May I please have another?
Yeah.
[01:00:35] Unknown:
And what's your plans now? Like, you said it's 5 months. You're obviously honing your math skills.
[01:00:41] Unknown:
Have you got any thoughts? It's almost like prayer. I the math work I do is like prayer. I I don't understand. I I can't really explain why I do it. It's not to learn more math. I mean, it's not something I, like, be better at it for a reason. It's to, it's it's just I think it's filling a spiritual hole in some way that maybe it's because I need more conviction in myself at this to be in this stage of my life. Like, studying math will give you conviction in yourself. Like, I could tell that to anybody here. If you spend a month getting better at something in math, you will have more conviction in yourself. There's like no way around it. It's like if you go to the spend serious time training physically, you will have more conviction in yourself. So, like, I think that's I think it's a big reason why I do that.
I really don't know what I'm I don't have a plan and it's, like, really bothering my wife. I don't know what I'm doing really yet. I I, you know, I'm trying to throw a bunch of logs in the fire. I I know I probably wanna teach in some way, but there's no way to I don't know how that makes money. Maybe create a game and sell it. I've thought about teaching through games, things like that. I don't know. I do think, like, you know, I have you know, for now, I'm not I don't have an enormous amount of pressure. My family is fine.
Mhmm. So it's not like I have this huge amount of pressure to go back, but I do feel pressure to make some money so that I know I'm adding value. You know, I don't think I I know I can't run around in the world just not doing anything. Like, not not me. You know, not having the world tell me that I'm adding value. Like, that to me, I know I can't that can't continue. That's been happening for that's been happening for a few months. Right? So, like, I need some value signal that I'm on the right track. I need, you know, I need something like that for sure. Right? And I'm not gonna I'm going back to fiat isn't the best form of that. It's kind of shitty form of that. It may be the it may be the one I end up having to do, but at least I kind of wanna know what's my time worth. Like, we're setting up a geyser for the podcast just to see if people are willing to, you know, what people are willing to pay, kind of like what you guys you're doing with the t shirt.
It's just to see, okay. Well, what what what's out there? What are people willing to pay? What's my time worth in sets? Nobody knows. It's another it's another thing we're very early at and nobody on earth understands what their time is worth.
[01:03:13] Unknown:
Right?
[01:03:13] Unknown:
So, like, I feel like if it's inevitable that I have to go back to that fiat shit, I kinda want I wanna have a bunch of logs in the fire that could add value in Bitcoin so that maybe I can work on those things in parallel.
[01:03:28] Unknown:
You know, it's important, as we all know, like, having some purpose, doing something that you feel is adding value to the world. And even if you're doing, you know, like I was doing with my Fiat, it's like, my Fiat work was adding no value to the world. Like, none at all. It wasn't fulfilling, and it added no value, but it paid the bills. And then, you know, you carry on with the pardon, whatever else I was doing that I did care about in the evenings and early in the mornings and on the weekends, because that's what actually feeds the soul and feels good and you actually care about. You've gotta have that whether you, you know, whether it's on on the side with something else or full time. Either way, it has you have to have it. Otherwise, it's just it's a miserable existence. Otherwise, that feeling of, like, you know, like well, I did it for years, like, in previous work where it was relatively well paid. It was cons you know, most people consider it a pretty decent job and, like, had a nice car and all that stuff, but, like, Yeah. Just get home in the evenings. Just be like People make you feel bad. No. Not even people make you feel bad. Like, I made myself feel bad. So just get home and be like, what the fuck have I done that's actually of use? And everything that I've fixed today is gonna be fucking broken tomorrow again.
And if I die tomorrow, no one's gonna care. Like, nothing that I'm doing here matters. And that was just the general feeling.
[01:04:54] Unknown:
I don't know how old you are, but, like, imagine getting to John's age in in my age Yeah. Of course. And still feel and still feeling that way. Like, actually, you know, really taking you know, I think that's what midlife crises are all about. I think you get to a certain age and you have this realization, like, I haven't done anything. Holy shit. And it's like all like, it's such a it's all such a lie. It could go in a fucking snap.
[01:05:20] Unknown:
Then what? It's weird, isn't it, how you think about that? Because, like, when you're young young or at least for me, it was like, get a house, get a car, be able to afford stuff. You know? Just like you you're chasing chasing to, like, have a better quality of life. And then it's only once you get to that comfort zone of like, oh, I can, like, I can sit back a little bit now. Like, I'm not chasing my way out of a shit situation. And it gives you time to, like, think. And you reflect and you go, am I happy? Like, am I because you you're too busy before to think, like, am I happy? Or, like, am I doing anything that's valuable? As you have more time, you question that kind of stuff and you do think, like, the big thought I had when I left my, like, first, like, proper career and, like, went and just started painting every day. That's what I did for, like, a year and a half. Just literally smoked weed, painted, trained, did that on repeat because I just, like, got burnt out with work. And it was during that time I was like, yeah.
What I was doing, if I was on my deathbed and I was thinking about my life, I'd be thinking, you fucking wasted this time. What you've done is is, like, not worth doing. Whereas at least with, like, the painting or, you know, with the podcast, I feel like at least it, like, touches some people, interacts with people, like, hopefully, brings some joy to some people, hopefully, gets a laugh or, like, get some information out to someone and, like, there's a bit of a community around it. And I feel like, at least if I get hit by a bus, I could be like, yeah.
I've done something kinda cool. And that's got a huge value more than you can buy.
[01:07:04] Unknown:
Yeah. It's val I mean, it's real validation. You know? I I did stand up, probably thought that was my midlife crisis. It wasn't, but it was definitely a it was like a immune response to my life. And 12 years ago I started doing stand up and, you know, I'm pretty sure I did it to have my worldview validated because it wasn't nothing in my professional life. No amount of success was doing it. No amount of finally getting rising through the ranks and which, you know, for a retard like me is actually quite an accomplishment. To ever have one of those people be like, yeah. He should have more responsibility is pretty remarkable.
But those things were always ultimately not validating. But, like, putting my putting my heart and soul into something I genuinely thought was funny and having people agree that that was the case kind of told me maybe, okay, I I maybe have a sense that I'm on the right track. Like, maybe I can trust myself a little bit because what I think is funny, other people think is funny. Mhmm. So it's it's part of that valid getting that validation, which I didn't know at the time I was gonna need. Only the first time. Then it was like, damn. Why? This isn't even scary anymore. This kinda sucks. Now I I get why people do drugs and stuff like that. Like, it gets not terrible. After that first time, the first time was incredible rush. Like, you really fought through some you know, you really put your ass on the line. I remember thinking, man, if they don't like this, I'm never gonna do this again. Maximum slang of your own inner pussy.
Getting through it was like I felt like such a fucking man. It was incredible. And it's it's funny. It's like getting it's kinda like getting punched in the face if you're a man. It's like, you know, I always said people everyone should get punched in the face, should get fired from a job, just to get it over with and know that you're not gonna die if those things happen. Mhmm. And getting up on stage in a really vulnerable way, like, a lot of people do stand up in a non vulnerable way, and you can tell, and they usually do terribly. But when you get up on in a vulnerable way, meaning, like, you really care.
Like, you actually, you know, really care how it goes. It's pretty fucking incredible. And but then once that once you get over it, you start, like, you start having to take more risks just to get that feeling. You start wanting to do more fucked up things just to get that feeling back.
[01:09:32] Unknown:
Just just to feel, like, on the edge of, like, oh, is this too far? Is this gonna be,
[01:09:38] Unknown:
silence or, like, someone's gonna throw something at me? I've done it on certain podcasts too, Ed, where, like, I just because I have that general urge sometimes to take it. You know, it just feels like it's there, and I wanna take it to that level. And then I'll spend, like, the next 5 days thinking, oh my god, they're never gonna have me back again. Like, oh, yeah. But there's something about going through that that I enjoy. That anger that anguish about, like, oh my god. Do they am I really the most hated man in the world?
[01:10:12] Unknown:
Oh, that's funny. Well, you are certainly not the most hated man on this podcast. It's it's been a pleasure getting to know you, mate. Appreciate that. Appreciate that very much. I really, really hope that you find something where your skills can be used. I'm confident that you will, and, yeah, I'm happy to hear that you took this jump. It's fucking weird that you sit and do maths 5 hours a day, I have to say, But it's cool. I like that weirdness. I like the dedication.
[01:10:39] Unknown:
Yeah. You know, we don't it's like, I think it was Michael Burry who did say, like, we don't choose these things. They choose us. Right? He's like, I could have easily just been interested in reading the phone book than reading mortgage contracts, but it's like the you know, once it's like that autistic little fairy dust taps you on the shoulder, you're fucked. You this is kind of what you do. That's but that's why it's so important. It but that's why it's, like, really important to have, you know, like, a high degree of integrity in your lives because you wanna know you wanna have some belief that that's not it's not gonna be for nothing. Like, you wanna have this belief that, like, God wants you to God wants you to do this. Like, he would have to want me to do this for me to do it because it's it's fucking insane otherwise. Right?
It's a big battle for conviction if you think about it, and that's what I think people need in this space now anyway. Right? Is that battle, like, you're fighting for your life, for that conviction. I don't know if we dropped off or if No. That was deep.
[01:11:49] Unknown:
No. I was just, I was just thinking about what you said, and you're like, we're just fighting for our lives. And I was like, yeah. Sometimes it does feel like that. And then I just got lost in thought for a minute. That's a great moment, dude. That was, like, a really great moment just now because, you know, it is real. I mean, it really is fucking real. Like,
[01:12:06] Unknown:
look, I made a lot of money and, you know, enough that I can be, like, pretty kind of living comfortably at this moment. But I'm still fighting for my life. And I think, like, that gets expressed in what I do with my time. It's, you know, it, like, clearly expresses the battle I'm in. You know? I'm not on the golf course. I'm not maybe that would have you know, that's what it is for other people. But if you look at what I do all day, you could tell I'm gonna fight for my life over something. Mhmm.
[01:12:35] Unknown:
Well, I believe it will go somewhere, mate, and we'll see where we are in sort of 6 months to a year. But it's been really good getting to know you a little bit. And I'd suggest to anyone you, man. Who hasn't already, check out rock paper Bitcoin, check out the things you've written. And if you're knowledgeable and into maths, maybe, hook up and have these conversations. I'm not. So, it's not something I can talk about, but I appreciate that other people out there doing it and and checking things out and hopefully crunching the numbers and making sure we're not all just complete fucking retards and that hopefully we're right. And, hopefully, this Bitcoin thing, stays around, and we're all gonna be okay. This fight actually is one that we win. We are. That I'm sure of.
[01:13:22] Unknown:
I'm sure that we're right. You know? And I really do I appreciate you having me on, and I really like, I tend to believe that having these conversations is what causes the world to go where we want it to. So, like, would it would it you know, what you said, like, I hope when you said I hope you find a way. I think it's like putting this out on a platform like like yours that gets listened to a lot, gets heard, is what causes that result. I I have nothing but belief that we are gonna win, and that I have total belief that I'm gonna find a way to be part of that, doing what I was born to do.
[01:13:59] Unknown:
Let's keep in contact. If anyone wants to reach out to you, what's the best place to contact you? Just Twitter or
[01:14:06] Unknown:
Yeah. Twitter, it's it's, b Brian Paul. That was my comedy name, by the way, in case anybody wonders what the fuck that is. B Brian Paul. B Brian Paul. Brian with an I. That was my comedy name because I didn't want to be doxed. I got a very general evergreen name. That's my Twitter. So that's my Twitter handle, and everyone pretty much can find me on either, like, the mash adult group or, you know, wherever they are, and you guys know, like, reach out. I always I always love it.
[01:14:38] Unknown:
I hope you enjoyed that. And to everyone who's been supporting the show by sharing, liking, boosting, or all the other ways that you've been helping this show grow, I wanna say a big thank you from me and all of the Ungovernable Misfits. If you haven't already checked out the website, ungovernable misfits.com, it's well worth taking a look. We have articles, podcasts, clothing, and artwork. Thanks again for all the support, and I'll catch you on the next one.
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin.
[00:00:16] Unknown:
Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking 0. Welcome back to another Comfab episode. This episode is with fundamentals. But before we dive into it, I'm gonna read through the top boost from the last episode with Oscar Mery from fountain. Tone wrecker with 10,000 sats. Great to get these updates from Oscar at fountain. Still playing with how my RSS hosted music under Tone wrecker tracks. Functions differently from what is under Paul Birkin on Wave Lake at Henry with 5,000 sats. I would never have heard of Ungovernable Misfits were it not on fountain and Pies' relentless mushroom rocket and strong arms, 420 sat boosts.
And where would I be without poignant imagery of subway guy, vaginal blood farts, and Max's crusty feet haunting my subconscious. Probably not trying to wipe my mind with doctor Glenn doctor Glenn Maranji. Cheers, guys. Bleeding edge stuff. Jadki with 5,000 sats. Canary reviews dot I o. I don't know what that is, so I'm not endorsing it or anything. Tread carefully. Blazer with 1,000 sats. Can't think of a clever or witty boost. Good show, though. FOMO, Medtronic, exclamation mark. Abel or a I b l e, with 801 sats. Without Fountain, I wouldn't know about Uncoverable Misfits, so I'll always be grateful for that.
Keep the hard work going, brother Max. Bitcoin Boomer 12. Fascinating episode. I'm listening on Fountain when possible, but sometimes it's good to see the speakers as well. So I have to still use Spotify sometimes. I don't find Nosta very easy or useful, but I just keep going because I know it will get better, and I will get better. Oscar explains stuff really well. Bhrex8. Great content and useful info. Wartime. Good rip. Been a fan of fountain since the beginning, and it was amazing when I heard them switching to use Noster. The new mashup is fire.
Pies at the Pleb. Biz, mushroom, American flag, gun, film, strong-arm, salute, British flag, plus, great British flag, equals, shit. Oh, I actually probably agreed to be honest, mate. User, 872-49965. New Beyond fountain. Already think it's the future. Welcome, mate. And finally, Shadrach, boosting 70 sats a minute. Thank you, mate. Much appreciated. Thank you to everyone who's been supporting the show with boosts, Pay NIM support, Lightning, XMR chat, and all the other ways that people have been helping this show grow Before we start, I just wanna say a quick thank you to our sponsors I'll start with K Qualit, our new sponsors.
It took me a long time trying to sift through and find people that ungovernable misfits would work with. It might sound like it's easy, but there's a lot of scammy bullshit in the space. There's lending and thieving and everything else that goes along with it. And to find a company that just builds and ships without all the bullshit is tough. Cakewallet have been around for a long time, and you can use them on pretty much every platform. You can use them on your iPhone or Android device. Or for desktop, you can use them on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The UX is clean and simple. Literally, any idiot can use this, myself included. But under the hood, it's pretty powerful. You can connect this to your Bitcoin and Monero nodes. You can use silent payments. You can exchange within the wallet. And for those of you who actually use your Bitcoin, you can buy gift cards to pay for petrol, groceries, or anything else you might need. If you care about your privacy, security, and actually building this circular economy we all talk about, I'd suggest checking Cake Wallet out. Go to cakewallet.com. For Android, you can download the APK, or otherwise visit the App Store.
And if you have any questions, you can reach out to me, and I'll be having Seth and some of the other team members on the show very soon. Check them out at cakewallet.com. And finally, a huge thank you to Foundation. We wouldn't be where we are without them. They have been supporting us for years now and helped us grow. I had someone whinge in the comments that I had said the best hardware wallet, that it was definitive. Apparently, that's legacy. So I'll rephrase it a little bit. I think, and most of the people that I respect think that foundation make the best hardware device.
The passport is fully open source. It's beautifully designed. It's piss easy to use. Literally, anybody can use this thing without having to read a 1,000,000 guides just to send a transaction. It has all the features that anyone could really need. And if you really struggle, you can pay an extra $99 and have Bitcoin q and a hold your hand through the setup process. You can even have help setting up a multisig. This is the hardware that I suggest to all my friends and family. And if you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.xyzed, and you can use the code Ungovernable for a discount.
If you have any questions, you can reach out to me. Enjoy the show. Early early morning for mister Fundamentals.
[00:06:52] Unknown:
This is pretty normal, actually. Is it? I'm just it's normal. It's not like I'm used to waking up, making some coffee, and then doing math for a couple hours.
[00:07:03] Unknown:
Is that your routine, is it? I'm sure John's told me that. Yeah. He said something like, yeah. You get up, and then you, like, go and sun your balls while doing maths equations.
[00:07:13] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, the balls normally aren't part of the math. I wish they were, but, Listen, you're too too too camp, I assume. I do go outside. I mean, if if the weather permits, I try to be outside in the morning, you know, with the sunrise. It is dark here. Like, I just went out to walk my dog before before we ripped and there are stars still out there. Really bright. Pretty amazing, actually.
[00:07:36] Unknown:
It's, Pennsylvania, you're right, isn't it? Yeah. The same place that old Johnny D is lurking.
[00:07:45] Unknown:
Yep. We're sort of on, opposite sides of the state.
[00:07:49] Unknown:
Probably for the best. That's funny.
[00:07:54] Unknown:
We've been trying to we've been trying to get him to come to some like, we go to the middle the smack dab middle of the state to have, like, some events. We're working on him. Everybody loves John. You know? Oh, I'm too busy. Can't do it. I mean, he'd he really is he's busier than we are. He is
[00:08:12] Unknown:
now particularly busy. It's impossible to actually get a hold of him now. Just screens my calls and gets on with more important business.
[00:08:22] Unknown:
I could see it. Yeah. You've done your maths already, or am I interrupting that? Well, so this would be a day where I'll just do it later. You know? Okay. This time, it's so it's a little odd to just wake up and get right on a podcast, but, it's fun. It's fun. So I've been, you know, really looking forward to talking to you. Yeah. We've never spoken before. Yeah. We've never really talked. No. I,
[00:08:49] Unknown:
I fucking hate texting. Mhmm. Although I do it a lot in all, like, the Telegram groups and, like, organizing our government misfits, I actually fucking hate it. So for me, having a conversation on a messaging app doesn't do anything. Like, I don't feel like, oh, I know that person at all or I've got anything from it. It just, like, stresses me out. So for me, like, having a conversation like this and getting to know people is by far the best way. It's interesting. Lurking in all the gone. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I must be, like, really retarded because I
[00:09:23] Unknown:
I I can feel like best friends with somebody after a text.
[00:09:30] Unknown:
Well, you probably can read and write, which probably helps.
[00:09:34] Unknown:
I think I'm so autistic. Like, I'd stick up so fucking autistic that I just I end up in this world where this idealized world where we're just, like, fucking awesome. Like, oh my god. I mean, there's so many people understand me. This is insane.
[00:09:51] Unknown:
You're in the right place with your autism.
[00:09:54] Unknown:
We are surrounded by fucking autism. Look. If a text doesn't end with some kind of, like, horrible horrible argument, I feel like I was understood. Winning. Yeah. You know? So, yeah, I I, like, love I love Telegram. I just love it. The voice notes are good, but no one really likes them. Yeah. I will say if you really if you're really trying to get somebody to understand you, it's not great. Yeah. Like, if you're not gonna be happy until you get, like, confirmation that they actually know what you said, it's not a great medium. No. It is especially when you cannot read or write properly, it's, it's fucking
[00:10:34] Unknown:
it's fucking horrific. So, yeah. No. I thought it'd be good to just catch up with you. Like, our paths cross a lot in different groups, and I don't listen to a huge amount of pods, but I caught you on, the bugle the other day. I was chuckling away, and I thought, that's Alright. I hadn't I really don't know how that thing went because,
[00:10:55] Unknown:
you know, there there's nobody willing to stand by their own identity to give me feedback on it, you know. Those guys are their characters and they were shitting on they were shitting on me for 2 hours and, you
[00:11:09] Unknown:
know, it's just that was that was a hard one to walk away from and say, oh, that went really well. But I had a I mean, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. It was good. It was good. I only listened to half of it because I, I was at the gym, and then I listened to, like, the first half. And I was like, I'm actually not training here. I'm just, like, chuckling away and just, like, fucking around. I was like, no. I need to put some music on now. But, no. It was good. First half was a good half. You should finish it. Okay. That was definitely,
[00:11:33] Unknown:
I thought for for myself, like, where's where were you where would you get my best part of the first half?
[00:11:39] Unknown:
And you do your rock paper Bitcoin podcast as well with Business Cat, don't you? Yep. How many episodes are you doing on that? Is it, like, a weekly thing? Or We do every other week.
[00:11:50] Unknown:
So we just we just let released episode 49, so we got our big 50 coming up. Oh, nice. Celebrating? Yeah. I mean, we're just gonna know we're gonna note the number. I think we're gonna act. We actually have a plan. We have a plan for look. So we never have a plan. So this is we'll do something a little special. Nice. And what do you cover on,
[00:12:13] Unknown:
rock paper bitcoin? Is it just like general? Is it news or is it like not that bitcoin related or It's really strange.
[00:12:19] Unknown:
The best way I could describe it is is just like a continual conversation with Business Cat and I. So Okay. Every 2 weeks, we just catch up, and everybody sort of just catches up on where we are. But we are like I mean, I feel like we're taking people through our journey kinda like you are with where you are professionally. I you know, I'm going through some I went through something very similar and, like, the first 30 episodes of the show were me explaining that that's about to happen. Like, I'm about to lose my job, and I'm gonna have, you know, figure out figure out this post fiat thing. And, you know, business cat is in his rabbit hole around, like, the geomagnetic pole shift and things like that. And so it's sort of you know, we're just having a conversation about where we are in our lives, and, it's people have, people have decided that they like that.
[00:13:08] Unknown:
It's very different vibe to, like, something that's too structured and feels, just not real, basically. So I think they always make for the best pods. The, move away from fear and you getting fired, what happened there? Again, just from John, he was like, oh, you were x finance similar to, like, Ben Gunn sort of thing and then had left. But I don't I don't really know the story. So what happened with that? Yeah. Okay. So, the story begins on a sunny day in 1974.
[00:13:40] Unknown:
A baby was born. That was me. Born to 2 autistic parents. So I I mean, okay, so I was always a square peg in a round hole. The way I describe myself somehow surviving in like the tradfi in the normal world was, you know that meme of big bird on the death star? This is me at work today and it's it's like yeah it's like big bird it's like a bunch of you know soldiers following Darth Vader and then there's big bird you know just sticks out. So I was trained to be something called an actuary. I don't know if you have any idea what's going on. Accountant, isn't it? Yeah. An actuary is an accountant. So ideally, right, like the way the, the way a police report would describe an actuary.
I'd say an accountant that deals with uncertain outcomes. So they're so they're under so they traditionally work in fields like insurance where probabilities Yeah. You're accounting for things like cash flows, but you don't know when they're gonna happen because you don't know when people are going to die, etcetera. Mhmm. So we call them contingent outcomes. Okay. So so I was trained to be an actuary, and I was internally, my own autistic way, actually believed that, you know, they did some idealized version of this. And I thought I was gonna save the world with my ability to understand, you know, financial systems that are probabilistic.
And, so, like, you know, my career, you know, started in the nineties. You know, I just I kept getting really bored, you know, more and more bored with it. I got very disillusioned because I saw the majority of actuaries actually didn't do what I just described. They were big. What what you end up doing as an accountant is, or what an accountant typically gets paid to do is to set assumptions and then sign their name to say these are the assumptions that, we're comfortable with. And they're usually they're usually assumptions that make a company look better than they are. When it comes to what an actuary does, we look at companies' liabilities. So, like, imagine a pension, you know, a UK pension scheme as they call it there. Right? An actuary would say, it's well funded or it's not well funded. They would understand, you know, how long it's gonna have to pay its claims for. They would look at the amount of money that's in there and say, based on certain assumptions, yes or no, they're solvent.
And so it could be that it could be that the plan is solvent if you assume an 11% interest rate. Mhmm. But if you assume a 7% interest rate, it's not solvent. Now, without getting into what like, why a lower discount rate means higher liability, We lived through in the last 2 years why raising rates lowered like the long term value of bonds to the point where it became problematic for banks, right? So, it does the same thing for liabilities as it does for assets. Higher interest rates means lower asset values, lower liabilities. Right? So actuary will want to, tell a company that they can assume a very high discount rate so that their liabilities look low. Right?
And even today, they're signing off on 8, 9 percent 8, 9 percent interest rates even today when, you know, the rates were as high as they'd ever been, and, you know, we're talking 5%. So I guess that was that was all to say that it's very corrupt in a way that even, like, lay lay people who understand financial markets, like, I think Bitcoiners are, I'm actually really impressed in general. Like, the average Bitcoiner knows more than, like, the 95th percentile of person I worked with for 30 years, but they don't understand this basic thing I'm talking about. And Mhmm. An actuary basically gets paid till I I would say, almost a lie about what the future holds in a way that no one's gonna realize or figure out. You know, that was a glaring example. People do understand interest rates, but there are, like, a there are dozens of other assumptions that go in that can lever that could lever the value of liabilities.
[00:18:02] Unknown:
Presumably, like, you're in that job, and Ben's talked to me about this before. You start thinking differently. You start thinking, well, that's not true. Well, hold on a second. No. We should be accounting for this and that. And, actually, what we're saying is not truthful, and it's not right. And it's very frustrating, especially as someone who cares about these things. Like, to just go along with something that you know is wrong, it, like, just feels horrible. But when you start bringing it up, people aren't very happy about that. Like, if you start in that culture saying, good morning. Just to let you know that we are lying. That is our job is to lie and that we are gonna cause a huge amount of problems, and what we're doing is wrong. No one's gonna be like, yeah. Do you know what? I haven't thought about that. Let's talk about it. Let's see if we can change. Like, presumably, you either go along with it even though you work that out, and a little bit of you dies inside, but you take the money and you carry on or or you, you know, you leave.
[00:19:03] Unknown:
Yeah. And I I would say, oh my god. I mean, I listen to I listen to Ben's conversations very, very intently. I it's one of the few times I really felt like I was watching a TV show about my life in a certain way. Right? But even, like, what he experienced was just a like, he was he experienced that with a bunch of people he expected to be criminals, and it was not, what I experienced was a slight step beyond that where I saw all of society accepting it. So these guys wouldn't just these guys don't just tell the like the CIO of a bank what the assumption is. You understand? They're testifying in court cases as expert witnesses.
They're negotiating on behalf of gigantic unions. They're in charge of government agencies. And so I'm also watching the entire world go along with it and trust them and then watching all their financial systems get destroyed. Right? So, look, in the last 30 years, watched Social Security, Medicare, pensions, life insurance. Like, you watch all of these financial systems get destroyed under totally under the guise of how they were being advised. Mhmm. And so to me, it wasn't just that they were shit. It I got just as angry as the lemmings who trusted them, which really made me unpopular. Like I like to say I was the most I was the most hated actuary on the face of this earth.
There was an anonymous there was an anonymous message board that, you know, I was part of. I've told the story on our podcast but like I was just a maniac, an unhinged maniac expressing my hatred and exposing all the all the shit.
[00:20:56] Unknown:
But you gotta do it. Right? I imagine that just kills your soul otherwise. I I say you've gotta do it. You can know what you know, and you can just bury your head in the sand and go into work in the mornings. And you're gonna fucking hate yourself. Like, yeah, I see it all the time. I see people who are in those type of roles going into London. They kinda know what they're doing is, like, wrong, and they they kind of hate themselves a bit, and they end up with cocaine problems and hooker problems and a lot of other problems where they just spend the money that they're earning on stuff to try and forget that they're actually a piece of shit. They can't take the step to go fuck this. I'm leaving. It's bullshit.
[00:21:39] Unknown:
They have acting problems. It really is what it is. It's like it's really hard. It requires I mean, it really requires you act a certain way even if you're hiding in plain sight as a rebel. Right? You can only do like, you're still there, and you can't escape yourself. You know, I was embarrassed to say I was an actuary for a really long time, and I think it's been decades where I didn't even say this is what I did for a living. And it wasn't until I got sacked, right, and I started thinking about what I do and what I what kind of what I am is that I started telling people that that's actually my profession because I'm no longer well, no I'm no longer working for them. Right? I'm sort of on my own observing the financial systems that I'm observing now, and I am I'm okay saying that I'm doing it as an actuary, my own idealized version of what it was. It's almost like I survived it. It didn't get killed out of me in 30 years somehow.
Somehow finding Bitcoin and approaching the world the way I do and the way we do has kept this little pilot light alive. And I think in some way, I was supposed to survive to be able to look at the world through my lens and through, you know, through what I was trained to do. But it's interesting already sorry, mate. I don't I don't I never shut the fuck up. I think you know this. Business guys told me his like, our wives listen to the show, and his wife's primary issue is how many times I interrupt him. My wife's primary issue is how many times I interrupt him. What's his?
He was mad. Business Scats is like the coolest fucking dude ever. He has no issues. You know? He just like, him and I, we just go on and do it. But our we listen to our wives. Like, they're the we feel like they're the only ones who even listen. But they both say it's me who always interrupts. That's our running joke.
[00:23:35] Unknown:
So sorry, man. I guess, I'm that's No. No. That's cool. It's cool. It's hard when you, when you don't have video. You know? Sometimes you just have, like, a pause and then you both go at the same time. But, I was gonna say, were you already involved in Bitcoin during that time leading up to you getting fired from your work? Was it something that was already on your mind, or was this something you Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So here's I'll say now
[00:24:03] Unknown:
we've covered 1974. Let's, cover let's start at 2020. I think 20 so I started working in 1996, and, you know, I can almost say I never really added any value for 25 years. It's not that I didn't try, but, the closest I came to ever adding value anywhere was in, like, the mid 2000s. I started looking at pensions in a we started pioneering this thing that ended up getting called liability driven investments, which was blamed for the 2022 Bank of England bailout. But I didn't really add any value, in my opinion. You know, I was trying. I tried to I learned a lot, but it's very hard to add value when you have all these people in the way that are really you you have rules that disincentivize value. You have people that just want to keep their jobs. It's very hard to actually do that. In 2020, when the markets were going out of, like, completely haywire, you might recall.
I didn't I wasn't in Bitcoin yet, but I was doing my particular job, which my particular job at the time was explaining the performance of a very, very complicated, like, insanely complicated options system. And in 2020, like, nothing was making sense. Like, in February that month of February, nothing was making sense at all. And, you know, we were I was up till, like, midnight, 1 AM every day because we had to send some we had to send a report to our chief investment officer. So every night, like, I was just up by my computer with this disturbing feeling that nothing made sense.
And I did I I I did end up figuring something out that I converted into a trade I basically converted into a program for our company that ended up making in a very low effort, like, about $50,000,000 a year. And after about a year, once I proved that that worked, I started getting a little uppity about, like, I didn't ask for any I didn't ask for, like, pay or promotion or anything like that. I just asked to focus on this thing because it had the potential to actually be much more. It had the potential to, you know, bring in 100 of 1,000,000 to 1,000,000 of dollars a year. And there's something really stupid that anybody could have figured out, but it just happened to be I would happen to be the autistic one that spent enough time on it. So, you know, I started really battling with the company about focusing on doing this. And so anytime they anytime I got shit about a project that wasn't this, I did basically told them I didn't give a shit, you know?
Why am I like, you know, there's, like, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars that all I have, you know, all I have to do is spend, like, 10 hours, you know, like, we don't have to call a bank. We don't have to make any deals. We don't have to do any weird balance sheet shit. It's literally you have to get me to want to do this for 10 hours. And then, you know and so I started getting, you know, I started getting angry. And, you know, one of the one of the things I was counting on was that the greed would eventually like, I wouldn't I wouldn't lose my job. At some point, they would look in the mirror and say, well, we do we do need this money.
[00:27:15] Unknown:
Yeah. You would think someone would go, a $100,000,000
[00:27:18] Unknown:
sounds quite nice. Like Yeah. Yeah. Because give give it a go. This was this was validated. This is, like, validated. We actually like, we were a large insurance company in the S and P 500, and we paid a $50,000,000 dividend to ourselves based on this program. Like this is legit. So once I realized, I kind of, I kind of figured it was too late for them once they did that. Right. They can't, they can't stop now. Right. And so it really actually brings up a lot of questions I have now about, like, why is it that companies don't care about making money, and things like that. But that that's essentially how we got to the point where I got sacked
[00:27:59] Unknown:
in, May of this year. Yeah. And so they were just like, look. Stop going on about it. We don't care about the money. You gotta pipe down. You were like, fuck off. Don't tell me to do anything else. This is the most important. Well, if I'm being honest, I thought that
[00:28:14] Unknown:
you know, I thought that this was more important, yes, than anything else they had going on. And, I thought it should be the only thing I focused on. I thought it should be the only thing I spent my time on. And that, like, I didn't even wanna be told like, being told to do to, work on anything else, it was, like, insulting. And so their attitude basically became, look, dude, we could do this without you. So, like, we could just let you go. And and I'm like, you think you can, but you cannot. You can do 50,000,000 without me. No problem. Right? You'll you'll fuck it up, but you can do it, but you're not gonna go any further. And so then now we're we're 5 and a half months into that game of chicken right
[00:28:59] Unknown:
now. And this is presumably not something and this is not a game you can play
[00:29:04] Unknown:
without their backing or without Yeah. Actually, the only reason I was able to do this is because well, yeah. I mean, it's their it's their fucked up 10 years of decision making that enabled this to exist. So Okay. It's definitely possible that there are other companies that I could do this for, but at the you know, for the last five and a half months, that thought has never entered my mind. I've only really thought about adding value. Like, I don't care. I just don't care about that industry. I mean, I know the day is going to come and I might have to go back to fee at work, and that might be the case, but I'm not thinking about it right now. Like, I really have been focused on trying to figure out Bitcoin, trying to figure out who I can add value to here. And I've been very, like, I've been very busy and consumed with it.
I think a lot of people after 5 and a half months would be losing their mind. You know. Maybe spending 5 hours a day on math is losing my mind, but you know there's a re there's a reason my brain wants to do it, you know. Like, I do it until I want to puke and there's a reason, you know, so this is like this is so my process is I do what my brain tells me to do, right? I don't like want to do what a boss tells me to do. I usually think their judgment's bad, stupid. I do what my brain tells me to do and my brain's telling me to study math and try to help try to understand the financial system of Bitcoin, like, as an actuary and find some leverage points that I can add value. Yeah. Well, it's certainly an interesting skill to bring into
[00:30:36] Unknown:
the Bitcoin world. Because you said earlier, you're like, you know, you're impressed with the knowledge that the average Bitcoiner has and that it's that it's above that sort of 95% of people in the traditional financial world. But I would say, often, what I see is overconfident people repeating things they don't really understand to sound smart.
[00:31:01] Unknown:
Personally, I find it quite frustrating. I feel that people are a lot more cocksure than they should be. See my face right now. I would yeah. What was your face? I wish you could see my face right now because yeah. I'm just like no. Totally agree. Like, so, so good. It's so true, dude. Like, I it's so there's something weird that happens the second you get paid. You become a retard. So if I were to sort, like, the Bitcoiners that don't get paid with the ones that do, right, the ones that aren't getting paid to make like to under at least to understand anything are miles ahead of those that those that do. Once you start getting paid, it's weird. Why does this happen? That all of a sudden you start making all the bad decisions that all the fiat people made and people that you before you were getting paid to do this, you were making fun of all those people. Mhmm. And now you're getting paid. Your your a company is paying you, right, to do essentially the same things. This is what you mean, right? Like like the second I got a sniff of like these public companies, these mining companies, these, you know, pretty much any of these companies that exist. It's like they're no they're all of a sudden they've gone backwards.
[00:32:16] Unknown:
They've gone right back to fiat mindset. It certainly feels like that. But even on a deeper level than that, I just find and I found this myself, so I'm not, like, pointing fingers where I can't point them at myself. But, like, early days coming into Bitcoin, thinking, oh, I really understand the traditional financial system so much better than everyone else. And, like, I'm I'm so much further ahead of everybody else, and I've got this whole thing mapped out. And I know what's gonna happen with interest rates. I know what's gonna happen with, you know, just like everything. I have this delusion of grandeur maybe where I thought, well, because I've worked out this Bitcoin thing, and because I've been directionally correct when I've been borrowing and buying property and timing things historically, that I'm some sort of genius.
The further in time we go forward, the more I realize, no. You are a retard. I'm back to, no. I'm a retard. Yeah. Bitcoin's good. It's probably gonna do well. But outside of that, shut the fuck up. When I reflect on it, I'm like, you don't fucking know what you're talking about, mate. You know a little bit of something, but really actually have a guess where interest rates are gonna go. Really actually have a guess what's gonna happen in the next 6 months. And I can fucking guarantee you I'll be wrong.
[00:33:34] Unknown:
Yeah. So just because you know more than somebody else doesn't make doesn't mean you're ready to be responsible for a giant pot of money. Right? And, really, the reason you know more than them is because they just have tumors on their brain. Right? They have they have lesions that are just not that that are keeping them from understanding very basic things. Right? It's not even that your average Bitcoiner has some superior understanding of things. It's like there's this old expression, you don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the other guy. That's true for bar conversations. Right? And it's true for, like, building a general worldview for yourself. Right? It's definitely not true for, like, being responsible now for money. Like, you actually have to outrun the bear at that point. Right?
So I think a lot of guys develop a sense of themselves by, you know, real you know, there's a certain power from realizing that the emperor has no clothes. Right? Once you're over that, I still think take you know, that doesn't necessarily mean we're ready to this doesn't mean we're ready to manage some kind of big money. I think you see all these they're like little man children running around blowing up companies. You know?
[00:34:48] Unknown:
All the people of influence tend to be pretty retarded, and they tend to have, ulterior motives. There's an arrogance that goes with it, which I just find a real turn off. And, as you said, it is often talking to the people who don't get heard, who have got something interesting to say. You know, they've got something new to say. They're thinking about things a little bit differently. And it's also that, like, first year, 2 years, 3 years of being involved in Bitcoin where it really, really grips you. And you're just like, woah. This thing's amazing. And then you can quite easily get lost by just listening to Waffle, the same old Waffle. I'm saying there are all these different guys who get on all these stages, and it starts to, be less interesting.
[00:35:37] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I've now become, I think, pretty hated in this space now because, like Oh, really? Yeah. Because I've I've we had our big Bitcoin meetup last night. It was really we have a great meetup in Philly, and, Alan Farrington was there. I mean, you know, it's that kind of a meetup, right, where, like Mhmm. You know, you might have some somebody like that come. And so we also get all the, like, we get all, like, the Fiat simpies that Mhmm. You know, wanna talk about NGU and all that shit. Right? And I had a there's there's a guy. He's, he's very well known. I think he sits on board to some of these companies that we're talking about. Mhmm. I would even say I would even say that he's knowledgeable. Yes.
However, I actually think I forced a tear out of his eye last night because he was he was asking me he was asking me how I felt about institutional adoption, and I just, like, looked at him dead in the eye and I was like, it's not happening. There is no institutional adoption. I feel very strongly about this. I wrote a paper about it a year ago called HODLing as a Human Action, and it's about, like, how Bitcoin is is uniquely human. And it was back then, like, why it was institutional adoption was never really, I thought it was never gonna work. I recently reread the paper, and I was like, yeah, this kind of holds up. I still feel this way now. And I swear I felt I forced a tear out of the guy's eye, and I could feel him getting, like, super angry at me. Like, why won't you just shut the fuck up? And that's like this is part of my role. Like, I was born I was born to be this guy.
You know? It just is what it is.
[00:37:13] Unknown:
When you say you don't believe institutional adoption is gonna happen, do you Anytime soon. Class
[00:37:20] Unknown:
ETFs and those kind of things as institutional adoption? I do. But what people think is gonna happen with them is that, companies are gonna allocate, like, 5% of their pensions. Like, people think that there's gonna be 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars coming in through the ETFs, through institutions. That's not happening in the near future, in my opinion. I'll start with why I think it's uniquely individual first, right, which is that I think, first of all, buying not buying anyone buys Bitcoin. Right? Anybody everybody buys Bitcoin. Institutions, individuals, they all buy Bitcoin. Mhmm. We may see institutions coming in buying Bitcoin, and then you guys will all be like, hey, I remember that confab episode of that fucking prick said it wasn't gonna happen.
And that's fine, but, that's fine. I was told last night that I looked like Peter McCormack, and I almost wanted to punch this guy in the face. I couldn't believe it. That's not fine. That was not fine. Anyway, companies are not like people. Okay? People are unreasonable. People individuals can be ungovernable if they want to. Right? You have people individuals doing all kinds of unreasonable shit all over the world. Right? And one of them is HODLing Bitcoin. Right? I mean, it's incredibly it's an incredibly unreasonable thing to do. In fact, it's probably illegal. And when I say it's probably illegal, I mean, like, if somebody ever if a trustee ever figures out that he is in charge of a portfolio that has Bitcoin in it, that despite there being no explicit law, that trustee will feel to himself that he must remove it in order to be legally on solid ground.
Right? So any institution with a trustee isn't right now going to be you know, they're they're they're on automatic sell, right, if they figure out there's any Bitcoin exposure. It's very hard for 2 people to agree on HODLing Bitcoin. Right? It's a lot harder than 1. Okay? 1 person can be very unreasonable. 2 people, you're gonna get a little more reasonable. And the bigger the company, the more reasonable you have to be. The more governance you have to get approval from. And, you know, even a even a board that one day is psychotic enough to say, yes, we see why this is important and we're going to do this.
3 months later, if Bitcoin goes down by 20%, that Bitcoin will all be gone. They won't stay. They won't huddle. There's no company that is going to huddle through a 10 year period no matter what happens through 80% drawdowns. MicroStrategy worked the way it did because that one dude was the company. He happened to be his company. And that guy, I could tell you, I mean, I just did a whole, It's not an entire episode, but the majority of the episode was around why he's not one of us. And I had a very strong reaction to his his appearance on Saba Dean's podcast about it really I think he pulled the mask off. He pulled the mask off and really told us he's, you know, he's sucking JPMorgan's dick.
Right? Mhmm. And he's the most capable. Like he is an individual. I think in the paper I wrote, I covered Elon, you know, so, like, you know, you can have an individual who doesn't really fully get it. But an institution, there's just so many reasons why they're never gonna hang on to that Bitcoin. Right? And even with the ETF, they're not holding Bitcoin. Right? Knut Spadholme's quote, MicroStrategy doesn't hold any Bitcoin. Some guy does. Right? El Salvador doesn't hold any Bitcoin. Some guy does. I I would tend to think that there might have been a time where Michael Sailor was on an individual journey with Bitcoin.
You know? He, you know, he relinquished being the CEO of the company. Like, it started to cost him shit to really hold his Bitcoin, but he never held his keys. And, we just released an episode called gulp limit. Like, I think you have to be whole you have to be responsible for your own net worth up to some scare gulp limit for it to have that effect on you where you're where you're like, it gives you the fucking money power, and you're no longer interested in what a bank cares about. Mhmm. And if you're not holding your own keys, you're not sovereign, you're not pushing yourself to the limits of your own sovereignty. You're probably just very comfortable and you just end up in an NGU world. Right.
I forgot what the original question was, but I feel like that was the oh, yeah. Why institutions and instant yeah. So it's like you're relying on boards, committees. You're relying on people who have no connection to this Bitcoin whatsoever.
[00:42:03] Unknown:
Right? I've never worked in that kind of environment, so it's difficult for me to really wrap my head around it. But I imagine what you're saying is it's like when you have huge boards and groups of people, getting anything done is probably quite difficult. There's all these, like, internal rules and politics and bullshit that just means making any changes is probably quite hard, especially one that is considered possibly reckless. And, yeah, you may have, like, 1 person or 2 people in a board meeting who are saying, no. We're Bitcoiners. We understand this. Like, we have our entire net worth in this. We fully think this is the best thing that we could have our money in, but they're not the ones that are gonna be listened to. And like you say, when there is this drawdown, everyone will turn around and be like, right. I fucking told you, sell this shit. Let's buy some other nonsense. So I think I understand what you mean. I don't really care either way. I think Yeah. It would be nice to see more individuals hold it. Like, where I wanna see people hold it is builders and plumbers and general people who have, like, normal jobs who are struggling.
Cash is being phased out. It's getting harder for people to just get by. They're being squeezed from every angle. And there are people who would understand, because they're used to, like, keep some cash somewhere, don't have that through the books. People on that human level, I think, understand it, and they need it. And so that's where I'd like to see the growth because it's still only a very, very, very small percentage of people. Like, I don't talk to anyone about Bitcoin anymore. I just have given up with it, like, in normal fiat world. Like, even if people ask me, like, if I'm at the gym or I'm doing whatever, if someone asks me what I do, I would never tell them what I do. Maybe 1% or 2% of people that I know hold a little bit and
[00:44:01] Unknown:
the rest, like, wouldn't even consider it. Yeah. And it's it's really just I think it's comfort and not understanding how much you do need it. You know? People just don't understand how how much they need a money that can't be taken from them, and they don't it's not just about holding on your money. Right? It's about living a life of being subject. This is I don't know. I mean, I feel like most people just are perfectly fine subjecting themselves, but that's fine. You know, that is fine for them. But there's a there's a lot of people that just don't wanna do that that are are like, fuck fuck that. And you know what? Why should should somebody have to be poor because they don't wanna listen to some shithead prioritize what they do with their life? I mean, I don't think that's the way the world evolved. Right? I just don't I don't think that's how we evolved at all. I think it's a mistake. It's an error that's gone out of control.
And whether you believe it's divine or lucky, I think Bitcoin came to fix this error.
[00:45:04] Unknown:
It does definitely feel like if ever it's been needed if ever there's a time where I've looked around and been like, fuck. People need this thing.
[00:45:14] Unknown:
Like, it's now. Good people who know that they're being subjected to lesser men need it. Mhmm. They know they need it. I think that's what it comes down to. Right? We don't need it. Everybody in the world doesn't need it. It'd be nice, but it's not I mean, everybody in the world is honestly, it's like, I feel like that I think this whole scaling issue just gets brought up as an excuse to, you know, it's yet another reason why people don't accept limitations. Accepting limitations is why it works the way it does for the 1,000 or a 100000 people that really, truly need it. Like, I actually, I feel like these people are such jerk offs. These, like, these scalers. You know? It's just to get another reason to start a company. It's just, you know, they got a bunch of funding, and they need to do something with it. So let's use this line that, oh, well, the whole world needs it. You know? Though, if Bitcoin has failed, if we can't give it to the entire world, it drives me fucking crazy.
[00:46:10] Unknown:
Side chains and all these different, yeah, all these projects to make some extra money. I I I agree. Like, I use on chain most of the time. It costs you, I mean, fucking, like, a few pennies to send on chain at the moment. Yeah. There are spikes sometimes. Lightning sort of works okay sometimes when you need it. If there is, particularly high fees, it's like it's fine. And this whole there's gonna be, like, a flood of people any day now, whether it's institutions or it's some country where there's a problem or whatever the narrative is of the day is never usually right. What I kind of see is just more people who are using it use it more often. Like, there's a massive difference now how much I use like, every single day, I use Bitcoin multiple times a day. But when I first was involved, I'd make, like, one transaction in a year or 2. And then it kept scaling up and up and up and up. And, actually, if I think about it, like, how many transactions are made in a day through, like, me and Ungovernable Misfits?
100. Wow. We've got 100 of payments going through Lightning, the podcasting 2.0 stuff, responding back to messages, going through Nosta, organizing the clothing. We buy all our VPNs and storage and hosting and virtual machines and air, all the shit that we use. All of it is paid in Bitcoin the whole way through. And so maybe it's not necessarily a case of, like, you need more and more and more people. Maybe it's just that it gets better and better and more used, and the networks of people, like within the mesh to Dell, of people who accept Bitcoin for goods and services grows.
[00:48:00] Unknown:
That's just as good. I think so. I like, I think that people who don't use Bitcoin are just eventually look no different from institutions. I think it's you know what I mean? Like, they're if you're not using it you know, this thing came up last night in this meetup too, and I I grabbed the microphone and kinda just made everybody feel badly in the room. But this question came up. It was posed to Alan, and I could see I could see Alan getting he got annoyed with it. But this question was asked that, like, oh, you have, Michael Saylor and all these Winklevii and all these people.
And he basically is, like, if we fast forward to the year 2048 and, you know, 99% of the Bitcoin is already allocated, he said, is it even is it even Freedom Money anymore? And, you know, as opposed to Alan, like, it's like a fireside chat type format, and, he gave an answer. He looked super annoyed with it, and, I asked for the mic and basically said that I hated the framing of this question. All due respect to the guy that asked it, but I hated the framing that it's about what Michael Saylor cares about or people like that. Because, like, those people who say don't use your Bitcoin. Right? They're never gonna dictate whether or not Bitcoin is free to money or not. They don't get to say the same way, like, that Bitmain just because they were the most powerful company at the time got to determine what Bitcoin was. Right?
It's everybody else that gets to say. I feel like the people that do need to use it are always gonna be they're gonna do it and they're gonna be the best at it. So I think there's from being good at it and from the people who don't use it being bad at it, you know, that's a big advantage to those who use it. And then there is this other obvious point that we're not just gonna wake up in 2048 where, you know, we're all rich, blah blah blah. Right? You have to get there. And, like, the idea that anyone's gonna get there without using the majority of the Bitcoin that they've stacked is incredibly naive. It's just incredibly naive Mhmm. To think that you're not gonna touch
[00:50:02] Unknown:
like, that you're not gonna need to use it. Right? What a Pollyanna ish view of the world you must have. Well, I think people put their lives on hold as well. I I spoke to was it Zach I was talking to about this? Might have been. We're saying about, you know, I've sold the majority of my stack because I've made the plunge to go full time with this podcast. And I wanna make sure while I'm doing that, the family eats good quality food. I've got myself a gym membership. Like Yeah. Trying to live a life where I'm not just waiting for the price to go up to some magical number.
Okay. Now I can live. Because I sort of did that for a while. Like, I I worked multiple jobs. I, like, crammed doing all this stuff into the evenings. I started to not enjoy what I was doing because I was doing way too much and always had that pressure. I was always waiting, like, oh, I won't buy what I need today because, you know, Bitcoin could 10 x, and then, oh, you know, this £100 that I was gonna spend on that, you know, that's a 1,000. And, you know, always doing this kind of, like, calculation the whole time. You know, just thinking about starting businesses, thinking about going full time with a pod, and it was always going around in my head. And I always was like, no. You know, just hold on another 6 months. Just hold on another year. At the same time, like, literally having, like, crippling panic attacks pulling over on the side of the road, thinking I'm having a fucking heart attack. And then just accepting that, like, no. No. This is all worth it. And it's not. Like, especially when you have kids, you realize, like, I'm not gonna have a heart attack and leave them without dad. Like, I'm not gonna be that fucking retard.
I'm gonna spend some Bitcoin. I have to.
[00:51:43] Unknown:
Yeah. I and it's funny. Most people, like, just to get them to wait another month before they get the their new phone, you know, you know, the current money doesn't incentivize people waiting. Right? So, like, yes. If you go full blown, if you're fully on on bitcoin, you can go to the other side of the spectrum where it's like you just you got a Fred Flintstone car that you're half carrying. Right?
[00:52:13] Unknown:
You know, I a car anymore. I sold that. I've got a bicycle now.
[00:52:17] Unknown:
But, like, you could get to the point. Right? You just you know, you can you can get to that point, but the thing is you you get to find that point for yourself, I think, is the bottom line. Whereas without Bitcoin, you don't get you're you're stuck with, washing machines that don't work after a year. You know, you're just you're you're stuck with toxic food. You're just stuck with all that shit. You don't have anything you don't have anything to say about it. So at the very least, you get to put yourself on a spectrum and discover where, you know, the kind of person you are and how you want to live.
And if you, you know, even if you have a stack of Bitcoin, but you believe you should never sell it because, oh my god, I don't wanna pay, a $100,000 for a cup of coffee because that's the math people do in their heads. Mhmm. Yep. Oh, man. That's the most expensive cup of coffee I ever had in my life. You know, I'm never gonna do that again. It's it's, like, it's it's we're so early, dude. Like, it's we're we're so early that we don't even really know how to live in this world. That's you know, that is why I created rock paper Bitcoin. It's, before it was a podcast, it was a paper that I wrote to try to sort all this shit out. I realized, like, bitcoin really broke me.
I'm older than most people in the space, so I have a lot of things to unlearn.
[00:53:38] Unknown:
You can't be older than John. Yeah. I am older than John. Fucking hell. You are old. He's very old. Yeah. Wow. Okay. You're a wise old man.
[00:53:48] Unknown:
I am. Well, I well, I am a wise old man, and I do think I bring that's I think that's something I do I do bring to the space is a little bit of wisdom, but also it shattered my world to realize how much is wrong in my worldview. So how, like, how am I supposed to trust that I really should spend hours and hours and hours in certain rabbit holes, right, if I know my worldview is wrong? So to, you know, like, to me, that's not a good foundation for confident action, right? I created this thing called Rock Paper Bitcoin. There's a way of looking at the world, maybe like in the show notes or whatever. But, like, it was that and that's how we that that was the the genesis of the podcast was we're both like, okay. What the fuck do we do now? We don't know how to live. And in general, people it's it's not it's not a slight. It's like we have not discovered how to live on hard money. You know, we've gone through enough generations without it that we don't know how to do it and it has to be rediscovered and it's ugly. It's like watching somebody learn to play the violin. It's like sounds like shit
[00:54:51] Unknown:
until it until it's beautiful. Yeah. That's a good point. And the other point is, you know, when people say, oh, you should never sell your Bitcoin, At the same time, they'll say, like I don't even know the numbers. I can't remember now, but, like, annualized return on Bitcoin is x and you know? But you should never sell it. And you think, well, if it does continue as it has and if you are right with your projections, then, you know, slicing off a few percent every year just to, like, make sure that you have some health and, like, you're not fucking miserable would still make sense because you're still gonna be in a very, very good spot. It's still like basic money management that anyone should be able to do. Just never, never sell. Unless you're in, like, a extremely well paid job, and you already have everything that you need, and there's absolutely no need for you to use Bitcoin for any reason, then, you know, I kinda get it. Whatever. That's fine. But, you know, for most of us, we're not in that position.
[00:55:51] Unknown:
To get out of that job, you're gonna need to use your Bitcoin. So, like and that's Exactly. You know? Like, I would have never been able to put up the fight that I did that got me fired, which I considered that an accomplishment. So I, you know, I got my outcome was because of a fight that I put up, and I put that fight up knowing that I was gonna be okay. Yeah. I mean, people say and this is the thing that drove me crazy about what Saylor said. Bitcoin is a nonperforming asset. Are you fucking crazy? Like, it gave you know, knowing what I have gave me the strength to do what, honestly, 99.9% of the world was absolutely unwilling to do and will prostitute themselves before they do the step that they would take to leave their subjugation.
Right? I mean, how how could that be a nonperforming asset when it literally is this is the thing I'm relying on? You know, it's it's mere existence is what makes my family feel like this is okay that we can do this. You know, you have to live day to day in this world. Right? It's just like an oxymoron that, you know, it's like, you know, Karen 2 2 episodes ago, you know, who was talking about the ketamine trips. Oh, what a result. Yeah. Well, it's like we we live in a disassociated world where you have, like, people talking to people, giving advice.
Mhmm. They're not giving advice to that person. They're giving advice to, like, some person that lives in an alternate universe. Somebody who owns bitcoin doesn't want fiat advice. Okay? It's good fiat advice. Don't sell your investments. Okay? But it's really bad bitcoin advice that don't use your bitcoin. Alright? It's bad. Right? It's like what the to me, it's nefarious. It's like the only reason he would say that is because, yeah, we don't he doesn't want me to ruin his little n g u game. It's the only reason he would give me that bad advice knowing nothing else about the guy. It's almost like we have this collect there's like a collected cult that just doesn't want to upset that apple cart. Right? Totally focused on price, but it's pretty obvious for anyone with a soul to see how wrong that how, like, wrong headed all that is.
Bitcoin's a really powerful tool. You use it whether you spend it or not. Just having it, just knowing you have it, it's like brandishing a gun. Right? It's like knowing you have the gun means, okay, I can go into a dangerous neighborhood with a little bit, you know, Like, you're using it. Whether or not you pull a trigger or you pull it out, you're using it. You're using the fact that you have it. Yeah. It gives you a a confidence, and it gives you an option You have with your job. It's like it gives you the option
[00:58:27] Unknown:
to do what you believe is right and to have that fight. Having that as just like a cushion where you can take a few risks where you need to and make the decisions you need to, and you have just something to fall back on is really powerful because you end up acting completely differently. You don't nod along to things that you otherwise would because you feel you have to. You think differently. It changes the whole changes your whole life, the the way you think, the way you move, the way you interact with other people.
[00:58:55] Unknown:
Well, yeah, because you're not asking you're you're, you know, you're in charge. That's the key. It's just you're in charge of yourself. Right? So you're not walking around asking other people to tell you how to think about things. You do have to be willing to pull that trigger, though. You know, you could larp yourself into a very damaging situation. You could probably larp yourself into a worse slavery than you were in to begin with. If you walk around and so in the business world, in the corporate world, at least in finance, the correct adaptation is to walk around like you don't care about money. And so people do that. People do a pretty good job of acting like they don't give a shit about money. I think if Ben is listening, he's nodding his head. He's like, yeah, dude. Totally. I mean, if there's There's a book Liar's Poker, I think it is. It's like the first Michael, the guy that wrote The Big Short. I forgot his name. Michael Lewis. Michael Murray? No. Michael Murray is the guy. Yeah. Michael Lewis wrote it and it was about his time at, Solomon Brothers mortgage desk.
Anyway, first paragraph, he's like number one rule is nobody talks about money and you act like you don't give a shit about money. But they very much do. You know what I mean? Like they very, very, very much do. But you have to be you have to walk around, like, I don't care if I get fired. I don't care. You know? That's the act. Right? Mhmm. But unless you're really willing to walk away, unless you're really willing to pull that trigger, you know, you become a slave to that act. But, like, the people with the power know you're full shit. Mhmm. It's yeah. You know, so you're, like, in a almost in a worse situation than you were in if you were just, like, thank you, sir. May I please have another?
Yeah.
[01:00:35] Unknown:
And what's your plans now? Like, you said it's 5 months. You're obviously honing your math skills.
[01:00:41] Unknown:
Have you got any thoughts? It's almost like prayer. I the math work I do is like prayer. I I don't understand. I I can't really explain why I do it. It's not to learn more math. I mean, it's not something I, like, be better at it for a reason. It's to, it's it's just I think it's filling a spiritual hole in some way that maybe it's because I need more conviction in myself at this to be in this stage of my life. Like, studying math will give you conviction in yourself. Like, I could tell that to anybody here. If you spend a month getting better at something in math, you will have more conviction in yourself. There's like no way around it. It's like if you go to the spend serious time training physically, you will have more conviction in yourself. So, like, I think that's I think it's a big reason why I do that.
I really don't know what I'm I don't have a plan and it's, like, really bothering my wife. I don't know what I'm doing really yet. I I, you know, I'm trying to throw a bunch of logs in the fire. I I know I probably wanna teach in some way, but there's no way to I don't know how that makes money. Maybe create a game and sell it. I've thought about teaching through games, things like that. I don't know. I do think, like, you know, I have you know, for now, I'm not I don't have an enormous amount of pressure. My family is fine.
Mhmm. So it's not like I have this huge amount of pressure to go back, but I do feel pressure to make some money so that I know I'm adding value. You know, I don't think I I know I can't run around in the world just not doing anything. Like, not not me. You know, not having the world tell me that I'm adding value. Like, that to me, I know I can't that can't continue. That's been happening for that's been happening for a few months. Right? So, like, I need some value signal that I'm on the right track. I need, you know, I need something like that for sure. Right? And I'm not gonna I'm going back to fiat isn't the best form of that. It's kind of shitty form of that. It may be the it may be the one I end up having to do, but at least I kind of wanna know what's my time worth. Like, we're setting up a geyser for the podcast just to see if people are willing to, you know, what people are willing to pay, kind of like what you guys you're doing with the t shirt.
It's just to see, okay. Well, what what what's out there? What are people willing to pay? What's my time worth in sets? Nobody knows. It's another it's another thing we're very early at and nobody on earth understands what their time is worth.
[01:03:13] Unknown:
Right?
[01:03:13] Unknown:
So, like, I feel like if it's inevitable that I have to go back to that fiat shit, I kinda want I wanna have a bunch of logs in the fire that could add value in Bitcoin so that maybe I can work on those things in parallel.
[01:03:28] Unknown:
You know, it's important, as we all know, like, having some purpose, doing something that you feel is adding value to the world. And even if you're doing, you know, like I was doing with my Fiat, it's like, my Fiat work was adding no value to the world. Like, none at all. It wasn't fulfilling, and it added no value, but it paid the bills. And then, you know, you carry on with the pardon, whatever else I was doing that I did care about in the evenings and early in the mornings and on the weekends, because that's what actually feeds the soul and feels good and you actually care about. You've gotta have that whether you, you know, whether it's on on the side with something else or full time. Either way, it has you have to have it. Otherwise, it's just it's a miserable existence. Otherwise, that feeling of, like, you know, like well, I did it for years, like, in previous work where it was relatively well paid. It was cons you know, most people consider it a pretty decent job and, like, had a nice car and all that stuff, but, like, Yeah. Just get home in the evenings. Just be like People make you feel bad. No. Not even people make you feel bad. Like, I made myself feel bad. So just get home and be like, what the fuck have I done that's actually of use? And everything that I've fixed today is gonna be fucking broken tomorrow again.
And if I die tomorrow, no one's gonna care. Like, nothing that I'm doing here matters. And that was just the general feeling.
[01:04:54] Unknown:
I don't know how old you are, but, like, imagine getting to John's age in in my age Yeah. Of course. And still feel and still feeling that way. Like, actually, you know, really taking you know, I think that's what midlife crises are all about. I think you get to a certain age and you have this realization, like, I haven't done anything. Holy shit. And it's like all like, it's such a it's all such a lie. It could go in a fucking snap.
[01:05:20] Unknown:
Then what? It's weird, isn't it, how you think about that? Because, like, when you're young young or at least for me, it was like, get a house, get a car, be able to afford stuff. You know? Just like you you're chasing chasing to, like, have a better quality of life. And then it's only once you get to that comfort zone of like, oh, I can, like, I can sit back a little bit now. Like, I'm not chasing my way out of a shit situation. And it gives you time to, like, think. And you reflect and you go, am I happy? Like, am I because you you're too busy before to think, like, am I happy? Or, like, am I doing anything that's valuable? As you have more time, you question that kind of stuff and you do think, like, the big thought I had when I left my, like, first, like, proper career and, like, went and just started painting every day. That's what I did for, like, a year and a half. Just literally smoked weed, painted, trained, did that on repeat because I just, like, got burnt out with work. And it was during that time I was like, yeah.
What I was doing, if I was on my deathbed and I was thinking about my life, I'd be thinking, you fucking wasted this time. What you've done is is, like, not worth doing. Whereas at least with, like, the painting or, you know, with the podcast, I feel like at least it, like, touches some people, interacts with people, like, hopefully, brings some joy to some people, hopefully, gets a laugh or, like, get some information out to someone and, like, there's a bit of a community around it. And I feel like, at least if I get hit by a bus, I could be like, yeah.
I've done something kinda cool. And that's got a huge value more than you can buy.
[01:07:04] Unknown:
Yeah. It's val I mean, it's real validation. You know? I I did stand up, probably thought that was my midlife crisis. It wasn't, but it was definitely a it was like a immune response to my life. And 12 years ago I started doing stand up and, you know, I'm pretty sure I did it to have my worldview validated because it wasn't nothing in my professional life. No amount of success was doing it. No amount of finally getting rising through the ranks and which, you know, for a retard like me is actually quite an accomplishment. To ever have one of those people be like, yeah. He should have more responsibility is pretty remarkable.
But those things were always ultimately not validating. But, like, putting my putting my heart and soul into something I genuinely thought was funny and having people agree that that was the case kind of told me maybe, okay, I I maybe have a sense that I'm on the right track. Like, maybe I can trust myself a little bit because what I think is funny, other people think is funny. Mhmm. So it's it's part of that valid getting that validation, which I didn't know at the time I was gonna need. Only the first time. Then it was like, damn. Why? This isn't even scary anymore. This kinda sucks. Now I I get why people do drugs and stuff like that. Like, it gets not terrible. After that first time, the first time was incredible rush. Like, you really fought through some you know, you really put your ass on the line. I remember thinking, man, if they don't like this, I'm never gonna do this again. Maximum slang of your own inner pussy.
Getting through it was like I felt like such a fucking man. It was incredible. And it's it's funny. It's like getting it's kinda like getting punched in the face if you're a man. It's like, you know, I always said people everyone should get punched in the face, should get fired from a job, just to get it over with and know that you're not gonna die if those things happen. Mhmm. And getting up on stage in a really vulnerable way, like, a lot of people do stand up in a non vulnerable way, and you can tell, and they usually do terribly. But when you get up on in a vulnerable way, meaning, like, you really care.
Like, you actually, you know, really care how it goes. It's pretty fucking incredible. And but then once that once you get over it, you start, like, you start having to take more risks just to get that feeling. You start wanting to do more fucked up things just to get that feeling back.
[01:09:32] Unknown:
Just just to feel, like, on the edge of, like, oh, is this too far? Is this gonna be,
[01:09:38] Unknown:
silence or, like, someone's gonna throw something at me? I've done it on certain podcasts too, Ed, where, like, I just because I have that general urge sometimes to take it. You know, it just feels like it's there, and I wanna take it to that level. And then I'll spend, like, the next 5 days thinking, oh my god, they're never gonna have me back again. Like, oh, yeah. But there's something about going through that that I enjoy. That anger that anguish about, like, oh my god. Do they am I really the most hated man in the world?
[01:10:12] Unknown:
Oh, that's funny. Well, you are certainly not the most hated man on this podcast. It's it's been a pleasure getting to know you, mate. Appreciate that. Appreciate that very much. I really, really hope that you find something where your skills can be used. I'm confident that you will, and, yeah, I'm happy to hear that you took this jump. It's fucking weird that you sit and do maths 5 hours a day, I have to say, But it's cool. I like that weirdness. I like the dedication.
[01:10:39] Unknown:
Yeah. You know, we don't it's like, I think it was Michael Burry who did say, like, we don't choose these things. They choose us. Right? He's like, I could have easily just been interested in reading the phone book than reading mortgage contracts, but it's like the you know, once it's like that autistic little fairy dust taps you on the shoulder, you're fucked. You this is kind of what you do. That's but that's why it's so important. It but that's why it's, like, really important to have, you know, like, a high degree of integrity in your lives because you wanna know you wanna have some belief that that's not it's not gonna be for nothing. Like, you wanna have this belief that, like, God wants you to God wants you to do this. Like, he would have to want me to do this for me to do it because it's it's fucking insane otherwise. Right?
It's a big battle for conviction if you think about it, and that's what I think people need in this space now anyway. Right? Is that battle, like, you're fighting for your life, for that conviction. I don't know if we dropped off or if No. That was deep.
[01:11:49] Unknown:
No. I was just, I was just thinking about what you said, and you're like, we're just fighting for our lives. And I was like, yeah. Sometimes it does feel like that. And then I just got lost in thought for a minute. That's a great moment, dude. That was, like, a really great moment just now because, you know, it is real. I mean, it really is fucking real. Like,
[01:12:06] Unknown:
look, I made a lot of money and, you know, enough that I can be, like, pretty kind of living comfortably at this moment. But I'm still fighting for my life. And I think, like, that gets expressed in what I do with my time. It's, you know, it, like, clearly expresses the battle I'm in. You know? I'm not on the golf course. I'm not maybe that would have you know, that's what it is for other people. But if you look at what I do all day, you could tell I'm gonna fight for my life over something. Mhmm.
[01:12:35] Unknown:
Well, I believe it will go somewhere, mate, and we'll see where we are in sort of 6 months to a year. But it's been really good getting to know you a little bit. And I'd suggest to anyone you, man. Who hasn't already, check out rock paper Bitcoin, check out the things you've written. And if you're knowledgeable and into maths, maybe, hook up and have these conversations. I'm not. So, it's not something I can talk about, but I appreciate that other people out there doing it and and checking things out and hopefully crunching the numbers and making sure we're not all just complete fucking retards and that hopefully we're right. And, hopefully, this Bitcoin thing, stays around, and we're all gonna be okay. This fight actually is one that we win. We are. That I'm sure of.
[01:13:22] Unknown:
I'm sure that we're right. You know? And I really do I appreciate you having me on, and I really like, I tend to believe that having these conversations is what causes the world to go where we want it to. So, like, would it would it you know, what you said, like, I hope when you said I hope you find a way. I think it's like putting this out on a platform like like yours that gets listened to a lot, gets heard, is what causes that result. I I have nothing but belief that we are gonna win, and that I have total belief that I'm gonna find a way to be part of that, doing what I was born to do.
[01:13:59] Unknown:
Let's keep in contact. If anyone wants to reach out to you, what's the best place to contact you? Just Twitter or
[01:14:06] Unknown:
Yeah. Twitter, it's it's, b Brian Paul. That was my comedy name, by the way, in case anybody wonders what the fuck that is. B Brian Paul. B Brian Paul. Brian with an I. That was my comedy name because I didn't want to be doxed. I got a very general evergreen name. That's my Twitter. So that's my Twitter handle, and everyone pretty much can find me on either, like, the mash adult group or, you know, wherever they are, and you guys know, like, reach out. I always I always love it.
[01:14:38] Unknown:
I hope you enjoyed that. And to everyone who's been supporting the show by sharing, liking, boosting, or all the other ways that you've been helping this show grow, I wanna say a big thank you from me and all of the Ungovernable Misfits. If you haven't already checked out the website, ungovernable misfits.com, it's well worth taking a look. We have articles, podcasts, clothing, and artwork. Thanks again for all the support, and I'll catch you on the next one.
