Title: S15 E44: Chris DeRose on Bitcoin Uncensored (feat. Jay Berg, Wayne Vaughan & Paul Sztorc)
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Chris DeRose (former co-host of Bitcoin Uncensored), Wayne Vaughan (founder of Tierion), Jay Berg, Paul Sztorc (LayerTwo Labs, drivechains; joins at ~00:16)
Published: 2024-06-28
Duration: 3:40:16
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2024-06-28_s15_e44_chris_derose_on_bitcoin_uncensored_feat._jay_berg_wayne_vaughan_paul_sztorc_.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2024-06-28_s15_e44_chris_derose_on_bitcoin_uncensored_feat._jay_berg_wayne_vaughan_paul_sztorc_.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, reconciled against a full local small.en (int16, VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the livestream (three-way comparison over the whole episode; 624 disagreement spots reviewed). 94 doubtful, dropped or garbled stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD). The base transcript had hallucinated loops at 01:03:00 ("this status or this pressure ... it's all about the world") and 01:03:16 ("you need to know that you're a professional entrepreneur" x4) and a stray "Thanks for watching!" at 01:20:01 that replaced the "Texas could just say, this isn't a stock exchange" exchange; these were removed and the dropped speech restored from the small.en pass and clips. Other corrected passages include "provocateur and miscreant" at 00:02:33, "Digital Chamber of Commerce" (Perianne Boring's Chamber of Digital Commerce) at 00:04:06, Scrypt and GPU mining at 00:12:14, the sponsor block and Mining Disrupt / Braiins remarks at 00:43:26-00:51:00, "Balaji is talking about the nation state" at 01:08:08, "What is the Supreme Court going to do next week?" at 01:18:05, the Ivan Ilyin / "On Resistance to Evil by Force" recommendation at 02:14:29, Jay's birthday exchange at 02:08:43-02:09:25, Wayne's goodbye at 02:27:11 and "Romanian" at 03:23:41. Speaker turns (Vlad, Chris, Wayne, Jay, Paul) were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet centroids for all five voices, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), word-level re-segmentation and hand review. The livestream video contains ~3 minutes not present in the podcast audio around 02:28-02:36 (a stretch where Chris was muted was cut); timestamps follow the podcast audio. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: Bitcoin Uncensored, Junseth (Joshua Unseth), McAfee, Perianne Boring and the Chamber of Digital Commerce, Blockchain Association (Kristin Smith), Blythe Masters and Digital Asset / the Australian Securities Exchange project, Roger Ver, Flocka Felicia, Satoshi Roundtable, Counterparty, Ordinals and inscriptions, Rare Pepe, CryptoPunks, Tierion, Messari and Ryan Selkis, Richard Heart, OneCoin and Ruja Ignatova, Martin Shkreli, Barron Trump, HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu, 4chan, Theo Goodman, Thomas Hunt (MadBitcoins), MikeInSpace, Erik Voorhees, Saifedean Ammous, Luke Dashjr, OP_CTV, OP_CAT, Taproot, SegWit, Braiins, Mining Disrupt, drivechains, DriveNet launcher, the Zcash sidechain (zSide) and the Thunder sidechain, Signet, Balaji Srinivasan, ConsenSys, Chamath Palihapitiya, Enrique Tarrio, Anti-Oedipus, Baudrillard and simulacra, Haskell, Ivan Ilyin, Elden Ring, Grand Theft Auto V, Darkcoin, BCH, David Bailey, Toyota Supra; sponsors SideShift.ai, Wasabi Wallet (WasabiWallet.io, ShopInBit), Starknet / StarkWare, LayerTwo Labs (layer2labs.com, t.me/dcinsiders, blocks.drivechain.info) and Hodling.ch. Live chat names are kept as read out (e.g. Vake, Kanix, Jack Kensick, M.A. Caselli, EarlyNFT.bit, Johan Mullet, Martin Hanglestrom, Pukop). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:49] Vlad Costea: What's up, party people? I always wanted to say this. So, hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I'm Vlad, this is Season 15, Episode 44, and we are live with Chris DeRose alongside Jay Berg and Wayne Vaughan. Is that the way you pronounce it?

[00:01:06] Wayne Vaughan: Yes, sir.

[00:01:07] Vlad Costea: So basically, this is a reunion of Bitcoin Uncensored. Wayne has been on the show, if I'm not mistaken, three times?

[00:01:15] Wayne Vaughan: Six or seven.

[00:01:16] Vlad Costea: Six or seven times. Wow. So you are just, I think you mentioned that only Paul Sztorc has one more appearance than you?

[00:01:25] Wayne Vaughan: I'm pretty sure. It's not really a contest, but, you know, there was a few more episodes, I think, he got in after the blow-up between Chris and Josh.

[00:01:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, we also have Jay Berg, who said he has been on the show more than a couple of times.

[00:01:43] Jay Berg: Yeah, I've been on three times, you know, it's probably hard to find and that's probably best, but it was definitely influential moments back in the early days. It was awesome.

[00:01:53] Vlad Costea: And you also mentioned that you were one of the first people to get on the show.

[00:01:56] Jay Berg: I was there right before McAfee, that day when he showed up, I got kicked out, like we got, what's his name in here?

[00:02:06] Chris DeRose: That was, yeah, that was on one conference, not the first on the show, but he was probably the first at the conference.

[00:02:14] Vlad Costea: So, Chris, what have you been up to? I guess, no, wait, let's start with who are you? Because there are so many people who have no idea about Bitcoin Uncensored and will be listening to this wondering, who's this guy? Why is he so important that other people join just to have this conversation with him?

[00:02:33] Chris DeRose: Oh, well, for the people who haven't heard of me before, I ran a podcast with a co-host, Bitcoin Uncensored, that was fairly influential in its day. I wrote a good amount for a few of the periodicals in the space, including American Banker and Bitcoin Magazine, a few others. And in general, I was just sort of a provocateur and miscreant that had a lot of fun in the space and aired the fun for others to watch. I guess that's a good introduction.

[00:03:07] Vlad Costea: Just so you know, I was speaking with Jay Berg a few days ago, and we came up with the idea of bringing Perianne Boring on this live stream. Oh, man, that lady.

[00:03:20] Chris DeRose: Who the hell? There's a lot of these people I haven't even thought of in years. She said she would do it live. What is she up to? Is she in the space at all?

[00:03:35] Jay Berg: She's a badass in Congress or something.

[00:03:37] Wayne Vaughan: She's very active in DC. She still has the, it's not the blockchain association, what's the name of her organization? A blockchain association is Kristin's. I can't remember, but she still runs a pretty influential, basically, lobbying group. Okay. She doesn't [unclear: grok] technology in a meaningful way. She found her voice and she's doing good in the world.

[00:04:01] Chris DeRose: Okay, good. I'm rooting for the best for all the characters. Digital Chamber founder.

[00:04:06] Wayne Vaughan: Digital Chamber of Commerce, that's what it was. That's right. Okay.

[00:04:11] Chris DeRose: All right. Well, glad blockchain is still doing well. You know, I've got a lot of theories on blockchain. I don't even know, to the new audience, I don't even know that they really can understand blockchain in the way that we did on the show. Maybe they can understand it in the sense of AI. I've been thinking a lot about AI. It's going to become the next blockchain if it hasn't already. I'm debating whether or not to just adjust my vocabulary, remove the word good and just replace it with the word AI.

[00:04:45] Chris DeRose: You know, like, I don't know, that was an AI TV show I just watched. Or that was maybe an AI grade on your report card, young man. I was glad to see that. Just to kind of speed the process along or inevitably end up. Seems like that maybe is a good way to understand blockchain for anybody who didn't experience it as it happened.

[00:05:06] Vlad Costea: There's Vake in the chat.

[00:05:07] Chris DeRose: I don't know what you're talking about today.

[00:05:09] Vlad Costea: There's Vake in the chat and he says, Vake, V-A-K-E. Oh, hey Vake. He says it's good to see you alive, whatever that means.

[00:05:20] Chris DeRose: Well, I mean, I've been reclusive. I've been reclusive to like everybody. I've just been reclusive. And I don't know why. I go through phases in my life where I think about this sometimes. There are phases, I think, when like society is configured in such a way that I want to participate. And then there are times when it's not. And so I think at the moment, it's one of those latter phases. I've kind of done that off and on in my life. I have a little more freedom.

[00:05:46] Chris DeRose: I'm embracing that ability. It's nice. It's nice both to be interactive in society and it's nice to not be interactive in society, depending on what society you've been given.

[00:05:58] Jay Berg: Well, you're interacting now, so maybe this is the beginning of a new site.

[00:06:03] Chris DeRose: Yeah, Vlad, you caught me at a weak moment. I've actually had a number of interview requests, almost all of which I've denied for no reason, like nice people and all that. I just didn't really want to be in the public space. And then you called me like at the right time. If you had emailed me like an hour later, I probably would have said no. I don't know why. I've just gotten my Colombian citizenship. I think when you emailed me, I now have a Colombian birth certificate.

[00:06:25] Chris DeRose: And I don't have my driver's license yet, which is what I'm kind of in town waiting for. Mostly I hang out in Colombia. I really like it there a lot. It's a wonderful place. It's easy. People are very pleasant. And in general, they don't speak English there. So that's been like really nice. I've been trying to kind of remove English from my life, which is not going well, but I'm making progress.

[00:06:47] Vlad Costea: You told me in our email exchange that you gave away your podcasting gears to some Yu-Gi-Oh! Streamers or something from Colombia. I thought that was such a fun thing to say, and coming from you, it makes sense, you know?

[00:07:04] Chris DeRose: Yeah. I really like playing Yu-Gi-Oh!, actually. I play it quite a bit. And over there, they have like quite a few champions in this one shop in Medellin. And so I spend time with them, and they have their own podcasting ambitions. And so I was like, you know, I got a whole closet full of equipment. And so I shipped it on over and gave it away to the Colombian Yu-Gi-Oh! Community. Yu-Gi-Oh! Is a ridiculous game, and I'm almost embarrassed that I play it, but it captured me. And so I do.

[00:07:33] Vlad Costea: But is it not like Magic the Gathering?

[00:07:36] Chris DeRose: Yeah, it's the same. It's like Japanese Magic the Gathering. And Magic the Gathering is something I haven't wanted to get into. A lot of my friends play it. I've played arena a few times. I seem to just like Yu-Gi-Oh! More. I started to write like a program to play Yu-Gi-Oh! For me, and then I was like, why am I doing this? And so I stopped. But I've gotten pretty into it. I don't know why. I don't know. I still have a way to spend time socially. I'm practicing my Spanish.

[00:08:06] Vlad Costea: Sounds like something you would do. Yeah. So what's your current opinion on Bitcoin? Bitcoin's...

[00:08:19] Chris DeRose: Okay, so I have a lot of complex, a lot of complex opinions about Bitcoin. And it's not about good or bad. I try to remove a lot of that as much as I can from my understanding of the world. You know, I've read a lot of philosophy. I read a lot, generally. That's kind of all I do. I see it in like semiotic terms. We have these signs that glow red hot online. Bitcoin was one and or is one of them. I do kind of see it as a golden cow in terms of its anthropological significance.

[00:09:04] Chris DeRose: So it's kind of hard to unsee once you see it. If you put a bunch of cavemen on the internet, they're going to start doing the kinds of stuff that humans do in a sort of like [unclear: virtualized] representation. And one of those things is to worship golden cows, seemingly. And so I think that's definitely what I did in many ways. Although I didn't try to start out that way. And I think that's what people do now is that they sort of abstract this and that sort of mode of thinking and then they behave accordingly.

[00:09:34] Chris DeRose: And that's kind of how I see Bitcoin. And it's not like a bad thing. Just very detached from where we started, I think.

[00:09:45] Vlad Costea: So where did you start? Or what was the vision that you had on Bitcoin at the time?

[00:09:51] Chris DeRose: You know, I always really like the sort of Blade Runner. Movie underground kind of force where there's this sort of mainstream above board society, and then there's the other side of things where there's like, maybe other kind of resistance movement, you know, some sort of like shadow economy. And like, that was a big part of it. I liked that this existed in that space. I also liked that there wasn't an institution. This is another thing I deal with. In general, the institutions are like, just not acceptable to me.

[00:10:28] Chris DeRose: And so like, this wasn't an institutional force, which was fantastic. I look at how I've lived my life in general. And though I obviously interacted with institutions extensively, I rarely enjoyed the process. And I try to do things that aren't institutional nature. So like, Linux would be like a really easy example of that. And Bitcoin was part of that space. So you had a sort of like power to the people kind of thing going there in the shadows in this sort of like, sort of alternate economy.

[00:10:58] Chris DeRose: And then I'm not going to deny, you know, like the want to be wealthy was huge. And so like, there was that potential as well. So those are probably the main forces there. I very much liked the idea of decentralization. I still like the idea of decentralization, though I don't think that Quinn's going to deliver any of that, unfortunately. But that was a big part of it as well. If I had to guess, a lot of us still like decentralization. A lot of us probably are apprehensive about institutional models.

[00:11:32] Chris DeRose: Try to guess. I don't know. We're a little out of touch with the community. But these are themes that spoke to me. And then the dark day, like, let it be clear, like when Silk Road came around, that was when I was like, Oh, I get it. Blockchain makes sense.

[00:11:48] Vlad Costea: You know, I guess this was before the era of blockchain analysis.

[00:11:55] Chris DeRose: Yeah, well, the year of blockchain, even like Bitcoin was like the standalone thing at the time, like there was there was this idea of blockchain that was part of it, but it wasn't like the part that was good. It was just sort of technologically intriguing. Yeah.

[00:12:14] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah. A lot of people don't remember the Bitcoin 2.0 era, which was like right around when Counterparty was getting started and everything else. There were all these other coins and they were invented for a variety of reasons. Some of them were technical experimentation. Many of them were just because the GPU mining became inefficient on Bitcoin after ASICs existed. So people had all this infrastructure. So they did things like, you know, take Bitcoin and modify it so you can use Scrypt, which is the mining algorithm that can run on GPUs.

[00:12:45] Wayne Vaughan: And then there was a whole sort of Cambrian explosion around that time. So there was a lot more experimentation, a lot more of a feeling like we were doing something new and pioneering versus any sort of like organized effort or sort of the political zeitgeist nowadays is that, you know, if you're advocating for Bitcoin, it's part of your customer acquisition strategy for your company or have a big bag and you need the banks to change how they treat you or you want politics to be different. So, yeah, it was a kinder and simpler time.

[00:13:22] Jay Berg: Back then, you had to actually be a coder in order to launch one of these things. You didn't just have point and click, smart contracts. So it was much more, you know, scientific, you know, on the ground developers. You know, it was about it was the best time. I think we could all admit it to 2010, maybe 16 or something. That was Bitcoin, especially before the GPU mining actually had distributed consensus, decentralized, you know, censorship, and then...

[00:13:55] Wayne Vaughan: I mean, Kristin speaks to this too, probably better than I can, but I miss that we were all a bunch of bumbling idiots, that we are all just trying to find our way forward and see if we can make this thing work, as opposed to being culture warriors, or, you know, trying to take down the man or something like that. It was like, hey, this is really interesting. And many of us back then knew that digital currencies of a kind had been tried for many, many years across many iterations.

[00:14:24] Wayne Vaughan: It's like, is this the one we think it can work? You know, how can we take this fledgling thing and help it survive and turn into something noteworthy? And how can we make sure it doesn't die? So I miss those days. It was good times.

[00:14:39] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I agree with that. The culture war really is not the best thing. You know, it swept us all into, I think, at some level, and it's not for the better.

[00:14:52] Vlad Costea: And the reason why I invited you, Chris, for this episode is basically that I got canceled about three months ago for interviewing Roger Ver, of all people. I do a new interview every week. And basically that one blew up. It had like 60,000 views after two weeks. And I was like, wow. But at the same time, people hated me for it. And they said, I brought back into relevance this guy who's hated and is the Judas and he's a villain. And I didn't ask him all of the questions that people expected me to ask him.

[00:15:26] Vlad Costea: And I told him, you know, I'm not a tribunal. I'm not a court of law or whatever. If you want to sue the guy for some reason, just go ahead and do it. If you think he's guilty, go ahead. But don't put that, don't assign that role onto me, because honestly, I just wanted to have a conversation with him. Tell him where I think he was wrong and where I think he was right. And just giving him credit for stuff. He was right about the lightning network in some ways. That's blasphemous. So right now, I'm not invited to some conferences.

[00:16:00] Jay Berg: You never actually got canceled, right? So like, we shouldn't give them...

[00:16:06] Chris DeRose: It's actually like you lost conference invites.

[00:16:11] Paul Sztorc: Hey, guys, I'm back.

[00:16:12] Vlad Costea: Oh, you're too loud, Paul. Can you do anything about it? Do what?

[00:16:17] Paul Sztorc: Too loud? Oh, hang on. Let me see. I stepped into a quiet area.

[00:16:25] Chris DeRose: Yeah, the audio's pretty good.

[00:16:29] Paul Sztorc: I don't know how good the connection is here.

[00:16:31] Chris DeRose: Just don't talk so loud. I'm sorry to hear about your frustrations, but I don't know. It sounds like you're doing okay. The controversies would appear to be antithetical to your goals, but they probably are. You're probably making waves and that's just a sign that you're impactful. When you start this thing, you've got to cater to the crowd and then over time you're going to make the crowd. And so you might be like that change in the podcast. I don't know. People listen for all kinds of reasons, but generally people listen because they want to hear what they want to hear. And those people want to hear what they want to hear. Exactly.

[00:17:22] Vlad Costea: I think right now there's this movement of Bitcoin podcasts where if you say that we're very early and we're very smart and we're going to be rich and we're the new financial elites or whatever, even if you bought in 2024, that's how you get the views. And then the peak of your career is going to be inviting Adam back and then Michael Saylor. And that's it. That's when you know that you've made it and you have been validated by the community. And it means that you're successful. It means that you are someone you're going to be invited at conferences.

[00:17:57] Vlad Costea: You're going to be flown around the world to say stuff. You should never step out of line. And it was funny to me when I got quote unquote canceled and people were coming at me saying, oh, you did that and it's horrible. And I was telling them, you know, you also have a podcast. So you're just one interview away from being in a much worse situation than me. And I'm not sure if you're going to land on your feet because you are so deep within this cult that once you get kicked out, it's over. Do you have no backup plan?

[00:18:34] Paul Sztorc: I'm not so sure that, Vlad, you should do so much like meta talk, like talking about being canceled or whatever. You should just keep going. Just keep shooting the thing and just kind of say like, you know, I agree. Especially because the people who actually watch the show, they already know that you did a controversial Roger Ver interview and that they watched it.

[00:19:04] Wayne Vaughan: You can consider this the bottom. You've assembled the lowest quality guests that you possibly can. So everything is up from here.

[00:19:12] Vlad Costea: Was it really the lowest quality?

[00:19:16] Jay Berg: We could take our shirts off.

[00:19:17] Paul Sztorc: Definitely BU would be like saying we're trying to make the show as bad as possible. We're going to have after Roger Ver, we've got Adolf Hitler coming on next or something like that. You know, like it would be like just very inverted and kind of ironic. So I don't know.

[00:19:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I got to give Chris credit because he was one of the first podcasts I've ever heard saying give this show one star. You know, just say it's awful.

[00:19:46] Chris DeRose: It's kind of a foul to want attention or to want to be praised online in general. Like that kind of thing. And then you're not going to win twice. And like, you really shouldn't care, you know, if you're on sanity, you should just try to find whatever it is you're looking for, either truth or, you know, meeting or whatever it is.

[00:20:13] Paul Sztorc: I do think you had that quality that Bitcoin Uncensored was very fun. And you could tell that you guys like were having fun. And so it was like to be a part of it was kind of neat. A lot of fun. And it was just like these people, the poor. Sometimes I'm still, I honestly still think about it. Like I'm walking down the street and I think of like the blockchain encounter of the fifth kind guy, or I think about the poor like IBM people that you like cut in.

[00:20:40] Paul Sztorc: It's that one part like this poor, like, no offense is for like Indian people on stage, like giving this huge talk about like, well, everything is going to be on the blockchain, trustless and encrypted. And they have no idea what they're talking about at all. And just certain things are just... Chris, [unclear: you can't do] a lot of that now.

[00:20:58] Chris DeRose: A lot of that was... I agree. A lot of that was just how new the space was in for like broadcasting online, not even the crypto space. It was like... No, I completely agree. And the people who like, I don't know, came from the old world are just going to like come into this, assuming they're going into the other normal channel.

[00:21:20] Paul Sztorc: Yeah, it's definitely, it's absolutely key that I think there was kind of like a Goldilocks like time in media, you know, like where... Because also like your show significantly pushed the band, like I knew about like 4chan and stuff like that, but you guys were severely pushing the boundaries on like what is allowed, like in discourse, you know, like constant filthy swearing, kind of like the Alpha Bay commercial. I literally had to pull over my car. I was like, is this real? Like, I was like, what is going on?

[00:21:54] Paul Sztorc: And just like all the jokes, the prison wallet and everything, you know, like all these jokes were like, you know, because like, you know, I don't know about like something awful and fortune, but it was like, for some reason that was still like clinging to the anonymity of the internet. Like it was just like a message board and you just kind of read it. But I really do think, I can't really imagine, I know there was like the Howard Stern show, but I really, I can't really think of anything that you guys were going completely crazy.

[00:22:22] Paul Sztorc: Like the people you would interview, Flocka Felicia, like it was just like, it was like mind blowing. And then almost like the election of Donald Trump, like did definitely mainstream to the idea of just being like really, really rude in like a weird way and like getting big and not being canceled for it, you know, like the politically incorrect type of it. So there was something about it, the year 2015, 2016, that was like the, like the prelude, the preamble to this like idea of just like, you can just, there is no, there's no line like of what you can't say online.

[00:22:57] Paul Sztorc: Like you can just say filthy stuff. And it's like, everyone has to just deal with it. That was very new, I think in 2015, 2016. I mean, I don't know.

[00:23:08] Chris DeRose: Yeah, for sure. That's another thing here with all the cancellation allegations, like the other side of it is that you're also permitted the full reign of expression from which the cancellation can come forth. So like, I don't exactly know what that says, but it's a bit of a contradiction. Like, yes, you can be canceled, but also you can run around with your shirt off and like talk to drug addicts and, you know, that kind of stuff. Like, it's not.

[00:23:40] Wayne Vaughan: But you were just doing crazy stuff online, though. Like, I was actually just talking with Simon Dixon in a Twitter Spaces yesterday. There was a couple hundred people in the space and they were asking about the early days of Bitcoin. And I said, it's like, for me, one of the most Bitcoin moments that I can remember is at the American Banker conference in was 2015, I think it was, or 2016. You were there and you were filming and you have this interaction with Blythe Masters, who was like, you know, this, you know, people who don't know, she's like this maybe 50 something, you know, Wall Street executive who was on the cover of Forbes or Fortune magazine around that time.

[00:24:21] Wayne Vaughan: And I remember you were wearing a baseball cap and I've got a great picture of you with like, it's a tie dye cat T-shirt and shorts. And like you stood up in the middle of conference and you had like this conversation with her in front of everybody. And I think the consensus of the room was that she was right and you were wrong because of the way that you looked. And you were very polite to her and I remember thinking like, he is totally right and she is completely mistaken and she has no idea and everybody else in here thinks that she's right.

[00:24:58] Wayne Vaughan: And for me, like that was one of the most Bitcoin moments that I can remember because all the signals that you would have that somebody was intelligent and whatever points they were making were correct were completely flipped. In this scenario, and I think like to Paul's point, that was a unique point in time because you couldn't get in the same room with those people now. Like it just works now, it would not have been possible.

[00:25:27] Jay Berg: We had the confidence because we all knew what was coming. Like we had like a little secret that we knew we were all going to kind of make a lot of money because this was about to happen and people were catching on. So there was just like a confidence of people like being themselves and, you know, like a shared secret that I think that culture is kind of, you know, that's kind of the point where we were all together, we all kind of were way ahead of them.

[00:25:53] Jay Berg: But governments, regulators, gratify, we were like miles ahead of them. And I think they may have gotten up now. So that's where we may be missing some of that old culture.

[00:26:07] Chris DeRose: I don't, you know, I don't know, that's a very good point, Wayne. I certainly agree. That was a great time in my life. I don't know what, I look back at some of that stuff now, and even in just the context of what I deal with these days, that something happens, I don't know if this is my generation or just me personally, but I never got a, what's the word? I just never got a good feeling from the prestige around me. I have many prestigious people that I was exposed to in my life.

[00:26:39] Chris DeRose: And by and large, these people were very unimpressive to me. And that may have just been my experience. I don't know. I suspect that the systems by which we decide who's prestigious are the culprit. In any case, I found, particularly in recent years, like if you split the world into two spheres of competition. This [unclear: isn't the only] way to do it, but one way. Sphere one being like the realm of propriety, and then sphere two being the matters of truth. And like we can come up with justifications and rationalizations in either area for any given event that occurs.

[00:27:14] Chris DeRose: So like, let it be Bitcoin. Like you can be like the proper answer to what is Bitcoin is, a Ponzi scheme. However, the true answer to what Bitcoin is is a digital currency that is used where the sensor of devices or sensor transactions are happening, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And seemingly, like the prestigious people only concern themselves with like the sphere of propriety. And that's a very dim view of the world. It's not really going to tell you much.

[00:27:45] Wayne Vaughan: But that's why they get their identity. That's why they get their power from. That's why it's important to them.

[00:27:51] Chris DeRose: Correct. Yeah, for sure. My general theory on that, too, is like the selection mechanisms, and I saw this a lot when I was younger. It's the people that are obedient that get selected for advancement, typically, which is dumb. It's like really stupid. But whatever, like, it's fine by me. It works to my benefit, and it works to my benefit in the ways that you saw at like your banker conference. Like, okay, you're all here because you're obedient. Fine. Like, let's see what I can add to the picture.

[00:28:20] Chris DeRose: And just to the degree that I was able to offer prophecy, you know, it's anyone's interpretation, but to the degree that Blythe was able to offer prophecy was zero. Her project, last I heard, got canceled, finally, over there at the Australian [unclear: Stock] Exchange. So she said the proper thing, and it was without any prophetic value. And then I said the improper thing, and I think anybody who listened to me there is probably loaded by now. Maybe not. I don't know. But like, you know, at least gave some consideration to like Bitcoin.

[00:28:51] Paul Sztorc: Fair. Robin Hanson has a little thing on this. The experts versus the high status people. I forgot. He has another way of phrasing it, but it's basically like lots of people can be experts. So like everyone's an expert in their job. So like even if you're a janitor somewhere, like you're the only one who knows like which key goes where and how like which way to hold this mop on this hallway or something. So we all have a lot of expertise and people are experts on how to be, you know, a brother to their sister or something like that.

[00:29:23] Paul Sztorc: So some people have experts and elites. Yeah, that's it. But the elites are the high status people, and those are basically the people who have like the microphone or something. This was like a BU idea also, like you have like the conch shell or you have someone is allowed to speak for some reason. And then we repeat, we repeat and amplify what they say. So these elites are like professional bullshitters, basically, because their job is just to figure out what the elite opinion is and then like repeat it.

[00:29:51] Paul Sztorc: And so they are not really, they're not critical thinking about the subject. They're only critical thinking about. Like what the other high status people are interested in, like what the official, what you were saying is like the official position that Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme. They'll hear someone, chairman of the Fed, say such and such. And then they'll say, oh, yeah, when they were asked on stage, they'll just repeat that. And so they have their way of figuring out the elite opinion. And we all as a society have kind of agreed that we can't listen to everyone.

[00:30:26] Paul Sztorc: So we listen to them sort of first. And then we listen to other people later. And this is just like the weird system. But elites and experts do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. So you could have, you know, like the autistic engineer guy could be like not elite very easily. You know, and it's almost like sometimes people like Elon Musk, like, gyrate chaotically between those two. And then there's other people who are, you know, we're all an expert in something. But so the expert versus elite, like very different types of a thing.

[00:31:01] Paul Sztorc: Like usually, like, sometimes a professor can be an elite. Well, you know, you get the idea, I think.

[00:31:07] Wayne Vaughan: Well, Paul, I think it's even worse. Well, if I can interject for just a second, I think it's even worse than what Paul said, because in my experience, the people who are the higher their status is, the more afraid they are to say what they really feel in public. So we get this soft language that doesn't show how they really feel. You know, you talk from behind the scenes, and they'll express their frustration or their true thoughts. So not only are the highest status people given the biggest microphones, but they say the softest risk of things.

[00:31:36] Paul Sztorc: It's very vague. I agree. Like Robin Hanson has another great saying. He says that's the problem with being clear. Sometimes you're clearly wrong, which is like him indirectly endorsing being vague sometimes. Like you see, it happens at a conference all the time. People go up on stage and it's like they're not even speaking English. They speak like a different language that you can just ignore politely. Everyone just sitting in the audience, just ignoring it completely. And then they're finished speaking and then everyone collapse. And it's just like really vague, generic, you know, forgettable.

[00:32:06] Paul Sztorc: Dialogue. And then sometimes, you know, like Chris was saying, you talk to them in some other context, like in the directness, you know, changes. Like people on stage say, oh, I think we're going to be seeing a lot of movement into the whatever space, something that's really vague. And then backstage, like, oh, yeah, that guy, because a fucking idiot or whatever. This is the worst. This series of machines is the worst that anyone's ever done. And none of them work. And they say like really direct things that have a lot of actual specific meaning.

[00:32:37] Paul Sztorc: But on stage, they really speak like this professionally vague language that just doesn't mean anything. And people just, everyone sits in the audience just staring at it.

[00:32:48] Wayne Vaughan: The best thing about it is you guys were authentic, even if you were idiots. And we appreciate that.

[00:32:52] Chris DeRose: Thank you, Wayne. Thank you. Thank you. I still think a lot about authenticity. A lot, a lot about that. It's important to me. I don't think that I succeed. But it's at least an ideal. In my personal life, it's important.

[00:33:09] Jay Berg: It's hard to tell when you're being sarcastic sometimes?

[00:33:12] Chris DeRose: I mean, there's so much like crap, I guess you could say, but there's really layers of like dishonesty now that I think in order to communicate any idea, it's often like through these levels of irony sometimes that like would appear to be important. But the greater point is to get you to think in a certain way that is close to the truth. I see myself doing that a lot, which I'm not proud of. It's one of the reasons I'm not crazy for English. Like, I don't think it's going to work.

[00:33:52] Chris DeRose: I don't think English is going to work. Just, the language is not healthy. And I don't know who the custodians are, but I think they're going to be like Google and Facebook and these companies that are making money by eviscerating the meaning of the words.

[00:34:05] Wayne Vaughan: Are you sort of speaking in code here as you are want to do? English is the language of US politicians and sort of the woke movement and language policing is their weapon for trying to move the Overton window and change the meaning of things. Is what you're saying a reaction to that?

[00:34:32] Chris DeRose: That's part of it. I would say more specifically, you can see the denotation is being displaced by connotation writ large in most words. In fact, at any time some denotative value appears, like let's take AI because that's fashionable. Okay, like AI had some denotation along the lines of what we could call generative AI, which was like the model of the computer that can talk to us or something, or the thinking computer that can displace human agency. Okay, that in my mind is some realm of denotation. However, once it hits the internet, it will be entirely a matter of like moral connotation.

[00:35:12] Chris DeRose: And as such, what will happen is anything that is quote unquote good or that we wish to be perceived as good is going to be AI. And you'll see now as every product, service, et cetera, is shoehorned into the connotation that is AI by being labeled AI. And there's a lot of tangential points in there, but like in part what you'll find is that the reading level goes down and down and down, which seems like it's happening. And I don't know that there's like some like great catastrophe that will happen when it gets low enough, though I wonder if this isn't like the prelude to conflict.

[00:35:50] Chris DeRose: There's a lot goes with it, but that is part of the political process as well, though that is the pursuit of the internet. I could go back far. You know, like the war on everything basically started, I guess, with the war on poverty and the LBJ administration. That might be where the politicians started. It's the internet writ large, I think, that's accelerating that trend in all spaces. And so I use the example of AI, but that applies to every single word. People hear a word and they don't try to even think exactly about some concrete goal.

[00:36:27] Chris DeRose: What they try to find out is like, am I in trouble or will I be in trouble? And how do I stay out of trouble? Like that's sort of the realm of connotations, best I can tell.

[00:36:38] Jay Berg: A lot of those words are Bitcoin, L2, shitcoin, Bitcoin only. None of these things have any meaning.

[00:36:49] Chris DeRose: Like lightning had some very specific denotation when it was announced and when it was offered to the market. And it was announced by probably a prestigious person somewhere in the Bitcoin core development community. Thus, it had some like positive affinity. And from there, people wanted to like decorate their own language with lightning. And before long, it just like wasn't even anything anymore.

[00:37:15] Paul Sztorc: Yes, it no longer means, no longer has anything to do with HTLCs, which is the...

[00:37:20] Jay Berg: The name of the Bitcoin only VC is lightning. Like they only are Bitcoin, but lightning. It's the crazy, it's just insane.

[00:37:32] Chris DeRose: This is also part why I think we're like having these increasingly golden cow worshipping behaviors online, you know, be it Bitcoin or social justice or women or whatever comes around. Like I suspect it is partly related to this process by which something becomes so like connotatively imbued with value that it just turns into full-on religion. And like people will, you know, just assume bow to blockchain, give it a chance to like be seen doing so. Like at that point or not, you could probably find some video of somebody doing that.

[00:38:07] Chris DeRose: But like, you know, metaphorically, that's what you see. And so I think for reasons like this, the English language is not going to be healthy. So I'm trying to divest myself of it.

[00:38:22] Wayne Vaughan: So since you still need to talk, what languages are using nowadays?

[00:38:26] Paul Sztorc: Yeah, what's the better language?

[00:38:29] Chris DeRose: So I think the better languages are going to be as far as you can, whatever language is farthest from high speed internet. Like this is something I kind of realized in Colombia, because like you can.

[00:38:38] Paul Sztorc: Oh my God, this is a really crazy idea.

[00:38:42] Chris DeRose: Yeah, so Greek would be good. Latin is good. I've been specializing in Hebrew just because it's easier. It's easier to find Hebrew speakers than it is any of these other ancient dead languages. And it is sort of like cultural heritage also, which is nice. But I think Latin would be really useful.

[00:39:01] Wayne Vaughan: But English is the language of science. English is the language of internet, you know.

[00:39:06] Paul Sztorc: Yeah, I agree with Wayne on this one. George Orwell wrote this book, Politics and the English Language. You read that? You got to read that essay, Chris. He says English is being invaded by like Latin and like pseudo-French stuff is like invaded. So he's like, we have like backhoe is like the Anglo-Saxon, but like excavator is the Latin word for like the same thing. The Latin words are always vaguer and it's more easy to do the politician speech in Latin because they're just more abstract. So like you said, like a domestic abuse versus wife beater.

[00:39:42] Paul Sztorc: Or you say something like, I don't know, like spirit versus ghost. Ghost is like very visceral. It's like scary, you know, and it's like in your face. Spirit is like vague. It could just be whatever. Oh, spirit, whatever. It could be anything. So he's pulling for English and saying that you should not write it. But he also famously concludes in that essay, he says that English has been getting worse over time. And he says, like a drunk person, a man can drink because his life is so bad, and then his life can get even worse because he drinks.

[00:40:20] Paul Sztorc: And he has a passage about saying that English is getting worse, and because it's getting worse, people's thoughts are getting stupider. So he's really on the same wavelength as you in that idea.

[00:40:35] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I don't think English is going to fall off a cliff and we're all going to forget how to speak. But I can tell you for sure, for sure, what I've already seen in very obvious ways, once you go down this path of setting a minimum height to enter, you know, in the Monero parlance on the languages that you use, the quality of the speakers improve dramatically. You get rid of a lot of people from your conversation that don't need to be there. And I think this was like always the point of Latin, you know, before the Anglos came and I guess World War One started and the language started to deteriorate from there.

[00:41:12] Chris DeRose: But like, we need it. This is why all of that existed, I think, in the first place. It's like you have like, maybe, you know, you're like, for lack of a better description, you have like shitcoiner talk, which is just the bottom of the barrel of languages. And then like, you may have like, Latin was what it was, or maybe it'll be Hebrew, or maybe Latin or Greek or something else. I don't know. But it'll be only certain people are able to learn that language.

[00:41:36] Chris DeRose: And then also, you won't have these same forces, like where the connotation is perverted by companies and political actors. You know, like no one's going to sit around and start a campaign to re-connotate, you know, some esoteric Latin word or some esoteric Hebrew word. And so, for that reason, you don't have that foreign influence on your discussion, it seems. That's my theory. Like, we'll see, you know, how far we get into this. It's a very challenging project. It's not easy. And it's, you know, not working so far. But I'm holding out hope. I have faith in this.

[00:42:17] Vlad Costea: Most of this already happened in 1780 something during the French Revolution, when they were even trying to change the number of days in a week to 10, so that people forget when it's Sunday and they're supposed to go to church. They changed the number of days that they were working. They made 100 minutes in an hour and all sorts of crazy changes like this made no sense. They changed the language using the word vous, which is the polite way of saying you was good enough. A reason to have you beheaded.

[00:42:48] Vlad Costea: And I think most of this was already experimented and we can have some very good examples from there and where it leads. It's just that people discover these ideas and they become radicalized by them and they go too far. Maybe the Internet has helped polarize opinions and it's easier to find some echo chamber where you think that all the civilized world and everyone who's smart agrees with you and everyone else is just a dumb fuck or something. But anyway, I just remembered that I have bills to pay and my rent is due next week, so I've got to do some ad readings.

[00:43:26] Vlad Costea: Sorry, guys. So go for it. Yeah, I'm going to present all of them because I'm not sure when I'm going to have this opportunity again within this episode. It's getting very intense. The first one is SideShift.ai. If you ever get paid in a CBDC wannabe like a stable coin, dump that shit for free market sound money, whatever you think that is. I'm not going to tell you buy BTC or buy LTC or buy XMR or whatever. Just swap that CBDC wannabe, which is the stable coin that has a trusted setup that is not something for which Bitcoin was invented and get something much better.

[00:44:06] Vlad Costea: So go to SideShift.ai and do that. And you can also swap your Bitcoin for whatever you want, for whatever reason you may have. I'm not going to judge here. And it's pretty cool. SideShift.ai. The other sponsor is Wasabi Wallet. And these guys are out of business right now. But I promised them that I'm still going to promote their wallet because it still works. You know, it's open source software.

[00:44:32] Paul Sztorc: This is like the opposite. This is like if you have a bunch of Bitcoin attributes and you shuffle them around randomly. They went out of business, but we're still reading the ad and their software does work. It's like an ad-lib of a Bitcoin company.

[00:44:47] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but nothing's changed, you know. It's just that their coin join coordinator was shut down and now you can join another one. It's just one line of code that you must modify in the config file. Anyway, Wasabi Wallet, pretty cool coin joins. You can still use it for an SPV wallet, which downloads block filters. It has Tor natively. It has a lot of cool features. Check it out WasabiWallet.io. It also has a buy anything button. So if you're into buying stuff with your Bitcoin, you have an interface with another website that's called ShopInBit that happens over Tor.

[00:45:23] Vlad Costea: You tell them what you want and where you want it to get delivered. You pay and you get it within one or two weeks. I'm not sure exactly. Depends on where you are in the world. It's pretty cool. WasabiWallet.io. Check it out. There's also Starknet, which is an implementation of StarkWare. And these guys are basically doing something which is very avant garde with cryptography, zero knowledge proofs, and they don't require a trusted setup. It's made by the same people who brought you Zcash, but right now they figured out a way to do it without the ceremony.

[00:45:55] Vlad Costea: And their message is activate OP_CAT on Bitcoin, because if they do activate OP_CAT on Bitcoin, we're going to have STARKs and they can offer some privacy and scalability. And honestly, I'm all for any sort of experimentation. And speaking of experimentation and innovation, LayerTwo Labs, Paul, you're sponsoring my show. Oh, nice.

[00:46:17] Paul Sztorc: I'm here. OK, great. Wait, let me do it now with the updated info.

[00:46:21] Vlad Costea: Oh, you want to do it?

[00:46:23] Paul Sztorc: Well, how long do I have to speak?

[00:46:26] Vlad Costea: As much as you want.

[00:46:26] Paul Sztorc: I'm kidding. That's an ironic thing, because I'm going to speak whenever I feel like commenting on anything. But the latest thing is we have the new Zcash sidechain works on Signet now. So that's no offense to Wasabi, but it's way better at scale, because you automatically join with anyone who's using it in a way. I have this thing, melt/cast, where you click these two buttons and it moves.

[00:46:51] Paul Sztorc: This is like mostly a clone of Zcash, but with like a little GUI in front of it. So that's pretty neat. So go to layer2labs.com slash downloads or download with no S. I should make it redirect. So that's pretty cool. And we have Thunder, the large block sidechain that works on Signet. Actually, I think almost everything. I don't want to jinx. Almost everything works for now, but I'm always tinkering with the front end, and then I break the front end, wrecking it. From the command line it all works, but no one cares about that.

[00:47:21] Paul Sztorc: So try the DriveNet launcher. We'll give you fake Signet coins. There's a faucet. There's blocks.drivechain.info. It shows you how many blocks they'll have to see if you have synchronized. Join t.me slash dcinsiders and try it out for yourself, and that is the best way of learning about what it does and why it's important. So that's the end of that. Speaking of activating OP_CAT or anything, I don't know. Everyone here is very interesting in Mining Disrupt. The mining pools are very deferential to the customers, the miners.

[00:48:02] Paul Sztorc: They defer to the pool. They're like, we don't know what's going on. They're very ignorant of many of these matters. And then you would think that that would entitle the pool to take more of a leadership role, but instead the pools, I think the pools also defer to their customers. They say, oh, if our customers want to do it, then we'll do it. So it's kind of a little bit of a giant deferring loop. But I do think that, like I asked the Braiins people about like, hey, what about like OP_CAT or whatever?

[00:48:33] Paul Sztorc: And they're just like, you know. So a lot of people I think are afraid to have any opinion at all, even on something that is as simple as concatenating two objects. I don't know why people are afraid. I think nothing ever happens.

[00:48:50] Paul Sztorc: But I think it's related to just all of the drama with SegWit and even with Taproot. People think Taproot caused inscriptions or something.

[00:49:00] Jay Berg: That's what happens when you kick the developers out of the room. It's very interesting.

[00:49:07] Paul Sztorc: Some of them would complain. They [unclear: wouldn't] name any names. People would just share stories about various emails they got since they were running a pool. They would just share stories about like, oh, we did this or that thing. That has like no meaning. And they'll get angry emails from people saying like, why do you hate this such and such? Why do you whatever hate Ordinals? Stuff that's like not even on topic at all. So the knowledge gap between the miners and the software people is enormous.

[00:49:36] Paul Sztorc: And even like the pools can try to communicate things with like memos, but even they are not understood. So there's an extremely low, it's almost like an opportunity of some kind. The Bitcoin Uncensored hat would be like, now it's time to ship some kind of product that just eviscerates these people. And they're complete in total lack of knowledge. But it's kind of like just a weird situation where you have a lot of people, a lot of money on the line. And the knowledge gap is very big.

[00:50:07] Paul Sztorc: But I think it should be possible to get through, you know, if someone makes like the right YouTube video or something. I don't know. It's very interesting here, though. Definitely gathering a lot of info from people. I think, in general, Mining Disrupt. Commercial for that.

[00:50:27] Vlad Costea: One last ad, Chris, and then we can get to that point. Don't worry about that. I did not [unclear: detail] everything. So Hodling.ch, these guys are from Switzerland. And if you need help with your self custody, they're going to tell you exactly what kind of wallets you should be using. If you need hardware wallets, if you need multisig, it depends on how much you have and what you want to do with it. So if you're part of a company that wants to add Bitcoin to its reserves, they can help you with the multisig setup and provide to you all the consultancy that you need with the Swiss privacy.

[00:51:00] Vlad Costea: That is really interesting. So check out Hodling.ch. And thank you for sitting through these ads. Thank you, Chris.

[00:51:14] Chris DeRose: Advertisers. No, just in general, the theme of communication is weirdly present in a lot of spheres and the deterioration. We decided to wire everybody up to everybody thinking that that would like improve communication. And it kind of did. And it kind of didn't. I'm struck by just, we have to make routine phone calls now to something like Comcast, certainly Airbnb, various things. The communication has never been worse. It's very strange to me that that's where things are.

[00:51:48] Wayne Vaughan: Chris, what do you think about how things are kind of bringing it back to Bitcoin? How do you think things have changed with Bitcoin? We were talking a few moments ago through some of these ads about inscriptions and OP_CAT and the other stuff. You were a pioneer, let's call it, in the days of building layer two solutions on top of Bitcoin with Counterparty. And you were also a pioneer in blockchain technology. I recall being at the Roundtable this past year talking to a bunch of people.

[00:52:21] Wayne Vaughan: I was talking to people about inscriptions and Ordinals and things like that. They didn't even know what Counterparty was. There is a complete lack of knowledge about a whole set of historical technologies and learning experiences that aren't being pulled forward to the present. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts about what you see now reflected upon what we all experienced a decade ago?

[00:52:48] Chris DeRose: Okay, so the revolving circus is like a kind of description I would offer. There's been many times in my life, people have no idea what my history with Bitcoin is. And they're getting into the circus ride for the first time, telling me all these things that we've been through, that we all know what the conclusion will be. Yet, that was never presented to them, and they will be blissfully ignorant of those endeavors in the past. And a lot of these new technologies just seem like, to me, repetitions of the old cycle for a new audience that just got onto the ride for the first time.

[00:53:29] Chris DeRose: And it's hard for me not to see it that way. There are some people who I think are going in the ride. Like Space Mountain is open to them. They went in Space Mountain for the first time. They made it to the end, and then they got right back in and got on the ride again. No problem, no problem. I've certainly done that even in many ways. But they'll do it over and over and over again, and every time it'll be like a complete surprise to them how the ride ends.

[00:53:57] Chris DeRose: And I don't know what to say about that. But it does seem to me like the blockchain space and the Bitcoin space or crypto space, take your pick, is a kind of Space Mountain ride that is just perpetually going. And the carnival barkers get people in, and it's sort of the same ride. I guess they modernize it. I guess it's the same Space Mountain, but they have a new facade over the decorations on the ride. There's the 70s edition of Space Mountain, the 80s edition of Space Mountain, the 90s edition.

[00:54:30] Chris DeRose: So yeah, this year's buzzword is both new and also very similar to the buzzwords from five years ago and not very different. And I've got a good friend now who's like, I'm not going to say his name, he's like an Ethereum core developer. I'm just like amazed because I remember telling him back in 2011 or 2012 about this thing. He wasn't interested. Now he's totally locked into the ride, explaining to me how they're building all of these great new technologies. And I think ConsenSys is where he works for.

[00:55:07] Chris DeRose: I forget, one of those kind of companies. And I just kind of like smile. Oh, absolutely.

[00:55:15] Paul Sztorc: I think it's a very, Wayne and Chris, it's a very good point that I almost think we're still, I hate to say we're still early because it's the thing that idiots say, but I guess we could be an idiot for a day. But what I mean by that is it's almost like, I mean, we are early still. People still do not get it for some reason. And we are going to see it repeat again. You know, we will see it repeat. It's just shocking. And maybe there will be a time when something is launched and it becomes used by 8 billion people and it just like has like hyper whateverization, you know.

[00:55:58] Paul Sztorc: But it's, I don't know, it's a hard point to articulate, but I'm trying to point out that it's like, yeah, like people really do not care that Counterparty was before. Ordinals or even that there's this long history of stuff in between. So it's like, it is a new group of people each time though. It is not like, you know what I mean, like the people who would have been reached by Counterparty is like this very different set of people than reached by Ordinals. So it's completely, it's the same ride, but it's completely, it is completely new people.

[00:56:34] Wayne Vaughan: The people that I spoke with who, you know, who didn't know what Counterparty was and weren't aware of, they didn't want to know. They wanted to continue to pretend that the thing that they were doing was new and groundbreaking. And they didn't care to learn about the history of things that kind of, or not even the technical stuff, just the practical matters around building a community and driving developer adoption and writing good documentation. Like all those mundane things, it was just sort of like, oh, we'll just figure it out when we get there.

[00:57:05] Wayne Vaughan: And it was a certain like dismissiveness and disdain for the past. It's like, oh, this is the future. I'm working on something new. That stuff is the failed stuff of the past. You guys must not know because that stuff failed.

[00:57:19] Jay Berg: It also carries over to developers who are actually the only ones who, you know, really like the subject matter experts that could actually make a difference. They're kind of been dismissed completely.

[00:57:33] Paul Sztorc: Well, I think people are early. Like that's what I was trying to say. I couldn't quite figure out what to say, but I was trying to say that Counterparty was early, you know what I mean? And even probably inscriptions are early or whatever to like make the transition to whatever, other stuff, digital assets on the blockchain. I don't know. I'm just saying like it's very, very likely that someone, you know, you can have a really, really good idea, but it can just be at the wrong time. And then it's like nothing anyone can do about that.

[00:58:01] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah, that's always the case. I mean, you never know where this stuff is going to go. Like here in Texas, they're starting this thing called the Texas Stock Exchange. I think Citadel Blackrock are behind it.

[00:58:12] Jay Berg: We're going to beat them to it.

[00:58:14] Wayne Vaughan: It may be very possible that they take a tech stack that is some derivative of some of this blockchain stuff that's been developed and they use that as the foundation for some securities trading thing. And maybe, you know, it doesn't adhere to all of the strict doctrine of the proper blockchain stuff, but maybe it becomes successful.

[00:58:38] Wayne Vaughan: And then everything else will be reframed as a step along the way to get to this now new and great thing that has come into the world. I guess the point behind saying all of that is that you never really know where this stuff is going to go. And timing is absolutely critical. And we all know that, you know, Google wasn't the first search engine, you know, it takes a while for these technological innovations to iterate and for the market conditions to be right for them to really take off.

[00:59:19] Chris DeRose: I think to the point of the Ordinals crowd, again, I would defer to like this model of propriety versus truth, maybe. So you have a group of people who are there for the right reasons. They're not there to find truth. That's actually a very different goal. And so you're under the assumption that you're headed in the same spirit that they are and you're not. And so, yeah, for better or worse or otherwise, that's where that rub seems to be. Like, I see this pattern a lot. Once you start looking for it, you'll probably find it more.

[00:59:54] Chris DeRose: Fundamentally, not everyone's headed to the same… A lot of it… Okay, so this is like… Forgive me in advance. Okay. If we define spirit as a group's objective sense of perfection, if we use that definition for spirit. So like… You go to the football game, and there's the spirit of victory. Like if you pulled people on what it is to have a perfect day, they would say, oh, the perfect day would be for my team to win. Okay, great. That would constitute some matter of spirit. So then you are going to these people who are the ordinal's people.

[01:00:29] Chris DeRose: Their spirit is not the same spirit as yours. Their spirit is probably to be accepted by their peers and to seek wealth maybe by way of like… good positive feels of the group around them, receiving social validation, like these sorts of like senses of perfection. As opposed to what I think was the BU attitude, which was like, well, we're going to know what the truth is. Be it right or wrong, it kind of didn't matter. Like that truth was like the overriding spirit, I think, of a lot of our pursuits.

[01:00:59] Chris DeRose: And so like when you offer truth to people, like you're assuming that's what they want. Like I wish I'd known these things when I was younger, though if I had known these things, the show wouldn't have been as much fun. So… that's kind of where I'm at with some of that. I don't know if that helps people watching. At this point, what I would kind of do, and I wouldn't even… like if there's any coalition of like old timers that really wants to like seek advancement, like just lean into it.

[01:01:24] Chris DeRose: Just give it… just accelerate it. Give it 110% gas. Accept that you're not going to reform anybody. It ain't going to happen. And that all you can do is push them further down the path they're on. And if you take that attitude towards a lot of this stuff, something tells me we'll probably see a greater traction in sort of like the original wants of our coalition as original BU listeners, rather than like hoping that the crowd will see it our way, which will never happen. It seems, you know.

[01:01:55] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah, you can't change people's mind by arguing with them over the internet. It's just on any subject, it's not possible.

[01:02:02] Chris DeRose: Yeah, some people can, but the vast majority cannot.

[01:02:07] Wayne Vaughan: Basically, it's a very small fraction.

[01:02:09] Jay Berg: That's why we have code and pull requests and, you know, there was a whole process at some point that we were supposed to get through all this and we gave it up. That's where I think we went wrong. And that's what Bitcoin was. It was just code. And we kind of gave that up and now we're kind of…

[01:02:29] Chris DeRose: We wanted to believe it was just code, but it wasn't just code. It was like fiscal policy and like social policy.

[01:02:39] Wayne Vaughan: You could have status in the Bitcoin mailing list. Like it's always been a human endeavor full of political. I agree with Chris 100%. It's always been that, but things like Twitter and social media and the conference circuit and everything have taken it off from being this niche area where you could have this status or this prestige into being basically all the world's a stage for everything.

[01:03:05] Wayne Vaughan: And some people flourish in that environment and they like it. I can do okay with it when I need to, but I don't prefer that world.

[01:03:16] Chris DeRose: Something on that point, like there is… If you can consider like the performativity in our language, like the introduction of that term, like all your life were graded on how you performed. Like your academic performance, your work performance. If you didn't perform, you were labeled a bad actor.

[01:03:35] Chris DeRose: I think that from the level of the institution, we made a lot of decisions in the functioning of society that rewarded this level of intermediation between like what something is and how it looks. And then, like you said, there are people that are excellent performers. They've spent their whole lives studying how to perform. And on the matter of who they are, it's a wholly different subject. But these people are the ones that often succeed online. For various reasons, some good, some bad. Or in general, they do. And I think a lot of institutional inertia, it promotes this kind of thinking.

[01:04:12] Vlad Costea: So, Wayne, I got to disagree with one of the points that you made previously about Ordinals and Counterparty, because I do remember three years ago at the peak of the NFT mania, people were searching for the historic pieces, something that made sense for them, something that they could justify as being old enough. And this collection that is exquisite and something that they can shill. And basically, they started digging into the history. They did discover Rare Pepe, which I think is bigger than CryptoPunks or whatever. And they did discover that there were some crazy collections, like some Japanese girls that were part of a card collection.

[01:04:51] Vlad Costea: There were some cards by Theo Goodman. There were some cards by Thomas Hunt, MadBitcoins. MikeInSpace, I think right now, MikeInSpace has hit the home run with his stamps. And at one point, it became so ridiculous that they started to revive to run nodes for Namecoin, hoping that they're going to be able to retrieve some assets from Namecoin. And to everyone else listening to this, if you don't know what Namecoin is, I guess you should ask Paul Sztorc, because he's the one who's building a sidechain for it.

[01:05:30] Wayne Vaughan: Vlad, just to respond quickly, I agree with you. I have had great experiences with people as well. When I said that people were interested, I was talking very narrowly about the group of people that I was in at that particular moment. But yes, there are plenty of people who are trying to build things on Bitcoin, who do take a look back at what's been done before. And they do want to learn from from the history. I didn't mean to paint that I apologize if I accidentally painted that as a broad statement for all the people who tried to build things.

[01:05:57] Chris DeRose: On top of Bitcoin.

[01:05:58] Vlad Costea: No, it's funny because now we also have a reactionary movement against all of these assets being built on Bitcoin without asking for permission, you know, and you have religious zealots like Luke Dashjr, who created his own cult, started his own mining company. I'm not sure if you're aware of all of this, Chris, but it's really insane out there. He started his own cult right now, and they all want to filter all of these transactions with a custom piece of code that they have to embed into their nodes.

[01:06:28] Vlad Costea: And they all mine with the same mining pool. They run the same node client and they isolate themselves socially.

[01:06:35] Chris DeRose: I didn't know anything about that. That being said, that I think is the future. I have to say, you're going to have to lean into these religious movements if you're going to see any coalition endeavor succeed, it seems to me. And you're seeing this with others, like not just with Luke. I realized actually, I'm wearing a gray shirt, which is completely unintentional, but the logic of promoting this gray shirt idea makes perfect sense. I think that's probably, for anybody who wants to continue online in these coalitions, they're going to have to get increasingly cult-y and just lean into it.

[01:07:07] Chris DeRose: You're going to have to know, without irony or with, this is the direction in which we're going to expand.

[01:07:13] Wayne Vaughan: Choose your cult wisely.

[01:07:15] Chris DeRose: Yeah, for sure.

[01:07:17] Jay Berg: But we don't have a cult, so we have to find a cult.

[01:07:20] Paul Sztorc: I mean, to that point, Chris, you could even think about the people who had the UASF hats or even other kind of things about how, to be a Bitcoin maximalist, you have to be like a meat-eating, weightlifter type guy, no sunscreen lotion, no seed oil. But like, there's a lot of evidence for that.

[01:07:44] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I think the goal would be to get your cult to the point where it will be able to collect taxes. I'm not positive about this, but if you can create enough faith to, and or social signals to convince your group to pay taxes, that's probably what's necessary. I'm not positive about it. There might be other ways to do it, but Luke's already down that path.

[01:08:08] Wayne Vaughan: Balaji is talking about the nation state, you know, being something that is on the internet. So, I mean, if you can, maybe that's the future. We'll all join cults and pay taxes to those cults. It'll be just like religions in the past and, you know, tithing and all that kind of stuff.

[01:08:28] Chris DeRose: I do think we're going to decentralize. I really do. I just don't think it's going to be a Bitcoin thing. And I think, I mean, I'm just seeing this here and there, incidentally, like the sort of level of like what I would have expected to be like a prototype decentralization model is happening in various places, like in Latin America and even a little bit like in California. My sister tells me some things, and I wouldn't be surprised if we step in that direction. It just doesn't happen online.

[01:08:55] Chris DeRose: And, yeah, like the goal of any of these groups should be to collect taxes, I think. And like, what you spend it on and all that is very complicated. And how you like produce enough trust, like, you know, over the finances to like, you know, determine spending and all that. But like, the thing is, your decentralized group is going to have to like defend itself against the one next door. So the quicker you get to the tax collection phase, the quicker you can do that. And, you know, we'll see if that's what happens.

[01:09:22] Chris DeRose: I don't know how much people actually mean what they say they want, or if they will just be forced into this. But, yeah, seems that way to me.

[01:09:32] Wayne Vaughan: Well, what's the difference between collecting taxes in the metaphor that you're using and offering something that's of value that people repeatedly purchase?

[01:09:44] Chris DeRose: I think the burden of taxes is like psychological, like that's when you're in. Like, there's two ways I think to get people into your car, roughly. Like, some level of sacrifice, which taxes represent, like just pure sacrifice. It can't be like a purchase where you get something out of it. Like, it has to be like, I have like abstained from some pleasure, or I have sacrificed my labor with no expectation for the greater whole, and with no expectation of getting [unclear: direct benefit] that day. That's one way. I forgot the other way.

[01:10:21] Chris DeRose: There's another way. I forgot. But I mean, that's the [unclear: significance], at least, of the tax collection. Oh, the other way is voting. Yeah, that would be the other way. Voting, I think, also has that possibility. But I don't think it's as strong as tax collection.

[01:10:35] Wayne Vaughan: Have you been following what's been going on with all the politics stuff with Bitcoin and how it's becoming like an election issue?

[01:10:42] Chris DeRose: Oh, yeah. One thing about that, I think, is like, it kind of creates the carnival ride analogy. Like, I saw that Donald Trump is like, he took a million dollar Bitcoin donation and now he's like, you know, doing the Bitcoin circus ride, basically. It's even bigger.

[01:11:01] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah. I mean, in the sense that the crypto lobby was described by Chamath Palihapitiya as the most powerful lobby out there. And if you look at the fundraising numbers, which is all publicly available information, like, crypto-oriented PACs are basically outraising everybody else. And this is not something that's going to go away. I mean, I've been trying my damnedest to not get dragged into this stuff. Like, I don't want to fly out of Washington, D.C. Again and like talk to people and stuff like that.

[01:11:36] Wayne Vaughan: I did take the Elizabeth Warren. I'm building an anti-crypto army and made it into a Donald Trump. I'm building a crypto army meme, which has gone around the Internet quite a bit. So I'm helping contribute in my own way that way. But yeah, I just think it's, this is what happens when Bitcoin grows up. This is like an inevitable consequence of Bitcoin entering. And I know we've had this conversation before, but it's an inevitable consequence of Bitcoin entering. Maybe it's like awkward teenage years again.

[01:12:09] Chris DeRose: It could also just be like the Albanian Civil War. This is what happened to Albania. This is the same, very similar stuff, where you have these, like, for lack of a better description, you have these bad faith markets that don't go regulated and eclipse the size of the good faith markets. Or like the incentives are such that you, like you saw this even in companies. Like at Microsoft, you had a greater incentive to pimp your coin than you did to collect your work check. So like if I could use my job at Microsoft to promote my shitcoin, that is a wiser financial decision.

[01:12:49] Chris DeRose: So that could be going on at a macro level. I don't actually think, I like it. Like, I'm invested. Like, you want to make the money, fine. But I don't actually know that like this crypto thing is really going to work ultimately. Like it could just be like that they have to cut it out because the incentives are too screwy or they let it run wild and it displaces everything. And like the [unclear: Bitcoiners] get exactly what they asked for. And it wasn't what you wanted. That could happen too.

[01:13:15] Chris DeRose: I don't know. Don't know. But that's what I hear you saying. That's what it sounds like to me.

[01:13:19] Paul Sztorc: But it's a very interesting idea that in order to get to this point where we would be a huge lobby, we almost needed like the previous cults. It's like a little spiral upward, you know. It's not exactly the same rollercoaster each time, although it's sort of like repeated at each scale. It's like now we needed those pre-cults. We needed Vitalik in order to get to Ted Cruz speaking at Mining Disrupt, which he just did, by the way. He was here. So that's what I guess.

[01:13:48] Wayne Vaughan: I've been incredibly impressed with Ted Cruz talking about Bitcoin. Like he's very knowledgeable, very on point. It was very surprising for every time I've heard him talk about it, both publicly and privately, he's surprisingly more knowledgeable than most of the other politicians. You know, regardless of how you feel about his political perspective, at least he knows the subject.

[01:14:12] Paul Sztorc: He did actually make a joke on stage. He said that probably there's only nine other senators who know what Bitcoin is, which I don't know if that's, you know, I don't know if that's true, but that's possible, certainly possible. Certainly they don't like computers a lot over there in DC, it seems so.

[01:14:30] Wayne Vaughan: They're still running Windows 98.

[01:14:32] Paul Sztorc: Oh my God, I wish I could still run Windows 98. That was a joy to use. I enjoyed Windows 98.

[01:14:38] Wayne Vaughan: I think that came out [unclear: yesterday].

[01:14:39] Chris DeRose: I think the Bar Mitzvah is a better model for like people's blockchain like accomplishments. Where in like, you're new, you don't know much, you learn to be a man. Everybody throws the candy at you once you like make Aliyah. And now you've had your bar mitzvah, you're part of the club. And so it could be that like some of these people, like Ted Cruz, are just like 12 years old in Bitcoin years. And they're going to hit their 13th year, and then we're all going to congratulate them, throw some candy at them, and then the next guy is going to come.

[01:15:12] Chris DeRose: And like that could be like the carnival ride, basically, like that analogy might be what we're looking for. Although I don't know if it's too esoteric. I don't know if everybody knows the bar mitzvah traditions. Maybe that's why it doesn't work, I don't know. And the track could get longer every time. It could be that every time you get on Space Mountain, like you go down the whole ride, then the crew comes and add like an extra like, you know, three feet of tracks, and then you go back on again, and then they have three feet of tracks, it could be that.

[01:15:41] Chris DeRose: And then eventually, yeah, you go down like Nirvana, and you're there, I don't know.

[01:15:47] Wayne Vaughan: Chris, what's your take? What's your projections here on sort of the future of Bitcoin, crypto, and politics? Like if you had to look into the next like two election cycles, and you know, based on how things are maturing, you know, where's this going to go?

[01:16:08] Chris DeRose: Okay, so I've maintained, I don't know that I'm right about this, I don't care, this is what I suspect or think, and I'm going to go with it. Even if it's low probability, you can all laugh at me for being wrong, I would like to be wrong. I've said for over a year now, there will not be an election, that we're going to have to save democracy starting this November. I maintain, I'm going to stay by that, even if the chances are lower than when I first said it, although I think that's a possibility.

[01:16:33] Chris DeRose: I think what's going to happen is we're going to not to vote, because we're going to have to save democracy. That's what my name, that's what my guess is for this year. After that, I don't know. You know, like I don't, like I'm very much identified with like the conservative side of things for a long time, but I've completely fallen out with that, and I no longer see these parties as serving anybody at all, and so say it again?

[01:17:02] Wayne Vaughan: They serve themselves, their purpose is to maintain authority and to provision themselves, and there are people who are associated with them, with resources.

[01:17:10] Chris DeRose: Yeah, and you'll be totally wanted here, so we'll check a box, and then we'll be similarly discarded, and that'll be the pattern.

[01:17:18] Paul Sztorc: So you think there will be no, you think there will be like some kind of crisis will be declared, and there won't be an election day? It'll be November 5th this year, I think, so you think like nothing will happen on November 5th, something will happen before?

[01:17:31] Chris DeRose: I think before what's going to happen, it's going to be like the pandemic. There will be a broadcast on the state media and it'll be syndicated and you'll have a significant number of the population who see this as an opportunity for social advancement and they will immediately begin to champion the message that we have to save democracy and they will hold you in contempt for having not been on board of this I

[01:17:57] Paul Sztorc: Mean that's a long shot one, because it's tough to get people to break with the status quo, you know, people are conformists, so there's going to be...

[01:18:05] Jay Berg: What is the Supreme Court going to do next week? That's the big question. That will set that up.

[01:18:12] Chris DeRose: I agree, it's a long shot, I would like to be wrong, but I've said this now for long enough, we'll have to stick with it, and I don't think it's a small chance, I think it's not the likely chance, but I think there's a chance.

[01:18:22] Wayne Vaughan: Well let's assume that the small chance doesn't happen, and things pursued in a fucked up manner, but a normal manner. What's the future for crypto and politics, and what are the awkward teenage years for Bitcoin basically like going mainstream as a global investment asset, and look like?

[01:18:45] Chris DeRose: So I think if that doesn't happen, It's going to look like Brexit, where there's going to be, I think Joe Biden will win the presidency for various reasons, we can get into just a hunch. And he will represent nobody. He will just be like an island of like this very small group of people. And whenever they put something up to vote, like we're going to vote to just disrupt them. So it'll be like Brexit, I think where like, the politicians are like going to join the EU, and like, Maybe not enough people really want that and then the people vote against it, but since nobody in power represented that coalition it'll just be like weird and like -implemented and So I think we're going to have a series of things like that. Where like we'll have like transgender hockey leagues being like important for some reason and everyone will vote against it But there'll be nobody in power who can even know what it is to be against transgender hockey leagues and so it'll just kind of like limp along like indeterminately with like some players maybe or maybe not being transgender like these types of things I think would be my guess and I would like to see that like the states actually just start divorcing themselves basically like Not on paper.

[01:20:01] Chris DeRose: Like We're 100% part of the United States. Everything's great. We all believe everything you say, but also we have all these overriding rules that make it so that like whatever you say is basically not relevant. Just like Florida, like Texas has its own stock exchange. We agree in full with everything the SEC has to say. I'm very sorry, but the SEC has no jurisdiction here. Just sort of like that kind of a thing or like the words and the actions don't have any pretense of lining up. That would be like kind of the general theme, would be my guess.

[01:20:31] Paul Sztorc: And with your language theme, Texas could just say, this isn't a stock exchange. This is a whatever, a fruit factory or something.

[01:20:41] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Exactly. That's kind of, I mean, that's just in general what we're doing, like already, just seems like it, like, you know, like, take racism, like that's an easy example. Racism like once was a thing that had like a real concrete value to everybody. But over time, like the connotation displaced the denotation, and now it seems like everything, because it's such a powerful word, like the word itself is powerful, like the word racism.

[01:21:12] Chris DeRose: What it means is relevant, completely irrelevant. All we know is that you don't want to be racist. So therefore, if I don't want people eating my competitor's peanut butter, it's going to be racist peanut butter. And that's what we're doing, you know, and you have like this group of people who haven't figured out that's the game we're playing, and because of that, like we're like held hostages to like their faith, basically, in the words.

[01:21:40] Chris DeRose: I know this is like a great telling of what's going to happen, but decohering, like as a general theme, like I would see like as we go into a decentralized model, the institutional like regime will just decode here. It'll be effectively toothless. It'll be words without meaning. Like what's a good example?

[01:22:01] Wayne Vaughan: It's in the federal government, and they'll lose faith in some of the institutions, and then power will flow back to the states, because somebody has to put it all together. You don't want the livestock running all over the ranch, destroying everything. The ranchers have to stay.

[01:22:17] Chris DeRose: I think people just put their faith in local governance. And so when like the IRS is coming for you'll notify like your state IRS protection squad, who will supersede the IRS agents and ensure that your money is properly accounted for and lo and behold, in their determination, you don't owe the IRS as much money as they say, but what you do owe is half that amount to like the Texas government. And so you'll pay taxes, half the amount you owe the IRS, And then they'll protect you from the IRS and everything will be above board like it'll be something retarded like that, and because it's in everybody's interest locally, and the federal government's like power is like weird, that's just the stasis thing. That would be my guess, you know. I'm not like specializing in this stuff, but just watching somebody ask me every day like how do you make predictions, and it's like you know what, I generally just look to see an object in motion, and then I assume it'll stay in motion.

[01:23:15] Chris DeRose: So like here, that's what I'm doing. If I see what the current trajectories are, and I assume they continue, this is the outcomes I would expect, and we'll see what happens.

[01:23:25] Wayne Vaughan: I mean, on the opposite end of that, you've got Bitcoin as an object in motion. It's obviously getting, you know, we've got these ETFs now, we have even being approved for as an ETF, see what happens with the S1s. But the clear trajectory for the stuff is that more people will own these assets. More people will take these things seriously. And, I kind of have a hard time seeing a world where the momentum from that, which is pretty fast, continues and where We end up in a world where all the woke people just like change all of our language and you know, do all of these things that basically like control our lives and sort of the Orwellian outcome that you were describing.

[01:24:18] Chris DeRose: It's not just the woke people that are changing the language, but I see the conservatives catching right up.

[01:24:28] Paul Sztorc: But in a way, don't you think like Donald Trump is a reaction to like politically correct speech? So that is kind of like undoing a little bit of the language vagueness, where people are saying, no, I don't want, I'll vote for Orange Hitler, as long as he knows what this word means, you know?

[01:24:51] Chris DeRose: Fake news was something that at one point had a lot more credibility than it does now. Granted, there's like nothing but fake news now, but also like fake news once was like the idea that there were like intentionally deceptive forces out there. Now, fake news includes that group, but it also includes anybody who tells me anything I don't want to get. Like, yeah, colloquial, like the way I see people say it. Or like, what's another example? There are conservative analogs. The deep state is like similar. Like the deep state started off, I think, in one way.

[01:25:26] Chris DeRose: It is now basically included anytime anyone tells you something you don't want to hear that's like loosely affiliated with the bureaucracy, which I share. Like I actually think that's probably, like the bureaucracies have grown too big. Like I show that sort of like apprehension, but I just think that they're like similar but different on the conservative side. But to Wayne's point, like the problem I have, I think, Wayne, is that like, okay, so this is a longer thing. I think I touched on this in the show towards the end of the show, like much of what happens online is a simulacrum.

[01:25:59] Chris DeRose: Like this is just Baudrillard that I'm quoting roughly. And so like what you have with like crypto are series of simulacrums. We can get into what that is, but we have like very much a case of the stock market simulacrum. It would appear to be a stock displacing or would appear to be stock-like in all mechanisms that can be perceived. But what it is not its appearance. And again, this gets back to like sort of like the performativity that's required. It may be that everybody in the entire space is performing the act of stocks or performing the act of gold.

[01:26:38] Chris DeRose: So these things, these simulacrums would appear to be increasing in their penetration and they very well might be, but it doesn't mean there's any traction. It could just be that more people are playing the act. And what that means is that like there will be no companies, there will be no currencies, there will only be this gigantic mirage that has lots and lots of adherence, but which is otherwise vacuous. Like if you get too close to it'll just disappear. It's not there. Like that, that language, sure, broad strokes, sure, but that's kind of how I see this space.

[01:27:14] Chris DeRose: Like ultimately what will happen is like China, which is off its own currency, and it'll switch to it. And all the people who believe in the appearance will be left with sort of less useful tokens, perhaps. Like that could transpire. I don't know.

[01:27:33] Paul Sztorc: Okay, they have to go. This is the super cool stuff. I look forward to listening to it.

[01:27:39] Vlad Costea: Paul, [unclear: just before this prediction of mine].

[01:27:42] Paul Sztorc: In the real world, I'm not in the simulacra. I'm really at the conference, so better really go there.

[01:27:50] Vlad Costea: Just stay for 30 seconds because I want to make a prediction about US politics. I don't care what's going to happen this year, but in the next election cycle, I think we're going to see David Bailey, the owner of Bitcoin magazine, run for president. And I'm not even joking.

[01:28:05] Paul Sztorc: Just as a publicity stunt. Really or a publicity stunt?

[01:28:09] Vlad Costea: No, I think it's going to happen for real because he's so well connected. You can see a pattern here that he invited all these high-profile politicians to speak on the stage.

[01:28:21] Paul Sztorc: But that has also been a trend, though, because we had first Bitcoin conference, there was like Senator Lummis or someone, there was like a few people, and then we've gotten more and more and more. And so that is also the trend of attracting politicians.

[01:28:38] Wayne Vaughan: I wouldn't be surprised if Ryan Selkis ran for office at some point, too.

[01:28:42] Vlad Costea: So let me predict this. You're going to have a bill, you're going to have, I don't know if it's going to be the Republican Party or independents or whatever, libertarians. You're going to have David Bailey and his running mate is going to be Ryan Selkis of Messari. That's my prediction. You can record this. Come back to me in four years.

[01:29:05] Wayne Vaughan: Chris DeRose will be the Secretary of State. Junseth will be Chief of Staff.

[01:29:15] Chris DeRose: I like it. I think also, too, in a lot of this, we're finding out these officials probably don't have as much power as they think, as we think, excuse me. I think about someone like the campaign promises that we've heard over the last 15 years. And I don't know that many of them have come to bear. They can only be the judge of that. The health care system in America sucks. You know, if you go to like Colombia, just to try it out. I'm not saying it's the best health care system, but it will show you how inefficient ours is.

[01:29:49] Chris DeRose: Thailand's the same way. Go to get some kind of health care and kind of be amazed at how efficient it is. So like that was an Obama era promise. You can decide if that came true or not. I can maybe, I don't know. But I take my health care needs outside of the United States now. Not that there's any. You look at the Biden student loan stuff, like maybe that's like a promise that he'll make. It's a little weird to me whether or not that's the case.

[01:30:13] Chris DeRose: I don't know. It looks like it is. Trump made some promises that didn't quite come through. Weirdly, I think I saw on the news like Assange is like striking a plea deal now, which I thought that was a Trump era promise. I promise. I don't remember. That was not him. It was like I saw Trump promising or suggesting that he would let Ross Ulbricht go. I have no reason to believe that, even if he said it. I'd like to see it. Maybe he does. But I don't really have any faith that it's going to happen.

[01:30:46] Chris DeRose: I think he's going to say whatever he needs to say to get elected, and then he may even try to do that. And then someone's going to show up and tell him no, and he's going to say okay. That's what I suspect happens.

[01:30:55] Vlad Costea: Well, I think the narrative for Ross right now is stronger. He has been in jail for a decade, and everyone can agree reasonably that if you weighed in his crime, it's excessive. So they can maybe not declare him not guilty or whatever. He needs to get clemency, right, which is a presidential decision. It can only come from the head of state, according to how the legal system was designed. He has no right to appeal. All he can get at best is this clemency. And I think that right now the narrative is stronger for Ross than it was four years ago or any other time.

[01:31:36] Vlad Costea: It's just that the campaigning is more efficient, and Trump seems desperate enough to just accept any alliance that comes his way. There are rumors that he's going to be speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference. I don't know if they're going to be true or if we're going to see. It's going to be interesting if he joins because there is already Robert Kennedy, who's going to be part of the speaker's list. So if that turns out to be basically the largest stage for political candidates to express their opinions on Bitcoin matters, I think it's just confirmation that you guys were super right to join so early on.

[01:32:18] Vlad Costea: I was super wrong to join later because I did discover Bitcoin pretty early on, but I thought it was a stupid idea. But yeah, it's pretty cool.

[01:32:29] Chris DeRose: I don't know that that's what it says. It might say that, and it is comforting to hear. I think it says more about how far behind our leaders are to me. There's many, many, many cases where all of us knew what was going to happen before it happened, and somehow our leadership did not. So take the border thing. Anybody who is a three-digit IQ or higher – I guess not higher – a three-digit IQ could have told you that if we don't enforce some standards at the border, we're going to end up with rampant crime coming across the border.

[01:33:02] Chris DeRose: And somehow that message wasn't heard. Now, I don't actually know what to tell you. The story is on that because opening the border seemed to be some kind of political agenda and bad faith mixed with the allegation that these are bringing in more blue voters and also some kind of spite like orange man says it's good, therefore it's bad. Fine. But in general, I can't help but to watch. I can't watch regular mainstream TV anymore. I play some video games there. That's basically it. Maybe some YouTube sometimes.

[01:33:39] Vlad Costea: So what games do you play, Chris?

[01:33:41] Chris DeRose: Okay. Anything but from – anything from software. Those Souls games are amazing. So I've played – I haven't played Elden Ring, but I've played every other one of those games and beat it. And then I'm playing Grand Theft Auto V now just because I had to sit in there and put it in, and it's pretty great, actually. So that's what I'm going to do. But anyways, I don't – I watch like – if I watch like a daytime TV show every once in a while, I cannot relate.

[01:34:11] Chris DeRose: It is like watching like something, I don't know, from another planet. Mostly that's me, but I think that speaks to the kind of like mentality that the leadership is probably forced to accommodate. And, you know, I don't know. There's a lot of people out there that are functionally identical to slaves. Like not in exactly the way that their life quality is, but like in their attitudes towards like freedom and sovereignty. And like they just go on TV and they download the thing to believe. It's the right thing to believe.

[01:34:46] Chris DeRose: And then, you know, okay, master, I believe it. And then that's that. It's why I say I think this election will have to save democracy. Like it sounds crazy, but what will happen is this TV will say to people what the right thing is, and they'll just go – they're like, okay, I accept orders, and they'll go around and just repeat them, and there'll be a critical mass. And a critical mass doesn't even take much. All you need is like 20 percent or less, even 10 percent of the population, to be like steadfast about something.

[01:35:11] Chris DeRose: And if the other 90 percent is just like ambivalent, like they'll take over. So, you know, that's maybe one of the courses we're dealing with. I don't know. [unclear: Is there a Bitcoin?] There's a small number that will appear that will just coerce a huge crowd of like otherwise stationary objects, like people who just didn't wait for orders, you know, from basically a prestigious source. Like prestigious, like how the whole system seems to like perpetuate. If someone's prestigious, like they're, you know, quote, unquote, right, and I can live – like Paul kind of touched on – I can live with safety by repeating whatever they say. Like, consideration be damned.

[01:35:55] Jay Berg: When you have that kind of – You don't have any Bitcoin in your future, so do you think Bitcoin failed completely, and when did it happen? Because you don't really talk about

[01:36:04] Chris DeRose: It when you – Well, it didn't fail. I mean, like you can't look at the price and tell me it failed. But what I think it did do is perform success, which I know sounds like dicing hairs. Well, it performs like a successful asset would perform. Like, it's hard to take that away from you. However, if we look at things like adoption, if we look at things like non-speculative use, if we look at things that are otherwise obscured in the numbers, it hasn't been very impressive. Well, let me push back a little bit, Roger.

[01:36:37] Wayne Vaughan: Let me put it back on for a second, because if you look at a lot of metrics, even like on-chain metrics, like number of addresses and things like that, you know, it's all up and to the right. There's been no decline. If you look at least from my own perspective, my expectations of how Bitcoin would be adopted have not really been violated. I didn't think there was going to be a bunch of darknet markets and people overthrowing governments and things like that.

[01:37:09] Wayne Vaughan: It's pretty much gone according to the way that I expected, with the exception that I didn't think that the Democrats would be so openly hostile towards things so quickly. I thought it would still stay under the radar for a period of time. And when I look at things like, you know, people aren't spending Bitcoin to buy coffee or tamales or whatever, but I've always looked at Bitcoin more as like a reserve asset that a new financial system was going to be built on top of rather than like a day-to-day usage of cash.

[01:37:50] Wayne Vaughan: So when I look at things, I don't ever get the sense that Bitcoin really has failed anyway. We've met some serious obstacles.

[01:37:58] Jay Berg: The way you defined it is failure to many. The way you defined success is failure to many.

[01:38:04] Wayne Vaughan: Well, that's, you know, that's what's cool about the world is that people have different ideas about what success is and everything. Like, I don't look at, you know, I'm just saying that things have gone along with my expectations more or less for the past few years. I never think that Bitcoin is a failure.

[01:38:27] Chris DeRose: When was the last time you bought something in Bitcoin? Never. That may not be a good metric.

[01:38:33] Wayne Vaughan: I have never bought anything with Bitcoin. What? Okay, so I would say that. People internationally, I guess I've purchased labor with Bitcoin on occasion over the years for software developers. Other than that, I have never actually, and I've never wanted to spend Bitcoin to buy an object. I bought a house, you know.

[01:38:55] Chris DeRose: When have you used Bitcoin for something besides speculation?

[01:39:00] Wayne Vaughan: I used it in the business. I used it to pay people internationally.

[01:39:04] Chris DeRose: But you did use it for payment. There you go. You see this? That's something.

[01:39:09] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah. That's what I said. I purchased labor internationally. You know, basically people want to say, oh, you know, you hire somebody to build you a script or something like that. They want payment in Bitcoin. So, you know, long time ago I sent that. But I have never, I've never purchased anything in Bitcoin. I've never thought I should really buy this stuff with Bitcoin. I've never even thought Bitcoin is something that should be money sitting in my pocket that I can spend just like the cash I might have in my pocket.

[01:39:35] Chris DeRose: That sounds like some revisionism. I'm not positive. I don't care to prove you right or wrong. But my suspicion is that when you first came here, you didn't feel so resolutely as if the purchasing of goods and services was illegal.

[01:39:50] Wayne Vaughan: You're right. So a long time ago, maybe in like 2012, 2013, I was like, oh, yeah, sure. If you want to buy something with Bitcoin, go ahead and buy something with Bitcoin. But I was always sort of waiting for like the next thing to come along, not the next Bitcoin, but the next thing that would make it more practical, like a really good wallet to use or a really easy service that made it easy. Because I always found that if you wanted to try to buy something in Bitcoin, it was kind of a pain in the ass.

[01:40:19] Wayne Vaughan: And then once things like, you know, the IRS in 2014 said you have to treat Bitcoin for property, for tax purposes, they sort of clarified that. So now you have to calculate capital gains on all your purchases. There's been all of this other. Stuff with the world, the banks, the governments of the world have worked hard to make it so that Bitcoin adoption is slowed and buying things with Bitcoin is cumbersome. And I was like, okay, well, from my mind, that early thought that okay, I can use Bitcoin to buy stuff like, you know, graphics cards from Roger Ver, something like that.

[01:40:56] Wayne Vaughan: That's on hold until these other issues get resolved. And that's really how I've kind of thought about things. Even when I started Tierion, I purposely picked something that didn't involve a financial application of Bitcoin because I didn't want to get caught up in all that stuff. I wanted to do something that was useful where I can establish a foothold that didn't have to deal with all the regulatory and the banking mess and everything that I saw all of my peers going through.

[01:41:23] Jay Berg: When you say Bitcoin, do you mean crypto like USDT over Tron? Is that Bitcoin?

[01:41:30] Wayne Vaughan: No, that's something different. You know, so I'm just talking about Bitcoin right now. You know, stablecoins, I think stablecoins are great. You know, it allows people to get access to the US dollars internationally.

[01:41:40] Chris DeRose: They're bonds. They're bonds. They're not stablecoins. That's a perfect example of the simulacrum at work. They would appear to be a type of currency when in some greater... It's a fraction of a portfolio.

[01:41:59] Wayne Vaughan: You're right. You're 100% right. It's a fraction of a bond portfolio.

[01:42:03] Chris DeRose: Okay, so that's the thing. I don't think I'm right. I know that this sounds like I'm being impossible. I am. But I don't think I'm right. I think what's right is that you call them stablecoins. I think what's true is that they're bonds. Is that splitting hemispherically of these separate pursuits? That's why we have this term.

[01:42:22] Wayne Vaughan: But we suffer from very bad vocabulary in our sphere.

[01:42:28] Chris DeRose: Well, it's not like that. There's a lot of reasons to talk, no doubt. But there seems to be a huge coalition that talks in the interest of propriety or in establishing some ethical guidelines. There are other people who want to discover maybe the parts of something that won't change, the truth of the matter. And those two sides don't meet anymore. So what I generally try to do is just embrace being wrong. And I would choose to join the pursuit of Truth Squad, which is just like a small group.

[01:43:03] Chris DeRose: And what that means is that I'm wrong. What you'll get, Vlad, is a lot of people telling me how stupid I am. And they're right. They're 100% right. But they assume that I'm trying to say the right thing. I'm not trying to say the right thing. I'm trying to say what's evident to me, which is that stablecoins are [unclear: bonds]. And so I would always get outnumbered by those people, because there's so many reasons why they're going to be a greater coalition.

[01:43:30] Wayne Vaughan: I'm curious, Jay, you seem to have expressed before that you had some sentiment that Bitcoin has failed in some aspects. Can you elaborate on your feelings?

[01:43:42] Jay Berg: OK, I would say that maybe like a little ahead of the crowd, but I think let's put I want to spin this in a positive way. I think it's a new chance to restart. I believe that if you look at 2008, if you look at Wall Street integrated into crypto, we're talking about bringing Donald Trump instead of some developer to the conferences. I feel like it's just mainstream. It's just TradFi. And we need a new Bitcoin movement. We need a new movement to like create something out of this.

[01:44:24] Jay Berg: And why has it failed? Namely because of USDT over Tron. The fact that that is, you know, the underground and Iran chooses to use that instead of Bitcoin. It's, you know, how did how do we get there? We got there. Yeah, we got there because of technical reasons and mistakes and failures that we didn't scale. So what is scaling Bitcoin scaling Bitcoin? And now we have thousands of tokens and all the money Wall Street. And it's kind of a mess. And I don't know if you heard of OP_CTV, Chris, but that's like that was the goal.

[01:45:02] Jay Berg: Like at that moment, OP_CTV failed. It was obvious that everything that we did in 2013 and 2014 with, you know, evolving around developers and at some point you just got to go pure science, put everything else away, just get the experts together and agree. And that's how we can move forward. When that failed, you know, it's kind of, you know, it's lonely to be ahead of the game, but I thought it was over at that point. And now it looks like it is, but it's not over.

[01:45:29] Jay Berg: It's a new beginning. We'll see what happens from here. And I think what Vlad's doing is exactly what we need. I would love to get the past and move forward, but I guess one last look at the past worth it. But, you know, I think there is some hope. You know, we're just waiting for everyone to realize that what we had is kind of, we kind of screwed up and not in a negative way, you know, reality. And now we just got to find out what's next.

[01:45:58] Chris DeRose: I like what I'm hearing about Luke's plan. Like, look, I really like Luke. He don't like me at all. I really like to respect the man. Yeah, I really like Luke. And there's been a lot of times when he said something and I was like, I don't know about the man. It was just like, oh, I came around to his point of view. So I don't know what the details are, but I like what he's doing. So from the little I've heard, I'm going to look into this some more.

[01:46:19] Wayne Vaughan: He's basically sort of applied his puritanical views towards Catholicism in his career, where he's like, [unclear: can you say it like you mean it], but you like it? You like the chaos?

[01:46:31] Chris DeRose: No, I have hope in the outcome. I believe the potential there is non-trivial, like it is a path towards success. I'm not Catholic. I've read a lot of religious books over the years, which was freaking weird, but that's not what I set out to do. I've read a few Orthodox Christianity books. I don't believe any of that. But I do see that others will, and it's very likely that he will attract a crowd of like bloodthirsty, zealous maniacs. And those people are probably more likely to either gin up outrage or otherwise coerce the greater whole as a result. Kind of, yes.

[01:47:13] Wayne Vaughan: You know, it's interesting. At Satoshi Roundtable this year, Luke was there, and there was a meeting by Jacuzzi with a bunch of miners who were all sitting around talking. And I think the general consensus, like if you were just to zoom out and not say anything like really specific about this conversation, to betray anyone's confidence, I think Luke was like, I'm right, and I'm going to do what's right. And the other people were looking at him. The other mining pools were like, you're crazy, and you're going to go out of business. And that was in the way. Over time, we'll find out who's right.

[01:47:47] Chris DeRose: You'll probably start a new blockchain. You'll probably start Jesus Chain. And then we'll be in the awkward position of like, this is like the variance of the Darkcoin problem. We're like, you bet that Darkcoin won't work, and then it comes back as Dashcoin, and now who's right? I don't know anymore. I can see that happening.

[01:48:10] Chris DeRose: But you've got to consider, one of the reasons why we have so craziness is that I think the leader is just responding to outrage, as I can tell. So if you get more outrage than the next guy, you're going to push the line forward. And so now you've got to start thinking for better or worse. I don't want to pursue this, but for anybody who does, how are you going to create the most ravenous crowd of people? And we've seen this happen over and over again, where these people get their way.

[01:48:40] Chris DeRose: Or at least they torment the rest of us for some period of time before enough people get around to being like, OK, we've got to do something about these crazies. So that's where Luke is going intentionally or otherwise, not the worst plan, especially if he's bringing religion in, because that speaks to a much more denominational need than some of the other stuff that we've seen create these crazies.

[01:49:09] Vlad Costea: Chris, I got to ask you some questions from the audience. There's a bunch of them, and I don't even know where to start. I'm going to take them in chronological order. So some of them are from the chat on YouTube. There is Random Life of Brian who asks when AI uncensored needed.

[01:49:29] Chris DeRose: That's the opportunity if someone wants to take it, you know, like my time behind. I like very much like years behind the microphone. I don't see myself doing it again for a lot of reasons, but that's a great question. You're going to have a repeat in many ways of the blockchain, everything with AI for sure. And AI is going to stop meaning anything. Again, anyone who's watching this, if you want to accelerate the trend, you should just start displacing the word good with AI in your vocabulary like on Twitter or elsewhere.

[01:50:02] Chris DeRose: Anytime you want to use the word good, just say AI instead. It'll probably take off in short time. And that will help, probably. It'll be fun if nothing else.

[01:50:15] Vlad Costea: There's also Martin Hanglestrom. I hope I pronounce that correctly. He said Roger's interview at Bitcoin Miami Toilet was probably his best one.

[01:50:26] Chris DeRose: Oh, that was that was a great year here. I like Roger. I don't care what anybody says. Like that guy came in, put his time in when it was hard, you know, he clearly fell out of the grace of the community. But like, I look at it from his perspective, as best I can. And like, he didn't have to do shit. He could have just walked away. Fuck y'all, I'm taking my money from me. And instead, he tried to benefit the crowd in ways that I think were very well intentioned. And like, it's not over.

[01:50:59] Chris DeRose: Like, Roger may just be 100% right. And you don't know what that could be. Let's see. I like Roger too.

[01:51:04] Jay Berg: I wish he would have never left, because I think we would have done a lot better [unclear: in Bitcoin Core]. And he turns out, I learned that he didn't. I learned that somebody else did, and he just did a lot of things.

[01:51:17] Chris DeRose: So Culturally, he came from a different time. Like the libertarian culture coming off, like the Tea Party movement was a big part of the early scene. Like it wasn't the earliest part, but it was a big part of like, I don't know, maybe 2010 or so, like 2011, something like that. He was from that year. And that year ended, and he went with it. And that was a show, I guess. I don't know if that's the way to tell the story, but it seems that way.

[01:51:46] Vlad Costea: There's also Vic in the chat who started to make a list of memorable moments from Bitcoin Uncensored. And he says the Disney Dragonchain interview, crashing the OneCoin seminar, Brock the Backpage driver, Billy the gay escort, and too many classic moments.

[01:52:06] Chris DeRose: Thank you, Pete. Yeah, watching OneCoin on the news has been kind of cool too. I saw the documentary about Ruja. That was a fun chapter.

[01:52:15] Jay Berg: Talking about OneCoin, what do you think of Hex? Have you followed? Oh, man.

[01:52:23] Chris DeRose: So Richard and I had like odd paths, like unknown to him and only known to me now. We were very close to each other, living in South Florida in various ways. And I got to say, watching some of his later stuff now, like I can't, how to put it's a little sad to me. I don't know. I've gotten out of a lot of the materialism in my life. Like this was really something that I struggled with, like all of us, but like in recent years, like it's done.

[01:52:58] Chris DeRose: Like I stay away from logos. I hate logos. There's a general rule. I don't like signs. I remove like all my shirts are solid color. I try to wear like hats, nothing. I don't want any logos or signs. My possessions are minimal. I mostly live out of a backpack. I have like, you know, real estate and like, you know, some minor stuff here and there, but nothing that I couldn't get if I lost everything tomorrow. Like, I could just buy it all back in like a day and a half.

[01:53:25] Chris DeRose: Maybe not the real estate, but like otherwise material goods. And so I look at like Richard Heart, like he's the opposite. He has sacrificed his freedom or sort of find out that he sacrificed his freedom for these objects that I don't understand. My guess is that he was, okay, a lot of these objects are like coded, as best I can tell. Like if you think you're buying a watch, well, you're not buying a watch. What you're buying is the respect of some group of people, or maybe what you're buying is like the perception of power amongst the people around you.

[01:54:00] Chris DeRose: Like it's not really about the watch for most people. There's certainly some exceptions. So like I'm guessing Richard was trying to buy respect. I'm guessing he was trying to buy girls. I'm guessing he was trying to buy some of these things. It may be that like these possessions of his are in themselves the end that justifies the means for him. I don't know. But it's a little sad to me because like it's not worth it. Like he's going to go through this whole thing. He's going to get pinched at some point.

[01:54:28] Chris DeRose: And I could see him committing suicide in jail kind of guy. And it was like you did all that for like a brand stamped shirt, like a holy logo, basically. Like you were in like this sort of mis-prestigious or this revered like class of people, seemingly.

[01:54:47] Jay Berg: He's one of the smartest people in the space ever. Yeah.

[01:54:54] Chris DeRose: He's a smart guy. He's a smart guy. It's really sad to me because like he has the potential to have done things that I think would have been more impressive. I don't know. Like it's just an odd case to me. Like I don't know what motivation is that isn't sad, I guess. That's the thing.

[01:55:14] Jay Berg: He found a really good flaw in the AMM system. A pretty brilliant thing he ran. It lasted a long time. Yeah.

[01:55:22] Chris DeRose: But when I look at it, I don't know why he did it. Like if you just like hoarded the money, I don't know. For me, that would be like, okay, well, you know, he's just trying to be like a true businessman. But I don't think that's what it is. He was like very ostentatious on top of it. He like was happy to showcase like the heist, you know, the loot from the heist. And like I can't help but think that that's like the goal is for him to like buy respect or something, I guess.

[01:55:47] Chris DeRose: I want to be nice to the guy. Like I'm not trying to knock on him. Actually, I feel bad for him. I do. And it's a little sad for me. So I don't want it to be like, I don't want it to be framed in a way that like I'm jelly or something. I'm just not. I wish him the best. I wish he made decisions that were more suiting of his potential. I think he could have been a more valuable human being, maybe. These are just petty scams.

[01:56:16] Chris DeRose: Like they're not really that clever to me. Like he did him well. He gets great points on execution. Absolutely.

[01:56:22] Jay Berg: I think he's actually better than Charles Ponzi. He's probably the best.

[01:56:26] Chris DeRose: His execution is top notch. I'm with you. But I would say the idea itself, I didn't think was that like the idea is not so much like execution, five stars. But, you know, it's not like an Ocean's Eleven heist he planned, you know, just like a run of the mill Ponzi scheme.

[01:56:44] Jay Berg: No, but the way he keeps the price up, there's a whole thing that Jumps doing. I know.

[01:56:50] Chris DeRose: I don't find that interesting. Although it's interesting to me that he can sell that. Less than he can think that. Like thinking of that was not the challenging part. Selling that was absolutely deserving of admiration. He sold something I did not think most people would ever be convinced to buy. And he did a good job. Pompanoics, right? Pompanoics? Yeah, he actually does. Pompementals. Pompementals. Yeah. There's this weirdness of irony in our times that I think he's figured out. Where like you can, through irony, like we did it to a BU, but he also did it.

[01:57:25] Chris DeRose: Like through irony you get this odd form of permission to break the rules. So great, you know. Good. That's clever. Sounds like the meme coin.

[01:57:37] Chris DeRose: I've seen some crazy meme coins out there. I saw one, it was like supersonic 3000 hyper beta coin. And it's just, you had to, now I've got to find it, baby, but it was very underground. I don't know who started it. It was just the craziest marketing, promotions, over the top thing. And I got to see if I can find that, baby. I don't even think anybody would have known it. I wouldn't have made a big deal about it. Because it was so over the top in its execution.

[01:58:05] Chris DeRose: Like every possible trope of Bitcoin weird was pulled out. It was actually a very well done in that sense.

[01:58:12] Wayne Vaughan: Chris, I know you're a little younger than I am, but I still think you might be old enough to remember commemorative plate commercials in the 1980s on TV. Do you remember those? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the way I think of meme coins and NFTs. It's like the modern day version of commemorative plates.

[01:58:34] Chris DeRose: Okay, very good analogy. In that vein, I would submit to anybody, don't invest in this, but Harry Potter Obama, HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu coin. Yeah. And looking at this, everyone's seen it or not, I don't know. The marketing on that was hilarious. Absolutely hilarious.

[01:58:57] Wayne Vaughan: I had a lot of fun making Wayne Chain back in 2016. But that was pretty much, I kind of hit my zenith like really early. And I just I couldn't do anything better than that. So I think I just kind of sit on that for a while.

[01:59:11] Chris DeRose: I'm not into- Yeah, I mean, you know, I have a Neighbor that is over this way, who put, how I say $50,000. He can't afford this. He's like a blue collar guy. And he put, I think, $50,000 into some meme coin. And he told me that his friend is like an industry guy. You know, it's all about this thing, all about blockchain. This is the one that's going to make him a bajillion. And, you know, years gone by, he lost all the money. And that was like a major financial impact on his future. Not bad, but nothing good about it. He was, he was gone, couldn't reach him.

[01:59:58] Wayne Vaughan: Did you follow anything that the situation with Martin Shkreli and Barron Trump and Trump coin?

[02:00:07] Chris DeRose: I was tangentially aware of it, but I didn't follow it too much.

[02:00:12] Wayne Vaughan: We don't, we never talked about it, but it was just such a shit show. Martin went on a, I think it was eight hours Twitter spaces. I listened to a fair portion of while I was just doing yard work. It was just a total mess. And then he had multiple spaces in the subsequent days where he was just talking about his interactions with Barron Trump, am I getting all this? And I'm just thinking to myself, this is the craziest, how the fuck did I get involved in this?

[02:00:42] Wayne Vaughan: Like, how did I get into this universe where this kind of crazy stuff could happen and then almost start to feel normal? It's bizarre.

[02:00:55] Chris DeRose: You got to reckon, that is probably normal. But a lot of the berating that we all got in earlier days, everybody came around to like where we were at. Not everybody, at least a large percent of the population. But the degree that you now have like the President of the United States, like launching coins, or like people in his proximity. You know, like the 4chanification of what is like evident to me. People don't see it this way. I have a number of friends now. That are clearly, like completely never heard of 4chan, sharing memes and ideas that either I have seen coming out of 4chan or I know came out of 4chan, which certainly is like 10 types of people there.

[02:01:38] Chris DeRose: And these are like normies in my everyday life. And it's a little awkward now because like I was chastised for probably like being even proximate to these ideas. And now I'm watching as it's taking over everything around me, at least. And I don't know what to do anymore. I feel like I know where they're going to end up. They're not going to be as successful and maybe as I was because they're linked to the party. And I'm not even sure that I was successful in a lot of ways, just entertaining.

[02:02:07] Chris DeRose: It made money and I was entertaining. So for most people's measure, that's success. But I question sometimes that's a success, you know, sometimes I think we misplace our aspirations. Like I don't regret any of it. The last laugh hasn't been had yet. We'll see who that is.

[02:02:29] Vlad Costea: Glad you got more questions. Yeah, I have a bunch of them. There is a comment by Random Life of Brian who says cowboy hats at the first Satoshi round table and Club Med. I don't know what Club Med stands for, but I do. I guess it's a reference to

[02:02:46] Chris DeRose: Cowboy hat at Club Med in like central Florida. No, no, maybe. Yeah, that was fun. Those were fun days. Paul got so drunk.

[02:02:56] Wayne Vaughan: You guys interviewed him and he was like literally he was like swallowing the microphone and spilling his drink all over himself. That was I wish he was still on the call. Bust his chops about that one.

[02:03:09] Vlad Costea: Jack Kensick says how did the angel investment in next door go, Chris? Any opinions on robotics?

[02:03:17] Chris DeRose: So I lost some money on the next door to you. I was I was up and I was down. Nothing much. I forgot what I had for the final numbers. So that was a bust. Yeah, that was a bust. But I have to say, so my opinions on like going public have really changed increasingly. It's more evident to me now that when things go public, like you really just got to sell. I held on. If I'd sold when the IPO was, that's really the only time I should have sold. But I like the company.

[02:03:45] Chris DeRose: I was like, they're sitting on a lot of potential here. I think they just got to monetize the product. And that's not what's going on. So so be it. But generally when it comes to public now, no, that's when they turn to shit. Like Airbnb really went downhill when they went public. We have like a local pizza place. Anthony's Pizza is fantastic. They went public. They turned to shit. It's a it's a very common pattern seemingly around me now that when you go to public, it's like party's over.

[02:04:11] Chris DeRose: You're just like monetizing the sign. And you're just eviscerating it of any quality for whoever faith is left in it. That's what it looks like to me.

[02:04:20] Jay Berg: How is he going to get exit liquidity? There's no, you know, maybe tokenization.

[02:04:26] Chris DeRose: Some of this, I think, is actually like the Federal Reserve's like monetary policy. That's like incentivizing or like a high time preference returns. You know, I don't know if that's what we're seeing on the matter of robotics. Like I'm wishing to see some some great investment opportunity that I have it, though. I think it's a very promising space. These robot dogs are looking pretty cool. That's for sure. I like some of the footage I've been seeing there. Whether or not they replace our police force or not, I don't know.

[02:04:55] Chris DeRose: But you know, that's another thing with the robots. Like that's the kind of thing that's going to be so extremely successful as to maybe wonder if you don't lose by winning. Like sometimes like the robots really take off like the stock market doesn't make sense anymore. Almost kind of. Let's see. What do you do when like most of human labor is in automated? I don't know.

[02:05:20] Wayne Vaughan: It's like a video game where like you have infinite life and infinite money and all the items. And like once you kind of get to the end of it's like, oh, well, what do I do?

[02:05:31] Chris DeRose: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. I watch a lot of the robots. I really like the robots.

[02:05:40] Vlad Costea: Also, Jack wants to know what do you think Florida will look like in 10 years? Do territories like Puerto Rico and Saipan? Have a future?

[02:05:49] Chris DeRose: I can't say about the other territories. With Florida, the trajectory for Florida has been like up and to the right for pretty much all of my life. Property values are going up. The locals who were born here, there's a sort of pattern where they just move north that has accelerated in recent years. A lot of the people that I grew up with have now moved to Northern Florida or other parts of the country. Meanwhile, like my little area here is heavily invested. Like the amount of investment here is every year seems to be growing.

[02:06:23] Chris DeRose: And my rental receipts have been growing by and large. I do think there is a little bit of truth to some of the climate concerns. Like when it rains badly here on this island, like you can't flush the toilets. And nobody talks about that, which is very funny to me. I know we all have this problem because I have multiple properties here. And one of them has a brand new sewer system. And all of those properties, when the rain gets to high, the toilets won't flush because the water pressure isn't lower on the sewage.

[02:06:59] Wayne Vaughan: What happens when you flush the toilet? That's what I was going to ask.

[02:07:02] Chris DeRose: The water level goes up. The water level goes up. Exactly. So you have to like not hit the button more than once because then it will overflow. And nobody talks about it. I know all of my neighbors have this problem. But none of us have ever discussed it even once, which I find very, very funny. So that's like a concern with Florida. And like some of the stuff in Miami that seemed is like, odd, like concerning, like some of the water level, like you look at a lot of these videos, we're like, the water level is not this high when I was a kid.

[02:07:29] Chris DeRose: I know that. No, no, no, I'm certain of that. So I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means we need new products like toilet, like super flushers, like a turbocharger you put in your toilet that like pressurizes the outpour into the sewer system, and that fixes your problem. Or if we need to like, put our toilets on a second floor, and everyone needs to like just build a second [unclear: floor] on the toilet room, so that they can climb up the stairs and use the bathroom if that's going to solve the problem.

[02:07:56] Chris DeRose: But these sorts of things are going to be a combination in Florida. So I don't know what insurance is a big problem here. In fact, mortgages are getting weird for a lot of reasons. And if you can't afford to buy a house outright, you can have a real bad time here, in part because of the insurance requirements, which that has less to do with like climate concerns and more to do with legal concerns we understand like the cost of construction are higher, and the cost of litigation is higher, and the juries are sympathetic to claimants.

[02:08:25] Chris DeRose: So that reason we're all losing our insurance. Like, I only have half my properties insured right now because the other ones are just, it's too expensive. And I can just save the money, assume that I won't lose my house in five years, and then I'll end up on top and be able to buy a new place kind of thing. So I did like a 50-50 coverage basically in my places.

[02:08:43] Jay Berg: I'm going to head out a little bit. I'm honored to be part of this reunion.

[02:08:48] Vlad Costea: Wait, wait. Jay, it's your birthday.

[02:08:52] Jay Berg: It is my birthday.

[02:08:53] Vlad Costea: I was saving this for last. It's your birthday. I just wanted everyone to wish you a happy birthday and all the best because I was saving this for last. Maybe we're going to sing happy birthday for you but now what, you want to have your birthday with us, Jay?

[02:09:10] Jay Berg: Listen, it's an honor. It was like, I wish you could bring some of that energy back from what we had back in the day. It was great times and, you know, see you around. Pleasure to be here. Thank you, guys.

[02:09:25] Wayne Vaughan: Bye, Jay. Good seeing you.

[02:09:29] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I would say Florida is situated well politically and otherwise, even if the elements go out to get us here, I think the Floridians are going to figure stuff out, be it two-story bathrooms or otherwise, to deal with it. And I think what's probably going to happen is you're going to see a lot of New Yorkers here, and I've seen that. New York will just kind of like start moving over here, it's already started, and this will become like a finance and or retirement capital of the country.

[02:09:59] Wayne Vaughan: Chris, can you elaborate on like what's happened in Miami the past couple years since COVID? It seemed like a lot of people moved there, a lot of podcasters started making content out of Miami. You know, you're starting to see a lot of that culture being at least exported to the rest of the world, and a lot of people are talking about how Miami changes, but, you know, I've only been there a handful of times since 2020.

[02:10:26] Chris DeRose: So I really mostly hang out outside the country now. Most of my time is spent in Latin America, but I do go through Miami, and what you just said, I totally noticed. The Miami downtown area in particular, the downtown area in particular, seems to have a large influx of people. The financial district has a lot more banks moving in. I think it's just like politically, the climate was better for everybody here, or at least for a lot of people. And they all moved in. You had shutdowns that made it impossible to live in some of these other cities, and Florida was immune to that.

[02:11:03] Chris DeRose: So I don't know what else there's to be said about that exactly. The culture has clearly changed in a number of ways. I'm trying to think of the best way to say this.

[02:11:19] Chris DeRose: I guess I can say we have a lot more Jews here than I remember. We always have a lot of Jews here. So that's one way that the culture has changed. A lot of the Jewish community from New York seems to be coming down here. I noticed that. Communities when I was a kid that were not Jewish are now super Orthodox, very, very Orthodox for sure. I kind of like that. It's just odd to see. I wonder if there aren't a lot more of those New Yorkers coming down.

[02:11:45] Chris DeRose: But in general, I've seen a lot of New Yorkers come, and more of these New Yorkers come in. And the Latins that are here don't seem to impact, for what I can tell. I'm not really with those communities. I've seen more Brazilians come in. Over the years, although they didn't happen in 2020, that's been happening steadily. And sometimes my area on a popular beach area has a Brazilian community. Little Haiti seems to be losing its patience. And I think that's most of it. I do think you have a lot of blue Americans coming into Miami, and the red Americans are leaving.

[02:12:27] Chris DeRose: There's a saying around here, luckily, that if you're on the first floor, you're red, and if you're on the other floor, you're blue. And I do think that's the case in Miami. So you have, as far as I can tell, an interesting political environment where you have these people that are new. They're new to Bitcoin. They're here to fix it. And you have the Latins, which in many cases are like the conservatives in Miami, which is weird, because it's not how you imagine it if you watch TV.

[02:12:53] Chris DeRose: And like Enrique Tarrio or the Proud Boys. He's like, a lot of Latin guys are like that here. I like them. And meanwhile, you know, you have these like yuppie types when you're coming in that are conflicting with those guys a little bit. So I guess that's what I see. That's as much as I've seen. Maybe not the best person to ask because I'm out of the country a lot, but I've seen that.

[02:13:16] Vlad Costea: There's another good question in the chat also from Jack. But this is his last one because he seems like he is monopolizing the conversation. But he's asking for book recommendations.

[02:13:29] Chris DeRose: Oh, well, that's a long, that's the rest of our time here. I don't know what your reading level is. I spend a lot of time, I don't really like talking about what I read. I read a lot of religion and philosophy these days. What are some good books that I could record? Like, one of the most life changing books I've read in recent years was Anti-Oedipus. That was like major. That completely changed my thinking. That was a very, very hard book to read. It took me like six months and I read it with a strategy guide.

[02:14:03] Chris DeRose: And I don't think I understood it. And it also changed my life. I highly recommend that. The music and [unclear: art] are amazing. I think they have a lot of potential there. What else? That's like a very serious book though. You really got to like want that and it'll like challenge your life. Oh, there's another Twitter recently that I could recommend.

[02:14:29] Chris DeRose: The Ivan Ilyin books are a big problem. They're fantastic. That's on the opposite end of Anti-Oedipus. He is a very interesting Orthodox Catholic guy. And I don't like religion. But I got sucked into some of these religion books and he's another one. So like, On Resistance to Evil by Force. The signal to noise ratio is a little low on that one. But it's like a really good book. I think if you want to understand some of like the like title forces around you as like maybe. I don't know if you're into that kind of stuff.

[02:15:04] Chris DeRose: So like, then, like, I would also say, on the computer side of things, I've been really getting into Haskell.

[02:15:15] Vlad Costea: Chris, can you Rejoin the call somehow refresh the page because your video is stuck. And if you're going to show the book, it's probably a good idea to do something to your connection. He's going to be back.

[02:15:29] Chris DeRose: Okay, is my video less stuck?

[02:15:32] Vlad Costea: You have no video right now. I can see it. I can't. It's probably from my side for some reason.

[02:15:40] Chris DeRose: Okay, so Wayne sees me. I say we assume that I'm good and that it's on your end. But you may be broadcasting OBS without me. I don't know if that matters.

[02:15:50] Vlad Costea: Anyway, what's the book about Haskell?

[02:15:56] Chris DeRose: Oh, I mean, if you're a coder, like, I'm willing to Haskell right now. If you're a coder, I don't know if it's useful for anything. I'm still trying to figure that out. The syntax is alluring, and the problems are a little bit different. Like, it's... I want to nerd out. The concept of the monad doesn't really exist in other languages. And it lets you defer a lot of optimization to the compiler that you could never do. So that's been a book that I would recommend if you're a programmer.

[02:16:30] Chris DeRose: I'm trying to think of less... I read esoteric stuff. I'm trying to think of something less esoteric that I've read. I got a good one. Oh, tell me.

[02:16:41] Wayne Vaughan: I repeatedly thought that throughout the history of Bitcoin, watching all these political battles and everybody fighting all the time, that A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell has always been a good book that I come back to. If more people read this book and understood what he was saying, they would spend less time talking past each other.

[02:17:03] Chris DeRose: I've not read that book. I'm aware of that book. That sounds like a great recommendation.

[02:17:08] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah, it's the ideological origins of how people have different visions of the world and political differences. If you know somebody who's conservative or liberal, you can usually predict a bunch of other characteristics about them with a reasonable high degree of accuracy. Why is that? And it comes down to people having different visions, conflicting visions about things as basic as what knowledge is. We actually talked about this earlier in the conversation. Some people look at knowledge as what the really smart elites know. And other people look at knowledge like, what is the location of every bluefin tuna over 80 pounds in the Pacific Ocean?

[02:17:52] Wayne Vaughan: These are different types of information. Some people put a higher value on the location of the bluefin tuna, which has a huge impact on people's commercial viability of a fishing enterprise, their ability to feed a nation. Whereas other people would say that the answer to questions like, what is the meaning of life? Or deep philosophic questions are like a higher level of knowledge. So he goes into these dichotomies across a whole broad set of different subject matters. So it's a good book. And actually there's a YouTube video too, where he was on, oh God, what's that show?

[02:18:37] Wayne Vaughan: Uncommon Knowledge. And he talked about it. So if anybody's interested in that, I thought that was a good book.

[02:18:44] Chris DeRose: The problem I have with a lot of these beautiful libertarian-esque classical economic theory books is that much of it does assume a good faith regulatory environment and a good faith community. And I don't think we have that, nor do I think that's rewarded. Everything you said, I haven't read the book. I don't know what to think about it. I'd like to know something about it. I'd like to read it, actually. It's very practical. That's what I would say. You say it's very practical, but my concern is that you take these practical morals, lessons, themes, and then you go to the fermenting crazies. And it just doesn't help you.

[02:19:33] Wayne Vaughan: But that's the kind of stuff, you know. If you want to pursue truth in the world and build a model in your head of the world as it really is, it's oftentimes important to empathize with other people, understand where they're coming from. And if you can have a better rational basis for where they're coming from, other than they're just fucking crazy and I disagree with them, that's useful. And I found that book and some of the ideas in that book to make me have a better sense of empathy and also recognize why I might feel the way I feel about some things myself, but other people who feel very differently have a perfectly rational and reasonable set of reasons for feeling that way.

[02:20:15] Wayne Vaughan: And it doesn't make my model, my intuition valid and their intuition invalid. It just means that we have a difference. And if you recognize that, oftentimes it's easier to... Communicate, check your worst impulses and maybe come to some reasonable solution that allows you to avoid killing everybody.

[02:20:36] Chris DeRose: Okay, but what if you empathize with them and what they are consumed with is like resentment and vengeance and these sorts of possessions?

[02:20:52] Wayne Vaughan: I can't help you in a practical sense, but I'm just saying from a self-awareness perspective and from just being able to say, oh, hey, I understand why that person might feel this way. That's a tool that I want to have in my tool belt.

[02:21:07] Chris DeRose: I don't want to denigrate your book selections at all. I mostly just want to express that I feel like a lot of the mistakes we've made in various forms of, like, duty and idealism is in assuming that others are like-minded in their pursuit. We could be looking at these mobs of just beyond reform, belligerence, I don't know. Most of that way sometimes.

[02:21:37] Wayne Vaughan: Yeah, there's definitely irreconcilable differences between people.

[02:21:41] Chris DeRose: And I see it myself, honestly. I've got to be honest. There are times, and I'm private, but I get consumed by emotions that are not positive.

[02:21:51] Chris DeRose: And I'm beyond, you're not going to reason with me. Not that I should be that way, but I think that all of us are like that at times. And I think even increasingly so. And in 2020, you weren't talking to me in 2020 because it was just nothing but piss and anger. And I just was consumed with ruminating thoughts of what we have to do about this. And thankfully, nothing happened. But I can imagine others are in similar configuration to many times. And you want to come to them with what's fair, and it's not time for what's fair.

[02:22:26] Chris DeRose: It's not about that anymore. These are people who are stuck between a rock and a hard place. So in that vein, that's how I would justify some of the more esoteric stuff that I've been reading, probably. What do you do when that's your environment? And again, I don't want it to be like, these other books are perfectly commendable. But you have to find a pool of people where they're useful with too. So that's the one. It's a little harder to do.

[02:22:55] Vlad Costea: This whole explanation, Chris, reminds me of your episode with Saifedean where you basically pushed him. And he was speaking very ideologically, very textbook, libertarian arguments. And you're pointing out to him that reality does not necessarily reflect what he believes in. And you basically pushed him to the point that he insulted you. And that was the end of the episode. I thought it was a masterclass in debate. I wish we had more of that.

[02:23:24] Chris DeRose: Well, thank you. I don't know. I look at some of these episodes a little differently. That was a time for antagonism. And I enjoy watching that kind of stuff too. But I don't know that we have those opportunities as much anymore. I would assume he doesn't do interviews that aren't part of his already approved circle at this point. I don't know.

[02:23:48] Vlad Costea: No, right now he has his own platform and he doesn't do interviews outside of it. He's like, why would I boost somebody else's platform? Because I'm so big people want to join my show instead. OK, so there you go.

[02:24:00] Vlad Costea: Anyway, you have some comments from BTC Moon Guy, who says he was a big fan of Bitcoin Uncensored. And he's grateful for this chat. And there's also Icross007 or 007. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. He says, always excellent. Thank you. There's also Pete Rizzo on Twitter. And he says, is this Christmas? Well, I told him that this is half Christmas because it's the 25th of June. So it's six months away from Christmas. So it's almost Christmas. Theo Goodman. OK, go ahead.

[02:24:45] Chris DeRose: No, I was asked to write a piece by CoinDesk on multiple occasions and in recent years. And I like writing, so I took at least one of those opportunities to write something and then they rejected it. And it seemingly wasn't an unappreciated piece and was just too tangential to the focus of Coin Post. I was going, whatever, the periodical. And yes, I don't know where that was going, but I wasn't sure if Pete was part of that decision. If he was, I wouldn't blame him if he rejected the piece.

[02:25:18] Chris DeRose: But I was doing more creative writing than anything else. And it was crypto themed, but I didn't want to be a creative writing outlet. I get that. That's what I was offered.

[02:25:32] Vlad Costea: I had Pete Rizzo on the show about two months ago, and he spoke very highly of you and said that you're always ahead of your time. And at the peak of your rage quit moment, you basically called Bitcoiners communists. And I don't think you are too far off with that comment.

[02:25:50] Chris DeRose: Yeah, that's what's going to happen. I maintain a lot of these Bitcoiners should become communists. I fully see that, if not already. We can get into why. Well, that was very nice of him to say, so thank you, Pete.

[02:26:04] Vlad Costea: Theo Goodman. Hi, Theo. He says, is the current Bitcoin maximalism an affinity scam? That's a great question.

[02:26:19] Chris DeRose: Yeah, probably is. Yeah. I mean, what happens when the group, I don't know, this is such a problem. But this is like the turn to the eye. The out group becomes the in group, and now you can appear prestigious while offering concessions to the in group that prides itself on being an out. It just gets complicated, so I'm going to say yes. I'm going to say yes. It is probably an affinity scam. Richard Heart is a great example of that. Richard Heart basically did that. You know what?

[02:26:54] Chris DeRose: That's I think what I would say. Richard Heart probably, that was like his core, like innovative, like advancement. And not the only one, but that was like at the center of it. He was going to be the affinity scam for the people who are resistant to affinity scams, I guess.

[02:27:11] Wayne Vaughan: Hey, gentlemen, I got to drop, but Chris, it's fantastic to see you again.

[02:27:17] Chris DeRose: Wayne, it's great to see you. I apologize for not seeing you more. I'm not the best friend. I've just been like a hermit. I will come out of hiding at some point, maybe, and have something to tell us. But until then, I don't know. I'm a very boring person these days. Yeah.

[02:27:30] Wayne Vaughan: You make it back to the States. We'll definitely, you know, get together. I'd love to have you in Austin. And, Vlad, thank you for setting us up. I really appreciate it. Nice trip down there. All right. Take care, gentlemen.

[02:27:42] Vlad Costea: Bye, Wayne. Yeah, it's the way it was supposed to be in the beginning, but I got sidetracked and I thought it was too nice of an opportunity to not do this because these people are very passionate about expressing their super fandom for Bitcoin Uncensored and they appreciate your work and they're fans of yours. And I said to myself, you know, I shouldn't be selfish. I should allow them to get this. Because if I was selfish, I would just tell them, oh, you can ask them questions. I could even charge them for it and be like, oh, you get priority with your question if you pay me a hundred bucks.

[02:28:21] Vlad Costea: But I didn't do it. I said, OK, you guys can come in. There is Finit Maz on Twitter and he wants to know if Ethereum is still a fraud that proved its smart contracts are at the court of some Russian kid.

[02:28:34] Chris DeRose: Ethereum seems to me to be the exact same thing. You get kicked out of the room unless you affirm some basic things, then once you affirm those basic things, you will be held in like a steam. And, you know, there's so many scams out there now. It's like it's definitely a meaningless word. Just kind of got weird. I don't know what to say.

[02:28:55] Vlad Costea: Now, Chris, when Wayne left, I accidentally muted you on the screen. So you have to summarize your points about Ethereum once again.

[02:29:07] Chris DeRose: OK. OK. I don't know. Yes. Ethereum is a scam. It looks otherwise. It appears to be like a dot com replay, but it is nearly in appearance. The matter is not there. It's a [unclear: serial locker]. That being said, almost everything is turning into a scam anyway. So who cares? Yes, it's a scam. And who cares? Maybe that's the way to answer it.

[02:29:37] Vlad Costea: There's the Pukop psychopathic Bitcoin, whatever this is. He says, admit it. We should have all bought the shit coins. Logic, reason and morality is for peasants.

[02:29:52] Chris DeRose: Well, you say that now. So, yes. Now it's for peasants. Yes. Yes. But there will come a day, if history bears out, where that is not the case. So there's a time window. We are selling our future for the present is what's going on. And so while you're announcing this for the peasants, and I can see it, I probably even agree with that isn't ultimately what's going to happen. What's probably going to happen is that the whole thing gets called off and a bunch of people are left holding the bag, unfortunately.

[02:30:31] Chris DeRose: Or if it doesn't, that's also fine. But then what's going to probably happen is like. It's just what happened in Albania, which is also not really great. That being said, like from a financial perspective, indexing did great. Like what Shrimpy does I think is a fantastic product. None of you are going to like talk about it, but that's really in my estimation probably your best bet was. And last I checked, it was a better performance than Bitcoin, but only against strategy for reasons that are kind of obvious.

[02:31:02] Vlad Costea: Okay, there's also Kanix who says, tell him Chris DeRose's rabbit wants to know why the actual fuck he didn't choose a truly controversial podcast instead of the sorry ass excuse you produce. Gotta be someone with a brain to make it interesting. You suck. I like him.

[02:31:28] Chris DeRose: I really didn't want to be at any podcast. Honestly, Vlad, you called me at a good time. Before this started, I called Vlad. My answer is just no to everything. I get semi-regular invitations. I'm very appreciative of the people who think of me and I am uninterested. This is all cost for me. Like not even in terms of time, but also just like reputationally and otherwise. All I can do is go down the best I can tell. I'm not going to like go on a show and like walk away from here and have like somebody in my life tell me they watched this and they were really happy and impressed.

[02:32:02] Chris DeRose: That doesn't happen anymore for a lot of reasons. Mostly because of the people I hang out with. Likewise, like there's like some memory that many of you guys have of me and for better or worse, that's there. And anything that I add to it's probably not going to be like better. So like it's all negative, but to your credit, Vlad, you were persistent and I like you because you're a nice person. And I can tell you're a positive, intense-minded person. So yeah, I mean, I'm not looking for like greater exposure.

[02:32:31] Chris DeRose: In fact, I'm not even sure that I feel like I did the right thing here, but that's okay. Also, I got to go fuck off and I like it.

[02:32:39] Vlad Costea: Also, I've been chasing you for months, if not longer. Yeah, exactly.

[02:32:43] Chris DeRose: Good for you. The lesson I think is to be persistent. Thank you. [unclear: This is about Junseth.] It's interesting that Junseth's circle is different than my circle. I haven't talked to him since the end of the show. There's very little dialogue between us and I'm fine with that. I'm okay with that. But it's interesting to see that the kind of places, maybe even watching his interviews, where people send me stuff and I just kind of like notice, like I'm pretty sure that the people invite me on their shows and then there's people like you who, for whatever reason, didn't get along with Junseth and had me on their show.

[02:33:20] Chris DeRose: So it's just funny to me. It's just odd. I don't know what that says. It's kind of funny.

[02:33:27] Vlad Costea: It's definitely strange, if you ask me. So the Pukop psychopathic Bitcoiner wants to know what the fuck happened to black market money. Now I got presidents pumping my bags.

[02:33:39] Chris DeRose: Great question. I wanted the black. The darknet markets have some interesting developments. I don't know how much I want to get into, but like the HR departments are very interesting. That's a whole new thing that I can tell on the darknet. And they're not, from what I can tell, they're not using crypto as much. And when they do use crypto, Monero and Bitcoin are the two that I've seen. And Ethereum. I've seen Ethereum. But Monero I think is interesting given the size of the market cap. And I believe that there are some traditional payment processors that are being used now.

[02:34:18] Chris DeRose: Like just regular dollars going through some sort of intermediary. So I don't know what's up with that. But I don't think the darknet markets are as full on crypto as they were.

[02:34:29] Vlad Costea: There's EarlyNFT.bit who says, I have wondered if Chris ever felt somewhat responsible for having given Richard Heart the foothold he needed to launch his series of scams. Richard was an excellent guest on the show, so no blame should be assigned. But I imagine it's got to hurt to see what became of it all. That's a great question.

[02:34:53] Chris DeRose: At the time, I definitely felt responsible. And I felt responsible for a few reasons. And I tried to air his dirty laundry as a kind of apology. So now I don't feel responsible anymore because enough time has gone past and he's succeeded. You know, I meant some on his own. So, yeah.

[02:35:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Honestly, we did speak about Richard Heart earlier, and I didn't get into this point because the other guys had something to add. And I feel strange when I monopolize the conversation. But if I'm not mistaken, he is part of a cult, which is trying to create eternal life or something like that. They regard aging as a disease, and they're trying to get as much money to fund development so that they can live forever. And they think that if they are able to raise a lot of money and donate to research, they're going to be part of this privileged club that's going to live forever.

[02:35:52] Vlad Costea: I'm pretty sure that Vitalik is also part of that club. But where I'm hitting with this is that I think all of this scam and all of the fact that he was buying material things was just part of perpetuating his scam and attracting the kind of audience that he already had, which was very greedy and was very basic in its ways of relating to wealth. And he was doing all of this meta scammer play while actually I guess he had different reasons. I'm pretty sure that he donated a lot of money to that cause.

[02:36:28] Vlad Costea: And I'm pretty sure that he believes he's going to live forever. He's crazy enough to believe in this.

[02:36:37] Chris DeRose: I know that he's part of that cult. It is a cult. I've known others in that cult. That cult never interested me. I don't know why. Because some people were just lost to a flame, and then I was just like, I don't get it. A, I don't want to live forever. B, you're not going to be [unclear: successful]. That was my impression. So I don't know. If he gave somebody to charity of any kind, that's encouraging. I don't know. That would be nice to think of.

[02:37:07] Chris DeRose: Because my diagnosis of him, he just spent everything on his own personal material gain. And he's very transparent about those expenses. So maybe that's a good thing. Maybe somebody went to this nonprofit and they were actually a nonprofit and something good came out of it. I don't know. They're probably a fake nonprofit. And he just got friendship out of them. I don't know.

[02:37:33] Vlad Costea: M .A. Caselli says, Do you still believe in the efficient market hypothesis? Follow up question if yes, explain how it holds true in the case of Luna. Luna, if you're not aware, was the Ponzi scheme that crashed in the previous market cycle.

[02:37:50] Chris DeRose: Okay, so yeah, the EMH, I'm in. All I really do, we were talking before the show, the only investments I really have right now are just money and S&P 500. I buy some physical gold. I still have crypto. I've got everything. There's nothing that really speaks to me. I'm not buying real estate either.

[02:38:12] Chris DeRose: And that being said, one thing about the EMH that I don't know that we've harped on enough, that we probably should have, is that EMH is within the boundaries of your regulations. So if your regulation environment is retarded, like you've got to have like, you know, transgender midgets, you know, there's 50% of your board membership, the market will do that. And it will efficiently produce, you know, whatever your product is, given that encumbrance that the market has been forced to endure. So I think that because of those sort of perverse political and regulatory environments, we get what appear to be very inefficient results.

[02:38:50] Chris DeRose: But I would ascribe the inefficiency to the regulatory orders and not to the investment paradigm itself. As far as Luna goes, I don't know all the details. Knowing very little about it, all I can tell you is that it may be that the market depth is very shallow. There was very little liquidity. I don't know if that's true, but that would be my go-to guess, given the fact that it's Luna. And they probably made a lot of noise, and they probably had a lot of fake wash trade type stuff going on if I had to guess.

[02:39:21] Chris DeRose: And I don't doubt there was a lot of money involved also, but it may just not be amongst many people. It could have been a very, you know, like early Bitcoin was only, like Roger Ver had all the Bitcoin, and you had four other people. And your market was like, you know, like 1%, less than 1%, like 100 people owned 99% of the inventory. And maybe that's what happened with Luna. I don't know. That's just a guess. I have no idea though. Sorry. So I can't help you on that one.

[02:39:48] Vlad Costea: Wayne, before he joined the interview, he put this question out there, and I guess it's a good one. And I should read it, even though he had his time to ask stuff. He wants to know, what's life like after Bitcoin?

[02:40:02] Chris DeRose: Yeah, great question. So for myself and my friends that I've seen, a lot of people lived a fast life, like Richard Heart kind of guys. And many of them died. Not all of them, but like a non-trivial amount. I had a number of friends in the space that just died. They just died of their excesses and their ordinances. That was one unfortunate after Bitcoin experience for a lot of people. Even a lot, but yeah, more than a few. In myself, I have found a lot of change.

[02:40:39] Chris DeRose: You all don't know me now the way that most people know me, and on the one hand, I'm exactly the same. On the other hand, I'm completely different. One way in which I'm completely different, I touched on this here, is I don't care about money that much anymore. I do in the sense that I've written an accounting package. I manage my investments. That is my job, basically, is to manage our money. But I don't in the sense that I no longer find the question of what is money as interesting as I once did.

[02:41:12] Chris DeRose: That being said, I've got a friend who just bought a new Porsche. It's a very nice Porsche, some fancy model. I was very polite with him about it. It's a nice car, no doubt. I was just performing the act of kindness. I couldn't care less. About it, for a few reasons. Not least of which is I'm not into that kind of stuff anymore. I don't like possessions. I found myself having lost a lot of my faith, really, I guess. The process of consumption and materialism in general.

[02:41:56] Chris DeRose: This is me. There's been a lot of boredom. There was a time when I was just wandering beaches. Around Latin America. I still have to do that, actually. Things change. Just people watching, reading a lot. I get sucked into books. I found myself a bit of an alien, frankly. I feel like an alien in many ways. Not in a bad way. Like, just the sort of provincial concerns are no longer part of my life. That is not a situation most people have. Another thing I've seen in myself. I'm so boring now.

[02:42:50] Chris DeRose: I find that I'm a more content person by not indulging. By trying to remove the indulgences in various forms. My eating is very bland. I stay away from anything that's rich. I try not to eat food that's good. I'm not making a case here. I don't like eating at fancy restaurants. I don't like eating food that tastes good. In fact, I have a theory that the reason most people are fat is because they enjoy eating. I try not to enjoy eating. I'm happier that way, I believe. But these are all fairly significant changes.

[02:43:31] Chris DeRose: Not that I was ever like a big eater or something. I think in general, the aesthetics are... I no longer have faith in the aesthetics. That would be the summary. That's what I'm trying to say. I've lost my faith in the aesthetics. I don't believe them anymore. That causes a lot of problems for me in my life that are fine problems, but that alienate me with the people around me. I would define aesthetics as the feelings of the immediate. Not just the way that things appear, but how they make you feel.

[02:44:00] Chris DeRose: I just trust those feelings. And I try not to have them. I don't know what to tell you. That's what happened to me.

[02:44:09] Vlad Costea: This is the Eastern European in me speaking right now, but you sound like the wealthy westerner who went to India for a month and then came back and can no longer relate.

[02:44:20] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Talk to that guy. I don't like that guy. Oh yeah, I do sound like that guy.

[02:44:26] Vlad Costea: You're a lot more educated and well-read than that guy. But at the same time, there are some similarities and you have to admit it. I see that.

[02:44:35] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I do.

[02:44:36] Vlad Costea: Like rejecting materialism and saying that you're not happy eating good stuff, like you're not even taking good care of yourself. Maybe.

[02:44:46] Chris DeRose: I mean, my body fat is low. I work out a lot. I don't know that I would say that I'm not taking care of myself. I think I'm indulging in the things that make me feel good. I've lost faith in that. Every time I do that, almost every time I should say, I end up, if you eat rich foods, if you eat processed foods, you're going to get hungry. And that metaphor exists for a lot of the things we do. Like the guy that bought the Porsche, he's going to get hungry for another car, another year.

[02:45:18] Chris DeRose: Like I'm not hungry for a Porsche now. I don't want to be. And what's going to happen to him is he's going to buy his Porsche and he's going to want like a super Porsche by this time next year. Like, you know, satiated the hunger, only to have it come back and then some. So that's, yeah, that's probably some like hippie Indian idea, but it's, it's evident. Like you can just see it in yourself. You're being honest. Like most of you, probably.

[02:45:45] Vlad Costea: Now I was going to ask you reject the Porsche, but what about the Supra? Are you aware of the Supra cycle? I think I sent you the image.

[02:45:54] Chris DeRose: I don't think, I know the Toyota Supra, which had it's like re-release. Is it related to that Supra or?

[02:46:01] Vlad Costea: It's basically a Pun, you know, because there was this super cycle, which was this meme, which was propagated like four years ago. And they were saying, oh, we're going to go up and never go down. That was the thesis of this. I think I sent it to you by email. Let me put it on the screen.

[02:46:20] Chris DeRose: Yeah, you should see it. Let's see it.

[02:46:23] Vlad Costea: So basically I created my own price thesis, which says in the supercycle, what I did was to draw a line on the chart, you know, I just drew a line. And it played out so much better than anything else that's mathematical and financial and tries to justify itself with some very esoteric science. I just drew a line and it turned out to be more accurate. And the thesis of this is that you're gonna wait until you get to a certain price point where you're comfortable. And then you buy a Toyota Supra because it's the Supra cycle.

[02:47:00] Vlad Costea: And then you get a girlfriend. And that's the whole idea of it. It's aspirational. It's not about sitting on your ass in your mom's basement and saying, I'm going to hold on to this because it's generational wealth. I'm going to be the next George Soros or whatever. It's just about enjoying life. It's just about getting a girlfriend. Just do something with your life. Have a nice car. Get a girlfriend. Enjoy life. You know, it's not necessarily hedonistic. It's just aspirational and inspirational. It's just trying to do something that's so basic yet so alienated from your existence.

[02:47:39] Chris DeRose: I don't want to criticize anybody. If that's what they do, go for it. I don't know. I thought to myself that some of these things would leave us wanting.

[02:47:48] Vlad Costea: So you think you're going to want another girlfriend or another Supra?

[02:47:55] Chris DeRose: I don't know. I don't really want it. All I want is one time. And all I seem to do with the time is work out and read, because really, I'm very unimpressive. I'm like a house cat almost. Like a traveling house cat. There's really nothing that exciting that I do anymore. I've seen on some of these digital nomad groups, there's a kind of burnout from digital nomadism that sounds like what I've got. When I was younger, I would go and do more things like go check out the rainforest maybe or do the whitewater raft thing.

[02:48:29] Chris DeRose: Now I just kind of show up and walk around and people watch. I want to have kids. I would like to have kids. I was going to buy some and do like gestational surrogacy.

[02:48:40] Vlad Costea: What do you mean buy some?

[02:48:42] Chris DeRose: Yeah, you can do that. You go to Florida. There's a store. They collect your juice in a cup. And then you find it with their profiles. And I've looked into this a lot. You find a woman who will donate her egg. And they'll put the egg, like an immigrant usually, like a Mexican immigrant.

[02:48:58] Chris DeRose: And then nine months later, it pops out of her and you get the baby and you're all good. So I kind of, I may still do that. I don't know. But I was kind of guilty about it. I thought about it a lot.

[02:49:08] Vlad Costea: Isn't that called having a surrogate mother? Yeah, yeah. But that's not buying kids. It's just inseminating someone that you pay without actual sex, which is boring. You need a Supra, Chris, and then a girlfriend.

[02:49:30] Chris DeRose: Okay, I can get a Supra. I could buy one today if I really wanted to.

[02:49:35] Vlad Costea: I'm pretty sure there's someone listening right now who would buy you a Supra if they had the chance.

[02:49:42] Chris DeRose: Give me a charity. I don't need you to buy me no car. I don't deserve that. But thank you for whoever that person was.

[02:49:48] Vlad Costea: Anyway, I have more questions in the chat. There's Johan Mullet. Johan, I'm not sure. He says, what does Chris think about the future of hygienic models for Bitcoin? How does he feel about layer 2 hygiene? Is hygiene scalable?

[02:50:08] Chris DeRose: I think, unironically, I think hygiene is an excellent trope, if not a thesis. Anytime you're dealing with, like, if you're going to start your own cult or religious group, any matter of purity or hygiene is going to help you appeal to the senses that you're going to need to appeal to in order to track the types of zeal that you want. So yeah, I think hygiene is an excellent... Moniker and I think that's a positive direction. I encourage it. Okay. You know, as I'm thinking here, to revisit like some of my attitudes too on like the materialism, you know, as a traveler, you see, I don't want to be this guy, I don't want to harp on it too much, but you see poverty a little differently.

[02:50:59] Chris DeRose: And I think having ventured outside the tourist areas, it made it harder for me to enjoy a lot of the luxuries.

[02:51:08] Vlad Costea: Also, but I can relate to that. For me, growing up in Romania and still living here means that I deal with poor people every day. So everything that's, for example, people tell me, oh, Vlad, you should move to Dubai. And I'm like, why? Why would I want to be in that shallow society where everyone measures their success according to how much money they make? And they have this fake luxury where that's all they have. They don't have anything else. They don't have a culture. They can't relate to each other in other ways, except for, the money that they're making.

[02:51:40] Vlad Costea: For me, that's boring. There is nothing to it. Oh, you don't get taxed? Okay, fine.

[02:51:50] Chris DeRose: I would buy it like a super today. I'm going to think immediately of a handful of places in Colombia where the kids are not given what they need. And then I'm going to feel immensely guilty about having spent money on an indulgence of that kind. And I'm not proud of that. I'm not especially not proud to be, like, telling others that. But you ask about life post-Bitcoin? Like, these are the types of things that are haunting at times. It's going to happen.

[02:52:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but at the same time, I guess you're trying to deny the privilege of having had access to better education and infrastructure and information at a point in your life. And that's what led you to buy Bitcoin.

[02:52:40] Chris DeRose: I can justify my success in many, many ways. However, I'm telling you that I look at the kids in my head and they don't go away. Just saying. Like, I'm not saying I don't want it to be like...

[02:52:53] Vlad Costea: Maybe you should adopt them, Chris.

[02:52:56] Chris DeRose: I think about those types of things. I do. I think about that. And my mother taught me to do that. And I don't want to do that. And I don't feel good about that.

[02:53:04] Vlad Costea: You want to have your own.

[02:53:06] Chris DeRose: I have a lot of guilt. I don't, I don't, I don't have a lot of guilt. I don't know what to say. I am, like, consumed with guilt often. Not for anything relating to Bitcoin Uncensored. Just, like, reading and feeling like a monster. Like, that is maybe not a happy subject matter. Because you're all no different, you fuckers. But, you know, that's what happens. You spend a lot of time reading and [unclear: things] change. That's what happens.

[02:53:35] Vlad Costea: No, but my point is that if you grew up in one of these places that you think right now deserve help and you feel sorry for them, you would not pass on the opportunity to get a free Supra. That's what I'm saying. Because those people never had the opportunity and you have it. And you're in a position where you can deny this privilege, but they would never say no to it. So you're trying to relate to them, but at the same time you're acting in ways that they would never act.

[02:54:07] Chris DeRose: If I got a free Supra out of this, someone tomorrow showed up with one, I would feel compelled to sell it and give it a cherry. That's probably what would happen. I would drive it around for, like, a day or two. Take some pictures. Send me the pictures. They're cool cars. They're very cool cars.

[02:54:24] Vlad Costea: OK. There's David Freeman, or Freeman? I'm not sure. In the chat he says, what does he think of the current state of Bitcoin development generally and also Bitcoin core development specifically? This is broad.

[02:54:36] Chris DeRose: Oh, no, I mean, here's the thing. I've felt this way for a while. I've communicated this as much. We have a lot of impossible goals in the development. And as a result, it seems to me that we have effectively created a governance model that can't call itself a governance model, that is 100% a matter of human agency, which is opaque to us as users. As such, I resent a lot of the process. I think there will be far better, I hate to hit that word, but far more egalitarian ways of achieving the same results.

[02:55:19] Chris DeRose: And it's a disappointment to me that we don't. In the matter of competency, I think we have a lot of very competent people, certainly technically. And I think the goals are laudable. However, I think that, again, the means by which we make decisions is frustrating at the very least, but also probably not sustainable. The reason it's not sustainable is because the entirety of the matter is predicated on the ticker symbol, which we can get into. But the unspoken authority over the ticker, BTC, is the one who owns Bitcoin.

[02:55:59] Chris DeRose: That's an abstraction and a bit hyperbolic, but that's kind of what we've ended up with. And it's a lot of opacity between that ticker symbol and how things get done. You may not believe that, but we can talk about it if you want.

[02:56:16] Vlad Costea: Well, I came to this conclusion that right now development is no longer ideological in any way, or pragmatic, or practical, or relying on technological merits. It's all about to which extent is this going to upset the guys who are pumping our bags. And I think you are very much ahead of your time with the morality of number go up. You are presenting this idea that the only morality in this space is whether or not it makes the number go up. I think we degenerated to that point. Yeah, yeah.

[02:56:52] Chris DeRose: Well, it's not just a Bitcoin phenomenon. In general, all of our leaders, as best I can tell, in all of the Western space, believe what they believe as a matter of avoiding outrage or in response to outrage. And so some of that is technical, in the sense that the internet created these incentives. Some of that is our own bankruptcy as a culture.

[02:57:22] Chris DeRose: The whole morality thing kind of snuck up on me because I made it very clear to everybody at multiple times during the show, I'm not a moral person, I don't believe in morals, etc. And then I got really bitten by that at the time, to the credit of everybody who told me as much. I can't tell. I don't want to call their names out, but they were 100% correct.

[02:57:45] Chris DeRose: And all of us probably shared a lot of that. A lot of us came in, like the person who said earlier, like peasants, the ones who are in it for any cause are a peasant. That is the mentality that will get you burned ultimately. Not in the short term, but ultimately.

[02:58:06] Chris DeRose: But with the Bitcoin development, unfortunately, I think all Bitcoiners are a combination of stupid or intentionally lying and misrepresenting what it is that this space is about. In part because of how the development's done. And that's set. Roger Ver was knocking on that door and aware of that problem very fully at an early time. And I think a lot of the reason people hate him is because he disclosed these ideas.

[02:58:38] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I can relate to that. And also, I know back in 2018 you were talking a lot about Blockstream's influence in the space. And also came to the conclusion that the company, which I perceived as being this Bitcoin development company that was hiring developers to build stuff, is actually a political company that's meant to exert influence. They're pushing an agenda to a greater extent than they're actually developing stuff. None of the stuff that they actually built is successful. It's not a profitable company by any metric. Liquid never went anywhere.

[02:59:17] Vlad Costea: Their lightning network implementation has always been a niche project that nobody really took seriously for building stuff. They tried mining. They tried their satellite business. They're into hardware wallets. They're selling hats. But I think selling hats is actually something that carries a stronger political message and something that is distributed at conferences or whatever. And actually keeps people in check. And whenever Adam Back joins the bid on Twitter, he's like the guy who presents the ultimate argument. Nobody's going to want to disagree with him. And that's the end of it.

[02:59:54] Vlad Costea: What's interesting is that on one hand you have the CEO of Blockstream, Adam Back, encouraging stuff. And he goes on conference stages saying, you know, maybe that increasing the block size is something that we're going to do ultimately as the wounds of the civil war are going to heal. And maybe that Paul Sztorc's drivechains were a greater priority than Taproot, which was something that was built by people from his company. But his views as the CEO are more like the views of the ambassador of Bitcoin or something, saying everything that's nice, promoting every product, saying that it's great.

[03:00:29] Vlad Costea: But then you have to deal with the actual people of Blockstream who are discouraging stuff from happening. And they have this very, so I got kicked out. It feels in some ways, and I know that the metaphors relating to The Matrix are stereotypical, but it's like that scene when Neo gets rejected by The Matrix and he wakes up and realizes that everyone is in a pod, you know? It was very strange because I saw myself spending years of my life trying to please some people and trying to not step out of line.

[03:01:03] Vlad Costea: And then I did one interview and they were so angry at me and so mad that they started spreading rumors about me, getting paid by Roger for the interview, joining Bitcoin Cash and stuff like that. And of course, the Bitcoin Cash people were in my DMs all the time saying, hey, join us. Look, I can send you free Bitcoin. I can do this. What I actually did was I posted a tweet publicly and I said, you know, OK, I'll accept Bitcoin Cash. This is my address. You can send me your funds here.

[03:01:32] Vlad Costea: I got them to send me about $1,000 of BCH, but that was actually the address of Ross Ulbricht. Basically, I raised funds without their knowledge for a good cause. And I showed to people, you know, I also tried to make it more nihilistic in my discourse and say, you know, ultimately, it's just software. Why are we so offended about running software on our computers and our phones when the goal is actually to stay free, you know, or to be cypherpunk, whatever that means? And they don't like it. It doesn't pump their bags. They like narratives.

[03:02:10] Chris DeRose: That's not their goal. They like the narratives that they perceive as being a way to pump their bags. I mean, you know, you see, I'm going to add to that. You get it. Unfortunately, I think I don't want to watch. I love that you're doing what you're doing. But unfortunately, I think what you're going to find is that the size of your audience is going to suffer as a result of your, I mean, seeking truth basically is going to reduce the size of your audience, unfortunately.

[03:02:46] Vlad Costea: No, but that's very good. So I guess in your era, this was detrimental. In your era, maybe that this was suicide to pursue this path. But I came to the conclusion that when you compare shows and podcasts, it's like looking at restaurants and you're going to have the show that's like McDonald's and gives everyone what they want and everyone seems happy, but it's ultimately junk. And then you're going to have this fine dining restaurant that takes subjects and really puts customers and takes them for a journey and makes them experience something different every time.

[03:03:24] Vlad Costea: And there is a lot of value in that. Of course, McDonald's can have 10,000 customers in a day and deliver everything to everyone's home because they like that. But you're going to have this restaurant which maybe has 10 people who are eating there every day, but after they eat there, their perception of what food is going to get changed. And this is also the way in which I pitch my podcast to sponsors. I tell them it's not about how many people listen. It's about who's listening and who's sending me feedback about it.

[03:03:53] Vlad Costea: And I tell them, you know, the CEO of this company is listening. There is David Bailey, who's in my DMs, telling me I did a good job sometimes. It's incredible. So I'm appealing to this audience of people who actually can make a change and make a difference. Because ultimately, if you look at any revolution in the history, and right now I'm just rubbing my shoulders or stroking my ego or whatever. But in the history of mankind, you go, you look at the French Revolution, the American Revolution, 1848 revolutions in Europe, anything, it was not something that came from the masses.

[03:04:27] Vlad Costea: The masses were very much complacent and in line with the system. It was just a bunch of elites that got themselves educated on the means to start this revolution. And it was a handful of people in a room that they got together, they wrote some pamphlets and some declarations, and then they pursued them. So it was never about the masses. It's all about the people who are smart enough, educated enough, and motivated enough to make the change. And I believe that this show is contributing to a very small extent, but significant yet, to people learning some new stuff and escaping that mindset of a cult.

[03:05:10] Vlad Costea: And thinking of different ways in which they can contribute to something which is much greater than a piece of software.

[03:05:20] Chris DeRose: That sounds great. That's a beautiful attitude. Please keep it. I would only add to that that we had somebody earlier in the channel call you in some bad name, I don't know. You're going to be reviled if you continue with this beautiful attitude. And you should continue.

[03:05:40] Vlad Costea: But I enjoy it. I read that message specifically. That guy is in my mentions all the time and he insults me and he calls me names, he calls me a gypsy or whatever, which he knows is an insult for Romanians because whatever. It's long history. Yeah. He tries to get my attention, but I don't give it to him. And I know that there are a lot of people like that. Why would I waste my time? I know what they're trying to do, okay? I gave him this. I read his message on the show.

[03:06:11] Chris DeRose: That's his function. That's the function that he serves in this system, is to be a schmuck to anybody who is saying something that he perceives as being detrimental to the group interest and number. I mean, that's what they're there for.

[03:06:24] Vlad Costea: But it's much nastier. I had Giacomo Zucco. I'm not sure how much you're aware of his work.

[03:06:29] Chris DeRose: Yeah. I mean, not lately, but over time in the past, certainly.

[03:06:34] Vlad Costea: He bullied me to the extent that he created a page called Vlad's dog and claimed that I fucked my own dog. And that was my dog tweeting. And I thought on one hand, it's so stupid. On the other hand, it reached to some people and some people whom I considered my friends and whom I've been trying to please follow that page and were making fun of the memes. And I was thinking, this is how far they can go, because they have nothing on me, really. They have nothing to say about me. Unlike Giacomo, I didn't take money from shitcoin investors or whatever to start projects. This is validating.

[03:07:12] Chris DeRose: He could have done that to anybody, but he chose the number one problem to address, which in his mind was you. You went to the top. I got to say, one of the reasons why I got out of the space is that I did that to people. People did that to me. Eventually, I said to myself, you know what? Why am I spending my time doing this? There's a few other points to it, but just make sure you're getting enough out of this process to where those negatives aren't distracting.

[03:07:46] Chris DeRose: And they're truly validating. That's the other side of it. Here's the thing. What do you do when you're surrounded by morons? There may be a point where you look around the room and you're like, you know what? These are like sludge monsters. Every single one of them, or like 90% of them. And then, now what do you do? I don't have a solution to that problem. But you may find that that's what you're up against at some point. You may already be there.

[03:08:17] Vlad Costea: No. I mean, my point right now is that I'm very much aware that this is happening and this is what's going to happen to me. They have nothing to say, you know, so they're going to make up just like they make these sexual scandals or whatever. They're going to find something and they're going to present these stories. What they said about me that I took money from Roger for that interview was insane. At one point I even said, you know, I can actually prove to you. I can get Roger's statement.

[03:08:47] Vlad Costea: I can show my – I don't want to do that, but I can actually show my Bitcoin wallets or bank statements or whatever. I never received anything from that guy. There was no communication about payment. I've been chasing him for like six months to get an interview. And then he finally accepted. And when he accepted, it got big. And it's beyond my control which interview gets big. For some reason, this one only has 600 views on livestream right now. But the one with Roger had like two or three thousand while we were talking.

[03:09:17] Chris DeRose: People love to – yeah, people love to hate him probably. And then you didn't give him that pleasure.

[03:09:25] Chris DeRose: Unfortunately, the bigger cost in all of this is that you end up operating in a bad faith environment. Like The net effect on this entire space is that the waters become polluted by everyone's correct assumptions that truth-telling is not going to be in their benefit, which is one of the reasons why we had a lot of problems like we talked about in the space where you have people like the elites who say the right thing that people want to hear because they're swimming in bad faith waters.

[03:09:53] Chris DeRose: They may know that what they're saying is a lie, but they also know that if they don't say the lie, [unclear: the micro people]. So that's kind of what you're looking at in a lot of ways in the space is the result of that force that creates bad faith incentives for everybody, fortunately.

[03:10:11] Vlad Costea: Sometimes I'm super jealous.

[03:10:13] Chris DeRose: Everybody who's watching this, why are you jealous?

[03:10:16] Vlad Costea: Go ahead and I'm going to tell you.

[03:10:19] Chris DeRose: No, everybody who's watching this, who's like assuming – like I'm going to say like 90% of you are probably like decent people and you're not going to put the time into, you know, spending all day on Twitter. Totally reasonable. But because of that action, the other 10% is going to tell you guys what you do with your time. Ultimately, over time, this is how, you know, the critical mass is often only 10%. Because all you need is, like, a certain number of people to be active.

[03:10:49] Chris DeRose: Oftentimes, the easiest way to get those people is through, like, stoking the craziest conspiracies and nonsense and lies. And then the tyranny of that 10% ends up controlling the other 90%. So if you're watching this, that's what—like, just so you know, I'm not telling you to change. There's no reason you can't even. But, like, you are effectively choosing that environment to live in. You're okay with it. You're okay with it. But that's, you know, that's that.

[03:11:17] Vlad Costea: I'm done complaining, but I'm jealous sometimes when I think about you because I realize that you are older and you're in the right place at the right time when this was happening. And I was just a stupid student from Romania who discovered Bitcoin and thought it was a bad idea. And I realized that you did everything before I ever could. And whatever I do is just a remix or a different presentation of the same material. And I feel jealous. But at the same time, people tell me that I'm ahead of my time. So I don't know what to make of that.

[03:11:53] Chris DeRose: I would—thank you, that's a very flattering thing to say. What I would tell you is, A, I was emulating somebody else. I don't know who, but I'm sure somebody. I could probably come up with examples here and there. There's an amalgamate of inspiration that ended up on my show. So I wasn't quite so original as to be, like, the progenitor of this format.

[03:12:17] Vlad Costea: You're the reason—you're part of the reason why that article about Bitcoin maximalism was written in 2015.

[03:12:25] Chris DeRose: Yeah, that was a big part of that.

[03:12:27] Vlad Costea: And you basically started a movement without even knowing that you were starting a movement.

[03:12:35] Chris DeRose: You know, life is like that, man. There's other spheres. Sometimes you try so hard—so here's the thing. You should try so hard to do something, fail, and succeed at something completely different that you never even set out to do. That has happened to me often in my life. That may happen to you. I would say do what you're doing and be cognizant of that. Understand that your successes may come about in completely tangential ways from the podcast, though facilitated by the podcast, and your originality may poke out there.

[03:13:14] Chris DeRose: You know, from my perspective, too, like, when I was doing Bitcoin, we had, like, Andreas Antonopoulos kind of got started a little bit around the same time I did, maybe even before. I don't think so, but maybe. We had Erik Voorhees. Like, there were people that were preceding me, not in the format exactly, but, you know, sort of Bitcoin advocacy and such. So I don't think that I was really different, really. Like, you're going to add your own Romanian spice to this, and there may very well be somebody who comes after you who is giving you the same thing that you just told me.

[03:13:47] Chris DeRose: So, you know, it's a line. I will say, like, something that you're getting that the audience doesn't understand is, like, you're looking at your camera. Like, right now, what they don't understand, that you understand fully is that you're looking at the camera lens. And the near entirety of this experience that they're having is between you and, like, this stationary piece of plastic on your desk. And that alone is worth a lot of what you're doing, because not many people understand that. And if you haven't figured that out yet, you will at some point.

[03:14:18] Chris DeRose: It'll click, and then you'll look at the TV completely differently when that happens. So that's something. There's people who don't, like, they will tell you that they know that the TV is, like, a production, but you watch them, and it's like something they say, then that leaves their mind, and they're 100%, like, seduced and captivated, and they've forgotten what they just said. And, like, they think that they're there with their friends hanging around the couch watching, like, you know, some, I don't know, sports commentary or something.

[03:14:48] Chris DeRose: It's hard for me to go back to that, and it'll probably be for you as well, sooner or later. And that's worth a lot. That's worth an awful lot.

[03:14:58] Vlad Costea: It's hard for me to take the news seriously, because I see how Bitcoin news is created, and how narratives are invented on the spot for the purpose of justifying why the price went up or why it went down.

[03:15:12] Vlad Costea: It's very hard for me to understand how something else is serious in its methodology. I don't think anything is scientific. They're just trying to find the reason why something happened, and usually they pick the low-hanging fruit, you know?

[03:15:29] Chris DeRose: Well, their goals are to sustain an audience, which is a little different than, again, the pursuit of truth.

[03:15:38] Chris DeRose: You're going to see a lot of issues in the Bitcoin space very differently just because of where you are right now. Like, these people who knock you, call you names, etc., the reason they disagree with you is because they don't sit in the chair you're sitting in. They don't see the private conversations, the candid confessionals, the other side of the person offstage, etc., etc. And that's a big reason for why you see things the way they did.

[03:16:07] Vlad Costea: I do remember, so I don't think it's nice that I reveal this conversation, which was private, but okay, I'm not going to mention his name, but he was the guy who held a camera when you busted into Satoshi's roundtable at the Mexican restaurant. So he was living in Florida at the time. Yeah, I know exactly who he was. He was on my show a few times. He lived here in Romania for a few years. I'm giving too much information right now. But basically, he told me that he's very much aware that much of this is bullshit.

[03:16:40] Vlad Costea: And I asked him, do you honestly agree with Saifedean? Because you guys were on the panel and you seemed to agree with each other. He said, I'm not going to knock on the Bitcoin standard. It's a powerful brand and I think it aligns with the interests of me and my company. And I'm not going to disagree with that just because it's factually wrong, you know? Right, right. And to me, it was so disappointing because I perceived the guy as someone who is also a truth seeker and he also calls out some bullshit.

[03:17:10] Vlad Costea: But at the same time, I think for the purpose of staying in business and doing business with a bunch of guys, there are certain limits to his expression, at least in public. And that's disappointing because I joined this space, I come from a background in political science, right? So I did not want to pursue a job in political science because I knew exactly what this is about. And to me, it was disappointing. It felt like they lifted the veil, they let us understand how this works and then we're supposed to be part of the machine.

[03:17:49] Vlad Costea: I did not want to be part of that. And I perceived Bitcoin as being a more honest space that's meritocratic, that is all about proof of work. You know, we like to see that a lot, proof of work, but it's not. And it's so disappointing when you get to the politics and how petty some people are. And it's not even about technical criticism. It's just someone commenting based on their personal interactions and trying to destroy their reputation. It sucks. It's like high school.

[03:18:21] Chris DeRose: This is why I say this is a simulacrum. And what you've described is consistent in my estimation with that diagnosis. This person would perform the act he needs to perform in order to make money and whatever external influences are that he has. And you will arrive in a room where every single person is also acting in this way. And there's no orchestrator per se, but there are incentives across the line for everybody to say the right thing. And then the question of what is right is its own conversation.

[03:18:59] Chris DeRose: But most of the time we all know what the right thing is to say. Like, it's not that hard to figure out what the right thing is to say. And most people just can't even say it as opposed to saying the true thing. And as a result, what you have are these large orchestrations of lies through and through that appear to be something it's not, because that's the performative goal. And this has been going on for a while. And it's a little sad, although the blockchain technology really made that turn into a whole thing that's pretty unique, actually.

[03:19:34] Chris DeRose: So, yeah, you may just ask yourself when you go into these conversations what the right thing to say. And what's the right thing, not in terms of your own personal ethics, but in terms of what the crowd will decide is right. That's the key, because you don't decide what's right. Because there's only one of you. It's the crowd that decides what's right. And you'll know what the right thing is to say. But that's not what you should say, in my estimation. You shouldn't say the right thing.

[03:19:58] Chris DeRose: You should say the true thing. It's just for your own development as a human being. And, yeah, that's the top part of the station. These are themes that are being cancelled. Not everyone's going to understand what I'm saying. And maybe you don't either, but you might understand. If you do, then these are profound realizations, unfortunately.

[03:20:20] Vlad Costea: I do recall at one point someone called you a fake Socrates and you added that to your Twitter bio. And I think they were so off, because you were never trying to be a Socrates. You were more of a Diogenes, or how do you pronounce his name?

[03:20:36] Chris DeRose: Yeah, Diogenes, absolutely. I love Diogenes. 100%.

[03:20:42] Vlad Costea: But this also proves that they have no idea what they're talking about.

[03:20:46] Chris DeRose: Well, but it's post hoc. The goal is to denigrate me. That's the same thing with this other guy who called you a gypsy or whatever. It was never the case that he came here to tell the truth. It was the case that he came here to get rid of you. And once that's the goal, the effect precedes cause. That's the greater point. Cause does not precede effect, meaning the effect that he was seeking is your removal or my removal, and thus he will arrive at a cause post hoc.

[03:21:18] Chris DeRose: So yeah, calling me Socrates was in service of the effect of removing me. It wasn't that he saw me and said I was Socrates. No one's going to say that. He said that because he felt that there was some end that he could benefit from the effect effectively, which would then be a reason to conduct a cause thereafter that would send me to hell or something, I guess like that's, that's what you're dealing with with a lot of these people. It's not hard to understand. And unfortunately, you're going to lose a lot of your faith in the language.

[03:21:48] Chris DeRose: Just all of us are, but you're closer to the front of the line, so you're going to lose it first. I don't, I don't know about Romanian, like I don't even know how much of the language that is. I know it's some kind of language. Forgive me if I don't know if it's like a kind of some other, you know, no, it's fine.

[03:22:06] Vlad Costea: It's the closest language to Latin that there is right now. Oh, cool.

[03:22:12] Chris DeRose: Oh, so there you go. That's promising. I like that.

[03:22:15] Vlad Costea: You should come here, Chris. You're going to have so much fun.

[03:22:19] Chris DeRose: I've been pretty close to coming on a couple of occasions. One of these days, I'll definitely let you know.

[03:22:23] Chris DeRose: But yeah. Okay. I didn't know it was close to Latin. So you're sitting in a good spot with that. You may want to brush up on Latin over time if you feel the way that I feel. And I could just be crazy. But your faith in English will start to erode for reasons like this. What you'll find is that people aren't communicating to like convey truth. They're communicating for lots of reasons, most of which are not something that you're going to put your faith in.

[03:22:47] Vlad Costea: Oh, it depends on who you define English, because if you hear a German speaking English, he speaks in a very eloquent way with a rich vocabulary. But if you listen to the Kardashians speaking English, it's just noise. They're making sounds just to fill space. They're not saying anything.

[03:23:04] Chris DeRose: You're not missing the point. Well, they're saying something clearly, but they're not saying anything meaningful. And then you can ask your question, what is it that they're saying then? What is this? Why is this speech so echoed and so amplified and so reverberated? And then when you answer that, you're going to say to yourself, why the hell do I want to participate in a system where that's the outcome that is deemed good? And then it was your faith. It was your faith in English at that point, I think.

[03:23:41] Chris DeRose: And I know Romanian, maybe the same way, and I might be just completely wrong on my hypothesis, but I think the dead languages won't have this problem. It's certainly the ancient languages. But look for effect preceding cause. If you start finding effect preceding cause, you're going to know that you're dealing with bad faith and non-meaningful communication. The meaning is not there. It's all post hoc. It's there to denigrate the things that are not beneficial to this person and to promote the things that are beneficial.

[03:24:13] Chris DeRose: But that makes it advertising. It's no longer communication at that point. It's like this awful form of advertising. So then you're going to ask yourself, do I really want to put myself, spend my time around like nothing but nonstop billboards for crap, or do I want to spend my time maybe talking to somebody and not that. I didn't mean to come on here to pitch that sort of thing, but that's the kind of stuff I struggle with a lot lately. And one of the reasons why, and I definitely don't want to discourage you from what you're doing because you're doing is great, but you're asking for my opinion on some of this stuff. That's a place that I count myself in.

[03:24:51] Vlad Costea: On the topic of English, I can tell you exactly what I learned in school about English and how I perceive it right now. So the argument for learning English in school, because we had to choose between English and French, was that it has this use in computer science, which was a big deal in the 90s when I was in school, and also in business. They were saying if you learn English, you're going to be able to deal with a lot more people to do business. For French, the selling point was that if you know French, you're going to deal with much more educated people and more high class. Yeah. Yeah, actually. But basically, the way in which French works...

[03:25:34] Chris DeRose: I'm down for that. It'll be French, unfortunately.

[03:25:36] Vlad Costea: [unclear: Romanian] is very similar with French in lots of ways, from grammar perspective, the fact that you have gender to describe everything. There's masculine and feminine nouns that you point out to. But English is a lot simpler in the sense that it's more neutral when you speak it. So it's not always precise in its descriptions. And also, the hardest part about English is just learning the irregular verbs to know which form to use and which context.

[03:26:06] Vlad Costea: But once you get that, it's very simple. The words are very simple. The way in which you address people is very formulaic. It's not very expressive. For example, in French or Romanian, you have at least three ways of ending a letter or email or whatever. And in that one, you're going to express the tone of whatever you said above. It's with friendship. It's with love. It's with compassion. Just one word that gets swapped for another is going to reveal to you whether or not that person likes you.

[03:26:44] Vlad Costea: There's also one that is more polite, which means they don't like you. So there's a lot more nuance, and I think that all of the struggle with social justice in the U.S. Revolves around the limits of English. And I agree with you in the sense that English sucks, but people refer to stuff like history and they say, oh, it's his story, which means it's written by men. That word has origins in Greek, and they don't know that. Of course they don't know because your education system sucks to a degree.

[03:27:18] Vlad Costea: I mean, you learn stuff that we don't, and we learn stuff that is not accessible very easily in the U.S., and most people are not curious to know. But I think it's by design. You know, it's a different society, and the priority in the U.S. Is just to preserve individual freedom and to reject collectivism. For the past three or four decades, it seems like socialism is becoming sexy for some reason.

[03:27:44] Chris DeRose: I was going to say, yeah, that was clearly the case for many years. I don't know if I see that as much. That may be the difference between the two parties, although there have been a lot of differences now, so it's definitely not just that, but that's a little sad to see.

[03:27:58] Vlad Costea: That's also something that we don't really have here in Europe. I mean, there's always a convergence to left and right. It's an easy dichotomy to make, but we have lots of parties, and rarely do we have a party that gets more than 50 percent or whatever. So there's always this division of smaller groups, and they have to agree with each other, make coalitions, and I think it's more complex as a system. In the U.S. And the U.K., it's a lot more simple. But I think even the U.K., they have third parties, like the Green Party and the social liberal party or whatever, which are not part of the classic labor and conservative dichotomy.

[03:28:43] Vlad Costea: So yeah, I think in the U.S. You're sort of fucked with this two-party system, which seems to work until it doesn't, because it polarizes people to the extent that they can't talk to each other or they can't relate to each other's struggles, which sucks.

[03:28:58] Chris DeRose: I don't have a lot of faith in the politics, and I think the way we tell the story is part of the problem. I'm very skeptical that these parties are even... They hire actors, it just seems like Biden's an actor, Trump's an actor, and what happens behind the scenes is completely [unclear: opaque].

[03:29:17] Vlad Costea: But they have always been. That's what I'm trying to suggest right now.

[03:29:21] Chris DeRose: No, okay, so they were on the same page. I agree.

[03:29:22] Vlad Costea: What Biden and Trump have done was to lift the veil on how the system actually works, because before that it was harder to realize what's actually happening. But right now it's obvious. If you have a brain and you can think for yourself, you can understand that there are other people in charge other than the ones that you elect. Maybe it goes to the deep state theory, but it can also be just the fact that every democracy has this tyrannical bureaucracy inside of it that is supposed to be there, because if it isn't and you only have the elected officials, you're going to have a state of complete chaos.

[03:30:02] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I don't know how much I want a democracy. I really don't. This is one of the ways that I've come around to Luke Dashjr's side of things. I like monarchy. I'd like to go back to monarchy. I understand why people don't like it. I'm not crazy about it either, but I think that what we're doing now isn't going to work and that's probably the less damaging.

[03:30:23] Vlad Costea: But in the monarchy you're still going to have factions and you're going to have a royal families that are trying to ascend to the status of royal families. So you're going to have beheadings, betrayals, alliances. It's not like you're going to have a lineage that's going to continue for centuries. There's always this situation where they want to behead the king.

[03:30:50] Chris DeRose: I don't know that it's going to be successful either, but at least we don't vote. The problem I have with voting is that it completely corrupts the solidarity amongst the people. What is America is not evident to me anymore. What is blue is more evident. What is red is more evident. What is America is not so evident. So if you didn't vote, I think you wouldn't have that problem. And we may have all the same corruption or even worse, but I don't have to deal with the apologies and the excuses, which maybe that's just a selfish opinion, but I'm sick of the apologies and the excuses.

[03:31:33] Chris DeRose: So I think that's what I would like. At least I could say like, yeah, it's a fucking monarchy because we couldn't keep the democracy in line. And that's fine. But then we can go back to being friends. And we're supposed to now where it's like, you know, like there's some argument we have this perennial argument I have to have with the next guy.

[03:31:50] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but Chris, maybe that for the sake of efficiency, you would prefer to have a monarch. But honestly, someone like you and me can only exist within a framework that allows you to have free speech and say whatever you want and be able to vote out or get rid of the guy who's in charge. Even if you don't participate, some people are going to do that for you. They're going to make some change. So honestly, I think I don't see myself going to my girlfriend is from Iran, right?

[03:32:22] Vlad Costea: I don't see myself going to Iran for the simple purpose that I don't agree with the values of the regime. I believe it's a beautiful country. I believe the people are super nice. But at the same time, I don't see myself going there for the simple reason that I don't agree fundamentally with the idea of this government.

[03:32:42] Chris DeRose: I do think that we're going to decentralize. I do think that because people like you and I aren't going to eventually get I just not here with the program, like they're going to have to kill me. That will that will be a way that I die. That is very possible. I'm not living in like there's a handful of governments who are not living democracy.

[03:33:01] Vlad Costea: They don't really kill you in a liberal. I can't talk. So they don't really kill you in a liberal democracy. They do character assassination. They paint you as this crazy person, this guy who just talks to himself and reads crazy books and should never be listened to. And there's enough of a critical mass to believe in that and basically discredit anything that you might do in your future and cast you out. So that's the way in which it operates. But nobody's going to physically kill you, at least not where you are.

[03:33:37] Chris DeRose: Well, choose where the words fail us in a lot of ways, because then we're pressed to ask what is democracy? And one answer to what is democracy is North Korea. And I'm not even joking. If you look at the Constitution of North Korea, it is recognized, I believe, as one of the best models of a democratic government. Double check me if I'm wrong. I could be wrong. But last I looked into this, there's a beautiful constitution. And if we appeal said documents, we would be like, humoring the idea that this is like some kind of like democratic form of government.

[03:34:16] Chris DeRose: And I never know what to do in some of these conversations, because like, was America ever democracy then? Like, was it also a kind of in between? And we will probably agree that no, it probably wasn't ever like some kind of like pure democracy. It was like a representative democracy. And then like, it's just a lot of it comes into the woods. And what these things mean, I guess it's just a very frustrating place. I don't mean to be that way. But like, here's the thing that these systems are too big.

[03:34:43] Chris DeRose: Like, they're just I think, I think what happened with the internet is the same thing that happened with the printing press, which is that these incumbent leadership structures can no longer be believed. People like entertain the ideas anymore. And major reshuffling is have to happen. And maybe what we need is like, maybe we need 50 small democracies in the United States. So like 50, they say 49, or like, 2525 democracy, socialism, whatever, like, but the whole United States, they may be too big a government to run now on the internet. And we need smaller groups. That may be it. I don't know.

[03:35:19] Vlad Costea: But it's already a federation. So there's already some federal what do you call it? There's some freedom that each state has some autonomy.

[03:35:31] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I mean, that's again, we're like on the same page. Like, it's a lot of these sweeping themes don't have really precise delineations. And I don't know, we'll see. Like I said, I mean, like I said, I think in the beginning of in the middle of this, like, I think that we're going to see like increased fracturing in the states, I think the federal government will stay there. And the state governments will just render it redundant, like inch by inch over a long period of time. So I think it's probably going to happen if we have an election in November.

[03:36:03] Vlad Costea: But that's the beauty of democracies, honestly, because you have leverages, and you can try to subvert the authority of an authority. And within the system, you're going to have competition. And in the end, it's going to be the one that is either more acknowledged by the people or the one that has more market traction.

[03:36:23] Vlad Costea: I understand it was the same with the mafias in the US. And I guess the federal government was efficient at getting rid of mafias. But those mafias, and this term carries a very, you know, offensive meaning. But all of these mafias were basically local governments of people who are organizing themselves for a purpose because the government had failed them. There were immigrants who came to the US by different means. I don't think they filed, as I can rant for an hour about the way in which I couldn't get a travel visa for Nashville next month, but I'm not going to go there. But I, so everyone told me that.

[03:37:05] Chris DeRose: Internationally, I'm shocked by this, but people internationally all tell me they want to go to Nashville.

[03:37:10] Vlad Costea: I wasn't rejected per se, but they told me I should come for an interview in December.

[03:37:15] Vlad Costea: And I was like, I have to go there next month. And they said, sorry, we are overbooked for interviews. And it sucks because that's what everyone told me. And that's the irony of the situation because I tried to do everything by the book and be honest. And basically, I had to report all of my family members, whether or not they have American citizenship or if I have any family that can host me. And if I want to stay in the US or I want to go back. And if I have any criminal records or if I ever engaged in slave trade or a lot of crazy questions that you have to file on your immigration form. It's not even immigration. It's just five days that I have to spend in the US.

[03:37:58] Chris DeRose: If anybody would be honest, it was that kind of a crook.

[03:38:02] Vlad Costea: Exactly. If you did that, why the hell are you even filing? Yeah, it's insane. But I had to do that. I had to completely dox my family members and I had to tell these people from the embassy where I'm going, where I'm going to stay, who's going to pay for my trip, who's the person I'm going to be meeting in US, whether or not they have a criminal record, what's their home address. It's insane. So many requirements. And I've been told that it can also get to the point where I'm asked to have at least $5,000 in my bank account when I travel to prove that I can support myself.

[03:38:40] Vlad Costea: So it's really crazy the amount of paperwork that's required for something that can be bypassed if you travel to Mexico and you cross the border just walking. I don't know. And I'm not going to do that. I'm just saying that it's possible.

[03:38:55] Vlad Costea: I think this is when you realize that the system is rigged or corrupt, when you realize that breaking the rules is not just simple, but a more celebrated way than actually trying to do it by the book.

[03:39:15] Chris DeRose: Yeah, which has been going on for a while, but it's getting more, it's getting more clear, like a lot more clearly. But I apologize, but I've got to get somewhere here pretty soon.

[03:39:27] Vlad Costea: It's fine.

[03:39:28] Chris DeRose: It's five o'clock my time, and I would love to talk to you for some more. I just didn't budget that much time. It's fine.

[03:39:35] Vlad Costea: Okay, good. I'm so happy that we did this. I'm sorry. I apologize. There are some people complaining about the audio. I'm sorry about that. I fixed it. It's all live television, I guess. Thanks, Chris. And come to Romania and buy a Supra.

[03:39:56] Chris DeRose: I will let you know when I come to Romania. All right. Later, bud. Thanks so much.

[03:40:03] Vlad Costea: Can you say goodbye to the party people? Party people, peace out.

[03:40:09] Chris DeRose: I think that's what I said. Yeah, exactly.