What’s really going on with all the Hysteria? Is it a cabal or some confluence of interests? Laserhodl joins me to talk about what’s going on, and how to opt out.
- The Great Reset
- CBDCs / control coins
- Social credit systems
- Freedom tech
- Opting out of the commie tech stack
- #GetOnZero – and my slight disagreement
Links:
- Twitter: @laserhodl
Relevant episodes:
- SLP265 Diverter – Becoming Uncle Jim: Being Digital Sherpa for Family & Friends
- SLP315 k3tan – Networking For Bitcoiners
Sponsors:
- Swan Bitcoin
- Hodl Hodl Lend
- Compass Mining
- Braiins.com
- Unchained Capital (code LIVERA)
- CoinKite.com (code LIVERA)
Stephan Livera links:
- Show notes and website
- Follow me on Twitter @stephanlivera
- Subscribe to the podcast
- Patreon @stephanlivera
Podcast Transcription:
Stephan Livera:
Laser, welcome to the show.
Laserhodl:
Stephan, it’s a joy to be here.
Stephan Livera:
You’ve been definitely putting out some interesting analysis and thoughts around what’s going on in the world of the great reset and perhaps the great resat, which is the fight back. And I would love to hear a little bit about—obviously don’t dox anything—but just would love to hear a little bit about how you got your focus on what you’re thinking about and talking about.
Laserhodl:
Yeah, sure. Let’s see where to start. Okay so by craft, I’m a software engineer. I had a reasonable career, a little over 15 years in software, big tech, west coast Silicon valley stuff. And in 2020, when this pandemic broke out, I was in the same sort of cohort of people that were being fed images out of China. These sort of images of people keeling over, collapsing onto the floor. And so I fell for that first wave of propaganda and I thought, Oh man, no one is reacting to this. So no one is prepared in any way. So I started to sound alarms with folks around me like, Are you seeing this? And it was disturbing to me because it felt like no one was looking at it. And of course now we know that a lot of that was prepared materials put out there to do exactly what it did, which is get this hysteria cycle started. So I was glued to the coronavirus scenario since it started. And when it peaked in March 2020 is when I realized what was occurring here. I realized what was happening on this earth, what was happening to us was actually a lot bigger than we realized. And it wasn’t about a pandemic at all. And this was about two years after I started purchasing Bitcoin. And the experience was such a revelation. It shattered my worldview so strongly that I ended up really flipping my whole life upside down. And it changed the way I think so profoundly that I felt compelled to start talking about it, sharing with plebs the journey that I’ve been on, and recommendations for how to navigate what I believe we’re actually going through, which is a new form of world war, like a World War III.
Stephan Livera:
So it’s like we’re going through this information battle, propaganda battle. And essentially the enemy has become our own government—not our own, but really these other people—and sadly, a lot of the people who we share the earth with seem to believe in the government. And also, I see a lot of the issues are around the media being either dishonest, biased, and incompetent. It’s some combination of those, because they’ve fundamentally not challenged back the so-called political leaders who say, Oh, look, trust the science. And they don’t actually ask any of those questions about things that we know. Things like, Hey, natural immunity, which we’ve known about for how many hundred years, maybe thousands of years. And it just seems really crazy that we’ve gotten to this place where they’ve really engaged in a weird form of mind control, wouldn’t you say?
Laserhodl:
Yeah, well certainly we know that natural immunity is real, and the way that we know that it’s real is that seasonal viruses have to adapt by evolving faster than our natural immunity. So the fact that the seasonal virus adapts to our own immunity is proof that our immunity is robust enough to put pressure on the viruses. So we know that natural immunity is real, and it’s superior to what you can get from manmade medicine. And so yeah, that’s a huge red flag that we could go this far—two years—and that sort of important fact is blatantly suppressed, pushed under the rug. We know that countries like India and Japan had massive success with Ivermectin, and you have to use Bitcoin to get around medical totalitarianism in order to import Ivermectin in the states, at least. So I’ve been helping plebs do that. And that alone, that therapeutic is powerful enough to end this pandemic—if there is one, even. Like how much of it is really hysteria? But I think like as tempting as it is to get stuck in the conversation about influenza, stuck in the conversation about seasonal viruses, stuck in the conversation about, Is this a pandemic? When I zoomed out, I realized to me this looks more like an orchestrated campaign that is meant to basically keep us on house arrest so that the fiat experiment can be torn down and extended, rebooted, reset. And so to put that another way, I think that the central banks basically have been—since the early 2000’s—been running the world monetary system on life support. I think that we got a hint of it in 2008, and they’ve managed to kick the can down the road. And this is kind of it—they don’t think that they can keep this going much longer. And so given the choice between hyperinflation and forced austerity, that would cause mass revolt across the world, people would flip over the table, they would topple their own governments. And so the state’s in a really tricky place. They have to choose between that, and a war. And a war is a very good replacement for that, because what it does is it replaces the outrage and the fury that the people would direct towards their central banks and towards their governments. It replaces that with like a shared collective conflict, something that we’re all in together. And so you end up with a sort of civic duty and a gratefulness that you made it through the conflict. And so whatever the cost, whatever the measures were, are permissible because it can’t be helped. And that’s what I think we’re seeing. I think we’re seeing everything in the last two years is the answer to the question, How can we tear this system down? How can we reset the balance sheets of nation states? And, How can we reboot this system, upgrade it, upgrade the state and start over again?
Stephan Livera:
So I think we both agree that there’s a lot of issues. Maybe we have slight different interpretations of how and why it’s going down though. I’m curious to get your view on this, because there might be another way to think of it. It might be more like—it’s like a conspiracy without conspirators, right? It’s not like there’s some guy pulling the strings. It’s more like over time, we’ve just had this trend towards more socialistic ways of thinking. We don’t have strong respect for private property rights and strong respect for each other’s bodily autonomy. And it’s like, people are just jumping on and seizing the opportunity when it comes, whether you are a creator of a vaccine, whether you are a politician who got it wrong and now you’re doubling down to avoid that, or whether you are a UK politician getting busted for having parties during Christmas at a time when the rest of the population is locked down. And now they’re trying to distract everyone by saying, No, we need to do a vaccine mandate now. I’m curious your view on that idea. Is it just more like every party and player in this web of an ecosystem has their own incentive to push things in a certain way. And those of us who are pushing in the direction of freedom and private property rights and respect for each other’s bodily autonomy, we just are outnumbered and outgunned, sadly. What’s your view?
Laserhodl:
I think all of that is true and none of us are immune from incentives. But if there are incentives, then there’s coordination. And we live in a hierarchical society. You can’t escape that. The Cantillon Effect tells us that the closer you are to the money printer, the more influence, the more power you have. You have it because you can excavate capital through money printing, you can produce money. And so that’s the key influence. The key incentive is gaining audience to these Cantillionaires who basically can produce the money of nations. And so no one’s immune from that. If there is incentives, then there’s also coordination. There’s a hierarchy of privilege as it relates to the Cantillon Effect. And that means there’s a top. So at the top of the hierarchy, there are people who command great power to produce, extract the purchasing power of the citizens of the world. And they can direct that purchasing power. They can’t orchestrate everything—no one can. We live in a vast, complex system, but they can create feedback loops. And feedback loops are extremely powerful. So the combination of narratives and feedback loops can drive and steer society. And so I think what we’re seeing is a combination of carefully planned, unrestricted modern warfare through basically a government dramatization through a pandemic that’s been long in the making, paired with a very good media blitz, and the folks in the media don’t have to be in on it—neither do the politicians. They only have to be vulnerable to the incentive of money. And that’s a very true thing, right? And so if you needed to reset the fiat monetary system, if you needed to tear it down carefully, a pandemic would be a very good way to do it, because you basically could engineer down the velocity of money, put people on more or less a house arrest scenario, while you tore down the key parts of the monetary system, you could adjust their attitudes such that anger took place of fear—that puts them in a holding pattern so that you can actually take this thing down gracefully. But for that to be true, I would expect us to be seeing the new system coming up. And so then the question I would ask is, Are you seeing the emergence of the next monetary system simultaneously while, while we’re living through the last two years? Are you seeing the signals that suggest more and more, here comes the new monetary system?
Stephan Livera:
Right. And it seems that the what’s called CBDCs (central bank digital currencies)—or perhaps we should call them more accurately, surveillance coins or control coins—that seems to be very much the push coming from various central banks around the world. I know even the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) recently commented about this. There are other—the EU, Christine Lagarde and other people are talking about these kinds of ideas as well. So that’s definitely a big vector for social control, isn’t it?
Laserhodl:
Well, yeah. I look to the latest and greatest in statecraft and central banking and monetary technology, and a good place to look is China. China is not advanced broadly across the country, but they ran experiments in their population centers, and they’ve been experimenting with what I describe is—it’s like a social scoring technocracy. And what I mean by that is on the front end of their governance model is a social scoring communism, which is to say the things that you do, the way that you live in society—they monitor that. So they monitor you when you’re on your computer and when you use the internet, and then they monitor you as you move through space in the city, and they rank your actions. And those feed into—as inputs—into a social scoring algorithm, and that social scoring algorithm determines your privilege in society, things like your mobility, so how freely you’re able to move through society, things like your perks, your benefits. And so they’re developing a type of social scoring governance model. They even do things like—so for good model behavior, they actually promote the citizens on billboards and say like, This is what we want to see. And for bad model behavior, they make examples of those people. And that’s what China had in the mix, and that was the front end. On the back end, China did something clever. They learned from previous communist models that collapsed, and they realized as a state, we can’t take over all industry. We need to actually partner with industry. And so on the back end, it’s like a high tech fascism where they partnered with the industry. So this hybrid model of a social scoring communism married with a high tech fascism looks a lot like what the west is—they’re seeing that, and they’re saying, We don’t want to get behind in terms of statecraft. We need a way to Trojan horse this into the west. It flies in the face of social democracies. It flies in the face of republics like the United States who have constitutions. So it basically goes against most Western values. And so if you’re the state and you want to upgrade your model—from their point of view, it might be to stay competitive, right? So we want to stay competitive with where governance is going. You have a real problem there. And so something like a relentless pandemic is a very good vehicle for upgrading the state to a social scoring technocracy. And so the thing I would say is, through the last two years, here’s what I would expect to see. I would expect to see like a lockdown house-arrest scenario. And then I would expect to see something like movement passes, like what you see with China. So movement is not dictated. It’s not a right. It’s based on your score. So you need to normalize like a movement pass thing. I would expect to see gates, like checkpoints, at public transportation. So buses and trains. I would expect to see a scoring experiment where you’re rating citizens from the government’s point of view. And I would expect to see some creeping control over the Internet. And so I said, Have I seen those things in the last 18 months? Oh, also, I would expect to see the erection of some type of new punishment/prison system that was tied to the social scoring system. And that’s a really key part of what they do in China, so that if you consistently do not play the game, if you slide too far down that social scoring system, they’ll reeducate and eventually disappear you. And so that’s the mini-game they’ve created for society. So I zoom out and I say, Stephan, do we see these things appearing in the west? Do we see movement passes being normalized? This idea that after 9/11, you needed a passport to go between countries—that got normalized. So that became—you had to ask permission from the state to actually travel between countries. They were able to arbitrarily say who can and can’t travel. Has that moved to be in your town? Can you travel freely in your town? And it seems like COVID has been a perfect Trojan horse to normalize the idea that you’re going to carry around some type of pass. And they’re going to tell you if you’re okay to be traveling or not. And right now it’s for virus safety, but it’s not that much of a long shot to see that as a policy mechanism being used for environmental justice. And so these type of things, 18 months ago, if we were talking about this, you would stop me right there and you would say that seems absurd. But it doesn’t seem so crazy right now, this idea that they might extend movement licenses. That’s basically become a policy tool at this point. And so that can be used for whatever political reasons. And so I think we have seen broadly across the west, movement licenses being normalized through vaccine passports. And this answers the question why natural immunity has been dashed aside, because it’s not actually about vaccines. Because if natural immunity were to be entertained or respected or acknowledged, then these passports don’t mean anything. And of course that’s understood, right? Of course that’s understood. You can’t upgrade the west to a social scoring technocracy, this sort of autonomous governance model, without the concept of movement licenses—that is absolutely fundamental. And so that explains why Ivermectin is being suppressed, it explains why natural immunity is just being flat out denied in every Western democracy. There’s a synchronicity there that’s unsettling. Why are they all doing it? Why does not one Western democracy defend or acknowledge natural immunity?
Stephan Livera:
Now I’m broadly with you. I think we’ve seen some incredible synchronicity, as you say, across various governments in their response to the so-called Hysteria-19. Now one thing though, is that there are certain countries out there where for example, you can buy Ivermectin over the counter, right? And so I recall earlier this year I was in Colombia and you could just go to the pharmacy and just buy Ivermectin over the counter. It was just surreal to me given I knew how much more difficult it was to get Ivermectin in some of the Western world countries. And as an example, even in Sri Lanka where I am right now, it’s actually not that hard to get Ivermectin. So it’s like a weird thing. But at the same time—here’s the thing: so on one side, you’ve got this synchronicity going because everyone’s playing copycat. People in the UK are copying what happens in Australia, or Canada’s copying—they’re all copying off each other, they’re seeing ideas, and then the politicians potentially just rip that idea and say, Hey, we’re just going to implement that for my people over here. But then at the same time, there are certain countries out there who are pushing against in some way. So for example, El Salvador recently said no vaccine or test requirements to get into the country. So I’m curious how you see that, like, why is it that we’re seeing this synchronicity amongst certain countries, but then other countries are fighting it, or at least not going along with the party line?
Laserhodl:
Yeah. It’s complex. So there’s movement passes being normalized through vaccine passports. You see in Australia, you can’t get on public transportation without presenting it. You see Australia saying, They’re going to regulate the Internet tighter going forward. So you start to see the makings of it. You see in Israel that they’re basically saying, Okay, now we’re tracking citizens with GPS and we’re assigning them a score, 1 through 10, and we can swarm on them. So they’re normalizing scores for citizens. And this sort of omnipresent surveillance as well. This idea that the state will keep track of you, and that’s going to relate to your score. And so there’s the enthusiastic compliers, there’s the cohort of these countries that are like, We’re going to go as far as we need to with this. And of course in Australia, you have these politically correct—I don’t know what you wanna call them—quarantine centers. Maybe they’re hyper-PC concentration camps. I don’t know. I mean, it looks a lot like you have to go and you’re not able to leave, so I’m not sure what you call that, but you can keep your phone so I don’t know what to make of that. But that’s certainly in line with a parallel, punitive system that’s being launched that aligns up with COVID as essentially an arbitrary new justice system, if you will. It’s almost arbitrary pre-crime, right? The narrative becomes law. If you don’t follow the narrative, now we have these new punitive centers to reeducate you. So yes, you have the enthusiastic compliers, but then there’s different cohorts that don’t fit in with that. So Sweden didn’t really do much. And a handful of the Nordic countries didn’t really go along with any of the vaccine imperialism. They just said, Eh, it’s at your own discretion. And now they’ve flipped scripts here in the fourth quarter. All of a sudden, Sweden’s now saying, Okay, we’re going along with it all. And so—what happened? That one and was confusing to me. I zoomed out and I looked and I saw that Sweden actually is extremely progressive—a lot of the Nordic countries are progressive—I think you could call them like fairly far left. And they have long been on board with the idea of digital identity and central bank digital currencies. So part of me wonders if what we’re seeing in the Nordic countries is a cohort where they’re already on board with the underlying upcoming monetary system, and so they don’t necessarily need to be dragged through the dirt, because they don’t need as radical of a transformation. They’re already left-leaning ideologically, they’re already primed for a system like this. So I think that explains the Nordic countries. LATAM is a really interesting one because in the south of LATAM, Ivermectin was heavily used and the numbers are really shocking in terms of—it seems to have helped them avoid most of the health scare and the pandemic scare in terms of data. But at the same time, you see a lot of mixed results across the states down there in terms of compliance to this vaccine imperialism. And then of course in El Salvador you have Bukele who basically went from a year ago saying everyone will be vaccinated—this is the path, this is where we’re going—to now saying, You don’t need it for travel, you can come without being vaccinated, and it’s your choice. We’re going to leave it up to individuals to choose. But we’ll still provide it. And you still see folks with masks there. And so I think what we’re seeing is: this pandemic is basically the synthetic battleground that they’re using to reset the monetary system. And every state has to place themself across the risk gradient in terms of how they want to play it. So it’s probably not a super wise idea just to say, No, we completely disregard it, there’s nothing you can do about that—we’re not going along. If you look to Africa, you’ll see a whole pile of premieres that were assassinated from basically not playing along early. In Japan, they did some nice lip service, but then locally, they didn’t really comply very closely and they even doled out ivermectin, they stopped a couple of the vaccines, and it was two weeks from the time I saw that—the premier, the PM of Japan, said he’s not going to run for another election. So I don’t know if he got the call basically saying this is happening. Here’s what it is. So I think what you’re seeing is every office of government across the world is having to strategically place themself on the risk gradient in terms of what degree do they want to play ball with monetary reset, to what degree do they want to comply with vaccine imperialism? Can they bear the costs of not complying? And are they prepared to break away? And I think El Salvador is a shining beacon of hope because if you look at history, these small countries, there’s no other game in town. When it’s time to reset the monetary system, you play along, you hope that you’re still plugged into the system after, you’re not cut off, they don’t throw anything devastating your way. And that’s really your only choice. There’s no other game in town. So you hope that you still have good relations with whoever ends up being the reserve currency. You hope you’re plugged into the world monetary system. And now we have Bitcoin. We’ve never had this before. And so we’re witnessing it—what happens when these governments have a choice. They’re basically being told that they need to capitulate their citizen’s freedom permanently, submit to this new social scoring technocracy of basically omnipresent surveillance that feed social scoring algorithms, and then social scoring gates that live in physical and digital space that basically carry out the permission system for what your [inaudible provisions?] are. That’s what these countries are being asked to buy into. And if you want to break away from that, you need an answer. And I think that El Salvador is an example that—well maybe Bitcoin is the answer. And so what they’re doing is really tricky, right? Because the book of business for central banks in the IMF is a kind of monetary colonialization. So they get these tiny countries addicted to debt and they turn them into debt slaves. And then when they need something, they need to reset the monetary system, they need to upgrade statecraft for the world. It puts these governments in a terrible position. And so you’re left saying, Do I have to actually sell out my people’s sovereignty to this world order? Or can I push back and say, No, I’m going to protect my people. And without something like a Bitcoin, well I’m not sure what you would do.
Stephan Livera:
Right. Yeah. And I think it’s also interesting to see the shift in prevailing attitudes, right? Like in March of 2020, a lot of people were panicking. And then that may have spurred even more authoritarianism by the politicians. But then it’s almost like maybe there’s a feedback loop—because they started doing lockdowns, they started to drive it into the minds of the public—Hey, this is “serious.” And so then the public in their panic now start demanding more panicker policies from their politicians and kind of go along with what these unelected bureaucrats are saying—the health technocrats of the world. So my question then is—of course I’m all about Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin is a big part of the answer—do you think there’s also hope in educating and convincing the masses or at least those who can be convinced? Like you might have that 20% or 30% over on the side who are just lost, but perhaps people in the middle and people who are more freedom-loving can be spoken to and educated about actually the real level of risk around hysteria, and that versus the risk of all the authoritarianism that is coming here and is coming?
Laserhodl:
Well I don’t subscribe to the idea that there’s a small cabal of individuals that are orchestrating this against the world’s interest. I think that governments are a fairly good reflection of the culture of the world. And I think there’s been a trend towards—I call it like a safe space maximalism. It’s basically a demanding that the shared societal space be made safe at any cost. And not only safe from physical harm, but also safe from offensive ideas and anything that would be labeled like a bigotry. And so it’s almost like a postmodern safe space maximalism where instead of raising folks to have thick skin so that they can contend with a tough and unforgiving world, we’re demanding that governments wrap everything in bubble wrap. As a people we’ve become almost like emotional hemophiliacs. Like any little thing will hurt our feelings and make us bleed. And culturally, I think that that’s probably where we’re at. So I think that our culture manifests in the state, and that can create a feedback loop where if there’s a broad fear of danger, that you essentially demand over and over to tighten the grip on us until we’re safe. I go back and forth. I mean I’m a big fan of cycle theory. So if you zoom out and you look, you see that a lot of this is coinciding with cycles big and small. When you zoom in there’s a debt cycle that’s turning over. A small debt cycle, but also the large debt cycle that Ray Dalio speaks of. So that basically means that debt has gotten to a point where it can’t work anymore. Nation states won’t be able to service the debt any longer. So the books are broken. They need to be cleared, they need to restart this system over. And I’m guessing part of what’s going on is they see that as an opportunity to upgrade it and restart it. They don’t want to restart it to the old system. They see that they have CBDCs ready to go. They see that there have been great advancements with computers and information of things, and so they see there’s an opportunity to instrument society such that you can keep track of the citizenry. I could steelman it and you could say, In order to service your civilians—because they’re demanding a safe space—so you could say it’s in order to provide that. The west looks at China and they see that China has great control over the Internet. And you could argue that that’s maybe to protect their citizens so that they can carefully curate healthy narratives and provide that maximal safe space. So you can make that argument. And that’s probably what they think. I mean, I think most people believe they are good actors, right? So they believe in the problems they’re solving, and I don’t think there’s a cabal. I think it’s probably more something like a cartel, probably like 150 families that are the majority shareholders of central banks that task themselves with shaping and steering the highest-order societal narratives that we all kind of live by—our truths. And they work along the lines of these cycles. So as they see that the debt cycle’s coming closed, they go, Okay, we need an answer for that, because we’re going to have to reset the whole system. So they start think-tanking it, they start war-gaming it, they start thinking of, Okay, so how are we going to pull this off? I don’t think that nuclear war could work. I think too many countries have nuclear at this point. The collateral damage is so expensive. If you think about the central banks as a business, you don’t really want to wreak that much collateral damage across your balance sheet. So something cleaner would be a lot more ideal. So I think for the last couple decades they’ve been eyeballing like, Okay, how are we going to tear down the last debt cycle in a way that would be—palatable is the wrong word—but possible is probably the better word. Usable. Like, how could we actually do it and what are we going to upgrade it to? Because we’re not going to start the same thing over. We need to take advantage of the state of the art of governance and technology that’s out there. So I think that’s what I see happening. But the thing is, that doesn’t mean that they’re acting against—like that they don’t believe what they’re doing. I think society is largely turned into a culture of safe space maximalism and is demanding this of their statesmen. And so I think from their point of view, they’re like, This is the way, right? But that isn’t to say there isn’t a growing faction of freedom maximalists who are terrified right now, they see that we are on the edge of an inflection point that we might not be able to come back from in terms of permanent loss of autonomy of the individual, from being able to say what goes in your body, being able to reject forced medicine, from being able to travel freely—even in the small sense, like in your town. Of being able to go online and communicate with your friends and loved ones in a way where you have privacy, where that is not going to feed into your social score and affect your quality of life, or if you are re-educated, for example, the permanent loss of the ability to ever topple your government if it crosses the line in terms of what is good for humanity or not—the permanent loss of that. You have these people who—the permanent loss of the ability to save and store wealth in your family, so that you could actually build a family that survives multiple generations and stands for something that you decide what it stands for. So I think I paint like a bleak picture, but I’m not bleak—I’m actually extremely hopeful. And I’m generally like a white-pilled person because I think freedom maximalists, I don’t think we show up to the party till late in the game. And I think the folks on the other end, the majority of citizens who are saying like, This is the way—I don’t think they really stand a chance when people who actually care about freedom finally stand up and say, You know what, we’re not having it anymore. And of course I mean through peaceful means, because I think peaceful means are the best way to preserve freedom. And it’s all about defense, like asynchronous or outsized defense. And so like Bitcoin is just a beautiful example of a technology that lets you say no in a very elegant way, in a very safe, peaceful way. You can basically say, You know what? My family’s life savings is not going to be used to bail out the world. You’re not going to excavate our time. You’re not going to send my dad and my uncles back to work. You’re not going to take away my retirement. You’re not going to do all this under the guise of keeping people safe so that you can reset the monetary system. And so it lets you say, No. And it lets you take charge of your own household’s direction. And I started to see these two things: I held the great reset in one hand and I held the Bitcoin in the other hand, and I realized like maybe Bitcoin is teaching us. Like maybe it’s teaching us to become so expensive to tyranny that they lose.
Stephan Livera:
I think that’s a big part of the answer. So of course I’m all about Bitcoin. I think it is the most important technology for anyone who’s concerned with freedom or liberty, but it’s probably not the only one. I think it’s open source software, open source hardware, ideally, that will help us in terms of giving those people who want freedom the ability to keep some of that freedom, at least in a time when the rest of the world is losing their minds and going crazy about hysteria and about who knows what’s next—whether it’s climate lockdowns and so on. But in terms of Bitcoin and technology, what are the key technologies in your mind that the freedom lovers should be using?
Laserhodl:
Yeah so I think like the hysteria loop, the purpose is—and it’ll probably go on the rest of this decade—I suspect that it might peak around 2025, but the basic gist is they want to keep you on your knees so that communism can be made to look like salvation. So that you can say, You know what, I give up, give me communism, give me whatever it is you plan so I can be done with this. And they want to drain you of your energy and spirit so that you just capitulate. And the thing I would say to people is: you should behave as if your kids are going to be reliving 2020 permanently, unless you make your household expensive to tyranny. And so Bitcoin is the first step. I mean, for me, we put everything into Bitcoin and we’ve been holding it for several years. And I can’t tell you how well we sleep knowing that our time is protected. And I got a lot of flack from friends and family a couple years ago when I started doing this. When I went to that degree in, they said, you know they looked at the data and they said, Okay, every four years it could go down 80%. And I said, Well, I mean, sure, you could have a little bit of a gut check in one year, but if you zoom out, it averages over 200% a year. And so do your time, and once you’re above water, you’re feeling pretty good. And to the point where even if the prospects of an 80% are not the end of the world—80% down-dip doesn’t really bother me any. And now when I talk to them, it’s a different story. Because now, they’re sitting here where the monetary base has been increased by nearly 40% in the last 18 months, right? So now they’re saying—and they know from history, they know from like looking at Weimar, there’s an inflection point—when you passed it, you can’t print less, right? Because the purchasing power of the money is disintegrating. So you need to print more and more in order to create the same purchasing power to prevent the government from collapsing. To prevent it all from collapsing—the whole system. So now it’s like an easier proposition to say, Oh, maybe that 80% every four years isn’t as bad as losing half your purchasing power every year. I’d rather gain an average of 200% every year than lose half guaranteed every year. So Bitcoin is certainly the base layer for making yourself expensive to tyranny. You could protect your time, your kids’ time. You know you can store wealth for thousands of years. So immediately you can check the box of, Can I build a household for the ages? It’s like, Okay, done. That’s really, really critical for hope, right? Because that gives you a lot of hope that you could say, Oh man, I’m making the Livera household and what’s my family crest and what are we gonna be doing? What is our story? You can actually start thinking about that, and Bitcoin takes your mind in that direction. It’s not enough—so Bitcoin solves the money—but everything else is up to us. It doesn’t solve society. And I think the first order of business is just becoming expensive to tyranny, and just looking at your life and say, Well, where am I very affordable to tyranny? And I’ve talked a lot about like physically, and there’s a lot of common sense stuff, right? A lot of the plans governments have, it revolves around putting people into—they’re calling them smart cities—because that’s where they can deploy in a cost-effective way these omnipresent surveillance and social scoring systems. They can get you in there. And also if you are trying to move to more of like a freemium model where pods are free and soy food is free, well you can’t have people spread out, they need to be compacted so that you can make that work. And so, the obvious thing is, probably there’s some obvious physical things, like probably don’t be in the city. Like if you’re in a town that you don’t see and feel the pandemic every day, that’s a good sign. In general, COVID is like a very good proxy for freedom. Like if you see a lot of COVID everywhere, that’s probably a good signal that you’re not in the right place. And the less you see it, the more freedom you have. But that’s not where begins and ends. Really this is a different world war in the sense that it’s not boots on the ground. A lot of it, they’re coming through digitally, right? So they can reach out to you digitally. And the system of governance that they’re aiming for is a digital, autonomous governance, where basically it’s a statecraft where you employ a bunch of engineers that manage the social scoring algorithms. And then once you get social scoring gates installed physically and digitally—in terms of being able to log onto the Internet and it does the rest, because the incentives are so strong that you can basically control how people act—and so a lot of what you need to do to become expensive to tyranny is simply opt out. And this is tongue in cheek. I’ve been calling it like the commie tech stack—Opt out of the commie tech stack. I know that’s a little flagrant, but what I mean by that is—so remember when I talked about what China learned about the collapse of previous communist systems is they had to partner with industry. They needed a high tech fascism. And what you can see in the west is that if you’re not on main street—if you’re on Wall Street or Big Tech—you’re thrilled with the pandemic. Because the reason that you’re excited—not only because money printing is pumping up your assets, it’s keeping you afloat and making you wealthier through time theft—but also you are being courted by the state in order to partner on the next form of governance. And so you’re really excited because you’re going to work on the digital identity that people will scan their face to log into the Internet with. You’re going to work on the social scoring algorithms that will decide how much freedom people have or if they don’t, or if the government needs to go pick them up. So these companies are looking at getting awarded forever monopolies—which is every cronyist’s dream is they don’t have to compete anymore, they have permanent access to customers. And so my general view is like Google, they discarded their do not be evil slogan. And now you know why, right? You can see that they’re essentially a component of the state in terms of the way that they feed their corporate surveillance into the state through Gmail, through Google, the way that they censor, the way that they do everything that they can to craft a profile about you, know who you are, and then that can be directly fed into social scoring systems. So a Google, I would say is like, it’s not a good idea to sacrifice your digital sovereignty by projecting your person into Google by telling Google everything about you. I think that’s really not a wise move for families who want to keep or improve sovereignty in the future. And I think that that really matters. That is one of the key ways that China knows what people are doing, what they’re thinking. It’s through their Big Tech, Google-equivalent. And so Google is thrilled at a chance to get a forever monopoly doing that. And so—just basic stuff, maybe move to like a smaller search engine, like a DuckDuckGo, someone who proclaims to care about privacy, maybe move your email to like a protonmail instead of a Gmail. Just a disclaimer—email cannot be secured. That protocol is beyond repair. The actual emails get vacuumed off the internet backbone directly. So there’s, there’s not a darn thing any email provider can do that would give you privacy from the state. However, you can neuter corporate surveillance, right? You can cut Google out. You can cut the ad networks out. You can cut all the people that are monetizing your behavior and building a profile of who you are. And that’s worth it. For like actual communications with people, like not just logging into accounts and doing commerce—which you can’t escape email from—when you’re actually communicating with friends and people you like and family, move that to end-to-end encrypted chat apps. And there’s lots of really good options for my friends and family—people I already have their phone numbers and they have mine. It’s very easy to upsell them to Signal, right? Because you already have each other’s number. You can actually receive your standard unsecured text messages directly in Signal, and you could just shoot them an invite and say, Hey, let’s continue this conversation in Signal. I had my grandma on it. I have my, my family on it. It’s very easy. So for any personal contacts, I like Signal. For all my Bitcoin nym friends, I use the matrix protocol. It’s decentralized, it’s end-to-end encrypted, you can self-host rooms, and it has really good verification tools where you can sign each other’s public keys and prevent imposters from popping up. So it’s a really good place to take your Bitcoin contacts and develop relationships, congregate in a way that is unstoppable. It can’t be censored. It’s completely private. No one’s in the middle reading your messages. And so it’s a really good technology that we should be using. And so I’ve talked about two things: search, email and, chatting, but it goes further than that. On Twitter I often Tweet about my dad. I say, if my dad can do X then, so can you. Because I’ve been helping him opt out as well, because he’s a conservative guy. He cares about freedom and I don’t want him being persecuted because he’s just trying to stay plugged in, trying to find out if there’s hope. Trying to find out how we navigate this thing as a family. So I helped him get from Windows to Linux Mint, and he was blown away how simple it was. You throw Linux Mint on a USB drive, you can boot it from a 10-year old computer, and people are blown away when they see the progress of Linux in the last decade. It’s very usable. It’s very comparable. I like Linux Mint for the boomer generation. I think they take to it real quickly. I like Zorin OS personally. A lot of people love Pop OS. You know, you have a laptop, you have a desktop—you’re probably still using Apple. You’re probably still using Windows. Listen, these are the companies that are turning your cell phone device into a vaccine passport, right? These are the companies that are getting in trouble for eavesdropping on you through Alexa in every single way about it. And these companies want to partner with the state to launch this social scoring system. So if you want to opt out, then I would say, it’s not as crazy as you think, just to flash your operating system to Linux. It feels like a modern Windows, and you can even configure them to feel like an Apple. So I’ve been doing that for all my friends and family helping with that. Phones are a little harder, but not as crazy as you think. You can flash an Android phone into a Graphene OS phone, which is just de-Googling. It just rips off all the spyware, all of the surveillance, it’s still an Android phone. You can still have Android apps. So I live my day-to-day on a Graphene phone. Calyx OS is really popular within the Bitcoin space. I would say they’re fairly comparable. They take Android, which is open source, and they yank out all the Google bits in it, so you don’t need a Google account. You can just download apps anonymously through Aurora store or F-Droid. And you don’t have to be plugged in. And I can tell you from migrating to this and when I migrated my family to this, it’s not as hard as you think. The amount of ease and relief I feel being on these platforms is tantamount to the amount of relief I felt moving my monetary energy into Bitcoin. I basically feel like I’ve realized that most of this information war is taking place on Big Tech. And yeah, you can move to the countryside and opt out of it in your town, but you have to move to the countryside digitally if you want to opt out to where it’s actually occurring.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. There’s a lot of interesting points in there. And certainly the Calyx OS is a very popular one amongst privacy-focused Bitcoiners who want to use an alternative system on their phone and still have some access to Google apps but without actually doxing everything to Google. And then Graphene is probably one more step further where it’s even more removed from Google. So with all these things, it’s not like you can perfectly opt out and there will be trade-offs with these as well. So when things go wrong or if you need to recover, or if you are self-hosting, well now you are having to learn to run the server aspect of it. And if something happens there, well you need to spin that back up. These are all things that will take time to learn and do, but broadly supportive, of course.
Laserhodl:
There’s a progression there. So for example, my wife and I, we were completely addicted to Google drive. We’re like, Oh man, we have got to have a file cabinet that’s easy that we can access from anywhere. And some Bitcoiners were like, check out NextCloud, right? You can self-host it on your Umbrel. You get a private file cloud. And I’m like, Oh, that’s awesome. And then I started to think about data loss and I’m like, They don’t really have a good story about what you do for redundancy and backups. And Google obviously has a great story. You never think about it—they’ve solved it. And I’m like, Okay, is there anything in between? And I found sync.com. Sync.com is basically like a Google drive, but it end-to-end encrypts your files in such a way where it’s being encrypted on your computer. If you lose the password, they can’t decrypt the data. The portion of the code for the client is open source. You can verify it. So there’s an in-between place. I think this progression like, Okay, so it’s true there’s a self-hosting movement that’s happening, but it’s very nascent. The idea there is that this data center is emerging in the homes of Bitcoiners, right? And it’s becoming more powerful every week, every month. And the idea is eventually you’ll self-host everything critical, all the data that is critical to your life. And there’ll be apps that can read—you scan a QR code at home—and boom, you’re plugged into your server. But that’s nascent. I mean it’s really for tinkerers at this point. So you have to be committed to riding out the rough points early on, but there’s an in-between place, which is privacy-respecting hosted services. And so I think getting on those—so for drive, I use sync.com. I used to use Notion because my wife and I loved having a shared notetaking app. We were like, Oh man, that’s great. And then we ended up moving to Standard Notes. So Standard Notes gives you a notepad in the cloud but it’s client-side encrypted the same way. And so when you get to this in-between place, one thing that happens is you end up with these passwords that are really important. Because if you lose them just like your private keys on Bitcoin, you lose access to your data. So I recommend something like a BitWarden. BitWarden is a password manager that you can use with your wife. You can set up a family office in it. And you can set up multifactor. So you have a password to open your password manager and maybe you have like five YubiKeys for your house and you register them on both your wife and your account, right? This type of thing—you carry one in your keychains. You can always log into your password manager, and you have one in your safe maybe. And then maybe you give one to a trusted contact with like a backup kit. Maybe someone even holds one of your seed steels for your multisig, right? And you’re like, Oh, here’s a backup kit for me if I ever have an emergency. So you can secure a password manager in the cloud, like a BitWarden, and that’ll prevent you from losing these critical keys for your end-to-end encrypted services. If you use Matrix or the Element client for chatting on Matrix, same thing, you have an encryption key that you want to secure. And so BitWarden’s interesting because it’s open source and you can take it with you. You can self-host. So just knowing like, Oh, I can take this. I’m not going to get locked in, right? As the self-hosting revolution emerges, I’m good to go. I’ll be able to migrate to it. And when those tools are ready and I’m ready to learn, I can go there. Get to that in-between place, that freedom-respecting place. Once you secure a password manager within your family, you’d be shocked—everything else gets much easier. BitWarden lets you do multifactor auth inside of it. So every time, like let’s say you sign up to something critical like a River, you don’t want it just username password. You want to enable multifactor. So you want to scan that QR and it’ll give you that rotating six digit numerical code that you punch in just to ensure that not only do you have the username and password, but you have access to the multifactor device. If you plug all those into like a BitWarden, it’s really interesting, right? Beause now you have your YubiKey that you physically log into your BitWarden with, and then inside the BitWarden has your multifactor that’s portable. It doesn’t matter if you lose your phone, right? So you’re no longer beholden to a single device. So start imagining how you would build your family office in such a way that you can stand on your own two feet. You’re not projecting yourself into the computational state. They’re in a position where they’re having to answer the question, Okay, so a large percentage of the population we don’t believe is going to be able to adapt to this revolution, to the rate of technological increase, right? So you see AI, you see machine learning, you see robotics increasing at this rate where the people that steer society are genuinely worried that there’s gonna be a job crisis. And so they’re answering the question, How do we transition this large percentage of society to something that’s possible, that’s sustainable? And so this is where this kind of communism starts looking interesting, right? Beause it’s like, We need to feed them, we need to house them, we can put them in cities. But how do we—if they’re just in the liabilities column, that is a very poor business. It’s not a good way to run society either. So it’s just this cost on society. That’s not very good. And so then from a business point of view, you would say, Well, is there a way we can put them in the assets column? How could we take these useless feeders and make them these premium assets? And I think what we’re seeing is that the government is looking to Big Tech and seeing that Big Tech being able to make that work takes like a Facebook. You don’t pay for Facebook. Facebook is outrageously profitable and that’s mostly because you are the product, right? So Facebook has learned, if you run a freemium model, you need to aggressively monetize the users. And so I think that’s similar to what the governments are looking at. I think they’re saying, Okay, the users are going to be freemium. The high tech fascism partners—the industry—that’s who we will monetize them to. So we’re going to have to aggressively monetize the users to them. And so you say, Okay, what are the growth stories that are emerging as part of this next monetary system? And well, you see they’re going to train algorithmic governance. That’s very clear. You see the social scoring mechanism, you see Bill Gates buying up farmland and basically making a push on soy food, on pod food, this idea he wants these high margin synthetics to replace our ancestral natural diets, right? So you’re not eating ribeye, steak, you’re eating Impossible Ribeye—you name it. So there’s another industry. You also have this industry of transhumanism. This idea that you hear this narrative coming that’s like, thank God for mRNA. Thank God it’s finally on the scene, because think of all the advancements we’re going to have because of gene technology, right? So this is a big narrative that they’re trying to make the last two years—you know, Okay, I know that we signed away your rights and I know that we’re experimenting on the world population under the guise of a seasonal flu that is by the numbers not much more deadly than the seasonal flu. So I know we’ve completely eliminated the norm of having to go through trials and they’re celebrating that as: now think of all the advancements we’re going to make. Do you think that they believe that they’re going to be able to keep running experiments en masse on the world population? I would wager that they probably don’t want to go back to running trials, that they think this really is the new normal—this is how they’re going to be able to operate. And so this picture starts to emerge of now instead of this useless feeder, you’re this liability— you’re this extremely valuable human asset that is worth supporting in the basic ways, because you can be used to advance gene technology. You can be used to advance autonomous governance. You could be used to advance technology and synthetic food. So you are valuable as a human, whether you have a job or not. And I think that’s what they realized. That’s how they can rationalize this social scoring technocracy. Now again, look to China: it’s two-tiered. There are the people that still engineer the systems. There are people that are in think work, creative work. And they would still live in a capitalistic society, right? And I think that’s kind of where we’re aimed at now. You’re either going to get sucked into this—if you’re not working right now it’s probably a good indicator of whether you’ll be in the top-tier or not. If you’re taking assistance from the state at this point, it’s probably an indicator that you’re being sucked into the bottom-tier of this system. So I think that’s the shape of it. And the basic advice I’ve been giving is, Yes, there’s the obvious stuff—you can leave the city, you can physically opt out, go to somewhere where there’s not COVID, but there’s the less-obvious stuff. It’s all the digital stuff. And that’s really critical and as someone that has gone through it, I can tell you I know that I’m very expensive to tyranny, and that is the right posture to have leading into the peak of reset.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of interesting insights there for people, whether that’s the self-hosting stuff, and obviously my friend k3tan is big on that. So listeners, go and follow k3tan and Diverter_noKYC as well. I did an episode with Diverter_noKYC and k3tan about some of these related aspects of self-hosting. And you’re securing your network, obviously making yourself more difficult to tyranny, as you said, Laser. And I think there are multiple tools that we should all be using at our disposal. I think it’s a combination: obviously it’s stack sats is step one, and then obviously look for ways to give yourself more freedom, whether that’s physically moving to places or looking for ways to say legally reduce your tax payable so that you are in essence giving less off to the state. And so they will have less ability to use that money against you, essentially. And so I think that’s where Bitcoin people can really make a difference, as well as I think doing what you can to help other people who are willing to be helped, right? So people who are willing to be helped—you can’t get everyone— but the more remnant types we should be out there trying to help them opt out in their own ways as well, whether that’s Bitcoin-wise, whether that’s self-sovereign tech stack-wise—I think these are all ways to do that. Now, there are some elements where we still have to use the major platforms. So for example, I’m still on Twitter, right? You are still on Twitter. Even the use of YouTube as an example, to try to reach people. But it’s like trying to use the tools of our enemies against them, and at least use them to still have reach while we still can, before we all get canceled eventually. I think it’s a matter of time. But that’s how I’m seeing it around trying to put out good information. Of course this episode will not be going on YouTube because I think it’s too likely to get canceled, but in general, I’m staying on the platform, at least in terms of what content that I can “safely” put on the platform. So that’s how I’m seeing it. I think it’s a combination of using things that are out there already because already money and time and investment has been put into those. And there’s a network effect around those. Of course, Bitcoiners understand network effects. So I think those are a few points that I would summarize what you were saying as well, and at least put my own flavor and my own thinking onto that also.
Laserhodl:
Like in general, it’s like a rule of thumb Is that in the future, I think freedom will be measured in privacy, probably is the right way to think of it. And the sooner you get started on that, the better position you’ll be in if things escalate and get even weirder than they are right now. They’re already—I couldn’t have imagined that we would see what we’re seeing right now. And so don’t be naive and don’t be complacent. You want to move down the risk gradient physically, digitally, or you can think about it as voting with your feet not only physically, not only with your money, but digitally as well. And keep an eye on the self-hosting revolution. I know that many folks use Umbrel, and they’re aiming at like a server platform now. So a home server platform. And there’s RunCitadel, which is a free and open source fork of Umbrel is another one to gander at. And you have like Start9 doing a home server thing, and then there’s oldies like yunohost. So keep an eye on these folks. You don’t have to go all the way there, there’s privacy-respecting services. I’ve been calling this roll your own sovereign stack. Don’t wait, there’s a bunch of—you know, X21 has his sovereign stack. He retweeted mine. He’s like, Here’s the stack that I use when I’m not plugged into Big Tech at all. And you’ll see it’s like a mix of hosted and self-hosted stuff. And mine is like a little more moderate. You know, I haven’t gone as far as he has in terms of self-hosting, everything. So like, choose where you’re going to be. But definitely move down the risk gradient. I highly recommend that. And of course, the network effects of certain platforms are extremely pervasive. The Twitter, YouTube, like the cost of leaving that is astronomical because then your reach goes to zero. So I don’t mean don’t use Twitter, for example, like I use Twitter, right? Because the reach is really good. What I do is I take the nyms that I take a liking to, and I add them into communities on Matrix. So I know that we can basically have a backroom that’s unstoppable that we can congregate that we have guaranteed continuity through this whole government dramatization that we’re living through. And so that’s quite useful because for each tech platform, you can see the degree that they’re playing ball, that they’re being pulled in this direction on censorship. And censorship is where it starts. I mean, if you look at China, you’ll see that you end up with a type of pre-crime. So what happens is folks who don’t play along with the narrative, they get persecuted—and not in a case-by-case basis—they get algorithmically persecuted, right? So they’ve systemized it, they’ve automated it, they’ve turned it into a product for statecraft. So it’s just a matter of like looking at each platform and knowing when the ship has sailed on it with doing a cost-benefit analysis and understanding, Are you getting enough out of it to warrant the cost? And so like a Google, I would submit that you’re not getting enough out of Gmail to warrant the cost—move to Protonmail. It doesn’t fix e-mail, but at least you’re not feeding corporate surveillance. Your iPhone, like, yeah, it’s nice. It’s really pristine, but like Graphene OS is fairly good. So is Calyx. Like, you’d be surprised. And you’re not going to have a vaccine passport show up on your phone. So that’s not a bad idea. Like Facebook, the ship is probably sailed on that, right? Like you brought—a lot of people’s families and friends have moved to private chat rooms—that is a popular medium. You could do it—you could move your boomer parents and you could move your grandparents to chat rooms. I’ve seen it done. It’s really nice. You send pictures. Some people say it like eliminates a lot of the gossiping and stuff. People feel relief when they move to the chat model as opposed to Facebook. So you really can do it. You can make a Signal room, like it’s possible. You can help your friends and family who care about this stuff, move down the risk gradient. And also there’s something to be said about Bitcoin here, which is: a lot of folks give me pressure because I’ve been talking about like get on zero lately, this idea that I’ve been experimenting with—oh man, what if I could stop living in fiat in my checking account, right? Beause I’ve done the 99% already, all my retirement and savings, like everything is done. It’s self-custody that I’m like, Okay, check. But I’m still living in a fiat account. I still have dollars in a bank account. And because I’ve retired early, I still have a very long runway just sitting in dollars. And I’m like, Man, I really want to invest that. I just need it to be able to pay bills. And so I think a lot of plebs are right up at the 99% mark. And I’m like, Well, what do I do now? And so I’ve been playing with this idea of, Is there anything that will let me just live on Bitcoin, right? Hold my checking account in Bitcoin, get it out of dollars, hold it there permanently. Give me the ability to direct deposit directly, convert it automatically to Bitcoin, give me a debit card. When I spend it, you’ll convert it to dollars transparently—I don’t have to think about it. So at spend time, give me a billpay, give me wire transfers, give me all the features I need to plug into the fiat world—all the banking features—but let me hold permanently in Bitcoin. So I could have $0 and 0 cents, permanently. I can actually leave the dollar system in that way. And it’s still early, but I found a one company out of Austin, Texas, LVL, lvl.co, and they’re a quirky company, but they did this, they had this banking model and they have Bitcoin and a couple shitcoins, and I started talking with them and saying like, Hey, I think where the whole Bitcoin space is, is like, this is a problem that’s going to get turned into like a hair on fire problem. As we get closer and closer to the monetary system collapsing, people are going to need to answer, what do they do with their checking account? What do you do? And I realized I wanted to pay that pain down ahead of time. Like, I want to get out of the dollar years before they say, Okay, we’re doing bail-ins or whatever form of confiscation that might crop up, or that, Okay, you need to move to the CBDC. Whatever it is, I want to be out many, many months, years if I can, out of the system and already gone through the pain of adjusting my lifestyle to live on Bitcoin in the Bitcoin standard now. And so LVL, I can’t promise anything, but I’m cautiously optimistic. So I started chatting with them for a couple weeks, gave them a hard time about shitcoins, and started talking about the idea of get on zero, like that this probably is going to be important in 2022. And so it looks like they’re going to go Bitcoin-only. And the idea’s real simple. It’s like, give people a Bitcoin-native bank, let them live in Bitcoin. Now of course you could say—Holy Shit Laser, if you’re living month to month, that’s pretty scary. Because what if you get rid of your checking account and you ride down the Bitcoin bear, that could really hurt. And yeah, it could. I mean, if you’re in a place where you’re listening to this and you’re like living paycheck to paycheck, probably your first order of business is not getting a few years runway in Bitcoin terms. So that something like this makes sense, because the math with Bitcoin seems to be, you could go through paying for up to two years, but after two years, generally speaking you’re very grateful in whatever position you take across your portfolio.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Being honest, that would be my main criticism of the idea, right? I think it’s one of those things where—of course everyone’s situation is different—you might have loans, you might have other aspects of it. People might not be fully retired. For those people who are still working, it might make sense for them to keep a small cash buffer just in case of a dip or prolonged bear cycle, because you could end up with less sats in that scenario. And that could be an issue. So I think it really does depend on each individual and whether they are 99% in Bitcoin or 100% in Bitcoin, like I think that’s—.
Laserhodl:
Yeah, like the last 1% is harder than the first 99%, to be honest. And there’s things to be serious about, like doing napkin math. What I realized was, Okay, for me, I wouldn’t do this unless I readily kept two years runway in my checking. I already did that. So I knew that like, okay, I could be like pretty bruised for a while. But then as long as I live this way and I funnel new funds in this way, the value to me of living on a Bitcoin standard now—and plus the napkin math showed me that after two years, it would be really silly not to do it. So that was my basic synopsis. But the thing that was really compelling for me is as we head into reset, there’s an inflection point. There’s an inflection point where you look at other countries who have lost their reserve currency, or have gone through hyperinflation where it seemed okay to hold that currency for weeks at a time in between paychecks. But they got to a place where you wouldn’t want to hold that currency for days or hours.
Stephan Livera:
Of course, of course. That’s what happens in the later stages of inflation, right? It happened in Zimbabwe. It happened in various places. So I think for me, I see it more like you’ve got to think also about like the value of your time and effort and energy, and where’s the best place to spend it. And for me, going from 99% to 100%, I mean, it’s like, I’ve got other areas that I need to focus on. And there are other reasons. But I mean, look, I think I understand the reasoning why, I just would be cautious about the bear cycle risk of literally ending up with less sats. And also I think that my scenario is a bit different from yours because I’m still working, I’m still earning. So some of my income is in fiat and some of it is in Bitcoin. And so I just have to sort of manage that in terms of what my upcoming fiat obligations are and things like that. And so that’s my situation.
Laserhodl:
Really clear, what Stephan’s saying, is like, quite literally, let’s say you have a mortgage and Bitcoin starts going down and your value is stored in Bitcoin. Your mortgage is getting more expensive because the amount of sats that you have to—relative to where you store your value—because the amount of sats that you have to exchange for dollars automatically when you pay it, that goes up. And so that’s true. The other thing to note is that LVL is not like some cypherpunk, no-KYC thing, right? So every time you’re going back and forth between Bitcoin and dollars, even though they don’t charge any fee and I think they’re the first ones that truly don’t have a spread, that’s still taxable technically. So yes, you only pay taxes when you make a profit in fiat terms, but it’s still taxable. And I know what LVL does, they’ll just give you an automatic form. You upload to like TurboTax or hand to your accountant. So it’s straight for you. Like, for example, I had a hundred thousand dollars in checking and I’ve had it for the whole year, and let’s say it went to a million dollars. Well, and I’ve spent half of it, right? Well, of course the government wants their pound of flesh. You get your automatic form, you say, Oh man, I got to pay them their 30% because it grew in dollar terms. And, and so that’s another element to consider, and of course that also implies that they are custodying your sats, right? You’re not holding that in cold storage. So it truly is this 1% use case where you’ve done everything else. You’ve done everything else. And you’re like, okay, how do I solve this issue of, I don’t want to live in the old banking system—I want to live in the Bitcoin system. And even with your salary, like the napkin math is fairly compelling in terms of if you can get through the first couple years, the napkin math is very compelling. I mean, when I looked at mine, I saw that like, if I had been doing this four years ago it looks like I’ve left nearly half a million dollars on the table for not doing this. But no worries, this didn’t exist four years ago. You couldn’t have done this four years ago.
Stephan Livera:
And not everyone’s in America, right?
Laserhodl:
Right. And not everyone lives in the US. And the other thing I would say, if you’re going to put 1% of your purchasing power of your household into something like this, and you’re going to have accounting stuff, then you should hedge that because there’s a real chance that the state will go pathological. And you roll the dice and you’re in the wrong place and you end up with a pathological state. And so you should hedge that with some type of mechanism for rebalancing your portfolio to have a smart amount of no-KYC Bitcoin. And one way that I’ve been looking at that is you have Steve Barbour coming out with this black box that makes home mining look like a fun project. It takes care of the worst parts of it like the noise and making it firesafe. It’s not crazy to think—you know, you run a node today—it’s not crazy to imagine outside next to your AC, you have a black box with a couple miners, and you can use that to rebalance your stack. So if let’s say you’ve gone into Bitcoin quickly, because the light bulb came on. You’re like, Oh man. So I moved everything quickly. That’s all KYC. Let’s say you’re not comfortable with that. You’re like, My state could go completely pathological. And my family, my household doesn’t have a plan for that. You could set something like this up and you could basically rebalance to the allocation that makes you feel comfortable, right? Like, Okay, we want a 10% allocation within our household of electric sats, sats that we got through our electric—.
Stephan Livera:
Non-KYC coins. Yeah. I do think you can exist in two worlds. You can have one foot in both worlds, right? You can have some KYC coins and some non-KYC coins. And so that’s a balance that every individual has to find. And so I think these are a bunch of interesting thoughts, tools, ideas that can be used to fight this battle. And I do think we should be overall hopeful long term. I think we are optimistic long term that things are going to get better. At least for those people who are doing it intelligently and stacking sats and diligently looking at ways to improve their sovereignty, and to make themselves more difficult to tyrannize. So I guess if we had to close out, do you have any thoughts there for people out there? Why they should be optimistic as you said?
Laserhodl:
Well I’m extremely optimistic and come white-pilled. I try and share what I’m doing with my household to give you a framework for how I’m thinking about it, how I’m navigating it. Hopefully you can apply that to your own personal circumstances and find a path that makes you feel like you’re in control that you’re taking charge. I do think that the world is very large. It’s very easy to make yourself a very expensive to tyranny to where the same type of asymmetric defense that Bitcoin provides to your money, you could provide that to other parts of your life. It’s possible. It’s right there. You could do it. I do think that the worst of this clown world will probably peak in 2025. I think that they’re aiming to relaunch society around 2030 with the social scoring technocracy, but I think what happens is because there’s so much synchronicity and you have basically like over a hundred countries trying to coordinate together to try and follow this game plan on the great reset—they’re all in. They have a prisoner’s dilemma where they know that they can’t fully trust each other. Only one person has to defect and they’ll be essentially on the bad end of the deal. And so with Bitcoin hanging out on the sidelines, it really puts a wrench in doing something like this. So what I’m looking for is some more countries in LATAM to defect from this vaccine imperialism, this sort of central banking colonization. And so I’m expecting to see others join El Salvador. I want to see a defector in Europe. I want to see Africa starting to say, No, we’re saying we’re pushing back against this. We won’t be colonized by the west. We won’t be colonized by this agenda. And I hope they start clinging to Bitcoin. And I think we will see that—the game theory of Bitcoin is extremely strong. We’ve been watching it play out. They’re not immune from incentives either. Right? So I think what happens is we continue to see these four year cycles all the way through the super cycle. I think the floor is probably something like a hundred thousand in the next call it eight months. The floor—I don’t know much about ceilings. It’s easier to look and make an educated guess about floors. And then four years after that, you’ll probably be at like add a zero, like a million, and then like a 10 million, it’ll probably accelerate. The adoption curve will get steeper even on the log curve as countries race to not miss out. And so I think what will happen is countries will ultimately act in their own best interests. They’ll break away from this synchronicity, they’ll stack Bitcoin. I think they are stacking Bitcoin covertly now. It feels like the great reset’s falling apart right now. And I think we’ll see Bitcoin essentially a supercycle in 2030, 2031. To me it’s almost, predetermined. I mean, you zoom out, what are the chances that you have this collectivism that’s threatening to swallow the individual completely. And then you have Bitcoin that’s aiming directly at it, perfectly timed to when they want to relaunch society into this new system. So for me, I’m thrilled, I’m psyched. I think plebs should be too. There’s no reason to be paralyzed by fear, stuck in a holding loop. You can simply opt out of this and you should look at all this hardship as opportunity to build yourself up and become the type of hard men that are able to leave this soft era behind. And so with Bitcoin, in our satchel and street smarts about where we are physically and digitally, I think we can do it.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah that was fantastic, Laser. I really I agree with a lot of what you’re saying there. I think they need tax revenue and if more and more Bitcoin people are able to essentially take that away from them, then essentially they won’t be able to sustain this nonsense and sustain the nightmare. And so I think it might look bad right now, but I think if you confidently take steps now, as Bitcoin is, you can definitely achieve a lot more freedom for yourself. And I think the long term benefits are definitely going to be there for us. So certainly really enjoyed chatting with you. I think you’ve got a lot of great insights around what’s going on with the great reset and especially how can Bitcoiners react, respond, and fight back in their own way. For anyone who wants to find you online, what’s the best place to find you?
Laserhodl:
You can get me on Twitter, @laserhodl. Yeah. I’m pretty much on there. And I would say it’s much more enjoyable to work on your household. Watch this thing from the sidelines—just get to the sidelines. This whole thing doesn’t need your help collapsing. It’s going to implode on itself. Just get orderly, move you and your loved ones out of the blast radius. I think it’s as simple as that: focus on Bitcoin, focus on realizing the Bitcoin era. They’ve got it. They don’t need help failing at the great reset.
Stephan Livera:
Fantastic. Thanks Laser.
Laserhodl:
All right, bud.