AI Will Build Anything, That’s Why You Need Bitcoin | Jesse Tevelow | BFM232 - podcast episode cover

AI Will Build Anything, That’s Why You Need Bitcoin | Jesse Tevelow | BFM232

Feb 16, 202641 minEp. 232
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Episode description

Jesse Tevelow is an entrepreneur and the best-selling author of The Connection Algorithm and Life After Bitcoin. He explores the intersection of high-performance living, sovereign technology, and the civilizational shift toward a post-fiat "Creation Age."

https://x.com/jtevelowhttps://mylaunchteam.com/life-after-bitcoin


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🕑 TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - The Convergence of AI and Bitcoin

02:03 - Centralization vs. Decentralization

04:57 - AI as a Mirror

07:39 - The AI Alignment Problem

08:53 - Bitcoin as Economic Finality

10:58 - The Birth of Absolute Scarcity

13:11 - Creative Democratization Through AI

15:04 - Bitcoin as a Balancing Force

17:47 - The Future of Decentralized Systems

25:17 - Bitcoin’s Value and Divisibility

26:35 - The Energy Behind Bitcoin

28:00 - Bitcoin as a Measuring Stick

28:58 - The Future of Work and Creativity

32:27 - Curiosity as the Engine of Innovation

33:28 - Imagining a World of Abundance

34:11 - Empowering the Next Generation

37:33 - Core Beliefs and Personal Advice


ℹ️ EPISODE SUMMARY

Bram Kanstein and Jesse Tevelow discuss why AI and Bitcoin land as a civilizational fork in the road. They confront centralized AI black boxes, fiat money, and the Cantillon effect as engines for inequality. Jesse argues Bitcoin is the anchor of truth and absolute scarcity that can keep autonomous AI aligned. They connect proof of work to the physical world, like gravity for Icarus’ wings. The conversation ends on sovereignty, the meaning crisis, and a possible new Renaissance.


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Transcript

The Convergence of AI and Bitcoin

What if we are approaching A civilizational fork in the road, where one path leads to algorithmic control and the other leads to a second renaissance? I'm joined by Jesse Tevolo, an entrepreneur and best selling author who is sounding the alarm on this critical juncture.

Together, we unpack his thesis on why AI needs Bitcoin as a physical anchor to keep machine intelligence aligned with human truth and stick around to hear why Jesse believes Bitcoin is our best defense in a world where AI makes it impossible to know what's real and the one human skill that becomes more valuable when machines can do everything else. This was a mind blowing conversation, and I hope you find it valuable too. Now let's dive in.

Jesse Tavello, welcome to Bitcoin for Millennials. Thanks for having me Ram. I really appreciate it. Great to be spending some time with you today. All right, so you say AI is a mirror. Now I've used the description Bitcoin is a mirror a lot. I think in a similar way because you talk about it that you know that it, that it reflects our our values and it's kind of like how, how do we apply this, right? Like how do we instruct it? How, what do we use it for?

And so if our current money system is built on debt, fake value, right? People say nominal growth, when the numbers go up, it's actual growth, right? But it's not. And it's all focused on short term gains instead of long term building. It is inevitable, right? That like a centralized force controls that. How do you feel about that with

AI? Basically, can can it, should it also be as free as Bitcoin and decentralized or is there a real chance that would become centralized and like a tool for manipulation, surveillance, etcetera? That's a positive question to start. Well, you also went right to the, you went right to the meet, you went right to the middle. So, you know, this is I think maybe arguably the sort of the biggest question of our of our time is sort of like, you know, how do we continue to move

Centralization vs. Decentralization

forward seeing how centralization has really become a big problem in my mind? I mean, I think we basically had this massive experiment that we just did over the last call it quarter century called globalization, right? We made the US dollar the global reserve currency. We exported everything. We stopped making things at home. We did everything based off of, you know, the cheapest production cost wherever we could get that, whether it was China or Taiwan or wherever.

And you can just see that, you know, the government, the centralized systems that we have here in the United States, they are working off of a debt based system called the US dollar. It's Fiat money, which I go into a lot of detail about this and some of my other articles, some of the other writings that I've

done. But you know, if you really study money like I have for the past several years now, you know, I went to school for economics and sociology at Michigan, but they don't actually teach you this stuff at school. And I think over the last five years really from from let's say COVID to now here we are at the beginning of 2026, I think the world's waking up. You know, I think the average person is finally starting to understand kind of how money works, what money is.

And I think Bitcoin is honestly the reason for that combined with the deterioration of the US dollar and regular paper money. I like to call it toilet paper because that's really all it is. It's not really, it doesn't really have any value. The only reason the US dollar has value is because we, we say it does. And it's hard for people to understand that. And it almost sounds ridiculous, but I, I tend to believe that centralized systems are just,

it's a pyramid. The power is going to constantly flow to the top. If you're familiar with money, you know the Cantalon effect. I'll just define that for your listeners and the people that are listening. It basically means the people that are closest to the creation of the money are going to get the money first.

It's not rocket science. If you know that you have a printer and you can print money and you're sitting there and you're the Fed, the people that are friends and close, close by to the Fed, whether it's the US government, big institutions, banks, they get the money 1st. And then once it flows down, the more and more money that's printed, the prices have to go up. That's basic economic supply and demand. You dilute the currency, everything, the prices are going to rise.

And that's kind of the situation that we find ourselves in. It's led to AK shaped economy, right? We have the haves, we have the have nots. It's getting worse and worse. Middle class is getting hollowed out back to your sort of main question, you know you said you

think that Bitcoin is a mirror. I agree with that Bitcoin I we can talk about that for days from the the spiritual side of Bitcoin, how it changes your mindset, how it really is just a reflection of us and what we do AI is the same thing and people in from my from where I sit from what I see and I talked to lots of entrepreneurs I've been working with startups for over 20 years. I see a lot of the most cutting

AI as a Mirror

edge stuff. And then I can also see what the general public is doing. And I think a lot of folks are scared, you know, of AI right now for good reason, because it kind of feels like its own thing. And we can get into this brand. But I call it, it's almost like the emergence of another species. You know, I think a lot of people would agree with me on that. We're sort of marching toward, you know, can the AI do things without us? Can they become autonomous, completely autonomous?

And it's looking, it's looking like that's going to be happening relatively soon. We already have Claude bot and open open Claw and all these people building these agentic AI systems. So again, back to your question, AI is going to tend toward becoming centralized. That's just the nature of humanity. We tend to have power structures. The power flows up to the to the to the top of the pyramid. The people at the top of the pyramid have the most power.

They want to keep the power, so they maintain that structure. And you see that happening right now, whether we like it or not with companies like open AI, Sam, you know, we got Sam Altman, we got Elon building X AI, we've got, those are probably the two, in my mind, the two biggest players. And, and look, I love Elon. I'm personally not as fond of, of, of Sam Altman. I, I don't really, you know, I don't know either of them, but I tend to sort of like the vision

that Elon has. I use both products, right. But at the end of the day, like they're both centralized. And so we say, I said, you know, you mentioned Bitcoin as a mirror. AI is also a mirror in the sense that Sam Altman and his team, Elon Musk and their team, they're building systems in a closed box. We don't know what they're building. We can't see what their algos are doing. We don't know what their AI and it's theirs. It's not ours. It's their AI.

So we don't know what their AI is operating from. And that's neither a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a statement. That's just the truth. And so I believe we need to go to a decentralized AI type of system that I hope is going to happen organically. There's already other lots and lots of companies working on different AI tools. So Jack Dorsey is a guy that he

talks about this. He kind of thinks of this, I think similar to how I do, which is that we should be able to kind of choose, we should choose, be able to choose our AI. We should be able to choose which model we want to run off of. And there should be lots and lots and lots of models. Because if we just have one singular AI, that gets very scary, that type of centralized power. And remember, a lot of people think of whatever an AI says now is the truth. That is not accurate.

We're feeding the AI inputs. The the AI is giving us outputs

The AI Alignment Problem

based on our inputs. That's incredibly important. So we need to feed the system. We need to feed it in a decentralized way and we have to have lots of different AIS giving lots of different outputs through different algorithms. So I see a decentralized AI future as the only like good

solution. I think any kind of centralized control, whether it's AI, centralized control of Bitcoin or anything else right now, Fiat is centrally controlled, usually leads to corruption and inequality and and big problems. When it comes to holding Bitcoin securely, Peace of Mind starts with architecture. On Ramps multi institution custody model distributes control access across three independent regulated key holders in a two of three multi

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Bitcoin as Economic Finality

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for that. Over 70,000 people TuneIn regularly. But I've also seen that about 60% of you still haven't subscribed yet. So if you enjoy what I'm doing, if you think the content is valuable, I want to ask you to subscribe on YouTube. And please like any video that you find value in. This really helps me to fuel the YouTube algorithm and also to reach more people with the message on Bitcoin. I want to thank you for your support.

So let's continue. Like, you know, this pendulum swing idea, I feel like, you know that eventually it's all about harmony, but we go up and down, right? And at some point we're at an inflection point in the middle and then, you know, it either continues up, up or down and you have this idea of this pendulum swing. And I do feel like the pendulum swing has gone very far to the centralization side. And the last few weeks have felt, I don't know, in interesting.

I think there's a lot of chaos. Like there's a thing, there's a lot of stuff going on. There's like not a lot of direction. I think we are in this final phase towards centralization and, and the people that support centralization are doing everything to protect what they've gathered, right or what they control. And in between comes AI within, within all this chaos.

So I also think that AI and I agree with you, I don't, I don't think we only should, but I think it's going to happen because just the whole concept of decentralization with. Well, we started decentralized. We started in tribes. If you go back far enough, we were all spread out, all decentralized. No one was using the same stuff. And we've gone extreme centralization.

The Birth of Absolute Scarcity

Now again, back to globalization really with the US dollar as that core sort of centralizing force that goes beyond borders because it's the world reserve currency and that type of centralization. You can see the effects. You can see the effects. You mentioned the 4th turning. I fully, you know, I'm one of the people in the industry that is sort of banging on that drum and saying we are absolutely in

a fourth turning. And you know, that's debatable what that term means or how you define it. But in my mind, it's very clear to me that we're in sort of that fourth quarter, you know, the last quarter of the game and the game is about to change. And when you talk about all the chaos, to me that's that's a signal of the fourth turning. When you have all this chaos, you realize the system is sort of starting to break. It's starting to break and

something else has to emerge. And to me, those two things, which is what, you know, my book, my, my new book's about and also these articles is sort of like the emergence of Bitcoin

and AI and those two together. And I believe that can bring us into that, that with that fork in the road, I think that can take us from this sort of 4th turning that has been brought on by extreme centralization and unhealthy globalized centralization from the US dollar and the powers and the power structures of other countries back to a more decentralized reality where we can kind of operate sort of without the Big Brother. And the Big Brother is trying

everything it can. All the CBDC's that are coming out in Europe, the the genius act, the switch from, you know, over from analog money to stable coins. These are all efforts to sort of maintain that central control, but I believe the forces of Bitcoin and AI are going to allow us to to settle somewhere far more decentralized than we've had. Just the whole idea that you can just use AI to infinitely replicate and reverse engineer any other well, especially digital product or service or

tech that you come across. Today I saw a guy I know from my country, he made like a cursor for hardware. So he just said like, this is what I want to build with hardware. Then it searches on the Internet for all the components he has to buy, which are stupid cheap by

Creative Democratization Through AI

the way. And then he says, OK, I have all the components. And then, you know, the AI says, you know, wire this with this thing and then the display there and whatnot. And then, oh, here's the code, copy it on your Raspberry Pi or whatever and boom, it, it worked. And that's just a random dude that has never touched hardware in his life before he did this right? So stuff like that is already

happening today. And I think it it, it, it touches people somewhere, you know, in their creative mind, the fact that productivity is basically democratized now and it's all about applying your, your creativity basically. And so I think that's an underestimated part of this technology that it has a central roll out. But eventually people will demand and and clearly see that their ideas shouldn't be captured in this black box that they're that they connected their Visa card to, right?

Does that make sense? Ohh, yeah, absolutely. I track exactly with what you you're saying and I agree with you. I would say just to add on to that point, you know, I think we'll see a continued fragmentation of just sort of products, services and markets in general because of what you just said, because any, anyone now can basically go and build something. You don't have to know how to be a coder. You don't have to go to school to become an engineer

programmer. We've basically now gotten to the place where people are just starting to build their own products and services. And in a, in a way, you can see how that leads into a world of decentralization right where now you don't need to use the big, you know, service being provided by the multibillion dollar company. And you don't need to pay that company, you know, $100 a month or $1000 a year for the software.

You just go build it. You go with your open claw and you spin up your, your, you know, the, the hardware that you need and you build it relatively cheaply. And now you have it. So I think it's, we're entering a completely different world. You know, I come from an entrepreneurial background where I love to build.

Bitcoin as a Balancing Force

And that was like such a small percentage of the population. And it's like now all the sudden, everyone can be a builder, everyone can create, you know, which is I think a good thing. I think it's a good thing. You also mentioned the alignment problem, right, which is the the fear that AI will optimize for a goal, like the paper clip production problem. I love that you mentioned that because I read that once and it scared me, you know?

So it is, it's. Yeah. So it's about how AI optimizes for a goal until it consumes the planet, basically. So I'll, I'll, I have the definition. I'll read it and then ask you the question. It says the paper clip maximizer is a fault experiment where an AI is told to make as many paper clips as possible because it has no moral context and infinite speed. It eventually turns the entire planet, including humans, into paper clips to meet its its goal. It sounds absurd, right?

But it ties back to what you just said. Like if we, if we don't use this properly, if you don't prompt it properly, if you, if you're not clear about the input that you're, that you're giving it, you're, you're basically getting the output that you want. If you, if you didn't realize what you actually wanted. I, I, I think, right. So I, I think AI really demands this conscious use. And as we know, not everyone is, is conscious at the, at the same

level, right? So there will be stuff that that goes wrong. I think in article you argue Bitcoin fixes this alignment problem by it can introduce an economic finality. Yes, that. So there's so much here that we can talk about in many different offshoots, but let me just tackle, try to tackle a few of the, the things you mentioned. First, to clarify the alignment problem, What what I mean by that is back to how we described AI as a mirror, right? AI is built based off of and and

operates based off of inputs. And those inputs come from humans and we're at the place now, which is the scary part to where after you have enough inputs into the, into the system and you've got you, you sort of have the infrastructure built out far enough those the AI can start to then become autonomous, meaning it can go do stuff, it can go do tasks, you know, without the human. So it starts with the inputs

that builds the model. So that kind of like creates the, the vehicle, if you will, and then the vehicle can go drive around on its own eventually. And that's sort of where we're at right now. The alignment problem is, is that is sort of the space in between. Like how did the inputs affect

The Future of Decentralized Systems

the outputs of what these autonomous, this new species is going to be doing without us, right? Without us looking, without us watching, without us paying attention. And if our alignment, meaning the inputs are not, let's say ethical, moral, there's no safeguards, there's no guardrails. If that's not there, then our alignment is going to be off.

And if our alignment is off and you have a machine or machines that are now autonomous that are doing things by themselves, we could run into some very, very bad situations. And that's the paper clip example is like a fun. It's like a fun but scary actual real possible example to where I'll repeat it back is you tell the AII want you to go, you know, produce paper clips because I'm going to, I don't know, I want to go start a paper clip company and sell paper

clips, whatever. And I just say go, go, go produce, let's go make as many paper clips as you can make. And if the AI has no guardrails, then theoretically, if that AI is optimized, it would turn literally everything into a paper clip and you can just sort of play out the story to it sounds ridiculous at first, but if you think about it, just imagine like some AI program and it's it's figuring out how to do things. It's starting to make some calls. It's you know, you see this on

open claw already. So this stuff is already happening. You know, Alex Finn just put out a post on X, you know, where his his clawed bots like calling him, you know, it's like calling that that was wild. You know, it's Henry. I mean, it's not that wild to me, me personally, because I know how this tech works. Like it's not that crazy. But the point is, you know, he set the inputs and he's let it go and now the robot's doing stuff and the robot side of the column.

So imagine, you know, that the robot's calling, you know, metal distributors that the product, you know, and figuring out how to sort of get get the materials to create paper clips at a cheap rate. It figures out how to become profitable doing that. And then it just starts consuming everything and turning everything into paper clips.

And if it's good at it, it will then execute that and it won't stop because it thinks the AI thinks it's doing its job and it and it actually is based on the inputs. But clearly me, the guy that wants a paper clip company, I don't want you to be turned into a paper clip. I don't want the entire world to be turned into paper clips, right. So you get into this very difficult situation and. You know, people like Graham a lot, a lot of folks right now are worried about jobs, right?

Like, what are we going to do once the AI takes over? And I think that this is actually going to be one of the biggest jobs is that we are going to have to have humans that are just watching for these alignment problems. We, we have to, there's no other solution because we're the, we're the humans. Like there has to be at least one of us watching, right? I hope more than one.

So I think there's going to be lots of us that are working on this alignment problem, which is essentially just a way of saying monitoring. Like we just need to monitor the ethics and the morals and the guardrails of these inputs and how the outputs are affected by those inputs. So, so, yeah, I mean, I think that so Bitcoin back to that point is sort of the anchor, right?

And that is that is my, my argument really for my entire book life after Bitcoin, which is sort of this like theoretical version of the future that I think if we get it right, things will go very well. And to me that that solution is Bitcoin as the anchor for AI. And I think of AI as the engine and I think of Bitcoin as the guardrails. So AI is an engine with infinite productivity, right? It doesn't sleep, it doesn't forget, it doesn't need to eat, it doesn't need a bathroom break.

It can go as fast as we want it to go, but there's such a thing as too fast. I'm an entrepreneur. I love moving fast, but there is such a thing as too fast. And Bitcoin is the only thing that I that I believe can wrangle that speed of AII. Don't think it's regulation way too slow. I don't think it's any kind of government or institutional interaction Too slow. We need something programmatic. We need something based on math. We need something based on physics, and that's Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is basically unchangeable. It's a set of rules, it's a set of parameters. It's baked into the into the Bitcoin code. It's open source and we know how that that system works. So if you imagine, again, let's go back to the example of the paper clips. Let's say we have all these AIS running around. They're all doing different things. Some are creating paper clips, some are building buildings and robots that are going to go to the moon and they're doing all these things.

If they're all transacting in different currencies, all these different tokens, all this different stuff, they're making up their own currencies. They're speaking in languages we don't know. The robots, we're we're fucked. If that happens, we're fucked. Like period. So you heard the jabber talk. Did you hear the jabber talk? It says like, should we should we should we switch to. I don't know. It has a, it has a name. It's not jabber talk. Maybe it's jabber talk.

I don't know. And it's like 3 AIS on speech mode, 3 fonts next to each other. And once we switch to this and this and this and they're like, yeah, yeah. And then it goes like, and it goes like, and you have no clue. You, you don't know. Well, it's, it's known what they're using, right. But when you're just looking at it like you and I would have. No, no. Right, right. What they would actually be? Right, This is this is the this is the danger. So we can't have the robots

operating on different rails. Do we all need to be on the same rails? And so that Bitcoin rail is to me, you know, I see Bitcoin as truth. I see it as the only immutable truth system that has ever existed. I see it in a what it as a once in a species event. You know, I, I compare Bitcoin or I sort of stack it up with other things like protocols like fire language, language itself, you know, the, the printing

press, the Internet, right? These are things that are just structurally they're just protocols. And if humans and AI both operate on that singular Bitcoin protocol, then I believe we will go into the next golden age. And I think economies of scale will start to happen. I think productivity and, and cost will start to trend to 0. So I, I follow the same thought theories as Jeff Booth, right, in terms of deflationary economies.

And so it, but it's all predicated on the AIS using Bitcoin. That's the only way that this works. All the spiritual teachers talk about the golden middle way, right? And that's what the story of Icarus is also about. Like he, he got wings, right? He flew too close to the sun, he fell down. But the the the moral of the story, that that's how I understand it, is not about the hubris, right? It's about where you need to stay. Like the hubris is the same.

Yeah, exactly. The hubris is the same as the not even trying, but it's a different intensity. So it should it should be in the middle. Like you should try, but you shouldn't show too much hubris. All you know you'll touch the sun, and you and you fall. OK, the AI is the wings, very Icarus. Bitcoin is gravity. Exactly. Yes, yes, that's perfect. Yeah. And it's also. Yeah, It's it's literally to keep you in check. It's to keep you. Keep you it's. The balancing force.

Bitcoin is the balancing force I talk about.

Bitcoin's Value and Divisibility

I love that gravity. I talk about Bitcoin as the black hole that consumes everything. It it the whole universe, our entire everything we know and understand. It's all counter balances. We we're on a spinning rust. It's floating in nothingness. How does that happen? It's because there's forces at play that is keeping everything in the balance. Bitcoin is that counterbalance to AI. When we talk about scarcity and abundance, we're talking about them in sort of different contexts.

And we're all, and it also depends. So it depends on the context, OK. And, and how you talk about these things. And I want to just make a quick example and a point. So when you talk about Bitcoin and you talk about absolute scarcity, we're talking about 21 million tokens. We're talking about the fact that that can't be changed, that it can't be diluted, OK? A lot of the problems, in fact, I would say probably the core problem of all other money is that it's diluted. It becomes diluted.

We just make more of stuff. We figure out ways we find more gold. We shave, you know, the edges off of coins, we print more paper, whatever it is. And that's just a, that is a natural entropy that is going to happen. It is just a sort of human phenomenon that we've seen in history. We can just be, I can give you example after example. So Satoshi Nakamoto figured out a way to stop that where you

The Energy Behind Bitcoin

can't shave any coins off of Bitcoin, You can't create any new ones. And I'm not going to get into the to the technical details of how that happens, but just just just, if you're listening, follow me and just accept that for a moment. Now here's what you have to understand. Bitcoin is it is, it's not, it's not infinitely divisible, but is highly divisible, right? We can, we can divide it down into the satoshi, right? Which is, I think 9 decimal points, right, decimal places.

So I think, I think, don't quote me on the value of a satoshi right now, but I think it's under a penny. I think once we get over 100 or something, it starts to become maybe like a penny, a satoshi. So I think we're like fractions of a penny per satoshi right now, right?

And I think what's important for people to understand is that as more and more people start adopting Bitcoin, the value of each one of those Satoshi's and each Bitcoin continues to rise because more and more people are coming in and, and, and playing with this is a, this is a, this is economics, This is something you have to study. It's really sort of counterintuitive for people who don't study it. So I encourage everyone to try to just read about economics,

read about supply and demand. But the fact that the, there are 21 million tokens, but that they're divisible and that the value of each one of those units will increase as adoption

Bitcoin as a Measuring Stick

increases. That is the magic. That is the, that is the key here that we have 1 measuring stick. That measuring stick is defined each one of those SAT's, each one of these bitcoins, it's all backed up by energy, which is tangible. Every SAT, every Bitcoin was mined. In order to mine it, there had to be energy expended. And so that, and that energy is measurable. That's real. We can measure that energy. That's the heat that comes out of the computer.

That's the, the, you know how, how much work it takes for us to set up the system and do the stuff. So again, it is very hard for people to wrap their heads around, but like this is the first time that we've actually had any measuring stick. We've never had a measuring stick. Everyone thinks $1.00 is $1.00. That's bullshit. $1.00 is just a piece of paper that you hold in your hand. The purchasing power of that dollar is changing all the time because it's getting debased all

the time. And so, you know, again, it's just sort of this function. If you, once you see it, you

The Future of Work and Creativity

can't Unsee it, which is like why, you know, people talk about the matrix. It's like we can see that value people like me and you, we see people like more and more value flowing into the system. And as more and more value flows into the system, that's number go up. That's number go up. And like every, every time that the that the number goes down, It's just people not understanding how the system works.

You and I know this. So it just becomes this hilarious game where we're like watching the value flow in. Why? Aren't a Bitcoin? They're so crazy. Watching people trade out like you're trading. Whenever you trade out of Bitcoin, you're trading real money, real energy, actual tangible value for something fake. A fake dollar, a fake stock. Bitcoin is not an asset. It is so much more than an asset. It has some coins that we that we tie a dollar value to and

that's a number go up stat. But I don't care if all the dollars in the world go to nothing, right? That that that argument, it doesn't matter because Bitcoin isn't a single solitary like it's a measuring stick, right? So if all the dollars go away, it's just going to measure something else. It's going to measure. It's going to measure gold, it's going to measure apples, it's

going to measure barrels of oil. It doesn't matter, you know, if if the US dollar disappears, it's not like Bitcoin goes away. And that's just, that's just the fallacy of an American thinking in U.S. dollar terms. It's very hard for us to think outside of dollar terms. But if you, if you start to realize Bitcoin is not like a stock, it's not an asset, it's a

measuring stick. It's a measuring stick for value and it's the sandbox for money, and it's the only real money that's ever existed, then you start to see why it doesn't really matter what the dollar is doing. It doesn't really matter what gold's doing.

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your keys, your coins. If you want to get started, download the app file in my link below or in the description and use code BRUM. That's BR AM at checkout to get 10% of your fees. A huge shout out to Relay for sponsoring the show. Now let's continue. So your book is called Life after Bitcoin. And you mentioned that we can fix the survival problem. We can have hard money, we can have a proper reward for our work. We can basically build anything

with AI, robots, etcetera. But then you talk about demeaning crisis. So humans have always used, we've always used our, our intellect to gain an economic advantage or to, to, to create a certain economic reward, right? But that's going to be gone. I I think you would agree. So diminish what do? People. What do people actually do with our time and with their time? How, how, how do people find purpose again? What is that? Well, what does that look like?

Sure, This is a great question. So this gets into the later stages of my book and my theory, which kind of takes us into what I call the Golden Age. And I draw comparisons to the first Renaissance, which is sort of like the Medici's, the florin. They did a very good job keeping their money hard. They didn't debase it. And this is sort of the Enlightenment escape birth to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment.

Curiosity as the Engine of Innovation

And if you look at that period, what do you see? You see beautiful architecture. You see a proliferation of art. You see, you know, the the buildings that they built back then are still standing, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years later, some of the best art pieces and some of the most beautiful content ever created came out of those periods. Why? Very simple. People could could relax. People could take a breath. We haven't been able to take a breath for hundreds of years.

We don't realize we're in the silent depression right now. We're oppressed. We don't know because we've been living through it through generations and we just think this is how it is. This is not how it has to be. This is the battle for humanity. It's the battle for our energy back. It's the battle for our time back. We're not meant to be hurriedly rushing around, scrambling to try to figure out how to get the next dollar. That is not what we're supposed

to be on this planet doing. We're supposed to be here

Imagining a World of Abundance

thinking, growing, evolving, playing around, messing around, being curious. So I believe what happens is we go to a world where all of the sudden all of these problems start to crumble away, start to fall away. Governments get smaller. The whole globalization, Big Brother government, that whole experiment is over.

We start to go bottom up. We start to build communities from the bottom up. And those communities run on Bitcoin and those communities run on AI and those communities run on whatever you and me and these other entrepreneurs are building. It's a new era. It's a new surge of entrepreneurship and creativity

Empowering the Next Generation

and creation that I think we're just nobody's ready. I'm not ready, you're not ready because we don't know what we don't know. And there's so many entrepreneurs out there that are building right now. You know, I like to imagine a future where, you know, we're taking like, I have a 5 year old, OK, my daughter, she's going to be sick soon. I'm imagining a world where maybe my daughter's hanging out on the moon every now and then.

Maybe she's hanging out on Mars every now and then, you know, maybe she's up there, maybe she's up there for a party. Maybe she's doing a research project up on the moon paid for by her, her mentor or whoever she's working with. Like, I think there's going to be a lot of crazy stuff to where we're just building, creating. We're curious, we're creating art, we're creating new science, we're creating new, new, new ways to explore the, the frontier.

You know, I think curiosity is the key to humanity. And I think curiosity has been completely suppressed and pretty much destroyed and erased from society. If you look around there, there hasn't been a lot of curiosity and creativity over the last 4050, sixty years. Our architecture sucks, our systems suck, everything sucks. The government systems suck. Like it's not very impressive.

And then you look back at the good, the first golden era, at the first Renaissance, I mean, all those cathedrals, all the things they were building and doing. I mean, it's incredible. I want to get back to that. And so I I see a world where I think we just move a lot more toward creativity, creation, invention, science, and just just starting to understand the universe. If we, if we think about everything we talked about as

being this civilizational fork. Also, I think in the, the attitudes of people and especially people that are, are way younger than us that are like at the beginning of their adult life. How, how would you talk to an 18 or 21 year old that that has like a nihilistic idea of the future? Like how can we tell them that they can be architects or actors in everything that is happening here instead of kind of being like spectators or, or, or

bystanders? Well, I am middle-aged at this point and life is goes faster than then you can possibly imagine and I like to think that I have some wisdom. I think I do at this point. However, young people continue to impress me and I don't know if they need much.

Honestly. I think for me, I think my job is to just get out here, do these podcasts, write my stuff, put out sort of my thoughts and I believe the right young people will will pick it up. I think they're already picking it up. I think a lot of them don't even need to pick it up. I'm so impressed by the the generation right now that's, you know, call it like whatever it is. I guess it's is it is it ZI think it's Generation Z, maybe alpha.

I think my daughters alpha. She's a little too young. She's not old enough to do stuff yet. But the people in their teens, the teenagers right now, the people in that are like college age, they, they're, they're

Core Beliefs and Personal Advice

smarter than we are, man. Like they know what's going on. They see the writing on the wall. Like, you know, like, I think a lot, I think fewer folks are going to go to college. You know, I think fewer folks are going to kind of go into the centralized systems. I think fewer young people are going to have any interest in government, going into government jobs going to be like, this is not, this is not for me.

I'm going to go over here and I'm going to work with my AI agent and I'm going to build the next billion multibillion dollar company and it's going to do XYZ. So I'm very hopeful for the builders, the entrepreneurs, the young people, you know, I think every generation is, is just doing the best they can. And I'm no different. So I just implore everybody, myself, you, everybody to just speak truth as much as you possibly can.

See, I'm a truth seeker. So I try to seek out the truth and then I try to voice my opinion on what I believe the truth to be. And truth is a funny thing. Truth is a very funny thing because we're all living our own truth. I see it as almost like a truth is granular. Everyone is living their own reality. And we all try to agree on sort of like what is the base layer of truth?

And that's why I love Bitcoin so much because I think no matter where you are, on what intelligence scale, how old you are, your history, your past, whatever you think, Bitcoin can kind of be that that anchor. But because we're in the fourth turning, there's massive incentive for everybody to just pick this stuff up. Just do the right thing.

Get into Bitcoin, get into AI, start messing around with it, fire up a node, get a get an agent, start start downloading some software building with AI. I think it's going to happen organically. I think that's, that's a great hopeful message. So that's a, that's a good one to end with. But I do want to ask you my last question, and I ask everyone the same question, which is what is a core belief you will never let go of? The best advice is your own advice.

I like that you're the first person who says that. That's that's great. OK, that's an amazing ending. Thanks so much for this talk. Honestly, probably top five conversations for me. I think. I think we went very far and I hope people found it valuable. If you did and you're still listening, let us know in the comments, please. And if you have any other ideas or stuff you maybe want Jesse and me to talk about in the future, let us know. Again, I really enjoyed it.

I want to thank you and. Yeah, yeah. Let's stay in touch, man. The the failing is mutual my friend. Thank you so much. Cheers, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can click here to find more just like it and click here to find all Bitcoin for Millennials podcast episodes. Also, if you want to help me shine a light on the message of Bitcoin, please like this video and subscribe to stay connected. I hope to see you for the next episode. Bye.

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