ALEKS SVETSKI | Sound Money and the Samurai Code: Bitcoin and the Future of Masculinity

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to one of the last episodes of the Renaissance of Men podcast. The clock is ticking down to my big debut. It's been more than nine months worth of work. I'm very excited and I hope you are too. My guest this week is the host of the Wake up podcast and the author of the new book the Bushido of Bitcoin. Please welcome Alex Svetsky. You are the Renaissance. Alright, listen, I get it. Some of you guys arent the biggest fans of my bitcoin podcasts.

But heres why I keep doing them. Bitcoin might be the most important technology today that people dont fully understand. Youll hear about it on CNBC. When bitcoin pumps, that means the price jumps up dramatically. And of course youll hear about it when it dumps too, or when it crashes, which by the way, it does. But then it rises again. Maybe you've heard your friends say things like, bro, you gotta get orange pilled or number go up. Little phrases like that.

But those bro isms are just a way to express a lot of excitement about something really special. There are a lot of reasons that bitcoin has this effect. One is the elegance of Satoshi Nakamoto's solution to a tough problem. There's a beauty to it conceptually. Then there's the global effort happening right now.

From bitcoin mining to infrastructure to storage and next gen transaction systems, thousands of smart men, and yes, many women, are pouring themselves into this work, trying to free America and the world from the grip of the Federal Reserve system. But one of the coolest and yet under acknowledged aspects of bitcoin is the effect it has on men. As men, when we grasp what bitcoin means for who God made us to be, it's transformative.

Now, I need to be careful here, because in the bitcoin community, it's easy for the language to get a little hyperbolic, sometimes even idolatrous. I remember back in 2021 I heard a podcast where a group of bitcoin guys were asking, is bitcoin Jesus? Even back then I was like, alright guys, take it easy. So that's not what I'm saying.

But when a man realizes there's a technology out there that guarantees his hard earned money won't get inflated away or stolen, it changes how you think about things. So hold on, you're telling me I can learn a skill, make money from that skill, put it in an online wallet, and that money will only grow in value, not shrink. The government can't tax or confiscate it, as long as I keep it in that wallet without converting it to dollars.

And no matter how much the Federal Reserve prints, it'll still be there, untouched and never diluted. This is a massive paradigm shift for men who have been trained to think they have to earn a salary that somehow outpaces inflation, something that's basically impossible unless you're a high level investor.

And maybe I'm crazy, but I'm the kind of radical, right wing, christian extremist who wants to live in a world where a father can support his family on one income and trust that the government and its agencies will protect his family's savings. I know crazy. Right now, we don't live in that world anymore, unfortunately. But if we did, it would change the way we think about our lives, in ways our grandfathers took for granted.

So it's worth asking, if we could live in that world, even for a moment, what would happen? How would we as men be different? And that is the power of bitcoin. And that's why I love it and why I still believe that you'll love it, too. Which brings me to my guest this week. His name is Alex Svetsky, and he's been on the podcast before. The last time he was here, we discussed his book, the uncommunist Manifesto, and we had a great conversation that sticks with me today.

But this time, he's back to discuss his newest book, the Bushido of Bitcoin. Bushido was the warrior code of the samurai, focused on men embodying virtue, discipline, and honor. Those are exactly the sorts of things men start thinking about when they dive into bitcoin. Now, I know it might sound crazy, but imagine if you knew that you could get ahead by being honest, working hard, and delivering real value, and the economic system would reward you for that.

How would that change how you see the world? Now, obviously, we're all accountable to the word of God, and hopefully, we're all pursuing truth for its own inherent goodness and not for some external reward. But doesn't it get exhausting when the incentives seem to run the other way? What if that wasn't the case? What if we could all make more money by being honest craftsmen rather than lying superstars like, you know, p. Diddy?

What if, at least when it came to our money, the incentives flowed downhill to virtue, rather than uphill to vice? Well, bitcoin fixes this. And that thought experiment is what inspired Alex to write his new book, which we're about to discuss. And hopefully this podcast will convince just one more person to take a closer look at something I think is pretty cool. I mean, it had better because the bitcoin podcast will keep coming until morale improves.

In this conversation, Alex and I discussed testosterone as an on demand hormone. Justice, mercy, and grace, masculine and feminine virtues in society, the cultural need for a warrior class, the transformative power of beauty, why courage is faith in action, and finally, self control, restraint, and excellence. If you enjoy this podcast, thank you. Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If this is your first time here, welcome.

I release new episodes every week about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family. Also, just a quick note, this podcast is available for advertising and sponsorship. So if you're an advertiser with a high integrity product or service and want to reach thousands of christian men, women, and families every month, please email infoennofmen.com for more details.

People all over the world are tuning into this podcast, and with the rebrand coming soon, I'm planning to expand its reach dramatically with without sacrificing quality. And to all my listeners, I'm deeply honored by your time and attention. Thank you. And if you like me prefer an ad free experience, check out my substack at willspencerpod dot substack.com and become a paid subscriber. You'll get ad free content, both audio and video, every week. Before we dive in, one more quick note.

Alex and I have spoken often, and he's seriously exploring Christianity, but he's still on that road home. So there are a couple swear words in this episode. If you've got kids around, maybe send them off to bed with a good book, and you can tell them that I gave Alex a very hard time for it and told him to slap himself on the wrist with a ruler. And I'm pretty sure he did it. And now, please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the author of the Bushido of Bitcoin, Alex Svetsky.

Alex, welcome back to the podcast. Will. Thank you for having me again, man. It's been a couple of years. I'm glad to be back, man. I really enjoyed the last conversation we had, which I guess was a couple years ago, but you said something before we get into what you're working on now, you actually said something that kind of lives rent free in my head during that podcast. And you said testosterone is an on demand hormone, and I've used that line.

I can't count the number of times trying to explain. Obviously, men's testosterone decline is big in the news right now, and there are all kinds of conspiracy theories, like, and I don't mean that in a disparaging sense. I mean it, like, just kind of floating around and valid in explanations as well.

But when you said that it's like, well, of course, naturally, if testosterone is an on demand hormone, if our body produces it on demand and our civilization demands it less and less, doesn't it stand to reason that completely independent of any other outside interference, of which there's plenty, but even setting that aside, with our increasingly comfortable world, we would need less and less testosterone? So thank you for that insight.

I get a lot of pushback when I tell that to men, by the way. But maybe we can kick that around because I'm sure it feeds into the book you've written. I would love to. And it's funny, I get a lot of pushback on that, too. And an incredible amount of pushback from people that I don't expect pushback from. They're like, oh, yeah, but the seed oils and the plastics and this, and they'll, like, pull out all the other things, which are all valid concerns, as you said. Like, if you, you know, if you.

If you're eating like that and if you're, you know, if you're wearing polyester and all this sort of stuff, I'm sure that has an effect. But as I said back then when we had that conversation, and I maintain that, and I've experienced it myself more and more as I've been training and practicing jiu jitsu. More is like the body has a way of producing it or responding basically to its environment.

And we are living in a world that is optimizing fundamentally for safety, for comfort, for ease, for all of the things that just don't need testosterone. Like, you know, this keyboard here, like, doesn't require testosterone to punch the keys. Like, maybe we need to invent a new keyboard, a high t keyboard, elbow. The keys if you want anything to come out. But seriously, it just doesn't like, testosterone is needed for a particular purpose.

And when you need to protect, when you need to be aggressive, when you need to compete, when you need to push against something. And these are all masculine traits. It's no wonder that the man, the masculine, is the creature in which testosterone is most prevalent. It's for a reason, right? So, yeah, I think I remember you actually cut that clip out from when we first spoke, and that was something that definitely did the rounds quite a bit.

And I've seen other people start to sort of mention it here and there on the twitterverse, etcetera. But, yeah, I think it's such an underappreciated thing and just something that gets pushback from people who want to basically, theory sell their way into explaining everything when, you know, quite often in life, the practical thing is, dude, stand under a barbell or get punched in the face and watch your testosterone go up. You know, like, that's really as simple as it is.

Yeah, I think that there are lots of environmental factors that kind of feed into it. But even if you were to completely purify your diet and your physical environment of all toxins and live out in the jungle and eat entirely naturally grown foods and everything, I still think you would probably go a long way towards reversing the decline.

But without struggle, if you still have a life of ease, you're just naturally not going to become the kind of man who has a body that produces testosterone to meet challenges. And so it seems like such a simple idea that puts the responsibility on the man beyond just like, well, you have to buy the right stuff. Like, no, you have to do the right things as well.

And I think that there are a lot of people, even today, and I think we all have to root this idea out from within ourselves, that it's not just about buying the right stuff or consuming the right things. You have to do as well. And maybe that's the theory cell kind of thing that you were talking about. 100%. In fact, it's going to touch on what I think a large part of the conversation is going to be about today, which is virtue.

And the new book that I wrote that I spent the last couple of years since we spoke, really writing, researching, developing, and all this sort of stuff is a book about virtues. And I like to differentiate between virtues and values, as values are things that you desire, so values are things that you want or a state that you want to experience. Virtues are a behavior.

In fact, I almost think of, like, so etymologically, this is not correct, but I guess energetically, like the spirit of the word virtue means something like principle and behavior, right? Those two things together. So a virtue is something you do in order to achieve that which you value, right? So it's almost like the theory versus the practice, right? So freedom, for example, is not a virtue. Freedom is something you value, but the virtue that delivers freedom is responsibility.

So there's that kind of interplay. So I think, to your point about doing, and I say this many times throughout the book, actually is, look, we can sit here and write and all this sort of stuff, but no civilization, no business, nothing was ever actually built just by reading books. You actually have to go out there and do something about it. And that sort of action element implies risk, implies conflict, implies pressure, implies aggression, implies the need for something like testosterone.

But there's a strong parallel there that, as you were talking, it just hit me. It's like the do versus the want, the produce versus the consume, the act versus the desire, the practice versus the theory cell. It's funny you mentioned virtues, and this is something that I've given a lot of thought to, and I'm glad that you brought it up, because I find it's a conversation that a lot of people don't have, or they have it in this really reductionistic way.

They select, particularly in the masculinity conversation that I came from, they would select for this very small number of virtues, like physical fitness. Right. Or wealth, wealth creation. Right. These are specific virtues, and they would kind of, like, autistically focus in on, like, just one of them. This is. This is how you become a man, with this. With this one virtue. And I had to try and teach people, try and instruct people, like, no virtues live in constellation.

You can't just have a virtue on its own, divorced from any other virtues around. It becomes toxic or can become destructive. But you have to have these virtues aligned in constellation so that you know how to properly orient towards any action. So, for example, if you say that truth is the highest virtue, and the state police or the Gestapo comes to your house and says, like, we're here to kill your firstborn son, do you have a firstborn son? If truth is your highest virtue? You say, yes, I do.

It's like. But we all know how ridiculous that would be, right? So there's other virtues that have to live and that have to live in constellation with that to produce a happy life. But that's not easy. That's a multipolar kind of way of thinking about life. To have all these virtues produce action, thought. Right, responsibility, etcetera. So to pull on that thread further, I think constellation is a great word. I actually haven't thought of it that way.

I've always thought of it as a spider's web, almost, where you've got tension between the different virtues. But constellation is a perfect word here, which is if you look at any of the. The moral or virtue codes throughout history, whether they're or at least the great civilizations, in my opinion. So the christian west, the Japanese, the ancient west, as well, fundamentally, the Greeks, the Romans, all this sort of stuff. There's quite a strong overlap.

And what you find with all of them is this healthy tension. The best one that I usually explain, and this is this washing quite important in japanese bushido. And so, for those who are listening, who don't know what the word bushido means, it means way of the warrior. And what it essentially referred to was the implicit code of conduct or code of virtue or moral code that the samurai would live by in order to be considered a samurai or a man of value, right?

So it wasn't like a written ten commandments, but it was like a code of ethics that was sort of passed down through action and deed. But two of the virtues in the traditional japanese bushido are justice and compassion. And justice is viewed as sort of like the skeleton of the body, right? So justice is like the righteousness. It is the strict line of truth and what is just and what is not. But what was very clear in the way Bushido was kind of.

I don't want to say taught, but, like, embodied and I guess implicitly taught in samurai culture, was you had to temper justice with compassion. Because sometimes, if you, like, a good mental model here is if you build something purely, like, justice oriented, you get something that looks more and more and more like, probably Nazism or extreme fascism, right? It's, like, very hierarchical, and there's no room for error. There's no room for softness. And it becomes extremely brutal.

And the more brutal it becomes, the more brutal it actually becomes. So compassion softens. And this is why men alone don't exist. That you have masculine and you have feminine. Compassion is more of a feminine trait. Justice is a much more masculine trait. And there's, like, a softening, which is coming back to what you said about a constellation, that there is multiple virtues that need to come together in combination. Like another great one is courage tempered by restraint or self control.

You need both. So that's in the japanese context. In the christian context, you had courage tempered with temperance. So you had sort of that balance between the two. And balance is probably the wrong word. I think tension between the two is more important because you never get balance. Balance, I think, is a big scam. What you get is a flow between the different virtues, and you find the appropriate one for the right context.

Like, if the house is burning down, you don't have time for, oh, compassion, let's all be nice to each other and walk out of the door in an orderly fashion. No, the fucking house is burning down. You get the chair, you throw it out the window. You send everybody out. It's time to be a gestapo. You know, in a different context, you might need compassion, right? Like, you're in a courtroom and you have a young person who's got energy and vitality and everything, and he's done the wrong thing.

You might need to, like, justice might say, okay, we should chop his hands off, right? Like, because he stole something. You know, compassion might say, no, there needs to be some level of care given here and an attempt to turn this person around or to correct them. So you need. You need all of these things. And that's where, I mean, you and I are definitely not figuring this out on this call. It's like, we can do it.

Yes. We have been discussing this for millennia, and the hard thing about hard things is that these things are hard, and we just must contend with them as the. The humans that we are. So I'll shut up there for a moment, but I love that point. No, that's great. Can I offer you a christian perspective on some of these issues? Please. So, in Christianity, there's justice and mercy. Mercy is the. Mercy is a word we don't hear very often.

I think it gets reframed in English today as compassion or empathy. But justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. And then you add onto that the concept of grace, which is getting what you don't deserve. And so in a christian context, the justice and mercy, they live in intention. The young man you mentioned, he may be deserving of justice. And in a sin and salvation context, we're all deserving of justice, which is a whole other conversation.

But in an earthly context, this young man may be deserving of justice, but the judge. The judge may choose to give him mercy and that mercy. And I think compassion, empathy as feelings. And I think this is part of the pollution of our language. Once you start making it about a feeling, as opposed to, I'm giving you the gift of mercy, someone receives that gift and they're like, I've just been given the gift of mercy. I'm going to go sit and think about that.

And I think this is a masculine approach to mercy is masculine versus compassion and empathy are more feminine feeling based. Right. So that's why I lean on justice and mercy when our culture doesn't actually need any more compassion or empathy. What it is asking for is mercy. But mercy is a gift. And we want to feel that we're entitled to something, not that we're being. Given as a gift, such a good distinction. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic.

And particularly that distinction we just made there about just the masculine versus feminine energy of what's effectively the genesis of the emotion is similar, but there's a different shadow to it. And mercy is. Yes. Very, very masculine and very absent in the modern world, as you said. I think about. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. No, I think about the. I think about the end of the movie Braveheart. You know, where he's being tortured and what are people crying out?

They're saying mercy. Mercy. Right. They're not saying compassion. Compassion, empathy. Empathy. Right. It's that he could ask for mercy, but he doesn't. He refuses to make a supplication to his inquisitor asking for a gift. He's like, no, I don't want anything from you. Exactly right. Exactly.

So I think this is just the pollution of language that we're kind of dealing with right now, that we're men trying to reestablish a masculine way of living in a world that's completely captured by the feminine. Now, this is really good. So that reminds me of another thread is something I tried to do in this book, which we did somewhat in the original. The uncommon manifesto that Mark Moss and I wrote, I think, which you and I probably did a first.

Maybe that was one of the topics of our first podcast, or we touched on that in some way, but. Mark Musser. No, Mark Moss. Mark Moss. Mark Moss. Okay. I was gonna say, I just interviewed Mark Musser last week, and so I don't know that you guys know each other. Okay, sorry, go ahead. Another one. So he and I, in the beginning of the book, had, like, the definitions of particular words.

So we define things like capital and capitalism and equality and all this sort of stuff, and made important distinctions at the beginning of the book so that the rest of the book, the points that we made were not misunderstood. What I did in this one was even more in depth. So the book, if I may, is like, I break it down into five parts, and each part of the book is essentially a standalone book.

There's the prelude where I go into things like equality and resisting mediocrity and vitality, heroism, the evolution, moral dimension of the universe, all this sort of stuff. Then I go into a history sort of deep dive called origins, where I look at the origins of the samurai, I look at the origins of Bushido, the origins of words like virtue and all this sort of stuff. And then I actually look at the parallels in Christendom, not to a huge extent.

But definitely, I dig into chivalry, I dig into feudalism. I dig into the virtues of chivalry and how they overlap and all this sort of stuff. But then the third part of the book, which is basically, I would say, the spine or the main meat of the book, is the ten virtues which I pulled out. And the virtues that I picked are not virtues that I chose. These are virtues that have been chosen again and again in all successful cultures that have yielded the most successful civilizations.

That's kind of like my marker. You find this set of virtues in Christianity, and the closest overlap, honestly, I found, was Romans, Greeks, and Japanese. That seemed to be the closest overlap to Christianity, and Christianity seemed to blend across both. But the beginning, first two pages of each virtue, I go into the etymology of the words.

So the etymology of the word courage, the etymology of the word compassion, the etymology of the word honor, of honesty, integrity, responsibility, excellence, respect, duty, loyalty, restraint. And I did something interesting. So I go into the English, the Latin, the greek etymology, all the way to the proto indo european root of the word. And I did the same with the japanese and chinese pictogram.

And you would not believe, like, the very structure of these words from different languages, from different places, from different cultures, end up referring to the same thing etymologically and through to the current. I guess understanding and conception of the words like excellence was an interesting one. So, excellence derives from two proto indo european words, like eg and selair. And what it essentially means is climbing a mountain or separating oneself from the field.

So it's about, like, excellence as a concept is something to do with heights and climbing and separation. And it's basically the same meaning in Japanese. And I think to your point earlier, what you were talking about, like, the pollution of words, is that words didn't just arise out of nowhere, right? Like, didn't just, like, I. Like, I'm just gonna call this a cup.

Like, the reason we call it a cup is something to do with a thing that bears something, and that's something to do with, you know, some sound that we imbued on something that carries something. And, you know, without sort of getting too bogged down in this part of the discussion, but, like, words and the sounds that they're made up of and the fragments that they're made up of actually have a meaning, and they mean something. They carry a charge, they carry weight.

And in many ways, we've forgotten that in the modern world, because these days, everything is relativistic. Nothing has meaning, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this sort of crap that we know and discuss.

But I think that approach, and this is what I, in my opinion, without blowing smoke up my own butt, but part of the power of that central section of the book in the virtues, before I go into all the examples of these virtues, etcetera, and I use like, Christ, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Caesar, all these sort of like great men throughout history, as like, exemplars of these virtues, is understanding that etymology is like understanding the actual meaning of the word and not losing that.

So, yeah, just wanted to on that. Im so glad you did that because I often when IMD writing a piece for Instagram or substack or something like that, or sometimes even when I write the intros to this podcast, I'll go to Edmonline and I'll look up the etymology of words to understand. What does it actually mean? How do I know I'm using the correct word? And I'm glad that you did that with those virtues, because, again, virtue is not something that we talk a lot about in our society today.

We have virtues imposed upon us by culture, tolerance, respect. I guess you might say diversity would be another one. All of these inclusive virtues, virtues that bring more people into the fold, they're essentially feminine. And that's not to say that feminine virtues are negative. They're not. Feminine virtues are beautiful. But when you have them running an entire society, the society begins to crumble. Because feminine virtues don't build society. They sustain society by sustaining the home.

But you can't actually sustain society based on feminine virtues. Masculine virtues build. But masculine virtues are more exclusive. Like you said about excellence, it's about climbing to a mountain height. Well, that's not very inclusive. Mountaintops are so. Mountain stops are so exclusive. Like, what if someone is differently abled and they can't get up to the mountain? It's like, well, sorry, tough, right? But these virtues inspire men to heights that other men can't achieve.

But we're not allowed to know what those virtues are. And I think we're starving for them as men. To hear these words that speak to, that speak to the best parts of us, as opposed to trying to bash us into boxes where we're less effective women or bad copies of women. This. It's funny, when I was writing the book, I was using the word moral code quite a lot. And morality just gets so abused as a concept, particularly in the modern world. Everyone's trying to.

When they find someone who is somewhat moral, then people use it as a way to browbeat you, you know what I mean? It's like I'm more moral than thou and all this sort of stuff. And then your morality and my morality and all this sort of stuff, it just gets really messy. So I was trying to avoid that and I kind of make a point in the book. I said, look, if you want to understand morality, I said, go read the Bible. Don't come to me for morality.

Talk in this more about virtue, which are more like, which is, I don't want to say different to morality, but it's related and it's more something that you can see. If you have a virtue around bodily excellence and you're fat, I can tell very quickly that you don't have any virtue there, right? So virtues are far more like visible, whereas morals can be more easily hidden. Now this is, it's not always the case, but I think you get a lot of that obfuscation.

So I chose primarily to focus this book on virtues in particular. But something somebody said to me when they were reading, they're like, what about virtue signaling? Isn't that like a big problem today? I was like, fuck, you know, that didn't even like register for me because I, like, I've forgotten all about it. Like it wasn't even in my periphery. Like I missed it. And I was like, you know what, you're right.

So I had to like write a section in the book about like how even the concept of virtue today has been like deformed into this thing. Like about virtue signaling. So there's no, it's no longer even about what you said. Like, you know, we've got these feminine virtues and everything. But I, many of the virtues aren't even examined and the essence of the virtue is not even discussed.

Like you ask the average leftist or average psycho that wants to impose their Dei and all this sort of stuff, diversity, equity, inclusion, all this stuff. You ask them what the meaning of those words actually mean. They would have absolutely zero idea. 0000 but they're signaling to the world that, hey, I'm diverse, I am inclusive, I'm all this sort of shit. And like it just, it's maddening in itself.

But to add to that, as you said, about which virtues actually build society, it is fundamentally the masculine ones because structure itself, like if you look at what a civilization is, a civilization is a structure and a structure is something that creates an inside and an outside. A structure is fundamentally exclusive. Like I have the door on my room closed right now so that I can do a podcast. Like we have locks on doors, for God's sake, so that we can keep people out.

You know, like, we build walls on a house so that we have a territory delineated and demarcated, and the structural element, whether of a home or a civilization, of a community, of a family or whatever, is established by a man. And there are specific virtues that are necessary in order to do that. And there are specific virtues that don't lend themselves, as you said, to building structure, but to creating, I guess, sustenance or life within a structure.

And this ties back into our earlier discussion about a constellation and having the right sort of virtue at the right time and everything.

So I know it's all simultaneously simple in some sense, but hard to do right and simple in the sense that if we simply just focused in on the virtues that are more masculine, more structurally oriented as a guide for civilization, and then within communities or within the household, wherever relevant, focused in on those virtues there, like, we would immediately fix, like, I think, 80% of the problems that we have today.

But there's, like, this inversion and this, like, incessant attempt to make dudes basically feel guilty about everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we try and accomplish, because it's not feminine enough, it's not inclusive enough, etcetera. So anyway, I think your audience knows that, so I don't have to ask. Hop on about that point. No, I think it's actually really.

I think it's really important, because when we did this thing called sexual liberation, which sort of fueled feminism, what we did is not me, not you, but generations before us determined that women deserved a place in the market, the economy, and the government, and so we liberated women from the home. Now, men and women are different. I think we can all agree on that at this point. So men and women have different innate value systems.

And so when you bring women out of the home, into the marketplace with men, and women bring their innate value systems with them, there's going to be a clash. There's going to be a clash of women's values versus men's values. Right? And so somewhere along the line, we just kind of accepted that, well, women can't compete on men's playing field. They just can't. I understand that there are females that can beat average. There are excellent females that can beat average males, but.

Yeah, but the best woman at anything is not even close to the best man at a thing. Right? When in terms of competition, intelligence, like, this is real, these things are real. So what we had to do was in order to make the playing field level, we had to impose feminine values on men. And that was all taking place before we got here. I was born into that world. I lived in that world in San Francisco. I can't even imagine. I left that world almost ten years ago.

So I can't even imagine what it's like right now. But this is the world that we're all kind of living in. In fact, we're watching it play out on the stage of the presidential election, where you have feminine values versus masculine values. That is what this election is about. It's not about virtue. It's not about policy. It's not about different ideas. It's not even about the border per se. It's about feminine values versus masculine values, period.

That is what it is, and which has a hold over the particular voter's psyche. So when we demolished masculine values to make way for feminine values, what have we seen? Not that feminine values are bad. They're incredibly productive inside the home for making a home, for making a house into a home, for sustaining and nurturing the next generations. But when you bring it out into the marketplace, it becomes corrosive for the same reason.

When you bring masculine values too much into the home in terms like we're going to build, you can overdrive your family, and you don't want to do that. So when we collapsed the separate spheres into one big mass of society, we lost the ability to make distinguishing features and say, well, this is good for this and this is good for that.

And so that has had a particular impact on men, because you said, it's an uphill struggle to get back to a point where we as men can talk about these ideas and then embody them and then gain proficiency in them in a world that's essentially been captured by feminine ideals run amok. Again, I don't want to say that feminine ideals are bad. They're not. They're not innately bad. They're how women were made. But when they subsume the masculine ideals, it becomes bad. It becomes bad for everybody.

It reminds me of, like, taking a flower out of a garden and then, like, placing it in, like, a harsh environment, right? Like, a flower thrives in a very different environment than a cactus does. And, you know, cactus is like, you know, far more masculine, for example, than a flower. And, like, the cactus is prickly. And it has evolved in a particular way because it exists in a harsher environment. And the two just don't play nice together.

And this is one, obviously, one of the big, just like, classic hypocrisies of the whole diversity thing is, like, in an attempt to make everything multicultural and everything diverse in a particular single territory. And, you know, what they end up doing is they kill all diversity and they kill the differences that actually create genuine, like, organic diversity. There's, like, a big difference between the enforced one and the. And the natural one.

And you get the natural one purely by acknowledging these differences that you just alluded to. There was something else I wanted to mention there about men, women. Anyway, I've forgotten. It'll come back. Yeah, that's fine. I want to make sure that we gave the title of your book, which is called the Bushido of bitcoin. I think we just drove off road so excitedly, like, oh, by the way, the exit there was bushido bitcoin.

You said you've been working on it for a couple of years, since your book with Mark Moss, and that was when we talked last, when you wrote the uncommunist manifesto. So what was it that inspired the bushido of bitcoin? And I guess you told me earlier that it's over 300 pages now, so this must be something that's pretty near and dear to you. Yeah. So the original inspiration actually came from. I had a really great conversation with Eric Kaysen.

I don't know if you've come across him at all in the bitcoin space, but he's an interesting character. And we spoke in 2022, kind of around the time when you and I first met. I think, actually, I remember I was in Austin at the time, and we discussed bitcoin and how there seemed to be this emergent value system among bitcoiners that was forming. And we also spoke simultaneously about a book called Shogun by James Clavell, which is now a tv series? Book is fantastic.

Tv series, actually, they finally did a half decent job of something that, you know, didn't totally turn into a woke fest. But I've heard. I think. I think I've heard good things about it. Yeah, they finally apparently, like, the main actor there, Hiroyuki Sanata, he's, like, based as hell. He's like, I will not be a part of this movie if that's what's gonna happen. So they stuck to, um, at least the spirit of the, um, of the book, which is. Which is great. So, anyway, that.

That discussion, that podcast that we did was called Bushido of bitcoin. But at the time, the. The original genesis of the idea was like, okay, could I write a book that looks at the japanese bushido and the virtues there? And the virtues that are emerging out of the bitcoin space and find what the overlap is. So it's kind of like going to be a simple book, 20,000 words, whatever. But as I started writing this, and, you know, there was.

There was a period where I had a bit of a hiatus from writing in 2023, but I evolved as a person. Like, I went and I did my 10,000 hours of, like, history, and I went down multiple rabbit holes. Definitely went down the japanese rabbit hole, went way down the. The ancient Greco macedonian, hellenistic rabbit hole, roman rabbit hole, medieval Christian west rabbit hole. What else did I go down? There was a couple other things in there, Chesterton, stuff like that.

And I started finding all of these overlaps. So the nature of the book transformed into something more like. The question I came to want to answer was more something like this. If we are on the precipice of a new age, something akin to when Christianity sort of became the west after Rome, right? There was a change in civilization. If we're on the precipice of something similar to that, what are the virtues that we should seek to embody to succeed in a new world?

The world cannot continue the way it's going at the moment. You can't build on continuous lies. You can't build on continuous gaslighting. You can't build on printed paper money. You can't build on a fake economy. All of this sort of stuff is self defeating in the end, right? The only real question is how much collateral damage occurs until men, strong men, in the true definition of the word, go and take fucking hold of things again. And I right the ship.

Like, that's really the only question here. So then I asked, like, okay, what are the virtues we need on this new socioeconomic standard? I believe bitcoin will have a big role to play as the world moves towards this sort of new paradigm, right? Like, if we look at the paradigm that we're currently in, we're in what I would call, like, the fiat and feminine paradigm, we will end up, at some point, moving into the sound money masculine strength paradigm, right?

A different set of virtues are going to be necessary in that paradigm, because in the current one, you need to lie, you need to cheat, you need to steal, you need to get into inclusivity, dei politics, whatever. You need to be a parasite in some way to get ahead. Nancy Pelosi is rich. You and I are broke in comparison to Nancy Pelosi. She's clearly doing something right in the current paradigm that you and I are not doing, right.

But in the new paradigm that I envision, someone like that should not have the oxygen to succeed economically or, you know, socially speaking. Right? So beyond that, then I said, okay, I am not going to come up with the virtues myself, because who the fuck am I? Let me look at. Let me look at the cultures. So let me look at the civilizations that were the greatest all throughout history. And what's upstream of civilization, it's culture. And what's upstream of culture, it's virtue, basically.

Like, it's behavior. It's behavior at the individual level and at the community level and at the tribal level, at the family level. Like, what is those virtues? And that's when I basically, as I was going down these rabbit holes of the Japanese, the samurai, the, the knights of Christendom, I found that each one of them had this code, particularly in the warrior class.

This was really interesting for me that I found along the way is that it was generally the warrior class that was sort of the beacon within each of these great civilizations that were kind of the carriers of the code.

I think that has something to do with, they inspired the lower classes, so they inspired the peasants, the artisans, the merchants, and all that sort of stuff, because there was just something noble about this warrior class, like these people who would go to war for what they believed, right? And the classes above them, the nobility, the royalty, the aristocracy, were dependent on the warrior class to have a civilization in the first place.

You couldn't have a high up, you couldn't have an aristocratic class without a warrior class. So in many ways, the warrior class came to be the bearers of these codes. So the book ended up just basically becoming this historical look into what were the greatest civilizations and cultures that came before us? What were the virtues that the great segment of their, or the leadership segment of their civilization embodied? And what can we glean from that?

What wisdom, what practical advice can we glean from them? What can we project forward? And it was quite easy for me because I found, as I said, those virtues overlapped very strongly amongst the best cultures of all. And that's why I ended up pulling out the things that I mentioned earlier. Restraint, duty, loyalty, respect, excellence, justice, compassion, honor, duty, all this sort of stuff.

So, so the spine of the book then became this analysis or basically this journey into history and anecdotes and examples and stories and narratives about the great men or the great figures throughout history who embodied each of these virtues. And then it goes into a whole discussion about how are we able to reintegrate these things and I look at four key pillars, like culture, governance, wealth, and just the cyclical, seasonal nature of civilization.

And then after I sort of have that discussion, then I go into this thing which I call, like, a section about praxis. And inside praxis, I talk about training, physio psychology, mastery, rites of passage. I speak about the idea of a mannerbund, like, how do we bring back societies and groups of men, which I know is a big part of your work, and how do we do that? Because that is critical to reestablishing and reintegrating these virtues.

And then finally, I finish off with, like, a big discussion on the final section of the book is called what the future holds. And I try and, like, future pace on, like, ideas like meritocratic feudalism, archaeo futurism, like an aristocracy. So, like, a structure of excellence and what that might look like and how we can move civilization that way.

So anyway, this is a long answer of saying, like, the book started off as one thing, and over the last two years, it really evolved and flourished into something far deeper and far more. It just touches many things. I know it's called bushido of bitcoin, but I almost have nothing in there about bitcoin or economics.

There's some sections where I try and relate it back to bitcoin and stuff, but really, the bitcoin piece is more about we're moving on to a new socioeconomic paradigm, and bitcoin will be a big part of that because you can't, like, you can't build civilization on fake money. That part, like, we have to acknowledge, and that's that piece. But then what's equally as important, or probably more important, is who we become and how we live on that standard.

Because at the end of the day, like, I can have all the bitcoin I want, but if I'm living amongst rubble, my bitcoin doesn't, like, you know, the wealth is not the bitcoin. The wealth is the civilization, the family, the tribe, the culture, the religion, like, what we have. And bitcoin simply measures that. And that's one of the big things that I wanted to put forward in the book. But I'll shut up there for a second because that's a big explanation of what the book is.

No, that's fantastic, actually. That sounds like you encountered some of the same ideas that I ran into when I started the renaissance of men, which was to look to virtues of masculinity in generations past to try and inform what the future could look like. So I want to dig into the pieces of that. But the question that I had in my mind as I was listening to that is, how have you been personally changed by going on that journey? Because it sounds like a lot. Exactly. Exactly. Mandy.

I went back, actually, about a couple months ago, and I read through one of the earlier drafts, and you could just see it in the. In the quality of the language. Like, the energy was completely different. Like, writing this book reinvigorated something in me that I haven't felt for many years. Like, I think in many ways, like the stupidity of the world.

Like the crap we went through in 2020, 2021, all this sort of stuff, as much as you kind of build these mental walls and you're strong and all this sort of stuff, it kind of gets in there and infects your mind. It infects your outlook on life. And a lot of my early drafts, like, one, two, three, as I said, I went back to some of the other ones, even up to draft number four, were very longing for a past that's gone and how stupid is modernity and just pointing out all the bad stuff.

And the book now is far more vital. You read the book, you feel inspired, and you want to go run through walls. Basically, I handed it out to a couple people. They're like, holy shit, this book makes me want to go to war and take over the world. And I'm like, yes, that's the fucking feeling that I want in the book. And writing it had fundamentally transformed me, I think, in that way as well.

In the intervening period, I went from going to battle with the stupid idiots in the government in Australia and losing my business because I didn't want to build a surveillance product and all this sort of stuff and being, honestly, down in the dumps. I spent five years building a company to just have everything taken away from me, from a bureaucrat. I was, for a couple of years there, quite jaded about the world, about everything. I was sort of just done with things.

I was like, well, I got my bitcoin, whatever. Like Yolo, you know? I mean, I shouldn't say I was Yolo, but I was just like, I didn't want to do another business. I just didn't have that fire again. But this book just, I don't know, teaching these things. And this is the funny thing about sometimes, like, when you. When you talk about something, when you. When you teach something, something in your head, you.

You either become a fraud or it forces you to actually embody that in order to be consistent with what you're saying. And for me, it had that effect. So, like, I've started a new business. I re raised capital again. Like, we are firing on all cylinders. We're building like, this social network for like the parallel, the parallel world. So, like, anything to do with nomad, NGO arbitrage, network, state, like circular economies, bitcoin, all that sort of stuff.

Like, there's something there where like, we need to build parallel economies and we need a communication mechanism for that. Like, I'm, like, fully in that now. And, man, I can't tell you the amount of energy I've got from that and from the feedback that I've had, the early feedback that I've had on the book.

So, yeah, long way of answering your question is, like, I feel better than I have in many, many, many years, and I credit a lot of that to just the journey of going down and writing this book. Yeah. Reading the chapter that you sent, it creates the feeling of, I can imagine you finally had something to look forward to, because what struck me about the section that I read was that you are thinking way, way, way down the line, we're all in the ditch right now.

We're trying to just climb out of the ditch. Let's say we get out of the ditch. Congratulations, we made it out of the ditch, we begin rebuilding. But once we actually arrive. Yeah, well, once we actually arrive to our destination, well, what then? Who are we going to be in that moment? And you were thinking at that point, who are men going to be? How is our society going to be structured when we actually arrive to the bitcoin standard? Whats that world going to look like?

And I can see how that would be quite an inspiring way to think about things. Like, okay, were going to make it just start with, yeah, were going to win. Who are we going to be when we win? Is a pretty cool question to think about. It really is. Yeah. Like, I ended up starting to think about the book as a playbook for. A playbook for succeeding in life on a more sound socioeconomic standard or a sound, like succeeding in that one.

That's kind of like, ties back to what I said earlier is like, today you get rewarded for diversity, equity and inclusion. Right. You know, you get deported. You get rewarded for being a tranny, you know, like, and getting into politics. Like, facts, though. Facts, though. I know, right? Like, this is what I mean. It's like, it's madness. Like, it's like the incentives are completely backwards and, like, and sometimes it sounds funny and you see it on Twitter and you're like, this can't be real.

But, like, it's actually fucking real. Like, from the educational system to whatever. Like, it's insane. And I just. That kind of anti life, antisense, anti God, anti hierarchy, anti sanity, anti everything stuff just can't last unless. Unless the whole thing is just like one big lie and it all collapses at some point. And we will come out of this. And as I said, the question is just how much damage occurs along the way?

Do we have to literally turn everything to rubble before we step up and take control of the situation again? I hope not. I really, really, really hope not.

I hope that we can grow enough balls, and I hope that I can do my little part with this book to charge young men in particular, because that's my audience for this book, and it's not, you know, I didn't write it specifically for bitcoiners or specifically for christians or specifically for, you know, the fucking samurai who are all dead, right? Like, I wrote it for like, the. The young men of the world. And when I say young men, I mean anyone from like 18 to 40, right? Like, where the.

That spread of men, it's on us to fix this fucking situation. Nobody else is gonna do it. Like, our mommies aren't gonna come do it. The politicians are for damn sure not gonna fucking do it. Neither are central bankers, neither are any of these idiots. Right up to us. And there needs to be an alliance among us.

And, you know, some people, you know, I know this on, like, the twitter sort of spheres is like, you've got, like, nietzscheans and vitalists and bap people, and then you've got, like, christians, and then, you know, there's some christians that don't like these other christians. And then, you know, you've got, like, other bitcoiners and other retards and all this sort of stuff.

And you got, like, we're all bickering and I'm like, look, guys, take a moment here for a second and realize that we actually have far more in common than we have in conflict. So let's look at. And this is why, once again, I should also mention why I chose virtues, because you and I can recognize virtue, whether we're of the same belief system or not.

And I use a great story about honor during the crusade, which was during the period when Saladin was alive and he was one of the muslim leaders, the islamic leaders that the Christians highly regarded. And he regarded the christians as well. There was a level of honor and respect in the way they went to battle for fuck's sake, they were enemies, but they honored each other in the way they dealt with each other. That, like, we don't have a fraction of that today.

People like passive aggressive and fucking talking about each other behind each other's backs and stuff like that over, like, little tiffs, whereas these people were at war, and they had more respect for each other than the average person does today in the workplace. But the energy that I'm talking about here is that you can have two people with differing beliefs who can both recognize courage or who can both recognize honor, who can both recognize respect. Respect.

Who can both recognize excellence and agree that, hey, that is fundamentally evil, that is fundamentally wrong. And we can establish a alliance of men, an alliance of strength and alliance of virtue around these things that we agree on. And there might come a time when we want to beat each other up again, sure. But now is not the fucking time. The time right now is to take back control of the ship.

And that's going to require a generation or two of strong, young, vital men who place the right virtues at the front. And those virtues have to be different than, I need to fucking make another shitcoin, make as much money as I can, have sex with as many girls as I can, swipe on tinder as much as I want to yell. It can't be that. It's got to be something more transcendent. And that's kind of. And I'm sweating a little bit now because I'm getting, like, into this. But that's.

That's really the message of the book and who I wrote it for. It's like, there's a. There's a Venn diagram among us. And I said this at the beginning, before we started the call. Like, there's like, a Christo Hopper, Nietzsche, Nism. Right? Like, somewhere in that there's a beautiful alliance, and I think we need to lean into that, because I myself find myself there. Like, I'm. I get asked a lot. Like, are you christian? I'm like, look, for all practical intents and purposes, yes.

Do I. Am I as devout? No. But there's just something there that's so powerful and so, like, in our blood, in that there's something there that's like a connection to the transcendent that you just can't deny it. Like, it permeates our civilization. And you know it when you walk into a cathedral, you know it when you. When you meet someone with those sort of shared values, like, it's. It's different. And, yeah, I'm kind of going off on tangents now. Shut up. But there's.

There's something special there, and that's what I wanted to talk to in the book. No, that's something. It's a conversation that I'm familiar with through the way that's being framed on twitter. Is this idea of, like, no enemies on the right. The idea that we're all on the side of. If we're all on the side of civilizational progress or rebuilding civilization with masculine values, that tends to be a more right wing coded thing versus a more left wing coded thing.

And so there's a big discussion happening around, well, all of us on the right should not be enemies with each other. Now, I don't personally hold to that, because if you run the logic of that out, you get into some pretty extreme beliefs that you can then no longer say are out of bounds. So then the question becomes, how do we determine what beliefs. And again, we're speaking exclusively on the right. What beliefs are out of bounds, one direction or the other?

Like, are more centrist beliefs out of bounds, our more extreme, fascist beliefs out of bounds? How do we determine, and I like the example that you gave of Saladin, because I think what it speaks to is the idea that you have warriors on the field of battle, and they can look at each other and they can say, we don't worship the same God. Right. We're not looking at the same transcendent universe. But I still see that you're acting in a spirit of service.

This is not serving exclusively your own appetites and ends. And that, I think, is a very important thing. Now, there's ways around the margin where it can be tough to determine, is someone serving their flesh, or are they truly serving something higher? But what I like is how you've landed on virtue, because virtue of necessity means sacrificing the flesh. My desire says, today, I want to go eat a pint of ice cream, but I desire the virtue of physical excellence.

So I'm going to sacrifice my fleshly desires in pursuit of this virtue. And I think all virtues do ultimately coalesce into a transcendent standardization. And so being able to say, these are the transcendent virtues that I, as a man, embody. And I can recognize that in you, and you can recognize it. And the other guy, this other guy over there we're not so sure about, I think that creates a ground that we can all kind of stand on together for this historical moment that we're all facing.

Yeah, dude, you just brought chills down my spine 100% you summed it up better than I could have. So, yeah, that's what the book's about. Cool. Well, that was a good conversation, guys. Thanks. We did it, everyone. Well, I mean, it's really important because even when I was working in the masculinity conversation, when that was still happening and I was primarily on instagram, I would notice all these different interest groups.

You had, like the barbarian guys, you know, like the north pagan kind of vibe, and then you had the elite moneymaker kind of guys with the suit and tie kind of vibe, and. And then you had the bodybuilding bros. And so all these people, they had all these different groups of men, these different tribes of men essentially had very separate value systems, right? And so, like, how do we get all these guys to work together? And that was the spirit of the renaissance of men.

Like, look, guys, and this is, this is, you know, I thought when I started my own podcast, I thought masculinity would save the world. I genuinely believed that. And I'll have a lot to say about that on a future episode, but I believe that. So I was trying to figure out, like, okay, like, im not trying to rally all you guys to follow me, right? Because im not the former special forces guy. Im not the dude with the giant family. Im not the 600 pound deadlifter.

Im just trying to say, hey, here are these transcendent virtues that I think we can ally upon. And then maybe the guys who are making the thing happen, you guys can lead us forward. So I think you and I landed on very similar ideas, but from different directions. You came in the door from, like, we're going to make it to this future society that's based on the bitcoin standard, right? And that's where you came in.

And I came in through this other, like, well, we got to defeat feminism in the new age. And so we've, you and I have arrived at the same place through very different doors. It's very, very interesting. And that, to me, points to, if anything, something true. Like, if we were not, we didn't know each other before. We've come from different lives, different backgrounds, different everything, and even a different approach to what we felt was the real problem for different reasons.

And we've arrived at a similar thing. Like, if that, if that's not a signal for some sort of truth, I don't know what is. And that's something I used throughout the book to try and find signals for truth around or at least validation around which virtues to select. And it was like, okay, well, if I see this virtue popping up again and again and again in the greatest cultures and the greatest civilizations, then it's not me saying that, hey, courage is important.

It's like clearly something about history says that that is important. And that's why I make clear in the book. It's like I'm not telling you to do this. Like I'm going to give you an entire story, narrative, examples and everything about why this is important. You go make up your own mind like you're an adult, you're human being, you know, you're hopefully sovereign and you're an agent. Like figure it out yourself.

But here's a bunch to work with and then here's a bunch of things to go and read if you want to explore further. But I mean, at the end of the day, you know, I think we as we know this, a lot of this stuff instinctually, like the words are just more reminder than anything else.

Like, and that's, you know, when you've been around this space for a while and you know, I've been thinking, writing, doing, talking, podcasting, all this sort of stuff for a while, it's, you come to realize that a lot of it is almost like removing the fluff and it's almost like a remembering as opposed to a discovering. And some of it is obviously always there's a discovery element, but the remembering, I think is quite powerful. And what are remembering?

The things that we know, the things that we've been instilled with. And this is why I do fundamentally believe in God, that we are instilled with something and we know this stuff deep down. We need to be reminded sometimes. Im in a bunch of arguments on Twitter right now about the foundations of morality that people are trying to say that I can get morality without some sort of transcendent standard, whether it be the Bible or somewhere else.

And its like, okay, cool that people are saying to me, you should just be a decent person without the need for a book or a God. Im like, okay, but why are you, on what principles are you saying that I should be a decent person? And people get very frustrated when you push them on that point. Why should I listen to you? One guy said to me, my morality comes from within and says I should be a decent person. I'm like cool.

So if inside me is the standard inside me, my morality says I should take your stuff. So who wins in that? And then people get very, very frustrated. But that all of these cultures around the world and that something about men's hearts and women's as well point to and orient towards these transcendent goods. And it's just kind of woven into us. I think that that undermines the whole notion of evolution. Evolution can't say why this should be the case.

Evolution would say that we should live in a survival of the fittest world and so there should be no such thing as self sacrifice. Evolution can't understand self sacrifice. It doesn't make sense. So all of these different virtues point to an author of those virtues. Where did they come from? Why are they there forever?

Why in the middle of historical darkness, a historical level darkness, why are people still able to look up and see something that transcends all of us and men feel themselves called to it? Well, because these things are woven into the fabric of reality. Wisdom. Wisdom was there with God when he inscribed a circle on the face of the deep. I believe the passage goes, so these virtues were there before there was anything else. And that's why they call us forward so powerfully.

And I think that's also why we're not allowed to talk about virtue. To say that virtue has a transcendent standard. It means that it exists independent of all darkness. In fact, there's a scene in the Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam are in Mordor, a virtuous land, virtue less land, if there was one. And they're looking up at the stars and they're seeing something that exists transcendently. And I think virtues to speak of.

Constellations does something similar for us even when we're in the middle of our own private Mordors or civilizational Mordors. Yeah. As you're describing that, it reminds me of just like, this concept of a north star and a guiding light. There's multiple ways to frame it, but it all points to the same thing, right? You said something about transcendence, and maybe this is a good segue into the beauty chapter, right? You see this a lot from the theory cell. Atheists.

There's that stupid tweet that I saw a little while back from that guy who put up a couple photos of universe constellation. A beautiful woman's face. And I have it. Urban, I think it was. I have it here. It's weight. But why. Let me. I pulled that up. I'm glad you mentioned. Let me pull it up and I'll put it on the screen and we can take a look at it. Yeah, it was. Wait, but y. And I think his name's Tim Urban.

So, you know, he writes like, oh, you know, since all values are subjective or something like that. Isn't it funny that we find all this stuff beautiful? And, you know, once we're no longer here, will any of this beautiful? It was, like, so, so stupid to me. Like, and it inspired an entire chapter in the book. I was like, man, I got to write about this. And, like, I did a talk in Prague a couple months ago now, which was called beauty will save the world.

And I bashed a little bit on Tim Urban's thing, and I opened up the quote with something that Nietzsche said. And, you know, whatever people think about Nietzsche, some people hate him, some people love him. Whatever. Like, I think he definitely had some really profound, particularly his aphorisms. I don't know. Like, he just had a way of, like, saying something in a few words, which just, like, resonated to be so true. And one of my favorite quotes from him is, if you.

If you step on a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a butterfly, you're a villain. Morality has aesthetic standards, and I love that quote because there's just something viscerally true about it. Like, the cerebral part of you. Your brain is like, no, that's not fair. And then the hippie will be like, yeah, but the cockroach has a life too. And the atheist will say, no, but there's subjective grounds here.

And even men of virtue, like, you know, if you're religious or whatever, you're like, no, that's not right. It's, you know, it's unfair and all this sort of stuff, but something biologically inside you. Like, you see it. You see a cockroach and you just want to crush it. Like, I don't know what it is. And if you see somebody, like, go and crush a butterfly, you're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Like, why would you do that? Like, it's just. And you don't even have to think about it.

And that, to me, just points to something that is, you could call it visceral. You could call it transcendent. You can call it higher, deeper, whatever, right? But, like, it points to something more than what the cerebral cognitive front lobe, you know, mental construct will sort of tell us. And to me, that's got something to do with beauty, and I think it fundamentally has something to do with God.

And the structure of the universe is that there is a something there that, like, we can recognize about beauty. Like, so I write in the book, like, beauty is not something that you're told. Like, I can't tell you, will, this is beautiful. Like, beauty is something that we recognize, and we recognize it for fuck knows what reason, right? Like, I'm sure we can, like, find logical reasons about, like, oh, the health of a person.

You know, there's definitely, like, practical reasons around beauty, but, like, it exists in the very structure of the universe. And it's not because we can measure it, but it exists and we can measure it like, it's the other way around. Right? So, like, it. It is something that. Yeah, in my. In my opinion, and I get the sense that you probably share this, is that, like, it's beauty?

Is this, like, almost like a beacon to the transcendent that we can all experience, and we can experience it both objectively and subjectively. And that, to me, tells me that a transcendent realm must and does exist, because you just can't have that with something that is purely material. And I make a big fuss about this in the book, is like, truth and beauty transcend the material. And this is what a lot of these materialists get wrong.

They live purely in the paradigm of the material, and they think everything is subjective and everything you can trade and all this sort of shit. And that's fine for things that are material and purely economic, but it's not fine for living beings that are connected to something else and that can't be explained away through economics. So I'll pause there, but I think what you said before about the transcendence just reminded me of the beauty chapter. Think.

Beauty is one of those things that it calls us forward to, those values even when we can't articulate it. It's not mental, it's not rational beauty, it transcends rationality. Using irrational minds, we can contribute to making beautiful things. I don't know that the rational mind has ever made something beautiful. I think beauty probably requires more than just strict rationality. I think about the bitcoin. Listeners will appreciate this.

I think that there's a beauty to Satoshi's white paper, just how clean and how clear it is. But there's an artistry to it that transcends the purity of rational calculation. So something more than that, actually, I tried to share the screen that had the tweet that you referenced earlier, but I wasn't able. Chrome doesn't have permission, so I'll just read it really quick. This is from Tim Urban. Wait, but why? He says it's strange that beauty is entirely subjective. These are beautiful to us.

And he provides four photos. These are beautiful to us because of how we're programmed objectively. They're no more beautiful than any other arrangement of atoms and photons. The day humans go extinct, everything we find beautiful will cease to be beautiful. And he has a photo of some beautiful photographs of the coastline of Hawaii. It looks like a purple and orange sunset, a lovely flower photographed in high resolution, and then a beautiful woman.

And it's just like the idea that, I mean, I get beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Like, there's truth to that. Absolutely right. That there is a degree of subjectivity to beauty, but it just kind of implies, I mean, by the same logic, I guess you could say, like, does anything even exist if humans go away? It's purely existentialist, right? If all humans were gone, how would we know there was anything? Because the counterargument is, say, beauty is a substance. It's a thing.

We can't measure it precisely. We can't say where it comes from, but it imbues some objects and people and things and not others. Humans have the ability to call it down through skill and mastery and practice and sometimes sheer dumb luck and providence. But it is a thing. And if we say that beauty doesn't have an independent existence, how can we say that anything has an independent existence? And what an incredibly nihilistic way to live and why.

I appreciate, maybe you didn't intend this when you wrote the book, but I've actually seen some of this nihilism kind of threading its way through the bitcoin community. Like, I don't know, maybe I'll just use his name. Robert Breedlove started toying with some of these ideas. And that's a whole other subject that's going on there that we don't have to get into right now. But I confronted him on this.

He was reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, some other books about existentialism, I think Martin Heidegger. And so I confronted him on this, and then later I found out what he was doing. Like, yes, of course, you're trying to destroy morality. I get it now. But, like, this nihilistic, you know, it doesn't produce action in men. Like, you can't look at these beautiful things and say, well, that beauty isn't real. It's all subjective.

It's like, no, if you give beauty an objective reality that exists independent from us, then it's a virtue that can be pursued. It can become a quixotic quest that destroys you in the pursuit of it. But the healthy arrangement of the pursuit of that virtue, I think, is a good thing and that men need it. I think one of the big psyops against men is how ugly everything is today. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I could not agree more.

When I. When I read that tweet from Tim, it just, like, man, it just triggered me. And the fact that that triggered me just says a lot about the fact that beauty must exist in some way, because it was just like, what he said was just so fundamentally devoid of life. And to me, if we make the argument that life doesn't exist in the universe, then sure, maybe the need for beauty is not there, or, like, beauty becomes irrelevant.

But in a universe, in a world where life itself exists, beauty also exists, and it is not material. As you said, there's a material component to it. So, like, there are many material things that are absolutely beautiful, but, like, it's not only material, and there's a couple of things I'd love to read a small passage from the book, please, if I may. And it says, beauty is simultaneously objective and objective.

It's the only thing that we know of with this paradoxical quality other than the divine, which says a lot about what beauty really is. Beauty is both everlasting and fleeting. It is both powerful and fragile. It is both dangerous and nurturing all at the same time. Beauty can be found in war and peace, conflict and cooperation, violence and love. Few things are as beautiful or violent as a thunderstorm crackling across the sky, a lion hunting, or a volcano erupting.

Few things are as beautiful or peaceful as the calm and stillness of the mountains or a tranquil cove cove in the Mediterranean Sea. There is beauty in the cold, barren antarctic ice caps and in the hot, rolling desert, San Diego of Arabia. There is beauty in the smooth contours of a woman's body and in the jagged edges of a sheer rock cliff face. There is beauty in the creation of life and the explosion of an orgasm in a cavalry charge and in the march of a phalanx.

Beauty is found in both deed and object, in both the uncharted wild ocean of the Atlantic and in its historic crossing. It is both natural and man made. There is beauty in the precision of a swiss made watch and in the chaos of the jungle. There is beauty in the creative destruction of deep work and in the leisure of stillness. The combustion engine and the Jed airline cutting through the sky are both marvels of engineering and beautiful in their own light.

Likewise, there is deep beauty in the sword, which has, through the centuries, shed the blood of many foes. So, like a kind of. I tried to do something in the book there to show that, like, beauty exists, in all of these things. And as a result, like, it's not a single. Like, it's not a. For something to exist in the fabric of so many diverse, disparate, fundamentally different things, by definition, means it transcends all of these things, right? Because it's. It's. It's all of them.

So if that's not a definition for transcendence, I don't know what is. And that's why I just think, like, you know, another section here, right? Beauty is beyond rational, but we can also rationalize it. It's beyond measurement, but we can, in fact, also measure it. It's found in the, like, literally, the fractals that make up life, golden ratio, musical archetypes, geometry, mathematics. Like, we discover it, we don't necessarily, like, create it. I guess trying to be precise.

Yeah. Channel it, I think, is a good way to phrase it. So, yeah, it became like, I think, one of the beautiful chapters of the book, and everyone that I shared it with actually really appreciated. It's a great piece. And actually, one of my christian friends, as he was reading it, he was the one who suggested the ecclesiastes excerpt that I put in there as well. To everything there is a season. I was like, fuck, that's so good. It's beautiful.

Yeah. I think you've captured it, especially because beauty seems to exist. Goodness, truth, and beauty. In some ways, these are synonyms, right? Can something be beautiful that isn't true. Can something be beautiful that isn't good? Right? Can something be good that is all these. In some sense, these are all synonyms.

But when it comes to making something beautiful, our ability to make something beautiful, I mean, anyone who's done any amount of creative work, whether it be songwriting or painting or sculpting, you know, that you can create a thousand pieces and, like, maybe one of them will be beautiful, and it won't be beautiful because of. Because of any, again, rational calculation. Like, I measured it all out to make a. It's something.

Something seems to have informed it spiritually almost, that passes through us on our way into the thing. And that's the universal experience of creativity. Like, you just show up writing every day until the muse is there and the muse is there some days and not there. And then you wrote something beautiful. Where did it come from? Not me. Right. And so. And not giving people the opportunity to experience that anymore, like, just how ugly and how broken and twisted everything is, it's.

It really makes us forget that beauty is a thing. Right. I think. And I think that's the goal. I really do think, like, I think. I think Satan's one of Satan's biggest weapons today is just how mundane everything is. Houses are beige boxes, all the. Have you seen the memes going around that show all the different later model cars that are coming out now and all. They all look the same. Exactly. Yeah, they're all the same.

And then all the logos, like, all these classic logos that are all becoming modern and they're taking off the serifs and it's like everything is becoming homogenized. Everything is becoming. And it's becoming bland. Right. And I think that that's a. I think that's a weapon that's being used against us as, as men and women that are making us forget that there is the good, the beautiful and the true. It's. It's. It's profoundly dehumanizing. Go ahead. Absolutely. It kills the spark.

Like, that's the whole thing. Like, and I've got to. The thing in the book, which I say is like, look, I think the true definition of evil really is, like, that which wants to destroy the beautiful. And, you know, that's a. As you said, like, the greatest tool of Satan is to make everything ugly, gray, homogeneous and lifeless. Like, it's. And in many ways, like, you look at the ugliest modalities of governance.

Communism, of all things, right, is the thing that wants to bring everything down to sameness. Like, and I. An analogy I've used on stage in the past is, like, you get a beautiful palette of colors. You have blue, red, orange, green, yellow and everything. And do you want to know how to make them the same? You get them and you mix them all together and you turn it into 1 gy chunk of goo, right? So that's like, sameness, and that's fucking ugly. There's a reason why grey is ugly.

Like, there's a reason why all the communist Europe is like these gray, ugly buildings, because it. It takes. Sucks the life out of people, and it just. It sends them on the path to being drones. Like, beautiful things inspire more beautiful things. It inspires life. And if we're on the side of life, if we're on the side of God, if we're on the side of truth, if we're on the side of all these things, we're on the side of beauty. Like, that requires the creation of all beauty.

And as you said, I think one of the biggest, biggest challenges that we're facing in the modern world is that destruction of the beautiful. It's no coincidence that the eco terrorists are throwing paint at orange paint over beautiful Renaissance paintings. It's not an accident.

And I think as an extension to that, I should just say as a call to action, to be in line with the whole message of the book here, is that its up to us to recognize that and not only just point it out, but to then go and find a way to channel more beauty into the world.

I think for the last number of years, and you and I were right in the thick of this as pointing out, basically acting as a bulwark from, I dont know how to pronounce that word properly, but basically acting as like a barrier to all the crap, right? And like pointing out, this is wrong with the world, this is wrong with the world. This is wrong with the world for me.

And the book is, my attempt to do this is to actually produce something beautiful that is no longer about pointing out what's wrong and kind of acting as a barrier to that. It does that in many ways, the book kind of draws that line. But the book's focus, and you really nicely said this earlier, is the book's focus is on what's next. Where are we going?

I want to lift the gaze, and when you lift the gaze, you actually have the opportunity to create something beautiful, because if you're always looking down and looking at what's wrong, you're just not going to far less of a chance to make something beautiful and to produce something enduring. So it's kind of my goal for.

The book, and I think it's really important, actually, that you included so much bitcoin mention, like, it's not a bitcoin book, but bitcoin is woven throughout many of the pages. And I think that really matters, because if you were to take that out, it becomes, in some sense, ungrounded. Like, okay, yeah, cool. Alex. We all want to deal with these transcendent, higher virtues, but at the same time, like inflation, et cetera, et cetera, fiat world.

By the way, I'll mention this in the introduction to the podcast. I think a lot of what you and I are talking about is kind of informed by the subjects from thank God for bitcoin by Jordan Bush and Fiat ruins everything by Jimmy Song. Like, the knowledge that's included in both of those books is really important, a really important foundation. So I'll encourage everyone to go read the books and listen to those interviews, which I'll post in the show notes.

But at the same time, without the practical element, without the pragmatic element, then it becomes just not just but another philosophical exercise. But once you can actually ground it, please go ahead and. No, no, I was gonna say, it is. It is just the. Just, you're 100% right. In fact, the the person that I got to help me edit the book, he kind of said the same thing, is like, you know, what?

If he came to me with, like, another book about, you know, bushido and philosophy and all this stuff, he's like, I probably would have passed. But he goes, the thing that captured me said was that it was the bushido of bitcoin. He was like, what? What the hell does bitcoin have to do with anything?

And he goes, as I read through the book, because he was new to bitcoin, he's like, I sense that he goes, what I got out of it was that there was actually exactly what you said, a grounding to something. It's like, okay, all of these things, but then what? How do we get there? What's the practical element of it? So sorry for cutting you off, but it just reminded me that. That's great.

No, that's really good to hear because I think that's what makes the book unique, is that it's not just a philosophical exploration, nor is it just an exploration of how bitcoin can change society. It's an idea of like, okay, once we have this changed society that's rooted in sound money, that's rooted in sound financial practices, what does that enable for men to be once we have that grounding, once we have that rooting, and once it can't be dislodged?

This is something that laser Hodl and I talk about in our conversations about, what does a sound money world look like? What does a sound money do to men? Once you know you can learn a valuable skill, earn based on the skill, and then save in bitcoin, what does that do to your whole outlook on life? And so I see this book as sort of a necessary extension of that thought. Like, okay, you've learned a skill. You've mastered it.

You're earning, earning income to support a family, and you're saving a bitcoin. And, you know, it can't be inflated away. Well, that gets you thinking. Actually, this is something I want to ask you about that gets you thinking about, you know, low time preference behavior. And you said that beauty is, I think you said it's the ultimate low time preference behavior. I wonder if you could talk. I was like, thats a really fascinating way to think about that idea. Its true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So in the bitcoin space. As you said, theres all this talk about low time preference and stopping this incessant need to discount the future for the present and basically the marshmallow theory in practice. And it hit me as I was writing the beauty chapter, I was like, you know what? Beauty is literally the highest manifestation of that approach. It's like to build anything of beauty.

You mentioned it before, like, you've got to do a thousand fucking sculptures so that one of them is beautiful, right? Like, you've got to do your thousands of hours of, like, practicing on the piano or the instrument or whatever, and then at some point, you will be, you will have the capacity to channel more beauty. Like, there's a sacrifice. Like the very act of building a family, establishing a relationship, having a child.

Think about the sacrifice and the time preference that is necessary to bear a child, for the man to look after the woman, to birth the child, to raise the child, to establish the child into a teenager. That's an investment in time, and that's beautiful. And that takes time, like, and that extends all the way up through, like, to build a beautiful cathedral. Like, what we have during the Renaissance, like, took hundreds of years.

People who literally started building the foundation knew that they would be dead before they would ever see the cathedral. Like, what does that take right from a person in order to do? And that goes on the way up through to the mountains that we look at, and we have, like, this reverence for, because it's like this. I know every time I go to the north of Italy, like the alps, there's just something special about those mountains.

And they formed over thousands and thousands of years, like the coastline of Hawaii that we just mentioned before, like the very world that we're in. Beautiful things take time, they take sacrifice, they take an investment. And that's why I just had that epiphany as I was writing this thing. It was like. And it just. It fits so well. I was like, damn. Beauty really is like the ultimate in low time preference. And when you try and fake beauty, it's just, you know it, right?

Like, it's just, it's the, you see the difference in the time preference, and there's always a price to pay for that. So, yeah, I think that's a. Thank you for bringing that up. It's a. It's a profound point that I. Yeah, that I hope I cover in the book. Yes. Oh, absolutely. It's kind of like those memes that went around Twitter a couple months ago. I think the difference between, in women, between beautiful, hot and cute, right? And so. Oh, it was pretty cool.

It was one of the, you know, one of the. One of the anonymous, maybe a statue account, something like that, sort of. It used imagery, and it might have actually been a woman that I think about it. But to talk about the way that different women's faces create different effects, like, here's a beautiful woman, which is not the same as a hot woman, right? And so hotness.

And there was also someone who wrote about this, I think, last year, that talked about the difference between beautiful and hot and hotness. That's high time preference. That's where you get all the plastic surgery and stuff like that to try and look like this. And it has a particular set of features versus beautiful, which is a very different thing. Right. And so I think this shows up everywhere, and I think our culture is saturated with things that are, things we might say are hot.

And I don't necessarily mean in the same way like a woman, but, like, here's this cheap, plasticky kind of thing that has this, like, instantaneous appeal but no substance behind it. It's like those guys that did that do the videos where they tear apart the Lamborghinis. Have you seen those? I haven't seen the territorial part of Lamborghini. It's these eastern european guys, and they bought, like, this brand new european Lamborghini.

And then they start, they go, they get into it and they start pulling on it, and they just start taking apart this Lamborghini. And they show that this car, on the surface, that's very hot. It's actually quite plastic. It's very cheaply built, and then they slap a massive price. Yeah. So that's kind of like a little bit. What our society is, is you have these sexy, on the surface values, but nothing deeper that's underlying it. Yeah, a lack of substance. It's like this kind of like manufactured.

Exactly. It's like a plastic civilization. Like, plastic is probably a good summation of all of it. Yeah, totally, man. Totally. So was there a virtue that you were studying when you put this book together that had a particular impact on you? Like, you're going on this big two year journey to write this book and you're exploring all these different ideas that are changing your world?

Was there a section that you were writing, I suppose, other than beauty, where you're like, would that really hit you in a particular way? Like, oh, oh, where things really shifted. For you, man, I had so many of those moments, but I'll kind of pull on a couple, so I'll just I'll say courage, because I think courage is, like, I almost consider that, like, the alpha of virtues.

Like, if without courage, all else doesn't exist, then I on a podcast that kind of, like, just came out as I was speaking. I said, courage is faith in action. And I was like, damn, that's good. So, like, pretty dope. I like that. Yeah, that's great. So. But courage has always been something. Like, I've very. I've had a strong relationship with. From a young age. It was like when I used to do Tony Robbins stuff. Like, it was. I considered it my power virtue. Like, it was.

So I've always had a good relationship. So not too much of an epiphany there. But other than that little quote that came out for me, a couple of the ones were excellence. Like, going down that rabbit hole and really just understanding how excellence is fundamentally about hierarchy and separation. It's almost like the ultimate masculine virtue between excellence and self control and restraint.

Like, those two were a lot of the, I guess, lessons for me, because I'm at the point in my life now where I'm entering the second half of my thirties and I'm entering a new season of life, and I'm valuing more. Like, the younger me would have fundamentally valued courage way more, and I still fundamentally value courage as, like, one of the absolutely most important virtues. You can't be a man without courage.

But, yeah, I just found something very special about those two virtues, in particular, the excellence and the restraint or self control. I kind of grouped that together as a concept, and what I called it was the virtue of maturity. And a good mental image of that is the ability to take a hammer and an egg, swing the hammer, and be able to stop the hammer before you crush the egg.

And what I mean by that is there's so much I could do, and I think this is probably the primary virtue that is missing from the world. In many ways, these two, like, excellence as a thing, because everything is now average and all this kind of crap, but also this idea of restraint. It's like, yeah, you know what? I could go and just, like, cheat on my wife and go and, like, have gay sex and I could do all this sort of stuff. I can cut my penis off. Escalated quickly.

Yeah. I was thinking all the dumbest things I could possibly do. I could vote for Kamala. I can do all these things. But should I? Probably not. No. Yes. Please don't. No, don't do it, Alex. This will be when I reach out in two years. I'll be like, well, I've got a podcast for you chopped off my dick. No, I'm kidding. I might not have you on. No, we'll talk you off the ledge. But seriously, it's like, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

And I think that's underappreciated in the modern world. Like, and that ties back into what you discussed earlier about, like, the sexual liberation movement. And I can do whatever I want, and, you know, God doesn't exist, and who cares? And I don't have a father. I don't listen to my parents. And, you know, all this sort of stuff, like, trying to shirk responsibility and all this sort of stuff. And to me, like, it's a little bit different to responsibility.

Like, I've got a whole section of responsibility, which was one of my favorite. Favorite chapters. But, like, self control and restraint is just. There's something deeply masculine about that. There's something deeply. I'm setting the boundary. And, like, I. You know, you said it earlier about I want to eat the tub of ice cream, but I have the capacity to say no. And that's just, like, for me, deeply powerful. And as I said, I called it the. The virtue of maturity. And it was.

It was one of my favorite ones that I. That I wrote in there. Your example about the hammer and the egg. There's a famous pastor named Bodhi Baucom who uses a similar example, encouraging christian men to strength, because he says that if you give a weak man a sledgehammer and you tell him to swing the sledgehammer and try and bring it down before you stop the egg, he'll crush the egg. Interesting.

Yeah. But if you give it to a strong man, he'll be able to use the strength, and he has the strength to encourage restraint. And so weakness is what leads to this imbalance of virtues. Not strength. But strength has been so shamed out of our culture because, yes, of course, strength has been misused in the past, but to misuse strength doesn't negate the need for strength altogether. It just means we need to bring the moral virtues back that restrain strength.

Man, I'm so glad you mentioned that, because there's literally a section in there about specifically strength. So under self restraint, there's, like, six sections to the chapter, and there's a section in there about strength specifically. And I lean into, like, what is the definition of strength? Like, is someone strong? Like, so am I strong? If I enter the boxing ring and I bring a kid in and I beat the shit out of him like, does that make me strong? Ben Shapiro at a university.

So, like, strength is the true strength comes from contending that which is, like, at your level or greater than you. And that's the only actually, like, funny enough, God made it such that the only way to actually build more strength is to push beyond what is comfortable and push beyond what you can, right? For me, that's where people always talk about, oh, you know, the central bankers, they have all the strength and power and everything like that.

And I'm like, no, no, no, let's flip this conversation on its head. The central bankers and the politicians and the scumbags and all this sort of stuff, these people are so weak that they need to cheat in order to win. Amen. They need to poison their opponent, get in the ring and then say, I won. But that is a pyrrhic victory in terms of, like, where the, like, what happens to the game?

Like, you know, you didn't win because you were actually better or stronger or more vital or more virtuous or more righteous or anything. You won because you cheated. And that's a fake victory. And that's all we're seeing around us today. Whereas true strength, as you said, is the capacity to, like, I know that I can beat the absolute fucking shit out of you, but I will not because I have the capacity to, like, I'm stronger than the desire.

And that was such a, I mean, I use Christ actually as an example in that specific chapter of, like, the ultimate, the paragon of restraint, right? Like, he's the, he's the ideal in that sense. And I also think in that, im thinking back now, I think I also talk about Alexander the great in that one where there was the story of how on the way back from India, they were trekking through the arabian desert and Alexander had been shot with an arrow in a previous battle.

It was about a month earlier or something like that. So he was already weakened from that, like, punctured lung. So it was quite a, quite a bit of damage. And as they're going through the, through the desert, like, they're strewn out and everyone's thirsty and they've been walking for weeks through the desert and all this sort of stuff. And a couple of his men, couple of the scouts find some water up ahead, and they fill a helmet with water and they protect it, like, to bring it back to him.

And they finally bring it back to him and they pass him the helmet, he takes the helmet and he looks up to the sky and he pours the water out into the sand. And the lesson of that is, first, that he would share the sacrifice with his men. And that sort of, like the historic story, is that when his men saw that, that actually carried them through. Apparently only lost six men on the. On the trek back through the, um, through the desert. So that that was more important than giving everybody water.

But it was also a sign of, like, an incredible level of restraint which is necessary for a leader. Right? Could you imagine, like, a modern politician doing that? Fuck no. Like, it's not gonna happen. You know what I mean? Like, that they would just, like, they would hide the water from their people and go and drink and pretend they're suffering along with them. So it's like that virtue, I think, for me, and I capped off the ten virtues with that.

Like I said, it's not the most important, because it's hard to say which virtues are the most important. As you said, they're a constellation, but it's the one. It's like, if courage is the alpha, then self control is the omega. It sort of caps off. So, anyway, I've gone on long enough, but that was the one, I think probably had one of the biggest impacts on me as I was writing.

I'm so glad that you picked up on that, because that's something that I've followed along similar lines, that the highest use of power is in self sacrifice. So you look at, whether you want, you can look at the Bible, you can look at Christ, or you can look at William Wallace, or you can look at Luke Skywalker, you can look at the way that this story is reflected all throughout our culture. And in some ways, it's tied to the Christ story.

But the highest use of power is not to use it, to then get all of your desires fulfilled. You attain the highest level of power in that particular story, and what do you do? You don't use it at all, and you sacrifice yourself. And that has a resonance so far deep within our culture, and I think probably within all cultures around the world. And that's the Christ example in a very real sense. He is the most powerful man to have ever lived. Legions of angels at his disposal.

And when you read the Old Testament, you see what angels are capable of. You know that he's got legions of them. And what does Christ do? He gives his own life, right? And he doesn't. And that's what the Jews were expecting. They were expecting him to use his power. You're the messiah. Conquer the Romans. Like, no, that's not what it's about. You sacrifice you attain that high level of power.

And where I think the discussion gets really lost, particularly in the christian world, is that gets used to say, don't pursue power at all. And I don't think that that's correct. I think you pursue power, but you recognize the point where you lay power down and you sacrifice yourself. It's kind of the ditch on the other side of the road. You have the barbarian ditch, which says, I'm going to use all this power to serve my own interests.

And then you have the ditch on the other side of the road, which is the passivity dish was like, well, power is bad because it corrupts or because people misuse it. It's like, no get. You don't just don't go into either of those ditches. You pursue power. And, you know, using Christ's example, when to lay that power down for higher purpose and give of yourself even for a result, you're not going to know, right? Like, this is why I like the Braveheart example. William Wallace gives his life.

He doesn't know what's going to happen. He just knows that it's the right thing to do in that moment. And then, of course, his people ride to victory afterwards, but he doesn't know that. This is actually my argument against Ayn Rand, is where I started thinking about all this stuff about the pursuit of rational self interest, because the pursuit of rational self interest can't understand self sacrifice, because you're not going to be around to know if your results are successful or not.

So this is where the Ayn Rand objectivist philosophy crumbles, because it can't understand that idea. It does. I grapple with that. There's a whole section in the book on duty and sacrifice, and how, in fact, there's a couple sections. There's also where I talk about the difference between civilian and warrior cultures.

Warrior cultures highly, highly value the tribe and sacrifice and adversity over where civilian cultures that are in more commercial in nature and more merchant like, value individualism and non sacrifice. So it's like, what do I get out of it? Like, everything is far more a trade. And like, you look at the Spartans, for example, you would, there was a small penalty for coming back without you, or for dropping your sword or forgetting your sword.

There was the death penalty for getting your shield, for forgetting your shield. That was because the shield was protecting the man beside you, because that's how the fountain was set up. So there was a different relationship to this. And. Yeah, like, I believe in the book, I don't know if it was in that section where I kind of, like, grapple with Ayn Rand's piece, but it's. There is something there that doesn't gel quite well in sort of the commercial civilian world.

That is far more like, it's different in the warrior realm, which actually, funny enough, I'm thinking out aloud here, ties back to why the warrior class are almost like the bearers of virtue, basically. And like, that kind of. That willingness to sacrifice or die for something is necessary for it to subsist. And that takes a special kind of person that's less interested in just their current material gain, but more drawn to something, once again, transcendent. So, yeah, interesting.

I'm thinking about, like, imagine a tribe, say, 100 people, and you have a chief, and then you have everyone else. And if there were some circumstance where the tribe had to sacrifice a man, you have to sacrifice one man for rain or to save the tribe or whatever, what kind of tribal chieftain would say, bring me the weakest man, and we will sacrifice him? Right. You would expect that the tribal chieftain, it was a noble tribe, would sacrifice either the chief or one of the closest nobles.

But ideally the chief say, take me. Right? If a man has to die to save the entire tribe, take me. And I think that speaks to. I can just speak for myself. That speaks to something so deep within me as a man, like, yeah, okay, I'll go right. And. Oh, gosh. And you can't get there unless you're a strong man, because no one's going to pick the weak guy for a sacrifice. What kind of sacrifice offering are you offering to God?

If you're like, well, I'm going to just take this weak and sickly sheep or whatever. It's literally not a sacrifice if you did that. That's right. That's right. Literally, the concept of a sacrifice means you paid something. And if it's just like, the worthless, the person who's already half dead, it's like, okay, well, then it wasn't a sacrifice. So it's like, congratulations. So, yeah, so you touch on something very, very important there. Like, sacrifice has a price, and you can't. You can.

You can skirt that as much as you want, but when push comes to shove, there is that. There is a real price in blood. There was a great quote that I saw the other day. It's something about all things priced in blood. I don't know. I got to find that somewhere again. But it was a great quote, which just reminded me of what you just said. It's so rare that men get the chance to explore these ideas, we'll say optionally, right?

Like, you got to go on an intellectual, philosophical, theological journey to sort of take all this apart over the course of a couple years and get down to the depths of it and the heights of it, for that matter, versus men who, like, I want to improve myself as a man, so I'm going to read Bronze Age pervert or I'm going to pull off a whole bunch of memes and look, if that gets you started, amen. Praise God. Hallelujah.

But the ability to go on this, I guess I might say cosmic in terms of cosmos, this cosmic journey to understand the nature of virtue and the nature of masculine virtue and how that can inform civilization. Very cool that you got to spend time in that, in that world. You know, you get to spend time in elysium, you might say, yeah, man. I mean, I thank you for that.

And I will say that I'm blessed in many ways that I was able to do that because, I don't know, I feel like I sometimes get asked like, you know what? Why do you do all the things you do? You know, you're either building a business or you're writing or doing all this sort of stuff? And my best answer is, like, because I can. And, like. And I don't mean that in, like, the surface level because I can.

Like, I mean, it is like, if you're blessed with the ability to go and actually go on these journeys and to push yourself, because writing this book hasn't been fucking easy, man. Like, like, a lot of time went into this. Like, man, yeah. The amount of arguments I've had with my wife about like, hey, you don't spend time with me. You're not paying me any attention. I'm like, babe, I'm fucking writing here. Something here. Just please give me a second. Or, you know, like, I'm.

I'm literally stress stretched between, like, writing versus. I've got people to manage. I've got capital to raise. I've got conferences to speak. I've got 10 million things. But, like, man, this thing is so valuable and important that I want to put it out there.

Like, it didn't come without sacrifice, it didn't come without cost, but to tie it back to, because I can, it's like if I've been given the gift or the opportunity to go down this rabbit hole, then I'm going to do it because I'm alive and in some way, shape or form, that's my opportunity to give something back and I make my small contribution to the world, to God, to humanity, to whatever. And something about that makes me feel right good about life and about existence.

So thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, but it doesn't feel like it was, and you just said it doesn't feel like it was self serving. But you also allowed yourself to be changed by the process. Like, you're going to go walking up to these really confronting ideas, like, wow, they hit me really hard. What do I do with that? Maybe I got to fix some things, right? But that's the journey of creativity. It's like, that's the sacrifice. Like, well, I really like this. Maybe this didn't happen to you.

It's happened to me a number of times. Like, I go on this big adventure to explore an idea and I encounter something that's true in there. It's like, wow. That comes into conflict with some ideas that I have. I really like my ideas, but this is what's true. Well, I guess I'll throw that out and that's growth. Right.

But you're dealing with the highest themes of what it means to be alive, what it means to be a mandeh, what it means to serve, what it means to, you know, to grow, what it means to sacrifice, like, that process, it changes you. And I can feel that in talking to you from the last time we talked about the uncommunist manifesto. Thank you, man. Thank you. It means a lot coming from you.

And, yeah, I really appreciate you, like, having me on and just having this discussion, honestly, and it's one of the better discussions that I've had, or one of the best, actually, I think, that I've had around this, because you get it. We're on the same side. We're on the same side, praise God. So where would you like to send people to find out about the bushido of bitcoin? Now that they're all fired up and excited, where can they go?

So depending on when you're releasing this, it'll either be on Amazon. If it's not yet on Amazon, it may still be on presale. So the best place to figure that out would be bushido bitcoin.com. if they go there, bushidobitcoin.com, the most current links will be there. So if it is on Amazon, you'll be able to click one click buy on Amazon. If it's not yet on Amazon, there'll be two links. One to buy it with shitty fiat, and the other two buy it with bitcoin. And the bitcoin is obviously cheaper.

Amazing. Well, I'm excited to. So it's been a couple of years since we had this conversation, and so now here we are with the bushido of bitcoin. I'm kind of excited to see where you're going next. I'm wondering what the next stage in the svetsky adventure will be. I promise it'll be just as exciting that I can tell you what it will be. God knows. Let's see. But I promise it'll be energetic at the least. I have no doubt. I have no doubt. It's great talking to you, Alex. Thank you so much.

You too, my friend. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast. Visit us on the web at Wren of men.com or on your favorite social media platform, en of Mendez. This is the renaissance of men. You are the Renaissance.