What is Cryptosovereignty? With Erik Cason

Erik Cason is author of Cryptosovereignty: The Encrypted Political Philosophy of Bitcoin. Erik is a regular speaker and essayist, focussing on the social, political, and philosophical aspects of Bitcoin.

Cryptosovereignty: The Encrypted Political Philosophy of Bitcoin - https://cryptosovereignty.org/

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
What does it mean to truly contemplate what is value?
What is the idea of money? What is the idea of our
spirituality or soul? And like, is there really a
greater purpose and meaning to life or is it all just?
Collect the money and and die. Hello, I am Cody Allingham and
this is the transformation of value.

(00:20):
A place for thinkers and builders where we ask questions
about freedom, Bitcoin, and creativity.
My guest today is Eric Cason, author of Crypto Sovereignty,
the encrypted political philosophy of Bitcoin.
Eric is a regular speaker and essayist focusing on the social,
political, and philosophical aspects of Bitcoin.

(00:40):
Eric, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on.
Appreciate being here. Starting off with your book
Crypto Sovereignty, the cover features the classic image of
Leviathan from the work by Thomas Hobbes on the state and
society. For me, the central idea of your
book Eric, is really exploring this new form of political power

(01:01):
that is not backed by rule of law or the monopoly of violence
of the state, but instead by therules of mathematics and
encryption. Can you tell me a little bit
more about this, please? Yeah.
The reason that I specifically used Hobbes's Leviathan, which I
greatly appreciate that you captured that was because Hobbes
really being sort of the first political philosopher, he really

(01:23):
surmised the sovereign's power as being authority, not truth,
as the finer purveyor of legitimacy.
And I really believe that with Bitcoin and cryptography on a
whole, there's sort of this schism that develops between
legality and legitimacy that cryptography sort of underlines

(01:45):
with the fact of that. Like if you encrypt something
and you do not have the private key, there is no authoritative
force that can give you legitimacy to access it.
And I believe from that dictum alone, it's sort of inverts the
that Hobbesian idea from authority, not truth, is the
purveyor of legitimacy. The truth, not authority is the

(02:07):
final purveyor of legitimacy. And so from that, I think a
totally new ontology of law actually starts to unfold.
And I think we're really just atthe very beginning precipice of
it. And I think specifically where
we're at with the development ofAI and the direction that the

(02:28):
world's going to be moving the idea of sovereignty through
cryptography is going to take ona much larger and more important
meaning well beyond Bitcoin. But Bitcoin sort of defines its
substrate in a very important and powerful way that
essentially leads through an economic paradigm first followed
by a legal one. That's fascinating.

(02:48):
And I guess reviewing Hobbs, kind of some of the key tenets
there is the site of the social contract being essential to
society functioning. This idea of the Leviathan, we
can think of it as the state having absolute power to enforce
the laws and I guess make peace from what would otherwise
potentially be warlords and different powers competing for

(03:11):
that power vacuum, but potentially A pessimistic view
of the human race. And ultimately this idea of the
state, you know, being able to be anything from a monarch to a
democratic government. It's sort of the, the, the
function is available and it canbe filled in a number of ways.
And what you're sort of exploring and, and certainly it

(03:31):
strikes me as a powerful conceptas I've gone down my own Bitcoin
journey, is that there is a new way.
And if I can sort of give you a real example of the way I see
this, Erica, I, I sort of meet alot of different kinds of people
and I'm in between a lot of different social circles.
And just last week, I met some central bankers actually at an
event at the Press Club that I'ma member of.

(03:52):
And I had a, you know, a chat, you know, they're just people.
But also what really struck me though, was this divergent
between the idea of language andlaw and the way, say central
banks have a, a coded language they use internally for
describing their operations. But then there's a public facing
language they use to, I guess, manage public expectations of
inflation, right? And so there's this kind of

(04:13):
slippage between what they say and what they do.
And as you sort of mentioned, Bitcoin, The thing is itself and
it's the sort of nothing outsideof it.
And there's something quite profound about that idea, which
I'm still trying to grasp myself.
But the cider of like language and law and the words making it
so as opposed to it simply beingso.
Maybe you can expand on that forme, please.

(04:35):
Yeah. Like when you start to look at
cryptography as on language itself, like it's not a
representable language outside of the numbers that they truly
are. And so we we make this
transition from, you know, if wetalk about a tree, there's any
infinite number of trees as opposed to just the idea of a
tree or a singular tree or a tree by name.

(04:58):
And it's pretty interesting thatthat I think in a lot of ways,
what Bitcoin almost represents is a grammar without words
because it's like just fundamentally a rule set in and
of itself. But because it displays that
rule set through cryptography, there is no, none of that
slippage that can sort of occur between what's said and what's
done. And that's sort of what the

(05:19):
entire verification process of cryptography is, is it descends
into a binary that is simply either a yes or a no.
And when it comes to something as important and societal wide
as something as money like you, you must have that sort of
binary in language. Or else very similar as I cover
in the book that the Schmidian concept of the sovereign

(05:41):
exception will take over. And it's simply because it's
such a powerful concept that really governs the whole of
society. And it becomes a very difficult
thing to start really considering how the rule set of
money truly is a a fictionalizedconcept that we have all came
into some sort of agreement about.

(06:02):
And Bitcoin allows for a totallynew function outside of that
that and very interestingly, like there's no decree, there's
no Fiat explanation for why and how Bitcoin has its value other
than that we see that there's a fixed supply, that it continues
to consume energy. And then anybody can participate

(06:24):
in this open decentralized network that provides the quote
UN quote rights to cryptography and ownership vis a vis the
cryptography. And so very much in like a
Foucault instance, idea, power and knowledge merge into a
single entity that becomes the private key itself.
And I think in the world that we're moving into the ability to

(06:48):
be able to secure data through cryptography that's provably
secure. It is going to become a much,
much more important concept and will fundamentally be demanded
as the substrate to any sort of digital economy, which we all
seem to be participating in now.And you mentioned Carl Schmidt,
who I'd like to return to in a bit.

(07:10):
But before that, this idea of again, the language and the law
and, and sort of the way I thinkabout this sometimes is the, the
state considers the the rules ofthe game of football to be the
same as the laws of gravity. And this kind of totalizing
system of the way money works, for example, that, that, that

(07:32):
their, their logical, their, their scope of logic can only
exist within what they can see. And so this is kind of an
interesting flip of James C Scott's idea of to understand
the state, you first need to seethe state.
And I, I wonder whether it's theother way around as well,
whether the state can only see what's within its space.
And because Bitcoin lives in theshadows, it's outside of the

(07:53):
balance sheet of the state. It's sort of outside of their
realm of logic. And it's not even logic.
It's sort of their own Gnostic knowledge of the way things
ought to work, right? And so that's sort of perhaps
explains why, you know, I can have these conversations with
these people casually and they still sort of write it off as
being too volatile or maybe the,the, the sort of feigning

(08:15):
ignorance. But it seems to me they still
don't understand what you and I have sort of and certainly
yourself have written about and,and, and what I've read about in
terms of the the paradigm changethat's happening potentially,
right. Yeah, I think I think one thing
is, is that like if the state starts to acknowledge it in a
way, particularly it's very interesting with Donald Trump's

(08:36):
done here in the United States because he's really forced an
agenda on it. Meanwhile, you still have the
laggards of the States and institutions struggling to
understand it or integrate it. But it sort of goes to speak to
the very real capital T, capitalT, the political that Bitcoin
has imbued in it because like it's going to be a forcing
function very similar to how gold was classically.

(08:59):
And while it didn't seem like wecould ever sort of roll back to
going to a truly like tangible sort of money similar to gold,
with which we've made this sort of strange inversion of it
through digital means vis A vis Bitcoin, There becomes this
extremely new powerful module ofI wish we had a better word than

(09:22):
law. Because like, as you pointed
out, like the, the laws of physics and the laws of the
state, they, they're, they're made to be equal when they're
fundamentally and distinctly different things.
And it all goes back to the social contract about which we
agree with. And there's a a quote from
Leviathan where Hobbes says something like there there is no
convent that can be relinquishedwhen it comes to the safety and

(09:46):
security of the individual. And one of the terrifying truths
of the sort of nihilistic post global liberal order that we
live within is that like we've all been captured within this
order where our safety and security is fundamentally
compromised with how the state has mismanaged the economy and
created these Fiat substrates that really are massive

(10:10):
parasitical institutions that debatably are, are sucking the
very life out of, you know, all peoples everywhere.
And part of that vampiric and parasitic processes to sort of
homogenize everybody and try to force everybody into this very

(10:31):
sinister post liberal idea. Because and, and, and the reason
why I call it post liberal is because it's, it came from like
Francis Fukuyama is the last manof history.
And that like liberalism did win.
And there was this massive opportunity after the collapse
of the Soviet Union that like wecould have actually totally
opened up global free trade in the economy.

(10:52):
But there was like, you know, asFrodo's being told to like throw
the ring into the fire, he's like, no.
And he like puts it on. And that's sort of the world
that unfolded after September 11th.
And now like This is why we're sort of in these perpetual wars
and why, you know, at this pointin time in the United States,
like 80% of what we're paying into the government is just to

(11:15):
pay interest on the very money that has perpetuated these wars.
And it, it's just important to understand that that
relationship to the post liberalorder and that like it's all
inherently and fundamentally lies and it's like incapable of
telling any kind of truth because it's corrupted itself so
deeply under this Fiat idiation and ideals.

(11:38):
Well, the, again, these conversations and, and I guess
earnest with, with these kinds of economic commentators,
central bankers, people within that political sphere, who I
think it is important not necessarily to believe what they
say. That's not a good idea, but
certainly to understand what they're saying as it does have

(11:58):
an impact on things. And it strikes me that the logic
of, of their world is changeable, but it's sort of the
classic Orwellian thing. Like, you know, we're now at war
with East Asia, we're now at warwith Eurasia.
You'd flip it and it changes andit becomes the new truth within
that system. And if you look at the evolution
of the central banking system, you know, pioneered arguably by

(12:21):
New Zealand 1989 with inflation targeting, and it's sort of a, a
version of a new, a new version of the, of the, of the truth.
And so the fact that it is changeable says to me that it
can continue to change and that it can be usurped as well.
It's not an eternal unchangeablelaw like something like gravity
or, you know, the time space continuum.

(12:41):
It, it, it is a human law, right.
And this brings us back to Schmidt.
Carl Schmidt, famous German, I guess you call philosopher,
political economist, who in a sense legitimized the Nazis rise
to power and provided some of the philosophical legal
background to that right and effectively usurped the German

(13:02):
constitution, if I remember correctly, to create this
eternal, this state of exceptionthat led up to the war.
So talking about that, maybe youcan tell us a little bit more
about the history of what happened in the 1930s with Carl
Schmidt, and then perhaps how that relates today to what we
saw with Covad and sort of this post Covad world that we live
in. Yeah, in a lot of ways, Schmidt

(13:24):
I find to be kind of a tragic character in like a jesterly
way, just because he originally wrote on the concept of
political, which was kind of oneof his major theses where he
made the assertion of about the sovereign exception.
And his original intention was to get that to Chancellor von
Hindenburg, to get both the Naziand Communist parties banned in

(13:45):
order to try to save the Wee Meyer Republic.
But ironically, the friends thathe actually gave it to, instead
of giving it to von Hindenburg, they gave it to Hitler.
And so when Hitler found this, he was like, ah, like this is a
very good strategy to execute upon.
And then Schmidt being the opportunist that he was after
the night of the Long Nines, he actually wrote the defense for
how and why Hitler was able to assert himself as the leader of

(14:09):
the German Republic and how in order to stabilize the
situation, he had to go ahead and murder through his own
decree. I think it was about 250
different members of the essay, which allowed for the s s to
consolidate power. And from there moving forward,
funny enough, Schmidt in being the opportunist that he was in

(14:29):
sort of the political conniving ways, he double crossed Goring I
think in 38 and really got himself dejected from the party.
And he was sort of a suspicious person all the way up until the
end of the war where he was captured by the Allies.
He was in prison for about two years before they decided that
they weren't going to put him ontrial at Nuremberg.
But he was banished from public academic at that life and time,

(14:52):
had to move back home with his parents and eventually came back
into prominence in the 1960s where he was welcomed to speak
under the Franco regime at the University of Madrid, where he
gave a number of very powerful and important political
philosophies. One such as I'm trying to
remember offhand, it was the theory of the partisan, which I

(15:14):
think it is a very important andinteresting political figure
because he asserts that essentially like the partisan
will become the preeminent figure of war on the future,
which traditionally in Schmidt style, which he did, he
absolutely nailed. But one of the most important
things that Schmidt pointed out,which was really damning for the
liberal order on the whole, was he pointed out that like the

(15:35):
sovereign always has the abilityto suspend the law under the
nation under the the name of an emergency.
So if they don't have that right, they're always at risk of
there being a revolutionary government can overthrow and
legitimize themselves through it.
So it's sort of the first rule of the sovereign is that the
sovereign must stand outside andinside the legal order at the

(15:57):
same time. And so with that same figure of
Leviathan on the cover, it's very interesting that if you
were actually to draw out Leviathan's body on Hobbes's
cover, you would see that where his legs would end, he'd
actually be standing immediate because that's not actually the
full image, but in the full image, because I wouldn't take
on the idea of comparing myself to Hobbes.

(16:18):
But in the full image that has everything there, if you show
where his legs would end, he'd be standing on top of Hobbes
name, which was sort of the moreinteresting statement that
Hobbes was saying like this is all actually sort of fictional
and it stands on top of the ideaof who the sovereign is himself.
And so rolling all the way forward into 2020, as we all

(16:38):
experienced, it became very clear that despite all of the
rhetoric that we have towards being constitutional democracies
that have certain inalienable rights, essentially the state
was able to crush under its bootheel this idea of there being an
emergency because there was a pandemic.
And as many people in New Zealand probably experienced,

(17:00):
despite being one of the least populated countries in the world
that had, you know, massive amounts of open space, there was
very tyrannical responses that came about that not only robbed
people of their very real freedoms, but it also deprived
them of a lot of what these constitutional rights were
really displaying. The fact that this is all sort

(17:20):
of a fiction. And one of the other very
interesting things that came about from that as well is that
it really displayed to a lot of people that in this fiction,
it's as quick as they're simply being a state of emergency that
you can find yourself labeled asone of the enemy camps.
And I think that this also goes into Schmidt's philosophy as
well as that like the political actually sort of becomes this

(17:42):
definition of the boundary between who you could call
friends and who you call enemies.
And the problem with the sovereign exception is, is that
there's always the possibility of you becoming labeled as an
enemy who can be stripped of anypolitical rights under the guise
of this emergency. And I think that's generally the
direction that we're going to see this post liberal order
going in more and more. And that's sort of what we've

(18:05):
seen September 11th here in the United States with the idea of
enemy combatants. Because since 2001, it's been
possible for the United States government to capture anybody,
label them as an enemy combatant, and then simply
instead of putting them inside of the judicial order, they can
hold them outside the judicial order and inside at the same

(18:25):
time, which is part of the same double negation that the
sovereign exception lives within.
That's fascinating. And that drawing that line
between Schmidt and the COVID era certainly is, is quite
relevant for my own Lyft experience learning and and
really getting into Bitcoin and understanding this stuff around

(18:45):
about then. And I think I wasn't the only
one. Many people had a similar
experience that this kind of opened up questions.
And I wanted to reference this book by a Gambon, which where
are we now? The epidemic as politics.
So you you quote Giorgio A Gambon quite a lot in your work
and by extension as well, Michelle Foucault.

(19:07):
And and those two figures are really, I think, connected
through the cider of bio politics and the control of the
human body as a as a kind of political concept.
And COVID is an absolutely crystal clear example of this.
We're in in New Zealand, we we had a Bill of Rights.
There's there's UN built human rights declarations around
medical experiments and you know, the right to choose what

(19:29):
you do with your body, etcetera.And as you said, in the state of
emergency, this was no longer relevant and it was legally
justified as not being relevant in the face of overwhelming
emergency. And it sort of makes you think,
well, what, what is it for then?If it can't stand up to an
emergency, then it's not really worth the paper it's written on.

(19:50):
And so I would be interested in sort of talking a little bit
about bio politics because this ultimately comes down to the
most base lived experience, which is your own body and the
how that can be controlled by the state and what that means
today. Yeah, it's Foucault's work
around biopolitics and biopower is really interesting because it

(20:13):
there's a a very deep philosophical study that that he
does where he sort of talks about this transformation from
the classic sovereign. They sort of saw the world as
like the world is this wild, chaotic place and there's only
so much the sovereign that they can do to sort of enforce the
law. So like they really operated
from a dictum of like let live and make die.

(20:34):
So like people that violate the principles, they would just
murder and they'd be like, let that be an example to all you
wacky folks out there. But it was really with the
implementation of the modern state and with techniques of
power and technology that this order was able to invert where
they could say make live and letdie, where it became about
population control and peoples transformed into population and

(20:59):
the body transformed into something of medical science.
And that the idea of your biological substrate was the
most definitive thing about you,as opposed to like you being a
being with a soul and agency andlike that having individuality
to yourself. And it's sort of like the
philosophical conversion that allows for the state to no

(21:21):
longer see individuals, but justpopulations.
And this links very interestingly in a way to the
sort of communist ideology that the modern state represents of
that like there are really no individuals anymore, but just
substrates of different populations.
And within that, the state has aright over your body and how
it's allowed to control it. And that's been a very slow

(21:44):
slipping that's occurred that I've spoken to this about being
what I call a form of inverted eugenics.
Because in the attempts to create these populations that
it's sort of cordons and controls over the last 100
years, it's slowly allowed for man to go from being sort of
these wild, uncontrollable bisoninto being essentially bred into

(22:06):
a form of cattle that can be utilized and exploited that
aren't wild enough to do anything.
In addition to the fact of that,now that the state isn't going
after these well, like we're notdrawing and quartering people
anymore under the auspicions that like this is because we're
human rights and we want to loveand protect people.
But meanwhile, we're taking, youknow, hundreds of thousands of

(22:28):
human beings and we're putting them into cages and isolating
them and really sort of torturing their soul in a very
new and very powerful and maniacal way that's also sort of
under the same rubric of becauseit's for their own safety and
security. We're allowed to do that.
But the idea of drawing and quartering is just too barbaric.
And this is all because it's part of a paradigm of population

(22:51):
control and the assertion of biopower in and of itself.
And, you know, I found it very, very disturbing to see how much
people have taken on that identity as well.
And how quickly they'll sort of speak in these universal
normative things, which I think many of us experienced in COVID,
where it was something that like, if I wasn't willing to

(23:12):
engage in having an experimentalvaccine done on me, that I was
somehow risking everybody else's.
And it it must be underlined theirony that after the greatest
tragedy of the 20th century and we had the Nuremberg trials,
most people are acutely unaware of that The first principle that

(23:36):
they laid down at the Nuremberg trials after seeing the sort of
science experiments that were being done on victims of the
Holocaust. But, and I think another one
that's not seen as much is the experiments that were done on
people from I think it was Unit 451 in Japan, which were like
they were experimenting with plague and other bio weapons.

(23:57):
That at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, the first
precipitate that they set down is that everyone should have
absolute right over their own body and not be subjected to
medical experiments, and particularly ones that they are
misled to and not openly understanding what they're
engaging in. And it was truly horrifying to
watch the entire global order, like in lockstep, just simply

(24:19):
dispose of that history and act like there there was no history
to that. And that speaks back to the same
Orwellian principle that that wespoke before about the
pliability of truth. And this is one of those places
where they're like, well, it's for your safety and security
that we get to throw you in a prison and make sure that you
can't have contact with your loved ones.
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that.

(24:40):
There's a lot there. And I guess a couple of things.
Firstly, Schmidt was operating in the same period as
potentially the high point of the idea of eugenics, right?
And it's kind of the golden age of eugenics in the 1930s.
At the same time, you had a Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
coming out around about then. And so there was this kind of
moment prior to the war where a lot of these ideas were floating

(25:01):
around. And absolutely, the irony of the
Nuremberg, you know, the medicalexperiments Unit 731, I think it
was in China that was being. Thank you.
That was the correct one. Yeah.
No, no, I mean, it's it's incredibly interesting.
And it's sort of just been forgotten.
I mean, I sort of, I mean, I haven't forgotten.

(25:23):
You haven't forgotten. But it's been what, 5-6 years
now and people still don't really recognize what exactly
took place. And it's quite, you know, it
stands out to me, Eric. As I said, I live in Japan, just
South of Tokyo and I mean it's like the matrix, man.
You know, you ride the train andeveryone's on their phones and
it's this like there's not even any nature really.

(25:45):
It's just kind of concrete and it's just kind of this grey kind
of late stage project. And in a sense as well, because
Japan had this like economic decline since the 90s.
It's sort of just frozen in timeright at that moment when, as
you said, you know, the history ended 19/19/91, the kind of fall
of the Soviet Union. This kind of moment really lines

(26:07):
up perfectly with Japan, which was Once Upon a time the future.
And now it's the past or it's, it's, it's an alternative future
that never emerged. And this brings me to some of
the stuff I'm very interested inaround like hauntology, the kind
of cultural memory of the the the way got the ghosts of the
past kind of haunt out our cultural mind, our kind of this

(26:29):
the remix culture and the like the eternal sequels of like
Disney films that we're seeing today.
It's like like kind of history has kind of finished and yet we
haven't learnt from the lessons of the past, which it's just.
Yeah, it's a very interesting time.
And for yourself as an academic,Eric, I'm really curious like
these references you make to this kind of thought, a Gambon

(26:50):
FICO. These exist within the
institution of academia, but is this an institution you went
through because you reference the stuff, but you're certainly
not the the kind of type I wouldimagine that would be, you know,
stuck in the ivory tower. Like tell me about that.
No, no, like I've I've 0 academic training at all.

(27:11):
My entire philosophical concourse was compelled by
Bitcoin and it, it started with AM again of I just got this
splinter in my brain pretty early on in my Bitcoin journey
where I was trying really hard to understand what Bitcoin was
doing. And when I sort of got into the
substrate of what cryptography was, I was like, how is it

(27:33):
possible that mathematics can sort of take this oath to itself
and then it can create an unbreakability within that oath?
And then I was like, well, what even is an oath?
Like what, what's the ontology here that would represent the,
the, the ontic nature of an oath?
And so I just started doing someGoogling and Ambigan came up

(27:55):
with one of his books from the homeless occur series of the
sacrament of language, the the archaeology of the oath.
And in that it was a, a truly profound investigation.
And also as soon as I opened it up, I was like, what have I
gotten into? Like, this is so heavy and deep
and big and I don't understand any of this, but I really forced

(28:16):
myself to read it despite the fact I didn't.
I probably understood maybe 10% of what he was Speaking of, but
I could get that there was some really important stuff there.
And a lot of my own writing, like I never intended Crypto
Sovereignty to be a book. It was just a series of essays
that I had wrote specifically for myself to try to get gain a

(28:36):
deeper understanding of what wasoccurring here.
And in that investigation, I slowly started to go, oh,
there's like something really important and profound here.
And from Ambigan, he sort of because he, he's so heavy on
referencing things that, you know, he, he introduced me to a
whole slew of different philosophical characters.

(28:57):
And, you know, that's how I cameinto contact with Carl Schmidt,
that's how I came into contact with Martin Heidegger.
And through investigating their work in continental philosophy,
I sort of discovered the heretical nature of these
individuals because particularlyin, you know, the 20 tens, the
like Heidegger still hadn't beena reformed character.
He was still just a Nazi. Same thing with Schmidt.

(29:19):
And it was really from a lot of the work that Ambigen did,
because Ambigen for a long time was a hugely celebrated figure
on the far left. And it was only with the advent
of COVID that he he really became a sacrificial lamb.
And the book that that you held up in reference there was sort
of after he had published that, I think Adam Coast was the

(29:42):
individual who had translated pretty much all of Ambigan's
books. But like he had this big blog
post that he was like, I can't work with Ambigan anymore.
The fact that he would say all of this stuff about COVID and
how dangerous it was and that like, we're abandoning all of
our principles. Like I just can't deal with him
anymore. So Ambigan was really thrown

(30:02):
under the bus by the left because, you know, in where are
we now? Like he, he is absolutely
damning about the process that we engaged in.
And I remember it was early on, I think it was either, I think
it was like maybe April 2021, you know, like we're still
really in the thick of COVID. But he published one of the

(30:23):
essays that was featured in there and it was absolutely
damning. And the left, like everybody,
there's a whole New York, NY Times article that was, you
know, saying that he had lost itand that he was a crazy person
now. And for me reading that, that
was really the first time that Iwas like, whoa, like I haven't
been a fan of any of this. It seemed like it may have been

(30:44):
a legit pandemic, but he really highlighted for me the first
time, not like none of this was OK.
And that because of the direction that we had taken,
there was something very important in the human psyche
that had been totally sacrificedin a way that was frankly
unrecoverable. And I think that sort of speaks
to the sort of frozen nature that I think Japan has

(31:07):
ultimately been experiencing. But I feel like now that same
hauntology is definitive in America as well.
And I think that that's part of from, for me, I think it's one
of the truly terrifying things Isee going on with sort of the,
the whole left liberal contingency in America now is
that they're sort of haunted by the ghosts of COVID and the very

(31:29):
idea of what it means to try to deny the quote UN quote,
science. And in that, everybody's sort of
been fixed in this dyad that hasessentially had them celebrate
their truth from 2020 as being the only truth and not allowed
for themselves to develop or evolve from there.
And it's very disturbing becauseuntil we actually approach these

(31:52):
questions in a legitimate way and have thorough dialogue, like
we'll be stuck here kind of forever.
This is almost this great task and challenge and, and for me as
an optimist, looking at the workwe have ahead of us, Eric, where
I, I, I find it interesting that, you know, you didn't go
through this academic institution.

(32:14):
You found the stuff on your own.And, and for me, you know, I
mean, I did an undergraduate degree, but it wasn't anything,
you know, too serious. And all of my studies kind of
happened after that. And I do recall quite clearly
though, on the first day of my, of my degree, they said by the
end of this, you will all be Marxists, you know, End Quote.
And I mean, this is a humanitiesdegree in Wellington, New

(32:36):
Zealand. And it was actually really
interesting because I often reflect on how that at that
time, and this is sort of slightly before the high point,
this was say early 2000 tens. And so it's kind of gave me an
inoculation in a sense, because I got exposed too for Co the,
you know, the Derrida, the French theorists, all the guys
that we talk about. But I didn't go all the way.

(32:57):
You know, I sort of got the, the, the, the, the watered down
version, which maybe gave me some in a sense, actually a
vaccination against it, ironically.
But at a later date, you know, beginning to discover this stuff
and realizing that there the critical voice of all of this,
it no longer comes from the the institutions.

(33:18):
And as an artist as well, I knowI have a background photography
and, and, and, and artistic visual art.
And I was certainly quite taken back during the COVID era that
artists weren't responding to this either.
They were the ones, you know, wearing the masks and dancing
along with it and actually not providing generally a critique
of what was taking place. And so it actually came to the

(33:39):
Bitcoiners as far as I could seeand and other fringe people to
actually be the ones, you know, holding the flag of questioning
and to forget the art of questioning.
It's like to figure something quite profound, right?
It's like to not ask and to justaccept as is verbatim is it's
quite a dangerous place to be, right?
Yeah, I think, I think one of the really tragic things that

(34:02):
sort of played out there is thatlike artists as like true
philosophical propagandists are supposed to sort of compel
thought in a new and different way.
And I think when the the direct threat came about.
And because, like, I think one of the deeply shameful truths

(34:23):
that isn't spoken to is part of the response to COVID, where it
it comes from a deeply callous and cowardly place where we have
to realize that when we're underpersonal direct threat and told,
you know, if you go talk to yourneighbors, you're going to die
some horrific death of this terrible disease that most

(34:43):
people are willing to deny straight to their face.
Again, in very Orwellian terms that like you, you, you will
allow for you to deny and what your own eyes see.
And I think that was one of the things that sort of started to
produce itself more as people saw that like people weren't
getting sick and dying in the numbers that we're being told
that they were and that there was clearly something disturbing

(35:03):
going on. But I think that helps some
people break more out of the cage.
But I think that's one of the saddest things is, is that
reminds me of a Julian Assange quote, that there was a point in
time where he realized that courage is much more rare of a
trait than intelligence. And I think that's part of what

(35:23):
came about in COVID. And I think that's also part of
why we found these sort of fringe contingencies and why
Bitcoiners tended to be a strongand leading voice amongst people
that were vaccine resistant and willing to actually call it out
and fight. It was because like they they
had already sort of done this same fight on an economic front
through the decade before. And my friend, my friend Francis

(35:47):
Putier, you know, what he chose to do in Canada and the way that
he really actively was resistingand encouraging others.
And then also all the individuals that participated in
the Canadian truck protests, theway that they found solidarity
with Bitcoin is very quickly when it became clear again that
vis A vis the state of emergencythat the Canadian state could

(36:10):
actually seize the bank accountsof these individuals that were
just trying to have their constitutionally recognized
rights actually mean something. They were.
They found themselves in a situation where they had been
stripped. Of those rights.
And made the enemy of the state.And it turned out that Bitcoin
was one of the very few things that could actually protect them
and couldn't be reneged in the same way.

(36:32):
And I think that there was this very powerful solidarity that
came about where essentially people sort of from all of these
fringe elements found that like,that's what the solidarity was,
was that like, you know, we, we're truly libertarian.
And so far of that, like, I don't want to tell you what to
do with your body. I don't want you to tell me what
to do with my body. And I find it deeply ironic

(36:53):
again, that, you know, like I'llhave the same sort of what's the
word? I want these like carbon copy
liberal friends that, you know, they'll be like, well, like it's
my body, my choice in regards toabortion.
I'm like, you're totally right. Like my body, my choice about
both what drugs I can take and also about what vaccines I don't

(37:14):
take. And they're like, whoa, hang on.
And you know, me and my Co founder, we were just joking
earlier today about the very deep irony of that.
Like it's it's like climate change honoring week or
something here in San Francisco.But meanwhile, like these same
people are protesting Tesla and we're like, what?

(37:36):
Like which, which one is it? Like do you do you want to like
do the right thing for the environment or like, do you hate
Elon Musk? Because what he's doing sort of
on the government side, and it'sagain with the huntology, like I
think that there, there's this deeply frozen viewpoint that
because of the ghosts of the past, we're going to constantly

(37:56):
be haunted by until, you know, like I, I don't see a very
positive political future comingout from this because like I, I
haven't seen anywhere that thereseems to be a real willingness
to create dialogue. And so, like, I think that this
is going to continue to exacerbate until these ghosts

(38:17):
haunting all of us become large enough and powerful enough and
terrifying enough that we actually perform the exorcism
that's necessary to actually ridourselves from them.
And I think that that's going tobe a very difficult process that
involves coming to terms with the economic terms of the world
and how this has happened. Yeah, that.
Thank you. That's fascinating.
And again, this idea of a, a cathartic moment or a

(38:40):
reconciliation, which certainly hasn't happened and still a lot
of reluctance to really acknowledge or communicate what
what what's took place in 2020 through to I guess 2022.
And I guess something I want to touch on.
And then I do want to return to the state and hopefully perhaps
look at some of the solutions that an optimistic side that may

(39:00):
lie beyond all of this. But coming back to COVID and
lingering there for a moment, something Gambon writes about is
this relationship between Christianity, capitalism, modern
science and how something I think we all recognize is that,
I mean, the world has become more secular.
And the the kind of the role of the spirit of this kind of the,

(39:25):
the transcendent has been subjugated to what you describe
as the population and this kind of this numbers of people.
And he says something to the effect that, you know, Pope
Francis, you know, promoted these vaccines and and chastised
people for trying to escape lockdowns, whereas Saint Francis
embraced the lepers. And this kind of contrast

(39:46):
between, you know, the body as simply a site of living versus
the body as a site for the Holy Ghost to communicate and some of
these Christian ideas. And you do reference a lot of
the kind of, I guess, Christian ideas in your work.
And so I wondered if that's something you'd be open to
discussing a little bit and sortof how you see all of that
fitting into maybe man's great search for meaning amongst all

(40:09):
of this. Yeah.
I mean. It's interesting because you
know, I, I grew up in this sort of West Coast liberal, like
spiritual but not religious idea.
And it's really actually throughAmagen philosophy that the ideas
of Christianity sort of started to actually show their credence

(40:29):
in a much more important way. Because like it, I started to
look at the actual historic context and there's something
truly profound about what the Western legal order founded and
created through not just Catholicism, but more
importantly, the way that it created this sort of super

(40:50):
substrate in order to create a legal order.
So that even amongst warring Princess, it was like, look like
there there's certain parametersof the bracketing of war itself
that we need to understand and engage in and that gets
legitimized by the Pope himself.And in this sort of form of
formalized war that we have. And through that, like there was

(41:12):
very much an imperialist order that came about.
But I also think that like when you start to look at that
imperialist order and want to introduce like Africa sort of
the perfect place in context where we can see that in the
post colonial era, like things have gotten significantly worse
than how they were in the colonial era.
And I think part of that is because the lack of the legal

(41:34):
order and what the connection with the legal order has to that
greater sort of religious idea, not as a not as like a religious
sort of law, but as these sort of basic sort of agreements.
And I think also like in those sort of basic agreements where
we find ourselves in modernity, it's the same reason why we find

(41:56):
so many people identifying with that.
You know what, I like how I was raised with this like spiritual
but not religious. And there's this real lack of
understanding of that like there, like evil is like a real
thing that like does need to be fought.
And like, part of what evil is is that like it doesn't have any
ordering or recognition of its own nature of being evil.

(42:20):
And I very much feel like that'ssort of the, the spiritual but
not religious thing is that it reminds me of a pretty funny
meme of that. Like people don't realize that
like demons are a spiritual thing as well.
And so like, you know, when you say spiritual but not religious,
it's like, well, what kind of spiritual are you?
It's like demonic or like something else.
And I think that it's, it's really important to understand

(42:41):
that in the concourse of human history, what Western religion
and Christianity represents specifically offered humanity
something very, very important and the redemption of what
Christ represents in a historic context, like not in a religious
context all, but in a historic context, I think it's truly

(43:02):
profound because it sort of opens up this entire
philosophical ordering from which the West was produced and
the way that they found their own legal orders and the
entirety of how we have an operating legal system.
And I think it's pretty tragic that.
The historicism of religion and how that has influenced the

(43:24):
Western order has been abandonedand there is no understanding of
those connections and how they operate.
And I think now the most ironic thing is that like, the Western
order itself has betrayed itselfwith taking on this liberal idea
of sort of being trying to be all inclusive, trying to be all
integrative, and really denying the fact that like, like we

(43:48):
specifically come from a Christian culture and that
culture itself allowed for us tobe able to exist societally.
And now that we're finding that we're just trying to integrate
everyone. There's sort of a.
Collapsing of the order within that and a real lack of
understanding of why that's happening.
And like these thoughts can be alittle bit dangerous because it

(44:09):
can start feeling like they're drifting in a direction of like,
well, maybe we should be nationalist or racist or other
things. But it's not that.
It's just to provide what the critique is.
And again, in sort of a philosophical life, I think it's
really important to highlight these things and that we don't
necessarily have to have answersto them.
But very similar to like with COVID, until we actually

(44:31):
acknowledge what's occurring there, we are going to be
haunted by these ideas. And until we deal with the fact
that Christian culture on a whole is collapsing, and it's
because of this sort of denialism of not only what it's
history is, but what it's provided to society in a
positive sense. Like we will continue to be
haunted by the ghosts of that specific past until we actually

(44:53):
acknowledge sort of part of what's occurred here.
Yeah, that's really interesting.I think a sort of a counter
example. I mean, you say there's this
decline of Christianity, but good friend of mine is, is a
Christian pastor and she says that more particularly from
China, the number of people she's baptized from China

(45:16):
outnumbers all other countries combined and and that this was
here in Japan. And so I thought that was a
really is a single data point, but it stood out to me as maybe
a symptom of communism, which isultimately humanist and godless,
is that, you know, these people are seeking out something,
right? So it's very interesting because
I think that that's part of sortof the cyclical thing that's

(45:39):
going on is because like we had Christianity and we had this
very capitalistic order pretty much until that same end of
history where I think the West started to pivot towards this
much more sort of socialist and communist ideas.
Which now sort of downstream from that.
Like, you know, we have all of our, our our individuals here in
the United States that believe in this sort of socialist

(46:00):
ordering and that we can sort ofintegrate all of these people
that don't necessarily culturally match with us.
Whereas I think after being under the thumb of communism for
the last 70 years and feeling the force of being homogenized
into a population, the experience of, you know, the
redemption of Christ, seeing youas an individual soul that can

(46:20):
be saved and rescued simply by acknowledging him for who he is,
is an extremely powerful and potent idea.
That I think in the undeniability of that, like
that's sort of where communism is doomed, is that, you know,
like people want their souls like that.
That's an entitlement that is specifically reserved only for
them. And as much denial as may occur

(46:44):
from the political order, it's very similar to our experience
of Bitcoin. Like the powers that be can tell
us the worth of Fiat money as much as they desire to, but when
it finally comes down to it, like it is simply a projection
on to us. And the truth is something
radically different from that. And I think this also echoes, I

(47:05):
think, this idea that in an absence of real religions,
people choose false religions orthey create false religions.
And ultimately, even a Gambon talks about this, you know, the
search for salvation, which is available through Christ isn't
something that you can find through a mask or a vaccine.

(47:25):
And yet the way people approached it at that time, and
we have to remember what it was like people lining up to get
their shots and to put put on their mask and to fall in line
and to obey and worship this piece of science, which
ultimately didn't even fucking work.
You know, they still got sick. There was this great that
spiritual moment there, which was so obvious to me at the time

(47:47):
and in particular now looking back on it, as well as like,
yeah, there there was a religious fervor there, but
there was no salvation availablethrough that path.
And I think this is, you know, maybe people listening, you
know, thinking about this stuff.I mean, certainly just reflect
on that. You know what, what do you you
know, what do you remember from that time and sort of how people
approached it because they didn't get anything from it and

(48:09):
there was no salvation there. And there's that eternal idea,
which, again, it's not necessarily rational.
It doesn't fit within the framework of modernity that we,
you know, it was talked about. It's still got a deep seated
place in the human soul. Right.
And it's kind of hard to unseat.Yeah.
And I think you know, it, it's so hard to think about and

(48:35):
remember the experience of beingin that.
And the, it's funny because I, Ifeel like in reflection, that
salvation piece is very true. But I feel like if you were to
go talk to people about that, they'd be like that.
Like that's not true. And it's also very.
Yeah. And it's also so interesting,

(48:56):
like how science replaced religion very much in the
authoritative way that religion operated historically in the
same way that Protestants eventually objected to.
And you know, what Martin Lutherpresented is that.
And and like this is something that still occurs to this very
day here in the United States atleast, is people still say stuff

(49:19):
like trust the science. And it's truly mind boggling for
me because like that, that's theentire predication of what the
scientific process is. It's don't, don't fucking trust
it at all. Like it's literally like do the
proof of work to show that like you don't need to trust me.

(49:39):
Like this is what presenting A hypothesis and testing it is all
about. And that relates to Bitcoin very
well. Is that like you don't have to
trust that there's 21 million units of Bitcoin or that it's
using more energy or any of thisstuff.
Like you can go look at it and it will prove it to yourself.
And like, that's, that returns us all the way back to the

(50:00):
extremely important point of why, you know, I have Leviathan
on the covers that like, there'snow this opportunity that we
don't need to rely on authoritative decrees to find
legitimacy, but we actually needto seek out the truth in order
to understand what legitimacy is.
Yeah. Well, something something I
wanted to return to. So coming back to mathematics

(50:22):
and you'll be familiar with Plato's Republic and this idea
of mathematics being in a sense the above the line, you know,
the pure abstraction of mathematical rules and logic is
the highest form for Plato. And this is operating in a pre
Christian moment. And there's this kind of
interesting inheritance of a lotof these ideas that were taken

(50:45):
up by the Christian Church. And so how do you sort of see
this idea that maybe the Platonists, the pre Christian
society saw this ancient Greece,saw this mathematics and this
ideal, you know, superposition, you know, it's not even real in
the sense you can touch it. It is above reality and it's the
highest form of good for them. And then at the same time,

(51:07):
Bitcoin sort of also operates inthat superposition where the
cryptography isn't something youcan touch, yet it, it sort of
speaks to a higher truth withoutfalling down the rabbit hole of
the scientism that we've just discussed.
Like how do you see all of thoseparts sort of fitting together
potentially? I, I think really like this all

(51:28):
comes down to like a giant experiment of being able to
really understand and tell like like what ideas are from the
very beginning. And I think that just being
presented with the idea of who Christ is and what his life was
and why he was sacrificed by theRoman Church is part of this
higher ideal of what does it mean that there could have been

(51:51):
a man who existed that like loved people enough to self
sacrifice himself? And that it's all in this realm
of ideas, very similar to the way that Bitcoin is in the realm
of ideas that you start to think, well, what if we did have
a money that was controlled onlyby mathematics?
What if cryptography could end up being these positions and
sort of interesting of that it goes from this place of the

(52:14):
ideal of the idea down into the actual substrate itself of like,
well, like if there was a language that could say these
things that could speak to that,it would be really powerful and
important and magnificent. And furthermore, like the more
that you sort of pour over and think about it, it really starts

(52:36):
to become a more profound and important ideal.
And I think that that's, I thinkthat's sort of where the
connection between the two starts to find itself.
Is that like when you actually truly start to get into the
realm of ideas and their superpositions?
Like for me, that's a lot of thethe same idea of where and how

(52:58):
Christ is such a powerful figureis like, it's not, it's not
necessarily about who he actually was and the way that he
lived, but it's more of what arethe ideals that he represented
that he was able to push forwardinto the human psyche.
And now that, you know, 2000 years later, we can be having a

(53:19):
discussion about him and what the way that he lived
represented as a higher form, anideal for us all to pursue.
That's fascinating. And just you mentioned Africa
before and sort of this post colonial moment that we're in
where it's sort of is all falling apart.
And it's quite an interesting timing because I just watched

(53:40):
the documentary from Al Jazeera on the conflict in the
Democratic Republic of Congo that was directed by Daniel
McCabe. And what struck me, perhaps
naively, is the essential role of violence in the formation and
continuation of the state, especially in these places that
are quite unstable. And it's really interesting, as
Mao Zedong said, political powergrows out of the barrel of a

(54:02):
gun. And I do wonder, Eric, you know,
I can have this conversation about these, these these
profound ideas on our computers or via the Internet, but in the
DRC and, and, and, and Rwanda, these parts of the world where
there's sectarian violence, the bullets and the bodies matter.
And I just wonder, coming back to this, these ideas like

(54:22):
kinetic violence, the state, thewarlordism and and people's
desire for safety from the state.
I mean, do you have any commentsmaybe perhaps without going
Tibet necessarily for the state,but just reflecting on it
critically, Like what what does that mean versus maybe our a
clustered existence here in in the developed world?

(54:43):
Yeah, I mean, we're extremely privileged that we live in the
West and not like what the idea of law and society in order like
is something that that we take advantage of from the very
start. And like if we if we were to
start from the Hobbesian state of nature where everything is,
where life is short, nasty and brutish, we would probably have

(55:03):
a very different idea of what the nation state is.
But because we've had 500 years of a process of the development
of the state of Society, of those laws, of us as peoples
being part of that, that's inherently and fundamentally
different from somewhere like the DRC that not only has gone
through a number of imperialist projects that were highly

(55:26):
exploitive in a number of ways, but also it's gone through a
number of tragic and horrific civil wars that continue to this
very day. And so, and again, like, I think
that that sort of speaks to the idea of what the Western order
provided because like without the sort of imperialism that
came in and asserted itself in, you know, the 15th through 19th

(55:50):
century, like things could be very different here.
And I think about Hernandez Cortez, him coming in and
conquering the Aztec people. Like while that is spoken to a
bit poorly, it's also important to understand that like part of
why Cortez was so successful as he collectivized all of these
smaller tribes that have been dealing with the absolute

(56:11):
barbarism of what the Aztec people were doing with human
sacrifices. And furthermore, like Cortez,
with this very small contingencyof Spaniards facing against the
Aztecs, like, he was able to fight them because he very much
believed that God was on his side.
And that, like, this was an important Christian and Catholic

(56:32):
mission to be accomplished because of, you know, the very
real evil that the Aztec people seem to represent by the fact
that, like, they were chopping up human beings and ripping
their hearts out while they're alive to eat them.
And, like, that was something that he was like, I don't think
that we should allow for that tofunction.
Yeah. There's one other thing I wanted
to pull on then, if that's OK. So come back to Bitcoin, Fiat,

(56:55):
Fiat money. You open the book with the quote
of what you're exploring really is, what the essence of Bitcoin
really is, which seems to have little to do with money and much
more to do with what it means tobe, to exist in our world of
today. We're Fiat money rules all.
And I guess one of the final pieces I've been thinking a lot
about, Eric, is this virtual world and this base layer

(57:19):
reality, reality that we live in.
And if there's kind of a connection between those or, or
sort of what that means going forward, because there's very
little that's kind of priced in Bitcoin in the real world.
You don't see supply chains thatare bitcoinized, whereas it is
but money native to the Internet.
And I just wonder if you see a connection between or, or what
you sort of see happening. Oh, but is that your cat right

(57:39):
away? It's not my cat.
It's a cat that. Lives nearby that likes to come
over. No worries.
I was just going to say optimistically, the virtual
economy, the real economy and how you see that playing out
moving forward. Yeah, like I think very similar
to the the Christian ideal, likepeople, people have to consider

(57:59):
and contemplate like what value is and existence is for
themselves. And I think that that through
the evolution of that process, do you realize that there is
this actual idealized utopian world that does have a sincere
possibility of existence, but it's because of the nihilism
that sort of haunts us and the forcefulness by which this Fiat

(58:20):
world sort of exists that we don't have it.
And it's very similar to like, you know, if everyone was to
convert to Christianity tomorrowbecause they like saw what
Christianity represented for theworld, it would be a truly
different, a radically differentsort of world that offered
itself to a very different potential.
But also like, that's not going to happen.

(58:41):
And part of what being a Christian in the world of today
is to sort of carry that Crucible, if you will, and be
willing to go into this world that is going to have the
nihilism and the blackness and the difficulties.
And it's by seeing the. Light of what is.
Possible. And allowing for ourselves to
engage in that in a deeper, moreprofound sense.

(59:01):
There's something that that's truly rescuing about that.
And I think that the sort of comparative is, is that like
what Christian, what Christianity can do for soul and
allowing for oneself to to give yourself over to Christ and
allow for that sort of redemptive possibility to
happen. Bitcoin sort of has the same
thing with Fiat money. And it's sort of interesting
that, you know, like the criticism of deathbed converts.

(59:24):
And it's like, well. Why?
Like why do they get to go? To the same heaven that I do
when they have this whole life of sinning.
It's very similar to Bitcoin, Like it it, you know, like I
can't fault somebody that comes into Bitcoin today and say like
they don't have rights to the network because they they
weren't like me and decided to be a crazy person.
Really not like no, like it's like a great positive something

(59:45):
and it's wonderful. And it allows for them to to
rescue themselves from this point forward.
Like they they've had to live a Fiat life and form of life
that's sort of dealt with that for the last 10 years, which is
difficult and of itself. Whereas like, I've been on a
Bitcoin standard for a decade and like.
That while it's had. Its own difficulties it's also

(01:00:07):
allowed for some truly profound things to happen and I think for
me one of the most important things is is going through the
four year cycles of the peaks and troughs.
There's this very real moment where we go like, yeah, like
Bitcoin could collapse. Maybe it could go to 0.
Like, is that actually somethingthat would happen very much?
And I think in and the night of the dark Soul for a Christian

(01:00:28):
where it's like, yeah, maybe Goddoesn't exist.
Maybe this is like, maybe there was no Christ, maybe maybe there
isn't anything to be redeemed. Like, is that actually true for
me? And going through that and
wrestling with it and going, no,like, I I know that there's a
different experience of life that's much more profound and
important. And for me with Bitcoin, I go,

(01:00:49):
you know, like, maybe those things are true, but my core
belief from seeing how it functions, what it offers, like
I I believe this to be true. And by leaning into that belief,
it in turn rewards. And I think it.
It it has. Pretty similar angles with
Christianity with what it sort of offers and sort of the
redemptive power in the same way.

(01:01:10):
So I think I think these things are pretty tangentially related
in a very powerful way of that. Like it, it truly becomes about
like, what are these things? What does it mean to truly
contemplate what is value? What is the idea of money?
What is the idea of our spirituality or soul?
And like, is there really a greater purpose and meaning to

(01:01:31):
life or is it all just collect? The money and and die.
Yeah, no, that that that that's incredible.
And I mean, analogies may be uncomfortable for some, but I
mean the prodigal son, the may be done on earth as it is in
heaven, these kind of ideas of bringing that down and kind of
improving our reality here, our lived experience at whatever

(01:01:53):
stage we may be, there's something powerful about that.
And I mean, there is connectionshere.
And you look at hospitals, universities, all these
scientific achievements that didcome out of the church.
And it's kind of like, yeah, there's there's certainly a body
of thought and the surface area from which to build work and
explore these ideas, which I think is really important in
this moment. And you've certainly done that
with crypto sovereignty, the encrypted, the encrypted

(01:02:17):
political philosophy of Bitcoin.And I think it's an incredible
read. Recommend it to everyone to
check out. Wrapping up, Eric, I know we've
covered a lot of ground today. It sounds like there might be a
lot more for us to explore, perhaps in the future together,
but. Yeah, I've really appreciated
our conversation and I'd love todo another one.
Yeah, personal life stuff comes up, but yeah, I'd love to

(01:02:41):
continue it. And I really love where your
thought is. And thank you for reading the
book. These have been very poignant
and important questions. So I'd love to find another time
to get together and maybe do a Part 2 where we can sort of dive
into the guts a bit more and getdeeper into the philosophy.
Yeah, and absolutely. That sounds great.
Well, I really appreciate your time, Eric, and I hope you have
a good day. And yeah, let's let's keep in
touch. Absolutely.

(01:03:02):
Thanks, Cody. Thank you for listening.
I am Cody Allingham and that wasthe transformation of value.
If you would like to support this show, please consider
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And you can always e-mail me at [e-mail].