FFS097 - Eric V Stacks

Eric: [00:00:00] when I hear people talk about banning self custody or putting a 30 percent tax on energy use for mining Bitcoin. I just laugh. I think it's hilarious. It's a total distraction.

bunch of FUD.

I feel like collectively humanity is organizing itself around this truth protocol, this indisputable ledger, an honest ledger, And it's like almost it's like tuning how we're vibrating because we're all believing in this thing

literally changing the direction of our civilization at hyper rate in both a very logical and like non philosophical or metaphysical way of looking at it, but also in a very metaphysical way.

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Welcoming Eric V Stacks

Luke: Eric, welcome to the Freedom Footprint Show. Thanks for joining us.

Eric: Thanks for having me guys. It's an honor to be on the show.

Knut: An honor to have you here, uh, let's start by paraphrasing Voltaire, we don't care what you smoke, but we're willing to fight to the death for your right to smoke it.

Eric: Yes, I love it.

Intro to Eric V Stacks

Knut: yeah, can we, uh, can we have the TLDR on Eric V Stacks, please, for our listeners who don't know who you are.

Eric: Yeah, I'll give you uh, the most comprehensive but short version I can. So, I'm a licensed [00:03:00] cannabis farmer in northern California. I grew up in southern California, My parents divorced when I was five years old. My mother remarried a psychiatrist. My mother got into pharmaceuticals. and so, and she also would at that time went to back to school and she ended up getting a doctorate degree in sociology.

So I was privy to, I don't know, now I look back at what's the fiat incentivized pharmaceutical industry, plus very deep philosophical conversations that I was fortunate to have with my family growing up. And by the time I was a teenager I was exposed to cannabis for the first time and I developed an affinity for cannabis and kind of a great, an ever growing suspicion for, I don't know, the fiat world or just our system in general.

And, um, yeah, so in my mid teens I started to question why cannabis was illegal, but you could get all, you know, Reckt on alcohol and pharmaceuticals and tobacco and whatever. And so it [00:04:00] seemed like there was definitely some double standards baked into our system and our society. And I began to grow and ever, I had an ever growing issue with that growing up.

And so by the time I was 25 years old, a friend of mine that I went to high school with, who knew I had an affinity for cannabis, invited me to Northern California. They were going to Humboldt State University. And, um, yeah, I came up and I worked a harvest and trimmed. A bunch of cannabis for a medical marijuana farm at the time.

That was in 2009 and I immediately knew when I got here, I was like, Oh yeah, I know what I'm doing with the next many years of my life. This is very clear. So yeah, I never left. And I've been professionally commercial at a commercial scale, growing cannabis. And, um, that resulted in me getting licensed by the state of California in 2018.

Um, I since then sold my business, sold my, my house, uh, essentially everything, but the two [00:05:00] vehicles that I need for my family. And, uh, now I'm all, all in on Bitcoin. So I still produce cannabis and, uh, I'm a hardcore Bitcoiner.

Knut: yeah, I'm thinking of many yolks here. Like, could you be more Pacific? And, uh, you grew up, you had growing concern, and then you grew cannabis, and the, uh, Tegrity Farms comes in at some point, but I'll skip the jokes for now.

Bitcoin Atlantis and Madeira

Knut: before we dive into, uh, the intricacies of cannabis farming, uh, how did you like Madeira?

Eric: Madeira was absolutely epic. Um, I attended Pacific Bitcoin in October, and that was the first time I was around any other Bitcoiners in real life. Like, other than people who I have orange pilled. And so, uh, that was a very powerful thing. I would say that Madeira was orders of magnitude a bigger deal.

There was more people there, so there was just more of that energy. Um, [00:06:00] yeah, there was something special about it being in this little, this island in the Atlantic. I don't know. There was just such an interesting, empowering, like, it was very energizing. The vibe there was very energizing. And it's also, I think, It's special being around so many other people that you have so many of the most important values are aligned, you know, every, when you deal with people, if it's, if they're a Bitcoin maximalist and they're not into shit coins, you can essentially, you can know right out of the gate that most of the most important things About life, you guys have an agreeance on.

And so that's an interesting thing being around so many other like minded people. They're so optimistic. It's like rational optimism, as American Hodel says. You know, so optimistic, so healthy, so happy, all working on this new beautiful, I don't know, protocol that's just gonna usher in so many great things for our civilization.

And so, yeah, it was It was very inspiring, [00:07:00] to say the least.

Knut: Yeah, we couldn't agree more. I mean, we had a great time there and As you say, you're aligned on most things, so you know that, like, the real interesting conversations is where you, where you disagree. So I think, like, real Bitcoiners love disagreeing, and to agree to disagree, and trying to find why we're in disagreement about very, very specific things on the edges of what we think, uh, and that's because that's how you evolve, right?

That's how you, uh, how your thoughts evolve, and how you get ahead, and how you put one I'm Two and two together and go forward and I was very happy to see so many Americans on Madeira because it's rare to see so many like hardcore Bitcoiners jump the pond and join us here in Europe. It's the other way around.

It's more common. I think that Europeans [00:08:00] go to. The Bitcoin conference, uh, and the likes of that, uh, where there are, it's bigger, uh, but there's also way more noise. Uh, there's a lot of shit coiners running around, uh, and, uh, yeah, Madeira was more pure signal, uh, so yeah, I just loved it.

Bitcoin and Cannibis

Eric: totally agree. You know, I think there's something interesting, and actually, as I say this, there's a little bit of a parallel between, like, the cannabis community that I've spent the last 15 years of my life, and really more since I was 15 years old, so you can say 20, 25 years of my life. And Bitcoiners, and like Jordan Peterson speaks to this and your personality trait and like how agreeable or disagreeable you are on the spectrum and Bitcoiners by nature are disagreeable because they're real quick to just question and have an issue with

Knut: No, we're not. No, we're not.

Eric: Yeah, exactly.

That's exactly it. Yeah. And it's a similar thing with cannabis. It's, you know, the [00:09:00] ethos is a little bit the same. It's a little bit of F you. We're going to do what we feel to be right, regardless of what your paradigm or your system wants us to do. And, um, yeah, so I kind of like that.

Knut: Yeah. So, so let's dive right into what, what does bitcoin mining have to do with, with cannabis farming?

Eric: well, I actually think they're kind of similar in the sense that you, You're building this infrastructure and you're setting up, you're setting up infrastructure to harness electricity to produce something. So there are some parallels there. I think in the future, what we're going to see is, is we're going to see the heat being used to heat facilities where heat is a requirement, but actually, Most commonly when producing cannabis with all of the lights and all the equipment, they produce a lot of heat like the Bitcoin miners do.

And so you end up needing to run similar cooling systems that you do when you're mining Bitcoin. there is some similarities [00:10:00] though, in the sense that you have this new industry growing and the economic incentive is so large that people are attracted to come into. Cultivating cannabis because it's traditionally been pretty profitable as a result of the supply being stifled by prohibition.

with Bitcoin mining, if you have the ability to harness a bunch of power, if you have renewable or cheap energy, or if you're flaring off gas, if you just have energy that's going to waste, or if you have an abundance of energy, You can essentially park these miners there and it's kind of like printing money.

Like how it's that vortex of incentives. How do you not do that if you're capable of doing it? And so, yeah, I just think it's the economic incentive. The thing that's so beautiful with Bitcoin is it seems to be this vortex of incentives. It's like Breedlove says, it's this vortex of incentives that you'd get paid to interface with.

And, and avoiding that is. And the long term will [00:11:00] bring economic pain really to people who try to ban themselves from it. And so, yeah, there's some parallels there.

Knut: Okay, but it's not, it's not like that Dutch, uh, tulip farmer that uses the, the miners to heat up the thing because the, the lightning, uh, equipment heats, heats the plants up already.

Eric: yeah. In most locations, most commonly people are going to be using cooling when they're, you know, I don't know, cultivating in greenhouses. Um, in the event that you need heating, And there are places where people are going to need heating, and with the introduction of LED lighting, so traditionally cannabis has been grown with high pressure sodium lighting, a byproduct of that bulb, high pressure sodium fixture, is infrared and infrared literally heats everything up that it hits.

It's like, it's like grow lamp slash heat lamp. And now that the, the technology with led fixtures is [00:12:00] becoming so good as people switch to leds, they're running into issues where they're accustomed to producing a lot of heat in their facilities, and they're not now with these leds. And so in places where you have more temperate or colder climates and the industry is moving to LEDs, we are going to see that people are going to start needing heating.

And um, with the reduction in power usage also with LEDs, now you're going to have surplus power that you, once we're using for lighting, now you'll need heating. And once again, if you can mine Bitcoin while you heat your facility, the economic incentive to do so. Is so much that and we're talking about a commodity, you know, Jeff Booth's work has really been pivotal in me understanding.

The forces that we're contending with in our world. As we make things more abundant, as human ingenuity and technology allows us to meet demand with supply, the cost of everything is falling to the marginal cost of production. [00:13:00] Unless you can build like a regulatory moat or a monopoly in some sector in the marketplace to prevent competition from coming in, then you could capture these large margins and continue to grow.

I don't know, make those margins in perpetuity, but typically in a free market, and I experienced this, uh, an extreme version of this in cannabis, as the supply is increased, as the demand has been associated with supply, as legalization has taken place and the regulations have become more friendly and the risk is less and so on and so forth, cannabis has become much more abundant.

And as a result, the price is dropping. And so you have a lot of volatility within the cannabis industry and a lot of people are going out of business as a result of cannabis falling to the marginal cost of production. As an example, for me, 10, 12 years ago, a premier world class pound of cannabis that I would produce and sell directly to a [00:14:00] dispensary in Southern California, lawfully, was between 3, 000 to 4, 000.

Today, really a better, higher quality pound. Is going between eight to 1200 bucks, call it a thousand dollars. So I'm making between a third to a quarter of what I once was, but my cost of living slash operating my business has doubled, if not tripled. So you have the inflationary forces of the fiat monetary system, where the monetary units are lent into existence as debt against assets, insolvent.

But I'm That force is the opposing force, the natural force of making something more abundant, and so I have wage, dollar denominated wage deflation, and dollar denominated cost of operating or cost of living inflation. And so, if I didn't adopt Bitcoin as a treasury reserve, And so it's [00:15:00] taking places as the appreciation on my balance sheet, you could say, is so great that it outweighs the loss of income on my P& L.

And so the thing that's so special for me about Bitcoin, and I can see this taking place across the marketplace, is, is that people that are saving Bitcoin, they save their surplus in Bitcoin as they're, as earnings are harder to make, their bitcoin is appreciating at such a fast rate, it's a hedge against these two inflationary forces, and, and, it actually like, so with cannabis specifically, I got two major issues, uh, well three, so you got the inflationary issues with The fiat monetary system, but I have commoditization.

And so that's essentially just where you have an incentive. You have a margin. People are going to move into this sector of the marketplace. Entrepreneurs and capital are going to produce more cannabis. That's going to drive the price down. But then I have jurisdictional competition. So I'm in Northern California.

My electricity is very expensive. [00:16:00] Gas is very expensive. Everything's really expensive. So, that means that somebody could go to a jurisdiction like Oklahoma where the regulatory fees are less, less money, there's less regulatory impedance, the cost of living is less, and when we're competing on the national stage, which is coming, I'm at a big market disadvantage against somebody who's in a jurisdiction that's more business friendly.

But those forces, commoditization, jurisdictional competition, and then the money printing, the inflationary modern monetary trash system that we have to use. Those three forces that make my life harder are making my bitcoin shred, which is making my life better. So, yeah, that's kind of a mouthful there, but you get the point.

Knut: no, it's great. Uh, and I'm thinking about how ironic it is that, you know, uh, everything is getting more expensive in Fiat land. Uh, it's getting more expensive to live and it's getting. Especially more [00:17:00] expensive to live a good life with high quality products. And at the same time it's getting cheaper to be stoned every day and live off of government subsidies and just lay on the couch and do fuck all every day.

Eric: yeah,

Knut: How convenient.

Eric: yeah,

Knut: Alright, yeah, so those are the policies.

History of Cannibis Legalization in the US

Knut: Yeah, tell me a bit about the history of legalization of cannabis in the US, because it's been talked about in Europe a lot, and Germany has been talking about it for ages, but it seems like the legislation never happens, or the decriminalization of what you say, so it's very new. Yeah. Yeah. This is a very tricky, uh, thing, because the laws around it are so different.

Uh, I mean, the cannabis laws are sort of like the lockdown laws in late stage COVID, where, where every country had a different set of laws and you were criminalized in one jurisdiction, but not in another and stuff. But like, what, what's the history there? How, how did it play out? Is it, [00:18:00] uh, I guess it's not legal in every state yet.

It's, uh, it's pretty strange, right?

Eric: Yeah, so what's happening is state by state, it's taking, it's happening on a state level. Um, It seems like every two years, more states legalize cannabis for recreational use that have had medical use, and then states that don't have any legal cannabis use seem to go medical. They'll go medical first, and that means that within the state, if a doctor writes you a prescription or gives you the right to go and buy cannabis through one of their doctor recommendations, you can go to a medical dispensary and you can purchase cannabis.

And it seems to go from like a A totally illegal black market activity to what becomes kind of a gray market activity where you're allowed to under nonprofit and. And medical regulations that go into effect. And then what will happen is, is the people of that state realize that this isn't some dirty, despicable drug and [00:19:00] people aren't dying on the streets because they're smoking weed.

And then they vote to legalize it on a recreational level. And so in the state of California, California has the largest cannabis industry by A significant amount. It's a huge economy here. Our GDP is enormous. There's, there's a lot of economic activity. And so in 1996, the people of California, uh, put into effect, or the state put into effect the proposition, Prop 215, which, which was the regulatory framework for medical marijuana.

And then what that stated is, is essentially you could share medicine, what They determined cannabis to be medicine. You can share this cannabis within qualified patient members within a collective that are members of a non profit organization, right? So it kind of made this like cumbersome process, but it wasn't that difficult.

You just form a 501c3. Everybody's got a doctor's recommendation. You get all the proper documentation of everybody within that [00:20:00] collective. And then now you can produce and share cannabis within that collective. Well, what ended up happening is as a result of having an enormous demand for cannabis, the price is high, the economic incentive is high, so a lot of entrepreneurs and capital flew into that sector of the marketplace and started participating in the production and the distribution of cannabis.

And from 1996 to 2018, and 2018 is when adult use recreational cannabis went into effect. So you could say it went fully legal. And over that What is that? That's 22 years. Over that 22 year period, a mega, multi billion dollar industry developed. And in 2015, the governor of California at the time, uh, wrote into effect, or signed into effect, a bill called Medical Marijuana Safety Regulations Act.

And this is MRSA is the name of this, this, uh, Bill. [00:21:00] And what that did is, is it put into the, put into effect the initial regulatory framework for the state to license and the counties to permit any cannabis activity that was taking place. So now you essentially had what was this gray market activity where all you needed was a 501c3 nonprofit organization.

People would go see their doctor. The doctor would say, Hey, here's your prescription for cannabis. And now you can go and And purchase cannabis. You could produce cannabis if you are under a certain amount and so on. So you basically had this explosion. It was kind of this chaos, this mania of this enormous industry that, that, that ensued and there wasn't any licensing.

There wasn't any permitting. It was kind of this, uh, guilty till proven innocent. If you got caught by law enforcement, you'd have to go to court and you'd have to say, Hey, here's all my documentation, so on and so forth. And so with the fact that. It seemed pretty clear that in 2016, the people of the state of California were going to vote into effect adult [00:22:00] use.

The prior election cycle, it almost passed, and so preemptively, the regulators started to put together this framework. And what the framework essentially said was, is that if you're on the county level, the county decides whether they're going to Permit cannabis activity or ban it, and if they're going to permit it, they're going to permit it, and then when 2018 hits, you're going to apply for a license with the state of California.

It's kind of like a liquor license. If you want to have a cannabis storefront, or a manufacturing facility, or a cultivation site, you need to maintain Proper setbacks from schools. You need to make sure you don't have any evasives, you know, endangered species on the property. Like, you know, you have to have biological studies.

You can't be bulldozing a forest to put in, you know, greenhouse facilities. You have to appease all these regulatory restrictions. And so, in 2016, when this 2015, when this bill was signed into effect, [00:23:00] Humboldt County, being the mecca of cannabis production, really, and you could say in the world, signed, they, they issued their land use ordinance.

And to give you an idea, and this is going to tie into Bitcoin here. In Humboldt County, at the time, they offered up a carrot and a stick thing. Here you go. So if you register your farm and quote unquote, come into compliance. You're going to get priority for state licensing and we're going to permit you at hyper speeds and you know, basically here, that's the incentive.

Come out of this gray market and into compliance into this regulatory framework. And if you don't, we're essentially going to shut you down. Out of what was determined to be Of commercial scale, visible via satellite imagery, Google Maps, like I could take you on a tour right now on Google Maps, there was 12, 600 and some odd farms in Humboldt County alone, okay?

They implemented a deadline. Six months [00:24:00] after MRSA got signed into effect, you had to register your farm at the end of 2015. Out of 12, 600 some odd farms, 123 people registered their farms. Essentially, the cannabis community at large gave the middle finger to the regulators because their regulations and what they wanted was ridiculous.

It was way too much. It was way prohibited. They wanted new roads, live camera feeds, all of these things. And everybody who was Producing cannabis who wanted a future producing cannabis. Now, mind you, licensed legal cannabis was a dream come true for 12, 600 farmers out there. 123 people came forth. These are also farms that you can see.

I just want to reiterate, you can see these from Google Maps. Like you can drive black SUVs right up to these people. You can go arrest these people and go shut these farms down instead of going around with the stick. They extended the deadline by 12 months, and they came back with way more favorable rules.[00:25:00]

And so when I hear people talk about banning, like, regulators at the U. S. government level, or the E. C. E. O. European Union, or any of these governments, Talking about banning self custody or putting a 30 percent tax on energy use for mining Bitcoin. I just laugh. I think it's hilarious. It's a total distraction.

It's a bunch of, it's a, it's a bunch of FUD. It's a, it's another reason to keep the everyday person out of Bitcoin. It'll never stick. None of this will ever stick. You can't ban Bitcoin. You can only ban yourself from it. Let's look at what happened to China. And I believe that what is going on on a, on a, on a level.

Within the United States and the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. Yeah, they want it all. They aren't even going to get remotely close to it. I watched it happen with cannabis. You could go right to these people's farms and you could shut them down. They're physical. They're in the physical world. They're mega greenhouses visible from satellite.

You can't even prove if somebody actually has the [00:26:00] private keys to their Bitcoin. you going to go and charge a Bitcoin miner 30%? You know what they're going to do? Texas, first off, would be up in arms if they tried to do that. Secondly, all the Bitcoin miners would just hit shipping containers and just leave, go somewhere else.

And then everybody gets the, dude, it's the economic pain that they would feel from that is enormous. So I believe it's a bunch of FUD. I believe it's based upon a bunch of regulators who want it all. Like they wanted it all with cannabis. They got a fraction of what they originally wanted, and then they came in and overtaxed it, and now they've had to reduce taxes because supplies meeting demand, and the cost of product, it's, it's, it's, the value of cannabis is dropping to the marginal cost of production, so the producers aren't this epic honeypot of tax revenue for the state, as a matter of fact, they're all going broke and going out of business, and the state's reducing taxes, the county has foregone its square footage tax, and so, I think it's important that we don't let the [00:27:00] regulators wreck the bright orange future that we have coming here.

But I also don't get too wrapped up in it and I don't lose any sleep. And I watched the government come in and try to regulate a multi billion dollar industry that was much, by orders of magnitude, easier to shut down, violate, regulate, whatever, than the Bitcoin industry is. So I think that they're going to bend the knee.

They're going to capitulate. They're going to fall into the Incentive Vortex, that is Bitcoin. You get paid to interact with the Bitcoin network, honestly, and you get punished to try to go against its incentives. And so I just think it's, we're in for hyperbitcoinization in some degree. I feel like we're experiencing that and it's just a capitulation into the incentive vortex.

Knut: Ah, beautifully put. Uh, just a quick question, who was governor of California when that bill was passed? Was it Arnold, or was it someone else?

Eric: No, it was Jerry Brown. It was Jerry Brown, uh, signed, signed [00:28:00] MRSA into effect.

Knut: Alright.

Prohibition

Knut: So, but there's something to be said for prohibition in general here. I know so many examples, like, I once visited the Faroe Islands, which are small islands between Scotland and Iceland. And, uh, the, um, The harbormaster there told me about the alcohol regulations they used to have, because it used to be, there used to be a ban on alcohol.

You could, like, have, consume a liter a year, each person, or something ridiculous like that. And, of course, it resulted in everyone making their own moonshine. And all the side effects of that, and there were alcoholics everywhere, and then they, at some point, they decided, fuck it, we'll just do Danish rules, which are some of the most liberal in Scandinavia.

And all the alcoholics went away, and now they're normal again. And like, the thing is, it's the same with cannabis in Europe. Like, in Scandinavia, I grew up, there's the, [00:29:00] The mecca for cannabis was in Copenhagen in a place called, um, Christiania. Yeah. So, so, and Christiania was this hippie, uh, there were some hippies that took over a part of the city that had, was slightly abandoned in the seventies or, or even late sixties, and, uh, built this little hippie collective and then somehow managed to be allowed by the government to do that and live outside.

of the rest of society, but over time, uh, it evolves into a, the, the, like the center of Kristiania, it's a, it's a terrible street called Pusher Street, where all the criminal, uh, drug dealers are, that, that are really, like, the, the scary guys, you know? And, uh, and same thing with Amsterdam, uh, uh, I mean, not, not anymore since cannabis is everywhere now, but, but, uh, I remember, uh, back in the day, Amsterdam used to, to attract all the junkies from all over Europe, and it, it used to be way [00:30:00] trashier because of Not because of the liberalization of stuff, but because of the prohibition everywhere else.

Eric: Yes.

Knut: So, so that's what, that's what happens. And in the US, if I go even further back in history to the alcohol ban and Al Capone and all of that stuff, what that led to, a giant criminal organization and the war on drugs, like all the violence that has come with that. I mean, the, the downsides far outweigh the, the upsides of, of prohibition in general, I think.

What are your thoughts?

Eric: Uh, well, I think that with cannabis specifically, prohibition of cannabis coincided the hyper debasement of the currency, and it also happened alongside of this pharmaceutical industrial complex, and the patenting and these regulatory moats being built around specific sectors in the marketplace, and so as the currency [00:31:00] is debased, your margins are harder to make, so if you have an inflationary rate, within, the expansion of the monetary units, let's look at inflation like bitcoiners do, is they expand the M2 money supply at 8 percent a year.

If your cash flows don't increase at 8 percent a year, you're actually taking a haircut. And so, there's a huge incentive from the petroleum industry, Um, and the pharmaceutical industry to ban cannabis and also just from the government in general, because I think cannabis, it does a, it's very therapeutic in multiple ways.

It's anti cancerous first off. It has molecules within it that are some of the most anti cancerous molecules. On planet earth, they perform a process called apoptosis, where the molecule can move in and penetrate the cell membrane barrier of a cancer cell and destroy a cancer cell without harming healthy cells around it.

So it's the opposite in [00:32:00] some sense of chemotherapy, which just destroys everything. And so cannabis is very therapeutic on a physical level, but also on like a psychological and a spiritual level where I don't know about you, if you guys have ever smoked cannabis, but if you do, you get that feeling of being like hyper aware of, of, of, of empathy.

You realize like, Oh, I'm kind of was a dick. You get that like feeling, some people call it paranoia, but I think it's a tsunami of suppressed, like feelings that you have around being too aggressive. And also as the currency is debased, it creates this low grade state of psychosis and it also rewards. I don't know, I call it scumbaggery, but like the, the raping and killing and stealing and pillaging that some of these mega corporations are the quintillionaires, they're too proverbial, too big to fail entities, corporations, nation states.

You have to like suppress people's empathy to get them to be, to not be [00:33:00] really bothered by what's taking place. And so there's a multitude of things that I think happened. Alongside each other that really incentivized the overlords or the powers that be, you could say, to ban cannabis and then indoctrinate the populace to think that cannabis is some terrible, evil drug and is going to make you stupid.

And so, yeah, the prohibition of cannabis I think is also similar to like, The attempt to 6102 people's gold. Well, gold by having gold on in possession of the populace, as they debase the currency, it becomes more clear that the currency is being debased because the gold was the money it's hard money.

It's going to inflate its supply at 2 percent while they start expanding the money supply at seven or eight or 9 percent or whatever. And it has this like effect of exposing what's taking place. Well, cannabis and. And psilocybin, and I would even go as far as to say like LSD or ayahuasca, some of these plant medicines, and even the synthetic version, like LSD, it [00:34:00] does something as far as it makes you more aware of the natural forces within the world.

And there's these both physical and metaphysical, like, like healing effects from this. And it kind of exposes what's taking place. The exploitation with the pharmaceutical industry, the petroleum industry, you can do so much with the fiber that comes from cannabis. Another one, actually, I live in the Redwood Forest, the timber industry had an issue with cannabis.

It's kind of similar to like I don't know, XRP donating to Greenpeace to attack proof of work mining. Like, the timber industry is fucking contributing to the making of reefer madness. So is the petroleum industry. So is the pharmaceutical industry. And then the central bank's like, yeah, we can't let them smoke weed because, you know, you can't have gold.

You can't smoke weed. We want these people waking up. Let's start fluoridating the water. Let's start feeding them a bunch of GMO poisonous food. So then they go to the doctors. And so, yeah, I think that there's a lot of interesting parallels [00:35:00] there with like the debasement of the currency, the debasement of the sanity and the culture and the, the, the truth, you know, like we're, we're like debasing the truth as the currency further gets debased.

And so I think there's, you know, a lot of parallels there. And so, and what happens though is, is that the people get what the people want. So as you stifle the supply, and if the demand is still there, the free market is going to bid the price up. So they're willing to pay more. And if the incentive, the economic incentive is high enough, people are going to be like, fuck it, I'll break the rules and I'm going to satiate that.

That demand with supply. And then now you have, now you have the government's bringing it in too, cause they're so broke that they need more tax revenue. There's two ways for the government to fund itself tax or debase. And if you debase too much, people go crazy. If you tax too much, people go crazy. So it's this back and forth, the tax debase, tax debase, tax debase.

And so now the government wants, you know, I think that they're going to come in and they're going to [00:36:00] legalize cannabis on. A federal level, which I personally believe in everybody's right to believe whatever they want, first off, but I do believe that there is a lot of misconceptions about cannabis, and how cannabis makes you stupid, and you got that lazy stoner, and you got the Cheech and Chong era, which is just a Hollywood ridiculous flick that I honestly have an issue with, and I would say that You know, and you mentioned it, the, the person who's getting, you know, welfare or UBI and they're laying on their couch and they're all stoned all day, well that person doesn't actually really exist that much.

First off, cannabis isn't cheap, so you're not going to sit there and you're going to, you can't really smoke a bunch of, you know. Cannabis

Knut: I know a couple of people like that, so that's why I mentioned it.

Eric: okay.

Drugs and Addiction

Eric: Well, and you know, what I think though is, is I have a theory about that and I could be wrong. I'm just a dude. I don't know. What do I know? This is just my thoughts, but we're being gaslit.

First off, we're being lied to by the [00:37:00] overlords. We're being stolen from. So we're being stolen from and we're being lied to, which is very depressing. We're coming out of a very nihilistic era, the YOLO period. People's time preferences short is really becoming very short. Because what they want that's of significance is so far out of reach.

And what is it, 50 years ago you made 30 grand a year, that the nice house that you wanted was 90k, right? That's three years worth of salary to buy a nice house and a car that was made out of steel and wood and leather, not plastic and pleather and garbage, right? Now you make 50 grand a year if you're fortunate, that's more than your average American does, and that, and a decent house.

It's actually made with a bunch of shittier materials. It's 500, 000. So it's 10 years worth of salary. So these people don't really, they care less about the longterm. That and then as you're economically impoverished and you're being lied to, and then you're being sold and so you're also [00:38:00] being lied to about the food pyramid.

You're being poisoned with all of this garbage food, all this, this glyphosate, glyphosate laden. Which is Roundup. Roundup laden, high fructose corn syrup. You can eat a bunch of sugar. You should have all this bread. You should, you know, go to the doctors. You don't feel good. We're going to pump you with a bunch of pills.

Oh, and then it's cool. Just drink a bunch of alcohol. So these people are all poisoned and they're hurting and cannabis legitimately on a, on a very high level mitigates both physical and emotional pain. So I think that that proverbial, like Lazy dumb stoner is somebody who's self medicating because they're physically and psychologically really suffering.

And I think that that's also part of the drug epidemic in our world. It's the addiction epidemic. It's the addiction to porn, gambling, spending a bunch of fucking money on things you don't need, drugs, like coffee's a drug, tobacco's a drug, [00:39:00] alcohol's a drug. Like it's, they're all things that you're putting in your body that change how you feel.

Knut: I talked to, uh, uh, Joni Appelberg about this, like the guy who, uh, I collaborate with, uh, every once in a while with those animations. And he's a medical doctor and is very interested in this subject, subjects. And like the, from what I learned, the, the latest studies, uh, about, or the latest insights about, uh, addiction in general is that it's not as connected to the substance as we think it is, like they, they, uh, they've had, um, uh, experiments where, where you, you put a bunch of rats in a, in a box and you give them supply, free cocaine, basically, and, uh, free just water without cocaine.

And, uh, then, uh, The rats become junkies, but if you build like rat paradise instead of just a box, where they have other rats to mate with and fun stuff to do, like running around in a wheel and whatever [00:40:00] else rats find funny, uh, then, then they, they, they, uh, become, uh, You know, Charlie Sheen, and they use cocaine moderately,

Eric: yeah, totally,

Knut: they can handle it socially.

So the whole, uh, Charlie Sheen might have been not the best comparison there, but still, they, he said something

Eric: they don't become rat

Knut: once, but no, exactly, so the junkies are a product of the world being what it is, rather than the drugs that these depressed people self medicate with.

Eric: I totally agree. And I've witnessed a lot of that in the world with, you know, so my mother, when I was 20 years old, 20 years old, she had been taking antidepressants, pharmaceutical drugs that were prescribed to her. This is a doctorate of sociology. She didn't smoke tobacco. She didn't drink alcohol. This is an upstanding, classy person who's intelligent.

She took pharmaceutical drugs [00:41:00] for 15 years. They didn't solve any of her problems. They made her borderline psychotic and depressed and she ended up killing herself. And so for me, by actually producing cannabis was also, there was like a little bit of vengeance. Like for me, it was a Royal F U to like, now what I just look at as the Fiat world, but as just the pharmaceutical industrial complex growing, you know?

And so for like, I've had a lot of family members who have suffered tremendously From pharmaceuticals, but actually to your point, this is an issue with the trauma and like, low grade state of psychosis induced by, I don't know, I would say that it's directly related to the, to the, how the world is getting perpetually harder as a result of fiat, not better.

And we're being told that it's getting better. Everything's getting better. Oh yeah, you live better than you, than a king did 200 years ago because of technology and. But these productivity gains that our [00:42:00] civilization is producing is being harvested from us as they debase the currency to fund things that otherwise the free market or the taxpaying Citizens of any populace would not want to fund.

Like if I got a tax bill, or most Americans get a tax bill, and it says, so here's for the roads, here's for schools, here's for, I don't know, municipalities like water services and sewer services, and then here's for bombing and killing people. People will be like, you could go ahead and get fucked with that.

We're not paying for the bombs, but I'm really totally cool paying for the schools and the roads and that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, the debasement of the currency is just a, just an epic issue. And You know, on that note, as far as like people struggling with addiction, it's, I really am very fascinated with Gabor Mate's work.

Gabor Mate is an addiction specialist, and he talks really about trauma. And he says that trauma is, is You, you, you experience a [00:43:00] traumatic experience and trauma is what happens inside of you as a result of that traumatic experience. And we're being sold solutions in our society and culturally really our civilization is doing things.

And I think it's a top down thing as a result of the broken economic incentives to like make you feel better temporarily in the moment and profit off of you, not actually solve your issues. And I think that's a huge issue. And I think that that's why we're being, and also it's like, if you're drinking a lot of alcohol and you're taking a lot of pharmaceuticals and you're watching the Kardashians and you're watching football every Saturday night while you pound a bunch of Bud Lights, like you're not really paying attention to what Jerome Powell's talking about at the FedChair meeting.

You're not paying so much attention to like, Hey, wait a second. What's, what, can somebody explain to me, like, what happened over the last 200 years as far as our monetary policy? Like, why were we using gold? Why do we have dollars? Like, can somebody [00:44:00] explain, like, why is it that my bills are more this year than they are next year?

Instead, it's like, CNN's like, oh, the Beyonce concert's responsible for the local inflation. Canada's like, yo, hey, these greedy capitalists are raising grocery prices. Then Matt Cratter makes a video and is like, actually I went online and looked at their profit and loss statements. They're actually making less money.

Everybody, the government is lying to you. And so, yeah, I just think there's just like a mass psyop taking place. It's just a lot of dishonesty. And it's just the result of the debasement of the currency, broken, broken incentives in our money system. And like with cannabis, The people wanted it. The people wanted true and honest, free, open protocol.

They don't, nobody wants to be stolen from, lied to, including, you know, from the pleb, the everyday man, all the way on up to the baking bloodlines. They don't want to be killed and have their stuff stolen. And so, also, I will, and I'll leave it at this, I don't think Bitcoin's a threat. It's a solution for everybody.

And [00:45:00] I just think people are like kind of figuring that out. And if us everyday people can figure it out, the most powerful entities on our planet can figure it out. And I think everybody's coming in for Bitcoin and I think that's good for everybody. It's the ethical investment. It is,

[00:46:00]

Medical Marijuana

Knut: thing you said a bit earlier in the conversation was that when this medical marijuana thing was, then you needed a doctor's certificate that you needed the marijuana for medical reasons, right? Uh, in my mind, that immediately creates a great big incentive for all doctors to, you know, take bribes, uh, and prescribe marijuana to whoever pays the most.

And also, the doctors would then be very pro that type of regulation. So, uh, it's very optimistic that, that, uh, Freedom won in the end. But was there a, a big, uh, you know, uh, Uh, movement against legalizing completely from the doctor's community? Or was that a thing at all?

Eric: uh, that's a [00:47:00] really good question. Actually. That's an interesting thing to think about. And I will say, yes, I would imagine that some of the doctors, because what ended up happening is you're absolutely correct. It's the economic incentives. Doctors People who had doctor degrees, who were capable of it, would set up a practice that was essentially only you come pay me 50 bucks and I'll write you a prescription for cannabis.

And so these doctors didn't have to go and do doctor work anymore. They're now just, okay, you sit down, anything from my toe hurts, my back hurts, I'm tired, life is hard, to I have stage 4 terminal cancer, right? And everything in between. They'll write you a script and it actually is not, it wasn't unlawful, but it's also the same thing that's taking place.

So I witnessed this from the ages of six years old when my mother remarried, my stepfather is a psychiatrist, the pharmaceutical representatives from the pharmaceutical companies would come by and they would [00:48:00] bring all sorts of knickknacks and cool little swag and then they would fly them all over the country slash world and send them to these conferences.

Pay to put them in baller hotel rooms, feed them steak and lobster, and then teach them all about their new funny pills that they have a patent on that's going to make this better, that better. It's going to, you got one to wake up, one to go to sleep. If you're hungry, you eat a pill. When you don't want to eat too much, you take a pill.

When you're happy, you take a pill. When you're sad, you take a pill. They got a fucking pill for everything. And so it's the same economic incentive to go ahead and cater to the people who are going to be pushing your product. As a matter of fact, I was just putting up some pictures for my wife the other day in the house.

I have a little torpedo level. It's a 12 inch level. This level I've had since I was like, I don't know, 15 years old. I poached it from my fucking stepdad's tool kit, right? It says Zyprexa on it. The pharmaceutical company was dropping pens and golf towels in a [00:49:00] torpedo level that has the name of a synthetic drug in it.

That, I don't know, probably Bayer Chemical Science or some big megacorporation is producing. And I just, I always laugh when I see that, man. And so, yeah, definitely an incentive for, for people to, I don't know, go capture those, those profits, those margins and satiate a market demand.

And so doctors were definitely writing scripts. The people who were the most adverse to cannabis Legalization were hardcore conservatives, I think, or people that are heavily indoctrinated that come from the Reefer Madness era. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Reefer Madness, but it was absolutely preposterous.

It was pretty silly. From the 30s, it was a government propaganda film that was going to teach everybody how I don't know, cannabis caused brown people to rape white women and you to go crazy and all this nonsense. And then also diehards within the cannabis community that knew the legalization was going to [00:50:00] stifle the profits.

So, but most people Most people now in our modern world know that cannabis isn't, uh, some dangerous, dirty drug. And so, the people voted to legalize it.

Europe vs the US

Knut: Many of the problems you described to me, they sound like, like these are problems that are bigger in the US than they are over here. Uh, like the, the pharmaceutical industry having this great monopoly. And, and giving everyone prescription drugs on, on, on such a wide scale, and also the food industry, like, injecting everything with really bad stuff, that's, that's not, uh, as bad here in Europe as it is in the U.

S., uh. And I guess that's a product of the crony capitalism instead of proper capitalism that has been going on since at least 1971, but what are your thoughts? What do you think, uh, why are we, um, like, not as, as, uh, affected by this, by these forces, [00:51:00] uh, as, as the U. S.?

Eric: think it's due to the fact that you have more cultural heritage. Is that the right thing? I think it's because you have these longer, these longer standing cultures. And with the, in the states, it's a new culture built upon a bunch of revolutionary savages that are like, Fuck you guys and all of your taxes.

We're going over here. It's like, Saylor says, Hey, too many rules, too many taxes. Go, go West, young man. Well, there's no more West to go. Now we're going to cyberspace. Right. And so I think it's that you had this new populace and this new culture developed, but everything pre Bitcoin, as far as I know, and once again, I'm just a dude and this is just my opinions, but as far as I know, for all of known history, Anything, everything has been corruptible because we've been trusting humans to operate and run whatever it is.

And in [00:52:00] this case, some, some sort of construct like a government governing body. So the governing body in a new populace and a new ever growing society and culture predicated on capitalism and freedom. And by the way, in my humble opinion, when some Caveman 200, 000 years ago stopped fishing with a spear, hung out with the babes picking berries for a week and made a net, and then went back to the river and caught 50 fish at one time instead of one at a time.

That's capitalism, right? And so, You mentioned crony capitalism where you've hijacked this free market apparatus to figure out how to exploit and, and, and siphon off the surplus through the broken, it's through the money mechanism. So I think though that in the, in the states, you have a new culture. And the prosperity that's taken place as opposed to this free market dynamic, where I think there for a period of time, there was the most free market because it [00:53:00] was this new area built by these revolutionary savages that were like, we want the ultimate form of freedom, the ultimate form of freedom developed to what some people call the greatest nation at the time.

And then there was this bloody conflict globally over who's going to be issuing these certificates that back That are backed by the gold. Now you got these world war conflicts, the United States wins, they're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're, the world's gonna use the United States monetary technology, but now you, once again, you have a honeypot that you're trusting people to not corrupt and you can't trust people to not corrupt something.

They've corrupted it and as now the corruption is taking place at a hyper rate, it's like this runaway corruption in this exponential debasement, which is resulting in a, in a higher grade state of psychosis and a shortening of the time preference and a shitification like Jimmy Song, Song's work like Ru, Fiat ruins everything comes to mind.

We're having hyper [00:54:00] rate. of like the degradation of our society because we were in this position where we had the world reserve currency the world's monetary technology it's been corrupted it's been hijacked and now it's like this civilization is collapsing and i so i think in europe You have a longer standing culture, and then you also didn't just come out of an era where you're the dominant world power shoving the monetary technology down the throats of the rest of the world.

So I think it's a dual fold thing there. And I actually really enjoyed, so I flew from So I'm in Northern California, I flew to LAX, and then from LAX I flew to Zurich, and it was just part of the flight plans, and I got a two year old daughter that's going with me, so the goal was, is we were going to get on a plane at like 8pm, she'd be asleep by 10 or 11, we'd wake up in the morning, she'd wake up, so I only had to entertain her for a few hours in the night time and a few hours in the morning, Well, that didn't work.

She stayed up all night long. That, but that's, that was a whole [00:55:00] besides the point. But I get to Zurich and I'm walking through the airport and I'm just like a first, I'm like, wow, everybody's healthy and dressed well. There's no bearded men with purple hair dressed as women. Like this is a very. I don't know, seemingly normal culture.

I go to Madeira, everybody's healthy. There's nobody's wearing masks. There's no 400 pound person wearing a mask. It's a man with a dress. And then, you know, I go to the Bitcoin conference and everybody's happy and everyone's healthy and everybody's fucking all optimistic and glowing and just so excited.

I fly back to Zurich, I stay the night, and then, dude, I fly into San Francisco's airport. First off, it's not raining, and the roof is leaking in three places, okay? It's leaking in three places, there's dirty, dingy carpet, I'm like, this place kinda smells a little bit like, I feel like they were mopping the floors once a day in Zurich, like, I don't know if anybody's vacuumed in here in like a week or two, and then there's just a bunch of overweight [00:56:00] people wearing masks, there's men dressed as women.

Like, the contrast was so stark, I could fucking barely believe it, man. And like, it was just an interesting thing. Cause like, you know, when you're in it, you don't really kind of like, I don't know, it's the slow boil. You're kind of like, you don't really realize until you go somewhere else and there's none of that and you come back, you're like, wow, like, this is, this is crazy.

And so, yeah, I don't know. What, what's,

Knut: I remember the shock and the smell from when I walked into a McDonald's in Baltimore once, like, uh, never again.

Eric: yeah,

Knut: It was horrible.

[00:57:00]

The Swinging Pendulum

Knut: I'm thinking, uh, one thing that might be slightly controversial amongst Bitcoiners [00:58:00] even is that I see this tendency sometimes Uh, with Bitcoiners that, uh, as soon as they realize that the state is lying to them and the fiat ruins all the incentives and that we live in this giant, uh, non truthful entangled thing where, where it's very hard to find the truth, they, they immediately abandon Uh, like all their old theories and they cling on to whatever Alex Jones said instead.

Uh, so like, and to me that, that is just as lazy as believing in what the state says. So, uh, so just, just hopping on to the most popular conspiracy theory or whatever you may call it. So what, what, what, so how, how, How to find signal in a noisy world. This is, uh, Jeff wrote an article about this once to me that like Bitcoin is not a signal in itself, but it's a noise remover and that [00:59:00] it, it provides you with like truth goggles.

Uh, you can see a clearer what's going on and who has the incentive to do what. But I see some Bitcoiners that I have just. Uh, just discovered bitcoin. Instead of, instead of think, actually thinking for themselves, they, they just start parroting whatever the, the most popular bitcoiner at the time is saying, like, uh, so do you see a risk there?

Like, what's your way of navigating that?

Eric: Well, first off, I absolutely love Jeff Booth's work. If I were going to give anybody, if, if anybody wanted some references and was willing to put in the time, I would say the two of them. And so, all of these pieces of work that you should digest is Jeff Booth's book, The Price of Tomorrow, and then the Sailor series on 1x, too.

Everybody in there, fucking high time preference, trying to 3x through that shit. No, you need to listen to it on 1x, and you probably need to listen to it three or four times because every time you do, you're going to have more lightbulb moments. [01:00:00] And so,

Knut: that. Those are both extremely good.

Eric: Yes, and so, um, one of the things that I really love about Jeff Booth's message is, is he does really hammer on the drum of if you're yelling at the clown world, you're only strengthening it. If you spend any time participating and combating in the clown world, And I refer to it as the old world, really.

This is B. B. This is the before Bitcoin world. It's A. B. now. It's after Bitcoin. It's a fundamentally different reality. I'll even get a little metaphysical. I feel like Satoshi, like, literally changed the fabric of our reality by inversing the incentive structure at the base layer from violence to peace.

And it's a fundamentally different reality now. And the incentive, you get paid to do the ethical thing. And so, Yeah, I think that as the, well, I think a few things are happening when people go into, when they come into [01:01:00] Bitcoin and you're looking at the world through the lens of Bitcoin, or it's almost actually in some sense too, on that like metaphysical front, it's almost like you're standing on solid ground.

We live in a reality where everything is in flux, everything within the marketplace, everything within the world is all a variable, if you think about it mathematically, and then interstage left a constant. You got this time chain, tick tock, next block, predetermined supply issuance, these coins are locked in time, it doesn't matter what the hash rate is, it doesn't matter if every government and every person on planet earth starts mining coins, the issuance is the same, it's this, it's this constant, it's this solid ground, it's this truth, it's this land of like, realness or something, I don't know, I can't come up with a better explanation.

A better metaphor, but you're looking at the world through the lens of truth, through the lens of Bitcoin. It's this, I [01:02:00] wear, sometimes I wear my orange lens glasses cause it's just, it's, you know, it's fun and they're blue blocking and whatever, but like it's the, it's, it's the literal, it's the literal, uh, implementation of like this metaphorical way of looking at the bright orange future, looking at the world through the lens of Bitcoin and it, and it makes things better.

Totally truth goggles, right? It makes things clear. You can see all of the lunacy. And so I think that what happens is, is when people start to look at the world. Newfound bitcoiners, when they start to look at the world through the lens of this truth, they see all of this dishonesty and then it kind of is like the pendulum effect where you swing from one direction too extreme to the other direction, but eventually you're going to land right in this like perfect little spot.

And then also, I think though, That the more that the government or the powers that be, the most important entities that were indoctrinated and told to believe from a young age, the [01:03:00] more you rea the more that they lie and the larger their lies get, the more distrust. Now people are like, is the world flat?

Did we ever go to the moon? Like, it's just literally the government comes out and says, Hey, you gotta, you gotta take these, These uh, jabs, and we got this disgusting disease that's gonna kill all of humanity, you gotta lock the whole world down, and then everybody realizes like, wait a second, it seems like this is the flu, and people aren't fucking dying like crazy, and actually more people are getting injured from, from this medical procedure than they are from the disease, and it just, it just wrecks people's, now they don't know what to believe, they mistrust everything, and so, I think that you have the pendulum effect, and then also the more the government Lies, and they might not sometimes.

I like how Saylor says it's well intentioned politicians. Maybe they're well intentioned, maybe not. I like to think that way because at least, like, it absolves me of thinking that these are these evil, diabolical people. He's like, you know, the best doctors in the [01:04:00] world bled George Washington to death thinking that they were solving his problems.

And so now I don't have so much distaste, you could say, for these people. Another thing that Jeff Booth says, there is no they, it's just us. Just us. There's just people. It's board of directors that have a fiduciary responsibility that are doing what's good for the company and their shareholders. It's a bunch of politicians that, you know, hey, if you got a little insider information, you know that some new thing's gonna happen and you could buy shares in this company.

Like, uh, you know, it's like. I don't know. So, yeah, I just think that the more people lie, and you're incentivized to lie in the BB before Bitcoin world. The sociopaths who don't give a fuck, who are willing to lie, cheat, and steal, and kill, were the ones that won the game. That's why we're all so broken inside, because if you're moral and ethical, you know that you're at a market disadvantage against people who are willing to lie, and steal, and cheat.

And then some weird thing, it breaks in our society where we [01:05:00] celebrate scumbags like Jordan Belford. This guy's famous for ripping people off, and he's the Wolf of Wall Street. Everyone wants to listen to his podcasts. Why? He's a shitbag. I know, let's defund this motherfucker,

Knut: Yeah, didn't you see the movie? Like, that's like, what the fuck is wrong with people? Why are they still listening to it?

Eric: me crazy, dude. It drives me crazy. So I love what Jeff Booth says, you know, don't pay attention to any of that stuff. Don't, you're just making it stronger. You, even if you're yelling at him, like if I start shitposting about how he's a scumbag, it's just strengthening it. Energy flows where attention goes.

And so where you're putting attention, you're, you're strengthening whatever that is. And so that could be positive or negative.

Knut: The mind meld here is so, if you knew, uh, like I'm going to tell you in a sec, but first I'd like to say, like, I don't believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't, I don't believe that if you gave me or Luke or yourself a money printer, that we would just start [01:06:00] printing money for our own benefit.

I don't believe that. I believe absolute power attracts those who are already absolutely corrupted. I That's what happens.

Eric: I really like that.

Bitcoiners Mind Melding

Knut: That's what happens with Bitcoiners. When you have conversations with Bitcoiners, you realize that you're like, you can come at problems from different angles and totally different backgrounds and totally different, but we're all thinking people and we come to the same conclusions. And to me, that's just, like, when you, when you described it, I'm almost getting goosebumps here because of, like, we're, we're, we're part of the same entity now, we are the Satoshis, we're, we're, like, there's this mind meld that is just so fucking profound, and it's all about human connections.

So beautiful.

Eric: no, it's a, it's like a grand calibrate, calibration. It's calibrating humanity. It's like, The county has to come once a year to the farm, and they have like, [01:07:00] white gloves, and they have this weight set, and they're putting these weights onto the scale, and then they're telling the scale that this is a thousand grams, this And so they're calibrating the scale, it's like without Bitcoin, we're out of calibration.

We don't know what's uh, what's, what's accurate or not. And so there's this grand calibration that I think's taking place as a result of, of this constant. Entering the marketplace, this incorruptible protocol that we can all tether ourselves to in a very meaningful, deep way. Um, I think of it, uh, Eric Cason, you know what I'm saying?

It's just interesting how we're like a culmination of all the people that we expose ourselves to, and you can kind of tell who's listening to who by what vernacular they use and whatever. Anyways, because, because our money is, as Saylor would put it, our economic energy, is a representation of life force [01:08:00] exerted.

It's the most powerful form of energy. Whatever you're channeling your energy into to harness that is, is like the most meaningful in some sense. Right? And in this case, it's the money. The money is now true. The money is now recalibrating. And that's. That's like the most powerful thing. And I also think, to get a little metaphysical, since, why not, Nikola Tesla famously said if you want to understand the secrets of the universe, you need to think in terms of energy, vibration, and frequency.

So everything is vibrating and it has its own frequency. And

Simulation Theory

Eric: I'm apprehensive to say it, but I'll just say it. So I kind of, I, I like to think about life and it's kind of fun through the lens of simulation theory. Right? And you could, you could just look at it like there's a creator or whatever. And the idea with simulation theory is, is that if you look at virtual reality and technology today, it's logical to think that at some point, whether that's five years, 50 [01:09:00] years, or 5, 000 years from now, it could be 5 million years.

It doesn't matter as long as we still exist and we're advancing technologically. It's logical to think that we'll create a virtual reality that's indistinguishable. from this reality. You could call it base reality. If that's the case, then it's actually not probable that we live in base reality. So as a kid, I kind of used to think about religion in the sense of like, so it's kind of like, okay, you come from this place, and we all intuitively know there's like a difference between our physiology and our consciousness, or our soul being, if you want to call it that.

And it's like, we come from this place, or at least there's a common theme through all of history. You come from a place You come into this, this body, this experience, you live this life. And then when you die, you go to a place. Well, so I used to kind of think like, Oh, it's kind of like if you sat down and you played a video game, like, you know, Hey, the three of us could be in a living room somewhere in some parallel, [01:10:00] far off dimension, universe, whatever.

And then we decided that we're going to sit down and we're going to put on this headset. We're going to play this game of planet earth, human experience together. And there you are, you play this game. It feels like a hundred years. When it's done, it's over, you check out, it's game over, you take the headset off, you're like, wow, that was really cool, like, that was an interesting experience, or whatever.

And so, so if I think about life in the sense of like, if, is it possible that this is a simulated reality, or, and then also another thing too is, Physicists and scientists continue to dig deeper and try to figure out what are the building blocks of this reality that we're living in. They're starting to think that it's computer code.

Like the base layer fabric of our reality is becoming seemingly indistinguishable from computer code. I'm not a physicist or a world class scientist, but I've heard people talk to this. If that's the case in some interesting magical way, it's almost like Satoshi fixed or [01:11:00] completed Like, some, something that was either broken or incomplete in our reality where the incentive was to violence.

He like, merged the physical world with the metaphysical world, and now that we have, as Saylor puts it, matter in cyberspace, and you have this substance, as he says, the hardest substance in the known universe, that you can custody, that's hidden behind a hundred and twenty 6 or 200, 100, 128 or 256 bit encryption.

You can now custody this thing that if I kill you or someone kills you, they don't get it. So the incentive has changed. It's like the code that that that's part of the base layer or the fabric of our reality has been altered in a way that fundamentally changes everything about this reality. And that's a super.

Fascinating thing for me. It's a little out there. I I'm aware of that, but it's just an interesting thought.

Knut: We love out there thoughts here. So I have [01:12:00] a couple of brain ticklers here for you. First of all, I would frame it as if computers were modeled after reality because it's simple. Like, the bit, the binary, Switch between one and zero. That's like the smallest part of anything that can be imaginable, like one out of two States.

You cannot imagine a smaller subset of anything. so if that's true and we're living in a simulation and we now have Bitcoin, so we have proof of work, which you cannot fake, right? Would the proof of work algorithm eventually slow down the simulation since you can't fake it? You need, you need the computing power to do that.

And would the avatars living in the simulation experience that, uh, contraction of time or not since they themselves would be slowed down too?

Bitcoin and Quantum Physics

Eric: Gosh, that is really profound. And you [01:13:00] know, what comes to mind though, is the double slit experiment in quantum physics, where the observer is affecting the outcome. You have a particle. So the wave collapses into a particle only when an observer observes it, which is also to tie this back to earlier in our conversation.

If you're yelling at clown world, you're vibrating at a particular frequency because every thought and everything has its own vibration, and you're resonating with clown world, attracting more of clown world into your reality. And I also believe that, like, at the, and this could totally be out there and not the case, but at least it feels good to think this way, and it makes some sense, and I can't really dispute the idea, if, if the double slit experiment is a real thing, and the observer is affecting the reality, and we live in a world, a universe, [01:14:00] that's energy, vibration, and frequency based, and as you Think more positive thoughts, those positive thoughts have a different vibration or a different feeling associated with them, and then they cause you to behave differently, more optimistically.

Now, as an example, you find bitcoin, you start to become excited, you realize that there is enough abundance for all, where you have scarcity and money, you create abundance in everything else. You become more hopeful, you become more farsighted. You start to behave differently, you think differently, you're focused on different things.

I feel like collectively humanity is organizing itself around this truth protocol, this indisputable ledger, an honest ledger, this list. And it's like almost it's like tuning how we're vibrating because we're all believing in this thing that on a, on a, It's like mass agreeance. It's the largest thing that we've ever agreed upon that's indisputable, like larger than religions, because every religion is kind of different.

There's a different version. There's the New Testament, Old [01:15:00] Testament, you're either this, you could be a Muslim, you could be Jew, whatever it is, right? And there's these differences within the story that we're ideologically aligning with, but that's not the case with Bitcoin. And so it's like almost upregulating how we vibrate or how we think.

And as a result, We're more optimistic, we're behaving differently, and then if you look at it through like the potential of a quantum world, we're literally changing the direction of our civilization at hyper rate in both a very logical and like non philosophical or metaphysical way of looking at it, but also in a very woo woo or physical or metaphysical way.

We're like, at hyper rate, changing the direction of what's happening in this reality, and I think that that's a very powerful and fascinating thing to think about. It's a little out there, but like, it's inspiring, and it also, it ties into something like, I don't believe that we're [01:16:00] in for a A 61 0 2 attack by nation states.

And I know a lot of prominent, very intelligent, some of my favorite people, as a matter of fact, in the world, believe that the government's gonna come after the coins. They're gonna 61 0 2. This is a threat to the system and the whole thing. And I think about it all the time, and the more and more I think about it, the less that I think that that's actually the case. And then that just layers on top of what I was just saying though, if you believe something to be true, and you truly believe it, I believe that like, it's like a vote for a different reality, and so I don't really want to put much time or thought into that, although I have, and I've started to have, develop a thesis that I can't dispute that Actually, this isn't a threat.

This is a solution. This is bringing solvency back into an insolvent world. It's bringing honesty back into a dishonest world. There is no they, it's just us. BlackRock is made up of people who have a fiduciary responsibility to provide shareholder [01:17:00] value. They were buying single family homes as a result of the broken fiat paradigm we came out of.

Now they're stacking sats. Like, Bitcoin is good. For central banking bloodlines, it's good for governments, it's good for no coiners. The fact that I own Bitcoin and I don't own any, I don't even own the house that I live in. Like I sold my farm, I sold my, my, uh, my house. I live in a rental and I plan on living in a rental until I'm absolutely forced like 60 years from now to buy a house because I think that they're terrible investments.

And so the fact that I don't own a home is downward price pressure on housing. That's contributing to. Making the housing more abundant. The fact that BlackRock's stacking sats now is good for Bitcoin, or good for people. It's, it's, they're not buying more houses. That's contributing to less homelessness.

And to think too that Larry Fink, for example, which I don't really know anything about this individual other than he manages the largest hedge fund. You could say, based upon the incentives within the system he was [01:18:00] operating with, He's a winner. He won the game. He figured out how to make the most. He acquired the most stuff, and he made, makes the most fees managing that stuff, and now the market is fundamentally different.

It's an A B world. It's after Bitcoin. Now the way to get the most is to stack your fucking ass off and you get punished if you try to go against the protocol. So why would he fork bitcoin when you could just stack the coins? Why would you mine a 51 percent attack? It's trillions of times more energy to try to attack the network than it is to try to protect the network.

And so I believe in this is also why I think you could say the normies are just your everyday person who has the inability to understand bitcoin. I think it's predicated. Upon the idea, or for everything for all of known history, as far as we know, has been corruptible. And now that we have, you know, one of the things I love Breedlove has said, [01:19:00] I've heard him say this several times, Bitcoin is the discovery of incorruptibility.

It's an incorruptible protocol. People can't wrap their minds around that. They're just like, no, I don't get it. It's just like hardwired into our genetic code to mistrust something like that. That's seemingly too good to be true because our ancestors who bought into that stuff typically got killed and had their shit stolen.

So the people who were evolutionary successful, successful were. This is very suspicious. So we have a tough time thinking that. And then I'll leave that thought, I'll wrap it with this, if a sociopath who doesn't give a fuck who will lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get the most is capable of that level of scumbaggery, I would argue you.

That they don't get off on doing the evil thing, they just don't give a fuck, they want to get the most. Well, they're almost more predisposed and primed to just do whatever to get the most, and now, let's figure out how to make a fasting [01:20:00] computer chip, figure out how to find cheaper electricity, figure out how to sell all your shitty dollar derivative assets, and plow into bitcoin, which is good for everybody.

And so why would BlackRock all, why would Larry Fink all of a sudden start, start bringing in a losing strategy? No, he woke up to the idea that Bitcoin's for real and he's stacking sats.

Focus Creating Reality

Knut: Oh, much to unpack. I'll start by saying I totally agree with you. I don't believe CBDCs will ever happen. I don't believe, uh, I, I believe we have already won and I believe this vortex of incentives is, and just us being optimistic is actually helping that come to fruition. Uh, I believe that the, then again, the, uh, the focus creating reality, I think there's, there are two different things here.

One is on a more practical level, and if we don't talk quantum at all here, uh, I think, uh, an organization like Just Stop Oil, when they throw paint at new paintings in museums, or even, [01:21:00] or the yellow vests, if we take a, uh, an example from the other side of the political isles in France, just destroying Paris.

The thing in protests, or the farmers, wherever they are, in Germany or in Holland or whatever, they may change a policy or two, but what they're really doing by, by, uh, you know, putting a cost to the overall economy of these nation states, is that they incentivize that, uh, government and that central bank to print even more, so they reinforce the system.

By trying to fight it, because the remedy from the system is always to print more money. So it's very, like, practically connected in Newtonian physics, if you will, and not quantum physics. However, this focus creating reality is extremely interesting. Uh, as well, because we don't know to which extent the mind creates reality.

And the thing that's often left out of the, uh, of the double slit [01:22:00] experiment and the observer is that the eye, uh, the retina, everything in you and in your brain is a quantum particle too. So the particle you're observing is observing you and altering the state of you at the same time. So reality.

Creates, so a subjective reality creates objective reality and vice versa. So I think the whole dichotomy of, of, uh, dichotomy of subjective, objective, that is my, where we might get it wrong. So there's this theory called the meme theory of everything, that the reality we experience is just where our individual consciousnesses is.

Collide, and where we can, uh, uh, agree on a, a objective reality because the objective reality agrees with us because it's an observer too. So, so you have this thing, uh, and therefore when [01:23:00] we look out into space and to things that are too far off for our, for our minds to sync with, we don't see other life forms and we don't see other, we see these weird galaxies and stuff because.

They're simply too far away for us to sync with. So there's no mind meld there. There's like, there's like a hash horizon for the, for the mind, just as there is a hash horizon for Bitcoin. You can't mine Bitcoin on Mars because Mars is too far away to sync with the network. And this might be. Somewhat akin to how our minds work that we're, we're sort of, uh, there's some chain, uh, happening where we agree on a certain timeline and that's the timeline we end up in, and that becomes the consensus timeline of earth and that's what we live in.

So, yeah, there, there's, there's so much to think about when it comes to that stuff, but, but I think. Even, even if you don't [01:24:00] go all, uh, you know, armchair philosopher slash physicist on the, on the quantum level, there are still like real world arguments to be made for focusing on optimism since the negativity and, uh, giving up actually does help the enemy win.

And I, I, I paraphrase Peterson and I say, uh, I act as if Bitcoin exists because I think that. You know, believing in Bitcoin, somewhat akin to believing in a god, uh, helps Bitcoin come, become a reality. Uh, in a, but with Bitcoin and not with a god, arguably, this is actually true. It's provably true that I helped Bitcoin succeed by, by participating in it.

You know, while a guy in the sky might, might not necessarily be more real because I believe in him. Uh, so, so, so I act as if Bitcoin exists. That's, uh, and I have [01:25:00] good arguments for doing so. That's, that's end of my rant.

Individual and Consensual Realities

Eric: Well, I think, I think about, so gosh, I really like that. I think that we each all have our own individual personal realities. That are separate, like my reality and my life experience is separate from yours, and separate from yours, Luke. And, but we come to this Mass reality, it's like, I call it consensual reality.

It's this place that we're consenting to, we're agreeing upon its existence. And the thing that's so fascinating with Bitcoin from an ideological standpoint or perspective is that it's the largest ideological protocol or story That's crystal clear, no distortion, pure signal. Everyone who runs a node is looking at the same list.

And so it's aligning humanity and clarifying our consensual reality on a level [01:26:00] on which we've never seen in all of known history. I don't know if I said that the best, but I think you get the point. And that's very powerful. Yeah. And it's both just from a very new, yeah, Newtonian, very literal, physical.

Nothing metaphysical, not quantum at all on that level. It's really easy to just understand, Hey, there's this list that everybody's agreeing upon. It's an honest ledger and there's nobody, nobody's looking at a dishonest version. If you fork it, it's like you can go live in the corner ball by yourself in your own little reality with your own little fork.

And you could go. Do your thing and it's just like you want to go live in la la land and if you're a biological male and you want the rest of the world to think you're a female like we're not going to agree upon that you can go live over by yourself that's totally cool you could have your hard forked reality that's fine but but most people are agreeing upon this reality and so I think it's very I don't know [01:27:00] calibrating It's like recalibrating us, it's just bringing us back to truth, I guess is, you know, would be the best way to say it.

It's just, it's the large, it's capital T truth in honor of Cason. It's like the largest truth we've ever had. It's indisputable and it's bringing clarity to that consensual reality that we live in, that we're all agreeing to.

We Are All Satoshi Except...

Knut: We're, we're, we're not all Satoshi, but we can all identify as our Satoshis.

Eric: Yeah, I like that. I like that.

Except for Craig Wright,

Knut: Yes. Except for Craig Wright. Uh, we're allowed to say that too now. Yeah. Yeah. The court has been as like, even a judge has told us now, so it must be true since the court said anyway.

Eric: Sight of transactions! Sight of transactions, dude. That's all it's done.

Knut: Yes. Luke, do you have any additional questions for Eric?

Uh, it's time to let you in, I think. We've been going on for [01:28:00] one and a half hours here.

Luke: Hey man, yeah, this has been awesome. Uh, yeah, you can, you can really go. This is great. It's, it's clear you've absorbed so much of the material here. Some, it's impressive you rattling off, uh, you know, this and that quote from everyone really. It's, it's, it's awesome. Uh, hey, I, I, I think, I think, We've covered loads here.

Eric's Future Plans

Luke: I think what I'm, what I'm interested in, what is it you're working on now these days in Bitcoin and cannabis, whatever, tell us about it.

Eric: That's a great question. I appreciate that. Uh, and this conversation has been really awesome, by the way. I just don't get to talk about this kind of stuff too often, so thank you. Um, and it was really awesome. It was really cool meeting you guys in Madeira, you know, running into you at the party.

It was like, oh my goodness, I've been paid. You guys are like, I have a one sided friendship with all of these people. Fucking savage bitcoiners and that relationship's becoming two sided now, you know, and so that's [01:29:00] really awesome. I, I'm very grateful for that. And, um, yeah, so I have, uh, I've contributed my life force for the last 15, 20 years to participate in the cannabis industry and, you know, in my subtle infinitesimal way.

pushing back against prohibition because I believe cannabis should be an option for people who want it and nobody should go to jail for having a plant, right? And so, at this point, I think that the toothpaste is out of the tube or we're past that tipping point and cannabis doesn't really need me.

There's a lot of die hard cannabis producers and there's an economic incentive and as commoditization and federal legalization takes place, we're It is going to get progressively harder for a small independent producer to compete in the cannabis market. And I have an aversion to climbing some corporate ladder.

You know, in the sailor series, he talks about commoditization and his time at DuPont, they used to say commodity is a dirty word. And the reason that [01:30:00] this is such an issue for cannabis producers specifically is as cannabis gets. Produced, the supply increases relative to the demand, the margin will fall and you'll have less margin and it's a real issue.

There's an existential crisis for cannabis producers as legalization takes place and publicly traded companies come in. They're going to drive the product down below the marginal and variable cost of production. And the way that they're going to do that is by selling shares to the everyday person on Wall Street.

Your normal everyday American is going to buy shares in some new cannabis outfit on Robin Hood with their iPhone. And they're going to speculate because they have to, because you can't save dollars. And so people are incentivized to travel further out on the risk curve with their investment strategy.

So they're going to throw a bunch of money at these new found cannabis. Publicly traded companies, they're going to use that capital to build infrastructure all over the country. And then they're going to go to the banks. [01:31:00] Which have to loan more shitty fiat into existence, and they do so as debt against assets, as debt against real estate, and debt against equities and companies.

So these companies now that have public retail money Are going to build infrastructure and then borrow against their company valuations and their infrastructure to get more fiat to then run their businesses at a loss, which is a very consolidating force. And they're going to use that capital to buy up small mom pops for pennies on the dollar.

And so. The antidote to that is bitcoin is a treasury reserve asset. And so cannabis doesn't need me anymore. I'm kind of losing the power. I'm very, I've been very passionate about producing cannabis and it's been a lot of fun for me. And I've learned a lot about how the world works and how nature works and how the forest floor works and the mycelium and the microecology and microbiology in us, on us, around us, and everywhere.

[01:32:00] Plant life, the cycles, cannabis kind of thing. Helped to, um, lengthen my time perspective as a result of, you know, you only get so many crops in a year or you get one outdoor crop in a year. And so I've learned a lot from cannabis and I've been very passionate about that, but I want to pivot my energy and my life force to participating in this beautiful thing that's taking place with Bitcoin and help use my story as far as some of the challenges that I experienced, some of the trauma that I experienced as a result of like.

Loss of family members in the fiat world and the broken incentives, and then just the economic forces that I've had to contend with as being a commodity producer with a commodity that's coming out of prohibition and the margins are dropping. And so I want to help, help to promote the Bitcoin knowledge base to people who really need it.

And I'm not hubristic enough in any sense to think I'm going to come into the Bitcoin space and provide some epic value. I'm just so fucking grateful [01:33:00] for this thing, I want to be a part of it. I'm just happy to be a part of it. And so I want to contribute the rest of my Life in whatever way I can to being part of that peaceful Bitcoin revolution, this new paradigm shift.

And so I have a couple Bitcoin business ideas, um, and I'm just going to keep pumping out videos. I make videos, I've been posting them on Twitter and I'm going to start putting them on Nostr and YouTube and all the, all the social media platforms. Because it's been working for me, it's led me to, you know, Madeira, Andre the coordinator.

He saw one of my rips on Twitter and he invited me to do a keynote and I'm talking with epic Bitcoiners like you guys. And so, yeah, I'm just going to keep doing that. My contract is up. I'm out of contract at the farm that I've been managing for the last two years. And so I'm going to take that leap of faith and, and, uh, change my direction in life and, and, uh, You know, fully live the Bitcoin life.

And that requires me having a Bitcoin [01:34:00] based business at this point. So yeah, that's the long and short of it.

Knut: Fantastic. I call it a leap of reason.

Eric: yes, leap of reason. I love that. I don't think it's only this way, but at least for me, what I've experienced and what I've watched in the world, it seems that the door that you want to walk through, if you want to. Walk through a new door in your life only opens when you close the old one. It's like you only find the right person when you're, when you're no longer spending time with the wrong person.

And so. Yeah, I've, I'm, basically if I put an end to my, all of my cannabis producing responsibilities and, uh, yeah, and so hopefully I don't have to sell a bunch of sats to fund my transition, but also, and I'll leave it at this, I've had to think a lot about this, what would I do if I lost my bitcoin? I'm not some whale, but I have enough that's meaningful to me.

And the thing that I think is so interesting And as [01:35:00] more, as I grapple with this thought more, and then what comes to mind is, is when I hear Bitcoin influencers, you could say, talk about, you don't have enough Bitcoin, you need more Bitcoin, get to one Bitcoin. Well, if, if Bitcoin is decentralized and secure, as Booth says, then it's going to appreciate at a faster rate than everything in the marketplace forever, for thousands of years, as Saylor says, if that's the case.

Then the strategy is, go to the marketplace, do the honest thing, provide long term, the most valuable thing that you can, and then sweep your surplus into bitcoin. And so, selling bitcoin to fund something, I don't think you should feel bad about that. I think that's a B. B. It's a before Bitcoin thought process.

That's a scarcity thought process. And so if I lost my Bitcoin, yeah, having Bitcoin or having money as a hedge against future uncertainty or the [01:36:00] future certainty of not being able to work when you're old, you could say, but also the strategy doesn't change. You just go out into the market and you earn Bitcoin and the Bitcoin's appreciated at a faster rate than everything.

So in some sense, it doesn't even matter how much you have. And then also in this other interesting way. Bitcoin's making things better for everybody, including people who don't currently own Bitcoin. And so I've kind of let go of, I'm like shedding layers of fear as a result of the broken incentives, the incentive to violence in the BB world that is behind us now.

It's AB, it's after Bitcoin. It's a new motherfucking world. And that is something to be so grateful for. And I just want to be, just experience more of that. That's what I'm

Knut: Well, Eric, uh, your, your thoughts, uh, um, show us that you're, you've come quite far in your journey, I don't know how long you've been in Bitcoin, but there's insight that every, yeah, yeah, the, the,

Luke: You came on the scene more recently though, like, I

Eric: Yeah, actually, yeah. So I posted my [01:37:00] first videos about it. I became public about it in December. I mean, really, I've been, it's been three months or something. So I've, yeah.

Knut: but, but this insight that we all have enough Bitcoin, uh, it's, it's something you come to at a latter stage when you have really thought things through and, uh, I can tell that you have, so

Wrapping Up

Knut: I'd like to thank you for this conversation. It's been great. Uh, it was great meeting you in Madeira. You're certainly bringing value to the community.

Don't ever doubt that. I mean, every bitcoiner does, just by existing, but you'd certainly provide a lot of value. Your rants,

Eric: That means a lot coming from you.

Knut: if that, if your rants have only influenced one person, which there's evidence, empirical evidence that they have, by the way, um, Then, uh, then it's all worth it. You never know where your thoughts land in someone else's brain, how much, to which extent they, they influence, uh, another person, but, uh, they do, the, the, the thing we can always be [01:38:00] sure of is that it's more than we think it is.

The butterfly effects on, on these things, on thoughts are, are just immense. So, thank you so much for coming on. I'd love to see you again sometime. We'll see if I end up in the States here. At Pacific or something, uh,

Eric: to Pacific, man. That would be fantastic. I'll be there

Knut: would be

Eric: I might not go to Tennessee. I watch after everyone's shitting on these Ordinal guys and all of the shit coiners. I don't know. Yes.

Knut: No, uh, Tennessee, uh, we'll see, but I'll, uh, I'm aiming for Pacific. Um, some things would have to change in order for me to go to Tennessee. That's, let's just put it like that. More

Eric: on, I was, I've been planning on moving there with my wife. I'm getting out of Northern California and Tennessee seems to be a place that we're very interested in, so I'll probably still be going, but there's part of me that wants to Be revolutionary and defund these [01:39:00] fucking dummies.

But anyways, yeah,

Knut: and less paper straws, fewer paper straws. All right.

Eric: This has been fun.

Luke: yeah, this is awesome, Eric. Thanks, thanks a lot for coming on. This really was really great and Knut said. It was awesome meeting you on Madeira and, uh, yeah, hope to see you again soon.

Eric: Yes. Same to you.

Luke: Any final words? Where can people find you online and all that?

Eric: Uh, I'm on Twitter at Eric, E R I C V Stacks, Eric V Stacks. And, um, I also have that handle for YouTube and all the social platforms. And, uh, very shortly here, I'll be pumping out, I don't know, just more. I make videos talking about more of the. Long term societal implications and the philosophical implications of Bitcoin.

Um, yeah, you're not going to hear me talking about the price very often, although it's important. It's kind of, we all know it's going up forever, Laura.

Knut: [01:40:00] Awesome.

Luke: Absolutely perfect. Uh, great way to end it. Uh, Let us know what you thought about this episode. Eric, thank you so much for, uh, for joining us and don't forget to like, subscribe and brush your teeth. This has been the Freedom Footprint Show. Thanks for listening.