FFS053 - Izzy

[00:00:00] Intro

[00:00:00]

Izzy: every show, every show he, every show he breaks the mic cause he's so fucking physical. He's like, he breaks it here, he breaks it here. They buy, they go through like 10 mics a fucking month.

Knut: That's why it's called

Izzy: Mike Tyson, I guess. Um, I just want to dedicate this to my great grandfather. Rest in peace.

That's what you're going to get from this conversation.

Knut: Airplane mode on. What?

Izzy: Oh,

Knut: welcome.

[00:00:37] Welcoming Izzy to the Freedom Footprint Show

Knut: I think we're recording, are we?

Izzy: It's the best way to start, right? When you just, kind of, what happens? Fuck it, we'll do it live!

Knut: Welcome to the Freedom Footprint show, Izzy! Yes! Nice to

Izzy: finally have you on, brother. I wish I could hug you, there's all this apparatus between

Knut: us. Yes, yes, we'll do it later. [00:01:00]

Izzy: As you know, I'm

Knut: a hugger. How are you enjoying the conference so far? It's terrible. It's terrible,

Izzy: right? No, no. To me, this is the, um, Honey Badger for me is the epitome of what a Bitcoin conference is about.

Knut: High signal to noise ratio.

Izzy: Absolutely. And everyone is accessible, you know, it doesn't matter who it is. I remember when I was here last year, it was because of you, you were like, Hey, I want to show Adam, uh, back the presentation that I have. And do you remember that? You were quiet. You were like a 12 year old school girl.

Yeah. You were like, Oh,

Luke: I just,

Izzy: but he was so cool. He just turned around and went, Hey

Luke: Knut. Yeah, yeah. He approached me

Knut: and asked me about like, he heard that I did the calculation on like, um, the, the, the kilo price of Bitcoin. Right. And he had done the calculation himself with using a different method. And we had come to the.

About the same results. So I really enjoyed that.

Izzy: And he was just [00:02:00] so accessible. You know, we sit down, uh, me, you, him, and Anita talked for about 45 minutes. He was talking about a, um, a whistleblower book that he had read. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Knut: It's fascinating. I don't remember the title.

Izzy: Yeah, but I love that aspect of a conference like this, where some of the conferences, you know, it's kind of everything is segregated, not to shit on any conferences, but, um, this is a really special one for me.

I love Max Hillebrand. A

Knut: lot. They're great. I mean, this year I really feel this, you know, Bitcoiners incentivized to help one another vibe going on. Like as you say, everyone's so accessible and it's like we're, we're. Living out this in, in real time. The, uh, the, uh, incentive structure of Bitcoin. How we're not incentivized to compete with one another, but com incentivized to, to collaborate.

Yes. And that like, uh, I, I think that's tightly connected to the shitcoin purge. [00:03:00] There's, there's no shit. There are no shit corners left here, zero. Zero. So, so, uh, and then you get, you get this beautiful Bitcoin world instead and, uh, there's no like, market competition becomes a different thing and a more beautiful thing.

I mean, there's some good free market competition as well as the coffee, the coffee shops outside. There's a long ass queue to the nice coffee and there's like no queue to the, to the slightly cheaper coffee. And you can see how, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so it's not only the price of the actual coffee, but it's also the price of standing in a line for 15 minutes, as opposed to, you know,

Izzy: And next to your heroes, if you will, because they're waiting in line behind you.

Yeah. But to your point, Knut, so, you know, I, I took over a business at the beginning of this year, and for me, I mean, I, I was a [00:04:00] surgeon and then I went into film and stayed in the Bitcoin closet for a really, really long time. And then running a business, it was kind of like, I had a lot of friends who are in business going, Oh, you have to be ruthless.

You have to be, be this. I'm like, none of that fucking makes any sense to me. Like it's not about that. So. I've hooked up with other Bitcoin only companies, and it's about the collaboration. We may compete in market, but it only makes each of us better. Yeah. And then we find all these backdoor collaborations.

Yeah, and all these synergies.

Knut: Not like that. Hang

Izzy: on. How sexual

Knut: can we get on this show? Now it's the coming out of the closet thing and, uh, sausage fest and so on.

[00:04:41] Preparing for Life as a Bitcoiner

Luke: You know, on the way

Izzy: here, I was in the, I was in the car with Roger9000. Roger9000. Yeah. And, um, he's a very sensitive, beautiful human being. And we were talking about life and how, you know, when you're younger, especially if you, if you're a Bitcoiner, you've always been a little bit left of [00:05:00] center.

You kind of, you know, you feel like, wow, I don't know if I fit in this. I mean, I hope I'm not, I mean. I think I know I'm speaking from my own experience. And sometimes you can put on that, that mask to try to fit, which rips your fucking soul out because it's not real. And you know that as a human and by opening up in this space to Bitcoiners.

You just feel so much freedom and so much love. And I said to Roger in the car, it's like, there was a point that I felt like, I mean, I felt I prepared for this my whole life. Um, but there was a point when I was in, in my forties, I was kind of like, Did I just make all that shit up? Like, did I really prepare for anything?

Like, is this just me? Like, what, what, what is, what's going on in life? Yeah. But the moment that I came out of that Bitcoin closet and put myself out there, every step made sense. [00:06:00] It felt like every single step led me to right here, right now, even the quote, missteps.

Knut: Yeah. It reminds me of a David Bowie quote, which I'm going to slaughter it, but it's something like, The process of aging is the process of becoming who you were always meant to be.

And I guess that's true for a life properly lived, which is in my view, what Bitcoin does to people. So you see all these characters and like the first couple of years you see them, they're, Sort of lost and trying to find their place in all of this, but slowly, but surely they're becoming who they were always meant to be.

Yes. Um, and yeah, I, I, I learned a lot from Daniel Prince and watching him just become this, um, become this walking dating app that he is now, you know, Is

Izzy: he a walking dating app?

Luke: Yeah, he's

Knut: a walking dating app, you know, it's connecting people and just. He's able to talk to absolutely anyone in the world [00:07:00] without feeling uncomfortable.

And I think there's a lot to that networking thing and just, and that's who he's supposed to be. Like it's, it's, when you meet him in these environments, it's like bleeding obvious that that's who he is. And I, and I love that. That's, you know, finding your path type of mindset. It's sort of playing the part and finding yourself are two sides of the same coin here.

You know what I mean?

[00:07:29] The Hero's Journey

Izzy: I do. Yeah. You know what it reminds me of? Uh, Joseph Campbell, looking at the, the hero's journey, studying all those cultures and going, it's not going to, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it's not going to make sense until you follow your bliss. Yeah. And when you follow your bliss, everything slots into place.

Knut: Yeah. Uh, what's his name? Mike, uh, Tyson. No. Uh,

Izzy: uh, everyone's got a plan.

Knut: Rob Reed loves, uh, Sidekick, uh, [00:08:00] Mike. Um, I don't remember his last name, but his, they made a whole series about the hero's journey. Yeah. So, so the way I see that every, every person Who, uh, quits their fiat life and becomes a full time something in Bitcoin.

Yes. They have this hero's journey. It is the hero's journey. It is 100 percent the hero's journey. They're stuck in this, uh, mindset of like, this is the way things are and I'm doing this rat race, uh, hamster's wheel thing. And that's fine because I get some spare time and I can have a vacation every two years and buy shit for my kids every Christmas and all this.

And then something in Bitcoin comes and pokes them on the shoulder and like, uh, uh, that's the equivalent of Obi Wan Kenobi just, uh, or Morpheus. Follow the white rabbit. Yeah. There's, there's something here. Uh, and then there's some crisis, uh, [00:09:00] usually, or. A

Luke: separation? Yeah. Or, or

Knut: like they, they experienced inflation firsthand or like some political decision they disagree with.

And, uh, they get this, holy shit, there might be something to this Bitcoin thing moment. And then they choose to hop off the cliff and see if their wings can actually fly.

[00:09:21] Jumping Into Bitcoin

Izzy: Where was that with you? What was that moment where you were like... Holy shit. I'm going to jump.

Knut: Well, like, I mean, I liked my fiat job, um, to, to a certain extent.

I did. I didn't like the fact that it was stealing too much of my time. And I didn't like the fact that it, I was giving so much of it away to a third party, you know, through taxes and inflation when you, when you see that thing. And then I had my Bitcoin scribblings that were sort of. Taking off and living a life of their own, um, in parallel with that, and of course that, that took more and more time and energy from me.[00:10:00]

Um, and I wanted to give it time and energy, of course. So, uh, at, at one point I realized I, uh, I need to make a decision here and I, I told my wife, uh, that, um, I'm going to, to, um, you know. Ask for a race and quite a ridiculously big race. And if I don't get that, we, we, we, we fuck off, we do this thing instead and we see where it leads.

And of course that's what happened because my employer realized that, yeah, he's probably not gonna stay very long anyway. . Yeah. Wow. So, so, uh, so that was me jumping off the cliff, I guess, and, and just seeing where this could take me And the last two years have been surreal, to say the least. I mean, Yeah.

Um, and then I found Luke last year

and we've been doing this thing for a year now. And this is like, I mean, I love doing this, talking to interesting people. Like what else, what else are you [00:11:00] going to do? Are there interesting people here? Well,

Luke: maybe not now, but...

Izzy: Where are they? Are they coming?

Luke: Are they going to show

Knut: up? Luke is mildly interesting.

I mean... I agree with that. I

Luke: agree.

Izzy: Does Luke speak during the podcast? Oh, he

Luke: does. I'm allowed to. Yes.

Knut: Okay.

[00:11:19] The Orange Glowing Light and the Tip of the Spear

Izzy: To circle back to what you were saying, it's interesting, right? Having, I had experience in that, in that fiat realm. And so I still have friends from that realm. And it's like, well, what do you do now? I focus on the orange glowing light.

Knut: Yeah.

What

Izzy: No

but How do you you pay your mortgage? I'm like,

what what are you talking about? I focus on the orange glowing light. That's it Yeah. Nothing else matters. I mean, think, think about it as well, guys, we, I don't know if our fathers and grandparents felt what we feel, you know, I like to think that they did, but [00:12:00] looking at history in the time that they lived, I don't know, because we are at the tip of the spear in a human revolution, the first ever opt out nonviolent revolution.

Yeah. It's like, hold my fucking beer. Yeah. Cause you can't, you can't do anything. And, and we are focused on this and it is literally changing the world. The proof is in the plebs.

Knut: Yeah. And it's changing us from within one at a time. Right.

[00:12:28] Bitcoin Mirror Art

Izzy: Bitcoin is a mirror. Yeah. Yeah. It's my first presentation. Yeah.

Beautiful. I remember I went up and I wrote it on the chalkboard. Bitcoin is a mirror. And there are a few technical guys in the audience. They're like, Oh, yeah,

Knut: here we go. Fiat is a black mirror.

Izzy: Oh, two way mirror. Black.

Knut: And, uh, yeah, Fractal Encrypt does Bitcoin mirror art. Yes. So, yeah. I

Izzy: remember when he came into the space and, um, I [00:13:00] thought, I actually felt something really significant about Fractal.

I thought the artwork that he's doing will be as important as Bitcoin, because being an artist myself, it's like you, art touches people in a way, you know, if you go to a city devoid of art. You see people devout of soul, but when you go to a city that has open spaces and art, people tend to want to commune and want to feel that inspiration, because it's around them everywhere.

And Fractal does that

Knut: in our space. That's what I find so fascinating about Riga. It has these, um, old communist era monuments every here and there, but there are these, you know, new hipster y places popping up every here and there with, you know, graffiti art and, uh, um, yeah, cool places that they're transforming, terraforming [00:14:00] Mars.

Like they're, they're, uh,

Izzy: I mean, we've got a space monkey.

Knut: Yeah. Space monkey right there. It should be a space cat, but yeah, I agree. I agree with that.

[00:14:10] Jugaad

Knut: So is it, what is a Jugaad? Can

Luke: you

Izzy: explain? Is this the interview? Is this where we start interviewing? Do I need

Luke: to? Yeah,

Knut: you probably should.

Izzy: Are you being serious?

What is a Jugaad? Yeah.

Knut: Explain the term.

Luke: If

Izzy: I'm going to explain, I must talk in Hindi a little bit like I'm, uh, because Jugaad is a Sanskrit word. Coming from

Knut: India. Yes. I can also do the dialect, but I think we might offend people if we keep on.

Luke: I will not offend anyone from India.

Izzy: They are my brothers. No, I

Luke: love this dialect.

It's one of

the most beautiful dialects.

Knut: Did you see the Bollywood version of, uh, Star Wars, A New Hope? No. It's so great. Was

Izzy: it a rip off? Like they made their own version? Yeah.

Luke: Well, [00:15:00] it's. I think

Knut: it's just dubbed to this Bollywood English. So it's like Admiral Oswell came out of lightspeed too close to

Luke: the system. He is clumsy as a stupidoar.

General Mayer, prepare your men for a surface attack. I love it.

Izzy: You got us, um, I mean, gosh, where do, where do I start with that? For me, there was that question, is Bitcoin an invention or a discovery? And I've been going to India since 1999. I love it. I did, uh, the white man's pilgrimage there, the enlightenment pilgrimage, you know, actually funny side story to that.

I, um, at one point I was living in Melbourne on the beach, um, not on the beach, but near the beach. And, um, I had this moment of like, what? What is life? What am I doing? I've left medicine. I'm playing around in film. What's the next step? What do I want to do? So I took a walk, and I went [00:16:00] into a bookstore, and I was drawn to go into this bookstore, and I bumped into one of those rotisserie book racks, and this book fell off, and it said, The Most Dangerous Man Since Jesus Christ, and I'm like, Who's

Knut: this?

It wasn't the Kama Sutra?

Izzy: Jesus was a tantrum man. Um, yeah. And, and that sent me to India because it was about this guy, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. And I found him utterly fascinating. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh? Yeah. Bless you. I bought a ticket. I left the bookstore, went out, bought a ticket and went to India. What was meant to be three weeks and stayed a year and a half.

Oh, really? And during that time, I heard the word Jugaad all the time, and I understood what it meant. And then in Bitcoin, I think it was around 2012, maybe 2013, people started really debating, is Bitcoin an invention or a discovery? And I knew back then, this is how I feel [00:17:00] about it, that it is the ultimate Jugaad.

So to your question, what is a Jugaad? You could say it's a life hack. It's a loose, like every nine year old in India knows what a Jugaad is because they have to, they have to find ways and means to accomplish what it is they're trying to accomplish with shit that they don't have. You know what I mean?

So like say they have to reach some electrical wire up on, on the top, but they have a, on the top of the building, but they don't have a ladder. Well, they've got a motorcycle and a box and their cousin can hoist them up here. And then they've got an old coat hanger to try to reach it. None of those things were designed for what they're going to use them for.

But the combination of that and a little bit of ingenuity allows them to complete what it is they're trying to do. And with Bitcoin, for me. Satoshi's Bitcoin is humanity's Jugaad, like he combined [00:18:00] these technological innovations that were already in existence and then added something, the difficulty adjustment of his own, that created this ultimate Jugaad, this life hack for all of us.

And, you know, I've said this to you before, I deeply feel that, um, I mean, whether you look at it from a philosophical perspective or spiritual, which I'm waiting for the backlash, um, That intent of Satoshi is imbued in the code itself. So it's a dugout for us as humanity to usurp this tyrannical system that has kept us in debt slavery forever, Laura.

[00:18:42] Satoshi's Intentions

Izzy: And then. In that as well, there's like the intent of the creator, not, not to get too juju, but if you look at it, right, like, I don't want to hog the conversation, but if you look at it, Satoshi said in 2008, I've been working on this for a couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. It [00:19:00] would have been a lot longer than that.

There was never a digital footprint. So he knew what he was doing. And if you know what you're doing in that sense, like you're going to put something out that anyone else who has put that out has either been killed or put into jail. So I'm going to cover my tracks, and this may or may not work. If you have that going in, when did you actually get that seed planted in you?

Were you 12? Were you 11? Did you show up with that? Like, what is it?

Knut: Yeah, it's like when people ask me when I started writing a book. Like, when did you start writing the book? Yeah. Fuck do I know? Like, I know it's not when I pressed the first letter in the first word. I know it's way before that. And it's like.

You spend your entire life thinking about stuff and then eventually something may or may not come out the other end, like, and as far as spirituality goes to, uh, because I'm not going

Luke: to, no, but, but, but the way I see it, like, I don't need an [00:20:00] old man in the sky, you

Knut: see. It's not as simple as that, I can admit that, and, uh, the way

Luke: I see it, there's, uh...

Izzy: Please take note, everyone, compared to softening.

Knut: I wouldn't call it that either. Okay. Uh, I'd say that...

Luke: Yeah, you're still hard

Izzy: as a rock. Oh, and we're back to the sexual nature of Tantra.

Knut: Tip of the spear and all a

Luke: bunch of

Izzy: homos. Nobody else will get that reference because

Luke: they weren't only Australians get that in

Knut: reference.

[00:20:34] The Definition of Consciousness

Knut: So, um, consciousness is like, it's very hard to define and it's very unclear what it is and where it comes from and how, how it, uh, how it happens and what types of beings have it and like what it is. And uh, it's unclear to which extent. our minds create reality and to which extent it [00:21:00] interprets reality.

Uh, and I suspect that we create it to a larger degree than we admit to ourselves. So that's about as far as I will go on the spirituality front. So, but what I'm saying with that is like, if you, if you find a Calling or like a clear path in your life and you start focusing on doing stuff to accomplish something later down the line, low time preference stuff, then good things may happen to you.

I'm like, I'm firmly believe that if you do fuck all, if you don't do anything and you never tried, you know, getting out of your comfort zone or whatnot. Then nothing will happen. I agree. If you do, most likely, nothing will happen. But it might happen. So if you just get out of your comfort zone enough and try different things, sooner or later, you know, uh, fortune [00:22:00] may come to you or like, fortune is a bad word, but stuff might start happening and you might start to connect with all these beautiful people and find a, uh, A path that feels worth taking, uh, find a hill to die on, which is also a valley to live in, if it's the correct hill.

Izzy: There's freedom in that, Freedom Footprint. There's freedom in those footprints, because... Like I, I really deeply resonate with what you just said in my own life and to circle back to Joseph Campbell and his work, there's always that journey of the hero, no matter whether you're male, female, what culture you've ever existed in, to follow your bliss.

And some people say that. I mean, you, you've heard this off that it puts you in a flow state. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is all just vernacular and terminology, but

[00:22:53] Experimental vs Experiential Science

Izzy: I look at science as there's two types of science. There's experimental science and experiential science. [00:23:00] And looking at the, I saw your eyes roll, looking at the.

I would

Knut: categorize it differently.

Izzy: Well, bear with me and let's put this on the ancient rishis and even, even Gautama Buddha, uh, sat under a tree with his eyes closed and said, there's no such thing as matter. Everything is what he called kalappas, um, rising and passing away non stop, millions and millions and millions and millions.

And he understood that sitting under a tree with his eyes closed. And modern physics would say the same thing. Yeah, basically. So, I look at, like, I can't... Verify my experiential science with you. And this is what I think the wise ones of the past said, like the enlightened ones, if you will, the self realized people who understood what Gautama understood, they can say, you are it, thou art that.

That's what the Sufis said, right? Thou art [00:24:00] that. But so many people get lost. And I know you agree with this of going, Oh my God, Knut taught me that I'm not that. Knut is the, is the one. Whereas Knut, the Enlightened One would be like, go fuck yourself. I'm not the one, you're the one. Don't get, uh, what Bruce Lee say, don't get lost on the finger or you miss all the heavenly glory.

Yes. And

Knut: the tip of the spear. And the

Izzy: tip of the spear. So I think we do create our own reality in the sense that life is a mystery to be lived, and it's my mystery, and I can't verify that with you, I can only show you who I am, and you feel it when we hug one another, you're like, holy shit, this guy's weird.

Knut: Yeah, that about sums it up. Thumbs up what I feel when I hug you, I mean that in the most positive sense possible. So reminds me, me and Giacomo once put a Venn diagram [00:25:00] together, uh, with the three different categories of, of science. And one is. a priori science, which is praxeology and mathematics and logic and whatnot, where you just deductively reason yourself to from a set of axioms that are undeniable.

And then there's empirical research, which is, you know, modern academia and you do studies and they get peer reviewed and you get a good picture of what's going on. And then there's the third category, which is bro science, which is sort of what you just explained. It is not!

Luke: But where you...

Knut: You just, you don't really have any evidence for your arguments, but you make sense.

Like, yeah.

Izzy: So let's unpack this, but you say you don't have any evidence. If you sit down and you experienced through your own awareness that Wow. Okay. My body is not what I thought it was. I think it's this solid structure that goes [00:26:00] around and eats and shits and does all this other stuff, but it's so much more than that.

It's constant fluctuation. It's not even solid. And you have the experience of that, but you say to somebody, um, you're, you're all energy and you're not really matter. And they'd be like, yeah, bro,

Knut: science, bro. But energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. So maybe we're saying

Izzy: the same thing. Yeah, I think so.

Oh, wow. I got it. I got it. Went from bro science to, yeah, it's

Knut: really... But then again, I, I think it, uh, goes back to, you know, um, I think therefore I am, which is, uh, which Descartes, which, uh, the, Descartes famous quote, which has been revised to, I think therefore some thinking is going on somewhere, which is the only statement that you can actually prove is true.

Like regardless of if you have ATIQ or more, like that's... That's the only thing you can prove.

Izzy: Right, right.

Knut: Uh,

Izzy: so I went through a huge dilemma with, I think [00:27:00] therefore I am when I was, uh, first started meditating because I was trying to move past the thoughts rather than just observe them and I was like, fuck, I think therefore I am, yeah, no, I'm much more than the thinking.

And so I had this real battle with Descartes for like eight years and coming back full circle going, yeah, no, I get it. I understand where this guy was coming from. This,

[00:27:24] Artificial Intelligence and Agency

Knut: this gets us into AI territory. And I find this fascinating because I think I figured out why AI isn't intelligence. Because we make it?

No, because it lacks, sort of, because it lacks agency. Okay. It's never compelled to act, uh, because of its own wishes. It's, it's a perfect slave, but it can

Izzy: never be a master. How do you give AI a penis then? Maybe it, I have the impetus. No, sorry.

Knut: You'll have to give it an artificial one, I'm afraid.

Izzy: No, I don't mean to break up your flow.

It's just non humorous. [00:28:00]

Knut: So I think, and I think this ties into how humans view themselves in general and how we view society and everything. Like we think intelligence is. This thing that you can pull away from, from agency, but it's not like we, we, we need agency and, uh, well, for lack of a better word, free will.

You can argue that you don't really have free will because you don't control what thoughts get into your brain and so on and whatnot. But I love the Hitchens quote. Of course I have free will. I have no choice but to have it. Because I have free will. That's sort of true as well. Like if, if we are to discuss anything or get anywhere with anything, we need to presuppose that we have free will.

Otherwise, what's the point? Like, there's absolutely no point otherwise. And also led me to other conclusions that we couldn't have free will without entropy. If the universe was deterministic, there can be no free [00:29:00] will by definition. So maybe, Free will is connected to entropy somehow. I don't know at all where I'm going with this.

Where

Izzy: do you, where, where do you land with that in your own ideology of what life is in the sense then, do you feel that you as Knut Svanholm have free will? Unless Sofia says, Hey, it's time to go. I have free

Knut: will when she's not around. That's

Luke: for sure.

Knut: No, but. Yeah, I don't, I think agency is a better word.

Okay. Uh, so, so as praxeology tells us, we, we, anything we do in any deliberate action is to remove a felt uneasiness by using means to reach a certain end, because we envision that end to be a better state of being than the one we're in now. Yeah, so true. And to me, a machine can never do that. Um, [00:30:00] Bitcoiners can do that and by extension why Bitcoin can do that.

But that's because Bitcoin is us. Yes. It's not because Bitcoin is this, you know, string of numbers. It enables us to to, you know, act in ways that are mutually beneficial, that makes that thing easier.

Izzy: So when I first saw you talking about us being the nodes, I was blown away because. You know me, and that's, that's, I mean, I know this, I feel this on the deepest of all level that we are Bitcoin.

And when I heard you say it as well, I was like, wow, I just love, how do I love this guy more? But I also put it that, uh, going back to the Kama Sutra, tip of the spear. Come here, come here, let me hug you baby.

Knut: Different direction. So how do I end this? Look .

[00:30:53] Bioelectromagnetic Nodes

Izzy: I feel that intent of Satoshi came through the code and some I I, like I said to farmer Jen in Australia, [00:31:00] I was going on and on about we are bio electromagnetic nodes and this and that.

She goes, it could just be hard money, Izzy. I'm like, could be, but it does something in the world. It connects us. Yeah. And if you look at where we are in the human endeavor, what did we need? Fiat money. Disconnects us, puts us in enslavement. Jeff Booth talks about this a lot, right? And to be able to take our sovereignty back, because I don't think Bitcoin gives you sovereignty.

I think it reminds you, you already were fucking sovereign. To be able to take that back, we needed to connect because Knut, or I don't know, I was about to dox you. Pseudo Finn, as himself, you can't fight this system. You can't. They have all the money, they print it. They have all the weapons, they created them.

They have the media, and I can get into who they is, if you want, but they have all that. So one person is not going to be [00:32:00] able to stand up like, uh, let's say a Jesus or whatever and be the Messiah, for lack of a better word, the inspiration for humanity. But what is? Swarm of what Michael would say, cyber hornets.

So I think very similar to you that Bitcoin is much more than hard money. It creates a mirror that reflects back our transactional lives and forces us to start asking questions about who we are, what this is, what is education, where was I lied to, and then I look in your eyes and I see the proof of work.

Holy shit. He went down the same rabbit holes as me. And so we connect. In this life, right here, right now, and the more of us that connect in this opt out freedom movement, we change the world.

Knut: Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to do the Knut thing about the bio electromagnetic nodes.

Izzy: Great. Then I'm going to bring up some science.

Knut: The bioelectric. [00:33:00] The bioelectric part, yeah. Is literally true. Like the nodes are us and we, our bodies are electrical things. Yes. And they're biological things. But where does the magnetic part come in? Is that a

Izzy: metaphor? No, it's not actually. So if you look at bio electromagnetism, you see that there's a lot of, um, especially neurological sciences.

Mm-hmm. neurological studies happen about what happens. The cell structure of the brain. Dammit. I thought I got you there. with bio electromagnetism, and if you look at it as well, just in a macrocosmic, microcosmic way, if the earth is bioelectromagnetic, which we know that it is, mm-hmm. , then we're born of this earth.

How are we not of that same thing? Well, modern medicine knows that we are because they study on an intercellular level how, how that affects human thinking and physiology. So when I [00:34:00] say we're bioelectromagnetic nodes, it's not a

Knut: metaphor. Excellent. Good answer.

Izzy: There's probably some doctor out there going, Jesus, he just bastardized my whole life work.

Speaking of

Knut: magnetic doctor, a doctor friend of mine recently told me a story about a gut surgery he had to do. And then you wonder what the fuck did this guy do? And it turns out he ate two neodyme magnets. The first one. Waited for an hour or two and ate the other one. They go through his belly and like, and it's stuck.

So don't eat neodymium magnets.

Izzy: I forgot we were on film. Yeah. Don't eat magnets. For any of you hippies out there, don't, don't go down the. You know, hippies in the 80s and 90s, they walk around barefoot and they're talking about, Hey man, I'm fucking, [00:35:00] I'm, I'm just, can we curse on here? I'm recursing, right?

Fuck yeah. Sorry, mom. I love you. I love you a lot. Um, but they would say, Hey man, we're, we're earthing. We're just earthing. And all the sciences would be like, these guys are so stupid. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but nonetheless, they weren't stupid at all. We know most of them were, wait, it's because they had so many psychedelics, they broke their brain in half, but they knew that standing on the earth, this is that experiential science.

Knut: They had at least 80

Izzy: IQ, maybe 78. But they knew a couple of things, at least this was my experience in being a low IQ hippie after medicine, I may not have segwayed from that, but, um, when you go barefoot on the earth, you feel, you feel the difference. And now we have studies that prove that, that shows what happens to your cells, what happens in your body when you're, when you're connected with the earth.

And then another [00:36:00] element of that is as well, when you walk barefoot, you're sending constant information from your foot to your brain. About, you need to move this way. You need to segue. Yeah. This way there's a sharp rock.

Knut: Yeah. That's why we have this big prefrontal, prefrontal cortal. It's, it's mainly to, to coordinate movement, you know, standing up, walking.

Izzy: Yeah. And so when we put these shoes on with these great, they're like rubber coffins, uhhuh. We deny the ability to develop that. In a sense. I'm not saying it's bad to wear shoes or anything. Take your fucking

Knut: shoes off. Yeah, that's exactly what you're saying.

Izzy: I am a little bit. I just think, like, there was a Bitcoiner, uh, in Australia recently, and he was like, I probably haven't had my shoes off on the earth in three years.

I'm like, you need to go outside right now and just walk around. And from a health perspective as well, if you look at the studies that were done with some of the Swedish and Finnish children who go barefoot year round. They don't get sick a lot. They're exposed [00:37:00] to the elements a lot more. I mean, you can't say it's only because of that, but that exposure has got to be more healthy.

Knut: Is this the section that is going to trigger that YouTube algorithm with the fact checking?

Izzy: I hope so. Just call

Luke: this episode Broscience with Izzy. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Knut: yeah. That's a good title. Probably, we've

Luke: got the title now, yeah. You

Knut: guys are assholes. You know what's funny?

Luke: I love you.

Izzy: Izzy. He

Knut: means it, I mean it too.

[00:37:29] Australia

Knut: When I visited you guys in Sydney, someone told me that Australia is made of iron ore. Like, mostly. It's mostly iron ore. It is

Izzy: Gondwana land, doesn't have the thickest mantle.

Knut: And I felt, like, more grounded. Like, there was something special about walking around in Australia compared to different continents.

You're being serious? Yeah, I'm being sort of serious. I, I, I think it's just my brain playing tricks of me, mostly. Because of my, you know, stubborn, denying everything attitude. But, but, uh, yeah, there's a, [00:38:00] there's a feeling there. I have a cousin down there who told me about that and that he felt one with the land and all of this stuff is deep into meditation and stuff as well.

So like, I think there's something to Australia, something

Izzy: based. When I went to Australia, I was only going to stay 18 months on, uh, on that job contract. And then you missed your flight.

30 years later. And, and, and my parents were asking me like, why do you want to stay? And I said, I don't know. There's two things. One, there's a different, it feels like there's a different moral consciousness here. Like Australians didn't take themselves too seriously. No. And they don't let you take yourself seriously.

No, I love that. I love it too. Yeah, yeah. And then the other, what you said, I just felt Grounded? I just felt a It's gonna sound wakey. Based, based is the word. I felt a pull to be there, like something in that place felt like you, you're meant to be here. This is where you're [00:39:00] meant to walk around. And they say that Byron Bay in Australia is very similar to that because it was the indigenous, um, they had a lot of sacred ceremony there and it sort of holds this energy, if you will.

But yeah, they talk about what is below the earth as well, but it was, um, Gondwana land, right? It was part of Gondwana and it's studied that it has the thickest crusts or mantle beneath beneath the earth as well. That, that, um, All of Australia and what used to be the, the portions that broke away. So maybe there is something in that.

Maybe.

Knut: Definitely call it bro science. I have to come back and make an empirical study.

Izzy: Well, you're an honorary. I don't know if your listeners know this, but you're an honorary Australian. That, that, that was immediate. People, people in Australia were like going crazy that Knut was coming down under. It was amazing, [00:40:00] actually.

And you, and doing that panel with you up on stage, me, you and Mike Dunworth, Is Bitcoin Alive? It's one of the funnest things I've ever done.

Knut: Yeah, same here. I absolutely love that. It was just such a riff. Because I love your brains.

Izzy: Well, Mike's wild. For anyone that doesn't know, like, I don't know if you know who Michael

Knut: Tomer is.

No, we have had him on, uh, Yeah, just recently. Oh, you did? Yeah. Yeah. And then he was on Infinity Day as well. Both Peter and Michael were there. Yeah, two of my yeah, we love them.

Izzy: I mean, he time locked Bitcoin and put it into the future and said, steal my keys.

Knut: Yeah. Wow. I love this.

Izzy: Love it. Yeah. Okay. Maybe. I mean, uh,

[00:40:39] Experiential and Experimental vs A Priori and A Posteriori

Izzy: I experimental and experiential to me is those are the, those are the sciences.

Like I experience Bitcoin and I can't verify it, but. I can, you'll feel it when you're around

Knut: me. So where does a priori come in there? Elaborate. Like, uh, [00:41:00] deductive reasoning only, like praxeology and mathematics, like something you, you reason yourself to a certain positions from a fixed set of axioms, that type of methodology, which is like, that's the thing that changed everything for me, like realizing that that's.

That will lead you to more robust conclusions than, than empiricism ever can. Uh,

Luke: here, let, let the a d I Q, uh, in the room, uh, try to put these two together. I, I think, I think a priori and, and experi experiential, it's, that's the same thing. I, I think, well,

Knut: experiential to me sounds like empirical.

Luke: No, but you, but you, you, you.

Do the deduction part, right? Like that's, that's the whole thing. If you, if you can just deductively reason the entire thing, then you're doing the experiential part of it. And, and, and the other side of it is if all you've got is, is your experience, how you're experiencing something well, then that's, that's true, but you're not producing evidence for that.

And the, the, [00:42:00] uh, the out of your ass science, a posteriori is, is, uh, is, uh, uh, you know, like that, that's the scientific method, right? Yeah, it is. So, so, um, yeah, it's not really out of your ass, but

Knut: yeah, it kind of is. And you can't have one without the other.

Luke: No. So it's, I think it is the two sides of the coin.

It's just said differently because the, the praxeological part, right. Where, where this sort of like, let's, let's build a set of axioms that actually explains the world in a real sense. Well, yeah, it's the, the sense of experience. And so I think just talk about two things, different perspectives.

Izzy: There is a, uh, I agree with that.

I think we come from it from those different angles and sort of. The, the, the speech or the vernacular sometimes maybe can make it seem like it's different, but it's not.

[00:42:45] Creativity

Izzy: What I get from Knut, you have this amazing ability to process information, categorize it, and almost tabilize it for a certain, to use [00:43:00] that word, in a way that you digest it and it all makes sense to you.

Knut: I think Twitter had a big role in helping me develop that skill, if you will, because you're limited to 144 characters, and I love that limit, that this is something I realized when producing music a long time ago, that like, when all the soft synthesizers came and all the digital effects and stuff, you had, instead of being constrained, you had This vast ocean of tools to use to produce music, which led you to like polishing a turd for a year instead of just taking a better take of the song or something.

There's a, Oh, the hi hat sound is wrong. You should have another reverb on the hi hat or whatever. So I figured out over time that creativity requires, uh, boundaries. Like if you're, if you're pursuing something creatively, like. Uh, if you don't have, if you don't set boundaries for yourself, you're going to, you're going [00:44:00] to hinder the process by having too many options.

So, and I think there's a, like a band, like the White Stripes is a very good example of that. Like they limited themselves to, we're only going to use, it's only us two, drum kit and guitar. That's it. Like you can find freedom in there and you can, because you, you, you're forced to find these true expressions, if you will.

And that's why I often like a sketch better than an. oil painting. You know what I mean? So I think there's some, there's a flow part of creativity and that you need to, I mean, if you work on something forever, I mean, I love the roof of the 16th chapel as much as the next guy, but, but still there's something to spontaneity and keeping a flow in creativity and being, uh, I learned a lot from, uh, The, um, South Park documentary, Six Days to Air.

So it's about how they make South Park. And Trey Parker writes the script [00:45:00] in two days. So, so they, they, uh, they start thinking about it six days before it airs and they make the entire episode, which is fucking amazing. And, and he says that he could have worked. Uh, for an extra month on the script and the script would have become 5 percent better.

Yeah, right. So, so the last month, it's, it's just this unnecessary polishing. And I think he's a better writer now because he learned how to be satisfied with, with 95 percent percent. Perfection, and, and then just moving on to new things. So, and of course it's subjective and different for different people, but I think you have to find if you're doing any, anything creative, you have to find your, your approach to it.

I know many people in Bitcoin that, that are writing books. Yeah, but they're never done because they're perfectionists. There's a lot of perfectionists there.

Izzy: It can be the death notes. I experienced that in business. [00:46:00] You know, and luckily I've surrounded myself with some absolutely amazing bitcoiners because they're like, nah, Izzy, bring it now.

It's, it's 95%, right? And the rest, the other 5 percent will work out in market. Yeah. We'll work out in the board meeting. Yeah. Where I'm kind of like, yeah, no, I just want. Take a little bit more time. No, no, we're going now. Well, what would you say at the start of this? Fuck it. We're going live. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, just to circle back to what we were saying before.

Knut: Bill O'Reilly quote.

Izzy: About, about,

[00:46:35] Approaching Life

Izzy: you know, I approach life in a nonsensical way. No shit.

I feel as a human being that I've been indoctrinated into what it means to be a human being. Yeah. And I saw that in my, in my twenties. That's actually why I left medicine. I [00:47:00] remember the day, I was standing in front of my mirror, pushing my tie up. And I just thought, this is, this is ridiculous. This is bullshit.

I'm going to go in here, I'm going to see some patients, I'm going to put some scrubs on, go into the theater, uh, surgical room, and then I'm going to put my suit back on, come home and put my fucking comfy clothes on. Why am I not wearing my comfy clothes all the time? And then that begged the question, why are we, as humans, like, go to school, learn this, go to college, get a job, get a mortgage, get married?

There's got to be something more to being human, right? And when I started looking for what that was, I quit medicine immediately. And I was like... So you were a

Knut: surgeon? Yeah. What kind of surgeon? The proctologist?

Izzy: You'd like that, wouldn't you? I was the biggest shitcoin surgeon ever. I was a hair transplant

Knut: surgeon.

Hair transplant surgeon, all right.

Izzy: Um, but I had this moment where I looked and it's [00:48:00] like, what did the, uh, ancients say? Where do, where do we find, like, we see it in the temple of Delphi, noseti ipsum, know thyself, and you find that phraseology everywhere, know yourself, know yourself. And when I looked around, I'm like...

To use the recent catchphrase, these motherfuckers right here are not real, they are not knowing themselves. I mean, not to be judgmental, but I was, I was like, I don't want to go down that path. And I made a promise to myself, I said, When I left, the exact amount of time that I've listened to other people, I'm going to do exactly and only what I want to do in life.

And that my North Star is going to be, I just want to know who I am, what this is. I don't, I'm not opposed to having marriage and children and all that. I mean, I, I gave that up with some wonderful partners to, to [00:49:00] follow this path. So there was, there's a lot of sacrifice there to follow that, to understand better who I am and what this is.

I guess that's why I lean on the experimental, the experiential bro science, because I've lived it and I did it for 26

Knut: years. I can see you're getting emotional about this

Izzy: stuff. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, very, very much so. Because, um, I mean, what are we here for? If, if we don't. Understand who we are. For the lulz, we're here for the lulz.

We could be, we could be here for the lulz, but I really deeply think life is a mystery and it's not meant to be solved, it's just meant to be lived. Yeah, yeah. And your mystery is different than mine. Yeah. What I've tried to do in, in that pathway is constantly get out of my own way. What are my beliefs?

How do I drop them? How do I get to a place of, I don't know. And I'm cool with not knowing.

Knut: That's so [00:50:00] crucial, I think. Like, I think people in general have, uh, a lot of people have this urge to have answers to stuff. Like, that's why people become religious, that's why they trust the science, and like, that's why they trust governments.

Authority in general is because they, they have this urge for free lunch. They, they, they want there to be an answer to everything and, uh, and to some, some deep questions that they find troubling. And they, they, like, if you can find a way to live with. The knowledge that you don't know, and I think life becomes way easier.

Yeah. Heaps easier. And you know, another thing I thought of? What? You know what I, what I would call, you know, leaving hair transplant surgery for soul searching? What? A bald move.[00:51:00]

Sorry.

Izzy: You're so good at these things, these little quips, you know that, right? I've been standing with you before. It's not a

Luke: quip, I'm being

Knut: sincere.

Luke: It is a

Izzy: bald move. It's definitely a bald move.

Knut: Toupee.

Izzy: That was my journey. That, that's what, um, and that journey as well, if you will. Like sent me down the, the rabbit hole of understanding this whole thing is a game. This whole thing is a racket. They, uh, I, I, in 2002, 2003, 2004, I was going deep down the Federal Reserve rabbit hole. Mm-hmm. and knew what the game was.

I had felt it as debt, being a debt slave, but I didn't know how it started or what it meant. And then when I understood what [00:52:00] it meant, I was searching for something like Bitcoin.

[00:52:06] Depression

Izzy: Were you ever

Knut: depressed?

Izzy: Yeah, it um, it takes its toll because I remember my, I mean, I don't know if depression is a word, right?

Mm hmm. I just know that hurt, hurt, because I understood things about the world and when I would try to talk to people about that, my best friends, they're like... Ah, Izzy. And I'm like, no, this is a racket, you live in a racket. How can you prop up this racket with your, with your choices every day? You, you're a consumer, you're, you're, you're propping up the very thing that inside rips your soul apart and you fucking know it.

And I got to a point, you asked me if it was depressing, I got to a point where I made a couple of choices. One was. I am not going to buy anything. I'm not [00:53:00] going to trade my life energy by something for someone that I wouldn't sit down for Sunday dinner with. And that's a really difficult choice because all of a sudden you can't buy anywhere.

You don't want to go to the big conglomerate stores because when you research them, they don't hold the same ethos that I have, but it brought me back to farmer's markets. It brought me back from buying my milk directly from farmers. And it was hard. Yeah. And, and I guess at times like, oh, you left this great career and then I had a career in film.

You left that great career. It was like, what, is there something wrong with me? Why am I walking away from this stuff? But I knew that there was something more out there and I had to find it.

[00:54:00] [00:55:00]

[00:55:53] When Bitcoin Clicked for Izzy

Knut: was there a specific moment when Bitcoin clicked for you, like, I guess, having researched the [00:56:00] Federal Reserve and stuff, like, uh, that contributed to you finding Bitcoin at a quite early point, like, is there a specific moment of clarity that you remember?

The abstract. The paper.

Izzy: Yep, 2010. I, um, actually it was in the title. I remember reading the title. Thank you, uh, Trace Mayer, Trace Mayer, for, um, I know you brought us Mimble Wimble, which is really fucking weird, but, um, thank you for pointing me in the direction of, of

Luke: Bitcoin.

Knut: There's no Trace of Trace anymore.

Izzy: No, and you know, he said that early. Yeah, I know, I know. That was a, that's a bald move. Poof! Bald move. Um,

Luke: I, I,

Izzy: I, I, I remember sitting at my, at my old antique wooden desk overlooking the bay. And it was like. Bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system, and I was like, Bitcoin, I've never heard that word before.

What is Bitcoin? And it just, [00:57:00] it, I had this feeling like, wow, this is so new. And then a peer to peer is like, boom, you had me at hello. I get it. I understand. I'm a torrenter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Demonoid piracy way back, right? And I understood you cannot shut that down. Electronic cash system, that's what I was looking for.

Because I knew that we lived in a corrupt world. And so when you asked me, was there a moment that that happened, it was the abstract. When I read the abstract, I felt... If I hadn't read the paper yet, but I read the abstract and I felt if this thing, what I'm reading can accomplish what it said in that short paragraph, this is going to change everything.

It's going to change what we think about. Um, life because everything is transactional. It's going to change how we feel about energy because it's going to redefine what energy means to us, how we extract it, how [00:58:00] we create it. And so for me, that was the moment of holy shit. But then I read the white paper and I realized I am such an idiot.

I don't understand any of this math. I don't understand any of this. But circling, just, just circling back to what we said before about leading a nonsensical life, my dear mother, who's still my best friend on the earth to this day, like best friend of all, she taught my sister and I, trust your gut always, no matter what, trust your gut instinct.

And by doing that, and I suppose that's why I come at it from an experiential, experimental type of science, because experiential to me is more important because it's a feeling I get. I've honed that in such a way that I trust it and it does not lead me astray in my life. So when I read the abstract, I was like, yeah, wow, this is, this is what I want.

This is, this is what I've been looking for. Yeah. [00:59:00] But it didn't come out of the closet for a decade. It was the pandemic that brought me out. I got pissed off. Uhhuh. .

[00:59:09] Amber App

Knut: And now, and now you're the, um, c e O of the Amber App. Yes. And, uh, I know you have some plans for that, where that is going and uh, yeah. How it's gonna evolve.

And could you give us the T L D R on, on that thing? No. Okay. Thank you. You're

Izzy: welcome. Thanks everyone. . Um, it totally happened by happenstance. I went, uh, on a speaking tour. Like I said, the pandemic really pissed me off. I just felt like, why am I hiding? I'm not Satoshi. I mean, uh, aren't you? Definitely not.

Uh, we all are and I get that. Um, but I just thought, why am I hiding? Like what if I've made these sacrifices in life? So why don't I put myself out there fully? And it was so weird. Maybe this goes back to the Joseph Campbell following your bliss [01:00:00] because you asked me if I was depressed, right? Okay. So. The pandemic to me was an amazing experience.

I extracted myself from Melbourne. We had this, I will answer your question about Ambarat.

Knut: Yeah, Melbourne was

Izzy: horrible. Like 18 months lockdown. You couldn't leave your house. And so I was like, fuck this. I'm going to go out. And, uh, it was a German guy got stuck in Australia. We, um, I moved to an old warehouse, and, uh, we built a sauna, we dug gardens, we sparred every single day in martial arts, like, for hours, and it was the best experience ever, but I saw everyone else going through horrible, horrible, they lost their businesses, couldn't leave their house, kids were suicidal, and it pissed me off, I was like, everything that I thought about these tyrannical powers that be is playing out.

And if people don't think that, if people think, oh, you know, this just happened and it was about this COVID virus, wake the fuck up. Have you [01:01:00] ever seen government work together? This was a perfect worldwide lockstep movement. That's not happenstance. And so that really upset me and I felt like, okay, I prepared for this.

And you asked me if I was depressed. After my friend from Germany depressed, after he left, I think I got depressed because I was like, I prepared for this my whole life. I felt like I'm meant to fight. And I wanted to go down and be on the street and fight. And my mother said, don't, don't, don't, um, miss an opportunity.

Like you, you may not need to fight the battle. You're in the war, but you have to choose your battles. And I just want to go down there. And she's like, I can't tell you, but be careful. Had I done that, I wouldn't be the CEO of Ambrap. Had I went down there and got arrested, I wouldn't be the CEO of Ambrap.

So did I get depressed? Yeah, I think so. I just started smoking copious amounts of cannabis [01:02:00] to, to like drowned out, like, I'm meant to be doing something. I don't know what I'm meant to be doing. How do I, like, I'm feeling useless. Like, all this preparation, what, I'm just gonna not use it? And then Wizard of Oz said, um, he said, uh, Izzy, I'm, I'm, I'm going around the world.

We're gonna speak at a conference. Do you want to come? And I was like, okay, I'll take a shot. I'll just. Because for a decade I never wanted anyone to know I was a Bitcoiner, other than my family and friends wanted to stay private. And then when I stepped out, started speaking, that was my bliss.

Knut: And you sort of realized that we are your family and friends.

100%,

Izzy: 100%. And that led me to opening up, realizing that I am an 80% er and that, yeah, we're all weird. We're all

Knut: weirdos. You mean ATIQ er? [01:03:00]

Izzy: Yeah. Yeah. But now I'm with a bunch of weirdos. And it felt right. And then again, to Wizard of Oz, he said, um, Alex said, had, uh, left the company that he founded, moved on to some more philosophical pursuits.

And, and there were some issues in his own life that he wanted to sort out. This thing has opened up and, um, do you, do you want to run it? And I said, no, not at all, you do it,

I'm actually acting in film as well. I fought Jackie Chan in my first film, but anyway, back to the CEO, right? So, um.

He asked me if I wanted to do this, and I said no, because he's well suited, he's a very successful man, and I really, really deeply look up to Wizard of Oz, I love him so much, he's done so much for [01:04:00] Bitcoin, and here he is offering me this position to run him. And exchange. And secretly behind the, behind the lines, I was researching the hell out of this company.

Cause I knew about it. I tried it early days. I thought, wow, it's very, very easy UX. And it took me about four months. Um, and then I went into negotiations with the board, similar to you. I just said something ridiculous. Cause I thought they would say, get out of here. You can't have any of that, but they went, okay, yeah, let's do that.

And I was like, holy shit. Okay. I'm going to run this company. Um, but for me, um, yeah, it's, it's the best thing that ever happened in my entire life and every step that I've taken prepared me to be right where I am because, um, I just want to educate the entire world. On Bitcoin. We have an ethos in our company.

I said it at the start, we focus on the orange glowing light. Anything outside of that makes no difference. So the hero's journey is important to me because I've overlaid our, our entire [01:05:00] educational content around that. And we've taken it from Amber app. I acquired Volt Pay, uh, well, Aqua acquired it because the person who created it agreed to become our CTO, brought that with him, we created additional, uh, adjacent products and services.

And we're about to launch globally. Um, and the whole mission is no matter where you are on your Bitcoin heroes journey, I want to help you. I want to give you some product. If you're not ready for a node, that's fine. Where are you? You're ready to buy KYC. I got you. And I'm not the only one, like there are a lot of exchanges and brokerages out there, but I want Amber app to be the place where someone can set up their Bitcoin life.

No matter where you are, if you're at collaborative custody, great, here's TribeKey, use this. If you're all the way down the line where you were never KYC, fantastic, we're introducing SovereignSats. So that's a peer to peer, uh, multi seq escrow. I just want to help people. [01:06:00] Come to Bitcoin and understand it and be able to have the ramp to be a Bitcoiner.

And I don't want you to hold your keys on my exchange at all, ever. Like, I want you to be self sovereign.

Knut: So you're sort of lining it up for this, uh, we're all incentivized to help one another type of thing. Looking for

Izzy: collaborations. Yeah, 100%. Just had a little brief conversation with Roy from Breeze.

Big hug. Big, long, weird hug, right? We're just hugging one another and he goes, Wow, let's talk. And I'm like, yeah, let's find some sort of something that we can do together.

Knut: I get some ideas just listening to this. Yeah? Yeah. What do you feel? I feel that we're on the same mission. Uh, like that's what, you know, I've been ranting about it for a year and a half on like where, uh, but.

It feels like it's [01:07:00] this weird living the meme thing, like what I experienced with, with the, um, uh, Infinity Day, for instance, it's just like put an idea out there and it somehow manifests into reality. And I think this we're experiencing what we, what we've set up through this show for none, that that was a big part of it.

And like having these conversations with people and people seem to tap into, I mean, I feel that. Collaborative vibe even stronger this year than last year, might be a bit fewer people here this year, like a hundred less than last year or something, but it's still the vibe is so it's this love is in the air for better or for lack of a better word.

[01:07:45] Connecting at Bitcoin Conferences

Izzy: You enjoying

Knut: it? Enjoying the fuck out of it. Of course. Yeah.

Izzy: You

Luke: enjoying it? Oh, yeah. This whole thing is so surreal because I, I mean, I, I got into Bitcoin only a couple of years ago and last year's Riga was my [01:08:00] coming out into Bitcoin and, uh, I, I had no idea. I arrived in, in Riga, uh, I k Newton and I, we'd done our first episode, maybe two of the, of the pod at Consensus.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so we, we had done those before Riga, but we, we, we didn't know each other. Yeah, no, we were, we were working together a little bit, but we didn't know each other yet, but, but, well, we got to know each other and it all started and, and, and suddenly we're, we're just, uh, doing this crazy, insane thing.

And, and, you know, back last year, you were one of the people who made the biggest impression on me just, and, and you looked a lot different down to there. Yeah, pre CEO days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but then, and then a year later. You know, next time seeing you in person, it's just like the instant connection is still absolutely there.

And, and we all go off, we all go off into our own little corners of the world and we do what we do. Right. [01:09:00] Then we all come back and see one another. And I mean, I think that's the best part of these conferences is just to, to build the connections and grow it. And it's amazing. We have. Zoom, and all of these communication tools.

Orange Pill App.

Izzy: Orange Pill App. Yeah. Shout out to Orange Pill App. Mateo, Brian, and shout out. That's

Knut: massive. Yeah. And how, how it connects all this, uh, like the, the, the Satoshi Rakamoto is, is the, the, um, Noster party here. They're the, they're the same entity now. Like. Yeah.

Luke: And, and, and then, so it's, it's great that we have the, the tools to stay, to stay connected over, over the internet and everything, but being able to come here, uh, anywhere, be in the same physical place, hug and, and keep that connection going.

I mean, that, it's, it's amazing. So I, I'm loving it. And, and the Bitcoin community has been amazing to me in a, in this last year. And, and I'm just, Trying to give back the way I [01:10:00] can. I think that making this show is the best way to use my skill set right now. Maybe I'll start doing some more things, but I love this show.

So yeah, this is, this is like, I'm living the dream right now, brother. Well,

Izzy: it's proof of work as well. You're one of the hardest Bitcoin, or not. What? Well, you are. I mean, uh, it takes a lot to produce a show. People don't realize that. It

Knut: takes a lot. Yeah, and when he has a fiat job as well, it's the, yeah, that's what, that might be what makes it the hardest.

I would say he's the, uh, uh, definitely the, uh, hardest working Canadian Finn in Bitcoin.

Luke: I'll probably take that.

Izzy: Well, I know about production and it takes a lot, man. And,

Knut: and you, but the tools are getting better. So, yeah. No, not to degrade you in any sense. No, no,

Izzy: no, pretty soon we won't need you. No,

Luke: pretty soon, no, no.

But, but, you know. [01:11:00]

Izzy: Some guy I used to know.

Knut: No, but that's, that's when, um, I mean, Luke is already being a bigger and bigger part of the show as, as far as the content goes. And like we're in the beginning, you were just. That's the sidekick. And now we're equals.

Luke: Yeah, yeah. Like, like, I still stay a little bit more in the, the background, but, uh, you know.

Izzy: You can come and sit in my lap if you want. Oh, okay. You can be in the foreground. Can

Knut: I sit on your laptop?

[01:11:32] Deep and Meaningful (DNM)

Izzy: So we had... In Australia, what we call is a DNM. Okay. You and I had a DNM yesterday. It's a deep and meaningful. It's when you opened up about your love of your life and what it meant to live where you are and everything like that. That's, to me, is a beautiful thing. To be able to, and I find it more and more and more with Bitcoiners.

You go to these, uh, [01:12:00] I guess you could say social normie events and people are like, oh, hi, uh, Knut, uh, what do you do for a living? Really? Uh, what car do you drive? How big's your penis? All this weird shit, right? Whereas a bitcoiner will literally, what kind of party were you at? They will have a look

Knut: at your penis instead.

Oh,

Izzy: by the way, for anyone that knows, I had a weird moment in the bathroom yesterday. No, you didn't. No, I did. I did for two reasons. Cut this part out. No, you can't. This is what people want to see. So there's a great, um, who put it up there? It would have been Max Hillebrand's company. Yeah. The sticker. They had

Knut: it in Prague as well.

That's a great ad for.

Izzy: And so I'm going to the bathroom and of course, being a guy, you're holding your business and you're like, you read the sign. This is what it feels like to hold Bitcoin. And I'm like. Does it? Is that what it feels like? I mean, wow. And then out of nowhere, Knut just comes around.[01:13:00]

But when you look in the eyes of a Bitcoiner, I think we open up because we see the proof of work and we're like, I already trust this person. Yeah, been through it, you understand, whereas if somebody's wearing a mask and they're just like, what do you do? How's your job? Where did you get that suit? Blah, blah, blah.

You're like, no, it doesn't mean anything to me what we're talking about.

[01:13:28] Fiat Feudalism

Knut: Isn't it wonderful to just drop all the masks we're wearing, like, and just be yourself because you can, like, and then you realize that people respect you more and not less. Yep. Like, just be who the fuck you are, like, wake up every morning, be yourself, it's wonderful, like, and you can't really do that in Fiat, because there are, I mean, there are social codexes in every community, and like, but, but having a leveled [01:14:00] playing field where there is no, like, Fiat feudalism, if you will, to play into, Uh, there's no, like, people respect you for your ideas and what you do rather than like what kind of

Izzy: shirt you're wearing.

There's a difference in that, what'd you call it, fiat feudalism. Yeah. So in that fiat feudalism, everyone should be equal. Cause that's part of the... Yeah. Well, no, we're not equal. No. Put me next to LeBron James. We're not equal at all, right? No.

Knut: If we're all equal, there's no trade. That's it. There's no, there's nothing.

And

Izzy: what about the expression of uniqueness? We're unique, right? Yeah, yeah. And Bitcoiners honor uniqueness. Yeah. And I love that. I love that in this community.

Knut: But it's, it's 100 percent equality of opportunity and 0 percent equality of outcome.

Izzy: Yeah. Do you remember the Satoshi Skull that Greenpeace [01:15:00] commissioned that artist?

Of course.

Knut: I had a pin, uh, a Satoshi Skull pin on my, the hat I bought in, in Sydney. You remember the shark toothed Chinese? Yeah.

Luke: Don't you need to start calling you Mr. Hat, by the way. Yeah.

Izzy: I think they have for quite a few years. Yeah. But it's one of the rare times you're not wearing a hat. But with that skull, that epitomizes exactly what you're talking about.

So Greenpeace thought, Oh, we're gonna wax these Bitcoiners and we're gonna get this artist to do it. And what did Bitcoiners do? Wow, check out that skull. That's a fucking cool skull. They're calling it Satoshi's skull. Yeah, yeah. We owned it. Yeah. It's like we absorb whatever uniqueness is out there, whether it's being targeted at us as a weapon or just something that someone creates and we go, yeah, it's awesome.

Like, I remember the meme, there was a kid looking at it going, oh yeah, that's awesome. Bitches love [01:16:00] skulls.

Mom, please don't watch this episode. I'm so sorry

Knut: for cursing. And I saw, I saw a post today on Twitter with, uh, from a person with at least 85 IQ who said like, there's, you can't fight, fight, uh, 80%, you can't fight the 80 IQ people. And damn right, pro tip, like, you can't fight us.

Izzy: What was that, uh, I think it was Mark Twain, Don't Argue With An Idiot.

Knut: And the Pratchett quote, which I love, like, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. Yeah. And to me, Bitcoin is the epitome of real stupidity. It's the power of real stupidity because it's a 100 percent real. Like, and that's better.

Luke: And what's the, what's the other quote? Do you, you, you always say something, but don't, don't wrestle a pig because the pig likes it or what is

Knut: it?

Because regardless of outcome, the pig wins because the only thing the pig craves is the [01:17:00] attention. Yeah. Yeah

[01:18:00]

Knut: up?

[01:18:01] Are We In a Cult? Or Leaving One?

Knut: Well, tangent to that, like, are we a cult or are we leaving a cult?

Izzy: Well, first, to really get to the bottom of that question, right, we have to define what cult is, and then we have to look at who gave the definition of cult, and why, to be able to answer that question if you're serious.

Knut: The way I see it, a cult requires a leader.

Izzy: They're definitely not an occult

Knut: name. No, that's the way I see it.

Fiat, though, is occult. Like, because it requires you to believe in this thing dictated by some entity. Like,

Izzy: Fiat. Yeah. By decree. By decree. Someone had to decree it. Yeah. Whereas you actually gave the simplest explanation of Bitcoin I've ever heard. They're so beautiful. Um, I was doing a presentation. We're all

Knut: a bunch of homos.[01:19:00]

Izzy: You said, um, I reached out to Gigi. I reached out to Eric and some other people and I was like, I'm doing this presentation, uh, just tell me what Bitcoin means to you. And Knut messaged me back and he said, Izzy, don't overcomplicate it. It's so simple. It's just a bunch of people agreeing on a set of rules.

Knut: Yeah. Yeah. We agree to disagree. Yes. That's what we, that's, yeah. With what we talked to tour about yesterday, that's like the, that's my definition of a Bitcoin. Now it's a person who deeply agrees to di disagree , because we, we agree to disagree . I mean, I'll, I'll try to flesh it out a bit more than that, but the consensus and the consensus mechanism, it's.

It's about agreeing that we, it's perfectly fine that we disagree. [01:20:00] If we don't agree to disagree, we disagree to disagree, which sort of implies violence somewhere down the line. Uh, agreeing to disagree is the nonviolent way. It's using conversation instead of force. I mean, you can't fight poverty by fighting prosperity, nor can you fight.

Nor can you reach world peace by force. The only weapon we have is communication. You can't

Izzy: fuck for virginity.

Knut: You can't fuck for virginity. No, no, you can't learn cooking by watching Jamie Oliver videos.

I think it's very fun. I think it's very fun.

Izzy: I want to put something on the table cause I've been grappling with it for two concepts. I've been grappling with it for a long time. You guys are great to go down this, this thought process with. [01:21:00] Um, there's two things. One, thank you, sir.

Knut: We need glasses, I think.

And do we, uh, maybe not. So big ass beer. I

Izzy: just need to be held. Um, so there's.

[01:21:17] Why Izzy Hugs - And the Aboriginal Handshake

Izzy: So, I actually think that, you know why I hug so much? I wasn't always like that. Um, a friend of mine, he's a gay poet from London. Um, he always used to invade my space and, and hug me. And it felt uncomfortable. This was back in the late nineties. And I realized, I asked him one time, I'm like, you're gay as shit.

And he's like, uh, yeah, but that's not why I hug you. He goes, I hug you cause you need it. And I was like, really? And he goes, yeah, but I need it more. And we became best friends and come to find out he, he didn't have a father and hugging for him was something that he needed deeply. Yeah. And when I understood [01:22:00] that, I was like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm going in.

No matter who the person is, I'm hugging them.

Knut: Yeah, same for me. And there's, there's a, there's a funny thing about the male hug though. Because I've,

Izzy: uh, yeah, different types of hugs and

Knut: it's, it's more common now than it used to be because like people who are like 10 years older than me, uh, or guys that are 10 years older than me, most of them feel very uncomfortable with hugs because they're used to a straight up handshake and like, uh, Whenever I do a handshake now, I do the, you know, white man, black man, Batman thing, and then you'll tap them on the shoulder and they're like, Oh, whatever Mason, Freemason handshake I can think of, like, because it's, uh, it's not even unnormal anymore.

Like it's this bro thing. And, uh, but the male hug. I always find it so funny when, when you feel that the other person is [01:23:00] not used to hugs. And it's usually that they're a bit old. You pull them in close. You do the Trump thing.

Izzy: I grabbed him in the... So do you know, just on that, do you know Australian, Indigenous Australians, there were some tribes up in Northern Territory that when they met, they didn't wear clothes, right?

And so when they met, the guys would reach out, they don't do a handshake, they reach out right there and hold the other guy's penis. Oh, really? How bizarre is that, right? I don't know why they do that. Is that like a... I mean, this is verifiable. You can look this up. I'm not making this up. And it's like...

Knut: I suspect, though, is if that becomes the norm in the future, we're going to feel slightly uncomfortable.

I'm

Izzy: not saying I want to slightly uncomfortable. Hey, Adam Back, how you doing, man? Yeah, we good.

Knut: Cheers, guys. Cheers. Cheers.

Izzy: Let's say if you don't look in the eyes, you have... [01:24:00] Seven years of bad sex.

Knut: That's probably a bit too much of bro science for my taste.

[01:24:10] Innateness of Technological Innovation

Izzy: So I guess back in early two thousands, I started thinking, I was always really worried about technology. I used to go to libraries, like I, I grew up in an era where we didn't have technology in our school. We had the Dewey Decimal System in the card catalog.

Knut: Oh yeah, yeah, I know what that is. You know what I mean?

There's no

Izzy: computers in

Knut: my library. I know about the Dewey Decimal System from UHF, Weird Al Jankovic movie from the 80s. Because they mentioned that in a It's in a small clip, it's an ad for, uh, Conan the Librarian,

where he says, don't you know the Dewey Desmond system and chops the guy's head off. He's a

Izzy: legend, Weird Al. Yeah, yeah. What a legend. Did you see

Knut: his latest movie? The

Izzy: one that was made about him? Yeah. [01:25:00] I actually thought it was really good. It was really good. I don't see movies, but I wanted to see that.

Knut: I mean, that's, that's how you make a biopic.

Yeah. Yeah. I loved it.

Izzy: So I was always a bit worried about technology. Um, I first encountered it, obviously computers in, in school. And, uh, maybe this was a precursor to Bitcoin because I was like, I used to put on a hat and like fucking dark glasses and go into the library and sign in under a different name because I thought, uh, yeah, no, this, this, this, you, this, whatever I put in this box is accessible.

It's like a box with colored lights and it's going to be accessible to anyone. And I kept that ideology of a box with colored lights. Sometimes, this is going in different tangents, but we get a lot of our information looking at a box with colored lights.

Knut: Yeah, that used to be the TV.

Izzy: Like, [01:26:00] be wary of...

But what I was going to say, I wanted to riff on is, uh, I had this idea sometime in 2000s. I had been toying around with computers for a little bit, trying to understand, trying to play with them. And I had this thought that the things that we create as, as humans. The ability to communicate at distance. Is this something inherent in us that lay dormant?

Because there are certain tribes that would talk about, um, like for instance, the, the men going out on hunt, there's been lots of story around this that they knew precisely when something had happened in the village. They felt it viscerally, or saw it, and they went

Knut: back. Was this because of the type of handshake they had?

Izzy: Could be. Could be. But to my mother, I brought up mom a lot, mom and [01:27:00] I, you know, I said we were best mates. When I was in India, and I was doing, I went very, very deep in meditation for the first time in my life. There was one meditation that I did which lasted three weeks. And you stay silent for three weeks and the first week for three hours a day, every day you laugh and you stay silent the other 21 hours, the next, um, week, it's a three week process, you cry for 21, for three hours a day, and then the other 21, you.

You just stay in silence and do your regular shit, right? And the last one, you start observance, which is a, um, like Vipassana. If you know what Vipassana is, it's the witnessing. And it's a very interesting mechanism because I discovered that laughter and tears come from the same place. They actually come from sort of down deep in the belly [01:28:00] and some of the things that I was laughing about, the emotions, uh, I was also crying about the same ones.

I remember thinking, that's odd. That's really weird. But the whole thing is a mechanism to get you to deeply connect, this particular process, deeply connect with yourself so you can take a step back and observe it. And I begin to wonder, are there. Are these technological things that we're creating, is it something inherent in our system, in our ability as human that lie dormant?

Because when I was doing that meditation, I called mom up afterwards, after the 21 days. And she said,

Knut: why the hell are you calling from India? It cost you a fortune. It did back then. Is that what she said? Well, no,

Izzy: she actually said I had a dream. Um, and I trust my mother deeply. She's very intuitive woman.

She said, I had a dream. [01:29:00] Um, I had silver cord, two silver cords coming out of my, my chest. There were two of you. And one was going to you and you were laughing and laughing and laughing. And another silver cord was going to you and you were crying. I knew you were okay, but I don't know what it means. And I'm just going, mom, can you stay the fuck out of my life for five minutes?

I'm trying to have some privacy over here. But yeah, I just, so I wonder it. It's moments like that that I wonder, are we already connected and we've lost it? And somehow by building communication tools on an internet that ultimately connects us all, do we have that? Have you ever thought about that? Yeah,

Knut: yeah.

Uh, well, similar, similar things. First to the laughter, uh, and crying dichotomy, if you will, uh, I, I have a very deep connection with my two brothers. We've always been [01:30:00] very tight and like, well, yeah, real brothers. And when our father passed away, uh, four years ago, we, uh, We, we sort of handled that through an extremely dark humor, like we made the most horrible jokes about the whole event.

And that's somehow that mended the wounds. It's like, it's like two sides of the same coin again, like it's, you know, laughter is, uh, and, and that's why I think humor is so important too. It's important to ridicule. Stupid ideas, like they're meant to be ridiculed. Like that's how people get out of these mass psychosis, totalitarianism things.

Like the only way, if, if, if speech and communication is the only weapon, which it is, if we, uh, if we choose non [01:31:00] aggression, then, then ridicule and laughter is. The best way out of it because like, look at that stupid fuck, we're wearing a mask still like that. It's, uh, . Yeah. And I mean it literally and metaphorically mask, you know, looking

Izzy: at it from a medical standpoint as well.

I mean, I, I don't want to break your flow because that I, I, I really like the deepness and when you talk about you and your brothers connecting in, that it means a lot to me.

Knut: I don't mean, uh, you would, uh, Couldn't even say the things we said to each other about our recently deceased father and his and his remains like because it's No, and and like, uh, but I think there's something really Like the ability to be able to take life for what it is It's basically just a ride and you have one chance to enjoy it.

You know, it's not a rehearsal So better live it while, while you're here, like, [01:32:00] and every time you, a moment passes and you're not enjoying it, that moment goes away forever. That's right. That's, that's a lost moment. Yeah. So, and it can take half a lifetime to figure that out.

Izzy: Well, at the end of the, this is something for me, there's only ever here now.

There's nothing else.

Knut: No. And that's true at all points in time.

Izzy: Yeah. I had a conversation with a guy at BitBlockBoom last year, and I could see his face melting. He was like, yeah, it's only ever here now, but it's actually here now. Sorry, Knut. And I said, he said, no, no, Izzy, that's bullshit. So really tell me how it's bullshit.

And he looked at me and he goes, I can record and play it back to you in the past and I'm like, when are you playing it back to me? [01:33:00] There's only ever here now. It's a serious, and to your point, if we don't get out of our own way and live fully in the moment, what are we doing?

Knut: No, yeah, we're missing, we're missing the point somehow.

And so, so, it's the John Lennon thing, life is what happens while you're busy doing other things, right?

[01:33:20] Time Preference and Living In the Moment

Knut: But, um, how, how does that connect to low time preference though? Like, if, if there's only here and now, how do you... And I really cherish the living in the moment thing, but in your view, how does that connect to, you know, getting a low time preference, planning ahead for the future, making sure that everything works and like this robustness that comes with it.

Like how do the, how do those two connect? Because living in the now is, it feels like a. High time preference statement, like there can be no higher time preference than living in the now, right? You're not thinking about the future at all. [01:34:00] But, but I think the, uh, you need, you need that to, to acquire the low time preference.

Living in the now, the way I see it, you have this set of cards on your hand and the, the, the kind of cards you have are Partly happenstance, and they're also whatever you built in the past, and whatever you are, the sum of your experiences to some extent. So you have the cards you have at each and every moment, and you can choose to play them in different ways, but they're still the only cards you have.

Like, you don't have any other cards, so you might as well just live with that. And that's where the now comes in for me. What's your take on that?

Izzy: It's something I've thought about, and I can only talk about from my own experience.

I'm a creep. I'm

Knut: a wiener.

Izzy: What the fuck am I doing [01:35:00] here? I don't belong here. I, for me, just for me, in that, I don't focus on the future. I don't, I don't. Yeah, you do.

Knut: I really don't. You have to. You're the c e o of a company. You have to focus on the future. I don't buy that Izzy, I surround my sincerely. I

Izzy: don't buy that.

Well ask the people that I work with ask my board. They, I don't know how they haven't fired me. But even when you're, I'm kidding. No, no,

Knut: no. What I'm saying is even when you're spontaneous and making these flow-based decisions that are completely in the now and you, you go with this feel thing. Oh my god.

You are, you are preparing

Izzy: for the future. Well, let me elaborate then, because we could be, as Pseudo Finn said before, using different language to say the same thing. I, it, to me it's very simple, because I understand it experientially, my bro science, I understand it that. [01:36:00] There's only ever here now. So if I'm focused on a future, I'm actually just wishing or setting intention, right?

Mm-hmm. , which is fine to do that because the series of here nows in some way equals uh, a mental future, right? Yeah. What I do for myself is I trust. Trust, wholeheartedly, what I'm doing right now is going to lead to the next moment. The next moment. So you don't verify? The next moment. The next moment. The next moment.

I think life is the verification.

Knut: Yeah, it is. Like, the next moment, you reap what you sow, right? So, and that's the

Izzy: verification part. The hardest part was, I remember early days when I was getting this, uh, when I was beginning to understand this and I said to one of the greatest loves of my life, um, Alexandra, bless you, wherever you are, you're in France, I know that, um, one of my close friends, she, uh, she said,[01:37:00] do you want to get married?

And I'm like, look, I'm on this journey of know thyself, I can't. Commit. Boy, you can't commit. How can we be together if you can't commit? You're not going to love me? I can't tell you whether I'm going to love you. I can tell you I love you right now. And I trust that this feeling is going to go into the next month.

Yeah, you don't say that to a woman. That's not what they want

Knut: to hear. It's not very tactical, no. Yeah,

Izzy: no, no. But I, but I, from that type of understanding of life, I've developed this trust that I know that the trajectory I'm on is going to equal some type of, and as long as in this moment I'm true to myself, I'm true to my intention, and I, and I, and I found the life hack.

I found it, brother. For me and for my company and companies. Focus on the orange glowing light, nothing else is important. We had some people in the company doing memes, comparing shitcoins, and I just, I just, we got them on a call and I said, listen, I'm going to be, can I be frank with you? [01:38:00] Yeah, don't ever fucking do that.

Like, why do you want to bring a shitcoin up to where we are? What's the comparison? There's no comparison. I have never, I know everyone has their own journeys and, and shitcoinery has helped people understand. I've never touched shitcoin in my life. I've seen every single one of them come. I do not care.

Well, you

Knut: touched dollars and stuff. Oh, good point. Good point.

Izzy: It's a very good point, actually.

Luke: And a really shitty one too, the Australian dollar.

Izzy: Don't get me arrested at the airport. I just don't care about them.

Knut: That's so to me. But yeah. Sorry. Okay. Uh, I just, I, I just wanna make a point about the commitment and non-commitment thing and time reference.

[01:38:43] Marriage and Love

Knut: Yeah. For me, getting married was like, your wife, your wife is so lovely. Uh, she, she's so,

Izzy: she lovely. She really is.

Knut: So I, I've always. Question the institution of [01:39:00] marriage. I don't really buy into it. And, and then when, when I proposed to Sofia and committed to that, I felt like, uh, you know, during my twenties, between 20 and 30, 35, I, um, had multiple girlfriends and I didn't know where I was going and stuff like, so like, and I mean, I had a good time.

I had a lot of fun, but I felt like I had no direction. So for me, uh, you know, to me, the act of proposing was showing to her that I was willing to give up my beliefs for her, which, which is the signal in the noise. And, and I'm, then when I make a commitment and make a promise that. Till death do you, does your part, or whatever.

Izzy: That's what he said in the vows. What?

Knut: No, I love you. No, but I mean that very specifically, till death does your [01:40:00] part. I'm too autistic to not take that seriously. If I make that kind of a promise, because I don't, I don't see the point in making that promise if divorce is an option. Like why the, then the promise is just, yeah, it's a nothing burger, right?

A vegan nothing burger. I mean, it's an impossible whopper. You can't, the whole point is lost if divorce is an option. So to me, like, she's the mother of my, of my children. I'm never going to let go. Like that, that's just not in my playbook. And I might regret saying that somewhere down the line, but I don't think so.

So

Izzy: I think we could be saying the same thing because in a way, like I trust in this moment, I trust it. So I trust that the next moment is naturally going to flow out of this. And I never, because of the mission that I was on to know who I am, I never, I felt too selfish to commit in a way [01:41:00] to a woman of that sense.

And I also felt too immature to bring children into the world because I knew that the unresolved issues inside myself, I'd probably screw them up. Maybe every parent. you know, goes through that. But for me, I was like, I'm not willing to screw someone up. I had this idea that it would, um, let me understand myself a little bit better before that happens.

And after going through all that and seeing my friends, um, tell me, you know, when you know, Izzy, like you meet someone and you know, I never had that. Like I, I had some amazing partners, like two or three that just some of my best friends to this day, but I didn't know. But last year, after this conference, I had that experience.

You met someone? Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, um, it feels like I met my other half. Fantastic. And so when [01:42:00] you say, I think I would say whatever she, like, I mean, uh, yeah, I just feel like I've met the person that it all, it all makes sense. And, and it's crazy because I didn't understand when people said, Oh, it's, you feel it.

And she and I used to, well.

Knut: What's his name?

Izzy: Uh, Pseudo Finn. You may know him. We, uh, we fell in love in the shower.

Her name is Samantha.

Knut: Oh, uh, you didn't have to dox her, it's just making a cheap joke. Well, there's a lot of Samanthas in the world. Yes, yes, Samantha Fox is one. You remember

Izzy: her? Yeah, I do, actually. Yeah. But I feel like I've met my kind of crazy. And we talk about it on the phone, like, do you feel that, and I'm like, yeah, I'm fully erect.

Knut: I'm very happy to hear that, Isi. Actually, like, it was wonderful. It feels [01:43:00] incredible.

Izzy: So I understand now how you can look at Sophia and go, I'm going to promise. Yeah, yeah. Till the end of time, I'm going

Knut: to be beside you. So are you doing this here on Let's Play? Pod are you proposing here? Like are you, are you willing

Izzy: to come in?

I think she knows. She's, uh, I tell her she's my scientific philosophical wife and she gets all gooey and

Knut: Is she your, your god? Wow, Samantha, your God has a ring to it, doesn't it? Maybe

Izzy: she is, man. Maybe she is. And we, and, and we might not. We came together through Bitcoin, a friend of ours. Like, I met a guy at, um, the, here at Baltic Honey Badger, uh, Zizou comes to me.

Knut: Zizou is one of the most wonderful human beings I know. Isn't he? Yeah, that's an instant bromance as well, yeah. Shout out to you, Zizou, you're the best. Shout out to Zizou.

Izzy: We saw each other at And he's a [01:44:00] great hugger. Yeah, I know. Well, that's how we connected. He was at the aboriginal

Knut: landshake. Just a hug.

Izzy: He was standing beside a window at the speaker's dinner and I went over and I looked out the window and I saw Zizzo and we just turned and we looked at one another and we had this like real guy moment. And he was like,

Knut: yeah, don't underestimate bromances. I think. A hundred

Izzy: percent. All. But, but just to finish that, he, he said to me, he goes, I don't know why is he.

You need to contact this, this woman, Samantha. Okay. And I had been, I had actually been purposefully celibate. A long time, and I'm like, yeah, okay, for sure. Um, and I did, actually the story gets a little bit deeper, I don't know how deep you want to go. Take it away.

Knut: Really? [01:45:00] Do whatever you like, man. Yeah, only if you

Luke: want to, but...

Izzy: I'll go there. Um... He said to me, you need to contact Samantha, and I did, and something happened in that first call. It was like a 45 minute call. I had left here. I went to Isle of Man, uh, catch up with Danny Brewster, and then went to India, back to a place that I love, right? And I got this bungalow on the beach, and I was there, and um, yeah, I wanted to get emotional.

I can, I can already feel it. Um, I, uh, my mother had been saying to me, uh, you need to pray. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and I'm not sure how I feel about prayer, um, but I just felt like talking to what was greater than me, whatever, because I know that I'm a part of something greater than myself. I just don't know what it is, and I'm not audacious enough to give it a name.

Well,

Knut: you're [01:46:00] talking to us. Yeah.

Izzy: And so I had talked to Samantha, which was interesting. Because Zizzo said, you need to call this strange woman, you are strange, my woman. Um, but the reason I prayed in that, um, in that bungalow was, um,

so about eight years ago, I, um, I felt something happening in, in my body. And, um, I called one of my colleagues, his doctor as well. And I said, yeah, something's not right. Something's going on. Uh, we need to do some tests and blood tests and figure out. Uh, what's going on and, uh, we did, and I was literally, I was about to go to India.

I had a film premiere. I was flying my whole family over and, uh, he said, yeah, not you. You shouldn't, you don't get on a plane. Um, and it culminated in, I said, I am getting on a plane. Uh, I'm going to India and [01:47:00] he said, no, you need to go to the, you need to go see a specialist hematologist. You need to go to the cancer center.

Like now. Um, and there's some very abnormalities in the blood and I went there and I saw this guy and, uh, it's a wonderful guy, Dr. Max Wolf, and, um, he, we took some blood results, sorry, he took some blood tests at the other doctor and he saw the blood results and he said, yeah, I think I know what this is.

It's very rare, um, blood cancer and, uh, we don't know the etiology of it. We definitely know it's going to, it's going to take your life. Um, and you, you, you know, you're going to have to deal with that. And I remember sitting there with Max and I was kind of looking at him and just going, well, I'm still going to India.

I'll fly my family over for this film premiere. I'm going to India. And, um. He said, there's a possibility if you get on the plane, you have a heart attack or a stroke. And we worked out, okay, let's just take out a lot of [01:48:00] blood. Let's mitigate this as best we can. So we did. We took out a heap of blood. I was really weak.

Got on the plane, went over there, got the bone marrow biopsy back. And he said, yeah. This is a JAK2 gene expression, uh, epigenetically, and that's one of the precursors, put all this together and you, you've got this. So I said, okay, I'll be back in Australia. We'll talk about it. I go back and he gives me two pathways.

This is the lead up to what happened in India after I talked with. Samantha said, you've got two pathways. You're it's going to take your life. We don't know why it is. Um, you, you can either do nothing. And I said, what's a prognosis? He said, oh, it's two to two to five years. If you don't listen to us, if you do, um, you'll live, you'll live longer, but you're going to have to take cytodurtic drugs.

You're going to have to take these type of chemotherapy drugs. And I have a background in medicine and I know. Nothing [01:49:00] against any type of, you know, I think allopathic medicine has its place, but for me, I was like, yeah, no, I'm not doing it. I'm, uh, I'm gonna, I'm going to find out what the causation of this is, uh, where it comes from, why there's an expression, whether it is epigenetic or whether it isn't.

Um, this was eight years

Knut: ago.

Izzy: Yeah, it was in March of 2015. So how long ago is that? Yeah. And, um, to cut a long story short, I said to him, uh, I actually called my friends together and I said, um, yeah, this is what's happening. I may not be around and I need to disappear. I need to go on the outskirts of society, cut off, and I need to start experimenting.

And they're very upset. Like fucking, you know, how, how are we going to feel if you go and never come back? Like, that's so selfish of you. And, uh, I just said, listen, it's this, [01:50:00] this is what I'm doing. You have no choice. Um, I'm on a mission. I'm going to figure this thing out. And um, so it disappeared. That was the celibacy because you can't really, I had to leave my partner at the time and she was lovely.

She was like, you know, I'll be here for you and I'm like, nah, I'm not, he's not putting anyone through this. I don't know what the end result is. So for about four, a little under five years, I just started doing the most ludicrous, ridiculous experiments, um, trying to figure out what causes this, what happens, and I won't go into all that.

I just wanted to give that as a bit of a backstory. So when. I was away from society for a long time. Almost killed myself there. One, not, not, not took my life, but through the experimentation. Mm-hmm. , I had a, a Herxheimer reaction. A lot of endotoxins got dumped in the body and I was, it was, it was you looking out the door [01:51:00] going, wow, I, I'm gonna make it out this door.

This is wild. And um, cut to going through that, figuring out what it was, being able to recreate it a couple of times. and then tell my hematologist that and him go, I don't know how you're doing this, but keep doing it and keep a medical file because this is, this is going to be important. And I'm like, dude, I've been keeping it from day one.

I know what this is. So when I get to India after last year and I talked to Samantha, I didn't know how I'd feel about her later, but I dropped down in, uh, in this bungalow. I just started praying because mom had said, pray. I didn't know who I was talking to, I think God is a word, I just knew that I was incredibly thankful for going through what I went through and [01:52:00] having this evidence to be able to help people and I just started like weeping.

It felt like years and years of... Sadness and guilt and everything else just washed away. And I, this whole thing was a precursor to tell you what I'm, the statement I'm about to say right now at the end of that, it may sound cliche, cliche, but I felt so cleansed. There's like 20 minutes on, I buckled, I ended up on my knees.

I don't know if that's a religious thing that happens to people or what, but I literally fell down on my knees and cried, and then at the end, and it wasn't like painful tears, it was just a washing, and at the end, I just felt, um, I said, well, if there is a God, I'm very thankful and I'm kind of ready for a woman, if, if, if there's one out there.

And then ended up having this, um, this wild love affair start [01:53:00] with Samantha, where I just feel something different than I've ever felt in my life.

[01:53:07] Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground

Knut: I mean, life happens so fast, right, and you, you go through these ups and downs and trauma is one thing and like, yeah, what we, what we tried to live by here on the Freedom Footprint show, that sounds like a commercial again, but is this notion of feet on the ground, head in the clouds, like, because you need to be grounded and you need to be in reality, but you also need to, to admit that There's infinite potential, like, I'm the Lizard King, I can do anything, that kind of vibe, you know, so, so, so you shouldn't deny either one.

I mean, a lot of people are seeking happiness or whatever, and they try to, try to live their dream, and it all fails, and they end up with a big mortgage or something, or some trauma happens, and they just can't do it, or [01:54:00] they get addicted to drugs or alcohol or whatever. Uh, and some people... Keep their feet on the ground too much and they end up, you know, doing the same thing over and over again every day.

And they're stuck in their hamster's wheels all their lives because they don't see the other roads they could have taken. So, and I think life is basically about that balance between feet on the ground and head in the clouds. That's

Izzy: beautiful. Yeah, that balance. Makes for a good visual as well.

Knut: Yeah, yeah, a really tall guy.

Izzy: Well, I think it's the best thing that ever happened to me, bar none. I think it was a lot harder for other people.

Knut: Better than Bitcoin? Yeah,

Izzy: yeah, because it was, it was the sort of end of that whole trajectory of know thyself. Yeah, yeah, and

Knut: I, this is in the Everything Divided book, uh, like, I truly believe that, uh, [01:55:00] The scarce time we have on this earth is, is what gives its value, like the notion that we're gonna die one day is what gives our actions value and like, like, and you get this periodic reminders during your life when someone passes or when you get a diagnosis or whatever, or when you're faced with it yourself, or when people close to you, yeah, and you get this reminder that This is going to end one day, it's not a rehearsal.

Yeah.

Izzy: And the funny thing about that is as well, one of the things it taught me was, Oh my God, I've been, like every step I've ever taken is one step closer to death. And when I look around, everyone's afraid of death. Like half their actions, if not more, if not all, are more like, Oh, I better do

Knut: this before.

An Asimov quote. I love Asimov. It's very quotable. Like, uh, uh, I think it's Asimov. I might be completely wrong here, but like, [01:56:00] life is beautiful, death is peaceful. It's the transition that bothers me. And I love that because like... Pain sucks. It sucks.

Izzy: But then again, if you, you, you said, you said a sentence before, you said, it's just a ride.

And it reminded me of, uh, Bill Hicks. Bill Hicks said, it's just a ride. And he said, uh. It's a choice between fear and love.

Knut: Yeah. And there's that dichotomy. You know, we've talked a lot about this before, that fear and love are two sides of the same coin and they're equivalent to low time preference and high time preference.

Like when you have a high time preference and if you, so the thesis is this, if you're stripped of everything you own, so you're thrown out on the streets, on the street, no, no food, no shelter, no clothes. Not even shoes, or hair.

Your time preference is high because you need to find [01:57:00] something to eat. You need shelter. You need all of this stuff. And what is that state? It's a state of fear. And what's the opposite of fear? It's love. Like, so when you, when you have your feet on the ground, when you have, when, when you, when you know that you're not going to get too fucked, you can actually focus on long term projects.

Commitment, whatever, uh, then you get into, uh, it, it gives you the ability to love others. That's how I see

Izzy: it. Cause you have the space to, you're not constantly in fear of where's my

Knut: food. No, exactly.

[01:57:40] Bitcoin Is Love

Knut: So, so to me, high time preference represents fear. Low time preference represents love. And Bitcoin is love.

There you go. There's, there's your, uh, hippie quote for you. When you

Izzy: gave that presentation, Bitcoin is Love, it just meant so much. It wasn't called that, I think. Yeah, but that's what you, [01:58:00] that was the gist of it. Yeah, yeah. It came out towards the end.

Knut: Is he? Yeah. I fucking love you, man. Give us a hug. I love you too.

I think this is a good point to end this on, and we'll go back to the conference.

bunch of them. I'm giving you a hug too.

Wow,

 Yeah, I love you, man. Fade

 to orange. [01:59:00]