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EXIT Podcast Episode 07: Citizen Hush
352 Plays3 years ago
Citizen Hush is a prolific content creator, entrepreneur, and a cool guy who likes guns a lot. He has dipped his toes into pretty much every hustle you can think of - from pulling weeds by the bucket to courting VCs for a tech startup - and the common thread running through all of it is a jealous defense of his personal liberty and autonomy. We discuss:
- building content as a student rather than an expert
- selling bots and the 'Wild West' era of social media
- diversifying income streams
- debt slavery and credentialism as social control
- decentralized guns, money, media
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Citizen Hush: A Goon Twitter Phenomenon
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm joined here by Citizen Hush.
00:00:23
Speaker
Citizen Hush is a rock star on Goon Twitter, creeping up on 100,000 followers.
00:00:27
Speaker
He's also a successful entrepreneur and his interest in being his own boss and charting his own course has led him to a lot of the same interests we have here at Exit, namely freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, building parallel institutions.
00:00:40
Speaker
Citizen Hush, welcome to Exit.
00:00:42
Speaker
Thanks for having me, man.
Critique of Artificial Institutions and State Overreach
00:00:45
Speaker
So my first question that I ask everybody that we have on the show is, if you could build your ideal detached life for yourself, where you are out of these institutions, you've made your exit, what does that look like to you?
00:01:02
Speaker
Huh, that's a big question.
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:07
Speaker
I think the more interesting question is why am I trying to get away from those institutions?
00:01:13
Speaker
I think fundamentally, a lot of these institutions that we've come to accept as part of our everyday existence are artificial and fragile.
00:01:28
Speaker
They're inorganic systems that have no precedence in nature.
00:01:32
Speaker
You have things like
00:01:34
Speaker
Like debt is a really good example.
00:01:36
Speaker
So debt isn't inherently good or bad.
00:01:40
Speaker
It's a tool.
00:01:41
Speaker
It can be used irresponsibly or could be used responsibly.
00:01:44
Speaker
And we have through the monopoly of the use of force that the government has,
00:01:51
Speaker
we've been able to scale what we can do with debt to unsustainable levels.
00:01:57
Speaker
That's just like one example.
00:01:59
Speaker
As far as like other institutions that I'd like to get away from, like largely just the institution of the state.
00:02:07
Speaker
Like I personally, I'm not a very political person, though.
00:02:14
Speaker
A lot of the things I do and say are inherently political because of the times we live in.
00:02:19
Speaker
But
00:02:20
Speaker
I think the idea of the state is this primitive and barbaric throwback to like early days of like hunter gatherer societies.
00:02:31
Speaker
I don't, it's archaic and I'm not a fan of it.
00:02:36
Speaker
And I think that's kind of the big answer to a big question.
00:02:39
Speaker
Like, I think, how do you escape the state and it's over reach?
00:02:44
Speaker
And I think,
00:02:44
Speaker
There are many different ways to do it.
00:02:47
Speaker
And that's kind of like the distinction.
00:02:49
Speaker
Like a lot of my views are very similar to like libertarians.
00:02:52
Speaker
A lot of my views are very similar to like anarchists.
00:02:55
Speaker
I probably, as a shorthand with people, I'll say I'm a libertarian just because I don't feel like explaining my beliefs, but like,
00:03:05
Speaker
My problem with libertarians is they just tweet about things and they just argue with people and they just argue on the internet.
00:03:12
Speaker
And I'm more interested in people who are doing things, if that makes sense.
00:03:16
Speaker
No, that does make sense.
00:03:17
Speaker
And that leads into, I think a lot of guys who would like to create content have concerns that they won't have the credibility to speak on whatever issue they want to speak on.
Credibility and Ventures in the Gun Niche
00:03:31
Speaker
And talking about doers,
00:03:33
Speaker
you've chosen this gun niche where there's tons of guys running their mouths and getting clowned on for it.
00:03:40
Speaker
And you are not a veteran yourself, but you've built this incredible respect and following among guys who are veterans and know their stuff and don't suffer fools.
00:03:50
Speaker
And I'd like to know how you built that credibility and following with those guys.
00:03:56
Speaker
I don't, I don't know.
00:03:58
Speaker
I don't know how true that is, but I appreciate you saying that.
00:04:02
Speaker
Um, I, I, I'd say like, it, it, it, it kind of just goes down to like how you interact with worlds, the world and different communities.
00:04:12
Speaker
So like, uh, did you play sports growing up or anything?
00:04:15
Speaker
Not much.
00:04:16
Speaker
Okay, well, so like I fought a lot growing up and like the first thing you do when you go to a new gym or a new place to learn how to fight is you don't come in walking, acting like you're Billy Badass.
00:04:31
Speaker
You have to pay your dues.
00:04:34
Speaker
You got to mop the floor because you're the new guy.
00:04:36
Speaker
Science is how it works.
00:04:39
Speaker
And with that comes a certain level of humility.
00:04:43
Speaker
And like, that's kind of like, I,
00:04:46
Speaker
the gun thing on YouTube and Twitter is just kind of a hobby for me.
00:04:51
Speaker
I, and I don't take myself seriously or I try not to rather.
00:04:54
Speaker
And I think that probably that maybe that lends itself to what you're saying where people are less hard on me than other folks.
00:05:02
Speaker
And, and I've talked to some of the former military folks about it too.
00:05:07
Speaker
And like,
00:05:08
Speaker
For me, like, it's about having fun and I try not to take myself too serious on camera or on Twitter.
00:05:15
Speaker
Like, I'm an equal opportunity firearms enthusiast.
00:05:20
Speaker
There's only one gun I don't like, and it's the Ruger LCP.
00:05:23
Speaker
Every other gun, I'm cool.
00:05:25
Speaker
Like, for me, it's just like we tend to segment ourselves into these camps of, like, Glock versus M&P.
00:05:34
Speaker
whatever, whatever brand tribalism.
00:05:37
Speaker
I hate brand tribalism and any, any manifestation of it.
00:05:42
Speaker
And for me, it's just about like, Hey, these are really interesting machines.
00:05:46
Speaker
They're fun to play with.
00:05:48
Speaker
And they're also useful.
00:05:49
Speaker
They're the utility factor to it.
00:05:51
Speaker
And, and there's, there's a political component as well, but that's, that's really just all it is just me messing around with guns and having fun with them and try not to take myself too seriously.
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:02
Speaker
So if you were all alone and it's Red Dawn, what's your loadout?
00:06:13
Speaker
I don't know.
00:06:14
Speaker
I'd probably...
00:06:16
Speaker
Probably just the AR-15.
00:06:20
Speaker
Any of the ones I have laying over next to me.
00:06:24
Speaker
A pistol and an HEB bag.
00:06:25
Speaker
I'll hold all my shit.
00:06:26
Speaker
Oh, sorry.
00:06:27
Speaker
Am I allowed to cuss?
00:06:29
Speaker
Am I allowed to cuss?
00:06:30
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:06:33
Speaker
For me, whatever you're most comfortable with is probably what you're safest and best with.
00:06:41
Speaker
I own a lot of guns and try to be at least somewhat fluent in using them.
00:06:50
Speaker
Not because I necessarily think I'll need to use it or any capacity.
00:06:54
Speaker
I see it as a new challenge.
00:06:56
Speaker
I suck with AKs and I still suck with AKs.
00:07:00
Speaker
I'm going to pick
00:07:01
Speaker
a bunch up and I'm going to find out how to run one of these and make it work for me.
00:07:06
Speaker
Right on.
00:07:06
Speaker
So what is the most exotic gun that you've shot?
00:07:11
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question.
00:07:13
Speaker
Oh, a 45 70 Gatling gun.
00:07:15
Speaker
That was fun.
00:07:16
Speaker
Oh, no kidding.
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah, that was expensive to shoot.
00:07:19
Speaker
I only, I only put, uh, I didn't run a whole, a whole, a lot of ammo through that one.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:28
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:07:28
Speaker
So you've done a lot of hustles.
00:07:31
Speaker
You've sold comic books, you've built Twitter bots, you're working this content game, you've done startups.
Comic Book Resale Business and Market Inefficiencies
00:07:39
Speaker
How do you identify opportunities and which one was maybe the best use of your time?
00:07:45
Speaker
Which one was the biggest like boondoggle?
00:07:49
Speaker
The thing for me is like opportunity, and this is probably a really recent realization, especially when you're young and you don't have money and you're thinking about different things to do to make money.
00:08:04
Speaker
You and your friends always sit down and you talk about different business ideas you have.
00:08:07
Speaker
And like it by, by default, everyone goes to trying to shoot business ideas down on like why this won't work.
00:08:14
Speaker
There's no way this would work.
00:08:16
Speaker
That's easy to do.
00:08:17
Speaker
That's easy to do.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I see that like as an adult now, there are lots of people who do that and it's,
00:08:27
Speaker
it's a cop out to me.
00:08:28
Speaker
Like, okay, talking about why this won't work, that's the easy conversation to have.
00:08:33
Speaker
Let's have the conversation about how to make this work.
00:08:36
Speaker
How do you make something palatable?
00:08:38
Speaker
Like if selling comic books is a stupid business idea,
00:08:42
Speaker
Let me tell you about the bottled water industry.
00:08:48
Speaker
You can sell anything.
00:08:49
Speaker
Whether or not it's useful, that's another question.
00:08:51
Speaker
But to go to your other question about some of the more interesting ones that I did.
00:08:57
Speaker
So the comic books, that is probably the most interesting one.
00:09:03
Speaker
How that started out is I was a big comic book nerd growing up.
00:09:07
Speaker
I still read them a lot in my adult life.
00:09:10
Speaker
Not so much these days.
00:09:11
Speaker
But one thing I noticed is the value of the first appearance of a certain comic book character would skyrocket once Marvel was announcing Marvel.
00:09:22
Speaker
They're phase one movies.
00:09:23
Speaker
So like Avengers 1, when the first Avengers movie came out, that one surged in price.
00:09:29
Speaker
And subsequently, other spinoffs would follow that same pattern.
00:09:33
Speaker
So effectively, I just built a Twitter bot, or not a Twitter bot, a RSS feed.
00:09:38
Speaker
scraper so that it would scrape PR news releases for whenever a new Marvel movie was announced.
00:09:44
Speaker
And I created a really simple database to cross reference the first appearance, pulling the keyword of that character, finding that first appearance and
00:09:54
Speaker
issue.
00:09:55
Speaker
And then I'd be able to go look on eBay and filter for the buy it now at the pre-inflated price and just effectively just buy it at a pre-inflated price and relist it.
00:10:05
Speaker
And basically I was just drop shipping rare comic books and that scaled
00:10:10
Speaker
That scaled to a point where I was just buying people's entire collections.
00:10:14
Speaker
Like I, particularly secondary markets have always been interesting to me.
00:10:18
Speaker
It's like collector's markets because they're incredibly inefficient.
00:10:22
Speaker
There's very scarce information and data to collect and act off of.
00:10:27
Speaker
And where there's inefficiency, there's always opportunity.
00:10:30
Speaker
So people are always afraid of market friction.
00:10:35
Speaker
People are always afraid of volatility.
00:10:37
Speaker
Well, I'm sorry, but those market environments, that's where money's made.
00:10:42
Speaker
That's where like serious money is made.
00:10:44
Speaker
And I didn't make enough money to retire off of this comic book.
00:10:48
Speaker
It's a footnote in my career and kind of like just a fun story to talk about.
00:10:53
Speaker
But it was really cool.
00:10:55
Speaker
I became a dealer and I was on the East Coast circuit going to comic book conventions and just hustling these first appearances.
00:11:04
Speaker
It was crazy.
00:11:05
Speaker
And then what ended up happening was around 2015, 2014, the market started getting more efficient and people started doing the same thing I was doing.
00:11:13
Speaker
And as the market became more efficient, that opportunity kind of evaporated.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:18
Speaker
So in the, in the, so I'm currently exploring the just third party book sales on Amazon racket.
00:11:28
Speaker
And is, so is there a reason why you just stuck to comic books or, you know,
00:11:35
Speaker
Would you have scaled that into other avenues?
00:11:40
Speaker
Or why did you move on from that?
00:11:43
Speaker
I knew more about comic books than I know about rare books.
00:11:47
Speaker
I was involved in the book hustle when I was younger.
00:11:51
Speaker
That market has also gotten very efficient.
00:11:53
Speaker
It's very hard to find an edge there.
00:11:56
Speaker
But textbooks, though, textbooks are still pretty lucrative from what I would what I'd imagine.
00:12:01
Speaker
But yeah, for me, it was just what I knew.
00:12:05
Speaker
Like, I already had this large amalgamation of useless knowledge about comic books.
00:12:11
Speaker
And I was like, oh, there's money to be made with this.
00:12:13
Speaker
Let's apply it somewhere.
00:12:15
Speaker
And so that was that was a big impetus behind that and why I didn't go with like the rare book market.
00:12:21
Speaker
I did have I did meet a bunch of people who dabbled in both worlds.
00:12:25
Speaker
And particularly they were dealing with like rare first editions and things like that and estate sales.
00:12:32
Speaker
But like any secondary market, like just because it's hard to find an edge like right now with books, it doesn't necessarily mean there isn't an edge.
00:12:42
Speaker
The question that someone needs to balance is,
00:12:45
Speaker
is it worth my time to try and find where my edge is?
00:12:49
Speaker
It could be a particular subset of a market.
00:12:51
Speaker
It could be a particular author or whatever, but it's really just that running that cost benefit analysis of how much ramp up time do I have to make before I need to make money, before I can make money?
00:13:04
Speaker
And is it worth the effort?
00:13:06
Speaker
Like what are my margins look like?
00:13:08
Speaker
Right.
00:13:08
Speaker
And I liked what you said about how easy it is to shoot down something like this.
00:13:12
Speaker
Cause I, so as part of exit group,
00:13:15
Speaker
I'm talking to, you know, a lot of the guys that have signed up for the group are already successful entrepreneurs and they're trying to support other people.
00:13:22
Speaker
And I've heard like really good ideas, really interesting ideas.
00:13:29
Speaker
You know, none of them are the next Amazon, but they're like making a very comfortable living.
00:13:35
Speaker
They didn't have to go total blue ocean and like, and like, you know, it didn't have to be this world changing idea.
00:13:41
Speaker
It just had to be
00:13:43
Speaker
better than what was already there in some kind of way.
00:13:46
Speaker
And so, yeah, it totally resonates with me.
00:13:49
Speaker
And that's something that's new to me.
00:13:50
Speaker
This is my first sort of jump into this entrepreneurship world kind of by default, having lost my job.
00:13:58
Speaker
And, and yeah, it's so encouraging to see there's just so many ways that you can make a living.
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, for real.
00:14:07
Speaker
And like everyone tends to like self-select out, particularly like younger people who like don't have like real world experience.
Diverse Income Streams and Blue-Collar Venture Capital
00:14:14
Speaker
So they don't know how to price things.
00:14:15
Speaker
So like our price goods and services and by proxy know what people are willing to pay for.
00:14:20
Speaker
So like you see a lot of people self-selecting out of even trying because it's not an Amazon idea.
00:14:28
Speaker
It's not a Google idea.
00:14:29
Speaker
Well, guess what?
00:14:30
Speaker
You don't need that.
00:14:32
Speaker
That is such an
00:14:33
Speaker
tiny fraction of what makes, where people make their money.
00:14:39
Speaker
So I tend to think of things of, can this scale to $20,000 a year?
00:14:45
Speaker
And my goal from the beginning was, I want to have five discrete income streams aside from W-2 income, where I'm making just 20 grand, 20 grand.
00:14:53
Speaker
That's an easily attainable goal with a little bit of elbow grease.
00:14:58
Speaker
Like if you stick with it and, and,
00:15:02
Speaker
refine your process, 20 grand a year, that's a little under 2K a month.
00:15:09
Speaker
That's not a whole lot of money.
00:15:11
Speaker
But if you have enough of those, it's just thinking in base hits versus trying to take the venture capital approach where you're only betting on home runs.
00:15:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:21
Speaker
So in addition to your day job, what sort of side angles are you looking at right now?
00:15:28
Speaker
What's interesting to you?
00:15:30
Speaker
Right now, I'm interested in... This is probably a longer term thing, but I'm interested in creating a market for secondary markets, if that makes any sense.
00:15:44
Speaker
So when you think of...
00:15:48
Speaker
like cryptocurrency that we were talking about earlier before, and you think about like secondary markets and secondary means of transactions, there's not a real easy way to bring buyers and sellers together.
00:16:03
Speaker
That's kind of why like we fell on money as a medium of exchange.
00:16:08
Speaker
It was a common denominator to make barter because barter was inefficient.
00:16:14
Speaker
And so something I've been playing around with in my head is just buying land to facilitate like an actual free market, like what we have in third world countries.
00:16:25
Speaker
I guess in the US we call them like flea markets, but like think of it like if you're able to bring together enough like-minded buyers and sellers,
00:16:34
Speaker
who want to get away from this fiat monetary system and exchange in... It doesn't necessarily... I'm not talking about creating like a barter system.
00:16:44
Speaker
I'm talking about creating an alternative means of exchange where cryptocurrency or precious metals or ammo are considered a currency.
00:16:53
Speaker
And like, it's always been a joke that like ammo is currency.
00:16:57
Speaker
Well, I mean, it kind of does meet all of it.
00:17:00
Speaker
It still is kind of a joke, but it's funny, especially in the last year we've seen that like, actually it kind of, it kind of does function as a currency.
00:17:08
Speaker
Like I've sold things for him.
00:17:11
Speaker
It's divisible.
00:17:13
Speaker
If, if, if two 23 gets into the, like the, the $2, $3 around range, that's, you know, you can carry that around in your pocket and, you know, get a sandwich and take it like, like it's, it's probably still a little too cheap,
00:17:25
Speaker
to be efficient to carry around, but it's getting there.
00:17:31
Speaker
In a pinch, in a pinch, it works.
00:17:32
Speaker
Like I've sold laptops for cases of 5.56.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
00:17:40
Speaker
But I mean, does that scale?
00:17:41
Speaker
Yeah, you're right.
00:17:42
Speaker
It doesn't really scale.
00:17:44
Speaker
It's more of like a flippant example.
00:17:46
Speaker
So like creating something like this, it's still very ill-defined in my head.
00:17:51
Speaker
Well, I mean, you're talking about you're talking about having more than one means of exchange.
00:17:56
Speaker
I mean, there are scales at which that is an efficient means of exchange.
00:18:00
Speaker
And so maybe you pick that one for those that that sort of range of transactions.
00:18:04
Speaker
And then if you want to buy a house or a boat, you use something else, you know, it's just sort of the right tool for the job.
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:12
Speaker
So yeah.
00:18:13
Speaker
Create, creating this market for non-traditional markets.
00:18:16
Speaker
That's, that's something that's interesting to me.
00:18:19
Speaker
Um, uh, multifamily real estate has always been something that's been on my radar.
00:18:25
Speaker
Um, storage units, uh, those are, that's another thing.
00:18:29
Speaker
And then
00:18:30
Speaker
One other thing, this is another long-term project, but this notion of blue-collar venture capital.
00:18:38
Speaker
So when we talk about venture capital, we immediately go to the Bay Area, SaaS companies and stuff like that.
00:18:47
Speaker
There's a lot of money that gets made in the blue collar world, like electricians, HVAC technicians here in Texas.
00:18:55
Speaker
The wealthiest people I know are mostly blue collar.
00:19:00
Speaker
And even in the ag industry, there's tons of opportunities.
00:19:04
Speaker
So like creating a venture capital fund that invests in these types of blue collar enterprises is
00:19:13
Speaker
is it also something that's been an interesting idea for probably a couple of like three, five years now.
00:19:20
Speaker
The problem here is like a lot of this is based on like human services.
00:19:24
Speaker
So it doesn't scale as elegantly as like software as a service does, but that that's a, that's a challenge.
00:19:32
Speaker
That's not something that makes it not worth pursuing.
00:19:35
Speaker
If that makes sense.
00:19:37
Speaker
I mean, that's,
00:19:37
Speaker
That's music to my ears.
00:19:38
Speaker
So the, for the first thing that we've the first project that we're doing at exit is I've got a friend who is a professional landscaper and construction contractor.
00:19:52
Speaker
And I asked him, you know, what is the easiest way for somebody who's not going to go to college to, you know, build a life for themselves?
00:20:03
Speaker
And he said, well, bar none, it's landscaping.
00:20:05
Speaker
You go out, maybe you scrape together a thousand dollars and you go get your trailer, your mower, your blower, your weed whacker.
00:20:13
Speaker
And it's just this incredibly scalable business from like the smallest amount of startup capital.
00:20:21
Speaker
And we're actually building a curriculum that's like, all right, lesson one, go get a polo and khakis, go get a trailer, like the basics.
00:20:30
Speaker
And then all the way to
00:20:32
Speaker
here's how you hire your first employee.
00:20:34
Speaker
Here's how you hire your 15th employee and a, and a supervisor.
00:20:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:39
Speaker
And it's the idea is take it from a thousand dollars to a million dollars.
00:20:42
Speaker
So, uh, I totally agree.
00:20:44
Speaker
Like we're seeing, uh, I mean, like I'm not seeing now, but I'm seeing for the first time, you know, I grew up in, in, uh, a school that was like, we're not even going to have shop classes because you guys are all going to go to college and you're going to have to pay somebody else to do that.
00:20:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:59
Speaker
And, um,
00:21:02
Speaker
And so I'm watching these guys who, you know, he has one friend who worked for like four years in like high school.
00:21:11
Speaker
And then they were able to like kick back and hand the business to somebody else.
00:21:15
Speaker
And they're just pulling it in as passive income now.
00:21:18
Speaker
And it's like the scale of possibilities are in that blue collar space, just unreal.
00:21:23
Speaker
So bottom line, that seems like an awesome idea.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:21:27
Speaker
Speaking of hustles, that was probably my first hustle.
00:21:32
Speaker
I remember 1993, 1994, I was in third grade, I think, maybe give or take plus or minus one year.
00:21:41
Speaker
But the Mortal Kombat movie had just came out, and I was begging my dad to take us to see it.
00:21:47
Speaker
My dad hands me a Lowe's bucket and goes, go knock on the neighbor's doors and see if they need their weeds pulled.
00:21:55
Speaker
And so I would just go around the neighborhood pulling weeds and like, I think I did like one or two yards to buy my ticket to go see Mortal Kombat.
00:22:04
Speaker
But that turned into a hustle, just pulling people's weeds for, I think I charged by the bucket of weeds and like, I would show them the bucket before emptying it.
00:22:15
Speaker
But yeah, that was that was that was how I got my start for sure.
00:22:19
Speaker
My dad was a hustler, too.
00:22:21
Speaker
Like he used to he used to his parents grew up in the Great Depression.
00:22:25
Speaker
So that kind of rubbed off on him.
00:22:27
Speaker
My mom's from a third world country.
00:22:30
Speaker
And so they my dad used to pick up me and my brothers when we were little and put us into dumpsters to go dumpster diving looking for it.
00:22:42
Speaker
My dad was so cheap when we took out the trash, we would have to bring the bag back.
00:22:47
Speaker
Oh, no way.
00:22:48
Speaker
Grind set, man.
00:22:50
Speaker
Exactly.
00:22:51
Speaker
And really, it's very similar to like going to the gym.
00:22:54
Speaker
Like having money is a formula that's very similar to losing weight.
00:22:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:01
Speaker
Or rather, it's the inverse formula.
00:23:02
Speaker
Bring in fewer calories than you expel.
00:23:06
Speaker
That's the formula for losing weight.
00:23:08
Speaker
And the opposite is true for making money.
00:23:11
Speaker
Bring in more money than you spend.
00:23:13
Speaker
And it's pretty like my dad's on the projects and he figured out how to do it.
00:23:19
Speaker
It's not that hard.
00:23:21
Speaker
What's hard about it is discipline.
00:23:23
Speaker
That's unfortunately something you can't really teach.
00:23:26
Speaker
And that's where having that discipline.
00:23:29
Speaker
And I think, I think that's why you see a lot of folks who do well in business usually have some sort of foundation and some hobby or skill that involves quite a lot of discipline.
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:43
Speaker
So I feel like there's a lot of guys in our space, in the church, frugality is really common.
00:23:53
Speaker
entrepreneurship is not.
00:23:54
Speaker
And I almost feel like there's, there's a lot of guys who will sort of scrimp and save at their day job.
00:24:02
Speaker
And they have no context for like, okay, now what do I do with this money?
00:24:06
Speaker
How do I make this money grow?
00:24:07
Speaker
And so they like put it in the S and P or whatever, but they don't like this.
00:24:11
Speaker
There's no, there's no creativity to it.
00:24:15
Speaker
And so like, that's a, that's a big piece that I'm starting to learn for myself is like, you know, it doesn't take a ton of money,
00:24:22
Speaker
to start something and to make something happen.
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:26
Speaker
And like, not to knock like the index approach.
00:24:29
Speaker
Like I give the index people like all sorts of shit all the time, but like that's a perfectly valid thing.
00:24:35
Speaker
Like at least it's not sitting in a savings account.
00:24:38
Speaker
It is working, but like it's really that cost benefit analysis.
00:24:42
Speaker
Like, are you the type of person that wants to get your hands dirty or do you just want a day job and keep off your index funds?
00:24:50
Speaker
Like, yeah.
00:24:52
Speaker
And depending on your opinions of like capital markets and things like that, like, is that gravy train?
00:25:00
Speaker
How much longer does that gravy train last?
00:25:02
Speaker
I don't know.
00:25:03
Speaker
But and.
00:25:05
Speaker
But one thing's for sure is owning your own business is like we're seeing it today with the Biden mandate here with vaccines.
Self-Employment vs. Government Mandates
00:25:16
Speaker
Like you have a certain layer of independence being self-employed that you don't get from being a W-2 employee.
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yes, 100%, 100%.
00:25:26
Speaker
And I mean, that was a big part of my kick out the door was looking at my 401k balance, just go up and up and up and be like, what are the odds I'm going to see that money ever?
00:25:36
Speaker
What are the odds that's still going to be there when I'm 65?
00:25:40
Speaker
You know, you look at what could happen in five or 10 years and it's just, so yeah, part of starting this business was like, no, I need to start accessing some of these resources that I'm just sort of piling up and do something with them while something can be done.
00:25:57
Speaker
So you mentioned before that that citizen hush got started as a bot account.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:26:04
Speaker
That you were building followers more of as an experiment and you were sort of selling the account.
00:26:09
Speaker
Obviously, the technical side of that is something people can Google, but can you tell me a little bit about your strategy with these accounts?
00:26:16
Speaker
Were they all just vanilla meme accounts?
00:26:18
Speaker
Did you chase particular demos?
00:26:20
Speaker
Do you have any facts that you apply now?
00:26:23
Speaker
No, it's gotten a little less efficient these days.
00:26:26
Speaker
I don't really run a bot.
00:26:27
Speaker
So in the early days of Instagram, I was, this is like pre-Facebook acquisition.
00:26:33
Speaker
I was building Instagram bots to auto-like, auto-engage, auto-follow people based on keywords and their captions and hashtags they use.
00:26:41
Speaker
And even geotargeting based on where they tagged people.
00:26:45
Speaker
And I would just have an account that would just go through and interact with them.
00:26:51
Speaker
Instagram's rules have gotten way more strict over the years, but I would churn out a meme account with 20, 40,000 followers and then I'd sell it.
00:27:03
Speaker
It wasn't a lot of money, but I was a broke graduate student, so whatever.
00:27:09
Speaker
It was fairly easy to do.
00:27:11
Speaker
And the same thing would happen on Twitter.
00:27:14
Speaker
I would just build up these accounts.
00:27:15
Speaker
Twitter accounts were a little bit... The market for those isn't quite...
00:27:19
Speaker
I would say companies still haven't found, figured out how to make Twitter work for them with a handful of exceptions.
00:27:25
Speaker
So the value proposition of Twitter is a little bit more confusing to businesses.
00:27:31
Speaker
And my personal account was just a bot account, scraping memes from Reddit and posting them as my own.
00:27:38
Speaker
And it was around 2016 when like I started just messing around on Twitter on my own account, just started throwing things out there or 2015.
00:27:46
Speaker
And, um,
00:27:48
Speaker
And then that's when, and then since I had built up this following, I think at that point it was like, just like 14,000, 20,000 followers.
00:27:57
Speaker
I was getting an engagement on some of the stuff and that's when the dopamine hooks got in, man.
00:28:01
Speaker
I was like, Oh, this is kind of fun.
00:28:03
Speaker
And then I remember going through a couple iterations.
00:28:06
Speaker
Like originally, originally I was posting mostly just art.
00:28:09
Speaker
I'm actually blocked by Google street art, the account, because I would,
00:28:13
Speaker
I created a bot to auto post the artwork that they would post as my bot was curating it.
00:28:23
Speaker
And so Google Street Art blocked me.
00:28:26
Speaker
And then it started going into like video games and stuff like that.
00:28:30
Speaker
And it wasn't until 2018 that I kind of cut off the bots.
00:28:35
Speaker
And that's when I came out as a gun owner.
00:28:38
Speaker
And I lost like five or 8,000 followers like overnight.
00:28:45
Speaker
And then like, I remember the great, the great purge of January 6th, 2021.
00:28:49
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:28:49
Speaker
I was like, oh,
00:28:53
Speaker
I was at a I was like 114,000 and then I was down to like 92,000 or something.
00:28:59
Speaker
Lost a lot of good people that day.
00:29:03
Speaker
We absolutely.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, we did.
00:29:04
Speaker
We did.
00:29:05
Speaker
Gone but not forgotten.
00:29:09
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:29:10
Speaker
So so Citizen Hush was not originally like a you weren't you weren't targeting like the gun community.
00:29:16
Speaker
You came into that later.
00:29:18
Speaker
I did initially when I lost those initial thousands of followers when I came out of the closet as a gun owner.
00:29:27
Speaker
It was the same thing, targeting based on keywords, hashtags, and geolocation.
00:29:31
Speaker
So I would filter out anyone...
00:29:33
Speaker
any account outside of the US.
00:29:35
Speaker
And then I would target anyone with like the 2A hashtag.
00:29:39
Speaker
And then I would go to other large gun accounts.
00:29:43
Speaker
So like some of the more popular YouTube accounts, and I would have my bot explicitly target
00:29:50
Speaker
the followers of those accounts and just go engage with them.
00:29:54
Speaker
And Twitter's gotten a little more strict with their rules too.
00:29:58
Speaker
I've gotten my wrist slapped a few times in the last couple of years.
00:30:00
Speaker
That's why I really turned it off.
00:30:02
Speaker
And like, I've been open about, like, if you go to my Twitter account, I'm following 64,000 people.
00:30:06
Speaker
I didn't sit there following 64,000 people.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yeah, and it was just an interesting social experiment.
00:30:15
Speaker
And I actually saved a lot of the data to look at the conversion rate of different hashtags and keywords.
00:30:21
Speaker
And it was really interesting to see what converted because I wanted to create a formula of like,
00:30:28
Speaker
what does it take to build an automated social media following?
00:30:32
Speaker
And this is kind of like still the nascent days of social media.
00:30:37
Speaker
And so you could get away with a lot more back then.
00:30:41
Speaker
Nowadays, it's a little dicier to try and do some of the things I did.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, so you're kind of...
00:30:49
Speaker
Like for an account like mine where like I have painstakingly gotten up to 10,000, it would be kind of betting the farm to automate.
00:30:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:58
Speaker
Risk.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:31:00
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:02
Speaker
I've personally turned it off.
00:31:03
Speaker
I turned it off a few years ago in my personal account just because it just...
00:31:07
Speaker
it stopped being worth it.
00:31:08
Speaker
I kept getting like flagged by Twitter, detecting like automated behavior.
00:31:13
Speaker
And I was just like, all right, whatever.
00:31:14
Speaker
And also like people, people started like pointing it out and I was like, yeah, dog, I'm open about this.
00:31:20
Speaker
Like I, this was a social experiment.
00:31:22
Speaker
Like I'm not trying to hide nothing.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:26
Speaker
Okay.
00:31:27
Speaker
Well, so as far as, as far as the way that you personally approach the account,
00:31:34
Speaker
Um, do you, so your, your social media, is that something that you are really just doing for fun or are you, are you attacking it from with like a, a, a growth kind of like, I want to build a following.
00:31:47
Speaker
I want to take this somewhere.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:50
Speaker
I'll be honest.
00:31:50
Speaker
Like I don't really have a plan.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:54
Speaker
It's a whole lot of just throwing stuff out.
00:31:56
Speaker
Like you can see it like on my timeline.
00:31:59
Speaker
Like I think last night I tweeted communism, like one word, like what?
00:32:05
Speaker
And that's kind of like my, that's kind of my entire shtick.
00:32:09
Speaker
I think like I'm just this stream of conscious guy that just occasionally says something funny.
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:16
Speaker
Okay.
00:32:16
Speaker
All right.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it's more of just a means to an end.
00:32:20
Speaker
Like, I make money from those 2A deal alerts that I tweet out, like through affiliate links and stuff.
00:32:26
Speaker
It's not a meaningful amount of money, but I like to think that I'm not entirely wasting my time on Twitter.
00:32:34
Speaker
But I definitely am.
00:32:35
Speaker
I definitely am.
00:32:37
Speaker
But like, the flip side to that is I've met tons of cool people from it and built lots of really good relations.
00:32:42
Speaker
Like, I write for Guns America now because of a relationship I forged from Twitter.
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:48
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I've never I've never like directly made money from Twitter, but I got the job that I got fired from from Twitter.
00:32:55
Speaker
Oh, OK.
00:32:56
Speaker
So that was some money.
00:32:59
Speaker
So in a couple of podcasts you've done, you refer to parallel systems that make gun control impossible.
3D Printed Guns and Gun Control
00:33:05
Speaker
From what I understand, the idea is to get enough 3D printed guns into enough hands that confiscation becomes impractical.
00:33:13
Speaker
So is the thinking that if enough Americans own guns, that like it'll be politically impractical, like electorally impractical to ban them?
00:33:21
Speaker
what's the thinking there?
00:33:22
Speaker
So I think my old stance was create as many gun owners as we can to make gun control impossible.
00:33:33
Speaker
And now with the advent of 3D printed guns, P80 guns, stuff like that, now it's gotten to the point where like, okay, even if you did go door to door, the information's out there.
00:33:46
Speaker
And I'm
00:33:48
Speaker
I'm adjacent to the 3D printed gun community because like I, I, I've printed my own guns and I've shot my own guns.
00:33:56
Speaker
I'm friends with Control Pew, Vin, and those guys.
00:34:00
Speaker
Vin stays at my house a couple of times now.
00:34:03
Speaker
And like for me, like I'm, I wouldn't consider, like I wouldn't try and steal their thunder.
00:34:09
Speaker
Like that's their baby.
00:34:10
Speaker
Like they're the design, them and their legion of developers who are creating these designs.
00:34:15
Speaker
Those are the folks that like,
00:34:16
Speaker
That's the 3D printed gun community.
00:34:18
Speaker
All I'm trying to do is help give some legitimacy to what they're doing in the mainstream firearms world.
00:34:25
Speaker
Because one of the things you're noticing is a lot of traditional gun manufacturers are like closeted supporters of what's going on with the 3D printed gun world, but none of them will come out and vocalize support for them because it's a political hot topic right now.
00:34:42
Speaker
And
00:34:42
Speaker
So I'm just trying to normalize what they're doing.
00:34:45
Speaker
Like creating your own guns, creating your own ammunition, like that's about as American as it gets.
00:34:50
Speaker
Like there's nothing, there's nothing
00:34:55
Speaker
that should be kind of seen shady about that.
00:34:59
Speaker
Like I went to the 3D Guns and Bitcoin conference and spoke there in April.
00:35:05
Speaker
And like if the media were to try and profile the types of people who would go there, you'd think it would just be like gangbangers, criminals, stuff like that.
00:35:14
Speaker
No, it's just a bunch of really interesting people who like playing with this technology and like creating this technology to make it accessible to other folks.
00:35:24
Speaker
That's all it is.
00:35:27
Speaker
Control Pugh and Vin and Ivan, I've met these guys, hung out with them in person, and they're some of the most genuine, kind-hearted people you could ever...
00:35:39
Speaker
I told Vin when he came on my YouTube channel, the stuff you guys are doing and working on with your anonymous developers, y'all are doing founding father stuff right now.
00:35:53
Speaker
They're putting themselves at risk, not just physically, but also legally, given the climate we're in.
00:36:01
Speaker
And they're doing it in the name of, hey, the state shouldn't have jurisdiction over what we do.
00:36:09
Speaker
And it's really humbling to be around these guys.
00:36:16
Speaker
And like, it's...
00:36:18
Speaker
They're moving the needle.
00:36:20
Speaker
They are moving the needle for freedom and liberty in the world far more than any blue checkmark account does yelling at Twitter because they're actually doing something about it.
00:36:32
Speaker
100%.
00:36:32
Speaker
And you're watching as the legitimacy of the institutions that oppose this are collapsing and just trust in the media is collapsing.
00:36:41
Speaker
And that is...
00:36:43
Speaker
a good news story for these guys because it's, it's, it's making it less weird, less fringe.
00:36:48
Speaker
Even, even in our, our little group, you know, I didn't want it to be like, like a right-wing ghetto where it was like, you know, weirdos who wanted to just say slurs.
00:37:02
Speaker
But I'm finding that with the Vax mandates and, and just, just the everyday sort of infringement on your Liberty all the time.
00:37:13
Speaker
that more and more like regular successful put together people have had enough.
00:37:20
Speaker
And, and, and so it's, it's really interesting to watch.
00:37:23
Speaker
I wanted to go back to one point you made about the gun manufacturers.
00:37:27
Speaker
I'm kind of surprised to hear that they support this given that it it's it's competition.
00:37:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:37
Speaker
I, I, I think it's more, I, I, and I'm getting out of my lane a little bit here because I've,
00:37:43
Speaker
I my my observation because like we can see who likes posts and stuff.
00:37:50
Speaker
My observation in the public sphere has been like, oh, yeah, these companies find the footage that the catalog folks that turns dispense folks are putting out like they like it.
00:38:03
Speaker
They like it.
00:38:03
Speaker
They think it's cool.
00:38:06
Speaker
But they're not coming out and defending these guys.
00:38:10
Speaker
They're not coming out supporting them financially in any way.
00:38:14
Speaker
Not to say that they should and they have a moral obligation to, but we tend to put ourselves into tribes when really we'd be much more effective.
00:38:26
Speaker
We have a common enemy here and it's politicians.
00:38:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:30
Speaker
And what the folks at Gatalog are doing, like that's, in my mind, that's complimentary.
00:38:36
Speaker
Like the folks at Gatalog are guaranteeing the existence of a gun industry.
00:38:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's true.
00:38:44
Speaker
And in a big picture perspective, I mean, these guys could sell as many guns as they could possibly produce.
00:38:51
Speaker
It's not like there's a really constrained demand for this stuff, artificially constrained by regulation.
00:38:58
Speaker
But yeah.
00:38:59
Speaker
Yes, that makes sense.
00:39:00
Speaker
I wanted to ask you about, so I talked to a small ammo business.
00:39:06
Speaker
One of our guys was like, hey, what about getting into this business?
00:39:09
Speaker
And I saw, I was like, well, I'll go find the guy and we'll talk about it.
00:39:12
Speaker
And he said, you know, the primer industry, the people who make the primers, because it's explosive and it's toxic, you've got EPA, ATF, OSHA,
00:39:27
Speaker
all kinds of regulation on the primary issues, only four players.
00:39:31
Speaker
And it's the big, you know, it's Winchester.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's the big ammo manufacturers that are allowed to play in that space.
00:39:38
Speaker
Do you think that there is a potential solution to the ammo issue in the same sense that we found a solution to, you know, the 3D printing guns?
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I believe there's a lot of really promising prototypes that are being developed here.
00:39:56
Speaker
Like DIY ammo, not necessarily strictly in the sense of like reloading, like Atlas Arms is developing something like kind of homebrewed ammo.
00:40:07
Speaker
That would actually be a really interesting conversation.
00:40:09
Speaker
He came on, the owner of Atlas Arms came onto my YouTube channel to talk through about that.
00:40:15
Speaker
That's also getting out of my lane.
00:40:18
Speaker
I'm not a reloader and I'm like a elementary level competency 3D printer.
00:40:26
Speaker
I know enough to print enough failed guns to post videos of people making fun of me.
00:40:34
Speaker
To be clear, like I say, and I'm explicit in my whether it's a P80 video or a 3D printed gun video, like the weakest link in the process is the human assembling it.
00:40:43
Speaker
Like it's not the printer's fault that you didn't get your settings right the first time.
00:40:48
Speaker
That's my fault.
00:40:49
Speaker
And with the Polymer80, it's not Polymer80's fault that like you didn't remove enough material to get your weapon to reliably cycle.
00:40:57
Speaker
And it's like my failures with 3D printed guns is not a condemnation of 3D printed guns.
00:41:06
Speaker
It's more of a reflection of my ability to build one myself because I've shot ones that function flawlessly like,
00:41:15
Speaker
And I would say it's, it's still a very young, young process and industry.
00:41:21
Speaker
But like, when you look at where we are today, relative to where we were just three, five years ago, like we have made exponential improvements and in how easy this is to be able to do.
00:41:33
Speaker
And all credit goes to the,
00:41:36
Speaker
the folks on the front line who are actually creating these designs, putting this out there for free.
00:41:43
Speaker
And like that's, that's a, that speaks testament to like these people's like character.
00:41:51
Speaker
Like they're doing this like out of passion, not because someone's paying them to.
00:41:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:41:57
Speaker
So you've mentioned that you've had several that have failed.
00:42:00
Speaker
And I, you know, I'm not trying to scare anybody.
00:42:04
Speaker
In fact, I'm kind of trying to do the opposite.
00:42:06
Speaker
So if you've gone through some failures, and you're still doing it, then that says to me that like the scale of what's likely to happen in terms of 3D printed gun failing is
00:42:20
Speaker
is tolerable in terms of like, it's not just going to explode and kill you.
00:42:23
Speaker
Right?
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:25
Speaker
When I said, yeah, thank you for clarifying that.
00:42:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:28
Speaker
Like I printed a DD, DD 19.2.
00:42:31
Speaker
It's a 3D printing block design, one of the newer ones.
00:42:34
Speaker
And, um,
00:42:35
Speaker
my layer height on my printer was, I screwed up the settings.
00:42:40
Speaker
And what ended up happening is like when I went to do test fire my first round, the frame just cracked in my hand.
00:42:47
Speaker
That's all that happened.
00:42:47
Speaker
Like the only thing that happened, like, so like when the slide cycled after the first round went off, I'm assuming the force against my grip, like the frame just cracked in half.
00:42:59
Speaker
Like
00:43:00
Speaker
there was no pain.
00:43:00
Speaker
Like all I noticed was, oh, my frame.
00:43:04
Speaker
I knew this didn't look right, but I went for it anyway.
00:43:10
Speaker
And like I successfully printed a DD 17.2 and also a Hellfire, Anderson Hellfire AI.
00:43:20
Speaker
as well.
00:43:21
Speaker
The AR actually, I was able to get the first, that was actually my first print that I did.
00:43:25
Speaker
I was able to get that working pretty, pretty flawlessly early.
00:43:29
Speaker
But yeah, it's, it's, it's really like when, if you're a lot of my gunsmith friends, like they, they get first time builders who come in and they tried to build their first Glock or build their first AR-15.
00:43:41
Speaker
They come in like, yeah, they just did something stupid.
00:43:43
Speaker
That's why it didn't work.
00:43:45
Speaker
And it's usually the human is the common denominator is when it comes to this assembly process and I mean the barrel and the chamber and the slide those are all still metal parts right so there's not like that you're not like firing up the explosion is not happening there right yeah yeah it's you you're just printing a frame.
00:44:05
Speaker
Now, there are, with like the FGC9 that was just released, I think a couple months ago, like that has like a DIY barrel that you're able to create yourself using just metal rods.
00:44:19
Speaker
And I forget what the process is called, but you're using electricity and water to rifle it.
00:44:24
Speaker
rifle it yourself.
00:44:26
Speaker
We're getting closer.
00:44:28
Speaker
I don't know how that would be a better question for Control Pew and Vin and Ivan and those guys.
00:44:33
Speaker
But the idea would be like it shouldn't be purpose built firearm parts.
00:44:38
Speaker
You want to get to a point where it's kind of more or less like household materials, Home Depot type materials.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:44:45
Speaker
And that effectively democratizes self-defense.
00:44:50
Speaker
Like the this information is out there.
00:44:53
Speaker
It's not going anywhere.
00:44:55
Speaker
And that's that's what I like about it.
00:44:57
Speaker
They're doing some they're doing something about gun legislation like you've got great groups like Gun Owners in America, Firearms Policy Coalition, who are fighting like the traditional route, like within the confines of the system.
00:45:08
Speaker
And then you have an asymmetrical approach, which is just ignoring the system and saying, screw you guys, we're gonna we're gonna figure out a way to do it on our own.
00:45:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:17
Speaker
And I mean, you know, so door to door confiscation, probably not feasible, even without 3D printing.
00:45:22
Speaker
There's just a bazillion guns in this country.
00:45:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:26
Speaker
I don't, I don't, I think the fact that we can't even get an approximate tally is pretty indicative of how many guns there are in this country.
00:45:34
Speaker
Right.
00:45:35
Speaker
But, you know, they, they still can do the whack-a-mole approach where they, they come get you if you discharge it, you know, right.
00:45:44
Speaker
And do you see a future for a way around that?
00:45:50
Speaker
Or is it going to have to be just sort of, we have to get this thing popular enough that the political system won't create laws like that?
00:46:00
Speaker
I don't know the answer to that, man.
00:46:03
Speaker
I don't really follow the news too much.
00:46:07
Speaker
The news that gets to me is just what shows up in my feed.
00:46:10
Speaker
I don't read the news.
00:46:12
Speaker
I don't watch the news.
00:46:13
Speaker
I cut that out in 2013.
00:46:16
Speaker
My life has been very peaceful since then.
00:46:21
Speaker
and uh you're just looking at the technical solution you're looking at you're looking at this is an engineering product and yeah yeah and i'm i'm yeah and i'm just interested in people who are doing something about the problem whether it's uh what the work that firearms policy coalition is doing or goa they're more on the policy side and like uh filing legal cases and stuff and that's not that's not my cup of tea quite frankly but yeah the the
00:46:48
Speaker
Specialization.
00:46:49
Speaker
The fact that they are good at it is incredibly valuable to me.
00:46:54
Speaker
Me, I'm just good at running my mouth and shooting guns and just creating more gun owners.
00:47:00
Speaker
That's really what I want to do.
00:47:01
Speaker
Just get more people involved in this by just being a friendly, approachable dude that won't gatekeep if you have a loose interest in firearms.
00:47:13
Speaker
Roger that.
00:47:14
Speaker
I want to talk about Bitcoin.
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
00:47:16
Speaker
What's up?
00:47:17
Speaker
So you've said if people think US government can shut down Bitcoin, they're just showing they don't know what they're talking about because they'd have to shut down essentially
Bitcoin's Resilience Against Shutdown
00:47:25
Speaker
the internet.
00:47:25
Speaker
And I am not a Bitcoin pessimist.
00:47:28
Speaker
I have a decent chunk of my savings in Bitcoin, Ethereum.
00:47:31
Speaker
I'd really like to have to share your confidence.
00:47:36
Speaker
And so can you explain what you mean by that?
00:47:38
Speaker
Can they not just monitor the network?
00:47:40
Speaker
and go after anyone performing non-KYC transactions.
00:47:43
Speaker
Like... Yeah, yeah.
00:47:47
Speaker
The most effective way... And we have precedents for the government doing things like this.
00:47:51
Speaker
So, like, I forget what the executive order was when...
00:47:55
Speaker
effectively became illegal for citizens to own gold basically.
00:47:59
Speaker
And I think that's actually a good precedent to compare that to.
00:48:03
Speaker
Like what was the compliance rate with that?
00:48:05
Speaker
Well, it was, I think, I believe it was less than 20% compliance rate.
00:48:10
Speaker
Now KYC versus non KYC.
00:48:12
Speaker
Like there are people out there like a Conor Alchemist who, you know,
00:48:18
Speaker
way more about this and ways to circumnavigate that system.
00:48:21
Speaker
But I think the component of shutting down the internet to be able to shut off the network, that's one problem.
00:48:34
Speaker
What they're trying to do now is going after custodial fiat on-ramp.
00:48:39
Speaker
So things like Gemini, Kraken, Coinbase, things like that.
00:48:43
Speaker
where they can do ostensibly do chain on chain analytics and effectively triage who, who owns what, because you have that identity tied to your wallet on a custodial exchange.
00:48:56
Speaker
Right.
00:48:57
Speaker
The other, the other notion too, is like, if they were going to come down with some draconian law to shut down these exchanges, right.
00:49:06
Speaker
The time to have done that was five to eight years ago.
00:49:10
Speaker
Right now, we are in a multi-billion dollar industry.
00:49:15
Speaker
We have multiple publicly traded companies that are playing in the space.
00:49:19
Speaker
We have multiple institutional funds that are invested in these companies and actually have their own holdings of cryptocurrency.
00:49:27
Speaker
We have Fortune 100 companies that are putting cryptocurrency on their balance sheets.
00:49:32
Speaker
Like the economic ramifications of, okay, hey, guess what?
00:49:37
Speaker
Coinbase, you're going to have to take one for the team.
00:49:40
Speaker
What you do is now illegal and facilitating what you do is now illegal.
00:49:44
Speaker
And Coinbase, I believe, is the number one facilitator of institutional transactions in the United States.
00:49:50
Speaker
So like Tesla used Coinbase to facilitate their acquisition of Bitcoin.
00:49:56
Speaker
And now you have the network effect has reached the institutional level.
00:50:00
Speaker
You now have you now will crash the economy and whether or not the federal government would be OK with that.
00:50:06
Speaker
You can make an argument, a compelling argument that, yes, the federal government would take that bullet to protect the dollar hegemony.
00:50:14
Speaker
But the odds are increased like every every day that goes by that this doesn't happen, the network effects.
00:50:20
Speaker
get stronger because this is an organic system that developed from the ground up.
00:50:24
Speaker
This wasn't a command control system.
00:50:27
Speaker
And so like, I would say...
00:50:31
Speaker
It's something I consider, but I consider far less likely.
00:50:36
Speaker
It keeps me up at night way less than it used to a handful of years ago.
00:50:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's I think that's a great that's a great argument for the survival of the network because, yeah, they're not going to they're not going to nuke Visa.
00:50:50
Speaker
They're not going to nuke, you know, Harvard, which I understand has a significant impact.
00:50:55
Speaker
investment in Bitcoin.
00:50:57
Speaker
Yeah, the endowment.
00:50:59
Speaker
But can't they turn that into a walled garden where everybody's on KYC and everything's tracked and monitored?
00:51:07
Speaker
They could.
00:51:08
Speaker
They could.
00:51:09
Speaker
But then you're just creating another secondary market because that's what we already have secondary markets like local Bitcoins.
00:51:16
Speaker
You've got Bitcoin ATMs, I'm assuming would go away if that became a thing, but you have different approaches to acquire non-KYC.
00:51:24
Speaker
Like I've sold firearms for cryptocurrency.
00:51:28
Speaker
It's perfectly legal.
00:51:30
Speaker
In-person sales in Texas are legal, and I just opted to accept cryptocurrency for it.
00:51:36
Speaker
Same way that I also sold firearms for silver.
00:51:39
Speaker
It's no different.
00:51:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:41
Speaker
And it's, yeah, I think the more real risk is making accessibility a challenge and accessibility within the confines of a walled garden.
00:51:56
Speaker
I think that's probably the more realistic threat, but that doesn't stop it.
00:52:01
Speaker
Like,
00:52:03
Speaker
making that claim that the government can flip a switch and shut it off, that's where I'm just kind of like, okay, so you've read a couple headlines about that.
00:52:12
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:52:13
Speaker
I'm with you, Derek.
00:52:16
Speaker
There's like some magical server rack where like Jerome Powell can just walk in and hit the off switch and it's dead.
00:52:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's not a real threat.
00:52:25
Speaker
Roger that.
00:52:25
Speaker
Okay.
00:52:31
Speaker
You mentioned in another podcast about working in the tech industry and sort of what
00:52:39
Speaker
components of the tech industry are more meritocratic, sort of easier to have wrong think opinions in.
00:52:52
Speaker
If you were advising someone who wants to get into the tech industry now and they're starting out and they have, you know, some no-no opinions,
00:53:03
Speaker
would you tell them to go like deep into the backend?
00:53:06
Speaker
What kinds of languages and components of development would you tell them to try?
00:53:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think more importantly, like...
00:53:16
Speaker
Being safe with your political views, I don't think that should guide your career decision.
00:53:23
Speaker
I think it should be a consideration because quite frankly, it does get really annoying to just be constantly bombarded by this leftist echo chamber.
00:53:32
Speaker
But first, I get this question all the time from folks in college, but what do you want to do?
00:53:42
Speaker
What's interesting to you?
00:53:44
Speaker
And
00:53:44
Speaker
The answer to that question then informs, okay, well, you want to be a JavaScript developer because you like building pretty web applications, or you want to be a front-end developer because you like design.
00:53:58
Speaker
Well, unfortunately, that's where the bulk of the echo chamber lives.
00:54:03
Speaker
And then, but like if, and one thing,
00:54:07
Speaker
Thankfully, the folks who have more liberty minded opinions tend to be more interested in the more abstract side of the tech world, which is on the back end engineering side of things as well as InfoSec.
00:54:23
Speaker
And
00:54:24
Speaker
the shining light there is that is very much still a meritocracy.
00:54:28
Speaker
It's not so much about how many conferences did you speak at and how loud are you on Twitter about your outrage of the day.
00:54:39
Speaker
It's solely pretty much about like, can you do the job or can you not?
00:54:44
Speaker
Because the skills gap between how many people who can do, and I'm using the backend engineering is a very broad term, but like,
00:54:54
Speaker
And so like the amount of people we need with that skill set and the amount of people with that skill set is so far wide.
00:55:03
Speaker
Like there's a lot more willingness to overlook wrong think in the echo chamber.
00:55:12
Speaker
And like particularly within InfoSec, like InfoSec is probably the least...
00:55:18
Speaker
the least of an echo chamber as far as the tech industry is like even in the back end world you still get some remnants of it but it's definitely far more muted like a lot of the folks in the back end world aren't extroverted by nature to begin with so they're going to be less vocal about their opinions whatever those opinions are and they're much more concerned with like can you build this yes or no yeah
00:55:47
Speaker
So one of the things that's challenging about the sort of emergency preparedness and self-reliance space is people have wildly different opinions about timing the decline, right?
00:56:00
Speaker
We see things changing pretty dramatically.
00:56:03
Speaker
And if it goes Mad Max in the next five years, then you should loot your 401k, go buy bullets.
00:56:11
Speaker
But if things stay on this sort of glide path and maybe you and I
00:56:15
Speaker
get old under the present conditions, the investment strategy changes quite a bit.
00:56:21
Speaker
And I know that like nobody knows for sure.
00:56:23
Speaker
I'm kind of asking you just for your guess.
00:56:26
Speaker
What are you hedging?
00:56:27
Speaker
Where do you think it's going?
00:56:29
Speaker
And what do you think is the best way to prepare?
00:56:32
Speaker
Do you have like a hedging strategy?
00:56:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:35
Speaker
I mean, like hedging, hedging in the sense of like the traditional financial term.
00:56:41
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:42
Speaker
Like I come from a finance background, but I would, to me, like what's, what keeps, what's always been like a thing that kept me up at night was like, what will make financially, what will blow
Diversifying Skills Over Doomsday Prepping
00:56:59
Speaker
me up?
00:56:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:01
Speaker
And I want to remove the ability to be blown up.
00:57:05
Speaker
And that's, that's, and I don't know anything about timing.
00:57:08
Speaker
So like, I, I've never, I've never been a directional trader in that regard.
00:57:15
Speaker
So like timing doesn't really concern me.
00:57:17
Speaker
What matters to me is like how diversified are your,
00:57:21
Speaker
Skills and your income streams Everyone like Everybody I've talked to about like Any type of doomsday scenario Immediately goes to like this red dawn Kind of Scenario and Like there's People and like you see this like prepper Communities and stuff like dudes who are like Stockpiling food for to last The family for three years Water for three years ammo all this Other stuff solar panels and I'm like
00:57:51
Speaker
dog, you a hundred pounds overweight.
00:57:53
Speaker
Maybe you should prep for that one.
00:57:56
Speaker
Or like, yo dog, you, you, you, you got 20 grand in credit card debt.
00:58:01
Speaker
Maybe you should work on that one.
00:58:03
Speaker
Like the amount of intermediate threats and there's, it's not, it's not particularly well thought out.
00:58:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:11
Speaker
And I get, and I'm kind of poking fun at the prepper community and like,
00:58:16
Speaker
And like, I've learned a lot of really great things from the prepper community.
00:58:19
Speaker
And, but that is, that is a stereotype for a reason.
00:58:24
Speaker
And for me, I think it's just like, don't fixate so much on like, what will, what this, what the end, what the end doomsday scenario will look like, because then you're going to anchor to that.
00:58:36
Speaker
I think the better question is like, how do I diversify myself, my skills and my assets and,
00:58:44
Speaker
to not be a liability to other people.
00:58:47
Speaker
And when you reframe that question from what does the end of the world look like and how can I become a warlord at the end of the world to like, how can I just be a more useful person?
00:58:58
Speaker
It becomes a much more healthy conversation and it becomes more productive, quite frankly.
00:59:04
Speaker
Because the,
00:59:05
Speaker
that type of allocation translates to the world we live in today.
00:59:10
Speaker
And if the world goes down the toilet tomorrow, it also translates into the Mad Max realm also.
00:59:17
Speaker
So like, I'm not talking about like skills, like sure, like bushcraft and stuff like that.
00:59:23
Speaker
Like that's a cool skill to have.
00:59:26
Speaker
It's useful.
00:59:26
Speaker
I get it.
00:59:27
Speaker
And it's useful today and it's useful in an apocalypse scenario.
00:59:31
Speaker
But I feel like most guys will
00:59:34
Speaker
without much prompting learn the cool stuff.
00:59:37
Speaker
Exactly.
00:59:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:39
Speaker
You don't need to, you don't need to like try real hard to teach yourself the cool stuff.
00:59:43
Speaker
Like you'll just pick that up.
00:59:44
Speaker
Maybe focus on the practical, you know?
00:59:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:48
Speaker
That's why I use bushcraft as an example.
00:59:50
Speaker
Like I think bushcraft is really cool.
00:59:52
Speaker
And I think that's like an awesome skill to have, but it's also one that I'm not interested in.
00:59:58
Speaker
So like, um, like that, that's not a skillset that I actively cultivating or anything.
01:00:05
Speaker
If that's a hobby that someone's interested in and it also compliments like one of their concerns or whatever, then sure.
01:00:12
Speaker
Go for it.
01:00:13
Speaker
If it's perfectly natural to have a hobby like that, and I'm not going to knock it, but like.
01:00:17
Speaker
And a huge, it's so much harder to diversify internally when
01:00:22
Speaker
it's a lot easier to just make some friends.
01:00:25
Speaker
Exactly.
01:00:26
Speaker
That's the other thing too, like social skills, like you have dog, you need to work on that a little bit.
01:00:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:36
Speaker
How many gun guys I meet who will not stop talking or listen into a conversation, not because they're interested in what a person is saying, but looking for a way to inject their own opinion or something about themselves into the conversation.
01:00:54
Speaker
I'm just like, dog, just shut up and learn how to talk to people, man.
01:01:01
Speaker
Yeah, no kidding.
01:01:03
Speaker
So...
01:01:05
Speaker
So that's good.
01:01:07
Speaker
That covers it.
01:01:09
Speaker
Are you at all familiar?
01:01:10
Speaker
This is my last one on sort of parallel systems.
01:01:15
Speaker
Are you familiar at all with URBIT?
01:01:18
Speaker
URBIT.
01:01:18
Speaker
URBIT.
01:01:18
Speaker
URBIT.
01:01:19
Speaker
Is that how it's spelled?
01:01:21
Speaker
URBIT.
01:01:22
Speaker
So I don't know if you know Moldbug.
01:01:23
Speaker
So he's the, he was just on Tucker Carlson.
01:01:26
Speaker
Very interesting, very smart guy.
01:01:29
Speaker
But he's obsessed with politics.
01:01:31
Speaker
I'm not surprised you haven't heard of him.
01:01:34
Speaker
Well, but he created this essentially.
01:01:40
Speaker
He says it's supposed to replace the Internet.
01:01:43
Speaker
What it is de facto right now is a an encrypt an encrypted peer to peer social media network.
01:01:51
Speaker
And it's it's intended to be a decentralized solution for social media when everybody gets kicked off.
01:01:57
Speaker
And it's like you own your ID and you like have to buy it with money and then it's yours.
01:02:04
Speaker
So it's kind of in that same lane of personal accountability, personal ownership, you know, staking out space of your own.
01:02:16
Speaker
But it's definitely doesn't have the penetration, obviously.
01:02:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:23
Speaker
since you haven't heard of it.
01:02:23
Speaker
It's definitely not something grandma's going to use anytime soon.
01:02:27
Speaker
But yeah, I wanted to see if you'd heard of that, but since you haven't.
01:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard of other projects, particularly like in the crypto world.
01:02:36
Speaker
Like I believe, the name's escaping me.
01:02:39
Speaker
I think it's Algoroland.
01:02:41
Speaker
I might be mistaken there, but did you ever, have you ever heard of that game Second Life or basically?
01:02:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:49
Speaker
It's like that for Web 3.0.
01:02:50
Speaker
Okay.
01:02:52
Speaker
Where like you can buy digital real estate and like that is your plot of land and you, your identity on Web 3.0 is like your entry point to many different social networks.
01:03:06
Speaker
I may be speaking out of my lane here also, but I think that's the gist of it.
01:03:10
Speaker
I don't know.
01:03:11
Speaker
I remember I've been in crypto for so damn long.
01:03:14
Speaker
Like I learned my lesson many years ago on like trying to follow all the interesting projects.
01:03:20
Speaker
Like you'll go insane doing that.
01:03:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:25
Speaker
I may be misspeaking here, but I'll double check myself on that.
01:03:28
Speaker
I think it's called Algoroland.
01:03:29
Speaker
It's similar to that.
01:03:31
Speaker
I mean, like, no, I'm all supportive of people.
01:03:34
Speaker
Like everybody will kind of like the side hustle and entrepreneur thing we started talking about with like, it's easy to tell people why something will fail.
01:03:43
Speaker
I want to encourage people to keep trying.
01:03:45
Speaker
Like 95, we're so early in this game, 95, 99% of you will probably fail, but I want you to keep trying, keep trying.
01:03:55
Speaker
Cause that's like, everyone thinks of like innovation as this big bang innovation.
01:04:01
Speaker
We're like,
01:04:02
Speaker
But a bunch of smart people get together in a room like we're going to build a thing called Google.
01:04:06
Speaker
No, that's not how innovation works, dog.
01:04:08
Speaker
Like it's stochastic.
01:04:09
Speaker
Like there's lots of failure along the way.
01:04:12
Speaker
There's lots of going back to the drawing board.
01:04:15
Speaker
Things never work the first time.
01:04:17
Speaker
Sometimes things don't even work out the way you think they work out.
01:04:22
Speaker
And that's why I try to be a cheerleader for all these different things, whether it's in the crypto world or whether it's 3D printed guns with the catalog folks and stuff.
01:04:34
Speaker
Just encouraging them because like they've got enough people shitting on them already.
01:04:38
Speaker
Like they don't need my voice criticized.
01:04:42
Speaker
And probably themselves internally, you know, they're thinking of it.
01:04:45
Speaker
They're obsessing.
01:04:46
Speaker
all the doubts and all the fears and yeah, no, absolutely.
01:04:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
01:04:51
Speaker
And like, that's, that's kind of like my whole identity on the internet.
01:04:56
Speaker
Like the, the nice guy who is positive or tries to be positive all the time.
01:05:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:04
Speaker
In terms of what, one of the things that I'm most excited about with crypto is,
01:05:12
Speaker
like industrial applications, ways that it's going to be actually sort of used, not just as a token of value, but, you know, industrial applications, finance applications.
01:05:25
Speaker
Is that a world that you're interested in?
01:05:26
Speaker
And do you see anything cool coming down the pike there?
01:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, that was probably my earliest.
01:05:35
Speaker
So DeFi on the Ethereum network, my injection point, but in crypto years, I'm a great grandma at this point.
01:05:46
Speaker
But in 2017, 2018, I think, I had been involved with Ethereum and Bitcoin for years before that.
01:05:52
Speaker
But I remember when MakerDAO first came out and then compound.finance, very simple things like collateralized debt.
01:05:59
Speaker
You put up...
01:06:00
Speaker
You put up a certain amount of money as collateral, you're able to pull out equity from that.
01:06:08
Speaker
Debt markets are indicative of a highly functioning economy.
01:06:13
Speaker
Well, fast forward three years or three or four years from then, and now the credit market and crypto is hundreds of billions of dollars.
01:06:22
Speaker
And it's...
01:06:26
Speaker
DeFi has reached this Cambrian explosion.
01:06:30
Speaker
I think it was last year because I remember opening up my first compound up finance account for a high yield savings account on stable coins back in, I think it was 2018.
01:06:44
Speaker
And now we're getting into all sorts of different yield farming liquidity.
01:06:50
Speaker
The things that we've done in DeFi and that we're seeing roll out in DeFi are things that took decades to develop in the traditional financial world.
01:07:00
Speaker
And it's like we are getting into exotic derivatives territory in DeFi.
01:07:06
Speaker
And these are just regular everyday people who just find these projects interesting.
01:07:13
Speaker
That's, I think DeFi is what drove the last run up that we saw in the fall of 2020.
01:07:22
Speaker
And to be quite frank, I do, DeFi is the first like multi-billion dollar, potentially trillion dollar application that's within blockchain.
01:07:32
Speaker
because traditional financial markets, particularly illiquid derivatives markets, like that's where Goldman makes their money.
01:07:42
Speaker
The spreads in some of these exotics are enormous and that's Goldman making those markets, capturing those spreads.
01:07:49
Speaker
And what we're doing is we're automating that and we're creating a trustless layer.
01:07:55
Speaker
And that's fascinating that
01:07:59
Speaker
things have progressed so quickly in such a short span of time.
01:08:02
Speaker
And like at this point, quite frankly, I can't even keep up with it.
01:08:05
Speaker
Like, I'm just, I'm just this boring dinosaur at this point.
01:08:10
Speaker
That's awesome.
01:08:11
Speaker
I wanted to talk to you real quick about, you know, you're a celebrity, like it or not.
01:08:21
Speaker
You're famous, people know you.
01:08:24
Speaker
And we can see your face.
01:08:26
Speaker
And you,
01:08:29
Speaker
I know you say you're apolitical, but you do talk about some bad guys that are out there.
01:08:38
Speaker
Do you think that that creates vulnerability?
01:08:41
Speaker
So I'm in this position myself where my name and face are connected to sort of my online identity.
01:08:48
Speaker
And I'm just now starting to navigate what that means.
01:08:52
Speaker
How have you handled that?
01:08:54
Speaker
And has it been something that's concerned you at all?
01:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, 2018.
01:08:59
Speaker
I used to go by my real name on Twitter and I had a few people attempt to dock.
01:09:05
Speaker
They had a few people tag my employer in some of my posts.
01:09:10
Speaker
That's when I went with the Citizen Hush name.
01:09:14
Speaker
And that's what Citizen Hush is nodding to.
01:09:16
Speaker
It's just a joke to stop snitching.
01:09:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:22
Speaker
And yeah, it probably occupies maybe 1% of my mental capacity at this point.
01:09:31
Speaker
Like,
01:09:32
Speaker
at this point, like I'm not doing anything illegal.
01:09:34
Speaker
I'm not saying anything overtly inflammatory.
01:09:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:38
Speaker
And like, I'm all, I'm all for free association, but like, um, D platforming people and things like that.
01:09:46
Speaker
Like my, my stance on that, like I used to have a very like free market approach to that, but like, I think seeing the extent of D platforming and what that does and the ramifications of it, like I've reached a point where I'm like, actually now,
01:10:01
Speaker
You are a private company in name, but the moment you start accepting public money in the form of funding from direct subsidies or funding from institutional sovereign wealth funds from any state, not even the United States, any state.
01:10:21
Speaker
Or even just the regulations that make them de facto monopolies that put out their competition.
01:10:27
Speaker
I mean, they're so...
01:10:28
Speaker
The levers of state power have infected the corporate world so deeply that it's hard to say that they're separate things.
01:10:36
Speaker
And that's what's scary.
01:10:38
Speaker
That's what scares me the most, actually, because that's the literal definition of fascism.
01:10:46
Speaker
And yeah, the moment you lobby for you spend private resources to lobby for special favors, accept subsidies in the form of either direct subsidies or investment from sovereign wealth funds.
01:10:59
Speaker
Like you're no longer a private company.
01:11:00
Speaker
I'm sorry.
01:11:01
Speaker
You, you are benefiting from the economies of scale that come with government and government force.
01:11:07
Speaker
And the moment you start doing that, you don't get the same benefits a mom and pop shop gets.
01:11:15
Speaker
I'm sorry.
01:11:16
Speaker
That's kind of how I feel about like these social media companies and things like that.
01:11:20
Speaker
Like it's a,
01:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, not anymore.
01:11:23
Speaker
Not anymore.
01:11:23
Speaker
And like for me, like my identity, like I've reached a point now where I'm close enough to financial independence to where it doesn't really, it doesn't phase me too much.
01:11:35
Speaker
Like it's a, it'll push back, it'll push back the champagne bottles popping a couple years.
01:11:43
Speaker
But I mean,
01:11:45
Speaker
Nah, that's kind of the thing.
01:11:47
Speaker
Like when you, like what we were talking about, like this doomsday thing, like when you have done enough to build enough fail-saves from an income perspective and from a skills perspective, like,
01:12:02
Speaker
You're not beholden.
01:12:03
Speaker
You're not beholden to a single employer.
01:12:05
Speaker
And like having W-2 income was always terrifying to me because it's very similar to like what you're seeing with the government today with the vaccine mandate.
01:12:16
Speaker
If you if you don't want the vaccine, but you take any form of government service that you need.
01:12:23
Speaker
provides a basic necessity, whether it's healthcare, education, whatever.
01:12:26
Speaker
Well, you got to do what the government tells you to do.
01:12:28
Speaker
And it's the same thing with W2 income.
01:12:30
Speaker
If you are beholden to your W2 income from an employer,
01:12:35
Speaker
they have leverage over you, quite frankly.
01:12:37
Speaker
And you are going from being an independent person to an indentured servant.
01:12:42
Speaker
And that has always been something I've tried to diversify myself away throughout my career.
01:12:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:48
Speaker
I mean, the biggest sort of awakening from my experience of being doxed and fired was the realization that
01:13:00
Speaker
you know, even if they couldn't send the police to kick in my door for the things that I've said, they could take away my kid's health insurance.
01:13:06
Speaker
You know, my kid was having a weird medical issue that we were concerned about.
01:13:10
Speaker
And all of a sudden I don't have insurance.
01:13:12
Speaker
And, and, you know, we were blessed that we had enough runway to, to, to make this new project happen.
01:13:23
Speaker
But like, I think about all the guys who don't have that kind of runway.
01:13:27
Speaker
And so for them to like,
01:13:29
Speaker
keep their head down and their mouth shut, I'm like, I totally get it.
01:13:31
Speaker
And what I want from what I'm doing is to get them in the position that you're talking about where they just, you know, maybe it stings a little bit, maybe it slows some things down, but they don't have this existential terror of being, you know, caught in those gears.
01:13:50
Speaker
So yeah, totally understand.
01:13:53
Speaker
I'm with you a hundred percent.
01:13:55
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like that's an unintended consequence of this push of we've created this unintentional
01:14:06
Speaker
manufacturing plant where we've created an economy that's so tied to having a college degree and we've pumped in cheap debt to help finance college degrees artificially making college degrees more expensive.
01:14:19
Speaker
So you need to take out each generation has to take out more debt to get a college degree in order to get that job.
01:14:25
Speaker
And now we're at the point where the college debt is so high per capita that like it is creating existential crisis with
Debt, College Degrees, and Economic Challenges
01:14:35
Speaker
people.
01:14:35
Speaker
When you, when you have a hundred K in debt as a 22 year old hovering over your head, I, that was me.
01:14:43
Speaker
When I left grad school, when I left grad school, I had like 90 K in student loans.
01:14:46
Speaker
And yeah,
01:14:48
Speaker
And when you have that hovering over your head, that's a scary feeling.
01:14:54
Speaker
And your principles are a little more flexible.
01:14:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:58
Speaker
No, absolutely.
01:15:02
Speaker
Power will find whatever pathway.
01:15:06
Speaker
It's an evolutionary process.
01:15:10
Speaker
If people can't coerce you one way, they're going to find another.
01:15:13
Speaker
And right now, the way they're doing it, because we technically still have the Constitution,
01:15:17
Speaker
is, is there, they're using employers.
01:15:20
Speaker
And it's so interesting to me, the way that, uh, you know, you, you talked about mom and pop shops, like the, the corporation is so big that when you're defending that corporation's rights, you're not really defending any human autonomy, any human agency.
01:15:37
Speaker
There's nothing behind it.
01:15:39
Speaker
It's, it's just a system that's totally separate from any one person.
01:15:44
Speaker
And whereas if you're defending the mom and pop shops right to exist, then you're really defending mom and pop.
01:15:50
Speaker
There's human beings.
01:15:52
Speaker
And so, yeah, I mean, I definitely had a so I'm an econ guy myself and I definitely had a libertarian spell.
01:16:00
Speaker
And and it sounds like, you know, like you said, you're using that word as a shorthand because you don't want to get into it.
01:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:16:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:09
Speaker
But like, yeah, you know, if you're smart and you're paying attention, you see that there's nuance there and that the state doesn't just mean the state.
01:16:19
Speaker
Yeah, it means all of its tentacles and all the things the tentacles touch.
01:16:24
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:16:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting too, because like we've meant, if you look at the distribute, like we've effectively erased the middle class because we've allowed, we've created all these government special favors to corporate interests, where now you can't really, yeah, like what you were saying, you can't defend a corporation as a small business because it's not really like,
01:16:48
Speaker
It's not the same thing.
01:16:49
Speaker
It's a legal entity at that point.
01:16:52
Speaker
We've effectively erased this middle class that was the bedrock of the American economy, which was entrepreneurial in nature.
01:17:02
Speaker
As you can see, entrepreneurial activity in this country has gone down.
01:17:07
Speaker
What we've done is we've created more and more debt slaves who are beholden to corporations, who are in bed with the government.
01:17:16
Speaker
They
01:17:17
Speaker
It's a nasty, nasty, vicious cycle.
01:17:19
Speaker
And like, I don't think that there was like, there's no nefarious design into this.
01:17:24
Speaker
I just think it's an unintended consequence of the incentive structures over the course of decades of cheap debt and government intervention.
01:17:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:32
Speaker
When you talk about, I mentioned this on my sub stack a little earlier, when you talk about laissez-faire and a huge portion of the economy is run by these sort of
01:17:43
Speaker
rapacious artificial intelligences that are like, like a corporation is in a sense like a profit maximizing artificial intelligence.
01:17:51
Speaker
It's not, it's not really run by the CEO.
01:17:54
Speaker
It's, it's this really distributed network.
01:17:57
Speaker
And so when you're talking about laissez faire, let them do,
01:18:00
Speaker
Who are you talking about?
01:18:01
Speaker
You're not talking about human beings.
01:18:03
Speaker
And that's my attitude is I believe in freedom for humans.
01:18:08
Speaker
Yep.
01:18:09
Speaker
And I'm with you.
01:18:11
Speaker
And so whatever it takes to maximize that, that's what I'm interested in.
01:18:18
Speaker
I heard it.
01:18:18
Speaker
I heard a trace of Frederick Hayek in that one.
01:18:21
Speaker
You know, I haven't done the reading like I should, but that sounds great.
01:18:29
Speaker
I did just read the Wikipedia actually reading us reading the Austrian economists is painful.
01:18:36
Speaker
They're terrible writers.
01:18:40
Speaker
Well, this has been a great conversation.
01:18:42
Speaker
It's so good to meet you.
01:18:44
Speaker
People can find you at Citizen Hush on Twitter or your YouTube channel where you're doing your gun videos and podcasts with some really interesting folks.
01:18:55
Speaker
YouTube is Citizen Hush.
01:18:57
Speaker
If folks are interested in what we do here at Exit, you can check us out at patreon.com slash exit underscore org or follow us on Twitter at exit underscore org.
01:19:06
Speaker
Thanks so much for coming on.
01:19:07
Speaker
Yeah, man.
01:19:08
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
01:19:09
Speaker
It's a ton of fun.