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ALEKS SVETSKI | Sound Money and the Samurai Code: Bitcoin and the Future of Masculinity
Episode 198 • 27th September 2024 • The Will Spencer Podcast • Will Spencer
00:00:00 01:57:45

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Will Spencer hosts a compelling discussion with Alex Svetski, the author of the new book "The Bushido of Bitcoin." This episode delves into the intersection of virtues and the transformative potential of Bitcoin, as Spencer and Svetski explore how sound money can reshape societal values.

They discuss the importance of virtues like courage, restraint, and excellence in guiding men towards a future shaped by Bitcoin's economic paradigm. Svetski shares insights from his extensive research into historical warrior cultures, drawing parallels with modern challenges and the virtues needed to navigate them.

The conversation also touches on the transcendent nature of beauty, the necessity of self-sacrifice, and how these timeless values can lead to a more virtuous and resilient society.

Takeaways:

  • The Renaissance of Men podcast is ending, but Will Spencer is excited about the future.
  • Bitcoin is often misunderstood but is considered one of the most important technologies today.
  • Understanding Bitcoin involves recognizing its potential to transform how we think about money and value.
  • The Bushido of Bitcoin explores how Bitcoin impacts men and their understanding of virtue.
  • Virtues such as courage, restraint, and excellence are crucial for building a better society.
  • The podcast emphasizes the tension between masculine and feminine virtues in today's world.
  • The episode discusses the need for a warrior class and the transformative power of beauty.

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Transcripts

Will Spencer:

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to one of the last episodes of the Renaissance of Men podcast.

Will Spencer:

The clock is ticking down to my big debut.

Will Spencer:

It's been more than nine months worth of work.

Will Spencer:

I'm very excited and I hope you are too.

Will Spencer:

My guest this week is the host of the Wake up podcast and the author of the new book the Bushido of Bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

Please welcome Alex Svetsky.

Will Spencer:

You are the Renaissance.

Will Spencer:

Alright, listen, I get it.

Will Spencer:

Some of you guys arent the biggest fans of my bitcoin podcasts.

Will Spencer:

But heres why I keep doing them.

Will Spencer:

Bitcoin might be the most important technology today that people dont fully understand.

Will Spencer:

Youll hear about it on CNBC.

Will Spencer:

When bitcoin pumps, that means the price jumps up dramatically.

Will Spencer:

And of course youll hear about it when it dumps too, or when it crashes, which by the way, it does.

Will Spencer:

But then it rises again.

Will Spencer:

Maybe you've heard your friends say things like, bro, you gotta get orange pilled or number go up.

Will Spencer:

Little phrases like that.

Will Spencer:

But those bro isms are just a way to express a lot of excitement about something really special.

Will Spencer:

There are a lot of reasons that bitcoin has this effect.

Will Spencer:

One is the elegance of Satoshi Nakamoto's solution to a tough problem.

Will Spencer:

There's a beauty to it conceptually.

Will Spencer:

Then there's the global effort happening right now.

Will Spencer:

From bitcoin mining to infrastructure to storage and next gen transaction systems, thousands of smart men, and yes, many women, are pouring themselves into this work, trying to free America and the world from the grip of the Federal Reserve system.

Will Spencer:

But one of the coolest and yet under acknowledged aspects of bitcoin is the effect it has on men.

Will Spencer:

As men, when we grasp what bitcoin means for who God made us to be, it's transformative.

Will Spencer:

Now, I need to be careful here, because in the bitcoin community, it's easy for the language to get a little hyperbolic, sometimes even idolatrous.

Will Spencer:

I remember back in:

Will Spencer:

Even back then I was like, alright guys, take it easy.

Will Spencer:

So that's not what I'm saying.

Will Spencer:

But when a man realizes there's a technology out there that guarantees his hard earned money won't get inflated away or stolen, it changes how you think about things.

Will Spencer:

So hold on, you're telling me I can learn a skill, make money from that skill, put it in an online wallet, and that money will only grow in value, not shrink.

Will Spencer:

The government can't tax or confiscate it, as long as I keep it in that wallet without converting it to dollars.

Will Spencer:

And no matter how much the Federal Reserve prints, it'll still be there, untouched and never diluted.

Will Spencer:

This is a massive paradigm shift for men who have been trained to think they have to earn a salary that somehow outpaces inflation, something that's basically impossible unless you're a high level investor.

Will Spencer:

And maybe I'm crazy, but I'm the kind of radical, right wing, christian extremist who wants to live in a world where a father can support his family on one income and trust that the government and its agencies will protect his family's savings.

Will Spencer:

I know crazy.

Will Spencer:

Right now, we don't live in that world anymore, unfortunately.

Will Spencer:

But if we did, it would change the way we think about our lives, in ways our grandfathers took for granted.

Will Spencer:

So it's worth asking, if we could live in that world, even for a moment, what would happen?

Will Spencer:

How would we as men be different?

Will Spencer:

And that is the power of bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

And that's why I love it and why I still believe that you'll love it, too.

Will Spencer:

Which brings me to my guest this week.

Will Spencer:

His name is Alex Svetsky, and he's been on the podcast before.

Will Spencer:

The last time he was here, we discussed his book, the uncommunist Manifesto, and we had a great conversation that sticks with me today.

Will Spencer:

But this time, he's back to discuss his newest book, the Bushido of Bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

Bushido was the warrior code of the samurai, focused on men embodying virtue, discipline, and honor.

Will Spencer:

Those are exactly the sorts of things men start thinking about when they dive into bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

Now, I know it might sound crazy, but imagine if you knew that you could get ahead by being honest, working hard, and delivering real value, and the economic system would reward you for that.

Will Spencer:

How would that change how you see the world?

Will Spencer:

Now, obviously, we're all accountable to the word of God, and hopefully, we're all pursuing truth for its own inherent goodness and not for some external reward.

Will Spencer:

But doesn't it get exhausting when the incentives seem to run the other way?

Will Spencer:

What if that wasn't the case?

Will Spencer:

What if we could all make more money by being honest craftsmen rather than lying superstars like, you know, p.

Will Spencer:

Diddy?

Will Spencer:

What if, at least when it came to our money, the incentives flowed downhill to virtue, rather than uphill to vice?

Will Spencer:

Well, bitcoin fixes this.

Will Spencer:

And that thought experiment is what inspired Alex to write his new book, which we're about to discuss.

Will Spencer:

And hopefully this podcast will convince just one more person to take a closer look at something I think is pretty cool.

Will Spencer:

I mean, it had better because the bitcoin podcast will keep coming until morale improves.

Will Spencer:

In this conversation, Alex and I discussed testosterone as an on demand hormone.

Will Spencer:

Justice, mercy, and grace, masculine and feminine virtues in society, the cultural need for a warrior class, the transformative power of beauty, why courage is faith in action, and finally, self control, restraint, and excellence.

Will Spencer:

If you enjoy this podcast, thank you.

Will Spencer:

Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Will Spencer:

If this is your first time here, welcome.

Will Spencer:

I release new episodes every week about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family.

Will Spencer:

Also, just a quick note, this podcast is available for advertising and sponsorship.

Will Spencer:

So if you're an advertiser with a high integrity product or service and want to reach thousands of christian men, women, and families every month, please email infoennofmen.com for more details.

Will Spencer:

People all over the world are tuning into this podcast, and with the rebrand coming soon, I'm planning to expand its reach dramatically with without sacrificing quality.

Will Spencer:

And to all my listeners, I'm deeply honored by your time and attention.

Will Spencer:

Thank you.

Will Spencer:

And if you like me prefer an ad free experience, check out my substack at willspencerpod dot substack.com and become a paid subscriber.

Will Spencer:

You'll get ad free content, both audio and video, every week.

Will Spencer:

Before we dive in, one more quick note.

Will Spencer:

Alex and I have spoken often, and he's seriously exploring Christianity, but he's still on that road home.

Will Spencer:

So there are a couple swear words in this episode.

Will Spencer:

If you've got kids around, maybe send them off to bed with a good book, and you can tell them that I gave Alex a very hard time for it and told him to slap himself on the wrist with a ruler.

Will Spencer:

And I'm pretty sure he did it.

Will Spencer:

And now, please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the author of the Bushido of Bitcoin, Alex Svetsky.

Will Spencer:

Alex, welcome back to the podcast.

Alex Svetsky:

Will.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you for having me again, man.

Alex Svetsky:

It's been a couple of years.

Will Spencer:

I'm glad to be back, man.

Will Spencer:

I really enjoyed the last conversation we had, which I guess was a couple years ago, but you said something before we get into what you're working on now, you actually said something that kind of lives rent free in my head during that podcast.

Will Spencer:

And you said testosterone is an on demand hormone, and I've used that line.

Will Spencer:

I can't count the number of times trying to explain.

Will Spencer:

Obviously, men's testosterone decline is big in the news right now, and there are all kinds of conspiracy theories, like, and I don't mean that in a disparaging sense.

Will Spencer:

I mean it, like, just kind of floating around and valid in explanations as well.

Will Spencer:

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

Will Spencer:

So thank you for that insight.

Will Spencer:

I get a lot of pushback when I tell that to men, by the way.

Will Spencer:

But maybe we can kick that around because I'm sure it feeds into the book you've written.

Alex Svetsky:

I would love to.

Alex Svetsky:

And it's funny, I get a lot of pushback on that, too.

Alex Svetsky:

And an incredible amount of pushback from people that I don't expect pushback from.

Alex Svetsky:

They're like, oh, yeah, but the seed oils and the plastics and this, and they'll, like, pull out all the other things, which are all valid concerns, as you said.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, if you, you know, if you.

Alex Svetsky:

If you're eating like that and if you're, you know, if you're wearing polyester and all this sort of stuff, I'm sure that has an effect.

Alex Svetsky:

But as I said back then when we had that conversation, and I maintain that, and I've experienced it myself more and more as I've been training and practicing jiu jitsu.

Alex Svetsky:

More is like the body has a way of producing it or responding basically to its environment.

Alex Svetsky:

And we are living in a world that is optimizing fundamentally for safety, for comfort, for ease, for all of the things that just don't need testosterone.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, you know, this keyboard here, like, doesn't require testosterone to punch the keys.

Will Spencer:

Like, maybe we need to invent a new keyboard, a high t keyboard, elbow.

Alex Svetsky:

The keys if you want anything to come out.

Alex Svetsky:

But seriously, it just doesn't like, testosterone is needed for a particular purpose.

Alex Svetsky:

And when you need to protect, when you need to be aggressive, when you need to compete, when you need to push against something.

Alex Svetsky:

And these are all masculine traits.

Alex Svetsky:

It's no wonder that the man, the masculine, is the creature in which testosterone is most prevalent.

Alex Svetsky:

It's for a reason, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, I think I remember you actually cut that clip out from when we first spoke, and that was something that definitely did the rounds quite a bit.

Alex Svetsky:

And I've seen other people start to sort of mention it here and there on the twitterverse, etcetera.

Alex Svetsky:

But, yeah, I think it's such an underappreciated thing and just something that gets pushback from people who want to basically, theory sell their way into explaining everything when, you know, quite often in life, the practical thing is, dude, stand under a barbell or get punched in the face and watch your testosterone go up.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, like, that's really as simple as it is.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, I think that there are lots of environmental factors that kind of feed into it.

Will Spencer:

But even if you were to completely purify your diet and your physical environment of all toxins and live out in the jungle and eat entirely naturally grown foods and everything, I still think you would probably go a long way towards reversing the decline.

Will Spencer:

But without struggle, if you still have a life of ease, you're just naturally not going to become the kind of man who has a body that produces testosterone to meet challenges.

Will Spencer:

And so it seems like such a simple idea that puts the responsibility on the man beyond just like, well, you have to buy the right stuff.

Will Spencer:

Like, no, you have to do the right things as well.

Will Spencer:

And I think that there are a lot of people, even today, and I think we all have to root this idea out from within ourselves, that it's not just about buying the right stuff or consuming the right things.

Will Spencer:

You have to do as well.

Will Spencer:

And maybe that's the theory cell kind of thing that you were talking about.

Alex Svetsky:

100%.

Alex Svetsky:

In fact, it's going to touch on what I think a large part of the conversation is going to be about today, which is virtue.

Alex Svetsky:

And the new book that I wrote that I spent the last couple of years since we spoke, really writing, researching, developing, and all this sort of stuff is a book about virtues.

Alex Svetsky:

And I like to differentiate between virtues and values, as values are things that you desire, so values are things that you want or a state that you want to experience.

Alex Svetsky:

Virtues are a behavior.

Alex Svetsky:

In fact, I almost think of, like, so etymologically, this is not correct, but I guess energetically, like the spirit of the word virtue means something like principle and behavior, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Those two things together.

Alex Svetsky:

So a virtue is something you do in order to achieve that which you value, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So it's almost like the theory versus the practice, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So freedom, for example, is not a virtue.

Alex Svetsky:

Freedom is something you value, but the virtue that delivers freedom is responsibility.

Alex Svetsky:

So there's that kind of interplay.

Alex Svetsky:

So I think, to your point about doing, and I say this many times throughout the book, actually is, look, we can sit here and write and all this sort of stuff, but no civilization, no business, nothing was ever actually built just by reading books.

Alex Svetsky:

You actually have to go out there and do something about it.

Alex Svetsky:

And that sort of action element implies risk, implies conflict, implies pressure, implies aggression, implies the need for something like testosterone.

Alex Svetsky:

But there's a strong parallel there that, as you were talking, it just hit me.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like the do versus the want, the produce versus the consume, the act versus the desire, the practice versus the theory cell.

Will Spencer:

It's funny you mentioned virtues, and this is something that I've given a lot of thought to, and I'm glad that you brought it up, because I find it's a conversation that a lot of people don't have, or they have it in this really reductionistic way.

Will Spencer:

They select, particularly in the masculinity conversation that I came from, they would select for this very small number of virtues, like physical fitness.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

Or wealth, wealth creation.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

These are specific virtues, and they would kind of, like, autistically focus in on, like, just one of them.

Will Spencer:

This is.

Will Spencer:

This is how you become a man, with this.

Will Spencer:

With this one virtue.

Will Spencer:

And I had to try and teach people, try and instruct people, like, no virtues live in constellation.

Will Spencer:

You can't just have a virtue on its own, divorced from any other virtues around.

Will Spencer:

It becomes toxic or can become destructive.

Will Spencer:

But you have to have these virtues aligned in constellation so that you know how to properly orient towards any action.

Will Spencer:

So, for example, if you say that truth is the highest virtue, and the state police or the Gestapo comes to your house and says, like, we're here to kill your firstborn son, do you have a firstborn son?

Will Spencer:

If truth is your highest virtue?

Will Spencer:

You say, yes, I do.

Will Spencer:

It's like.

Will Spencer:

But we all know how ridiculous that would be, right?

Will Spencer:

So there's other virtues that have to live and that have to live in constellation with that to produce a happy life.

Will Spencer:

But that's not easy.

Will Spencer:

That's a multipolar kind of way of thinking about life.

Will Spencer:

To have all these virtues produce action, thought.

Will Spencer:

Right, responsibility, etcetera.

Alex Svetsky:

So to pull on that thread further, I think constellation is a great word.

Alex Svetsky:

I actually haven't thought of it that way.

Alex Svetsky:

I've always thought of it as a spider's web, almost, where you've got tension between the different virtues.

Alex Svetsky:

But constellation is a perfect word here, which is if you look at any of the.

Alex Svetsky:

The moral or virtue codes throughout history, whether they're or at least the great civilizations, in my opinion.

Alex Svetsky:

So the christian west, the Japanese, the ancient west, as well, fundamentally, the Greeks, the Romans, all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

There's quite a strong overlap.

Alex Svetsky:

And what you find with all of them is this healthy tension.

Alex Svetsky:

The best one that I usually explain, and this is this washing quite important in japanese bushido.

Alex Svetsky:

And so, for those who are listening, who don't know what the word bushido means, it means way of the warrior.

Alex Svetsky:

And what it essentially referred to was the implicit code of conduct or code of virtue or moral code that the samurai would live by in order to be considered a samurai or a man of value, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So it wasn't like a written ten commandments, but it was like a code of ethics that was sort of passed down through action and deed.

Alex Svetsky:

But two of the virtues in the traditional japanese bushido are justice and compassion.

Alex Svetsky:

And justice is viewed as sort of like the skeleton of the body, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So justice is like the righteousness.

Alex Svetsky:

It is the strict line of truth and what is just and what is not.

Alex Svetsky:

But what was very clear in the way Bushido was kind of.

Alex Svetsky:

I don't want to say taught, but, like, embodied and I guess implicitly taught in samurai culture, was you had to temper justice with compassion.

Alex Svetsky:

Because sometimes, if you, like, a good mental model here is if you build something purely, like, justice oriented, you get something that looks more and more and more like, probably Nazism or extreme fascism, right?

Alex Svetsky:

It's, like, very hierarchical, and there's no room for error.

Alex Svetsky:

There's no room for softness.

Alex Svetsky:

And it becomes extremely brutal.

Alex Svetsky:

And the more brutal it becomes, the more brutal it actually becomes.

Alex Svetsky:

So compassion softens.

Alex Svetsky:

And this is why men alone don't exist.

Alex Svetsky:

That you have masculine and you have feminine.

Alex Svetsky:

Compassion is more of a feminine trait.

Alex Svetsky:

Justice is a much more masculine trait.

Alex Svetsky:

And there's, like, a softening, which is coming back to what you said about a constellation, that there is multiple virtues that need to come together in combination.

Alex Svetsky:

Like another great one is courage tempered by restraint or self control.

Alex Svetsky:

You need both.

Alex Svetsky:

So that's in the japanese context.

Alex Svetsky:

In the christian context, you had courage tempered with temperance.

Alex Svetsky:

So you had sort of that balance between the two.

Alex Svetsky:

And balance is probably the wrong word.

Alex Svetsky:

I think tension between the two is more important because you never get balance.

Alex Svetsky:

Balance, I think, is a big scam.

Alex Svetsky:

What you get is a flow between the different virtues, and you find the appropriate one for the right context.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, if the house is burning down, you don't have time for, oh, compassion, let's all be nice to each other and walk out of the door in an orderly fashion.

Alex Svetsky:

No, the fucking house is burning down.

Alex Svetsky:

You get the chair, you throw it out the window.

Alex Svetsky:

You send everybody out.

Alex Svetsky:

It's time to be a gestapo.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, in a different context, you might need compassion, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, you're in a courtroom and you have a young person who's got energy and vitality and everything, and he's done the wrong thing.

Alex Svetsky:

You might need to, like, justice might say, okay, we should chop his hands off, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, because he stole something.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, compassion might say, no, there needs to be some level of care given here and an attempt to turn this person around or to correct them.

Alex Svetsky:

So you need.

Alex Svetsky:

You need all of these things.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's where, I mean, you and I are definitely not figuring this out on this call.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like, we can do it.

Alex Svetsky:

Yes.

Alex Svetsky:

We have been discussing this for millennia, and the hard thing about hard things is that these things are hard, and we just must contend with them as the.

Alex Svetsky:

The humans that we are.

Alex Svetsky:

So I'll shut up there for a moment, but I love that point.

Will Spencer:

No, that's great.

Will Spencer:

Can I offer you a christian perspective on some of these issues?

Alex Svetsky:

Please.

Will Spencer:

So, in Christianity, there's justice and mercy.

Will Spencer:

Mercy is the.

Will Spencer:

Mercy is a word we don't hear very often.

Will Spencer:

I think it gets reframed in English today as compassion or empathy.

Will Spencer:

But justice is getting what you deserve.

Will Spencer:

Mercy is not getting what you deserve.

Will Spencer:

And then you add onto that the concept of grace, which is getting what you don't deserve.

Will Spencer:

And so in a christian context, the justice and mercy, they live in intention.

Will Spencer:

The young man you mentioned, he may be deserving of justice.

Will Spencer:

And in a sin and salvation context, we're all deserving of justice, which is a whole other conversation.

Will Spencer:

But in an earthly context, this young man may be deserving of justice, but the judge.

Will Spencer:

The judge may choose to give him mercy and that mercy.

Will Spencer:

And I think compassion, empathy as feelings.

Will Spencer:

And I think this is part of the pollution of our language.

Will Spencer:

Once you start making it about a feeling, as opposed to, I'm giving you the gift of mercy, someone receives that gift and they're like, I've just been given the gift of mercy.

Will Spencer:

I'm going to go sit and think about that.

Will Spencer:

And I think this is a masculine approach to mercy is masculine versus compassion and empathy are more feminine feeling based.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

So that's why I lean on justice and mercy when our culture doesn't actually need any more compassion or empathy.

Will Spencer:

What it is asking for is mercy.

Will Spencer:

But mercy is a gift.

Will Spencer:

And we want to feel that we're entitled to something, not that we're being.

Alex Svetsky:

Given as a gift, such a good distinction.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, fantastic.

Alex Svetsky:

Fantastic.

Alex Svetsky:

Fantastic.

Alex Svetsky:

And particularly that distinction we just made there about just the masculine versus feminine energy of what's effectively the genesis of the emotion is similar, but there's a different shadow to it.

Alex Svetsky:

And mercy is.

Alex Svetsky:

Yes.

Alex Svetsky:

Very, very masculine and very absent in the modern world, as you said.

Will Spencer:

I think about.

Will Spencer:

Oh, sorry.

Will Spencer:

Go ahead.

Alex Svetsky:

No, no, go ahead.

Will Spencer:

No, I think about the.

Will Spencer:

I think about the end of the movie Braveheart.

Will Spencer:

You know, where he's being tortured and what are people crying out?

Will Spencer:

They're saying mercy.

Will Spencer:

Mercy.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

They're not saying compassion.

Will Spencer:

Compassion, empathy.

Will Spencer:

Empathy.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

It's that he could ask for mercy, but he doesn't.

Will Spencer:

He refuses to make a supplication to his inquisitor asking for a gift.

Will Spencer:

He's like, no, I don't want anything from you.

Will Spencer:

Exactly right.

Will Spencer:

Exactly.

Will Spencer:

So I think this is just the pollution of language that we're kind of dealing with right now, that we're men trying to reestablish a masculine way of living in a world that's completely captured by the feminine.

Alex Svetsky:

Now, this is really good.

Alex Svetsky:

So that reminds me of another thread is something I tried to do in this book, which we did somewhat in the original.

Alex Svetsky:

The uncommon manifesto that Mark Moss and I wrote, I think, which you and I probably did a first.

Alex Svetsky:

Maybe that was one of the topics of our first podcast, or we touched on that in some way, but.

Will Spencer:

Mark Musser.

Alex Svetsky:

No, Mark Moss.

Alex Svetsky:

Mark Moss.

Will Spencer:

Mark Moss.

Will Spencer:

Okay.

Will Spencer:

I was gonna say, I just interviewed Mark Musser last week, and so I don't know that you guys know each other.

Will Spencer:

Okay, sorry, go ahead.

Alex Svetsky:

Another one.

Alex Svetsky:

So he and I, in the beginning of the book, had, like, the definitions of particular words.

Alex Svetsky:

So we define things like capital and capitalism and equality and all this sort of stuff, and made important distinctions at the beginning of the book so that the rest of the book, the points that we made were not misunderstood.

Alex Svetsky:

What I did in this one was even more in depth.

Alex Svetsky:

So the book, if I may, is like, I break it down into five parts, and each part of the book is essentially a standalone book.

Alex Svetsky:

There's the prelude where I go into things like equality and resisting mediocrity and vitality, heroism, the evolution, moral dimension of the universe, all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

Then I go into a history sort of deep dive called origins, where I look at the origins of the samurai, I look at the origins of Bushido, the origins of words like virtue and all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

And then I actually look at the parallels in Christendom, not to a huge extent.

Alex Svetsky:

But definitely, I dig into chivalry, I dig into feudalism.

Alex Svetsky:

I dig into the virtues of chivalry and how they overlap and all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

But then the third part of the book, which is basically, I would say, the spine or the main meat of the book, is the ten virtues which I pulled out.

Alex Svetsky:

And the virtues that I picked are not virtues that I chose.

Alex Svetsky:

These are virtues that have been chosen again and again in all successful cultures that have yielded the most successful civilizations.

Alex Svetsky:

That's kind of like my marker.

Alex Svetsky:

You find this set of virtues in Christianity, and the closest overlap, honestly, I found, was Romans, Greeks, and Japanese.

Alex Svetsky:

That seemed to be the closest overlap to Christianity, and Christianity seemed to blend across both.

Alex Svetsky:

But the beginning, first two pages of each virtue, I go into the etymology of the words.

Alex Svetsky:

So the etymology of the word courage, the etymology of the word compassion, the etymology of the word honor, of honesty, integrity, responsibility, excellence, respect, duty, loyalty, restraint.

Alex Svetsky:

And I did something interesting.

Alex Svetsky:

So I go into the English, the Latin, the greek etymology, all the way to the proto indo european root of the word.

Alex Svetsky:

And I did the same with the japanese and chinese pictogram.

Alex Svetsky:

And you would not believe, like, the very structure of these words from different languages, from different places, from different cultures, end up referring to the same thing etymologically and through to the current.

Alex Svetsky:

I guess understanding and conception of the words like excellence was an interesting one.

Alex Svetsky:

So, excellence derives from two proto indo european words, like eg and selair.

Alex Svetsky:

And what it essentially means is climbing a mountain or separating oneself from the field.

Alex Svetsky:

So it's about, like, excellence as a concept is something to do with heights and climbing and separation.

Alex Svetsky:

And it's basically the same meaning in Japanese.

Alex Svetsky:

And I think to your point earlier, what you were talking about, like, the pollution of words, is that words didn't just arise out of nowhere, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, didn't just, like, I.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I'm just gonna call this a cup.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, the reason we call it a cup is something to do with a thing that bears something, and that's something to do with, you know, some sound that we imbued on something that carries something.

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, without sort of getting too bogged down in this part of the discussion, but, like, words and the sounds that they're made up of and the fragments that they're made up of actually have a meaning, and they mean something.

Alex Svetsky:

They carry a charge, they carry weight.

Alex Svetsky:

And in many ways, we've forgotten that in the modern world, because these days, everything is relativistic.

Alex Svetsky:

Nothing has meaning, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this sort of crap that we know and discuss.

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, just wanted to on that.

Will Spencer:

Im so glad you did that because I often when IMD writing a piece for Instagram or substack or something like that, or sometimes even when I write the intros to this podcast, I'll go to Edmonline and I'll look up the etymology of words to understand.

Will Spencer:

What does it actually mean?

Will Spencer:

How do I know I'm using the correct word?

Will Spencer:

And I'm glad that you did that with those virtues, because, again, virtue is not something that we talk a lot about in our society today.

Will Spencer:

We have virtues imposed upon us by culture, tolerance, respect.

Will Spencer:

I guess you might say diversity would be another one.

Will Spencer:

All of these inclusive virtues, virtues that bring more people into the fold, they're essentially feminine.

Will Spencer:

And that's not to say that feminine virtues are negative.

Will Spencer:

They're not.

Will Spencer:

Feminine virtues are beautiful.

Will Spencer:

But when you have them running an entire society, the society begins to crumble.

Will Spencer:

Because feminine virtues don't build society.

Will Spencer:

They sustain society by sustaining the home.

Will Spencer:

But you can't actually sustain society based on feminine virtues.

Will Spencer:

Masculine virtues build.

Will Spencer:

But masculine virtues are more exclusive.

Will Spencer:

Like you said about excellence, it's about climbing to a mountain height.

Will Spencer:

Well, that's not very inclusive.

Will Spencer:

Mountaintops are so.

Will Spencer:

Mountain stops are so exclusive.

Will Spencer:

Like, what if someone is differently abled and they can't get up to the mountain?

Will Spencer:

It's like, well, sorry, tough, right?

Will Spencer:

But these virtues inspire men to heights that other men can't achieve.

Will Spencer:

But we're not allowed to know what those virtues are.

Will Spencer:

And I think we're starving for them as men.

Will Spencer:

To hear these words that speak to, that speak to the best parts of us, as opposed to trying to bash us into boxes where we're less effective women or bad copies of women.

Alex Svetsky:

This.

Alex Svetsky:

It's funny, when I was writing the book, I was using the word moral code quite a lot.

Alex Svetsky:

And morality just gets so abused as a concept, particularly in the modern world.

Alex Svetsky:

Everyone's trying to.

Alex Svetsky:

When they find someone who is somewhat moral, then people use it as a way to browbeat you, you know what I mean?

Alex Svetsky:

It's like I'm more moral than thou and all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

And then your morality and my morality and all this sort of stuff, it just gets really messy.

Alex Svetsky:

So I was trying to avoid that and I kind of make a point in the book.

Alex Svetsky:

I said, look, if you want to understand morality, I said, go read the Bible.

Alex Svetsky:

Don't come to me for morality.

Alex Svetsky:

Talk in this more about virtue, which are more like, which is, I don't want to say different to morality, but it's related and it's more something that you can see.

Alex Svetsky:

If you have a virtue around bodily excellence and you're fat, I can tell very quickly that you don't have any virtue there, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So virtues are far more like visible, whereas morals can be more easily hidden.

Alex Svetsky:

Now this is, it's not always the case, but I think you get a lot of that obfuscation.

Alex Svetsky:

So I chose primarily to focus this book on virtues in particular.

Alex Svetsky:

But something somebody said to me when they were reading, they're like, what about virtue signaling?

Alex Svetsky:

Isn't that like a big problem today?

Alex Svetsky:

I was like, fuck, you know, that didn't even like register for me because I, like, I've forgotten all about it.

Alex Svetsky:

Like it wasn't even in my periphery.

Alex Svetsky:

Like I missed it.

Alex Svetsky:

And I was like, you know what, you're right.

Alex Svetsky:

So I had to like write a section in the book about like how even the concept of virtue today has been like deformed into this thing.

Alex Svetsky:

Like about virtue signaling.

Alex Svetsky:

So there's no, it's no longer even about what you said.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, you know, we've got these feminine virtues and everything.

Alex Svetsky:

But I, many of the virtues aren't even examined and the essence of the virtue is not even discussed.

Alex Svetsky:

Like you ask the average leftist or average psycho that wants to impose their Dei and all this sort of stuff, diversity, equity, inclusion, all this stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

You ask them what the meaning of those words actually mean.

Alex Svetsky:

They would have absolutely zero idea.

Alex Svetsky:

0000 but they're signaling to the world that, hey, I'm diverse, I am inclusive, I'm all this sort of shit.

Alex Svetsky:

And like it just, it's maddening in itself.

Alex Svetsky:

But to add to that, as you said, about which virtues actually build society, it is fundamentally the masculine ones because structure itself, like if you look at what a civilization is, a civilization is a structure and a structure is something that creates an inside and an outside.

Alex Svetsky:

A structure is fundamentally exclusive.

Alex Svetsky:

Like I have the door on my room closed right now so that I can do a podcast.

Alex Svetsky:

Like we have locks on doors, for God's sake, so that we can keep people out.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, like, we build walls on a house so that we have a territory delineated and demarcated, and the structural element, whether of a home or a civilization, of a community, of a family or whatever, is established by a man.

Alex Svetsky:

And there are specific virtues that are necessary in order to do that.

Alex Svetsky:

And there are specific virtues that don't lend themselves, as you said, to building structure, but to creating, I guess, sustenance or life within a structure.

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

But there's, like, this inversion and this, like, incessant attempt to make dudes basically feel guilty about everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we try and accomplish, because it's not feminine enough, it's not inclusive enough, etcetera.

Alex Svetsky:

So anyway, I think your audience knows that, so I don't have to ask.

Alex Svetsky:

Hop on about that point.

Will Spencer:

No, I think it's actually really.

Will Spencer:

I think it's really important, because when we did this thing called sexual liberation, which sort of fueled feminism, what we did is not me, not you, but generations before us determined that women deserved a place in the market, the economy, and the government, and so we liberated women from the home.

Will Spencer:

Now, men and women are different.

Will Spencer:

I think we can all agree on that at this point.

Will Spencer:

So men and women have different innate value systems.

Will Spencer:

And so when you bring women out of the home, into the marketplace with men, and women bring their innate value systems with them, there's going to be a clash.

Will Spencer:

There's going to be a clash of women's values versus men's values.

Will Spencer:

Right?

Will Spencer:

And so somewhere along the line, we just kind of accepted that, well, women can't compete on men's playing field.

Will Spencer:

They just can't.

Will Spencer:

I understand that there are females that can beat average.

Will Spencer:

There are excellent females that can beat average males, but.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, but the best woman at anything is not even close to the best man at a thing.

Will Spencer:

Right?

Will Spencer:

When in terms of competition, intelligence, like, this is real, these things are real.

Will Spencer:

So what we had to do was in order to make the playing field level, we had to impose feminine values on men.

Will Spencer:

And that was all taking place before we got here.

Will Spencer:

I was born into that world.

Will Spencer:

I lived in that world in San Francisco.

Will Spencer:

I can't even imagine.

Will Spencer:

I left that world almost ten years ago.

Will Spencer:

So I can't even imagine what it's like right now.

Will Spencer:

But this is the world that we're all kind of living in.

Will Spencer:

In fact, we're watching it play out on the stage of the presidential election, where you have feminine values versus masculine values.

Will Spencer:

That is what this election is about.

Will Spencer:

It's not about virtue.

Will Spencer:

It's not about policy.

Will Spencer:

It's not about different ideas.

Will Spencer:

It's not even about the border per se.

Will Spencer:

It's about feminine values versus masculine values, period.

Will Spencer:

That is what it is, and which has a hold over the particular voter's psyche.

Will Spencer:

So when we demolished masculine values to make way for feminine values, what have we seen?

Will Spencer:

Not that feminine values are bad.

Will Spencer:

They're incredibly productive inside the home for making a home, for making a house into a home, for sustaining and nurturing the next generations.

Will Spencer:

But when you bring it out into the marketplace, it becomes corrosive for the same reason.

Will Spencer:

When you bring masculine values too much into the home in terms like we're going to build, you can overdrive your family, and you don't want to do that.

Will Spencer:

So when we collapsed the separate spheres into one big mass of society, we lost the ability to make distinguishing features and say, well, this is good for this and this is good for that.

Will Spencer:

And so that has had a particular impact on men, because you said, it's an uphill struggle to get back to a point where we as men can talk about these ideas and then embody them and then gain proficiency in them in a world that's essentially been captured by feminine ideals run amok.

Will Spencer:

Again, I don't want to say that feminine ideals are bad.

Will Spencer:

They're not.

Will Spencer:

They're not innately bad.

Will Spencer:

They're how women were made.

Will Spencer:

But when they subsume the masculine ideals, it becomes bad.

Will Spencer:

It becomes bad for everybody.

Alex Svetsky:

It reminds me of, like, taking a flower out of a garden and then, like, placing it in, like, a harsh environment, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, a flower thrives in a very different environment than a cactus does.

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, cactus is like, you know, far more masculine, for example, than a flower.

Alex Svetsky:

And, like, the cactus is prickly.

Alex Svetsky:

And it has evolved in a particular way because it exists in a harsher environment.

Alex Svetsky:

And the two just don't play nice together.

Alex Svetsky:

And this is one, obviously, one of the big, just like, classic hypocrisies of the whole diversity thing is, like, in an attempt to make everything multicultural and everything diverse in a particular single territory.

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, what they end up doing is they kill all diversity and they kill the differences that actually create genuine, like, organic diversity.

Alex Svetsky:

There's, like, a big difference between the enforced one and the.

Alex Svetsky:

And the natural one.

Alex Svetsky:

And you get the natural one purely by acknowledging these differences that you just alluded to.

Alex Svetsky:

There was something else I wanted to mention there about men, women.

Alex Svetsky:

Anyway, I've forgotten.

Alex Svetsky:

It'll come back.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, that's fine.

Will Spencer:

I want to make sure that we gave the title of your book, which is called the Bushido of bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

I think we just drove off road so excitedly, like, oh, by the way, the exit there was bushido bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

You said you've been working on it for a couple of years, since your book with Mark Moss, and that was when we talked last, when you wrote the uncommunist manifesto.

Will Spencer:

So what was it that inspired the bushido of bitcoin?

Will Spencer:

And I guess you told me earlier that it's over 300 pages now, so this must be something that's pretty near and dear to you.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

So the original inspiration actually came from.

Alex Svetsky:

I had a really great conversation with Eric Kaysen.

Alex Svetsky:

I don't know if you've come across him at all in the bitcoin space, but he's an interesting character.

Alex Svetsky:

And we spoke in:

Alex Svetsky:

I think, actually, I remember I was in Austin at the time, and we discussed bitcoin and how there seemed to be this emergent value system among bitcoiners that was forming.

Alex Svetsky:

And we also spoke simultaneously about a book called Shogun by James Clavell, which is now a tv series?

Alex Svetsky:

Book is fantastic.

Alex Svetsky:

Tv series, actually, they finally did a half decent job of something that, you know, didn't totally turn into a woke fest.

Alex Svetsky:

But I've heard.

Will Spencer:

I think.

Will Spencer:

I think I've heard good things about it.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, they finally apparently, like, the main actor there, Hiroyuki Sanata, he's, like, based as hell.

Alex Svetsky:

He's like, I will not be a part of this movie if that's what's gonna happen.

Alex Svetsky:

So they stuck to, um, at least the spirit of the, um, of the book, which is.

Alex Svetsky:

Which is great.

Alex Svetsky:

So, anyway, that.

Alex Svetsky:

That discussion, that podcast that we did was called Bushido of bitcoin.

Alex Svetsky:

But at the time, the.

Alex Svetsky:

The original genesis of the idea was like, okay, could I write a book that looks at the japanese bushido and the virtues there?

Alex Svetsky:

And the virtues that are emerging out of the bitcoin space and find what the overlap is.

Alex Svetsky:

So it's kind of like going to be a simple book, 20,000 words, whatever.

Alex Svetsky:

But as I started writing this, and, you know, there was.

Alex Svetsky:

t of a hiatus from writing in:

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I went and I did my 10,000 hours of, like, history, and I went down multiple rabbit holes.

Alex Svetsky:

Definitely went down the japanese rabbit hole, went way down the.

Alex Svetsky:

The ancient Greco macedonian, hellenistic rabbit hole, roman rabbit hole, medieval Christian west rabbit hole.

Alex Svetsky:

What else did I go down?

Alex Svetsky:

There was a couple other things in there, Chesterton, stuff like that.

Alex Svetsky:

And I started finding all of these overlaps.

Alex Svetsky:

So the nature of the book transformed into something more like.

Alex Svetsky:

The question I came to want to answer was more something like this.

Alex Svetsky:

If we are on the precipice of a new age, something akin to when Christianity sort of became the west after Rome, right?

Alex Svetsky:

There was a change in civilization.

Alex Svetsky:

If we're on the precipice of something similar to that, what are the virtues that we should seek to embody to succeed in a new world?

Alex Svetsky:

The world cannot continue the way it's going at the moment.

Alex Svetsky:

You can't build on continuous lies.

Alex Svetsky:

You can't build on continuous gaslighting.

Alex Svetsky:

You can't build on printed paper money.

Alex Svetsky:

You can't build on a fake economy.

Alex Svetsky:

All of this sort of stuff is self defeating in the end, right?

Alex Svetsky:

The only real question is how much collateral damage occurs until men, strong men, in the true definition of the word, go and take fucking hold of things again.

Alex Svetsky:

And I right the ship.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, that's really the only question here.

Alex Svetsky:

So then I asked, like, okay, what are the virtues we need on this new socioeconomic standard?

Alex Svetsky:

I believe bitcoin will have a big role to play as the world moves towards this sort of new paradigm, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, if we look at the paradigm that we're currently in, we're in what I would call, like, the fiat and feminine paradigm, we will end up, at some point, moving into the sound money masculine strength paradigm, right?

Alex Svetsky:

A different set of virtues are going to be necessary in that paradigm, because in the current one, you need to lie, you need to cheat, you need to steal, you need to get into inclusivity, dei politics, whatever.

Alex Svetsky:

You need to be a parasite in some way to get ahead.

Alex Svetsky:

Nancy Pelosi is rich.

Alex Svetsky:

You and I are broke in comparison to Nancy Pelosi.

Alex Svetsky:

She's clearly doing something right in the current paradigm that you and I are not doing, right.

Alex Svetsky:

But in the new paradigm that I envision, someone like that should not have the oxygen to succeed economically or, you know, socially speaking.

Alex Svetsky:

Right?

Alex Svetsky:

So beyond that, then I said, okay, I am not going to come up with the virtues myself, because who the fuck am I?

Alex Svetsky:

Let me look at.

Alex Svetsky:

Let me look at the cultures.

Alex Svetsky:

So let me look at the civilizations that were the greatest all throughout history.

Alex Svetsky:

And what's upstream of civilization, it's culture.

Alex Svetsky:

And what's upstream of culture, it's virtue, basically.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's behavior.

Alex Svetsky:

It's behavior at the individual level and at the community level and at the tribal level, at the family level.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, what is those virtues?

Alex Svetsky:

And that's when I basically, as I was going down these rabbit holes of the Japanese, the samurai, the, the knights of Christendom, I found that each one of them had this code, particularly in the warrior class.

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

I think that has something to do with, they inspired the lower classes, so they inspired the peasants, the artisans, the merchants, and all that sort of stuff, because there was just something noble about this warrior class, like these people who would go to war for what they believed, right?

Alex Svetsky:

And the classes above them, the nobility, the royalty, the aristocracy, were dependent on the warrior class to have a civilization in the first place.

Alex Svetsky:

You couldn't have a high up, you couldn't have an aristocratic class without a warrior class.

Alex Svetsky:

So in many ways, the warrior class came to be the bearers of these codes.

Alex Svetsky:

So the book ended up just basically becoming this historical look into what were the greatest civilizations and cultures that came before us?

Alex Svetsky:

What were the virtues that the great segment of their, or the leadership segment of their civilization embodied?

Alex Svetsky:

And what can we glean from that?

Alex Svetsky:

What wisdom, what practical advice can we glean from them?

Alex Svetsky:

What can we project forward?

Alex Svetsky:

And it was quite easy for me because I found, as I said, those virtues overlapped very strongly amongst the best cultures of all.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's why I ended up pulling out the things that I mentioned earlier.

Alex Svetsky:

Restraint, duty, loyalty, respect, excellence, justice, compassion, honor, duty, all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

So, so the spine of the book then became this analysis or basically this journey into history and anecdotes and examples and stories and narratives about the great men or the great figures throughout history who embodied each of these virtues.

Alex Svetsky:

And then it goes into a whole discussion about how are we able to reintegrate these things and I look at four key pillars, like culture, governance, wealth, and just the cyclical, seasonal nature of civilization.

Alex Svetsky:

And then after I sort of have that discussion, then I go into this thing which I call, like, a section about praxis.

Alex Svetsky:

And inside praxis, I talk about training, physio psychology, mastery, rites of passage.

Alex Svetsky:

I speak about the idea of a mannerbund, like, how do we bring back societies and groups of men, which I know is a big part of your work, and how do we do that?

Alex Svetsky:

Because that is critical to reestablishing and reintegrating these virtues.

Alex Svetsky:

And then finally, I finish off with, like, a big discussion on the final section of the book is called what the future holds.

Alex Svetsky:

And I try and, like, future pace on, like, ideas like meritocratic feudalism, archaeo futurism, like an aristocracy.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, a structure of excellence and what that might look like and how we can move civilization that way.

Alex Svetsky:

So anyway, this is a long answer of saying, like, the book started off as one thing, and over the last two years, it really evolved and flourished into something far deeper and far more.

Alex Svetsky:

It just touches many things.

Alex Svetsky:

I know it's called bushido of bitcoin, but I almost have nothing in there about bitcoin or economics.

Alex Svetsky:

There's some sections where I try and relate it back to bitcoin and stuff, but really, the bitcoin piece is more about we're moving on to a new socioeconomic paradigm, and bitcoin will be a big part of that because you can't, like, you can't build civilization on fake money.

Alex Svetsky:

That part, like, we have to acknowledge, and that's that piece.

Alex Svetsky:

But then what's equally as important, or probably more important, is who we become and how we live on that standard.

Alex Svetsky:

Because at the end of the day, like, I can have all the bitcoin I want, but if I'm living amongst rubble, my bitcoin doesn't, like, you know, the wealth is not the bitcoin.

Alex Svetsky:

The wealth is the civilization, the family, the tribe, the culture, the religion, like, what we have.

Alex Svetsky:

And bitcoin simply measures that.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's one of the big things that I wanted to put forward in the book.

Alex Svetsky:

But I'll shut up there for a second because that's a big explanation of what the book is.

Will Spencer:

No, that's fantastic, actually.

Will Spencer:

That sounds like you encountered some of the same ideas that I ran into when I started the renaissance of men, which was to look to virtues of masculinity in generations past to try and inform what the future could look like.

Will Spencer:

So I want to dig into the pieces of that.

Will Spencer:

But the question that I had in my mind as I was listening to that is, how have you been personally changed by going on that journey?

Will Spencer:

Because it sounds like a lot.

Will Spencer:

Exactly.

Will Spencer:

Exactly.

Alex Svetsky:

Mandy.

Alex Svetsky:

I went back, actually, about a couple months ago, and I read through one of the earlier drafts, and you could just see it in the.

Alex Svetsky:

In the quality of the language.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, the energy was completely different.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, writing this book reinvigorated something in me that I haven't felt for many years.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I think in many ways, like the stupidity of the world.

Alex Svetsky:

e the crap we went through in:

Alex Svetsky:

It infects your outlook on life.

Alex Svetsky:

And a lot of my early drafts, like, one, two, three, as I said, I went back to some of the other ones, even up to draft number four, were very longing for a past that's gone and how stupid is modernity and just pointing out all the bad stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

And the book now is far more vital.

Alex Svetsky:

You read the book, you feel inspired, and you want to go run through walls.

Alex Svetsky:

Basically, I handed it out to a couple people.

Alex Svetsky:

They're like, holy shit, this book makes me want to go to war and take over the world.

Alex Svetsky:

And I'm like, yes, that's the fucking feeling that I want in the book.

Alex Svetsky:

And writing it had fundamentally transformed me, I think, in that way as well.

Alex Svetsky:

In the intervening period, I went from going to battle with the stupid idiots in the government in Australia and losing my business because I didn't want to build a surveillance product and all this sort of stuff and being, honestly, down in the dumps.

Alex Svetsky:

I spent five years building a company to just have everything taken away from me, from a bureaucrat.

Alex Svetsky:

I was, for a couple of years there, quite jaded about the world, about everything.

Alex Svetsky:

I was sort of just done with things.

Alex Svetsky:

I was like, well, I got my bitcoin, whatever.

Alex Svetsky:

Like Yolo, you know?

Alex Svetsky:

I mean, I shouldn't say I was Yolo, but I was just like, I didn't want to do another business.

Alex Svetsky:

I just didn't have that fire again.

Alex Svetsky:

But this book just, I don't know, teaching these things.

Alex Svetsky:

And this is the funny thing about sometimes, like, when you.

Alex Svetsky:

When you talk about something, when you.

Alex Svetsky:

When you teach something, something in your head, you.

Alex Svetsky:

You either become a fraud or it forces you to actually embody that in order to be consistent with what you're saying.

Alex Svetsky:

And for me, it had that effect.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, I've started a new business.

Alex Svetsky:

I re raised capital again.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, we are firing on all cylinders.

Alex Svetsky:

We're building like, this social network for like the parallel, the parallel world.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, anything to do with nomad, NGO arbitrage, network, state, like circular economies, bitcoin, all that sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, there's something there where like, we need to build parallel economies and we need a communication mechanism for that.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I'm, like, fully in that now.

Alex Svetsky:

And, man, I can't tell you the amount of energy I've got from that and from the feedback that I've had, the early feedback that I've had on the book.

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, long way of answering your question is, like, I feel better than I have in many, many, many years, and I credit a lot of that to just the journey of going down and writing this book.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Will Spencer:

Reading the chapter that you sent, it creates the feeling of, I can imagine you finally had something to look forward to, because what struck me about the section that I read was that you are thinking way, way, way down the line, we're all in the ditch right now.

Will Spencer:

We're trying to just climb out of the ditch.

Will Spencer:

Let's say we get out of the ditch.

Will Spencer:

Congratulations, we made it out of the ditch, we begin rebuilding.

Will Spencer:

But once we actually arrive.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, well, once we actually arrive to our destination, well, what then?

Will Spencer:

Who are we going to be in that moment?

Will Spencer:

And you were thinking at that point, who are men going to be?

Will Spencer:

How is our society going to be structured when we actually arrive to the bitcoin standard?

Will Spencer:

Whats that world going to look like?

Will Spencer:

And I can see how that would be quite an inspiring way to think about things.

Will Spencer:

Like, okay, were going to make it just start with, yeah, were going to win.

Will Spencer:

Who are we going to be when we win?

Will Spencer:

Is a pretty cool question to think about.

Alex Svetsky:

It really is.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I ended up starting to think about the book as a playbook for.

Alex Svetsky:

A playbook for succeeding in life on a more sound socioeconomic standard or a sound, like succeeding in that one.

Alex Svetsky:

That's kind of like, ties back to what I said earlier is like, today you get rewarded for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, you get deported.

Alex Svetsky:

You get rewarded for being a tranny, you know, like, and getting into politics.

Will Spencer:

Like, facts, though.

Will Spencer:

Facts, though.

Alex Svetsky:

I know, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, this is what I mean.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like, it's madness.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's like the incentives are completely backwards and, like, and sometimes it sounds funny and you see it on Twitter and you're like, this can't be real.

Alex Svetsky:

But, like, it's actually fucking real.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, from the educational system to whatever.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's insane.

Alex Svetsky:

And I just.

Alex Svetsky:

That kind of anti life, antisense, anti God, anti hierarchy, anti sanity, anti everything stuff just can't last unless.

Alex Svetsky:

Unless the whole thing is just like one big lie and it all collapses at some point.

Alex Svetsky:

And we will come out of this.

Alex Svetsky:

And as I said, the question is just how much damage occurs along the way?

Alex Svetsky:

Do we have to literally turn everything to rubble before we step up and take control of the situation again?

Alex Svetsky:

I hope not.

Alex Svetsky:

I really, really, really hope not.

Alex Svetsky:

I hope that we can grow enough balls, and I hope that I can do my little part with this book to charge young men in particular, because that's my audience for this book, and it's not, you know, I didn't write it specifically for bitcoiners or specifically for christians or specifically for, you know, the fucking samurai who are all dead, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I wrote it for like, the.

Alex Svetsky:

The young men of the world.

Alex Svetsky:

And when I say young men, I mean anyone from like 18 to 40, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, where the.

Alex Svetsky:

That spread of men, it's on us to fix this fucking situation.

Alex Svetsky:

Nobody else is gonna do it.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, our mommies aren't gonna come do it.

Alex Svetsky:

The politicians are for damn sure not gonna fucking do it.

Alex Svetsky:

Neither are central bankers, neither are any of these idiots.

Alex Svetsky:

Right up to us.

Alex Svetsky:

And there needs to be an alliance among us.

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

And then, you know, you've got, like, other bitcoiners and other retards and all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

And you got, like, we're all bickering and I'm like, look, guys, take a moment here for a second and realize that we actually have far more in common than we have in conflict.

Alex Svetsky:

So let's look at.

Alex Svetsky:

And this is why, once again, I should also mention why I chose virtues, because you and I can recognize virtue, whether we're of the same belief system or not.

Alex Svetsky:

And I use a great story about honor during the crusade, which was during the period when Saladin was alive and he was one of the muslim leaders, the islamic leaders that the Christians highly regarded.

Alex Svetsky:

And he regarded the christians as well.

Alex Svetsky:

There was a level of honor and respect in the way they went to battle for fuck's sake, they were enemies, but they honored each other in the way they dealt with each other.

Alex Svetsky:

That, like, we don't have a fraction of that today.

Alex Svetsky:

People like passive aggressive and fucking talking about each other behind each other's backs and stuff like that over, like, little tiffs, whereas these people were at war, and they had more respect for each other than the average person does today in the workplace.

Alex Svetsky:

But the energy that I'm talking about here is that you can have two people with differing beliefs who can both recognize courage or who can both recognize honor, who can both recognize respect.

Alex Svetsky:

Respect.

Alex Svetsky:

Who can both recognize excellence and agree that, hey, that is fundamentally evil, that is fundamentally wrong.

Alex Svetsky:

And we can establish a alliance of men, an alliance of strength and alliance of virtue around these things that we agree on.

Alex Svetsky:

And there might come a time when we want to beat each other up again, sure.

Alex Svetsky:

But now is not the fucking time.

Alex Svetsky:

The time right now is to take back control of the ship.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's going to require a generation or two of strong, young, vital men who place the right virtues at the front.

Alex Svetsky:

And those virtues have to be different than, I need to fucking make another shitcoin, make as much money as I can, have sex with as many girls as I can, swipe on tinder as much as I want to yell.

Alex Svetsky:

It can't be that.

Alex Svetsky:

It's got to be something more transcendent.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's kind of.

Alex Svetsky:

And I'm sweating a little bit now because I'm getting, like, into this.

Alex Svetsky:

But that's.

Alex Svetsky:

That's really the message of the book and who I wrote it for.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like, there's a.

Alex Svetsky:

There's a Venn diagram among us.

Alex Svetsky:

And I said this at the beginning, before we started the call.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, there's like, a Christo Hopper, Nietzsche, Nism.

Alex Svetsky:

Right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, somewhere in that there's a beautiful alliance, and I think we need to lean into that, because I myself find myself there.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I'm.

Alex Svetsky:

I get asked a lot.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, are you christian?

Alex Svetsky:

I'm like, look, for all practical intents and purposes, yes.

Alex Svetsky:

Do I.

Alex Svetsky:

Am I as devout?

Alex Svetsky:

No.

Alex Svetsky:

But there's just something there that's so powerful and so, like, in our blood, in that there's something there that's like a connection to the transcendent that you just can't deny it.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it permeates our civilization.

Alex Svetsky:

And you know it when you walk into a cathedral, you know it when you.

Alex Svetsky:

When you meet someone with those sort of shared values, like, it's.

Alex Svetsky:

It's different.

Alex Svetsky:

And, yeah, I'm kind of going off on tangents now.

Alex Svetsky:

Shut up.

Alex Svetsky:

But there's.

Alex Svetsky:

There's something special there, and that's what I wanted to talk to in the book.

Will Spencer:

No, that's something.

Will Spencer:

It's a conversation that I'm familiar with through the way that's being framed on twitter.

Will Spencer:

Is this idea of, like, no enemies on the right.

Will Spencer:

The idea that we're all on the side of.

Will Spencer:

If we're all on the side of civilizational progress or rebuilding civilization with masculine values, that tends to be a more right wing coded thing versus a more left wing coded thing.

Will Spencer:

And so there's a big discussion happening around, well, all of us on the right should not be enemies with each other.

Will Spencer:

Now, I don't personally hold to that, because if you run the logic of that out, you get into some pretty extreme beliefs that you can then no longer say are out of bounds.

Will Spencer:

So then the question becomes, how do we determine what beliefs.

Will Spencer:

And again, we're speaking exclusively on the right.

Will Spencer:

What beliefs are out of bounds, one direction or the other?

Will Spencer:

Like, are more centrist beliefs out of bounds, our more extreme, fascist beliefs out of bounds?

Will Spencer:

How do we determine, and I like the example that you gave of Saladin, because I think what it speaks to is the idea that you have warriors on the field of battle, and they can look at each other and they can say, we don't worship the same God.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

We're not looking at the same transcendent universe.

Will Spencer:

But I still see that you're acting in a spirit of service.

Will Spencer:

This is not serving exclusively your own appetites and ends.

Will Spencer:

And that, I think, is a very important thing.

Will Spencer:

Now, there's ways around the margin where it can be tough to determine, is someone serving their flesh, or are they truly serving something higher?

Will Spencer:

But what I like is how you've landed on virtue, because virtue of necessity means sacrificing the flesh.

Will Spencer:

My desire says, today, I want to go eat a pint of ice cream, but I desire the virtue of physical excellence.

Will Spencer:

So I'm going to sacrifice my fleshly desires in pursuit of this virtue.

Will Spencer:

And I think all virtues do ultimately coalesce into a transcendent standardization.

Will Spencer:

And so being able to say, these are the transcendent virtues that I, as a man, embody.

Will Spencer:

And I can recognize that in you, and you can recognize it.

Will Spencer:

And the other guy, this other guy over there we're not so sure about, I think that creates a ground that we can all kind of stand on together for this historical moment that we're all facing.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, dude, you just brought chills down my spine 100% you summed it up better than I could have.

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, that's what the book's about.

Will Spencer:

Cool.

Will Spencer:

Well, that was a good conversation, guys.

Will Spencer:

Thanks.

Will Spencer:

We did it, everyone.

Will Spencer:

Well, I mean, it's really important because even when I was working in the masculinity conversation, when that was still happening and I was primarily on instagram, I would notice all these different interest groups.

Will Spencer:

You had, like the barbarian guys, you know, like the north pagan kind of vibe, and then you had the elite moneymaker kind of guys with the suit and tie kind of vibe, and.

Will Spencer:

And then you had the bodybuilding bros.

Will Spencer:

And so all these people, they had all these different groups of men, these different tribes of men essentially had very separate value systems, right?

Will Spencer:

And so, like, how do we get all these guys to work together?

Will Spencer:

And that was the spirit of the renaissance of men.

Will Spencer:

Like, look, guys, and this is, this is, you know, I thought when I started my own podcast, I thought masculinity would save the world.

Will Spencer:

I genuinely believed that.

Will Spencer:

And I'll have a lot to say about that on a future episode, but I believe that.

Will Spencer:

So I was trying to figure out, like, okay, like, im not trying to rally all you guys to follow me, right?

Will Spencer:

Because im not the former special forces guy.

Will Spencer:

Im not the dude with the giant family.

Will Spencer:

Im not the 600 pound deadlifter.

Will Spencer:

Im just trying to say, hey, here are these transcendent virtues that I think we can ally upon.

Will Spencer:

And then maybe the guys who are making the thing happen, you guys can lead us forward.

Will Spencer:

So I think you and I landed on very similar ideas, but from different directions.

Will Spencer:

You came in the door from, like, we're going to make it to this future society that's based on the bitcoin standard, right?

Will Spencer:

And that's where you came in.

Will Spencer:

And I came in through this other, like, well, we got to defeat feminism in the new age.

Will Spencer:

And so we've, you and I have arrived at the same place through very different doors.

Alex Svetsky:

It's very, very interesting.

Alex Svetsky:

And that, to me, points to, if anything, something true.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, if we were not, we didn't know each other before.

Alex Svetsky:

We've come from different lives, different backgrounds, different everything, and even a different approach to what we felt was the real problem for different reasons.

Alex Svetsky:

And we've arrived at a similar thing.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, if that, if that's not a signal for some sort of truth, I don't know what is.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's something I used throughout the book to try and find signals for truth around or at least validation around which virtues to select.

Alex Svetsky:

And it was like, okay, well, if I see this virtue popping up again and again and again in the greatest cultures and the greatest civilizations, then it's not me saying that, hey, courage is important.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like clearly something about history says that that is important.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's why I make clear in the book.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like I'm not telling you to do this.

Alex Svetsky:

Like I'm going to give you an entire story, narrative, examples and everything about why this is important.

Alex Svetsky:

You go make up your own mind like you're an adult, you're human being, you know, you're hopefully sovereign and you're an agent.

Alex Svetsky:

Like figure it out yourself.

Alex Svetsky:

But here's a bunch to work with and then here's a bunch of things to go and read if you want to explore further.

Alex Svetsky:

But I mean, at the end of the day, you know, I think we as we know this, a lot of this stuff instinctually, like the words are just more reminder than anything else.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, and that's, you know, when you've been around this space for a while and you know, I've been thinking, writing, doing, talking, podcasting, all this sort of stuff for a while, it's, you come to realize that a lot of it is almost like removing the fluff and it's almost like a remembering as opposed to a discovering.

Alex Svetsky:

And some of it is obviously always there's a discovery element, but the remembering, I think is quite powerful.

Alex Svetsky:

And what are remembering?

Alex Svetsky:

The things that we know, the things that we've been instilled with.

Alex Svetsky:

And this is why I do fundamentally believe in God, that we are instilled with something and we know this stuff deep down.

Alex Svetsky:

We need to be reminded sometimes.

Will Spencer:

Im in a bunch of arguments on Twitter right now about the foundations of morality that people are trying to say that I can get morality without some sort of transcendent standard, whether it be the Bible or somewhere else.

Will Spencer:

And its like, okay, cool that people are saying to me, you should just be a decent person without the need for a book or a God.

Will Spencer:

Im like, okay, but why are you, on what principles are you saying that I should be a decent person?

Will Spencer:

And people get very frustrated when you push them on that point.

Will Spencer:

Why should I listen to you?

Will Spencer:

One guy said to me, my morality comes from within and says I should be a decent person.

Will Spencer:

I'm like cool.

Will Spencer:

So if inside me is the standard inside me, my morality says I should take your stuff.

Will Spencer:

So who wins in that?

Will Spencer:

And then people get very, very frustrated.

Will Spencer:

But that all of these cultures around the world and that something about men's hearts and women's as well point to and orient towards these transcendent goods.

Will Spencer:

And it's just kind of woven into us.

Will Spencer:

I think that that undermines the whole notion of evolution.

Will Spencer:

Evolution can't say why this should be the case.

Will Spencer:

Evolution would say that we should live in a survival of the fittest world and so there should be no such thing as self sacrifice.

Will Spencer:

Evolution can't understand self sacrifice.

Will Spencer:

It doesn't make sense.

Will Spencer:

So all of these different virtues point to an author of those virtues.

Will Spencer:

Where did they come from?

Will Spencer:

Why are they there forever?

Will Spencer:

Why in the middle of historical darkness, a historical level darkness, why are people still able to look up and see something that transcends all of us and men feel themselves called to it?

Will Spencer:

Well, because these things are woven into the fabric of reality.

Will Spencer:

Wisdom.

Will Spencer:

Wisdom was there with God when he inscribed a circle on the face of the deep.

Will Spencer:

I believe the passage goes, so these virtues were there before there was anything else.

Will Spencer:

And that's why they call us forward so powerfully.

Will Spencer:

And I think that's also why we're not allowed to talk about virtue.

Will Spencer:

To say that virtue has a transcendent standard.

Will Spencer:

It means that it exists independent of all darkness.

Will Spencer:

In fact, there's a scene in the Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam are in Mordor, a virtuous land, virtue less land, if there was one.

Will Spencer:

And they're looking up at the stars and they're seeing something that exists transcendently.

Will Spencer:

And I think virtues to speak of.

Will Spencer:

Constellations does something similar for us even when we're in the middle of our own private Mordors or civilizational Mordors.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

As you're describing that, it reminds me of just like, this concept of a north star and a guiding light.

Alex Svetsky:

There's multiple ways to frame it, but it all points to the same thing, right?

Alex Svetsky:

You said something about transcendence, and maybe this is a good segue into the beauty chapter, right?

Alex Svetsky:

You see this a lot from the theory cell.

Alex Svetsky:

Atheists.

Alex Svetsky:

There's that stupid tweet that I saw a little while back from that guy who put up a couple photos of universe constellation.

Alex Svetsky:

A beautiful woman's face.

Alex Svetsky:

And I have it.

Alex Svetsky:

Urban, I think it was.

Will Spencer:

I have it here.

Will Spencer:

It's weight.

Will Spencer:

But why.

Will Spencer:

Let me.

Will Spencer:

I pulled that up.

Will Spencer:

I'm glad you mentioned.

Will Spencer:

Let me pull it up and I'll put it on the screen and we can take a look at it.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, it was.

Alex Svetsky:

Wait, but y.

Alex Svetsky:

And I think his name's Tim Urban.

Alex Svetsky:

So, you know, he writes like, oh, you know, since all values are subjective or something like that.

Alex Svetsky:

Isn't it funny that we find all this stuff beautiful?

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, once we're no longer here, will any of this beautiful?

Alex Svetsky:

It was, like, so, so stupid to me.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, and it inspired an entire chapter in the book.

Alex Svetsky:

I was like, man, I got to write about this.

Alex Svetsky:

And, like, I did a talk in Prague a couple months ago now, which was called beauty will save the world.

Alex Svetsky:

And I bashed a little bit on Tim Urban's thing, and I opened up the quote with something that Nietzsche said.

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, whatever people think about Nietzsche, some people hate him, some people love him.

Alex Svetsky:

Whatever.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I think he definitely had some really profound, particularly his aphorisms.

Alex Svetsky:

I don't know.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, he just had a way of, like, saying something in a few words, which just, like, resonated to be so true.

Alex Svetsky:

And one of my favorite quotes from him is, if you.

Alex Svetsky:

If you step on a cockroach, you're a hero.

Alex Svetsky:

If you crush a butterfly, you're a villain.

Alex Svetsky:

Morality has aesthetic standards, and I love that quote because there's just something viscerally true about it.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, the cerebral part of you.

Alex Svetsky:

Your brain is like, no, that's not fair.

Alex Svetsky:

And then the hippie will be like, yeah, but the cockroach has a life too.

Alex Svetsky:

And the atheist will say, no, but there's subjective grounds here.

Alex Svetsky:

And even men of virtue, like, you know, if you're religious or whatever, you're like, no, that's not right.

Alex Svetsky:

It's, you know, it's unfair and all this sort of stuff, but something biologically inside you.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, you see it.

Alex Svetsky:

You see a cockroach and you just want to crush it.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I don't know what it is.

Alex Svetsky:

And if you see somebody, like, go and crush a butterfly, you're like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, why would you do that?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's just.

Alex Svetsky:

And you don't even have to think about it.

Alex Svetsky:

And that, to me, just points to something that is, you could call it visceral.

Alex Svetsky:

You could call it transcendent.

Alex Svetsky:

You can call it higher, deeper, whatever, right?

Alex Svetsky:

But, like, it points to something more than what the cerebral cognitive front lobe, you know, mental construct will sort of tell us.

Alex Svetsky:

And to me, that's got something to do with beauty, and I think it fundamentally has something to do with God.

Alex Svetsky:

And the structure of the universe is that there is a something there that, like, we can recognize about beauty.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, so I write in the book, like, beauty is not something that you're told.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I can't tell you, will, this is beautiful.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, beauty is something that we recognize, and we recognize it for fuck knows what reason, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I'm sure we can, like, find logical reasons about, like, oh, the health of a person.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, there's definitely, like, practical reasons around beauty, but, like, it exists in the very structure of the universe.

Alex Svetsky:

And it's not because we can measure it, but it exists and we can measure it like, it's the other way around.

Alex Svetsky:

Right?

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, it.

Alex Svetsky:

It is something that.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, in my.

Alex Svetsky:

In my opinion, and I get the sense that you probably share this, is that, like, it's beauty?

Alex Svetsky:

Is this, like, almost like a beacon to the transcendent that we can all experience, and we can experience it both objectively and subjectively.

Alex Svetsky:

And that, to me, tells me that a transcendent realm must and does exist, because you just can't have that with something that is purely material.

Alex Svetsky:

And I make a big fuss about this in the book, is like, truth and beauty transcend the material.

Alex Svetsky:

And this is what a lot of these materialists get wrong.

Alex Svetsky:

They live purely in the paradigm of the material, and they think everything is subjective and everything you can trade and all this sort of shit.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's fine for things that are material and purely economic, but it's not fine for living beings that are connected to something else and that can't be explained away through economics.

Alex Svetsky:

So I'll pause there, but I think what you said before about the transcendence just reminded me of the beauty chapter.

Will Spencer:

Think.

Will Spencer:

Beauty is one of those things that it calls us forward to, those values even when we can't articulate it.

Will Spencer:

It's not mental, it's not rational beauty, it transcends rationality.

Will Spencer:

Using irrational minds, we can contribute to making beautiful things.

Will Spencer:

I don't know that the rational mind has ever made something beautiful.

Will Spencer:

I think beauty probably requires more than just strict rationality.

Will Spencer:

I think about the bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

Listeners will appreciate this.

Will Spencer:

I think that there's a beauty to Satoshi's white paper, just how clean and how clear it is.

Will Spencer:

But there's an artistry to it that transcends the purity of rational calculation.

Will Spencer:

So something more than that, actually, I tried to share the screen that had the tweet that you referenced earlier, but I wasn't able.

Will Spencer:

Chrome doesn't have permission, so I'll just read it really quick.

Will Spencer:

This is from Tim Urban.

Will Spencer:

Wait, but why?

Will Spencer:

He says it's strange that beauty is entirely subjective.

Will Spencer:

These are beautiful to us.

Will Spencer:

And he provides four photos.

Will Spencer:

These are beautiful to us because of how we're programmed objectively.

Will Spencer:

They're no more beautiful than any other arrangement of atoms and photons.

Will Spencer:

The day humans go extinct, everything we find beautiful will cease to be beautiful.

Will Spencer:

And he has a photo of some beautiful photographs of the coastline of Hawaii.

Will Spencer:

It looks like a purple and orange sunset, a lovely flower photographed in high resolution, and then a beautiful woman.

Will Spencer:

And it's just like the idea that, I mean, I get beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Will Spencer:

Like, there's truth to that.

Will Spencer:

Absolutely right.

Will Spencer:

That there is a degree of subjectivity to beauty, but it just kind of implies, I mean, by the same logic, I guess you could say, like, does anything even exist if humans go away?

Will Spencer:

It's purely existentialist, right?

Will Spencer:

If all humans were gone, how would we know there was anything?

Will Spencer:

Because the counterargument is, say, beauty is a substance.

Will Spencer:

It's a thing.

Will Spencer:

We can't measure it precisely.

Will Spencer:

We can't say where it comes from, but it imbues some objects and people and things and not others.

Will Spencer:

Humans have the ability to call it down through skill and mastery and practice and sometimes sheer dumb luck and providence.

Will Spencer:

But it is a thing.

Will Spencer:

And if we say that beauty doesn't have an independent existence, how can we say that anything has an independent existence?

Will Spencer:

And what an incredibly nihilistic way to live and why.

Will Spencer:

I appreciate, maybe you didn't intend this when you wrote the book, but I've actually seen some of this nihilism kind of threading its way through the bitcoin community.

Will Spencer:

Like, I don't know, maybe I'll just use his name.

Will Spencer:

Robert Breedlove started toying with some of these ideas.

Will Spencer:

And that's a whole other subject that's going on there that we don't have to get into right now.

Will Spencer:

But I confronted him on this.

Will Spencer:

He was reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, some other books about existentialism, I think Martin Heidegger.

Will Spencer:

And so I confronted him on this, and then later I found out what he was doing.

Will Spencer:

Like, yes, of course, you're trying to destroy morality.

Will Spencer:

I get it now.

Will Spencer:

But, like, this nihilistic, you know, it doesn't produce action in men.

Will Spencer:

Like, you can't look at these beautiful things and say, well, that beauty isn't real.

Will Spencer:

It's all subjective.

Will Spencer:

It's like, no, if you give beauty an objective reality that exists independent from us, then it's a virtue that can be pursued.

Will Spencer:

It can become a quixotic quest that destroys you in the pursuit of it.

Will Spencer:

But the healthy arrangement of the pursuit of that virtue, I think, is a good thing and that men need it.

Will Spencer:

I think one of the big psyops against men is how ugly everything is today.

Will Spencer:

Right?

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

I could not agree more.

Alex Svetsky:

When I.

Alex Svetsky:

When I read that tweet from Tim, it just, like, man, it just triggered me.

Alex Svetsky:

And the fact that that triggered me just says a lot about the fact that beauty must exist in some way, because it was just like, what he said was just so fundamentally devoid of life.

Alex Svetsky:

And to me, if we make the argument that life doesn't exist in the universe, then sure, maybe the need for beauty is not there, or, like, beauty becomes irrelevant.

Alex Svetsky:

But in a universe, in a world where life itself exists, beauty also exists, and it is not material.

Alex Svetsky:

As you said, there's a material component to it.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, there are many material things that are absolutely beautiful, but, like, it's not only material, and there's a couple of things I'd love to read a small passage from the book, please, if I may.

Alex Svetsky:

And it says, beauty is simultaneously objective and objective.

Alex Svetsky:

It's the only thing that we know of with this paradoxical quality other than the divine, which says a lot about what beauty really is.

Alex Svetsky:

Beauty is both everlasting and fleeting.

Alex Svetsky:

It is both powerful and fragile.

Alex Svetsky:

It is both dangerous and nurturing all at the same time.

Alex Svetsky:

Beauty can be found in war and peace, conflict and cooperation, violence and love.

Alex Svetsky:

Few things are as beautiful or violent as a thunderstorm crackling across the sky, a lion hunting, or a volcano erupting.

Alex Svetsky:

Few things are as beautiful or peaceful as the calm and stillness of the mountains or a tranquil cove cove in the Mediterranean Sea.

Alex Svetsky:

There is beauty in the cold, barren antarctic ice caps and in the hot, rolling desert, San Diego of Arabia.

Alex Svetsky:

There is beauty in the smooth contours of a woman's body and in the jagged edges of a sheer rock cliff face.

Alex Svetsky:

There is beauty in the creation of life and the explosion of an orgasm in a cavalry charge and in the march of a phalanx.

Alex Svetsky:

Beauty is found in both deed and object, in both the uncharted wild ocean of the Atlantic and in its historic crossing.

Alex Svetsky:

It is both natural and man made.

Alex Svetsky:

There is beauty in the precision of a swiss made watch and in the chaos of the jungle.

Alex Svetsky:

There is beauty in the creative destruction of deep work and in the leisure of stillness.

Alex Svetsky:

The combustion engine and the Jed airline cutting through the sky are both marvels of engineering and beautiful in their own light.

Alex Svetsky:

Likewise, there is deep beauty in the sword, which has, through the centuries, shed the blood of many foes.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like a kind of.

Alex Svetsky:

I tried to do something in the book there to show that, like, beauty exists, in all of these things.

Alex Svetsky:

And as a result, like, it's not a single.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's not a.

Alex Svetsky:

For something to exist in the fabric of so many diverse, disparate, fundamentally different things, by definition, means it transcends all of these things, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Because it's.

Alex Svetsky:

It's.

Alex Svetsky:

It's all of them.

Alex Svetsky:

So if that's not a definition for transcendence, I don't know what is.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's why I just think, like, you know, another section here, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Beauty is beyond rational, but we can also rationalize it.

Alex Svetsky:

It's beyond measurement, but we can, in fact, also measure it.

Alex Svetsky:

It's found in the, like, literally, the fractals that make up life, golden ratio, musical archetypes, geometry, mathematics.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, we discover it, we don't necessarily, like, create it.

Alex Svetsky:

I guess trying to be precise.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

Channel it, I think, is a good way to phrase it.

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, it became like, I think, one of the beautiful chapters of the book, and everyone that I shared it with actually really appreciated.

Alex Svetsky:

It's a great piece.

Alex Svetsky:

And actually, one of my christian friends, as he was reading it, he was the one who suggested the ecclesiastes excerpt that I put in there as well.

Alex Svetsky:

To everything there is a season.

Alex Svetsky:

I was like, fuck, that's so good.

Alex Svetsky:

It's beautiful.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Will Spencer:

I think you've captured it, especially because beauty seems to exist.

Will Spencer:

Goodness, truth, and beauty.

Will Spencer:

In some ways, these are synonyms, right?

Will Spencer:

Can something be beautiful that isn't true.

Will Spencer:

Can something be beautiful that isn't good?

Will Spencer:

Right?

Will Spencer:

Can something be good that is all these.

Will Spencer:

In some sense, these are all synonyms.

Will Spencer:

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

Will Spencer:

Because of any, again, rational calculation.

Will Spencer:

Like, I measured it all out to make a.

Will Spencer:

It's something.

Will Spencer:

Something seems to have informed it spiritually almost, that passes through us on our way into the thing.

Will Spencer:

And that's the universal experience of creativity.

Will Spencer:

Like, you just show up writing every day until the muse is there and the muse is there some days and not there.

Will Spencer:

And then you wrote something beautiful.

Will Spencer:

Where did it come from?

Will Spencer:

Not me.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

And so.

Will Spencer:

And not giving people the opportunity to experience that anymore, like, just how ugly and how broken and twisted everything is, it's.

Will Spencer:

It really makes us forget that beauty is a thing.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

I think.

Will Spencer:

And I think that's the goal.

Will Spencer:

I really do think, like, I think.

Will Spencer:

I think Satan's one of Satan's biggest weapons today is just how mundane everything is.

Will Spencer:

Houses are beige boxes, all the.

Will Spencer:

Have you seen the memes going around that show all the different later model cars that are coming out now and all.

Will Spencer:

They all look the same.

Alex Svetsky:

Exactly.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, they're all the same.

Will Spencer:

And then all the logos, like, all these classic logos that are all becoming modern and they're taking off the serifs and it's like everything is becoming homogenized.

Will Spencer:

Everything is becoming.

Will Spencer:

And it's becoming bland.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

And I think that that's a.

Will Spencer:

I think that's a weapon that's being used against us as, as men and women that are making us forget that there is the good, the beautiful and the true.

Will Spencer:

It's.

Will Spencer:

It's.

Will Spencer:

It's profoundly dehumanizing.

Will Spencer:

Go ahead.

Alex Svetsky:

Absolutely.

Alex Svetsky:

It kills the spark.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, that's the whole thing.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, and I've got to.

Alex Svetsky:

The thing in the book, which I say is like, look, I think the true definition of evil really is, like, that which wants to destroy the beautiful.

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, that's a.

Alex Svetsky:

As you said, like, the greatest tool of Satan is to make everything ugly, gray, homogeneous and lifeless.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's.

Alex Svetsky:

And in many ways, like, you look at the ugliest modalities of governance.

Alex Svetsky:

Communism, of all things, right, is the thing that wants to bring everything down to sameness.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, and I.

Alex Svetsky:

An analogy I've used on stage in the past is, like, you get a beautiful palette of colors.

Alex Svetsky:

You have blue, red, orange, green, yellow and everything.

Alex Svetsky:

And do you want to know how to make them the same?

Alex Svetsky:

You get them and you mix them all together and you turn it into 1 gy chunk of goo, right?

Alex Svetsky:

So that's like, sameness, and that's fucking ugly.

Alex Svetsky:

There's a reason why grey is ugly.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, there's a reason why all the communist Europe is like these gray, ugly buildings, because it.

Alex Svetsky:

It takes.

Alex Svetsky:

Sucks the life out of people, and it just.

Alex Svetsky:

It sends them on the path to being drones.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, beautiful things inspire more beautiful things.

Alex Svetsky:

It inspires life.

Alex Svetsky:

And if we're on the side of life, if we're on the side of God, if we're on the side of truth, if we're on the side of all these things, we're on the side of beauty.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, that requires the creation of all beauty.

Alex Svetsky:

And as you said, I think one of the biggest, biggest challenges that we're facing in the modern world is that destruction of the beautiful.

Alex Svetsky:

It's no coincidence that the eco terrorists are throwing paint at orange paint over beautiful Renaissance paintings.

Alex Svetsky:

It's not an accident.

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

And like pointing out, this is wrong with the world, this is wrong with the world.

Alex Svetsky:

This is wrong with the world for me.

Alex Svetsky:

And the book is, my attempt to do this is to actually produce something beautiful that is no longer about pointing out what's wrong and kind of acting as a barrier to that.

Alex Svetsky:

It does that in many ways, the book kind of draws that line.

Alex Svetsky:

But the book's focus, and you really nicely said this earlier, is the book's focus is on what's next.

Alex Svetsky:

Where are we going?

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

So it's kind of my goal for.

Will Spencer:

The book, and I think it's really important, actually, that you included so much bitcoin mention, like, it's not a bitcoin book, but bitcoin is woven throughout many of the pages.

Will Spencer:

And I think that really matters, because if you were to take that out, it becomes, in some sense, ungrounded.

Will Spencer:

Like, okay, yeah, cool.

Will Spencer:

Alex.

Will Spencer:

We all want to deal with these transcendent, higher virtues, but at the same time, like inflation, et cetera, et cetera, fiat world.

Will Spencer:

By the way, I'll mention this in the introduction to the podcast.

Will Spencer:

I think a lot of what you and I are talking about is kind of informed by the subjects from thank God for bitcoin by Jordan Bush and Fiat ruins everything by Jimmy Song.

Will Spencer:

Like, the knowledge that's included in both of those books is really important, a really important foundation.

Will Spencer:

So I'll encourage everyone to go read the books and listen to those interviews, which I'll post in the show notes.

Will Spencer:

But at the same time, without the practical element, without the pragmatic element, then it becomes just not just but another philosophical exercise.

Will Spencer:

But once you can actually ground it, please go ahead and.

Alex Svetsky:

No, no, I was gonna say, it is.

Alex Svetsky:

It is just the.

Alex Svetsky:

Just, you're 100% right.

Alex Svetsky:

In fact, the the person that I got to help me edit the book, he kind of said the same thing, is like, you know, what?

Alex Svetsky:

If he came to me with, like, another book about, you know, bushido and philosophy and all this stuff, he's like, I probably would have passed.

Alex Svetsky:

But he goes, the thing that captured me said was that it was the bushido of bitcoin.

Alex Svetsky:

He was like, what?

Alex Svetsky:

What the hell does bitcoin have to do with anything?

Alex Svetsky:

And he goes, as I read through the book, because he was new to bitcoin, he's like, I sense that he goes, what I got out of it was that there was actually exactly what you said, a grounding to something.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like, okay, all of these things, but then what?

Alex Svetsky:

How do we get there?

Alex Svetsky:

What's the practical element of it?

Alex Svetsky:

So sorry for cutting you off, but it just reminded me that.

Will Spencer:

That's great.

Will Spencer:

No, that's really good to hear because I think that's what makes the book unique, is that it's not just a philosophical exploration, nor is it just an exploration of how bitcoin can change society.

Will Spencer:

It's an idea of like, okay, once we have this changed society that's rooted in sound money, that's rooted in sound financial practices, what does that enable for men to be once we have that grounding, once we have that rooting, and once it can't be dislodged?

Will Spencer:

This is something that laser Hodl and I talk about in our conversations about, what does a sound money world look like?

Will Spencer:

What does a sound money do to men?

Will Spencer:

Once you know you can learn a valuable skill, earn based on the skill, and then save in bitcoin, what does that do to your whole outlook on life?

Will Spencer:

And so I see this book as sort of a necessary extension of that thought.

Will Spencer:

Like, okay, you've learned a skill.

Will Spencer:

You've mastered it.

Will Spencer:

You're earning, earning income to support a family, and you're saving a bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

And, you know, it can't be inflated away.

Will Spencer:

Well, that gets you thinking.

Will Spencer:

Actually, this is something I want to ask you about that gets you thinking about, you know, low time preference behavior.

Will Spencer:

And you said that beauty is, I think you said it's the ultimate low time preference behavior.

Will Spencer:

I wonder if you could talk.

Will Spencer:

I was like, thats a really fascinating way to think about that idea.

Will Spencer:

Its true.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

So in the bitcoin space.

Alex Svetsky:

As you said, theres all this talk about low time preference and stopping this incessant need to discount the future for the present and basically the marshmallow theory in practice.

Alex Svetsky:

And it hit me as I was writing the beauty chapter, I was like, you know what?

Alex Svetsky:

Beauty is literally the highest manifestation of that approach.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like to build anything of beauty.

Alex Svetsky:

You mentioned it before, like, you've got to do a thousand fucking sculptures so that one of them is beautiful, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, you've got to do your thousands of hours of, like, practicing on the piano or the instrument or whatever, and then at some point, you will be, you will have the capacity to channel more beauty.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, there's a sacrifice.

Alex Svetsky:

Like the very act of building a family, establishing a relationship, having a child.

Alex Svetsky:

Think about the sacrifice and the time preference that is necessary to bear a child, for the man to look after the woman, to birth the child, to raise the child, to establish the child into a teenager.

Alex Svetsky:

That's an investment in time, and that's beautiful.

Alex Svetsky:

And that takes time, like, and that extends all the way up through, like, to build a beautiful cathedral.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, what we have during the Renaissance, like, took hundreds of years.

Alex Svetsky:

People who literally started building the foundation knew that they would be dead before they would ever see the cathedral.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, what does that take right from a person in order to do?

Alex Svetsky:

And that goes on the way up through to the mountains that we look at, and we have, like, this reverence for, because it's like this.

Alex Svetsky:

I know every time I go to the north of Italy, like the alps, there's just something special about those mountains.

Alex Svetsky:

And they formed over thousands and thousands of years, like the coastline of Hawaii that we just mentioned before, like the very world that we're in.

Alex Svetsky:

Beautiful things take time, they take sacrifice, they take an investment.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's why I just had that epiphany as I was writing this thing.

Alex Svetsky:

It was like.

Alex Svetsky:

And it just.

Alex Svetsky:

It fits so well.

Alex Svetsky:

I was like, damn.

Alex Svetsky:

Beauty really is like the ultimate in low time preference.

Alex Svetsky:

And when you try and fake beauty, it's just, you know it, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's just, it's the, you see the difference in the time preference, and there's always a price to pay for that.

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, I think that's a.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you for bringing that up.

Alex Svetsky:

It's a.

Alex Svetsky:

It's a profound point that I.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, that I hope I cover in the book.

Will Spencer:

Yes.

Will Spencer:

Oh, absolutely.

Will Spencer:

It's kind of like those memes that went around Twitter a couple months ago.

Will Spencer:

I think the difference between, in women, between beautiful, hot and cute, right?

Will Spencer:

And so.

Will Spencer:

Oh, it was pretty cool.

Will Spencer:

It was one of the, you know, one of the.

Will Spencer:

One of the anonymous, maybe a statue account, something like that, sort of.

Will Spencer:

It used imagery, and it might have actually been a woman that I think about it.

Will Spencer:

But to talk about the way that different women's faces create different effects, like, here's a beautiful woman, which is not the same as a hot woman, right?

Will Spencer:

And so hotness.

Will Spencer:

And there was also someone who wrote about this, I think, last year, that talked about the difference between beautiful and hot and hotness.

Will Spencer:

That's high time preference.

Will Spencer:

That's where you get all the plastic surgery and stuff like that to try and look like this.

Will Spencer:

And it has a particular set of features versus beautiful, which is a very different thing.

Alex Svetsky:

Right.

Will Spencer:

And so I think this shows up everywhere, and I think our culture is saturated with things that are, things we might say are hot.

Will Spencer:

And I don't necessarily mean in the same way like a woman, but, like, here's this cheap, plasticky kind of thing that has this, like, instantaneous appeal but no substance behind it.

Will Spencer:

It's like those guys that did that do the videos where they tear apart the Lamborghinis.

Will Spencer:

Have you seen those?

Alex Svetsky:

I haven't seen the territorial part of Lamborghini.

Will Spencer:

It's these eastern european guys, and they bought, like, this brand new european Lamborghini.

Will Spencer:

And then they start, they go, they get into it and they start pulling on it, and they just start taking apart this Lamborghini.

Will Spencer:

And they show that this car, on the surface, that's very hot.

Will Spencer:

It's actually quite plastic.

Will Spencer:

It's very cheaply built, and then they slap a massive price.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Will Spencer:

So that's kind of like a little bit.

Will Spencer:

What our society is, is you have these sexy, on the surface values, but nothing deeper that's underlying it.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, a lack of substance.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like this kind of like manufactured.

Will Spencer:

Exactly.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like a plastic civilization.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, plastic is probably a good summation of all of it.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, totally, man.

Alex Svetsky:

Totally.

Will Spencer:

So was there a virtue that you were studying when you put this book together that had a particular impact on you?

Will Spencer:

Like, you're going on this big two year journey to write this book and you're exploring all these different ideas that are changing your world?

Will Spencer:

Was there a section that you were writing, I suppose, other than beauty, where you're like, would that really hit you in a particular way?

Will Spencer:

Like, oh, oh, where things really shifted.

Alex Svetsky:

For you, man, I had so many of those moments, but I'll kind of pull on a couple, so I'll just I'll say courage, because I think courage is, like, I almost consider that, like, the alpha of virtues.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, if without courage, all else doesn't exist, then I on a podcast that kind of, like, just came out as I was speaking.

Alex Svetsky:

I said, courage is faith in action.

Alex Svetsky:

And I was like, damn, that's good.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, pretty dope.

Will Spencer:

I like that.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, that's great.

Alex Svetsky:

So.

Alex Svetsky:

But courage has always been something.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I've very.

Alex Svetsky:

I've had a strong relationship with.

Alex Svetsky:

From a young age.

Alex Svetsky:

It was like when I used to do Tony Robbins stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it was.

Alex Svetsky:

I considered it my power virtue.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it was.

Alex Svetsky:

So I've always had a good relationship.

Alex Svetsky:

So not too much of an epiphany there.

Alex Svetsky:

But other than that little quote that came out for me, a couple of the ones were excellence.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, going down that rabbit hole and really just understanding how excellence is fundamentally about hierarchy and separation.

Alex Svetsky:

It's almost like the ultimate masculine virtue between excellence and self control and restraint.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, those two were a lot of the, I guess, lessons for me, because I'm at the point in my life now where I'm entering the second half of my thirties and I'm entering a new season of life, and I'm valuing more.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, the younger me would have fundamentally valued courage way more, and I still fundamentally value courage as, like, one of the absolutely most important virtues.

Alex Svetsky:

You can't be a man without courage.

Alex Svetsky:

But, yeah, I just found something very special about those two virtues, in particular, the excellence and the restraint or self control.

Alex Svetsky:

I kind of grouped that together as a concept, and what I called it was the virtue of maturity.

Alex Svetsky:

And a good mental image of that is the ability to take a hammer and an egg, swing the hammer, and be able to stop the hammer before you crush the egg.

Alex Svetsky:

And what I mean by that is there's so much I could do, and I think this is probably the primary virtue that is missing from the world.

Alex Svetsky:

In many ways, these two, like, excellence as a thing, because everything is now average and all this kind of crap, but also this idea of restraint.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like, yeah, you know what?

Alex Svetsky:

I could go and just, like, cheat on my wife and go and, like, have gay sex and I could do all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

I can cut my penis off.

Will Spencer:

Escalated quickly.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

I was thinking all the dumbest things I could possibly do.

Alex Svetsky:

I could vote for Kamala.

Alex Svetsky:

I can do all these things.

Alex Svetsky:

But should I?

Alex Svetsky:

Probably not.

Will Spencer:

No.

Alex Svetsky:

Yes.

Will Spencer:

Please don't.

Will Spencer:

No, don't do it, Alex.

Alex Svetsky:

This will be when I reach out in two years.

Alex Svetsky:

I'll be like, well, I've got a podcast for you chopped off my dick.

Alex Svetsky:

No, I'm kidding.

Will Spencer:

I might not have you on.

Will Spencer:

No, we'll talk you off the ledge.

Alex Svetsky:

But seriously, it's like, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

Alex Svetsky:

And I think that's underappreciated in the modern world.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, and that ties back into what you discussed earlier about, like, the sexual liberation movement.

Alex Svetsky:

And I can do whatever I want, and, you know, God doesn't exist, and who cares?

Alex Svetsky:

And I don't have a father.

Alex Svetsky:

I don't listen to my parents.

Alex Svetsky:

And, you know, all this sort of stuff, like, trying to shirk responsibility and all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

And to me, like, it's a little bit different to responsibility.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I've got a whole section of responsibility, which was one of my favorite.

Alex Svetsky:

Favorite chapters.

Alex Svetsky:

But, like, self control and restraint is just.

Alex Svetsky:

There's something deeply masculine about that.

Alex Svetsky:

There's something deeply.

Alex Svetsky:

I'm setting the boundary.

Alex Svetsky:

And, like, I.

Alex Svetsky:

You know, you said it earlier about I want to eat the tub of ice cream, but I have the capacity to say no.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's just, like, for me, deeply powerful.

Alex Svetsky:

And as I said, I called it the.

Alex Svetsky:

The virtue of maturity.

Alex Svetsky:

And it was.

Alex Svetsky:

It was one of my favorite ones that I.

Alex Svetsky:

That I wrote in there.

Will Spencer:

Your example about the hammer and the egg.

Will Spencer:

There's a famous pastor named Bodhi Baucom who uses a similar example, encouraging christian men to strength, because he says that if you give a weak man a sledgehammer and you tell him to swing the sledgehammer and try and bring it down before you stop the egg, he'll crush the egg.

Alex Svetsky:

Interesting.

Will Spencer:

Yeah.

Will Spencer:

But if you give it to a strong man, he'll be able to use the strength, and he has the strength to encourage restraint.

Will Spencer:

And so weakness is what leads to this imbalance of virtues.

Will Spencer:

Not strength.

Will Spencer:

But strength has been so shamed out of our culture because, yes, of course, strength has been misused in the past, but to misuse strength doesn't negate the need for strength altogether.

Will Spencer:

It just means we need to bring the moral virtues back that restrain strength.

Alex Svetsky:

Man, I'm so glad you mentioned that, because there's literally a section in there about specifically strength.

Alex Svetsky:

So under self restraint, there's, like, six sections to the chapter, and there's a section in there about strength specifically.

Alex Svetsky:

And I lean into, like, what is the definition of strength?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, is someone strong?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, so am I strong?

Alex Svetsky:

If I enter the boxing ring and I bring a kid in and I beat the shit out of him like, does that make me strong?

Will Spencer:

Ben Shapiro at a university.

Alex Svetsky:

So, like, strength is the true strength comes from contending that which is, like, at your level or greater than you.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's the only actually, like, funny enough, God made it such that the only way to actually build more strength is to push beyond what is comfortable and push beyond what you can, right?

Alex Svetsky:

For me, that's where people always talk about, oh, you know, the central bankers, they have all the strength and power and everything like that.

Alex Svetsky:

And I'm like, no, no, no, let's flip this conversation on its head.

Alex Svetsky:

The central bankers and the politicians and the scumbags and all this sort of stuff, these people are so weak that they need to cheat in order to win.

Will Spencer:

Amen.

Alex Svetsky:

They need to poison their opponent, get in the ring and then say, I won.

Alex Svetsky:

But that is a pyrrhic victory in terms of, like, where the, like, what happens to the game?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, you know, you didn't win because you were actually better or stronger or more vital or more virtuous or more righteous or anything.

Alex Svetsky:

You won because you cheated.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's a fake victory.

Alex Svetsky:

And that's all we're seeing around us today.

Alex Svetsky:

Whereas true strength, as you said, is the capacity to, like, I know that I can beat the absolute fucking shit out of you, but I will not because I have the capacity to, like, I'm stronger than the desire.

Alex Svetsky:

And that was such a, I mean, I use Christ actually as an example in that specific chapter of, like, the ultimate, the paragon of restraint, right?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, he's the, he's the ideal in that sense.

Alex Svetsky:

And I also think in that, im thinking back now, I think I also talk about Alexander the great in that one where there was the story of how on the way back from India, they were trekking through the arabian desert and Alexander had been shot with an arrow in a previous battle.

Alex Svetsky:

It was about a month earlier or something like that.

Alex Svetsky:

So he was already weakened from that, like, punctured lung.

Alex Svetsky:

So it was quite a, quite a bit of damage.

Alex Svetsky:

And as they're going through the, through the desert, like, they're strewn out and everyone's thirsty and they've been walking for weeks through the desert and all this sort of stuff.

Alex Svetsky:

And a couple of his men, couple of the scouts find some water up ahead, and they fill a helmet with water and they protect it, like, to bring it back to him.

Alex Svetsky:

And they finally bring it back to him and they pass him the helmet, he takes the helmet and he looks up to the sky and he pours the water out into the sand.

Alex Svetsky:

And the lesson of that is, first, that he would share the sacrifice with his men.

Alex Svetsky:

And that sort of, like the historic story, is that when his men saw that, that actually carried them through.

Alex Svetsky:

Apparently only lost six men on the.

Alex Svetsky:

On the trek back through the, um, through the desert.

Alex Svetsky:

So that that was more important than giving everybody water.

Alex Svetsky:

But it was also a sign of, like, an incredible level of restraint which is necessary for a leader.

Alex Svetsky:

Right?

Alex Svetsky:

Could you imagine, like, a modern politician doing that?

Alex Svetsky:

Fuck no.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, it's not gonna happen.

Alex Svetsky:

You know what I mean?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, that they would just, like, they would hide the water from their people and go and drink and pretend they're suffering along with them.

Alex Svetsky:

So it's like that virtue, I think, for me, and I capped off the ten virtues with that.

Alex Svetsky:

Like I said, it's not the most important, because it's hard to say which virtues are the most important.

Alex Svetsky:

As you said, they're a constellation, but it's the one.

Alex Svetsky:

It's like, if courage is the alpha, then self control is the omega.

Alex Svetsky:

It sort of caps off.

Alex Svetsky:

So, anyway, I've gone on long enough, but that was the one, I think probably had one of the biggest impacts on me as I was writing.

Will Spencer:

I'm so glad that you picked up on that, because that's something that I've followed along similar lines, that the highest use of power is in self sacrifice.

Will Spencer:

So you look at, whether you want, you can look at the Bible, you can look at Christ, or you can look at William Wallace, or you can look at Luke Skywalker, you can look at the way that this story is reflected all throughout our culture.

Will Spencer:

And in some ways, it's tied to the Christ story.

Will Spencer:

But the highest use of power is not to use it, to then get all of your desires fulfilled.

Will Spencer:

You attain the highest level of power in that particular story, and what do you do?

Will Spencer:

You don't use it at all, and you sacrifice yourself.

Will Spencer:

And that has a resonance so far deep within our culture, and I think probably within all cultures around the world.

Will Spencer:

And that's the Christ example in a very real sense.

Will Spencer:

He is the most powerful man to have ever lived.

Will Spencer:

Legions of angels at his disposal.

Will Spencer:

And when you read the Old Testament, you see what angels are capable of.

Will Spencer:

You know that he's got legions of them.

Will Spencer:

And what does Christ do?

Will Spencer:

He gives his own life, right?

Will Spencer:

And he doesn't.

Will Spencer:

And that's what the Jews were expecting.

Will Spencer:

They were expecting him to use his power.

Will Spencer:

You're the messiah.

Will Spencer:

Conquer the Romans.

Will Spencer:

Like, no, that's not what it's about.

Will Spencer:

You sacrifice you attain that high level of power.

Will Spencer:

And where I think the discussion gets really lost, particularly in the christian world, is that gets used to say, don't pursue power at all.

Will Spencer:

And I don't think that that's correct.

Will Spencer:

I think you pursue power, but you recognize the point where you lay power down and you sacrifice yourself.

Will Spencer:

It's kind of the ditch on the other side of the road.

Will Spencer:

You have the barbarian ditch, which says, I'm going to use all this power to serve my own interests.

Will Spencer:

And then you have the ditch on the other side of the road, which is the passivity dish was like, well, power is bad because it corrupts or because people misuse it.

Will Spencer:

It's like, no get.

Will Spencer:

You don't just don't go into either of those ditches.

Will Spencer:

You pursue power.

Will Spencer:

And, you know, using Christ's example, when to lay that power down for higher purpose and give of yourself even for a result, you're not going to know, right?

Will Spencer:

Like, this is why I like the Braveheart example.

Will Spencer:

William Wallace gives his life.

Will Spencer:

He doesn't know what's going to happen.

Will Spencer:

He just knows that it's the right thing to do in that moment.

Will Spencer:

And then, of course, his people ride to victory afterwards, but he doesn't know that.

Will Spencer:

This is actually my argument against Ayn Rand, is where I started thinking about all this stuff about the pursuit of rational self interest, because the pursuit of rational self interest can't understand self sacrifice, because you're not going to be around to know if your results are successful or not.

Will Spencer:

So this is where the Ayn Rand objectivist philosophy crumbles, because it can't understand that idea.

Alex Svetsky:

It does.

Alex Svetsky:

I grapple with that.

Alex Svetsky:

There's a whole section in the book on duty and sacrifice, and how, in fact, there's a couple sections.

Alex Svetsky:

There's also where I talk about the difference between civilian and warrior cultures.

Alex Svetsky:

Warrior cultures highly, highly value the tribe and sacrifice and adversity over where civilian cultures that are in more commercial in nature and more merchant like, value individualism and non sacrifice.

Alex Svetsky:

So it's like, what do I get out of it?

Alex Svetsky:

Like, everything is far more a trade.

Alex Svetsky:

And like, you look at the Spartans, for example, you would, there was a small penalty for coming back without you, or for dropping your sword or forgetting your sword.

Alex Svetsky:

There was the death penalty for getting your shield, for forgetting your shield.

Alex Svetsky:

That was because the shield was protecting the man beside you, because that's how the fountain was set up.

Alex Svetsky:

So there was a different relationship to this.

Alex Svetsky:

And.

Alex Svetsky:

Yeah, like, I believe in the book, I don't know if it was in that section where I kind of, like, grapple with Ayn Rand's piece, but it's.

Alex Svetsky:

There is something there that doesn't gel quite well in sort of the commercial civilian world.

Alex Svetsky:

That is far more like, it's different in the warrior realm, which actually, funny enough, I'm thinking out aloud here, ties back to why the warrior class are almost like the bearers of virtue, basically.

Alex Svetsky:

And like, that kind of.

Alex Svetsky:

That willingness to sacrifice or die for something is necessary for it to subsist.

Alex Svetsky:

And that takes a special kind of person that's less interested in just their current material gain, but more drawn to something, once again, transcendent.

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, interesting.

Will Spencer:

I'm thinking about, like, imagine a tribe, say, 100 people, and you have a chief, and then you have everyone else.

Will Spencer:

And if there were some circumstance where the tribe had to sacrifice a man, you have to sacrifice one man for rain or to save the tribe or whatever, what kind of tribal chieftain would say, bring me the weakest man, and we will sacrifice him?

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

You would expect that the tribal chieftain, it was a noble tribe, would sacrifice either the chief or one of the closest nobles.

Will Spencer:

But ideally the chief say, take me.

Will Spencer:

Right?

Will Spencer:

If a man has to die to save the entire tribe, take me.

Will Spencer:

And I think that speaks to.

Will Spencer:

I can just speak for myself.

Will Spencer:

That speaks to something so deep within me as a man, like, yeah, okay, I'll go right.

Will Spencer:

And.

Will Spencer:

Oh, gosh.

Will Spencer:

And you can't get there unless you're a strong man, because no one's going to pick the weak guy for a sacrifice.

Will Spencer:

What kind of sacrifice offering are you offering to God?

Will Spencer:

If you're like, well, I'm going to just take this weak and sickly sheep or whatever.

Alex Svetsky:

It's literally not a sacrifice if you did that.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Will Spencer:

That's right.

Alex Svetsky:

Literally, the concept of a sacrifice means you paid something.

Alex Svetsky:

And if it's just like, the worthless, the person who's already half dead, it's like, okay, well, then it wasn't a sacrifice.

Alex Svetsky:

So it's like, congratulations.

Alex Svetsky:

So, yeah, so you touch on something very, very important there.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, sacrifice has a price, and you can't.

Alex Svetsky:

You can.

Alex Svetsky:

You can skirt that as much as you want, but when push comes to shove, there is that.

Alex Svetsky:

There is a real price in blood.

Alex Svetsky:

There was a great quote that I saw the other day.

Alex Svetsky:

It's something about all things priced in blood.

Alex Svetsky:

I don't know.

Alex Svetsky:

I got to find that somewhere again.

Alex Svetsky:

But it was a great quote, which just reminded me of what you just said.

Will Spencer:

It's so rare that men get the chance to explore these ideas, we'll say optionally, right?

Will Spencer:

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

Will Spencer:

Praise God.

Will Spencer:

Hallelujah.

Will Spencer:

But the ability to go on this, I guess I might say cosmic in terms of cosmos, this cosmic journey to understand the nature of virtue and the nature of masculine virtue and how that can inform civilization.

Will Spencer:

Very cool that you got to spend time in that, in that world.

Will Spencer:

You know, you get to spend time in elysium, you might say, yeah, man.

Alex Svetsky:

I mean, I thank you for that.

Alex Svetsky:

And I will say that I'm blessed in many ways that I was able to do that because, I don't know, I feel like I sometimes get asked like, you know what?

Alex Svetsky:

Why do you do all the things you do?

Alex Svetsky:

You know, you're either building a business or you're writing or doing all this sort of stuff?

Alex Svetsky:

And my best answer is, like, because I can.

Alex Svetsky:

And, like.

Alex Svetsky:

And I don't mean that in, like, the surface level because I can.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, I mean, it is like, if you're blessed with the ability to go and actually go on these journeys and to push yourself, because writing this book hasn't been fucking easy, man.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, like, a lot of time went into this.

Alex Svetsky:

Like, man, yeah.

Alex Svetsky:

The amount of arguments I've had with my wife about like, hey, you don't spend time with me.

Alex Svetsky:

You're not paying me any attention.

Alex Svetsky:

I'm like, babe, I'm fucking writing here.

Alex Svetsky:

Something here.

Alex Svetsky:

Just please give me a second.

Alex Svetsky:

Or, you know, like, I'm.

Alex Svetsky:

I'm literally stress stretched between, like, writing versus.

Alex Svetsky:

I've got people to manage.

Alex Svetsky:

I've got capital to raise.

Alex Svetsky:

I've got conferences to speak.

Alex Svetsky:

I've got 10 million things.

Alex Svetsky:

But, like, man, this thing is so valuable and important that I want to put it out there.

Alex Svetsky:

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

Alex Svetsky:

And something about that makes me feel right good about life and about existence.

Alex Svetsky:

So thanks for bringing that up.

Will Spencer:

Yeah, but it doesn't feel like it was, and you just said it doesn't feel like it was self serving.

Will Spencer:

But you also allowed yourself to be changed by the process.

Will Spencer:

Like, you're going to go walking up to these really confronting ideas, like, wow, they hit me really hard.

Will Spencer:

What do I do with that?

Will Spencer:

Maybe I got to fix some things, right?

Will Spencer:

But that's the journey of creativity.

Will Spencer:

It's like, that's the sacrifice.

Will Spencer:

Like, well, I really like this.

Will Spencer:

Maybe this didn't happen to you.

Will Spencer:

It's happened to me a number of times.

Will Spencer:

Like, I go on this big adventure to explore an idea and I encounter something that's true in there.

Will Spencer:

It's like, wow.

Will Spencer:

That comes into conflict with some ideas that I have.

Will Spencer:

I really like my ideas, but this is what's true.

Will Spencer:

Well, I guess I'll throw that out and that's growth.

Will Spencer:

Right.

Will Spencer:

But you're dealing with the highest themes of what it means to be alive, what it means to be a mandeh, what it means to serve, what it means to, you know, to grow, what it means to sacrifice, like, that process, it changes you.

Will Spencer:

And I can feel that in talking to you from the last time we talked about the uncommunist manifesto.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you, man.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you.

Alex Svetsky:

It means a lot coming from you.

Alex Svetsky:

And, yeah, I really appreciate you, like, having me on and just having this discussion, honestly, and it's one of the better discussions that I've had, or one of the best, actually, I think, that I've had around this, because you get it.

Alex Svetsky:

We're on the same side.

Will Spencer:

We're on the same side, praise God.

Will Spencer:

So where would you like to send people to find out about the bushido of bitcoin?

Will Spencer:

Now that they're all fired up and excited, where can they go?

Alex Svetsky:

So depending on when you're releasing this, it'll either be on Amazon.

Alex Svetsky:

If it's not yet on Amazon, it may still be on presale.

Alex Svetsky:

So the best place to figure that out would be bushido bitcoin.com.

Alex Svetsky:

if they go there, bushidobitcoin.com, the most current links will be there.

Alex Svetsky:

So if it is on Amazon, you'll be able to click one click buy on Amazon.

Alex Svetsky:

If it's not yet on Amazon, there'll be two links.

Alex Svetsky:

One to buy it with shitty fiat, and the other two buy it with bitcoin.

Alex Svetsky:

And the bitcoin is obviously cheaper.

Will Spencer:

Amazing.

Will Spencer:

Well, I'm excited to.

Will Spencer:

So it's been a couple of years since we had this conversation, and so now here we are with the bushido of bitcoin.

Will Spencer:

I'm kind of excited to see where you're going next.

Will Spencer:

I'm wondering what the next stage in the svetsky adventure will be.

Alex Svetsky:

I promise it'll be just as exciting that I can tell you what it will be.

Alex Svetsky:

God knows.

Alex Svetsky:

Let's see.

Alex Svetsky:

But I promise it'll be energetic at the least.

Will Spencer:

I have no doubt.

Will Spencer:

I have no doubt.

Will Spencer:

It's great talking to you, Alex.

Will Spencer:

Thank you so much.

Alex Svetsky:

You too, my friend.

Alex Svetsky:

Thank you.

Will Spencer:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast.

Will Spencer:

Visit us on the web at Wren of men.com or on your favorite social media platform, en of Mendez.

Will Spencer:

This is the renaissance of men.

Will Spencer:

You are the Renaissance.

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