Apr 20, 2026 · 1 hr 18 min · 12 segments
Sean is my boy from Boston and a great fellow Bitcoiner. He's building Rythm.xyz, a last line of defense for Gmail and Outlook that whitelists known senders and lets strangers pay a Lightning…
Yeah, I'd love to double click into the building on Bitcoin thing, especially now with AI.
But before I do so, I'm just curious, in my experience going down the rabbit hole, so much of the challenge was actually unlearning things.
Now, I only took EC5, I didn't actually get a degree in economics, but I did find that as I was trying to study different aspects of Bitcoin, understand things, realize that 2% inflation number, it actually should be way lower than that.
Everything should be getting cheaper constantly over time due to everything falling to the marginal cost of production.
But yeah, I just used that as an example, because in my personal experience, the hard part wasn't learning new things, it was unlearning so many of the things that I had been taught and just took for granted.
Yeah, unlearning, I mean, I think we're all still going through that because when you live in a reality for the last 100 plus years that has been built, I mean, it's been a problem for all of humanity.
We've had broken money, but just anecdotally, our time frame, when you live in this reality that's built on broken money, the second, third, tenth older generation cascading impacts of that and how it manifests in our day-to-day life and our perception of things rising in cost all the time are all rooted in like systems engineering issues all the way down at the foundation and it's hard to see that until you really kick the tires on it but Unlearning is really, really hard, especially when we've gone our whole lives soaking in and seeing firsthand how the world works.
So to imagine what would happen when you shift a foundation that impacts everything, it's really, really difficult to start imagining how the things 10 layers outside of that change.
So it's a constant unlearning, I would say.
yeah no it is uh pretty crazy the deeper you go down the bitcoin rabbit hole it's just it always cracks me up that paradox of like it's greed that gets people in the door it's number go up it's thinking your purchasing power is going to be worth more but then you know there's a moral imperative i feel as i go deeper down the rabbit hole that this is honest this is just money we should have a system where a small group of people cannot print the money that the rest of us have an opportunity cost to work for they shouldn't get these incredible privileges to essentially, you know, own the Ponzi scheme to print the dollars that the rest of us have to use.
But it's that tension, that paradox of like, what gets people in the door is greed is, uh, it's a funny one that, you know, it's from an outsider looking in, if you haven't gone down the rabbit hole, you're, you know, I'd see why people look at this and be like, what do you mean this, this has like positive moral implications.
You just doing this for your own greed, which is a fair assessment if you haven't studied it.
It is.
Alex Gladstein says a long time ago, many others have probably said it, but Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom.
It's disguised as this gift, this, you know, number go up is the like, oh, look, it's so pretty.
But once it's in, you know, a couple of guys are going to sneak out and unlock the gates.
And it's really inside of the horse is freedom tech.
It's giving individuals agency over time.
Their own money, so they have agency over the rules.
Of their own money, and we don't need to trust rulers to govern.
Correctly, and that, like, eliminates this existential crisis idea of a central choke point.
And a bad leader getting elected or a state being co-opted.
Yeah, it really empowers individuals.
And that's what's really exciting about it.
Yeah, I'd love to double click into the building on Bitcoin thing, especially now with AI.
But before I do so, I'm just curious, in my experience going down the rabbit hole, so much of the challenge was actually unlearning things.
Now, I only took EC5, I didn't actually get a degree in economics, but I did find that as I was trying to study different aspects of Bitcoin, understand things, realize that 2% inflation number, it actually should be way lower than that.
Everything should be getting cheaper constantly over time due to everything falling to the marginal cost of production.
But yeah, I just used that as an example, because in my personal experience, the hard part wasn't learning new things, it was unlearning so many of the things that I had been taught and just took for granted.
Yeah, unlearning, I mean, I think we're all still going through that because when you live in a reality for the last 100 plus years that has been built, I mean, it's been a problem for all of humanity.
We've had broken money, but just anecdotally, our time frame, when you live in this reality that's built on broken money, the second, third, tenth older generation cascading impacts of that and how it manifests in our day-to-day life and our perception of things rising in cost all the time are all rooted in like systems engineering issues all the way down at the foundation and it's hard to see that until you really kick the tires on it but Unlearning is really, really hard, especially when we've gone our whole lives soaking in and seeing firsthand how the world works.
So to imagine what would happen when you shift a foundation that impacts everything, it's really, really difficult to start imagining how the things 10 layers outside of that change.
So it's a constant unlearning, I would say.
yeah no it is uh pretty crazy the deeper you go down the bitcoin rabbit hole it's just it always cracks me up that paradox of like it's greed that gets people in the door it's number go up it's thinking your purchasing power is going to be worth more but then you know there's a moral imperative i feel as i go deeper down the rabbit hole that this is honest this is just money we should have a system where a small group of people cannot print the money that the rest of us have an opportunity cost to work for they shouldn't get these incredible privileges to essentially, you know, own the Ponzi scheme to print the dollars that the rest of us have to use.
But it's that tension, that paradox of like, what gets people in the door is greed is, uh, it's a funny one that, you know, it's from an outsider looking in, if you haven't gone down the rabbit hole, you're, you know, I'd see why people look at this and be like, what do you mean this, this has like positive moral implications.
You just doing this for your own greed, which is a fair assessment if you haven't studied it.
It is.
Alex Gladstein says a long time ago, many others have probably said it, but Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom.
It's disguised as this gift, this, you know, number go up is the like, oh, look, it's so pretty.
But once it's in, you know, a couple of guys are going to sneak out and unlock the gates.
And it's really inside of the horse is freedom tech.
It's giving individuals agency over time.
Their own money, so they have agency over the rules.
Of their own money, and we don't need to trust rulers to govern.
Correctly, and that, like, eliminates this existential crisis idea of a central choke point.
And a bad leader getting elected or a state being co-opted.
Yeah, it really empowers individuals.
And that's what's really exciting about it.
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