Ryan Broderick
Appearances
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Genesis
Yeah, but you pay a lot of money to do it, though. Oh. Obviously. Obviously. It's less money than just a normal yacht.
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Genesis
And I was the son he's talking about. Yes. And he's talking about a Fox business host. I think her name is Susan. And she's pretty good. And I opened Twitter and she's like, you should buy the dip now. And I was like, I wonder what that would do. Let's see. And it worked. Yeah. For a little bit. And then we kind of lost those gains. But yeah.
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Genesis
They were conventions like this, except they weren't selling Bitcoin. They were selling horse semen.
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Genesis
I'm like, it's just like Arabian horses. I went to a few of those conventions. They're a weird vibe. But they're not... He's right. They are very similar to this. So, obviously, when he first told me he was investing in cryptocurrency, I was extremely worried. But it turns out, like, he was pretty good about it, and he was making pretty decent money. It was also good timing for me because...
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Genesis
I started covering it through him. And I was very upfront about that in my newsletter. I was like, my dad's investing in Bitcoin, I'm gonna just study him like a little lab rat. But I honestly think it's an interesting experience to be with someone who's actively trading it and has been at it for a while, watching the markets with him. I think it's useful.
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Genesis
So I went in thinking Ethereum people are the freaks and the scammers and they're bad for the world and Bitcoin people are actually the reasonable ones. I have come away with a more nuanced idea of that dichotomy. Ethereum people, I mean, here they're accused of being too woke, which is blowing my mind. But they're younger, they're a more vibrant cultural space.
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Genesis
One kid we were just talking to outside at the techno party that's happening right now was saying that Ethereum is not currency, it's technology. And I think that is a good way to think about it. Ethereum people, they want to run the whole internet on the blockchain. It's what they call Web3. They're trying to reinvent information technology and combine it with finance.
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Genesis
Interesting idea, horrifying, depends on your point of view, I suppose. Bitcoiners, I have learned, are much more militant about Bitcoin. The Bitcoiners are much more obsessed with redefining how society works in a way that I don't see in the Ethereum community.
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Genesis
That was the dark realization I had. In fact, just before this interview, the group of kids we were talking to, one of which was a libertarian YouTuber, kind of dropped his mask in a way that a lot of Bitcoiners do if you talk to them for long enough or have enough drinks with them, where they start talking very openly about acquiring generational wealth.
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Genesis
And I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with the book Neuromancer, but it's basically about a rich family that lives in space and uses cloning to store wealth over centuries, and then they get robbed, thankfully. Spoiler. But that's kind of what the people here are dreaming about. They're dreaming about a way to store their wealth
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Genesis
for centuries or millennia and have it be able to leave Earth. And they're very serious about it. And it's kind of goofy. It's like, oh, wow, you're wearing a Rick and Morty t-shirt and walking around Miami. But then you're like, oh, you are literally preparing for a world in which you are an oligarch in space.