Financial Fallout! 21 Futures Podcast S2 E5 - Max Hillebrand talks freedom tech and 'Underworld'

I should say that this, our first anthology, Tales from the Timechain, was a Bitcoin anthology, and that's very much at the ethos of 21 Futures. We are affiliated with ConsenSys Network, and it's very much the starting point for 21 Futures and the idea. I mean, it's in the name too, right? This book though, Financial Fallout, is not specifically anything to do with Bitcoin. A bit of a spoiler alert, several of the stories do mention it and include concepts of Bitcoin in the stories. But I think further to what you said, we're moving from the period of learn about Bitcoin and study Bitcoin to why should we care? I think many people in the space are starting to think, well, We've been saying study Bitcoin for 10 years, and not everyone's into studying Bitcoin because most people won't want to or need to, but they will come to the realization of what the problem is and why it's necessary. And I think this second anthology aims to branch out a little bit into those stories of if we continue down this dangerous path of financial issues, shall we say, what might happen. And there will become a point where people have to stand and fight rather than burying their head in the sand or saying, oh, things are getting tough, things are getting harder for us. I saw a quote just to illustrate that the other day about the film It's a Wonderful Life, which was published in 1946 or '48 or something like that. And there's a quote in it about how hard it is for a family to save, to get their hands on $5,000. And the tweet was that it was the reason that the film has endured so much is that that statement hasn't changed, right? It's still very hard for families to save $5,000 or to get their hands on that money now, like 70 something years later or 80 years later. So yeah.

Yeah, back then for $5,000, you could build yourself a house, right? Now you can barely get a computer for this, right? So it really shows the deep injustice that the fiat monetary system is, right? It makes the people who work hardest work even harder, right? And to not be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. And of course, with the devaluation of money that is caused by monetary printing, this problem goes worse and worse and worse. So that wealth gap and the discrepancy between the people who produce and the people who loot has just been exponentially more of a problem nowadays than it was 70 years ago.

100%. I think another example that springs to mind is how prevalent the idea of 6 figures has become as a baseline for an okay middle-class life or being able to survive as a family in the States. Originally, when that became popularized, it was in the 1950s. And $100,000 in the 1950s was worth $2.1 million or $2.4 million now. So we have gone from seeing that as an attractive proposition to clinging on to, oh, please, can I have $100,000 of income in a year so that we can get by as a family? I mean, if you're living in some parts of the States, like San Francisco or something, I'm sure it's Extremely difficult to live on that. And that's a sign of where we're at. What are some of the indicators that you see in modern life, maybe apart from inflation or apart from falling purchasing power, that people should be worried about, that you see the signs of dystopia starting to creep in?

Well, I think the fact that we're writing here a book about the future is already quite outstanding, because most people don't think much about the future anymore, especially not the long-term future, right? People are caught in the short-term thinking, simply because they're not sure how they're going to put food on the table next week. And so how are they going to think decades or centuries out ahead? That advanced planning of the future and building on something great that takes longer than a human lifespan to compete is something that we've seen back in the days in the Golden Age, right? When we build massive cathedrals that took 200, 300 years to complete. And back then, this was normal to work on something which you yourself wouldn't even see the completion, maybe not even your children, but your children's children would. And nowadays, that's no longer happening. And people are working on short-term gains and trying to get lucky, but not really on structural and systematic long-term improvements. And I think this is something where in the book, Just the fact that 21 Bitcoiners are getting together to write a book about the future and how it could look like in a long time horizon is quite important. I think it shows that we're back interested in building something that is greater than ourselves.

Certainly, I think the ethos of 21 Futures is community as well. And I should say thank you to everyone who's been involved, from all the people who help make the books and the project possible to the authors themselves. Everyone is so supportive, and I love working with Bitcoiners especially because they say what they do and they do what they say, and they are very efficient and keen people to spread these ideas. So that's been great. Any other aspects that you could mention about the signs of financial servitude or difficulty starting to creep in in 2025?

Yeah, I think most people know that something— or they have an intuitive feeling that something just isn't right. Just as you said, $5,000 doesn't you know, buy you a full basket at the grocery store anymore. And that is a problem. And people start to think much shorter and no longer actually hopeful for the future itself. And we felt that in the last 20 years, things went worse, right, on so many different aspects. And, you know, the scary thing is that it will get a lot worse before it will get better. And I think this is the core narrative of this anthology, is that things can get so much more worse. And just some brief history of failed monetary systems like the Weimar Republic, like the Zimbabwe dollar, or like Venezuela, just shows that when the money is sick, or the world is sick because the money is poisoned, and the money that we have nowadays is just anything other than logically sound and reasonable and heartfelt. So yes, people are struggling at the moment, And unfortunately, more people will struggle even harder in the future if we keep playing these fiat games. However, on the other hand side, we see that Bitcoin heals people and it heals the economy and at an incredibly rapid rate. So that's what makes me hopeful for the future, that in fact, we do have an alternative, right? We do have something better that we can use. And it's It's here, it's available for anyone who's courageous enough to pick up the tools and start to defend himself. And this is also something that the book highlights, right? That it's in the hands of individuals to protect themselves and their families and their loved ones. And now that cypherpunks have created these tools necessary for this, it's become a much easier, a much riskless or costless plan of Of bringing a more delightful future into reality.

Let's hope. Many of the stories in the anthology do have a positive message. I think in order to reach that positivity, there has to be some kind of defeat of the dystopia or defeat of evil. And I suppose a common theme is that all of the stories at some point have that moment of the character Saying no more, the character fighting, be it physically or technologically, for what they believe in. Let's switch focus to your story, your contribution to the anthology, Underworld, which is one of the more wide-ranging stories in a way that it describes a dystopian future. Where did the idea come from? And tell us a bit more about the story itself without revealing too many spoilers.

Yeah, the idea itself is, as all great things, copied from another great idea in another great book, one of my favorites, a book that inspired me and many others to do the things that we do. And that is the book A Lodging of Wayfaring Men by Paul Rosenberg. And it tells a story based on real events, even though it is fictionalized, on an underground world where cypherpunks build technologies for anonymous trade in cyberspace, right, online. And they do so because of deep, fundamental, ethical, philosophical, and principled reasons. And however, it's much more than just a technological book, right? It's about humans, about life, love, religion, and the purpose in life. So this book was a really incredible book when I read it, and I've tried to distill some of the messages that are taught in this tome in a much shorter version that, of course, can barely scratch the surface of the interesting ideals that are there.

I'd like to dig a bit more into that because I've read Lodging based on your recommendation and a few other people, and I think it's a great book. As you say, it definitely immediately connects with people because you follow people, you care about the characters in the book, and you're following a story rather than learning purely about a— A concept. a new technology or a new system. And you said it was based on reality. I haven't been able to find much information out about that. Can you shed any more light on which real events it is based on?

Yeah, you can find a much— a very accurate description of what happened on the freemansperspective.com website, which is by the author Paul Rosenberg. And there you can find the The Untold Story of the Greatest Crypto Project Ever, which goes, goes in deep. And this was in between 1997 to 2001-ish, where a group of freedom lovers got together in Costa Rica to, to work on the first anonymous marketplace online. And they worked on digital cash and anonymous remailers and mixnets and anonymous hosting providers, right? And they were sponsored by well, wealthy, freedom-loving individuals to bring humanity to the next level. And this project was less successful than the one depicted in The Lodging of Wayfaring Men, ultimately, simply because the technology wasn't really there yet and timing the market wasn't either. It was way too early, as you could say. But ultimately, this was a tale of real people. And a lot of the writings, especially the essays and letters that are depicted in are straight-up copies from the people who wrote about the subject back in the days.

It's a really interesting book because it feels like a much bigger project which has been amalgamated into this sort of storybook. There's essays attached to it and a lot of notes. And when I read it, I certainly sensed the author's understanding of much, much bigger events and projects going on in creating this story. But yeah, I think it will be a great film that is yet to be produced. What other books inspire your writing and your thinking in the freedom scene?

Well, my first love was economics, praxeology, Austrian economics. So specifically the writing of Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are quite influential in the way that I think. Starting from an analysis of the individual, because that's what we can verify ourselves, and then drawing conclusions and deducing logically the consequences of human action. is something that has always fascinated me. So economics is incredibly important. And it's not just important to understand how money works or why business is valuable. I think economics can teach you so much about how to interact with other humans and how to interact with loved ones and families. So economics is not a dull science as it's made out in university. I think it's quite colorful and beautiful and funny. Like the writings of Rothbard are hilarious. They're really, yeah, just a joy to read and so easy to read, right? Economics doesn't have to be hard and difficult to convey. These masters of the science have made it so approachable, so understandable, so intuitive that it really is a next-level delight to read. So that is quite important or influential on my writing. And then further, the cypherpunks, specifically things like the Declaration of Independence or the— Yeah, the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, I mean, as well as the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto or the Cypherpunks Manifesto. And probably my most loved one is the Declaration of Separation, a much lesser known and much more recent building block on top of the giant work that cypherpunks have done. So cypherpunks are punks, you know, they're free and unashamed. And they They don't quite care about how others might perceive their quite harsh rhetoric because they've done their homework and know that what they're saying is true. And so this is a bold and courageous literature that was always quite attractive to me. So Austrian economics and cypherpunk, that's somewhat the culmination of my writing.

Yeah, really interesting. Where do you think this movement is going? Let me ask you that. Maybe, I guess we know what's going on with 21 Futures. There'll be more information about that coming soon. Lyn Alden is writing a fiction, sci-fi fiction book. Saifedean Amos is releasing a alternative history fiction book. There was a bestseller about a sort of Bitcoin thriller, or Bitcoin was involved in a plot last year. There's a lot more books on the theme of cypherpunks, crypto, and freedom tech. Do you think that's going to break into the mainstream? Do you think more people are going to be reading about this? Maybe are we even going to see films, TV shows, and that translated onto the, onto the big screen? Any predictions?

I, I think so, if we make it happen, right? It won't come out of nothing, but as, as more and more individuals start to pick this up, as their passion projects and really driving it forward, then ultimately it's a numbers game. Eventually we'll have such a killer of a story that will go viral like nothing else, because Bitcoin and cypherpunk is such a great story, right? It's a story of rebellion, of depicting the horrors of a past system and of building towards the beautiful delight of a new system. That's such a human story that I think can touch billions of people. And I think the world is ripe for a new and a better story. And we've honed our craft and improved our narrative on how we can depict the story in a more meaningful way, right? And as the authors that you just mentioned are quite well in, you know, writing and painting pictures with words. So I do believe that we're on a very good track of having a great success of freedom literature in the coming short term. And likewise with movies, right? Obviously, film is more expensive to produce than a book. And so it's natural that this comes a bit later. But, you know, we've had the first Bitcoin Film Fest last year in Poland, in Warsaw. And that was a great success. There were 10+ movies depicted, right? And not just documentaries, but But also, you know, fiction stories that were very close to this theme. So this will happen more and more. And, you know, specifically with film, now we have so many great stories that we can pick from and build upon that I think that we have a pretty straightforward path of spreading the great work much, much more.

I think that's why it's So exciting to be involved in the— Excuse me. In the scene, because we have this background in grounded knowledge, which books are not going away. They're going to be the main way that we can express ideas in a complete or considered or perfect way. But we've also got all of this other type of new media that, you know, I myself like short stories, and I think we should see more anthology shows, more short films as well, because our concept of stories is a little bit based on 20th century media, be it novels and cinema. And now we can really surpass that, especially with AI that's coming on to allow people to record audio and video with, you know, minimized cost as well, which could be pretty exciting for the, um, for the future. What kind of other projects are you working on, Max? Tell us about your, your work outside of writing and appearing on podcasts.

Yeah, I'm building Freedom Tech with my friends. That's, that's my work and my passion and a lot of fun. So there are so many different projects that deserve attention and being built further. And so Wasabi Wallet, the sponsor of this book, is obviously one of them. But more than that, there are, for example, Nostr, as mentioned in the foreword briefly that I wrote, is an incredibly exciting new playground and field of technology that allows us to build applications of you know, incredible user sovereignty, something that has never been seen before. I know you can write messages and videos and pictures and publish them securely, you know, such that your followers actually can verify that these are yours and cryptographically signed coming from you. And on top of that, we have a resilient infrastructure, right? We now can actually spread messages in such a way that they cannot be taken down. Which has happened way too often in the past, that great voices have been censored and great stories could not be told, not just because the original authors were censored, but because of the fear of censorship, nobody else retold those stories either. So this is a thing of the past with the technologies that Nostr has enabled. And it's of course much more than just short text notes, etc. This can be used to, for example, spread or to deliver software to the end user. And SamStore is one example, allows you to publish applications freely without having an app store that you need approval from Apple or Google to publish apps at. That's fantastic. And Blossom, another interesting protocol, quite tangential to Nostr, but essential in the secure and resilient distribution of messages and data. White Noise is one application that aims to bring secure encryption to Nostr for even large group messages, where you can have groups of hundreds of thousands of millions or even billions of people and encrypt messages securely and scalably to this large group, you know, for a real private gathering online. And this enables us to do marketplaces. And finally, now we have decentralized marketplaces, like truly, that rely on Bitcoin and Nostr to make sure that trade can happen, which is groundbreaking, which is absolutely essential, right? The problem of the old marketplaces is that they were all centralized and could easily be shut down. And this is again a thing of the past. So just continuing the mission on freedom tech in general has so many different nuanced projects that that can be tackled, that it's a delight to work on. So if anyone is bored and wants to live a fulfilled life, join us in building freedom tech.

I definitely advise everyone to learn about Nostr and get started on it as well, because there are many great clients that make it pretty easy for a non-tech guy like me to be involved. And it's so— I can't tell you how exciting it is. To zap someone. To send value across the world with no one in between to somewhere where a person could not usually receive money or receive that value is life-affirming. And it's so important for creators as well, creative people. The creator economy is broken, is absolutely broken, worse than the monetary system. Most people who are creating art, who are writing, who are producing videos, film, any other kind of art cannot receive value easily for the art that they create. And Nostr makes that possible. And I hope and think it's something we're going to see much more of in the future that will allow projects like 21 Futures and any other projects that people have to continue and to do well. Yeah, very exciting times on Nostr, I think. Brilliant. Well, I think that is most of the questions that I have for you, Max. Have you got any other points that you'd like to make or maybe tell people where they can find you online?

Well, we still have billions of people to liberate out of slavery and to hand them the tools of of freedom. And you can make a meaningful contribution to this effort. And I think it's a, it's a wonderfully worthwhile venture that is incredibly rewarding to be a part of. So I cannot encourage people more to, to, you know, be part, to become active, and to build something, anything that furthers this cause along. And I think what 21 Futures perfectly shows is that you don't need to be a developer to build freedom technologies, right? You, you really don't. Um, writing stories, telling stories, making movies, etc., is an incredibly vitally important part in, in this project, right? It's, it's the, the freedom propaganda, basically. We need to de-brainwash billions of people out of, of the Stockholm Syndrome of, of decades, centuries of, of harassment and, and harm that has been done, and we need to help people heal. And stories like 21 Futures are an incredibly important part of this. So if you're a writer, write a book or join us for the next anthology in this series, and hopefully together we can make the world just a bit better.

That's great, a really empowering message. for everyone involved in the project and who will be involved in the project going forwards. We have many more futures to go. Max, thank you so much for coming on the show and all the best with your thousands of projects. Yeah, encourage everyone to get involved with Nostr and we'll see you in the next episode.

Yeah, thanks, Philip, also for your work with producing these 21 futures. It was a great first volume. The second volume is, I think, even better. So I can't wait how the third one is. So please guys, check it out, buy yourself a copy. It's a great one to give to friends and family as well. I hope it's going to be a good orange pilling.

For certain. Yeah, I should say final thing is March 14th, 2025 is the release date for this anthology. So we are getting everything together. This episode will probably be scheduled for around that date. So, if it's after that date, buy the book and check it out, 21futures.com. Thanks very much to Max, and I'll see you in the next one.

Bye-bye.

Bye, everyone.