The following probably shares more personal information about parts of my life than the reader may care to know. I'm sharing this as I wrote it as an honest attempt to strengthen the conviction of a potentially tired or jaded reader who believes in, and works toward bitcoin adoption for similar reasons to myself: freedom from unnecessary human control. I'm not quite sure how to make it less personal, and as this post will reveal, I don't reject all authority as a concept outright. Please be forewarned as, to some, either of those inclusions will certainly be more nauseating than the post if helpful, and I do value your time.

I got a rejection letter yesterday

It stung so hard. I am pretty sure that I know exactly why I lost this particular opportunity. It was the end of the second interview and the panel asked, "Can you think of a time when you enforced a policy you disagreed with? How did that play out? We're a highly regulated company and we have to enforce many policies involving KYC rules and other legal compliance."

This should have been my clincher moment. I was uncharacteristically nervous though. My phone (despite actually being plugged in) had just died, interrupting the interview for more than a couple of minutes, and I was feeling tense. I reached in my mind for a period of time in which I enforced a policy that I disagreed with.

The following story is NOT how I lost my passion for music.

Covid

In late 2015, after much of my artistic and touring career had been on hold for a few years, I started a branch of a corporate party band company in a midwestern city. I recruited and trained a couple hundred musicians while also booking and managing a few events a month in another established city about two hours away. By the end of the year, I was booking and managing thirty or more events a month in the new city. That following year, I was tasked with bringing order to another neighboring city a few hours away in which the person in my position had been asked to step down. This experience was brutal, as I came in under high suspicion by the musicians, venues, and other vendors alike. For quite a while, everyone there was hostile. Within about a year and a half, that city was doing as well as mine.

When Covid struck, I was supposed to be on my first true, "do-not-contact," vacation in half a decade, yet I spent the first week harshly enforcing contracts, what I still believe was the correct call. This meant that the client was out of a 20% deposit, no small chunk of change, even for the wealthiest people in society. Nevertheless, it's how we protected our musicians, many with families and typically not the wealthiest people in society if they're working the wedding band circuits.

What I shared with my interviewers last week was what started with a phone call in the Denver airport in March of 2020. Despite building their business in a large swath of the midwest, I was instructed by my superiors to enforce their new policy about Covid related cancellations.

• First off, we are pausing all cancellation payouts for musicians. I was livid, but there was a silver lining. At least all of these high net worth people that had been yelling at me on the phone the last few days of my "vacation" would get their money and peace of mind back.
• Second off...well you probably already guessed it. We're still keeping the deposits.

So here I am, having made this company millions, enforcing the worst of both worlds. We're keeping the deposits despite the crazy circumstances and breaking our contracts with our contractors, despite our agreements to pay out some fees for cancellations. All this, despite my having built them an operation in the region that had made millions by this point. I made my opinion heard, gritted my teeth while enforcing this policy, and finally trained a few people to replace me after a few months.

The exact wrong response

So last week I said some platitudes about living in the real world and ended with this depressing tale, portraying myself as a pushover and a quitter. Both of these preparatives are, of course, accurate. But I still think my decisions reflected both my recognition of the proper need for authority and also the integrity to hold the line in the least destructive manner possible. Simply put, my track record trends toward radical, but not for the sake of being radical. I believe last week that I expressed the exact opposite of this in the way I framed this story.

Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

Wedding bands are fun. When done right, they're very lucrative. That said, if I never...ever hear September, Uptown Funk, Don't Stop Believing, Shake it off, or Crazy in Love again, I'll be just fine. No one ever picked up a guitar with starry-eyed dreams of playing some rich guy's daughter's third wedding.

But this also is NOT how I lost my passion for music.

I actually really fell in love with music when I first discovered jazz. Real jazz! Have you ever heard Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Kenny Garrett, John Coltrane, Bill Frisell, Sonny Rollins, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Woody Shaw, Steve Turre, Jaco Pastorious, Curtis Fuller, Pat Metheny, Albert Ayler, Bela Fleck, Courtney Pine, Chris Potter, Eddie Bayard, Paul Brown, Andy Woodson, James Gaiters, Chris Howes, Bobby Floyd, or Derek DiCenzo?! There are so many more. What's even more amazing is that there used to be a pretty strong economy built around this music, and more recently than many here may realize. In the decades before doing the wedding band thing, I spent about half my time performing R&B (often on the road), but about half my time performing jazz, including with some of my musical heroes listed above.

That economy went away at one point. I had to pivot towards less adventurous musical endeavors.

But that's also NOT how I lost my passion for music.

How I lost my passion for music

I still love music, and it's how I pay the bills to this day, but you may have gathered already from this post that it's not how I hope to. And I've been trying to make that transition for a while.

A few years back, I was sitting in a club waiting to perform with an "avant garde" jazz ensemble. It paid ostensibly nothing, but there was a really talented "jazz famous" guy sitting in with our group that night and I was kind of excited. The club also gave us all a free burrito and chips. :)

Half way through my chips, some part of my brain heard something that made me pay attention to the conversation at the next table. A member of the band who had a doctorate in "jazz studies" was speaking with our guest artist. He had just been hired by a prestigious university and was describing his curriculum plans. The guest artist made a passing comment about how it sounds like he's institutionalizing jazz music, and the phd guy retorted, "well isn't that the point?"

This was the exact moment that I decided that I want to work in any capacity toward making Bitcoin more successful and accessible. I still enjoy music much more than the average bear, but the sentiment expressed by the phd guy is the exact opposite of what compelled me to tens of thousands of hours of practice back in the day. And it's far from the minority view at this point. Listen to any of my musical heroes listed above and, potentially, the only common thread you'll hear is a lack of institutional rule following. But the youngest of those folks is now the old guard.

It's no coincidence that jazz music originates from, and traditionally thrives in the black community. It is rebel music at it's core. The joy of Louis Armstrong, the complexities of Charlie Parker, and the freedom of Ornette Coleman all establish loose structures (even authority) in an effort to cast aside oppressive control. But "jazz studies" is now a part of normal university curriculum, and despite the standards being way lower than what's necessary to even play cheap bar gigs, the power to codify the rules is established and enforced. I wouldn't go so far as to say, "jazz is dead," but it sure ain't what it used to be...

Furthermore, and more importantly, I found another way to scratch that itch.

Spoiler Alert (not clickbait)

I'm reading The Two Towers to my two daughters right now. The night after my terminal interview with this bitcoin company, a scene I had long forgot underscored the motivations behind my attempted transitions the last few years and my failure that day at the same time. (last warning, the sentence after next is a huge spoiler) The scene is the forest reunion. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are all reunited with a Gandalf they long thought dead.

As a quick aside, the reunion starts with a mesmerizingly beautiful conversation about Boromir's last day in Middle Earth in which Gandalf is relieved to hear he "escaped." It's a stunning theological lesson about grace, and an example of one of my favorite things about Tolkien's writing. I've long thought that Tolkien is so much more popular with the secular community than his friend C.S. Lewis because all of his preaching goes over all of our heads. Setting aside their essays, and only focusing on the fiction, I'm convinced that Lewis writes philosophy disguised as narrative while Tolkien writes narrative disguised as philosophy. As a result, when reading the former, we bump into offense and sometimes miss a brilliant tale. But when reading the latter, we go on an adventure, and suddenly that amputation on Mount Doom is less than a quarter as exciting (and offensive) as it really should be. I digress.

After confusing the three of them with this speech about Boromir, Gandalf then continues to catch up with another "riddle," to borrow Aragorn's description.

'What then shall I say?' said Gandalf, and paused for a while in thought. 'This in brief is how I see things at the moment, if you wish to have a piece of my mind as plain as possible. The Enemy, of course, long has known that the ring is abroad, and that it is borne by a hobbit. He knows now the number of our Company that set out from Rivendell, and the kind of each of us. But he does not yet see our purpose clearly. He supposed that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he himself would have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the ring, and assailing his with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no (emphasis Gandalf's, not mine) one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream. In which no doubt you will see our good fortune and our hope. For imagining war he has let lose war, believing that he has no time to waste; for he that strikes the first blow, if he strikes it hard enough, may need to strike no more. So the forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended. Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile on the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded: neither Ring nor bearer could have long eluded him. But now his eye gazes abroad rather than near at home; and mostly he looks toward Minas Tirith. Very soon now his strength will fall upon it like a storm.'

I have no memory of reading this part as a kid.

I had long remembered the theme throughout this epic that the free peoples of Middle Earth all had to put aside their differences and band together if they wanted to continue their individual ways of life. I've even long enjoyed the funny, annoyed responses Tolkien is recorded giving when people said it was an allegory for either of the world wars since that theme is so similar. But somehow, over the years, I forgot that part of the success of the free people in the Lord of the Rings is the fact that Sauron doesn't even have a category for them not wanting someone in charge.

Read that Gandalf quote again and tell me with a straight face that Tolkien wouldn't have been a bitcoiner!

What's wild is that I asked the LLMs about this, and they came up with a totally different passage! "You must be remembering the council of Elrond." Sure enough, I checked and he outlines the same strategy, as well as the enemies same oversight thereof in the first book. I didn't just miss it as a kid, I missed it again when I read it to my girls last month. But it's there, and I think I caught it last Wednesday because of my flub. This is a major theme of the book. Freedom loving people want to minimize human power over others, and the most power-hungry don't even have a category for someone not wanting that power themselves.

Delegated Authority

I know this is stacker news, and there are a number of folks that I respect here that don't respect those of us that believe authority has a place at all. But I'm in good company. There's no doubt that Tolkien believed in authority. The man was Roman Catholic. Elrond rightly leads the counsel, Gandalf responsibly leads the Fellowship, and ultimately, Aragorn justly leads his country. Yet, he's not as black and white about most moral issues as he's often portrayed. It wasn't enough to keep the ring from Sauron. It wasn't enough to keep the ring from Saruman. It didn't just tempt Boromir. It didn't just take Frodo. The ring was good for NO MAN. It's what I loved about jazz. It's what I love about bitcoin. Just like Sauron, the enemies of bitcoin think it's about moving power elsewhere. They have no idea that it might be about removing a whole layer of power altogether. It's why so much of my passion has been sucked into something so seemingly different from what I've spent most of my life doing.

The response next time

I believe we need to be radical. But we also need to be effective. Bitcoiners love Hayek's famous, "sly trick" quote, but in practice we are anything but sly when dealing with the uninitiated. I want to do something radical, and I'm convinced this company is doing something radical. I want to see a more fair, just, and prospering world, but I don't think we get there with chaos. I believe in freedom and authority. When authority is abused, I don't jump to chaos as a response, but I want to fight alongside and for people that reject needless control. Now that we have bitcoin, needless control is what the dollar has become. I would like to be with an organization that is working towards dissolving that control.

The cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning!

The above quote is from Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis. He's talking about even loftier ideas in the essay quoted (The Weight of Glory), but the point applies to this work as well. The past seven months have been pretty depressing for me. After going whole hog on trying to setup a bitcoin project last year, I'm back to playing local gigs. Sometimes it's so joyful. That's what the best music always is. Sometimes it's work. That's good too. But a lot of what I've worked so hard for has been consumed pursuing "bitcoin stuff." Maybe you've had setbacks too. If you have, I hope you remember what's so exciting about the opportunity this technology presents. If bitcoin succeeds in the manner that many on this forum hope it will:

No one will be in control of the money.

That's not just a clever approach that breaks the rules. That's something that will change people's lives. Maybe I won't ever get my bitcoin job. There are plenty of ways outside of a job to pursue this end. There are also other noble pursuits (some greater) which we should pursue as well. But that's a darn good one.