The other day while preparing for my future Amaury interview, I had a small epiphany.

I was thinking about people like him, and Antony Zegers, and I’m guessing other members of Bitcoin ABC, all of whom came to see themselves as libertarians long before Bitcoin was ever a thing.

Since I’m someone who was completely oblivious to ideas like economic freedom until well after I fell down the crypto rabbit hole, it has always both impressed and baffled me that there were people out there not only thinking about, but also fighting for, these things.

One reason is because it’s not like these guys escaped from some communist regime or authoritarian state. They’re from places like France and Canada, which are probably considered some of the freest places on Earth, though maybe not as free as we thought.

Before crypto, I never met people like Amaury or Antony. All the people I knew wanted to do well in school, get a job, fall in love, and live happily ever after. Nobody was complaining about taxes, or worried about money printing, or losing access to their bank accounts.

Truthfully, I guess most people I know still don’t worry about those things, other than maybe the part about taxes.

So I started to ask myself why do some people wake up to these concepts so much earlier than others. For me, I only woke up to it because I was incentivized to after investing in crypto. But for Amaury and Antony, apparently they came to it through books. Books written by economists and philosophers that warn about the dangers of tyranny and central planning.

While this made perfect sense, it never really clicked for me. Maybe because I’d never been interested in reading those kinds of books, probably because I always thought they would be long and boring, but also because I couldn’t imagine a book having the power to open my eyes to a new way of looking at the world.

As someone who pretty much only read fiction as I growing up, I was used to reading novels and feeling as if I’d gone on a long journey. If it was a good novel, it might even have an effect on how I felt in that moment, but they never altered my reality.

Except maybe one.

I remember I was a freshman in college when a friend recommended I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. She thought I’d like it, and though I’d heard of it, I’d never read it.

I remember I started reading while I was home for winter break and couldn’t put it down. I liked the prose, but I what I loved was the character of Howard Roark. I wanted to be Howard Roark. It was like discovering the kind of person I wanted to be through a book.

For weeks afterward I went around trying to be like Howard Roark. I walked around campus trying to be singularly focused on doing well in school to become a doctor. I tried to act like I didn’t care what others thought of me, only what I wanted to be. I remember one day someone even mentioned to the friend that had recommended the book that I reminded them of Roark. When she told me, it initially filled me with self-satisfaction, but that feeling also revealed to me that I was a complete fake.

I soon gave up on the impersonation, realizing that it wasn’t in me, and maybe not anyone. After all, Howard Roark was only a work of fiction.

But I share this story because the epiphany I had was that if The Fountainhead could make me see the world differently, even if only for a month, I can’t help but ask why can’t a book do that for libertarianism? A book with a character and a story so compelling it opens people’s eyes to what it really means to be free, and why it’s so important.

And no, I’m not talking about Atlas Shrugged.

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