BTC Sessions - The Big Lie Masking America’s 50-Year Economic Collapse | Mike Green & Jeffrey Tucker

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 067: The Big Lie Masking America’s 50-Year Economic Collapse, Boomers Hoarding All Assets With No Buyers Left, and Why AI Demands Expertise| Michael Green & Jeffrey TuckerWhat if the problem isn't the policy — it's the system itself?Michael Green and Jeffrey A. Tucker sit down for a rare, wide-ranging conversation that cuts to the root of what's wrong with modern economics, monetary policy, and the assumptions most people never think to challenge. From the structural shifts that began in the mid-20th century to the invisible architecture of today's financial system, this discussion pulls back the curtain on ideas that mainstream economists refuse to touch.In this conversation, you'll learn why participation in the current financial system doesn't equal understanding of it, what economic data from 1950 reveals about where we are today, how the incentives baked into modern money shape behavior at every level of society, why Bitcoin represents a genuine alternative rather than just another asset, and what both Green and Tucker believe must change before any real economic reform is possible. If you've ever felt like the official explanations don't add up — this conversation will give you the framework to understand why.⏱️ Timestamps:00:00 - The Dual Income Trap: How Two Incomes Masked America's Decline00:01:02 - Introducing Michael Green & Jeffrey Tucker00:01:36 - Jeffrey Tucker: The Real Story Behind Household Income Stats00:06:33 - 1950 (20%) vs 1990s (65%): Rise of Dual Income Households00:10:05 - Michael Green on Expenses, Childcare & True Economic Health00:13:46 - $30,000/Year Childcare: The Hidden Cost Destroying Families00:17:41 - Golden Handcuffs: Corporate Jobs & Benefits Trap00:20:05 - Retirement System That Forces Boomer Asset Hoarding00:23:57 - Demographic Crisis: No Buyers Left for Boomer Assets00:27:28 - Housing Market Breakdown & Reverse Mortgages00:32:45 - Why Individualism Over Community Broke the System00:39:56 - Antitrust Failure, Consolidation & Real Capitalism00:42:33 - Corporate Consolidation Crushing Competition (Food, Healthcare, Tech)00:49:57 - Voluntary vs Coercive Exchanges: Capitalism's Hidden Flaw00:55:19 - COVID Mandates & Why Libertarianism Keeps Failing01:00:11 - How Intellectual Property Created Tech Monopolies01:02:48 - Michael Green on the Philadelphia Society01:05:13 - History of Women Entering the Labor Force01:17:02 - Future Outlook: Community Return & Economic Self-Correction01:22:25 - AI, Job Market Shifts & Deflationary Bust Warning🔗 Links & Resources:Michael Green:• Twitter/X: https://x.com/profplum99• Simplify Asset Management: https://www.simplify.usJeffrey A. Tucker:• Brownstone Institute: https://brownstone.org• Twitter/X: https://x.com/jeffreytuckerBitcoin + Privacy + Security: https://btcmentor.io/untouchable-bitcoiner/Bitcoin Survival Workshop: https://btcmentor.io/bitcoin-survival-workshop-2026/📌 Previous Episodes: Katie Ananina → https://youtu.be/cJ3Rnpticg0⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#BTCSessions #Bitcoin #BTC #MichaelGreen #MikeGreen #JeffreyTucker #BitcoinEducation #MonetaryPolicy #SoundMoney #BitcoinPodcast #EconomicFreedom #Brownstone #BitcoinInterview #Deflation #Inflation

We're participating in a system, but we're not questioning the nature of the system. In 1950, about 20% of households had two income streams. And then by the 90s, this reached about 65%. That is the most significant demographic change that affected American culture and American incomes. And then it gets even worse. We've created effectively an impossible condition in which people have to incur significant additional expenses, even as the headline data suggests that nothing. has ever been better. What looks like increasing incomes is actually declining incomes. Once you

look at the hours worked per household, hiring of those 55 and older is up 84%. On the flip side of the equation, the hiring of the younger generation is down 25%. Most people are familiar with in the Great Depression. They're completely unaware of periods like 1837 in which the unemployment rate for New York City hits 63%. I think we have a depreciary bus long. before we have the inflationary response. Today I'm joined by two of the sharpest economic minds willing to say what no one in mainstream finance will. Michael Green, macro strategist and portfolio manager

who spent decades mapping the machinery underneath the global financial system and Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute and one of the most fearless economic writers alive. In this episode, we discussed the dual-income trick that has been hiding a 50-year decline, how AI won't just disrupt jobs is doing something far more insidious,

and why the generation that hoarded assets can't find anyone left to sell to, and what happens next. I am Nathan with the PTC mentor. Let's get into it. Gentlemen, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Very excited to have this conversation. Very excited to get you guys together because I think you both have incredible outlooks on the economy and the future and where things are moving.

And I think your underlying thesis have a lot in common. Michael, where I've kind of taken your work to really looking at how passive flows have distorted the economic health of businesses. Jeffrey, you just put out an article that was showing how basically the dual income phenomenon has distorted the economic health of households. So even just to kick off the conversation, Jeffrey, starting with you, could you outline we had the a half century of household income article that you recently penned? Can you give us an overview of what you found there and also what you might think is the driving cause behind it?

I've been bugged for years about the claims that we've been making enormous income progress over the last 50 years. There's an organization called Human Progress that's forever pushing out this chart that looks like, household income and the real median household income has been nothing but up. Maybe not as much you think it should be but they're showing something like

upwards sloping to the right curve and so shut up, stop complaining about it. I've been bugged about this for a very long time trying to figure out exactly what the problem was this because it doesn't seem intuitively right and a lot of this

my memories traced to my own childhood. My father was the assistant principal of a high school, which I looked it up at which is like, you know, at the time it was about $14,000 a year. Wow. Yeah. And which in today's terms is something like $115,000 a year. So not an entirely shabby income, but not brilliant either,

but looking back at the life that we had, we had a home, there's no question about it. It was maybe a starter home. But it was, we own the home, and I don't know how long the mortgage was. It probably wasn't 30 years. It was probably far less. This would have been the early 1970s.

When my mother didn't work, there were two kids, we wanted for nothing. We had good schools, a nice neighborhood. And everybody was just, like us. There was no sense that anybody was different from us. Everybody had two cars. Everybody had a home. Most of the people I knew had one income coming into the household. And I tried to figure out like, well, how is it that today, if you had a same situation, there would be no chance that there'd be home ownership. And if you had two cars, one would be probably used pastime from a parent,

the other you'd be paying a note on it probably. But you wouldn't be living in a very nice neighborhood. You'd probably be in a tiny apartment somewhere. And you'd be scraping by with, not to mention, you know, the medical bills and health insurance, and God knows, you know, you'd hope that the one income, you know, had medical insurance associated with, But even then, if you use that, you're going to be hit with enormous bills because deductibles are so high. And so much I just began to think through this. I thought, you know, there's something funny about this idea of progress over the last half century. When I'm just not, you know, based on personal anecdotes and other things I see, I'm not feeling it.

And none of the data shows this. You know, if you look at long-term trends and consumer confidence or people's outlets, for their lives. It's just been down and down. And, you know, we've got people, people who claim that there's been nonstop progress, just shout and scream and say, well, what are you complaining about? You've got, you know, activate your lights, which is with the voice command, and you've got, you know, Wikipedia there on your phone, you know, stop, stop complaining about it. So I began to just wonder about what the source of the problem was. And I realized that there's a fundamental miscalculation here. to look at the real median income, household income, without looking at the hours worked in the household. So there's a difference between, for example, if you're making a certain salary, you're making $20 an hour,

and you're working 20 hours a week, and then you move to 40 hours a week at the exact same salary. Has your income increased? Well, yes, but your salary hasn't, right? So there's a real difference there. you're working twice as much for twice as much income, but your salary range of salary is exactly the same. So something like that, at best, has happened to the American household.

So in 1950, about 20% of households with children under 18 had two income streams. And this is the time when people felt a lot of confidence in their local public schools, which they don't now. Nowadays, people feel like they have to. paid for private schooling in many areas of the country, not all. But so that was typical. When that became, went from being the typical case to atypical, when it became much more the norm for a household with children under 18.

By the way, if they were under six, it was close to 12%. But when that became not the norm, when it became more the norm for households with children under 18 to have more than one-income stream was about 1985, 1986. And then by the 90s, this reached about 65%. So this is a dramatic change from one income to two-income households. So that is the most significant demographic change that affected American culture and American income.

So all this data on median household income is profoundly subsidized by the fact that you've conscripted another income source into the household. And that changes life around the house. It changes a lot of things. The reason for this change was from a cultural standpoint, yes, you could say that there is a move towards, you know, oh, Mary Tyler Moore inspired women to go to the cities and go to work. you know, women's liberation and so on. But on a practical level, what happened was the three waves of inflation in the 1970s. It basically gutted the American savings in real terms and the value of the single income stream.

So it had to be subsidized with the second income stream just to keep up with where people were. And so that was a sort of a devastation that didn't go away. I mean, once that bite was taken out of American purchasing power and American effective income, you know, that persisted as the inflation, yes, was at a much higher, was at a much lower level, but still it accumulates over time. So it's just gotten worse. That subsidy to the American household income was a one-time subsidy. And it came to an end, essentially, you know, reaching two-thirds of American households.

that was a peak and it just stopped to the point that people were, she just couldn't, can't do anymore to add to the income. So that explains the flatness over the last 25 years. And this was created, it's just one measure of a profound struggle. So what looks like increasing incomes is actually declining incomes once you look at the hours worked per house. rather than the cumulative figure. So that's essentially my argument. Beautiful. Michael, could you give us a bit of an outline of your thesis with regards to passive

flows? And are there any parallels in what Jeffrey's talking about that you see that relate to your world and what you're seeing in distortions for business health and valuations? Well, the work on passive flows is related. It's primarily tied to the mechanism by which we save for our retirement. But it's not directly tied to Jeffrey's observation. on the dual income family, as much as the work that I did around the poverty line is tied to the expense component of it. So let me suspend the discussion of passive for a second, because I think that is something that we can return to and discuss.

But I think the more important point is actually on the expense side of Jeffrey's equation. First, I don't actually think it was the inflations in the 1970s per se that caused this. I think the inflation in the 1970s were a symptom of this process actually starting. So many of the changes in terms of dual income households, female entry into the labor force, et cetera, preceded those inflationary waves. And in my analysis, we're actually largely directly responsible for the catalysts behind them. Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve further created them in its response function. And so just very quickly, if you actually think about the mechanical properties of what occurs

in an economy in which there is a surge in labor force participation. In other words, a dramatic increase in the percentage of the labor force that is working primarily due to the inclusion of women and minorities in the traditional labor force. Productivity is largely a function of what's called the capital labor ratio, how much capital is invested for each individual worker. In order to sustain a capital labor ratio in a population surge and a surge in your labor force, you have to deploy that capital rapidly and in advance of the productive contribution of those individual workers. When I show up at work, they have to have a desk for me. They have to have a computer for me. There has to be a building to house me. That means that a surge in labor force

drives a required surge in capital formation, which the Federal Reserve responded to the inflationary consequences of that required capital surge by hiking interest rates and making it much more difficult. Unfortunately, that coincided with a external impact, the U.S. switching from an oil exporter to an oil importer, the world's largest consumer of oil with the highest productivity in the world suddenly showed up on the world stage to start buying oil. That caused oil prices to surge, which in turn impaired about a third of the productive capacity of the United States at that time, which relied upon diesel generation. So we had an inward shift in supply. We had an outward shift in demand that results in price increases, that increasingly necessitated what had been

an optional and income enhancing choice that was being made up to that point. So I think that there's a very close link between the two, but I would argue that the specification is reversed from how Jeffrey is describing it. On the expense side of the equation, we look at the income that is earned, but we ignore the costs associated with that change. And the most important costs that has actually merged as a component of that change is the introduction of childcare. If the mother stays home with the child, the need for child care is greatly diminished. If the majority of women in the neighborhood stay home with the child, the one woman who is forced to go work due to exigent circumstances can rely on her neighbors to care for her child

in the community that is built up around that. As you move across a sigmoid function and fewer, fewer women are staying home, there's less care available in the community framework. You have to go out and secure it in the private market in the form of child care, early childhood education, daycare centers, private daycare centers, etc. That effectively drives a rapid increase in the cost of child care, which has become the single largest expense for most young households. It's about $30,000 a year that a dual income two-child family will spend on child care for young children in the United States.

That in and of itself exceeds the poverty line threshold for that household in U.S. poverty measures. And so we've created effectively an impossible condition in which people have to incur significant additional expenses, not just the additional effort that Jeffrey is highlighting, but greatly. increase incremental expenses, and then it gets even worse from there, right? Because our educational system benefited from the subsidy that was created by women having a lack of career options other than teaching or nursing, that intern meant that we received far better teachers than we should have received for the pay that we were providing. We were effectively discriminating against women. As those women were given the opportunity to go to work in other sectors, the quality of education

deteriorated, that introduced the necessity for an increase in private education, tutoring, all these incremental expenses. And so not only are they not making meaningfully more money relative to the income, to the effort that they're putting out as Jeffrey highlights, but the dollars that are going to service the needs of those households have increased dramatically as a direct result of those choices as well, leaving those households much worse off than the headline data would suggest in validating Jeffrey's core concern. Yeah, and then you would have to add to that, I think the health care expense, which I don't know that you've considered it, but once you leave the employer-provided health care and enter into the exchanges of the situation for the typical family, you can look at monthly expenses for health insurance with very high deductibles that can exceed your mortgage these days. And that seems to be, you know, very much on the increase.

and nobody seems to have any idea what to do about it. Well, there are a lot of things that can be done about it. There's very few things that can be done that are politically popular. The way that the health care system is set up, as you described, Jeffrey, is a incredible subsidy for the corporate sector. Effectively, they are able to individually mutualize the uncertainties at a much lower cost, the administrative cost of compliance, figuring out how to navigate the system, how to negotiate with insurance companies, et cetera, doesn't exist within the individual household.

It does exist within the corporate sector. On average, they purchase their health care at about an 18% discount to an individual household or a small business. So it's a huge subsidy effectively forcing people into seeking corporate employment, which in turn further depresses wages relative to what you would expect to earn elsewhere.

The system is basically turned into a giant cluster, fuck because we are unwilling to accept that there are mutual responsibilities across our society in which robust communities are actually an asset that should be protected and subsidized as compared to a quaint thing to look back upon and fantasize about how the way things used to be. So it's really a mess. And we need to acknowledge that we have created a system that is not working for an increasing majority of households by number, even as the headline data suggests that nothing has ever been better, which is the refrain that Jeffrey kept encountering as he tried to push back a little bit. I'm curious. Just want me sure. Sorry, Jeffrey, go ahead. Yeah, just one quick

point about this in terms of the psychology of the labor force. Once people land these corporate jobs and they've got, you know, a retirement plan in place, and they've got seemingly good health care that is not hurting them too much from an income point of view. They feel very much locked into these jobs and even locked into their existing salary for fear of losing. I mean, you talk to people like, oh, I hate my job, I hate my job, but why don't you get somebody else? Well, the benefits are too good. I can't possibly turn them down. So people are working for their benefits instead of for their income. even if they hate their jobs.

This has been going on for a very long time, but it's much more intense now. The fear of leaving your employer provided health care is, I think probably wildly exaggerating people's minds, but it's very much of a psychological hold that people have. Once they get a job, they just want to hold on to it forever, and they give up their happiness, their freedom, even income, just to keep what they consider it to be their benefits.

I mean, that wasn't true. And my father's, when my father was young. Agreed. I think it's gone. People feel trapped by golden handcuffs. Yeah. I mean, so first of all, the maximum of the golden handcuffs is absolutely correct. And I would certainly reinforce what Jeffrey is highlighting there.

I don't actually agree to quite the extent that Jeffrey is framing it, right? Nobody in history or very few people in history have ever looked at their employment and said, gosh, I really want to work. in, you know, a slaughterhouse in Chicago in the 19th century. It's not like things have gotten radically worse from that perspective. In fact, many ways they've gotten radically better, and we should acknowledge those components. On the flip side of the equation, where I would emphasize Jeffrey's point is in the unequal treatment

between two forms of unemployment. If I choose to work for myself, I have a radically different cost structure and radically different benefit structure than I do if I choose to work for a large corporation. This is where it does start to overlap with my work around passive investing. A brand new paper that I highlighted with you guys that just came out actually highlights the difference between defined contribution and defined benefit plans in terms of the implications for how a society behaves.

Under a defined benefit plan, which is the pension system that was largely introduced by the private sector as it was forced to compete with the public sector in the late 1930s and 1940s as the public sector expanded employment dramatically, and the war effort effectively consumed a sizable fraction of workers and the technological complexity of managing larger organizations drove an increase in demand for skilled workers. Businesses were forced to compete for those workers by offering benefit plans like defined benefit plans. Those were built on statistical models of basically how long people would be expected to be

retired, et cetera. Health advances primarily the introduction of antibiotics and some forms of modern treatment radically changed that life expectancy and that retirement period. And so plans that had built to expect four to five years of retirement suddenly were confronted with people regularly living 15. plus years in retirement, and they went bankrupt in the late 1960s. That in turn created the revolution to the defined contribution plan because we did not want to have individuals exposed to the corporate risk that the benefit plan was underfunded. Unfortunately, we failed to think through the implications

of that in part because it's very hard to think through. But when you move from a pension plan, while it can get the forecast wrong in terms of the actuarial tables of where individuals are going to expire, there still is a collective benefit. The failure was caused by a large scale change in overall demographic expectations in which effectively all underwriting for life expectancy was wrong. That can cause the system to experience stress. But as an individual, I have no idea how long I'm going to live. I can live to 105 and I could die tomorrow. And my asset accumulation for retirement has to reflect a near worst case scenario.

And it's terrible to describe worst case as I live to 105 years. It does sometimes feel that way as you get older and wake up in the morning. But the simple reality is that means that everybody has to accumulate dramatically more assets than they would under a collective framework. We can't share those statistical properties unless we're in a program like a defined benefit plan that is guaranteeing the income, not assets. The net implication of that is that we end up with extraordinary hoarding of assets, driving the price of housing and stock prices and bond prices for that matter, to levels that were largely unfathomable in prior periods,

and creating the correct perception amongst the young that they can't afford to buy the same assets that their parents are currently hoarding in competition with them. It also perversely creates incredible uncertainty and fear in the older generation because they're forced to hold assets as a substitute or income guarantees.

Those assets have volatility associated with them. That causes me to spend less money than I otherwise would And the money that I spend is the income to the younger generation. So we have created a system largely as a byproduct of our fetishization of individualism that is poorly serving all of us. That is a fascinating observation. I recall that when Trump was on the campaign trail,

he said he was going to lower the price of houses for young people. But more recently, he said, look, I would never do that because that would reduce the asset valuations of people's portfolios. People feel themselves to be rich for the very first time because they're looking at their homeownership values go up and I don't want to do anything to endanger that. My first thought of that was, well, I mean, that's great that you can refresh Zillow and see your valuations go up. But what does that mean in terms of, this is not exactly liquid funds?

Plus, you know, even if they were liquid, selling your home great profitability still poses a second order problems, namely the acquisition of a new place. It gets even worse than that, Jeffrey. So this to me is actually the core of the issue that many of us face, right? we're participating in a system, but we're not questioning the nature of the system in which we're participating. It causes us to go off the rails complaining it's the Jews or it's capitalism or it's XYZ. This is not capitalism. These are choices that we make about how to structure our retirement system under policy that lead to the direct consequences that we're all experiencing. And until we actually force ourselves to become educated in terms of the implications of the choices

that we've made from a policy standpoint, we're basically left shouting at the windmill saying, you know, stop turning, stop turning. And it's not helpful. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed. The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering, are my keys safe? Did I do this right?

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If you're ready for that level confidence, then head to BTC. mentor.io and book a call with us today. No, agree. There's some, there's some interesting implications there. And correct me where I go wrong, because it's a few things that immediately kind of popped out from both your guys' comments. One of them is the idea that, like, the demographic implications of what both you guys are talking about has for things moving forward. So if we have dual income, it's going to put more stress on the household. We have expenses for children, basically rising through the pay for people to rear them. The younger generation is not able to save, not

able to afford the assets that are being hoarded by the older generations. We've seen in Canada that the birth rate has turned down to 1.25%, I believe, in the U.S. is 1.6. And I would think that this would have a major implication going forward when the older generation that is retired needs to liquidate those assets, that they don't necessarily have a large enough buyer to come in and be a bid. Like, who's going to buy the assets of the retiring generation if the younger generation hasn't been able to accumulate any other wealth? And even just the, I'm thinking about like the pig and the Python in terms of boomers even moving to sell real estate portfolios or properties that they have to use for retirement, the younger generation can't afford those homes. And so if you have a large

swath that needs to liquidate their ill-liquid assets in order to actually live off them, but there's no buyer available, I feel like this could go very wrong, very quick, but there's probably a ton that I'm missing. So Michael, I'll start with you and then Jeff, I'll get your comments. No, this is generally my view as well. And I've pushed back very hard against the idea that what we're experiencing is a general shortage of housing. What we're actually experiencing is the boomers staying in their houses for a much longer time period than we would have anticipated, at least under prior periods. And when they go to sell, they are discovering exactly what you're highlighting. There's two responses to that. One is that we have increased the non-market sales, things like reverse mortgages,

in which there is a non-market established price because you actually haven't cleared it. That ironically puts the insurance firm on the hook for it as well, basically leaves the reverse mortgage provider praying for home prices to go up because that is ultimately how they are going to make their money. Since they have far more money than you and I do individually, they then lobby for policies that actually restrict future development, even as they argue that, you know, they're pro free market and everything else. The simple reality is you've created an incentivized opponent to actual housing. The second thing that ends up playing out is people stay in their homes longer because

we tend not to think about them properly. If I buy a house and I take a mortgage out on it, I have simultaneously purchased an asset and issued a bond. That bond with the hike in interest rates has fallen to give or take 50 cents on the dollar. Why in the world would I pay back a bond at par? that's currently trading at 50 cents. So I stay in my house far longer than I otherwise would. Despite that, the pig in the python is actually working through,

and today we have more sellers than buyers across most markets in housing, and it's beginning to cause the structural break. On a personal basis, I will say I literally just bought a place in Philadelphia. I picked it up for 40% of list price. because I was able to pay cash. And I found a distressed boomer who had to move into assisted living facility in an unanticipated fashion. There was no child to take the facility because it was a single woman. Right.

And so I ended up picking up Philadelphia Waterfront property for $110 a square foot. Oh, my God. Holy crap. Yeah, this time will come. And I think it has been about. 10 years now that many people have been locked into their homes because of the extremely low interest rate environment that was pervasive really since 2000, but especially since 2008. And then that reverses itself. And you're going to be stuck in that home.

So Trump's over there saying, oh, look how rich you are. But you're stuck in a home that's very expensive to maintain. your your insurance rates are going up even if you if you if you're not carrying a mortgage your your property taxes are sworn because your valuations are so you want to get out right but Jeffrey think about the irony of that right so what's happening in florida what's happening in Texas those who have paid off their mortgages and no longer and almost by definition

no longer have children in school are now lobbying for property tax exemptions so they can stay in their homes despite the fact that they don't want to contribute to the education of children because they don't have any, right? It's that individualism again over the collective. What an absurd society that we would decide that if you've lived in a home that you no longer need the square footage that happens to be in a good school district that your children benefited from. And suddenly, once you cross a magical AARP line that you no longer are responsible for the education of other people's children, as people took care of viewers. This is just an absurd society that we have entered into

in which our fetish for individualization and our Austrian acting man characteristics, which I'm hoping gets a reaction from both of you, has created the conditions under which we're all saying it's not working because that's what it is. No, I can see the contradiction there and I appreciate the observation there because, you know, you've used all the services, all the educational services, you know,

under a low-tax environment and an extremely subsidized interest rate environment, which I think is actually the root of the problem. It was the, it was the policies from 2008 and forward. It was basically a zero-interest rate policy that created, you know, uncountable numbers of of production structure distortions. Yeah. Mal allocation. And so many sectors, the corporate sector and the residential housing sector and the commercial real estate sector in every area, the one thing that it did not do is what everybody

expected to do, which was to increase inflation. There's specific structural reasons why that didn't happen. But the damage caused by ZERP, we're still dealing with it today. and having problems digging ourselves out of that. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet is still not fixed up from 2008. And the current head of the Fed was trying to unravel that in 2019 and then got hit with COVID. It had to slam them back down to zero again.

But this time, followed by helicopter money with stimulus payments, that ended up taking about 25 to 30% bite out of purchasing power of the dollar over five years. I mean, it's just an unbelievable tragedy, really. So, Michael, you're taking shots of the Austrians here, right? I do resent it just a little bit, just a little bit, but it's totally fine. This idea of the fetishization, the overemphasis on individuals versus kind of community and family and collective, Why do you think that that has been the case over the last, I'd say maybe since like Gen X kind of forward is where it feels like it kicked off. But what's your outlook as to why that is the case and where that may have started?

Because it feels like everything we're discussing, it wasn't always that way. No, it definitely wasn't that way. We actually understood very well the importance of collective structures. And I would argue that by and large, the response of the United States and the Great Depression, the introduction of FDR, is extraordinarily well. in a book called The Three New Deals that compares the United States, Italy, and Germany. Effectively, Mussolini, Hitler, and FDR were all responsible for elements of new deals and collectivization that moved away from the laissez-faire environment that existed in the 1920s or for an extended period prior to that. The reason for that was because the system wasn't

working. Uniquely among them, FDR was the one who decided we are going to try to maintain the components of a market-based economy and a capitalist society. We're going to have limited socialism in terms of the implementation. Whereas Mussolini and Hitler, you know, decided to go full-bore collectivists, whether it was collectivist under a fascist framework under Mussolini or collectivist under a socialist, national socialist framework under Hitler, they were, were all collectivist structures, it's just FDR worked harder than the others to preserve the individual rights within that system. The reaction to that and the frustration with that that emerged from the business right, giving rise initially to the business plot and the attempted

coup in the United States that was largely concealed from the public, to the rise of the sound money characteristics was hamstrung by the failure of the laissez-faire economy that was remembered so well in the United States by the vast majority of the voting public is why Goldwater lost. If you actually look at the pattern of voting under Goldwater, it was uniquely, poorly received amongst the older generation that had been alive during the 1920s and 1930s and saw the failure of the system. It basically rejected any Republican solution that was, quote-unquote, business-friendly. By the time we get to the Reagan revolution in 1980, all those people are dead. And so we basically went into a traditional cycle in which the wisdom that had occurred in prior periods was gone.

As that process is rising, the rise of the neo-conservative movement under individuals like Frank Meyer celebrated the individual. Frank Meyer, who was the founder of firms like of entities like the Philadelphia Society where I just came from their meetings or many of the neoconservative movements like heritage, etc. those, emphasize the individual. And Frank Meyer actually was a hardcore collectivist Communist Party member who when he saw the failures of implementation said, oh, well, it has to be 180

degrees in the opposite direction. And so he went from a hardcore collectivist and socialist to the, we have to just do everything about the individual. Both extremes are stupid. The reality is, that we have a collective responsibility to each other, but the system that harnesses that best is the one that utilizes our self-interest to maximize the benefits for others.

That's what capitalism is. I have a profit incentive to create innovations that you value and are willing to pay me for under a non-coercive market exchange. That's what capitalism is supposed to be about. But the governance of capitalism has to recognize that I have to do everything in my power to prevent that exchange from being coercive. Monoplies are coercive exchange. So when you decide that you're going to abandon antitrust, and you point to the one example of the failed antitrust that was pursued for the wrong reasons against the greater Atlantic and Pacific grocery company, you effectively create the Bork Doctrine that says, the only way that we will consider opposing a consolidation is if there's immediate harm to the

consumer in the form of higher prices. That means that we are restricting, that we are creating conditions under which competition itself is not seen as the good, which is actually what Adam Smith identifies in the wealth of nations as the true value to a capitalist society is the competition that is created in pursuit of the profit motive. And so why did it stop? It stopped because we stopped thoughtfully thinking about what we were actually trying to protect. Instead, we decided we wanted to protect our individual property rights instead of the competitive framework that facilitated the greatest flourishing for the greatest number.

Jeffrey, I'm very curious to get your thoughts. I'll hold mine for now. There's so many aspects to, to, to, to, to, to, to, uh, the story. I'm not sure what I would like to comment on. One quick comment about Frank Meyer and that generation of conservatives is that I think all the post-war intellectuals were had a distorted outlook on things because of the existence of the fable of the Cold War. In 1948, our former ally, Russia suddenly became our enemy and we were able to cobble together a kind of civic story, that America was about freedom

and Russia was about tyranny and that framework, that sort of weird binary seized the country all the way up until from 1948, all the way up to 1989. And that was the times

in which I was raised. And I remember it well. So yes, it created a kind of I guess she would say like intellectual paranoia, you know, so that anybody who talked about the well-being of the community was probably a communist, you know?

So that, you know, that I find so much of the intellectual work of that period to be, you know, nearly useless. And I find myself going back to the interwar thinkers and before, and even late 19th century to find really, clear-headed thought. Concerning antitrust,

it is an intriguing feature that an essential element of capitalist thinking for centuries has been the merit of competition. Without that, without that, you lose efficiency, you lose freedom itself.

And for some reason, antitrust has never been a very good vehicle for somehow guaranteeing a competitive environment, partially because the process of antitrust regulation is usually being captured by the biggest dominant voices within an industry. That's been true since the early part of the 20th century that antitrust has been used not for the benefit of the consumer or for the benefit of, the idea of competition itself, but rather to reinforce the monopoly privileges of dominant players in any particular industry. And so we're sitting here today with grotesque ironies. I mean,

we're living with an agriculture and a food system that's heavily monopolized and cartilized by just a handful of players in agriculture. And it traces all the way from its, from its earliest Browns are in the production structure from your large-scale corporate farming all the way to the retail end. And it's true in health care too, which has become ever more monopolized. And it's true in banking and finance, where we're seeing consolidation take place. So in almost every area of American life, we're seeing consolidation with zero near zero interest in doing anything about it. And the COVID period just enhanced this, dramatically, by crushing literally millions of small businesses. And here is the time where you have

an overt policy. If you're a big business, a big restaurant, a big chain, you're allowed to stay open, but if you're small, we think you're unessential and you have to shut your doors. So this consolidation is definitely contrary to everything Adam Smith celebrated. I mean, we're looking at the 250th anniversary of his book, Wealth of Nations. This is a book that valorized The Butcher, the Baker, and the Brewer. And we look at this and we think, oh, look how wonderful. The essence of the capitalist spirit comes down to the small family businesses and the magical way in which they're allowed to cooperate through the

system and the division of labor. But it's ever less in evidence around us at all today. So, yeah, I think that's something of a scandal. Michael, do you have any comments before I interject an idea there? No, I mean, I think that is actually the core of my point, right, which is that we largely have accepted the platitudes without examining the system that we're actually in the process of creating. Adam Smith's wealth of nation is a pay on to competition. It is the harnessing of self-interest in the benefit of the whole. And unfortunately, what that requires is rule setting. Now, we allowed our unfamiliarity and our poor education on this system and what it actually means. We use capitalism to mean any number of things, but almost never do people refer to it in the

context of the mechanism by which we harness the powers of self-interest and behavior for the benefit of the collective by setting a series of rules that enforces fair competition. Right. Almost nobody thinks about it that way. I literally gave a lecture at a senior economic forum two weeks ago, and none of the graduate students had read a wealth of nations because it's no longer a required reading in the economic literature to pursue a graduate degree in economics as perceived as archaic and far less interesting than the math-intensive papers that are produced today that carry very little philosophical of insights. site. So I just, look, I think that we have become a nation that is in a society broadly on a global basis that is so insulated from want in the traditional sense of you're going to starve to death or you're going to be abused by an invader or a marauder that we by and large would prefer to speak in platitudes, a free competition and, you know, property rights without actually thinking about what any of those actually mean. I forgot to mention.

among the consolidated sectors is big data and tech and the digital economy today, which has become just a level of absurdity. And I feel like I've lived through this because, you know, I was among probably wrongly, one of the deluded techno-utopians, you know, early in the digital age. I wrote books celebrating the glory of the tech sector. The last thing I imagined is that it would become. to be dominated by four or five companies, and now we're seeing the same thing emerge within

AI. I mean, it's getting ever more consolidated to the point that, you know, we're at. Yeah, and that is the natural byproduct of laissez-therap behavior, right, particularly if you allow regulations to be set by, you know, representatives, and I'm using that term loosely, who have no insight and no awareness and effectively respond to the lobbying dollar, which was greatly enhanced under a quote unquote free speech movement with Citizens United. So, you know, the benefit of linking democracy or representative democracy or republic with capitalism is a capitalism is effectively each dollar gets one vote. So the richer you are, the more impact you have on the market economy. Democracy is one man or one person and one vote. It's a natural check on the abuses of a

capitalist system. But the minute the representatives become captured by the lobbying activities of the wealthy individuals, you end up with the corruption of Rome. Coin kite has been in the game for years creating hands down the best and most secure hardware when it comes to securing your Bitcoin. The cold card Q is an absolute powerhouse. house and my daily driver and it's ideal for newcomers and advanced users alike. The tab signer gives you a low-cost, user-friendly option for those just getting started or for convenience when traveling. You can head to coincite.com and use code BTC sessions for discounts or simply scan the QR code on the screen to get started right away.

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power from their fleet so earnings don't just stop and every machine is insured at full replacement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S. powered by hydro and mining equipment may qualify for 100% your one bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundant minds.com slash sessions. The element that I think we're missing here that I would maybe push back a little bit, Michael, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on is that I think in order for the capitalist system to achieve the ends at which we're looking for in for that societal good. And I think it ultimately would. And there's a few other elements I kind of want to explore there is that there, it has to have volunteerism attached to it as well, too. I think that as soon as you have a capitalist system

where there are non-voluntary interactions, it's doomed to ultimately fail, which would be even in the case of like, then it being used for lobbying for government regulation, which is then causing for involuntary situations or acts or cost or whatever it might be. And I think that's where the capture and the monopolization comes into play. But I'd be curious to get your things. Your thinks, your thoughts. Do you breathe air voluntarily? Yes. No. It's an involuntary response. If you fell asleep, you're not voluntarily breathing.

You were doing it in an involuntary manner. Does that... Oh, but I'm voluntary, sorry, let me make the clear distinction. I'm breathing, there's the involuntary reaction as well too, but there's also an element of I'm choosing. You're not choosing to breathe. I could choose not to breathe. I'll pass out, but I'm not going to be able to hold that for long. Once you pass out, what happens? I would resume breathing autonomically. So it's not voluntary. It's voluntary to throw a tamper phantom and say, I'm not going to listen to you, I'm not going to breathe, I can't hear you, you can't make me smell your fart, right? These are all things that are, you know, voluntary actions, but they can only be sustained for a short period of time. The vast

majority of our activities are largely involuntary, my heart beating, the blood coursing through my veins, et cetera. What you want to do is you want to establish a situation under which those involuntary actions, the requirements to eat, the requirements to have shelter, the requirements for health care, et cetera, are not forced in coercive exchanges. The Bible has one of the best examples of coercive exchange. Esau coming back from hunger, starving to death, and his brother Jacob extorting his birthright from him in exchange for a bowl of stew. That is a coercive exchange that was entered into voluntarily. So it's far more complex than simply saying voluntary versus.

If it was his birth, sorry, if it was his birthright, then his property was already taken coercibly. So it was an involuntary exchange. Who's, who was birthright? I'm sorry. I'm not 100% familiar with the fable. You're saying he was coming back for his birthright, correct? And he was so hungry.

He gave it up. Jacob is the younger brother. Yeah. He saw as the older brother. because of limited resources, the oldest sibling, the oldest son was the one who inherited all the assets of the parent, and the younger son was basically left to fend for themselves. Okay. And that's the way things used to work.

Esau, very successful, went out hunting, came back very hungry, and Jacob decided that he was going to extort him because he was starving for his birthright. He said, I will not give you the food that I have prepared unless you give me your birthright. You saw agreed to that exchange. Was that voluntary? Yes. No, he's starving. Let me give you an example, too. So it's still, it's, it was not coercive in that he did not take anything from him.

He was offering him something there. Like, there's a key distinction there in the same sense that like we might value, so for example, the classic desert island situation. If you're completely dehydrated, I'm sure. sure you would give me any of your assets if I can provide you with water. It's still voluntary. Just your need has been so escalated that you're willing to exchange with it for more than you normally would be. And these are going to the extremes. And just for clarification as well, too, when I'm saying voluntary, I am specifically referring to just the voluntary exchange, which you are

referring to. No, I actually am saying that the conditions under which the exchange occurs determines whether it is truly voluntary or not. If I were to decide to fly you against your will to a desert island, leave you there without water, and then approach you and say, hey, will you give me X in exchange for this glass of water? The exchange is still voluntary under your definition. No, because the coercion occurred when you made me go to the island. No, that wasn't good. I mean, that is coercive, absolutely, but we're getting lost in the actual point here, right? Correct. I guess my point is that the role of the government under that system is to minimize the number of non-voluntary exchanges, the coercive exchanges, the basic needs of

life, including breathing, et cetera, are non-voluntary. You don't have a choice. And so, as Jeffrey correctly points out, if I live in a world in which I inhabit an urban environment, I don't have access to 40 acres and a mule, and I can only go to a grocery store and I can only buy a select number of goods provided by a select number of consolidated merchants. Am I actually in a voluntary exchange or coercive exchange? I would argue it leans towards the coercive because I have no alternative.

If I may interject a more recent example, during the pandemic period, there was many companies demanded suddenly of their employees that they accept vaccination or be fired. Now, I got into unrelenting arguments with libertarians about this, who told me it's the right of companies to do this. And I said that was not true because, first of all, there was not part of the contractual terms in which they signed up to do this. The companies were bearing no insurance liability if something could have gone wrong. And because ultimately these shots were indemnified thanks to an emergency use order. And so that it was a coercive, like a totalitarian despotic imposition.

on employees. And it's very strange to me that I had a hard time explaining this to libertarians who said, no, they had a full choice about it. They could quit. Yes, they could quit. But then they're going to be faced with impoverishment and professional calamity. So that to me is a coerced choice. It's the same nonsense of, you know, you remember this on Twitter back in 2020 and 2021, right?

You know, go start your own Twitter if you don't like the rules around it, et cetera, right? Like, these are just absurd projections. And what they're actually telling you, Jeffrey, is that they're not truly libertarians. Yeah, I know. I'm open. And the vast majority of libertarians are only as libertarian as they say, keep your hands off my stuff. But here's how you could live your life. I'm profoundly aware.

It's sad. Theitarianism is a great example of something that looks very beautiful on the black and white print on the page. But then begins to kind of be strained to the point of very quickly breaking in real life if you reduce it down to a handful of postulists if you're not thought through very well. And this is why the libertarians have repeatedly failed to perform in any sort of impressive way on any crucial questions during any period of national crisis that I can never remember. They always fall apart.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I would actually go even further and just say that the vast majority of libertarians aren't remotely libertarian in their construction. They just don't like the current control system. I want to unplug that a little bit. Sorry, I want to unpack that a little bit too, and then I'm going to pivot. So as being the resident anarchist libertarian, what is it that you think that they feel to? And by the way, I do agree.

Even speaking with libertarians can be the most frustrating thing in the world because it gets so fixated on like one stupid minutiaiae and miss that 99.9% were agreeing on things unanimously. I even think of the examples of like one classic would be like dealing with the system as it is not as you want to be. So for example, like if it's a public school, then everyone should be able to attend. is like, well, does that mean that the junkie gets to go and hang out there in the classroom as well, too? It's like, well, obviously not, right? Because that wasn't the intention that wasn't what the dollars were going for, that wasn't even baked into the example or a public park, that same sort of thing as well, too. So I think a lot of times libertarians fail to deal with things as they are, even if we tried to move to a less coercive or more, as they say fair, a freer organization, but you still have to be pragmatic or practical in the steps. But specifically, I'm curious.

When you say libertarians aren't that libertarian, they just don't like the existing system. I experienced something very similar in my youth in the sense that I got the drum kit behind me. I was a punk rock kid and I thought that all the people around me were kind of anti-authoritarian libertarian as well and this would have been during the neocon phase and so I assumed okay.

You and all your friends were the only ones who are anti-institutional. Well, I just want to add, I thought they were. But as soon as their party got in power that was dropped like a bad hat, I was the only one left standing there. I thought that we were more

in this libertarian. they were just leftists that weren't in control. Yep. You know, there's other practical problems. I almost raised this point earlier, but we were talking about consolidation and the cause of it. Specifically, what broke the digital world

was the imposition of intellectual property over programming. And once that went into place, and I'm going to say that was sometime in the late 1980s, the consolidations have got more and more intense and to the point that you can't even break in. You know, the days of the small company, digital company, and a garage, you know, are just sort of long gone. And a major reason for that is there's patents and copyrights, which, you know, I don't like them, But there's no reason to have that argument.

But just on an empirical basis, that's the basis of the consolidation. And libertarians have never had anything remotely like a serious theory as it pertains to IP and its relationship to genuine property rights. I mean, that's just a subject about which hardly anybody speaks at all. I agree that that one is almost impossible to touch. I'll just quickly add. It's interesting now with things like Anthropic and Mythos. coming out that your intellectual property rights to your software aren't actually going to be a moat

necessarily anymore when it's so easy for anyone to spin up their own code using these models. But Michael, I'd love to get your thoughts on that. I mean, I broadly agree. I think that there's, you know, the idea that ideas could be patented was a unique feature of the late 18th century, 19th century. It was clearly embraced because we recognized the value of ideas in mobilizing. capital. But it's become ridiculously perverse.

It is a pantomime or a clownhouse fund mirror of what our original intellectual property was designed to do, which was to provide an incentive and a period of excess return associated with innovative work. Instead, it's turned into a mechanism for exploiting a moat. And so a reformulation can be, well, I, I put blue and yellow gel in the cap lit as compared to purple, and that leads to greater effective outcomes in some unexplainable manner. It doesn't really matter, and I understand I'm being facetious in my description of that

particular formulation. But, you know, going from 850 micrograms of oxycontin to 1,000 micrograms of oxycontin in a pill is not really the sort of innovation that requires 17 years worth of protection. So, like, you know, again, this is just the core of the issue. We are so far removed from the intent of much of what we have built into our system that it has allowed it to become a caricature in which exactly as you saw in the 1950s, as Jeffrey pointed out, you know, you can simply shout at someone, you're a communist. Well, today you can shout you're a communist or you can shout you're a racist or you can shout you're a homophobic or you can shout you're a big, you're a communist. Or you can shout, you know, you're a big. government libertard, right? And it doesn't matter what you say. The whole objective is to basically

shame people into their behavior that you want them to experience. And the superpower becomes having no shame. And so you get Donald Trump. Michael, I'm so curious what brought you to the Philadelphia Society and what your impressions were of the meeting, if I may ask? At my core, I'm actually, you know, I would love to be a I would love to be a conservative. I am a fiscal and economic conservative. I genuinely believe and celebrate capitalism as it's intended to be used, that it is the tool that harnesses our own naked self-interest, which taps into that reproduction capacity to generate the greatest and most moral outcome for the greatest number of individuals. The problem is, as I said,

is I think the vast majority of people at this point are pantomiming their understanding of that. And by and I think the Philadelphia society is better than most places in terms of their embrace and understanding and love of that. But it is inherently conservative and thinking in the traditional sense, meaning the Burkian protection of what exists, you know, what exists as compared to critically examining what the system has become and determining whether or not that is actually worth defending. Yeah. I want to ask you, Michael, and I do want to get kind of guys, I want to look forward a little bit and see where the implications of these, these ideas lead. But I want to jump back to something. I'll see if I can illustrate the point, clearly, let me know if I go too far astray. So I'd be curious because you set up that the, the, um, entering the labor force, women entering the labor force and minorities entering labor force pre, I suppose the inflation was the result of it because we had more people participating, more capital investment, if I have that right. Um, but the other thing I want to point out is we're talking about like,

responsibility and community and how we become basically so individualized and the the consequences of doing that. And the idea that's sticking in my mind, I'm trying to articulate is that I think that civic duty, the sense of responsibility to your community, it stems from your relationship to your immediate family. They have a good relationship with the immediate family. You're at home with your folks. That's where you build those kind of bonds, that feeling of kind of that team effort, that's something outside of yourself. And that ends up being extended to the broader community so long as are able to do so. I would also make the argument that I think a lot of it out about you guys at your experience, but for me in particular, my community around me is my wife, that my wife is the one

who talks to the other moms, knows the event, she's that network plug into what's going on around us, the other families and that interaction is well there too. So it seems completely in line with me that if we had women entering the workforce, not being at home with the kids, that the kids in daycare would not have that same sort of civic duty because they weren't with their family. They were removed from that situation. So they'd be very focused on themselves. And that those communal ties, if women are in the workforce and not with one another, either just like events and planning and career and actually seeing each other at the groceries or this sort of thing, that all those bonds would kind of fade apart. And everyone would become

so focused on just their immediate self that I think the two kind of play together. But I wanted to get your thoughts on that. And then additionally, because I don't think we commented on it, if it wasn't inflation that drove, women into the labor force, what was it in your estimation that started that trend that had all these cascading effects? So actually, there's a very interesting cohort analysis that basically looks at the women's entry into the labor force. What you discover is that there were waves of cohorts, and really the late 1960s was just

the final one. So women actually had been active participants in the labor forces prior, you know, high levels of household help, domestic service, et cetera. in the 19th century, much of that was replaced by automation. You went from washer women to washing machines. And then that freed up significant time to pursue individual activities. The other really big implication of things like antibiotics and sterilization, which was not broadly introduced until the 19th century,

is that the fatality rate for women in childbirth collapsed. And it's very expensive from a societal framework to educate women if there's roughly a 50% chance that they're going to die in the process of giving birth to a child. That means that we aren't able to make the same. We couldn't rationally make the same economic investment in women broadly that we did in men. And that largely had been ameliorated. And so the conditions were in place for women to begin entering the labor force in the 1940s. We actually see this.

It's just successive waves of cohorts entering the labor force. The BLS did a fantastic study on this. How much does the war impact that? I mean, the draft, the war conscription. Well, the Rosie the Riveter component definitely opened women's eyes to life outside a home. Yeah. Right. But the vast majority of those temporary workers went back home and allowed themselves to return

to domesticity with all sorts of problems associated with it as well, right? having experienced the freedom of not being in the home and having their own money to spend, et cetera, there were high levels of dissatisfaction with the perceived idyllic nature of the 1950s housewife. Fortunately, they were barbiturates available to address many of those issues. But that data is actually very, very clear. It's just successive waves that effectively went in, and that was the culmination of it. A little bit different for minorities, the civil rights legislation actually did cause significant changes in various forms of labor force participation and the relocation, the Great Migration North that occurred influenced that as well,

as well as candidly, the reality that met most minorities that came back from World War II were not able to take advantage of the GI Bill in the same way that many white individuals were. So all of these are legitimate complaints and gripes, and I think those things were incredibly important, but that was actually the proximate cause. It wasn't the inflation. This is partially why I tried to narrow my examination of this period to parents with children under 18, because otherwise, if you're talking about women in general, this story gets really complicated, really fast. I mean, like, even if you look back in the 1920s, most unmarried women, at least, you know, women between the ages of like 16 and, say, 25, were in the workplace, right?

They were doing things out there as teachers and as nurses, whatever. And urbanization had a huge effect, too, because suddenly women could leave the homestead and take these extremely cool, very fashionable jobs as telephone operators and secretaries and things like that in urban environments in the 1920s. One of the more interesting aspects of this is how the Great Depression had a profound impact on women who had newly moved to seize on new work opportunities in the city. And one of the best pictures of this is actually this wonderful film called Gold Diggers of 1933, which has all these women who naturally their jobs are unstable. right in 1933 they they moved to the big city for a great opportunity but now you know the financial pressures are on they're they're scrappy they're looking around for work and that's where we get that

song we're in the money right we've got we've got enough of what it takes to get along right so this is a song sung in the film about young women in urban environments being scrappy and trying to figure out you know what their next steps are in life But anyway, that's why I try to narrow my balance. Unfortunately, the answer, as you point out with gold diggers, was often to fall onto their backs. Well, that was implied, yes. It's really, you know, it is quite terrible.

If you think about an environment in which women were disproportionately likely to be fired because they did not have families to support. And then in turn, you know, we're faced with the reality of having moved to an urban environment. They were separated from their traditional support networks and forced into very poor circumstances. Terrible. Look, we can't look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, but we can look back on the past in terms of some of the wisdom that was expressed in that time period from 1929 until

give or take, 1973, and recognized that we made a lot of mistakes in correcting the excesses of that era. The extraordinary levels of regulation that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating with things like the attempt to force through a horribly, horribly flawed civil rights legislation as it related to women's rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, the Clean Air Act, etc., these were all really terrible choices. But we also made all sorts of terrible choices around that. the Bork Doctrine is just a terrible mistake. Volcker's policies were a terrible mistake.

The fascination was sound money as compared to proper investment, terrible mistake. Like all of these things that we fantasize about that can be fixed, quote unquote, with, you know, just fix the money, fix the world. Nice stealing of a, you know, motto from heroes that short running. they're just there's simplistic things that appeal to children and it makes perfect sense. You mentioned the community that you belong to. You're advertising your community with a Bitcoin mentor hat, right? Why?

Well, you know, not that popular is I'm a good Catholic. That would feel very old fashioned to you. That wouldn't signal anything to you. But you can certainly get a hat that says that. And by the way, more and more people are. I was going to say there's also a return to church going on as well too. And particularly even in the Bitcoin community, it's weird. People are a huge crossover with Christianity.

But it's all the same thing, Nathan. You guys are desperate for community. Yes. And so you'll take any community, you're the opposite of Groucho Marx, any community that forces you to do an adequate quantity of homework, do your own work. Now you can understand, right? Feels like you've crossed.

You've done your catechism. Congratulations. It's the same nonsense. You're desperate. You know, this desperate. This desperate desire for a community comes about in part, you know, as a consequence of the COVID period. But even beyond that, the new technologies of digital media where we can be anywhere we want to be other than where we actually are. Thanks to the technology has led to mass social isolation and alienation and a sense of just being lost.

So I just wrote about this in an article today. I was thinking about it, it just came out yesterday, but this wave of young men converting to church, to become churchgoing, churchgoers. It's the least expected demographic trend ever.

And it's sudden and it's dramatic. And there's a lot of reasons for it. And there's a lot of empirical basis for this. So many, people spend far less time socially with others now than they did. I mean, this is like documented empirical fact. people are isolated.

We also have a lot of document and empirical studies, one from Stanford that came out, I think, a year ago this month showing that Stanford paid people to stay off social media for six weeks and then measured them according to a sort of index of happiness and showed a very statistically significant increase in their happiness once they got off Facebook and Instagram. I mean, it's like all these things that we pursued to do. to give us a joy have actually had the reverse effect. Well, it's, I mean, again, we have weaponized in many ways our bodies against us.

The simple reality is as mammals, we are trained, or we're not trained. You know, we have a natural inbuilt need to identify the novel, right? Just, but not meaning book, meaning the unusual and the unexpected. You know, think about the process of walking. walking along a path and looking at a bush, right? Green, green, green, red, Barry captures my attention, right? Scrolling through TikTok, green, green, green, red captures my attention, right? Provides me an immediate feedback mechanism, makes me feel better about myself, kicks off a dopamine hit, et cetera. We've allowed these things to be weaponized. We've released them on the young and we've robbed them of

many of the authentic experiences, which now, as everybody does, they're compensating. I'm going to use this occasion to brag about my change of my iPhone. Is anything unusual about that? All black and white. It's a change I made about four days ago, and it's made me so happy. I'm now a fully gray-scale guy and took away the power of these predatory corporations to constantly distract me with bullshit. I can tell you, and I have to.

like the data from the channel, if I don't use red in the thumbnail, it vastly underperforms because your brain is hardwired to pay attention to red. It's clear as day. High contrast, red, novel, grab their attention. So I'm a big advocate of going to full gray scale. Gentlemen, I have to go get some of the train stations, so I'm going to have to leave you. I'm so sorry if that's okay. That's totally fine. I enjoy talking. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. All right. All right. All the best, gentlemen. Thank you. Michael, I do have just a few more things. if you got a moment for it. Yeah, I can give you a few more minutes. Perfect. That sounds wonderful. So one, I wanted to just tease apart whether or not this is kind of a, where you think things are

going economically with regards to we're talking about demographic changes to dual income and then speaking to the passive flows. Because I wonder if this is kind of a, everything we discussed is kind of a self-correcting problem at some point in time, meaning that like it feels like things are getting worse and we're seeing return to church. I think if you have problems with people in retirement, we're going to see multi-generational household, that it might be one of those, you know, kind of silver lineings that poor economic situations, things being harder for people, they may have a return to community, family formation out of necessity, the kind of hard times make strong men sort of thesis. I do think that there is a self-correcting nature to the cycle, but it is not fully correcting.

And I think that's really critical to understand. And so the question is, what are we trying to correct? Are we trying to correct the loss of community? Are we trying to correct? Are we trying to correct? the intrusion of monopoly and coercion into our lives, are we trying to correct, you know, fix the money, right? Like, what are we actually trying to do? And I think unless we have a very thoughtful answer to that, we should expect stupid results. And by and large, I would say that, you know, humanity is a lot like America, according to Churchill. We'll do all, it will do the right thing after we've exhausted all the other possibilities. And so, you know, right now I would argue that you are seeing various communities that in one

form or another are over-correcting for the errors while very few people are willing to actually address the core components. The core component of communities, it's not really a community if you decide that you're going to participate and it's largely frictionless to leave. you are tied into the Bitcoin community by virtue of a platform that you've built that would make it very difficult for you to immediately turn around and say, hey, I don't believe in Bitcoin anymore. If you're going to do that, you'd lose a sizable fraction of your audience. As a result, you can no longer be an authentic representative of the case for Bitcoin. And I'm not picking on you in that. I'm just saying the simple reality. There's a cost that if I were to actually come to a different conclusion, which for the record audience, I have not.

but if I were to, there's all of a sudden a huge cost involved that would say pressure to maybe be unauthentic or not honest in my actual views. Yeah, absolutely. And I would suggest that it's actually even more intrusive than you may realize. There. Right. We're all faced with the same thing. I don't want to stand up and say, hey, I'm a communist because one, it's not true. Yeah.

But if I express dissatisfaction with how we're currently interpreting capitalism, it's very, easy for somebody to lob that accusation, and that gets some sizable fraction of the audience simply to turn off, right? It's a war of attrition in that framework. And so I just, I think unfortunately, we're going to have to explore the parameters on the outside of this. New York City will likely, you know, go downhill because of its embrace of socialism. But man, that's not going to stop Washington State, is it? They're really showing them. And so, you know, Washington State has decided that they were going to introduce wealth taxes. California is talking. about wealth taxes. Eventually, you get to the point that there is a tipping point in the same

manner as we were discussing with women staying at home. Eventually, the costs just become too high. Not everybody can go to Florida. And eventually, Florida will fit as there are fewer and fewer restrictions on state behavior because every state is acting like an idiot, that makes it harder and harder for people to relocate to Florida because the property prices in Florida becomes so high that it creates a barrier to entry and prevents people from leaving. And then we're left with, well, now I'm stuck in California. And so that phenomenon, you know, runs in cycles. And my point on education is really about let's try to minimize the impact that has.

We've gone to the extremes on the individualism. You may not recognize it, but we're actually in the process of rotating away from it. That's why you're seeing your generation desperately seeking community. You want to belong to a community. want to experience mutual insurance, you want to have the feeling that people have your back. Right. I think you'll eventually get there, but it's a long path with many wrong steps. And the people who take those wrong steps, unfortunately, I think will find themselves in very

exigent circumstances, which again, just adds to the intensity of the experience. No, it makes perfect sense to me lines up with Neil House forth turning, sort of a framework as well, too, that we're tearing down potentially old institutions, a point of chaos. and cataclysm that ends with new institutions and this return to, we'd just say, a very, a very collectivist thinking for a period of time until those become overbearing and we repeat the cycle again. Wonderful.

Michael, was there anything you want to ask? I know we barely touched on it as well, too. Was there anything regarding even just the current economic situation? Do you think is worth highlighting for the audience? It feels very weird to me to have everything going on and have the start market at all-time highs, which directly aligns with the passive flows theory. But I just want to know if there's anything else

that you think people should be on the look at from a market standpoint going forward in the coming weeks? Coming weeks, look, I mean, the most important thing that's going on, obviously, is what's transpiring between the war with the U.S. and Iran. Ultimately, I think it is absurd but revealing that so many people have declared that Iran has the upper hand in this. It's just kind of silly. Iran imports 50% of its food.

Simple reality is we are now engaging in a blockade that even if it isn't perfect and it reduces the ability to import, give or take, 50% of that. That's still a 25% food shortage in a population of 93 million people. You don't solve that through vibes. The simple reality is that Iran is very much on the back foot. The United States is going to have to deal with four or five, six dollar gas for a period of time. We are far less impacted than the rest of the world. Demand is already starting to fall to a significant degree around the rest of the world, which means we've likely seen the worst of the oil price impact. It's possible it gets slightly worse for brief periods of time.

But how that resolves, I think, is ultimately going to be quite critical. Once that has resolved itself, I think, unfortunately, we're going to find ourselves back in the reality that our economy is slowing and that's creating conditions, particularly around the implementation of AI that bears a distinct and adverse resemblance to what transpired with the early industrial revolution, most people think of that period as a time of rising surplus. They don't fully appreciate that it also created tremendous disruption, particularly to guild membership, which is the old forming of unionization. You'd have a master craftsman who would have a series of apprentices.

As you transition to the industrial economy and you move from piecework to factory work and automation, which didn't mean the same thing that it used to. We didn't have robots that were actually doing automation. It was more like a jig. The domain-specific expertise that resided within the guild masters, the experience craftsmen, those who survived to the ripe old age at which they could train the next generation, suddenly found themselves remarkably well bid up by industrialists who would say,

okay, I'm going to go get a master craftsman who's going to come in and teach my factory how to build this, and they stopped training the apprentices. Yeah. Right? And that's exactly what we're seeing. We're seeing a radical shift in the behavior of corporations in which they are retaining and hiring 55-year-olds and failing to hire 24-year-olds. All the research that is currently being done is focus on the idea of AI job loss, not the absence of AI job gain. And so what has actually transpired is in the last two years, we've seen a database emerge that says the hiring of those 55 and older is up 84%.

very unusual for 55-year-olds to get hired and much less to see an 84% increase. That's telling you that expertise is rising in value. On the flip side of the equation, the hiring of the younger generation is down 25%, which is why you're seeing the elevated levels of unemployment amongst young people. How far that goes, we don't know. But what it does mean is that the younger generation is failing to gain the experiences that are required to compete in the old world, much less the new world, and we haven't digested the implications of that yet.

That combined with a generally shrinking population across the overall developed world means that aggregate demand is unlikely to grow significantly relative to the productive capacity of those few who remain employed. In other words, you'll experience the same thing you experienced in the early 19th century. Extraordinary productivity growth, but periods of intense unemployment. And so while most people are familiar with the statistics from the Great Depression, in which unemployment hit 25%. They're completely unaware of the statistics

from periods like 1837 in which the unemployment rate for New York City hits 63%. Wow, wow. That's incredible. Would that just quickly, would that also mean that you're looking potentially

like a deflationary bust or if you have no aggregate demand? I think we have the deflationary bust long before we have the inflationary response. Yeah, okay, wonderful. Michael, thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. We'll have to do it again.

Maybe later in the evening, we'll grab a pint. We can hash out libertarians and Bitcoin a bit more. But it was wonderful to have you and Jeffrey together. There was a ton of insight there. Where can people go to check out your stuff, follow your work, all that fun stuff? Easiest place to find me is on Twitter at Prof Plum 99, P-R-O-F, P-L-U-M-N.9. If you're interested beyond that, you can check out my substack at yes, I giveafig.com.

And if you still haven't gotten enough, and I know I'm down to a select audience of negative three people at this point. You can check out my website at www.simplify. We're on the chief strategist and portfolio manager for our high yield product. Hey guys. Thanks for watching the video. Just wanted to quickly let you know we're going to be doing our annual Bitcoin survival workshop covering how to privately use and acquire Bitcoin June 28th in Banff. You can scan the QR code or check the link in the description to learn more. We'd love to have you there. If you enjoyed this episode with Michael Green and Jeffrey A Tucker, please do hit that like button. It really does help us out and check out the previous episode with Katie from Citizen X or the recent live stream.

Thank you.