TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #401: Inflation Hitting The Real Estate Market and Bitcoin Urbanism with Kelly Lannan

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Kelly Lannan to discuss the condition of infrastructure and the real estate market during this period of inflation, as well as Bitcoin Urbanism. Follow Kelly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ktlannan 9:55 - Riffing on infrastructure 17:18 - Current condition of real estate 22:43 - Marty asks question, are we in the eye of the storm? 27:04 - New home buyers are screwed 32:44 - Stopping the cycle with bitcoin 35:51 - Inflation is real, believe your lying eyes 45:42 - Debt slavery 49:03 - No man's land 50:46 - Hyperinflation looks near 56:57 - Diverting attention 1:01:18 - Bitcoin Urbanism 1:13:59 - Real estate is a shitcoin 1:16:14 - Strong Towns 1:19:08 - 15 Minute Cities 1:30:06 - The state of digital tech masks how bad it is 1:38:08 - California's decline 1:45:19 - Bitcoin fixes this 1:51:26 - Building on bitcoin 1:56:22 - Bullish vibes, plugs, wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River CrowdHealth Bitcoin Talent Co TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

look on the cars distracting you it was loud they're very loud they were blasting their woofers we're at the bitcoin commons here in austin texas on the corner of sixth and congress it is pretty bumping out there on this monday afternoon we had a hell of a conversation today with kelly Lanet. Second time on the show. Going to try and make it more frequent moving forward. It's been two years since he was last on.

For those of you that forget, Kelly is the Bitcoin urbanism guy. He's in the real estate market. He understands what's going on. Crazy in that market right now. Figured I'd have him on to talk about it. Plus some cool Bitcoin stuff.

So I think you guys are going to enjoy it. I have to apologize. I have not been reading the boostograms the beginning of the episode so i got to go back three episodes rip 400 we're gonna win against broken money and broken culture was at sovereign bra at mav 21 boosted us 25 000 sats awesome talk thank you mav at mongo 1000 sats great podcast thank you thank you mongo at btc or nothing 21 m did you hear that did that come through i did hear that uh my bad we will win fire emoji fire emoji and at blizza b-l-i-z-z-a-h 200 sats boost thank you for the boost booza excuse me rip 399 bitcoin mining is igniting an engineering renaissance with reet and isaac

from cathedra you freaks are loving that rip at blockchain bug 5000 sats y'all nerded out on this one ha ha ha crazy to hear guys self-teach themselves grabbing demo textbooks to solve real world problems thank you blockchain bug at renick 777 sats great episode having a home dryer that mines bitcoin would be fucking awesome sometimes i also think about using a fridge cooling system to mine without fans imagine a single chip asic attached to most of the daily use electronics how about that decentralization of the network i agree right now we need to put asic hashing boards on on as many applications as possible at cantillionaire 500 sats absolutely fascinating rip i agree cantillionaire was fascinating and last but not least

we have three sats from rip 398 with amjad masad replit ai and bitcoin blockchain bug 5000 sats nice tight rip i tried replit and the app is very confusing one day hope to get good enough to earn some side income doing bounties go check it out again blockchain bug they're getting better every day at krsh 2000 sats will be easier to reach common grounds with the general ai than it is with a politician would not be surprised cannot say for sure though at user 1-1-6-6-3-2-9-4-2-7-1-8-4-1-2-8 great episode great content thanks so much and keep building fire emoji fire emoji fire emoji thank you freaks for contributing to tftc via podcasting 2.0 enabled apps if you don't know what that is the podfather adam carey has iterated on his version

of podcasting 1.0 he created podcasting 2.0 which allows you to put a lightning network address in your rss feed so when i send my podcast out has that lightning network address in the feed and anybody listening on apps like fountain breeze podverse echo i think you can do it for your albie now if you're using the albie wallet and browser extension uh you can contribute sets you can stream sets or boost sets which is what we just read participating in the value for value model thank you guys for participating if you're getting value out of these conversations you want to send it back and you don't like listening to the ads we would like to transition to this model and so the more you boost the quicker we get there this rip was brought to you and with that being

said this rip was brought to you by our great friends at river river's here to provide you a bitcoin company i always want to say exchange but it's much more than that it's a bitcoin company built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners and exchange is just one aspect of this company uh if you buy bitcoin on river you know that your bitcoin is held in custody in a multi-sig wallet with 100 reserves behind it they advocate that you send it to self-custody they have literature to teach you how to do that but if you do hold it on rivers exchange you can know for certain that it's in a multi-sig wallet with 100 reserves they don't leverage third parties like prime trust or anything else they build it all themselves the wallet the exchange you can send and receive

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capital unchained is here to do many things mainly help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model this plays out with their vault product which is a two or three multi-sig in which you hold two keys unchained holds one since you have those two keys you have full control over your Bitcoin. It's a beautiful thing. If you're ever in a pinch and need Unchained to be the second in a two or three multi-sig quorum, they are there, the second signature in that quorum. They have a white glove concierge service. It's going to take you from zero to having this vault set up. They're going to get you wallets. They're going to get comfortable with everything. Go to unchained.com slash consultation and check it out. Tell them the TFTC sent you to get $50

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And enjoy this rip with Kelly Lannan. Tiki. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor

i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be mr landon with the good flow how are we doing ah mr ben i am very good i am happy to be back flo is intact and ready to go well i'm very happy that you're back too i hit you up a couple weeks ago i forget if we talked about on rhr but obviously there's a lot of noise around the real estate markets right now the fed is raising rates that is affecting mortgage rates which is affecting the ability to move houses in the u.s housing market uh it seems a bit chaotic i figured hey i need to pull in kelly to help me get a better understanding of what's going on in this market but before we get into like the current state the first time you're on the show gosh it

had to be like a year and a half almost two years ago now yeah i think it was two years ago it was right after i had published an essay about public bathrooms and i made a couple jokes that got some attention so glad to be back though well i'm glad to have you back again but that first conversation Not only did we talk about like Bitcoin urbanism, just how messed up the coding, zoning, excuse me, the zoning laws are and how it perturbs, what's the word I'm looking for? Urbanism, urban design. That's what I was looking for with the phrase. I guess natural, natural development in the built environment. So instead of, instead of, um, I guess the built environment being a reflection of an ecology being, you know, the humans live in an urban space. And therefore, since we're animals, we would create our own ecology that it's essentially top down telling you where you can put things. Um, so I am officially the head of the hating central planners, United, uh, organization, and I am proud to be, uh, in that position. So, but yeah, some of my favorite quote tweets, this is your, this is your world on central

planning. Yeah. Laughs in central planning and, uh, just, oh, it's, it's rough out there. I actually, there's, there's actually a lot of good news on that front. smaller cities larger cities even some states are starting to ban single-family zoning I mean they're not in places that you would expect I believe Minnesota is one Oregon is one but you would think that places like Texas or Arizona which has stronger property rights would be leading that charge but it's actually it's actually not which is quite interesting but

another big one is eliminating parking minimums because that's that's like the bane of urban existence so to speak yeah austin seems to be a pretty unpleasant urban existence now as the cities seems to be outgrowing its infrastructure they're putting up a bunch of phallic buildings here in the middle of the city and getting to work is a big pain in the ass yeah well they do uh they're they call them podiums so they're they're glass office buildings on top of like 20 levels of parking most people don't know the one of the most expensive things to do when you're building a building or really doing anything is digging up dirt so when you're excavating to build a parking garage you know that can basically double the cost per parking space just to dig a hole in the

ground so people who avoid it avoid it but when you're walking around like downtown austin like you see it there's 20 levels of parking and then the office building is built on top of that so and to your point about exacerbated infrastructure it's like yeah you know when you have these boom and busts you you model parking or transit or cars based on the current formulas right or the current knowledge but if you build you know if you build the equivalent of 5 000 new parking spaces for buildings where you know those 5 000 cars got to go somewhere and you know typically cities are always playing catch up in order to make that happen because you know construction takes time all this planning takes time and it has to be approved reviewed you know everybody likes to

think that their house will just pop up in six months it's like that's true i'll build it in six months but all the all the work required before that takes years from like permitting and actually acquiring the supplies needed yeah i mean not so much acquiring the supplies needed it hasn't been as bad as it was before like it like it up to i guess you could say the end of 2022 2020 through 2022 is absolutely awful for procuring anything i guess uh the easiest way to describe it is you could buy something like we were buying a good example is uh shower bypass doors so instead of stepping over a tub or having like curtains for a shower you know you have like a glass door we ordered all of this stuff for one of our projects and not one of the sets match the

color of the other set now keep in mind we ordered like champagne bronze which is kind of like it looks like gold but none of them matched there is no piece that matched so you're getting stuff there's no quality control because they're just getting it out the door and then you're just you're you're literally just stuck with it because there's no there's nowhere else to go so well that that was one of the things i wanted to leave with is last time you were on you were talking about just how terrible the supply chains were so they've uh they've improved a bit but the quality control has gone down well quality controls come back up um i say it's probably standard now but i mean it's still hard to get stuff i think there's enough complaints about like don't

don't me crap that it stopped um but yeah i mean overall it is getting a little easier to find everything i mean lumber is down i just saw stat lumber's down almost 70 percent from the high um so you measure lumber in thousand board feet and it got up to like 1735 i think it was and now it's down to 365. that's good that's good at least yeah i mean it's it's good but it's also you know a forward indicator i guess you know for what we're going to talk about it's a forward indicator of like what's going on in the business so you know when lumber shoots from where it is now all the way up to over 1700 back down to where it is say okay hold on now like trees take time to grow and you have all the manufacturing process that goes into that and then like when i order it

or when everybody orders all at once price goes through the roof right but you know like a typical supplier like you ramp up production or you ramp up new inventory in order to meet demand thinking that that's going to be going forward so now you know i don't want to say everybody's left holding in the bag but uh there's uh there's definitely like we had leftover lumber there's lots of people who are trying to renegotiate contracts that are not having a fun time right now so yeah locked it in at a higher price it's finally time to deliver and they're like um actually i'd like to pay less for this but yes yes jump into like the current state of the market as it pertains like mortgage rates commercial real estate like i mentioned austin has a shit ton of new construction going

on with high rises in the middle of the city facebook was a lead anchor tenant in one of these buildings and they pulled out uh late last year um see they're still building that building and their anchor tenant one of the largest corporations in the world said actually we're not going to buy or rent that that real estate anymore rates are high mortgage rates are high You have people like Blackstone defaulting on commercial real estate funds that they have or bonds. That was last week. But before that, late last year, they prevented some of their investors and one of their brutes from not one of their investors. They had to pause redemptions on that breed fund, particularly, I believe, BlackRock had a similar problem.

It seems that the Fed stepping in and raising rates as quickly and as aggressively as they have over the last year, year and a half, is really throwing a wrench in real estate markets, both residential and commercial. What are you seeing on your end? You are absolutely right. So I guess the easiest way to think about it is tying back in timelines into real estate development. So you buy a piece of land, you have to get entitled. That means, you know, you go to your city and make sure that I'm allowed to build, you know, an apartment complex, 50 units or, you know, I can build like a drive through Dutch Brothers. Right. So there's a whole process associated with that. And that could take, you know, if you have to rezone something that could take, you know, depending on your market, 12 to 18 months.

So you're looking at a piece of property. Let's say it's November 2021, the day before J-PAL announces that he's going to take rates to the moon. so you've got your assigned LOI you know or let's say you're even further along you have a purchase contract and you are in escrow so the clock is ticking and you need to figure out if you can get done what you need to get done so that takes you 12 to 18 months and you're here right now mortgage rates are 7% or the Fed funds rate is just under 5 I think it's like what's the rate so four and a half to seven it's like yeah yeah exactly so so the Fed funds rate has

what tripled since then and now you're looking at your model and you're like holy cow like does this math even work you know do we need to uh think about syndicating this or do we need to restructure all of our finances for you know or not finances our model for a long-term hold like how do we do this now don't get me wrong there's still development happening all across the country it's just not as much so when you're jacking up rates that fast instead of let's say you know 25 deaths every two months you know this gets in real estate that's like spinning on a dime you know moving in a year is spinning on a dime or trying to get new entitlement is just almost i mean the amount of brain damage that it would be to try and get let's say more product in order

to make a piece of land work in today's environment like you just you just wouldn't do it so things are definitely slowing down people are holding on to whatever their property is whether it's commercial or residential. Like if people own homes, I have a bunch of buddies that own homes over, or excuse me, under 3% mortgage rates. So they're just like, Hey, where am I going to go? And B why on earth would I sell when I've got, I have a buddy who's works at a bank. He's got a two and a quarter, 30 year mortgage, two and a quarter percent, 30 year mortgage. So, you know, these people are never going anywhere. And then the commercial guys, as long as they can hold their debt through this period and refinance, they're like, well, you know, I got seven years

to figure it out or got 10 years or 15 years, whatever it is. So there's definitely a lot of pencil sharpening going on, but at the same time, if you are in a position where you've owned something, you bought something two years ago, then you're probably just going to sit on your hands. Would you do new deals? Not nearly as much. Um, so a lot of the brokers that I've talked to, you know, their, their traffic or their, their deal flow has dropped 75 to 90%, but there's still stuff coming through the door. But I guess, you know, when you think about it, or if you're, you know, you're listening, you're thinking about it, it sounds like, oh, wow, that's crazy. It's like, no, the real thing, the real crazy part is how crazy things

were the last two years up till now, like absolutely bonkers. So we are below, you know, what normal activity would be especially for like single-family homes or apartments not so much we're probably right around the baseline commercial developments definitely slowed down at least in the research I've done and the buddies the stuff that I've talked to so there's there's a lot there's a lot of there's a lot of pain that's happening but at the same time there's a lot of people just sitting on their hands so there's not a whole I wouldn't say there's a happy medium it's definitely a no man's land bid ask spread is huge and just people aren't doing anything well that that's i think that's my big question is like how

how long do people do a subset of the market of people who own homes and have these low rate mortgages locked in like especially if you consider like the layoffs that have been going on in the tech sector like is there the potential that we're just in the eye of the volatility storm in real estate where at some point maybe later this year next year we'll reach a point where so many people have been taken out of the job market and they don't have the ability to service their mortgage or forced to sell their home they got it in 2020 2021 when the money printer was on they thought it was going to keep going forever that has obviously changed it's affecting the job market now do you see that being a catalyst for some uh that spread in the bid ass

getting compressed lower um in that regard not necessarily now i do see i do see let's say a lot of the tech sector are responsible for uh the work from home basically flight from cities so um if you're in san francisco you left for idaho or montana or some of these other places and you know you just lost your highfalutin job um now are you going to try and sell are you going to try and get a new work from home job like sure but if you're if you're not able to do that then you've got to move back to where all the action's happening so some of these people may take losses on their homes trying to get out um it kind of just depends now you have to remember these people are moving from very expensive areas to very i don't want to say like cheap that's not the right

word but relatively relatively cheap compared to them so they're and this is very true in arizona where like 85 of the buyers coming from out of state are putting down huge amounts of cash for their down payment so their loan to values are way lower than you know what a normal loan might be for the average person in the average town in these areas so can they take a hit and move back Maybe. Sure. But what's kind of going on, especially in the in the single family residential market, is that it's kind of creeping down slowly. So it may be nationally like one or two, one, one or one to two percent a month. But that's kind of just everybody ignoring the fact that they really need to move or they really need to do something. Right. So they're like, well, I'll sell it, but I don't I don't need to take a huge haircut.

There is some of that now will like tech people moving out of their homes and selling it, bring down comps in the neighborhood. Like, absolutely. Is that going to affect everybody else? No, not necessarily. If everybody else starts losing their jobs and they get foreclosed out, like you better believe it. But from the data that I've seen and that I'm reading, it's not it's not as large of a subset as you would think. And that the quantities are still so small relative to all the other homeowners that have purchased, especially, you know, with sub, we'll just say sub 4% rates, that they're more likely to just be one-offs than, you know, affecting the whole market to bring everything down. Now, will there be like concentrated neighborhoods where stuff like that happens? Like, sure. but um i from what i'm reading and what i think i don't think it's enough to take the whole ship

down with it so um but like i said it's kind of two extremes there's there's a lot of people that are very happy with what they were able to get as far as refinancing homes and sitting you know sitting their home forever and then there's lots of people that you know maybe got a mortgage in the fours or the fives that are kind of like okay well if home prices keep coming down you know one percent a month or whatever and after two three years which we would be i guess we'd only be about six to eight months into the first like leg of the downturn so to speak but you know it's it's it's out there but it's not as big of a concern for especially a lot of the research that i've seen yeah so what you're saying is like it's it's worse out there for

people trying to buy new homes for the first time right now obviously oh yeah so new home new home buyers are just totally screwed like if you're if you're so i'm i'm 35 so if you're younger essentially 35 or younger um the first of all if you're a millennial 35 percent of younger there's one in four of us that still live at home with mom and dad so think about that that's almost 20 million people. Right. So, you know, what are they doing? They're still at home. They're not paying rent or they're paying rent to mom and dad, whatever it is. And they still don't have even, even with that subsidize, you know, I guess rent, so to speak, they're still not able to save up enough or do they make enough in order to afford a home at 7%

rates? So I think there are like 6.95 right now, but you know, I was looking at some of the matrices that people put together of what's a 3% rate versus a 7% rate due for A, your down payments, B, your monthly payments, which is really what's most important. In some cases, it's double the payment than it was two years ago. A lot of times it's between 50 and 75% more. So if you had, if you could qualify for a $2,000 a month mortgage two years ago, same mortgage is now $3,000. So a 50% increase in the cost, you know, just shelter alone. It's like, Oh, okay. Well, everybody's rethinking this, you know, cancellation rates in Q4 or through Q4, at least in the Southwest, which is basically Phoenix and Vegas with 45%. So

almost half of every contract that these home builders had for home canceled. So what does that mean i mean if you're a home builder you have certain things that you can do you can offer incentives you can buy down uh the buyer's mortgage rate so you can essentially write a check to lower it from let's say five to four percent just just spitballing you know to help to help out the buyer the buyer buys the house at the price that you want you move inventory everybody's happy right so there's games that can be played um and i don't want to games is not like a negative term it's just like there's things that you can do to help the buyers offer incentives and to sell a home that comes out of your top line right yes it does so it becomes like a

rational calculation how much do we want to pay to sell this house you know to get it off the inventory either we get our money back we make less on margin you know that's fine it is what it is a lot of these guys are thinking that you know it's a redux of uh 2008 or the great financial crisis which not necessarily so uh for different reasons but you know they're they're all kind of like looking around and i i heard it described on the podcast as clearing the decks which is probably pretty accurate um you know starts are uh when i was reading the the home builder stats for central phoenix starts were down like 35 percent um from last january through last december so uh there's there's there's a lot of people pumping the brakes and trying to prevent new

basically they aren't starting new homes is what it's coming down to they have all sorts of inventory as soon as you pour a slab to start a home like you don't stop you finish it and you go from there so but marty if you if you are if you have the ability like right now if you know if you've been renting or saving cash or whatever you know i i would not i would sit on your hands because there's there's a lot of people thinking that you know this one to two percent drop in home prices you know that's happening every month is going to turn into like five or ten real quick now it's not like doom and gloom it's just that okay so now there's some people that have to sell and they are going to get aggressive about it or there's uh investors that need to sell and they're

going to get aggressive about it you know one of the one of those groups is like the short-term renters the airbnb folks i can't tell you it's almost a running joke in scottsdale about how many airbnbs some of these realtors have some of them are 15 to 20 right and these are the people just here these are the people we see on tiktok investors teaching you how to how to run a real estate portfolio yeah the guy the guy's making videos where it sounds like a ponzi scheme where you could take equity out of your your new rental property and roll it into that property and then you know from property b to property c to property d yeah those guys unbelievable no it's it's as somebody who has not purchased a home yet would like to buy

a home in some land it's like that that's the mentality i've sort of adopted over the last six months is like all right something's gotta happen here like rates are too high inflation still relatively high yes it's falling on a month-to-month basis but that lower cpi print is working off a higher base from last year when it was double digit inflation like it seems like there's some turbulence on the horizon again just goes into something we discussed in the first time you were on the show which is like the boom bus cycles that exist particularly in real estate and it seems like like what you're mentioning there's like no or new starts are are beginning to uh beginning to dry up all throughout the country like

what i'm trying to get is like how do we just throw a wrench in this boom bus cycle like is j pal gonna start pivoting at some point towards the end of this year maybe next year and then all right floodgates open start building again like how do we stop this the cycle already i'm glad you asked there's this technology called bitcoin okay and we we get rid of all of these people making all of these decisions for everybody else when it comes to the price of risk uh you You know, I, as far as it goes, yeah, the, so Lynn Alden had to tweet, I don't know, I think it was in December, basically saying that the average spread between the 10 year and the 30 year mortgage is about 300 basis points, so about 3%.

So like right now we're topping out or we had topped out about three and a half and now the expectations or basically the inflation misses that have happened in like the last month, you know, 30 year rates have rocked back up from just under six to just under seven so it's a lot you can reprice assets a lot faster than like you could build assets right so we're in this position now where home building starts are cut in half and declining to the position where even if you know they pivot in two weeks because you know the wind blows a different direction like whatever the reason is you know then then we're back in the same position that we were we had no supply and we have all this demand especially now we have all this demand

that's been waiting around for over a year because rates are up and then we haven't built anything for the last year so you get back into the same problem we had where prices went up you know 30 to 40 percent depending on where you are and only you know certain number of people can afford them anyways so if you're if you're a first-time home buyer like you know you would think that like i don't house but i don't own a house i've been doing this for too long i don't mind renting you know i'm sitting around i'd rather stack bitcoin than equity in a home but um you know if you haven't built any new inventory where are all these people going to go where are the 20 million millennials that live with their parents going to go what about all the gen xers what about

all these other people that want to get out of california for instance so um i think personally uh rates will start coming down definitely by the end of the year there's too many there's too many small indicators that are basically just flying all over the place you know costs are dropping fast and lumber which is a forward-looking deal uh even you know i like to everybody everybody has like a heuristic right where they talk to a neighbor or they have a family member or something where they're like you know this just doesn't seem right when everything is you know you definitely know everything's wonky or like when everything's crazy they're like hey have you ever heard of you know, Ethereum. It's like, no, no, yeah. Ripple, whatever. And it's like, okay, here we

go. Now, now we're at the top. I got to start putting, you know, guarding myself. But I was talking to, um, I don't want to read them out. We'll say a family friend. And he was kind of like, he's not financially inclined. He doesn't know anything about Bitcoin, but he was just like, you know, Kelly, it's so weird that I, they say everything's great. And these top line numbers like cpi and unemployment are getting better and all this stuff because but then i just look around and all of these small things i notice are just getting absolutely worse and i'm like yes yes absolutely that's all it's it's not it's it's like the the shiny object syndrome right they want you to look at a big shiny object but don't look at all the small things that are going wrong

and it's it's a very keynesian fiat thinking to think that like all of these other inputs like they matter they play into the larger inputs and depending on you know how you want to cook the books if you're um you know at the bureau of labor it just you know you can make these numbers look how you want but i'm inclined to talk to my heuristics and uh see what what's going on um so i think that they're going to be forced to to lower rates i think eventually you know all of these small things breaking you know are gonna you know finally break something big to get enough attention to be like okay and then what are they gonna do they're gonna take rates down 100 bps per meeting and we're gonna be back to zero you know before you know it i just so hard to predict

though it is you're like you said hopefully more and more people become attuned to this great technology called bitcoin where we don't have to worry about the whims of jpal and crew and just organize economy around a protocol that is very predictable but going back to the heuristics that your family friend was talking about like what are some of the examples that he was pointing out i mean it's basically he was one of them was going uh shopping at the grocery store and uh basically like the hardware store and it was it's so much that like you know eggs are up beef is up some things are down a little bit but it's more about everything's a little bit harder to get so like in the state of arizona raw milk is like legal you can just go buy it so uh i'm a

big fan and i buy you know just like a half gallon whenever it's available but it hasn't been available in almost three weeks so now i know that when it becomes available whoever else has seen it like me is buying two or three right so then the shelves go empty again so then the expectation of you know it should i should i buy this now or is it am i gonna have to wait another month um and with him it was like he he does a lot of stuff around the house he's a little bit older and um he was like you know i i go to the the ace hardware or wherever and you know think some things are more expensive definitely but it's not just that it's more expensive and i get less less of the items so like if he's buying wall hangers right instead of getting 15 per

pack maybe he's getting 10 but the price still went up 20 well that's actually not a 20 increase because you got a third of the quantity for 20 more right so that's a huge price increase and you know it's it's basically he was just saying it's like it's like the little things like you just normally wouldn't really think about it it's harder to do things you go places everybody you know is a little angrier or a little little spicy you know everybody everybody's kind of thrown in this giant pressure cooker you know it's like the frog in the pot everybody's thrown in this giant pressure cooker and it slowly gets turned up by inflation and there's no real like precipice that anybody can put their finger on but you know you just kind of you just kind of

feel it and that's how that's how this guy was kind of trying to explain it which you know that's I'm trying to relay how he felt but I would even say it in my own life like buying things it's you know getting fewer for more and the quality is definitely just not the same you know it's just just inflation is just nasty completely agreed like going out to dinner yeah it's shocking now like like cost per head at a meal is probably like we're like a couple years ago it was like 50 bucks it was like yeah this is a little steep now it's like 70 80 bucks sometimes 100 bucks depending on where you go if you want to get a bottle of wine or something like that you go out you swipe your card like what the fuck did i just do i just spent yeah i 100 percent i was

that uh my girlfriend and i went to dinner for you know valentine's day or whatever and um we went to like a nicer place we were expecting to spend like 100 bucks and you know 100 bucks ahead or whatever and that was like they only sit down and we're like holy shit like what like i didn't look this up online did you look this up online she's like no we're like oh oh man get the bill comes around and we're like okay so that was a very nice dinner that was a very nice dinner we're i have to uh sit out for a month or two on uh this kind of thing but it's just like you know i i do um i line up like for i you know run my own business self-employed so i line item all my own meals and entertainment expenses and even my accountant was like kelly what are you doing

it's like i didn't do anything i reduced the quantity of times i went out by almost 20 and my cost per head just like you said i think it went up like 48 percent and i was like okay well let's my goodness it's you know i'm not i'm not doing anything significantly different than i than i have in the past and um it just doesn't make sense no it doesn't and like you said like the bls the fed federal government they game all these numbers because that's that's like something i've been paying closer attention to particularly like the cpi printer where he's like up inflation's on its way back down towards two percent maybe it doesn't get there maybe it hovers around four but it's like it's not actually like 6.8 or whatever

the recent prints are and then you're actually seeing many people don't catch this because they do their adjustments like a couple months after but they readjusted november and december cpi print higher like you're just like oh by the way like back in november december those numbers were a little lower uh let's adjust them higher but even the higher adjustment does not factor in what we're describing is like i believe my lion eyes like i'm going to the restaurant i'm paying 50 more than i was this time last year or two years ago it's very visible even if you even if you look at the shadow stats you know the shadow status calculator where it uses the 1980 base cpi before before they took you know a hatchet and just absolutely obliterated that formula like

kids it was running in the teens it may still be in the teens i forgot to check but it was running in the teens like all last year and it's like yeah that that that about feels right to me like my my expenses are changing 10 to 20 percent like yeah yeah and there's other little heuristics too like i see you know i see it on twitter every once in a while like people who are driving for uber eats or doordash or driving uber like they're getting visibly angry like on these videos on tiktok or whatever saying like really getting pissed off at people for not tipping enough like they're expecting people on top of the ride to like tip significantly because they think that people should know they're not making that much money um which is like i like first seven eight

years i used uber like never even thought about tipping i thought it was like baked in and every thought every uber driver was happy with what they were making and now you're seeing that that type of gig economy work are getting really stressed yeah well you know speaking of gig economy and the fed and the bls it's like you know every they say everything's fine in employment unemployment's like sub four percent but they keep forgetting to bring up the fact that like the quantity of people who now have two or three jobs whether part-time or you know gigs is up something like what like 50 or 60 percent so all of these people who are having a hard time making ends meet all they're doing is working more and what like nobody thinks to mention that like

you know it's not obviously it doesn't it doesn't promote their narrative they have no incentive to tell anybody this but it's like you when you look at the the numbers of quantity of people working more and more jobs it's like you know what you can only you can only work so much like even even if you were you know a wall street banker working 80 to 100 hours a week for 10 years like i there's lots of guys that crack you know even even you know developers that i know have worked hours like that and after like 10 or 15 years like it just they just fall aside yeah so yeah and you can in the older that you get especially if you're a senior citizen think about being a senior citizen right now and seeing m2 go up uh what was 2021 it went up like 28 like how are you going to

work yourself out of that one like you really can't i think uh i can't remember who who posted it but like the average 401k balance is like 100 grand so that's not gonna last anybody no any amount of time no not not when you're what your average m2 increase in the last like 20 years is like just over eight percent something like that it's like dude we are all in trouble yeah and like bringing back to real estate i saw a crazy stat on twitter the other week that made me laugh not out of like jeer but pure like holy shit this is insane it was like if the average millennial making a median salary wanted to save up enough to put 10 down on a mortgage they'd have to save 10 of their paycheck for 10 years like just for a 10 down payment with rates

going up like and i can't even believe that statistic as you look at the median income it's like $41,000 after taxes and all your other disposable income expenses. Like it seems like that even that 10% for 10 years for 10% down payment is a bit of a stretch. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when you compound that with the student debt that millennials have, it's like, you know, the debt slavery is a real thing. So if, if prices are going up or they, let's say that like they have the last three years, they go up 40% and, uh, interest rates then start cranking up. Now you're at 7% and you've got to

put down, uh, you know, you're 10%. So you're, let's say the average, the average price is like half a million bucks. It's, it's like four 70, but for easy math. So you've got to put down 50 grand just to, just to start. Right. And, um, your mortgage payment is going to be probably about, I think it was like 3000 bucks a month. So if you already only had $40,000 left after everything and you have, you know, no more working job and all this other stuff, that's $36,000, right? That's your, that would be your mortgage payment for the year. So what about like clothes and food and, you know, a beer with Marty after the pod, something like that. Like what, you know, like what, where do these things come? Like, how does it happen? It doesn't happen.

It's just like, it's just simple math. And you know, it's no wonder, like all, I think like the Zoomers do post on TikTok about like living in the shed in their parents' yard forever. And It's like, yeah, buddy, like, hate to tell you, but that's kind of, uh, where things are trending. It's not fun, you know, and as a developer, it just, it just drives me absolutely nuts. So like, you know, what, what, like what I want to do, I want to build things in the built environment. I want to make homes or build your offices or whatever it is, commercial space, residential

space, uh, retail space, all of that stuff. Like that stuff interests me, but like, I want to provide that service. That's the value that I provide in my profession. but it's like you know i'm hamstrung by a like rates b central planning garbage from various places but you know how how does a guy like me help somebody like that you know i want to build like a good quality product that'll last for 30 40 years so that people like that can find use in it find value and they're willing to pay me like that's that's a legitimate as far as i'm concerned that's a legitimate use of my time. But you know, how, how do you do that? How do you do that right

now? Um, I was talking to, uh, I was talking with my dad last week and he's been doing this for 35 years. So he describes this area or this essentially this point in time in the cycle is like no man's land, right? So you look at all the new deals that come across your desk, you model them out, how much, you know, what, what would you have to pay an investor? Um, what's it going to cost you to borrow the money? All, you know, all, just all these basic things you throw into the model and you're just looking around and you're like, man, something's got to give because nobody's going to do anything with this.

Like construction prices definitely have to come down because they went up so high, but even, even land prices need to come down. So we're, we're still at the, we're still in the phase where it's like nobody's really accepting reality or believing that things need to change to the downside right so they still think that their land's worth what it was worth you know a year ago or that you know they can definitely grind down their subs to save 10 or 15 percent of the budget but it's like you know a lot of times the subs you know if you ask or when you ask them you know for a haircut to take off you know five

percent at the top you know they'll send you their their uh their materials quotes and they're just It's like, where you show, you show me where on this piece of paper that you see 5% fluff and it just doesn't exist. So, you know, basically costs got to come down, mortgage rates or, uh, fed funds rates got to come down. Mortgage rates definitely have to come down just for activity in general. So even if you want it to buy a home, there's, there's just not a whole lot of inventory that is in demand.

so now this is in my mind where things get really scary because again like we've been mentioning even though cpi is lower like we believe our lion eyes we're going eating dinner we're buying stuff at hardware store getting less for more money uh it's very obvious to me that inflation is out of control, even though it's not being reported accurately. And this is something I've heard a thread about over the weekend and discussed on Rabbit Hole Recap last week and a show that we posted this morning. But it seems like we're in the beginning of that hyperinflation stage where you can easily see a situation where everything that we've been describing as it pertains to the real estate market commercial retail retail construction of that market

seems to be pointing like things uh rates need to come down to like stoke this market and what i worry about is that when they inevitably do come down who knows when later this year next year 2025 who knows but like the fed is not going to have inflation under control and they're going to be lowering rates and printing and just exacerbating that problem which is a very scary proposition to to think about yeah yeah and i think uh i think a good a good thing to mention too is that like you know inflation isn't always just it's a it's the quantity the increase in quantity supply of money but right when you start breaking things there is no amount of money that can make jump you know excuse me that can make lumber arrive to my job site right so if if things

start breaking fundamentally because inflation makes it not worth anybody's time let's say that you know a low margin item that i need for a house is you know like my plumbing fixtures right and if it becomes just too expensive from a base materials point of view to put something together to make a faucet and then try to sell that faucet then you're going to stop selling faucets right and then if jay powell lowers rates a year from now and i need a faucet well guess guess what? There, there's no amount of money that I can have. That's going to get me a faucet. So, you know, that just drives up the price of whatever else is available. So, you know, it's just like, you can, you can destroy demand, but you're also destroying supply at the same

time. Not to mention supply lines are still semi messed up and it just, it just gets out of hand really fast. And I, I absolutely agree with you that we're, we're kind of in, in having read things like, uh, Adam Ferguson's book, uh, what's, uh, how about the Weimar? Yeah. How money dies. It's I've, I think I've read that like three times. It's just, it's just absolutely fascinating because I'm trying to read it to figure out like, where are we right now? And we're kind of at the point where it's like, okay, some things are definitely, everything is definitely more expensive but some things are just harder to get and if you can't get them they're just more expensive and coming from somewhere else so i think we're kind of we're definitely getting to

the point of no return where it's like okay like like with my raw milk like it's literally just within the state because you can't transport it across state lines and it hasn't been in the store for three weeks so does that mean that it's no longer ever coming or when it comes is it going to be $20 instead of five. And it's just, I'm already, I'm worried. I think this, I don't want to, you know, incidentally segue this, but it's just like, when I think about the Bitcoin urbanism stuff, you know, cities used to be able to take care of themselves. Like they had surrounding areas that were either farms or farms for both, I guess, agriculture and for livestock, right? They could they could take care of themselves and then they exported whatever was left over. Right. So we had this country where we were basically on this giant landmass. We could transport and trade with everybody. You know, goods went to all sorts of different places. And then as far as I'm concerned, basically, like the Fed's 30 or not the Fed, but the federal government's 30 year mortgage plans basically screwed that up.

and then you combine that with all the available credit and subsidies in order to build suburbia and you literally just built a subdivision where you needed to grow food so what does that mean you know just makes everything more difficult to get if you can get it at all you know it's just like globalism was nice for everybody until they realized that you know i can't grow food in my backyard now yeah so what is that i think uh i think i think that's that's that's like what i that's like what i worry about i go for walks around my neighborhood and look at ugly houses and i just think to myself like man like scottsdale used to be a highly productive uh agricultural city like lots of phoenix was uh

we live in the salt river valley so think about like the nile flooding the desert and you know you can grow uh there's copper citrus or not you don't grow copper there's five c the five east of arizona so it's uh cattle copper citrus cotton and climate so climate's not related to that but you know we were used to we used to grow just all sorts of stuff but you know what do you what do you do when your 600 square mile landmass is now covered in pavement and roofs what do you grow how can you grow you grow people who are complaining about the state of the world and their ability to to get along and get and they're over here and they're over here on a podcast trying to figure it out at least two of them well yeah god i don't want to get too doomer

but it does seem like we're in no man's land like your dad was describing it like i do not have confidence in the ability of the fed or the federal government to produce the the soft landing that they keep talking about and they actually are beginning to talk about it less which would signal that maybe they can see the writing on the wall know that things are going to get a bit hairy and in parallel with that like there's other signals that are signaling that this may be the case predominantly the the war drum beating for world war iii whether it be supporting ukraine uh in their war against russia or saddle or saber rattling against china which seems to be heating up it seems that the powers that be are beginning to try to divert attention toward war

to to create an excuse to turn back on the money printer or destroy demand in another way yeah and i think you know if we want to keep it you know in the same vein with real estate thinking about you know being in china most most people's like savings are essentially in real estate because they don't trust the government i mean like why like why would you obviously but the notion that they have these ghost towns or these ghost cities with all this stuff and people are buying them you know evergrande going bk like and all they're doing is just saying you know okay Like, well, we'll guarantee this. We'll guarantee that. Or, you know, we'll, we'll make payments on your behalf. So a lot of people don't realize that, uh, a lot of Chinese real estate buyers

will buy like a condo and a tower before it's actually even built. So like, you've got to put down like 50% of the costs and then the builder builds it and then you pay the rest. So somebody's out 50% while that building is going up. Now, if the builder runs out of money because, you know, he got tired of bribing the local politicians which is you know part of the gig it's part of the game then your half-finished building that you pay a condo in paid for is worthless like it's just it's not there like you can't use the space there's no value in it like it's a concrete square there's no utilities it's not even finished there's no windows right so it's like the the degree to which stuff like that is going on, you know, leads right into what you're saying. It's

like, Oh, well, you know, let's rattle some sabers. Look over here. Don't worry about that finished building. Um, yeah, we'll, we'll guarantee that. Here's your check. It's like, okay, well there, there's second and third order consequences of just doing stuff like this. Like you just, you're papering over a problem now that is going to turn into a volcano in like a month. so it's just you know or whenever whenever they the focus comes back around like hey where's my condo or where's my check yeah and we're on like the sixth or seventh layer of paper mache on top of a problem that started decades ago and if you if you live you know if you live in a place like china when they they just say nope so when's when do i get my house nope you know when do i

get my check oh no it's in you know it's in the mail here download this app download this app we'll airdrop you some of you want i have to spend it uh in two weeks you can only spend it here unreal unreal yeah so here here's your here's your deposit back for your house you have three days to spend it or it's gone it's like what i could i mean i just that that is just like i i mean listen i you know from from my perspective of being a grug boy and not a think boy i just say to myself like i don't even know like what are the implications of something like that like how do you you know like tell us you know tell somebody that they can't have their deposit back but here you go here's some money and but you gotta spend it in

two weeks yeah don't think it can't come here freaks if our government can figure out a way to make it happen i wouldn't be surprised that they would but let's get to some theoretical more optimistic talk which is i mean you are the bitcoin urbanism guru you uh i brought you on this show today to talk about real estate because you're immersed i mean not in the selling of it but like the construction of real estate commercial and retail what is a way like let's paint a picture of a potential soft landing by incorporating bitcoin into the world of real estate or just into the economy more generally like do you think if people were to wake up understand that bitcoin is here is extremely useful and can help facilitate the soft landing that that actually

could like is there any way from a financial perspective that bitcoin can sort of help people whether it be people selling or buying homes i think that the idea would be that the the people most likely to i guess move like to to go down this path would be the people that a can't afford a home or b are on the verge of affording a home but don't know if they want to do it because just think you know they're just like well you know everything's up everything's down it's all moving really fast like should we really do this and i think that the best case is that those people kind of find bitcoin and realize that like you know if we are thinking along the lines of a store value and we can objectively define what a good store value is bitcoin is much better than real

estate but it's like now hold on like it's not like you know i i can hear i think i hear gg der gg posting in the background real estate is a shit coin but it's like you've got to live somewhere you may not need to buy a home but you know you can still rent something and live somewhere now will it be more expensive than you would like sure but i think over time the best thing that people in this situation can do is realize that bitcoin is a much better store of value it might be better to buy bitcoin instead of putting down a deposit for a home or trying to build equity in a home because the equity in your home is literally just it's unrealized gains it doesn't exist until somebody buys it so like all these boomers with mansions in all of these

areas think that they have all this wealth right but it doesn't exist until somebody buys it so why take that risk why take that risk now if it's done over time which i think it will be i don't think it's going to be like some catastrophic deal like oh my gosh you know real estate is worth nothing anymore buy bitcoin instead i think it's more like okay well we know that the store value angle is much better with bitcoin than it is with real estate so instead of throwing all of our money all at once into real estate we're going to slowly put it into bitcoin and essentially slowly bleed the demand for real estate in that fashion right it's not and i in in the fashion i mean though like it's it's an argument that it's a your largest investment that you're ever going

to make right the typical the emotional uh drawstrings that you know realtors or whoever want to use in order to get people to buy a home now like don't get me wrong of course there's demand to buy a single family home like i i would like to live there one day but that doesn't mean that it has to happen you know right away so i think that the best case scenario is that real estate slowly bleeds out its value or i guess it's its value premium as a store value does that make sense yeah so um you know that that's kind of just for like the single family home because it's it's a it's a durable consumer good right you're just you're buying it for shelter you just want to make the shelter your home right so there's an emotional appeal to that it's it's not necessarily

in my opinion it's not an investment it's only an investment because you allegedly make a return because jay powell lowers the real you know lowers the rates enough to where it's just people can afford more with their monthly payments so now like as applied to everything else my opinion generally especially bitcoin urbanism is that there is no there is no underlying basis for which development is priced over a long period of time so um this harkens back to a lot of like what uh strong towns and uh chuck marone talks about or say okay and i and i know this because i like i build it i get it like i read all this stuff read his books freaks um and it was like yes yes absolutely all of this stuff has to be replaced entropy is a real

thing, right? Your water pipes are going to break in your house just as they are outside in the street, right? All of these utilities, all these things have to be replaced. Now, how do you calculate, how do you calculate fixing that road or replacing that building or that light pole, you know, into the future? How do you do it when the quantity supply of money goes up by 8% every year. But remember at the same time that that 8% doesn't end up distributed evenly. So if cost construction goes up 30%, like it did in the last two years, like all of your municipal budgets for replacing things, the next five years are totally trashed. They totally trashed. So if you, if you have a money that can be printed at whim, like how on earth do you have, how on earth do you

maintain a budget for a city right how on earth how how does a city even calculate like how much it's going to cost to repair a sidewalk in six months or a year or five years from now so like these are the things that that cities need to be thinking about or people need to be thinking about when you know they're at their local zoning meeting complaining about a new development or the density of a new development or whatever it is so all of these things in the built environment have a cost, right? And they have a cost now when they're built and they have a cost in their future because entropy is a thing. It exists. Everything falls apart slowly over time and must be replaced. So just like we need more and more energy to maintain our current standard of living,

you need more and more infrastructure in order to maintain your existing cities. It's like it's not hard. People are not going to stop having babies. People are not going to stop voting with their feet are moving around like you've got to be able to to adjust to keep up but at the same time like you've got to know that you know you've got to know that you're going to be able to afford to replace all of those things that need to be replaced throughout time so um yeah no marty i just want to build mid-rise buildings that are very highly aesthetic you know instead of this background i want to have something else i can tell you that you're gonna have to wait till we get to a bitcoin standard because these problems are pervasive i mean personally i've experienced

this in my life just on a micro level in the last week like we rent our house our house was built in the 70s and we had somebody come do some work on our pipes in our bathroom and they had to go under the house and they looked at the pipes they're like these all need to be replaced i think i don't know yeah and it's going to be very expensive and i don't think the owner of the house realizes that And it's when you think about it, like at a micro level of a house by house basis, like you need all that maintenance, but then expanding it to city by city, state by state, it is a very precarious situation we find ourselves in. And Chuck Marone really drives that home in strong towns. Like Kelly said, go read that book. Like the amount of maintenance debt that this country has accrued over the last 50 years is astonishing.

And I don't think it's something a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill is going to fix, especially if a lot of that $1.2 trillion either goes towards things like renewable energy or just gets siphoned off. How can we make sidewalks woke? I think there's probably there's probably something in there about that no definitely yeah no so freaks if you're interested just think about this go stand outside your house go stand on the sidewalk in front of the front door of your house look down and just try and wonder how much infrastructure is under your street and what does it cost to put it there and then that's when you're gonna go down a rabbit hole of like wait a minute there's stuff under my

street it's like oh yes freak there's lots of things under your street and I can probably guess that it hasn't been touched in 20 to 30 years which like you know what you were talking about with the house that you rent the the thing about it this way the way that your house the house that you live in was built 70 years ago is way better than the house would be built today so you probably have copper pipes and all of these things like the actual durable materials that are in there the stuff that goes in the house today for plumbing is pecs so it's like it's basically hard plastic and it's held together by pex couplings so uh when the texas freeze happened like a year ago was that a year ago it was two years ago like one of the yeah so one of

the major things that was happening was that like all of this pex that they put in the houses is not rated for sub-zero temperatures or even like freezing temperatures right because your your water is going to freeze in the house and then it's literally just going to pop off all of those joints right so your your house was literally not built to handle this and those people have to go back and replumb their entire homes whereas like you could just replace copper if you really wanted to but in that situation where there's plastic everywhere that falls apart like what are you gonna do what are you gonna do freaks no then there's a situation if you don't even realize it's broken or if it's just like a small break and it's just leaking into the foundation of your

house like they get structural problems yep yep yep free zero your home was not built to last more than like 25 30 years unless like that comes into the high type preference stuff you know deal deals are done in real estate to turn you know to essentially flip and move on very very seldom you know even if they're building like a huge apartment complex and they sell it to like new York life or whoever for, you know, $250 million. It's like, still they built it at the price that they could in order to move it in order to maintain some level of control for a profit at the end of the day. But, you know, it became an industry standard. So now PEX is everywhere, right? So it's just the, I wouldn't say it's like corner cutting, but it's like cost cutting.

So I have this, I've been kicking around this idea for, um, like a, like a long form essay on craftsmanship and like how we got to, you know, where we were like a hundred years ago. Um, so like where we are today, like, where's, where's the craftsman? You know, I lament about that. Even my, the supers that I talked to lament about that. There's no craftsman left. It's like, well, what do you, what do you need a craftsman for when you can unroll a plastic tube and pop it together?

You know, people don't even use brick anymore. They use veneer and they use all sorts of labor saving techniques. So you don't even, you don't even need a mason, right? You don't need a bricklayer. Where's, where's the craftsmanship and nailing a template to a wall and then, you know, put in, put in bricks between each little line exactly where it shows you to go. So, um, I think 50 years of labor saving techniques and, and moving to lower quality goods that have you know allegedly the same lifespan allegedly but not allegedly but not yeah it's

just it's just a slow degrading of quality and all of these things you know well you're really driving home the point that real estate is a shit coin because what you just described is essentially like the ico boom like just spin up a token cheaply pump it flip it make your return that's what you're that's what you're fine tuning for i think they seem very similar i mean sure except to some degree i mean yeah the the difference is it's not an air token you know it's we'll call it a brick token right you can go and kick it with your toe and bust your toe it exists it's real it's and it can be repriced and so that it is a good deal right so you know I'm just, and some of the research that I've done, so let's say that people are paying

like five, 5% cap rates. So what a cap rate is, is that, um, uh, it is like the net operating income of something. And then you agree to pay X times it. So if something is a five cap, you're paying 20 times the income. Um, so, you know, the cap rates for real estate, you know, a hundred years ago were high teens, twenties, stuff like that. And now they're down into the fives. Then why, why is that? You know, cost of debt was way lower. The terms of the debt are way different. You know, if you guys think that a 30 year mortgage existed a hundred years ago, you guys are crazy. You know, if you wanted to buy a house a hundred years ago, you were essentially getting a commercial balloon mortgage where, you know, you had a five year

term, you know, but at the same time, you know, that was two and a half times your income. Now it's like 10 so um i lost my train of thought buddy i'm not gonna lie no it's it's not hard to lose your train of thought when uh you're trying to put together all these disparate pieces and variables that explain how our world is fucked but i do believe we're going to fix it i believe bitcoin is going to play an important role in that you were mentioning some positive optimistic trends you were seeing in particular markets around zoning rights what else are you seeing that is giving you some hope some optimism about the future so let's let's uh let's not be so dim here and um yeah so there there are and strong towns is a very good example of like

local communities getting together and pursuing change we'll say so most people don't know that um, land use is generally controlled. We'll say like the super lions majority is controlled by local, local ordinance and state more local than state. Um, because the federal government or the Supreme court, uh, ruled that Amber, the Euclid, but what that means is that you freak have control over what happens in your city and you can go and you can bitch about it and you can change the rules so that is what is happening around the country there's lots of great information lots of good arguments that can be made to pursue change so like the the the one that's very popular is eliminating parking minimums so parking

is one of the largest expenses that developer has on a per unit basis when building let's say an apartment so if you are a zoomer and you want to move in to this new place the difference you know per unit may be five to ten percent of your rent just to build that one parking space right um and it just it also depends on how it's built and all this other stuff but there's always a cost to consuming space for land right whether it's underground parking or like a podium structure kind of like the ones that we talked about earlier in austin or if it's just a giant you know walk-up apartment like you would find here in town where you know a 10-acre site half of it is parking right so there there's always a cost to all of

these things now there's a push to eliminate those and reduce those costs now what that does is it allows for walkable urban environments to be built because you're no longer having to spend And, um, a, the money for, uh, uh, the parking and B you don't need necessarily a car. So if I, I, you know, I don't know what the average car payment is, but let's say it's like 500 bucks. So if you're able to build and live in an environment where you don't need one, especially in like the desert Southwest, which is like totally car dependent, if you don't need a car anymore, you know, not only did I just save you 500 bucks a month on a car payment,

you don't need the parking space so i just say five to ten percent of your rent so now we're getting into the thoughts and the cycles where it's like okay well now if building what if building wealth is important in order for your future right or even just having cash for a rainy day fund which like 60 of the country has what like less than 500 bucks or whatever that stat is you know these these numbers start to become really important um and that kind of feeds on on itself because it's like well if you're going to have if you're going to eliminate parking for your apartment complex and you need to walk to get all your goods you know then you need to have services within walking distance now not to trigger like the the wef you know yeah 15 minute cities

kelly's 15 minute city guy so let's think about it this way we've got a we've got to clear the record for this so the 15 minute city is like is a heuristic so that was like studies done where it basically says people will generally generally walk 15 minutes to get the services that they want and desire now that got turned upside down by china by putting fucking gates everywhere and not letting you out unless you have a green you know qr code and then of course the wf is like oh yeah this is great let's just do this everywhere you know the ccp has got it figured out so no freaks the 15 minute city is not some giant conspiracy theory it was just a heuristic that basically what's that the saying where it's like as soon as a metric becomes a measure it becomes

a bad metric or something like that where it's like you know if somebody puts together a heuristic where it's like well a successful urban environment has you know all these services within a 15 minute walk of somebody's domicile somebody's like where they live then it's like okay then you're going to draw people to those areas you're going to be successful in building a uh a car minimized or even a car free environment which is cheaper to maintain and also produces more wealth for the people that own the land the people that live there and for cities so um yeah it's unfortunate i can't remember i was going to read some of those i have like three or four essays that are you know in the oven for bitcoin urbanism one of them um briefly mentions that but it's like

they they they they took this idea where this is kind of essentially in a complex system this is just kind of like what happened and then you know china got a hold of it and you got to scan your qr code in order to leave your your cell block your cell in in cell block i mean like like your city block becomes a cell where it has all the things you need. And technically you should never be able to go that, that, that is an abomination, no doubt. But, um, you know, yeah, the West trying to do that kind of stuff happens top down central planning and not emerging, which is what you're describing.

It's like the, like the externalities of eliminating, uh, parking minimums leads to a design landscape for the architect or the person constructing where they have new parameters and they're likely to include goods and services around that design landscape that they have where as wef yeah correct in china they're like no we're going to use this to um to to essentially police you and confine you intentionally where yeah what you're describing is emergent or like what the web points is like penalties if you go outside your zone and drive a car into somebody else's zone if you do that too many times you get you get dinged that's like that uh what was that movie called uh timeless yes um where you had to you had to

pay for your entry in time in order to go to the different tiers of the city. So, I mean, I guess it's kind of, it would be, it would end up being the same thing where they control blocks and in order to pass through blocks, there's some sort of fee and you either have it or you don't, or you know somebody or you don't, and you know, you're stuck in your little hellscape and you know, that's that, that becomes like a, like a cast essentially. So yeah, no freaks. I'm not,

i'm not a secret spy uh wef agent i am not claude schwab even though you know if you cut off the hair who knows but um no just kidding but uh yeah and i just you know i have uh when it comes to like urban planning and stuff like that you know it's they try to do it like top down like most people don't know when you want to build a coffee shop let's say that you find a space there's no parking required you're in a nice little area um and you buy all your equipment and you show up and you want to open a coffee shop it's like well sorry pal you forgot you got to go to the city and get your use permit and then you come to find that actually that area isn't zoned for that use permit so you can't build your coffee shop there so that that plays into the issue with top-down central

planning and especially when it comes to use and like the the the notion of the 15-minute city it's like okay well they quote unquote know which services you need and want therefore they will plan them in an urban block in the manner which suits them or which they believe suits you and then it's copy paste and don't forget all the security cameras and all the locks and all the gates right so that that's like the ccp wef version of the 15-minute city now that's just like a total sad ripoff off the the complex emergent you know version of that but um to go back to the the main point is that like eliminating parking is a very important parking minimums are are a very important step in that direction because that's that's really

what gets the ball rolling if you can create an environment where people don't need cars now like don't get me wrong i'm not anti-car like i'm i'm absolutely not they have wonderful you know utility value they they perform you know wonderful functions like i drive a big ass truck like you're not you're not taking that big ass truck from me so uh i get it but at the same time like i know that for my city to produce wealth and for land to continue to have value into the future it has to be able to pay for itself parking is one of those things especially parking required parking minimums are one of those things that reverses that calculation and makes it very expensive because you have to have all the surrounding infrastructure remember like

second and third order consequences how does everybody get downtown well you got to have a 10 lane freeway both directions like Houston does and then they just keep adding lanes and what does it do it does nothing it saves like a minute for two years and then guess what they're back to where they are so they spent all this money on freeways bulldozing houses in order to do that and then what downtown Houston is basically a giant parking lot and that that's like another thing with like the last and central planning tweets I show I retweet these all the time cities from what they look like 75 80 years ago versus what they look like now it's disgusting

just talk it's just totally gutted they're just parking lots so you had all of this wealth that existed or was being fostered over time and then you just bulldozed it for a parking lot that is free yeah no and this gets back to what i think was the highest signal in chuck we're in strong towns is this concept of revenue per square foot which obviously parking spots most places you go aren't paid parking so you're taking up all this land not getting any revenue from it you're basically wasting all the square footage with no revenue whereas i think that's something we should make a push at the local level here in the states if you're a freak listening to this you want to get involved in your local community like go to your local zoning board

whatever it may be and say hey we need to shift our kpis from whatever they may be now to revenue per square foot let's just like hone in on this this one metric and really try to optimize that as much as possible yeah so like an example for that would be with transit departments the the metric is uh uh in in echoing chuck marone that the the uh the metric is an efficiency so like how long, how long does it take you to get somewhere? How much time does something save you versus like the safety of versus safety, which is, you know, how safely can you get somewhere and how safely can everyone else be on your path to, for you to get somewhere. So, um, a lot of the, if changing a metric like that totally changes the design of transportation environments,

cars all these things you know streets are you know freaks if you're driving down like a subdivision and it's like 50 feet between the curbs on each side of the street like i can tell you right now that street was not designed for you to go 25 miles an hour like your brain sees a wide open area and it's just like go right versus a narrow street where you've got to pay more attention like you you subconsciously slow down um so we have like this data exists and that's one of the things that i like to include in bitcoin urbanism it's like the the evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology like all of these things like there are objective tests that can be done so like your your ugly ass building downtown that you hate which is for you know four

walls and glass like your brain you can literally test your brain ignores all of that versus you know if you wouldn't looked at the state texas state capitol like you're you can see you see all these details your brain is occupied subconsciously you're not even like you you may know that you're looking around but your eye moves so fast and your brain catches so much information you know visually that like you are looking at these and it pleases your brain so for all of you people that like uh modern buildings and and architecture i'm sorry but you've been conditioned and um you're essentially you know you've been cucked i'm sorry that is true you've been cucked and you're making all of our lives worse and you're making

it harder for our cities to produce revenue to actually reinvest in infrastructure and maintain correct what what their what their original job was supposed to be yeah now now it's about putting you know whatever gender deals are decals on the bathroom about who could be there who can't just remember they're they're focused on the important things freaks nothing to see here yeah let's spend hours at a at a board meeting talking about this and everybody's feelings instead of the uh the blatant structural problems that exist right in front of our lives like oh how are we gonna oh yeah actually rebuild all of our bridges all of our bridges that got uh d d grades in the the latest uh uh civil engineers report yeah yeah no no don't worry about that

that's fine which gender are you today yeah all these train derailments are normal don't look over there yeah i mean that's i hate to that's like a glaring like topical example of crumbling infrastructure because like absolutely like east valentine obviously terrible situation but it wasn't until that happened you had all this vinyl chloride leaking into the atmosphere i was like oh no this is terrible and then you look up the stats there's like 1700 train derailments a year on average what how is that possible how am i only hearing about this one well i think to to tie it back into like you know uh us dollar fiat money versus like bitcoin remember that especially in uh an industry like rail right the it's it's a now become like a lower

margin business well a low margin is like three or four maybe five percent returns whatever it is but it's like if you are eroding the purchasing power of that money and you are in a competitive environment you are forced to essentially cut corners right or do fewer things now when it comes when it gets so bad that you are not fixing the rail upon which your entire business resides or depends on like how how do you make that work and the the answer is you can't you can't the infrastructure costs too much money in order to replace and then you're basically just forced to put out 1700 fires a year where it's like oh well you know that that line needs work or uh yeah i note that or maybe bump that up in in terms of like urgency for needed repairs but then now flip

flip the script your money gains purchasing power over time and theoretically these costs go down because competition and technology creates cheaper products cheaper better products so that you can maintain your infrastructure in a uh let's say a higher grade manner over time right as things basically things should be getting better instead of worse right it's not it's like we're we're turning into like death by a thousand cuts instead of like death in a thousand years right things should be getting better things should be working better lasting longer you know up until up until like the 50s that was basically the case yeah and then we had just just weird anomaly of the digital age coming and software driving down uh you have this deflation in the the area of the digital

world where it really confuses people it's like oh my iphone's faster it's cheaper uh i can i can do things like stream over the internet for relatively low costs like things are getting better but it's just this is weird point in time that we've been born in where yes we are reaping benefits of software driving down costs to create things but the physical world still does exist well think about it this way too the the digital world and the digital the software and all of these things that we can use digitally i think is part of like what jeff booth says is that like that that's literally what's kept the lid on all of this on all of these problems we're able to essentially lower our costs elsewhere and use what the digital environment

allows us which is essentially infinite replicability right other than bitcoin oh yeah um but at the same time like that's really the only thing that's kept the lid on basically things just going to super fast like it's it's it's masked so well by the improvements in technology and what we can do with software that people think that it's like okay well maybe this is just normal and uh another good thread about this alan farrington had a thread about basically arguing that like why if inflation is good or bad or why why isn't technology getting expensive better right like you said your iphone is the same price but now it's two times faster or it has all of these extra gizmos and gadgets you're streaming from your iphone right now aren't you exactly so

i'm streaming from my iphone which is a superior technology to the camera in my in my laptop but they just updated the software so that i can do it literally without plugging anything into my phone into my camera or excuse me plugging my phone camera into my laptop so it's like well that was a step function change you know my hair looks so much better can't you see marty but it's like ah you know how do you if it was really the case that falling prices were going to stop consumption why wouldn't it stop the just absolute gangbusters improvements in technology and the answer is it doesn't because the underlying paradigm is incorrect so yeah that's why we bitcoin freaks we're turning the world around we have to turn it around we have to we're gonna win because we have

to win what's the alternative all this uh all this cool technology is going to be for not in like 20 30 years if you literally don't have the physical infrastructure to keep all the servers and things running like going back to the train like the way like the train example obviously very topical but like it's so clear like i'm sure you saw that video the one train in michigan or something it was on that rail that was just like holy shit i must disclose that i am a rail fan freaks so like you know i like my trains i'm not gonna lie but yeah seeing that that one video is emblematic of kind of like what i described like how much does it cost to fix that rail and replace it so that they don't have to do that and it's it i'll tell you how it works it's a

it is a math equation for how much the line is used how much is transported transported on it from one place to another and how much is it going to cost to repair it so what's the speed difference between if it was a perfect rail versus that fucking wobbly god-awful video and the answer is it doesn't need to be repaired yeah and just like the way the monetary system is set up right now it in the long run if something doesn't change if we don't adopt a bitcoin standard all these rails are going to completely collapse because if inflation keeps going up there there's not a cost where it makes sense to repair the rails not well not even that it doesn't make sense to it won't make sense to to pay to use the rail for what they would have to charge you just

to just to be able to afford to replace it so you know who's going to move who's going to move dvd players from uh jeez dvd players nobody's moving dvd players anymore yeah no okay so who's moving iphones from california to new york on a busted rail you know or if you want to replace the rail is going to cost you 10 times more sorry don't think you're getting an iphone yeah i mean then you go even lower down the societal stack like energy this is a problem that's been very front and center over the last few years like biden and crew calling the wheel and gas industry greedy profiteers but they're literally trying to eke every molecule they can out of the ground there's not enough drilling teams in the country to provide more supply to the market like you have

a breakdown there too and then rates are going up so the cost of capital is more expensive and you get into this doom loop that we're describing right now like you can't even begin to approach starting a new project because it's prohibitively expensive to to the interest rate environment yeah absolutely i mean i can i guess you know to merge both of uh you know your topic and kind of i'm talking about like california is a perfect example of that like they're they're net energy importers so they're in outside of phoenix there's a palverdi uh nuclear plant that uh powers a bunch of this state but like everything literally any spare capacity that exists it goes straight to california like there is there is no capacity for anything else and i've made those phone calls and

i've asked you know it's like hey you got a gigawatt or so available maybe i can strap some you know undisclosed uh computers to it but the answer is no like it's just it all goes california so california imports all of this energy and then they just backhand the crap out of anybody who wants to participate in the energy environment where it's just like you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't but if you're already in there like you good luck in now so yeah well california is going to be a great case study and just a collapse of an economy because what in california like separate from the united states would be like a top five economy on the planet and they have insane taxes insane energy policy

insane woke policy that's eking in and it's driving people out the richest people that provide most revenue to their tax base i think when do they have like a decline in population of a half a million people over the last two years oh yeah yeah i mean easy i wouldn't be surprised if it was half a million and well that'd be a lot so yeah probably half a million in two years i know that arizona i think has picked up 150 or 160 000 people in the last two years over half of them from california so it's just the people the the march and i describe it this way when it comes to putting up with bullshit from wherever you live it is like the marginal the marginal person moves right so it's like that that one more ordinance or rule where it's just

like i have had it right they're the first ones to go it's not even that they want to go or that they're that they're thinking that like wow in five years this place is going to be insane it's like okay no that was that like the one thing new that happened that was it i'm moving and like it you know i run into these people all the time especially as they move to to arizona and some of the areas that i like walk around you know i just talk to neighbors it's whatever and um you talk to your neighbors you freak i mean technically they're not even my neighbors because i'm walking around neighborhoods that i don't live you got you gotta these are neighborhoods where i would like to live so you talk to those people so that they you know they

know who you are but um yeah it's just i've got uh family friends that are very high-end builders and they service california clients and they're just like yeah no i just i got tired of it it was just like oh one thing i just got tired of it so it wasn't like the the entire existence of everything that california you know negatively does so to speak that was like you put up with that and they're like yeah that's pretty much it you know just one thing i just kind of got tired of it now i took all my money and i paid for too much paid too much for a lot or a house in arizona and sorry if you can't afford it anymore yeah well that brings up the other point too like with this population decline in california like who has the ability to move in the first place it's usually

people who are more well off and supplying more tax revenue to your state yeah absolutely if you If you want to see a jaw dropper, you got to look at the historical prices of U-Haul trailers from either L.A. to Phoenix or L.A. to Texas and then like Northern California to Idaho, Montana, all these things. The cost to take a trailer out of California and then the cost for that trailer to go back or even like the truck. it's it's almost uh i think when it got really crazy it was 10 times more expensive to take the trailer or the truck out of california than it was to take it back that's how that's how much in demand you know moving trucks were and that's there is a u-haul index for that so it shows you i think i'm pretty sure u-haul is the one that publishes it i mean i don't know why they would but they publish the the rates about where you know people are moving

so that's the the voting with their feet and it's just like there ain't a whole lot of people going to california at one point they were paying people to drive stuff back to california so they could use it as inventory for people to leave california so just i mean that's just nuts but yeah then you have the big worry of people in the states where the californians are fleeing to like are they they're going to turn this into california and that's yeah well these uh they they try that they try that here and um i would like to say that we've been reasonably successful and reminding people that they're no longer in fucking california so um is it working out and ask me in 10 years we'll find out yeah we will i mean i mean i'm i didn't flee california

I flew to New York, fleed, the New York area, came down here to Texas. I like to think I left because I didn't like it there. I learned my lesson and will not try to bring the same policies to Texas. I see Texas as a safe haven from that madness. And I imagine not everybody, but a good percentage of the people who are fleeing these places have had the same mindset. that yeah uh uh uh what's the name um to be um why am i forgetting babylon b they have those videos about californians moving to texas or whatever have you seen those before yeah they

have like the guns when they open the door like yeah yes and they all wear masks that's pretty funny but i mean on the bonus side people that are selecting you know where they're moving to are more likely to, I guess, espouse similar views to where their destination is, unless they're forcing because of economics. So like a lot of people move to West Phoenix because it's a closer drive, right? They're used to driving an hour and a half to work. So if they move to Phoenix where they got to drive an hour, 45 minutes to work and the home costs half as much, like it's it's a double it's a double win for them so there is lots of that that happens here but it's just because california becomes so expensive um so the economic moves or movers

are much less likely to at least in my experience and from the data that i've read here much less likely to espouse abuse of the places that they're moving to versus like well i'm just here because i have to be here yeah damn it now i'm gonna bring all of these things with me because i want to recreate the environment that i actually enjoyed it's like sorry dude there's no beach here so you're gonna have to you're gonna have to figure that out yeah god very interesting time to be alive hell yeah marty we're fixing everything but i know it's you know i don't want it to sound can we fix it faster than it's falling apart that's the question well how fast can you develop lightning apps how fast can people build on top of bitcoin that's

the real question. Um, so, you know, I'm, you know, we've, I've, I swear I have to be like the, the boy who cried wolf talking about Bitcoin mortgages, but it's like, you know, there, there are options for, there are options to do things differently. It's just more difficult to do in this environment. So, you know, people are, are building all sorts of tools, um, that can be used and i think and i always tell people they always argue with me like well why on earth do we need that here it's like well technically we don't right now but like guess what the number one uses the number one the places for the number one usages of bitcoin are not here but look where look where that's happening nigeria vietnam all these places where they have an option

and they are exercising it right there there's the the golden ray of sunshine through the clouds so tools are being built for people that are not as you know worse off than we are but are in a situation where they need the tools and the tools are working so you know uh parker lewis has an essay um it's not like bitcoin is for everyone but the idea is that if you do the logic where bitcoin works for criminals it'll work for everybody else but if it doesn't work for criminals it won't work for anybody right so if you're if you're in a situation where um your local currency is shit but bitcoin works then it's going to work if your currency is good right all of these underlying um apps and protocols that people are developing you know

it's it's if it works for them it'll work for you you may not be in the same situation but if the situation were to be applied to you you have an option and for what like the history of man there's always been very few options or the the chance to take that option or take accessibility to the option has not ever been what it is with bitcoin right now correct you know come get my note motherfucker so and i just like i just i just think that that's so cool like seeing all these projects and stuff around like you you had posted the other day about script and i'm in the process of basically moving away from substack to ghost and doing like the value for value thing because it's like well substack is going to use ghost underlying you know technology anyways like

what the fuck am i doing i'll go somewhere else where i can you know somebody can send me 25 sats or whatever for reading one of my essays like how cool is that that's pretty cool i think it's pretty cool i think it's going to catch on and yeah like going back to your point like if it works for people in emerging markets and you don't think you need it here but it will work for you anyway like that's powerful but also with that being said you may not think you need it here but everything we've discussed today with inflation being out of control uh the infrastructure are deteriorating before our eyes and this fiat structure really decaying the quality of life in the united states despite all the deflation that's going on in the tech sector like you may not

realize it but you do need it uh you are going to need bitcoin yes the u.s dollar is a reserve currency of the world right now it is the strongest fiat currency in the world right now but again it's the cleanest turd on the pile of shit and as we've explained throughout the last hour and a half like it doesn't seem like there's any easy outs like the options that jerome powell and the fed and the treasury have before them are very few uh and most of them or all of them essentially wind up with you being more debased than you are now yeah i mean like you know and on the essay was bitcoin is not for criminals um but again and kind of like what parker says it's the same thing like you can only you need a certain quantity of dollars for the existing system to function

but in order for the existing system to function you have to continuously expand the quantity of credit provided therefore you have to continually expand the quantity of money that you need in order for it to work right so you you're in this position where it's like it's like a top you know You know, you spin the top and then if it gets a little wobbly, you have to go and you have to spin it again. And hopefully you don't just knock it over. But it's like they're waiting to see how wobbly the top is, even though they're looking essentially in the past and it doesn't reflect what the reality is. So, you know, these things historically do not do not turn out well for anybody. so you need to seriously think about what's happening where we may be in that you know

acknowledge that there is an option to to literally just step outside of the sandbox pick a new one play a different game choose bitcoin freaks you can exit the system exit the madness that's the other thing too for westerners like i don't need it like again you do need it right now you don't need it right now i think you do need it right now i think you may not realize it but well between between me and you but like the argument's like well yeah you know they're not they're not thinking along a timeline they're like well yeah i mean they're very high time preference like right now yeah of course i don't need it like this is silly my currency is just fine it's like well yeah but on a long enough timeline even like the last three years what

about that so sorry i didn't mean to interrupt no it's okay people are going to need it that's i think what i wanted to add there is like since it's open since it's got these new layers coming to it like you can build like going back to like the utility that the tech boom and software particularly has provided us like that's going to be playing out again on top of bitcoin it's like if you want to build a company if you want to build utility provide something productive to the world like bitcoin is somewhat of a tabula rasa right now you can go build on yeah and i think that like uh like i don't really like i mean i have an austere account but like i kind of generally understand what it is as far as

a messaging relay it's like okay well here's a protocol where it's like this is it is it built on top of bitcoin bitcoin's integrated into it right through lightning and all of the use like zaps and all this other stuff it's like okay well what do we find here like how's this concept of developing open protocols with the monetary layer literally baked into it like are we starting to are we have we turned the corner where now things are built basically where like integrating bitcoin is like a uh like in it uh well right a primitive or like an imperative right so now like you can you can relay information with you know posting on on noster and like you can receive somebody else's bitcoin for that like the value that you would now have

provided in a manner that can't be stopped somebody paid for that yes like what what are the second third order effects of that or like what what can be done what can be done by running a relay for feet right you know so long as you don't violate the golden rule that you know all all information across the node is is valid right you know if you're not censoring anything like what i just i just think this i just i'm like i'm not technical i couldn't program my way out of a paper bag but like i just think that is the coolest the coolest stuff is being done you know on bitcoin and apps in order to help people around the world or to give them a chance to communicate freely and openly the the

free transmission of information ideas and thoughts you know i just think that's the coolest thing it's take it's taking the bitcoin night fight from twitter to a place where it literally can't be censored yeah so i just think that's that just blows me away yeah it's happening nostrils happening podcasting podcasting 2.0 freaks will be streaming us that's i'll leak some scrib outfit too dj um is working on a tool that will allow you to syndicate your bitcoin urbanism newsletter not only to ghost you post it on ghost it gets auto-syndicated to clients on nostre that are reading content in that way and it will include the paywall where like after a paragraph or two if you want to paywall it to read more right on masters will zap the

paywall and you'll the client will release the content to the end user so won't only live on ghost you'll be able to syndicate it to any Noster client that's presenting the the content in that way right and thinking think about think about like the the reach and with such like a low like a low barrier I guess like a low barrier to value right so you you want to consume information that you find valuable but the barrier is like a set right so it's super easy super easy to pay the sat and move on but it's like you know what i was thinking about like with scrib and like how it applies to like newsletters you know that kind of reminds me of like how medium used to

show like the most highlighted sections of somebody's essay or like whatever it is well think about like somebody paying you know paying you to do that say like well this is what i really liked about your your articles this paragraph or this this idea like and here's 10 sats for it Like, and then like, I'm gonna, as part of that, I'm gonna tweet it out to everybody because I think they'll also, or I'll send it on Oster rather, put it on a relay, send it to the whole world

because I think that the world values this or I think that they will. I just, it just blows me away. The idea that with internet native money, with Lightning on top of that, That the, the amount of value that can be provided, provided to others that they, you know, would be willing to send you a set or something for it. I mean, just, just the, I, just the ability to do that.

And the fact that somebody would do that and that they are doing that. Goodness gracious. Yeah. It's making me bullish. We were a bit pessimistic in the beginning of this episode and for most of it, but now, now we're turning the bull, the bull horns on. i i i'm a big fan of you have in order to understand where you want to go you got to know where you are and like you know shit's fucked up reese i won't i won't put any sugar

on it for you but it's like we gotta we gotta realize where we are right now because if you don't know where you are you don't know how to get out of where you're at and you don't know how to get or you don't even know where you're going so um yeah with with all of these tools everything changes there's we're eliminating you know for my part we're eliminating a central authority's ability to dictate land use and the only reason they can do that is because credit is centralized and they can play all sorts of games in order to make sure that you pay your fee right or that they have the power in order to do that but it's like you know the future is very bright the future is very bright um you know i think for people talking about citadels and

building the places that they want to have and be a part of like that's that's that's cool that's that's where we're heading i agree i agree the uh the present may see bit seem a bit uh gloomy but the future is very bright we have to acknowledge where we are to be even begin to think about where we're going absolutely so i think i mean i don't think we could say it anymore perfectly sometimes brother money just nail it and you'll leave it on a high note where can uh where can we send the freaks to learn more about bitcoin urbanism any of these ideas you're talking about today that you plan on expanding on in the future?

All right, Freaks. So I'm on Twitter at KTLANNAN and at Bitcoin Urbanism as well. I have a substack, bitcoinurbanism.substack.com, which will be transitioned to Ghost and it'll just be bitcoinurbanism.com. And I must note,

because around here we accept 1,000% responsibility, that in BlockFi going bankrupt, I used their, their Bitcoin rewards credit card and my survey monkey account expired and they deleted all my data. So if you guys remember taking a survey about Bitcoin mortgages, um, they deleted all that. Thank you. It's my fault. Yeah. So I had, I had hundreds of responses and they busted me down to a free account. So now I only have 40 And I was using that information to search for essentially financiers who would buy a package of essentially MBS. So like think about like a mortgage-backed security, but except with a Bitcoin as part of your collateral.

So some of the freaks know I'm working on a Bitcoin mortgage product with another guy. And it's slow going because as soon as you say Bitcoin, people usually reach to hang up the phone. so please take the survey if you have taken it once please go back and take it again because your information got deleted but if any of you are mbs guys or no mbs guys or want to raise money for a pool of funds and aren't afraid of bitcoin please reach out to me dm me whatever that would make the process and serving bitcoiners and giving them mortgages much easier and i can finally do something that i've been telling people i've been trying to do for two years so i'm not i'm not that the boy who cried bitcoin mortgage and never never did it so

but otherwise those are the places you can find me um i try i try i need to to uh pilgrimage out to austin for a bit devs um trying to do that once a year but it's time yeah i need to do that But, you know, otherwise, I'm on Noster. I don't even know. Maybe I'll send you my pub key, I guess. I don't even know, like, how do you share this stuff? We'll share your pub key in the show notes. Sure.

Share the pub key in the show notes. I'll send you some links. And then, yeah, Freaks, I hope you got value out of this. And one of my favorite things, I will say, from the last appearance was all the tradesmen who reached out and kind of were like, yeah, I listened to this podcast with you and Marty. but you're talking about this and i see this all the time it's like that that stuff really keeps me going because uh you know i'm not i'm not one of those developers that kind of hates on you know all the different people showing up to my job everybody has a very very important and valuable aspect of creating the built environment if you're in it and uh you know

being in the trade is not you know not something to be ashamed of so all the haters dm me i will i will pump you up because i think that's cool and um otherwise marty thank you for having me it is an absolute blast to be here and talk to people or i guess you particularly who uh are on the same wavelength because all of the people out here that are in real estate literally think i am batshit crazy so happy to be here i don't think you're batshit crazy kelly i think i know you don't barney that's you're like one of my favorite drinking buddies so like let's uh we're gonna we're gonna end this on a high high fun note i'm uh i'm definitely looking forward to making another pilgrimage come out definitely owe you a drink and uh howdy to all the other people in the

unchained office today in the bitcoin commons building all the cool stuff for the world justin moon i was broken to say hello to you but i told him oh we did uh you know what every time i talk to him he keeps telling me he's gonna grow a mullet and he hasn't done it yet so he has it it's a full-blown oh he does yes oh man it's there i'm gonna i'm gonna have to dm him get a photo otherwise we might have to have a competition that was always the the end game for the long hair was i was gonna do a mullet and do my best uh uh chad linebacker in high school look but uh i may i may be past my prime so it may just stick with the long locks so but otherwise marty i'll i'll stop talking thank you again for having me absolute blast to be on tftc kelly the pleasure

was all mine we have to make this we can't have two years between recordings next time we'll have to do this more often maybe twice a year okay well i'm gonna i'm gonna keep i got like i said i got three or four essays i'm i'm pulling myself out of the essay rut and uh if i do if i do a good essay or i have a funny joke about being woke or whatever that crap is that people believe and being wrong then more than happy to come back go sign up for the sub stack go take the survey monkey

what is it survey go to bitcoin urbanism.substack.com I pinned it to my twitter profile so it's there top tweet alright go do all that freaks the future

is bright understand where we are right now though peace and love Take care.