TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #425: Fiat Crisis with Balaji Srinivasan

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

Marty sits down with Balaji Srinivasan for the longest episode of TFTC yet, going in depth on the nature of the incoming fiat crisis. Balaji on Twitter: https://twitter.com/balajis 6:13 - How does the debt ceiling contribute to the fiat crisis? 9:48 - Reality check 21:38 - History is running in reverse 25:09 - The unipolar moment is over 38:05 - America is 3 tribes 44:42 - Democracy has 4 definitions 55:33 - India adopting pragmatic democracy 59:08 - China won’t go away 1:07:03 - USSA 1:36:11 - How America gets its strength back 1:43:16 - Dollar nationalists, social media politics 1:53:20 - It’s not one nation, it’s two parties with verbal footsoldiers 2:07:15 - The Gray tribe 2:35:47 - Blue losing media control 2:39:46 - Recap, Blue’s remaining power 2:45:48 - The tribal filter on the banking situation 3:01:36 - The declining US empire 3:13:13 - Blue America’s infrastructure highlights 3:16:40 - Exiting through Bitcoin 3:20:18 - We’ve lost our moon shoes 3:22:24 - The writing’s on the wall and states have incentive to exit early 3:42:53 - People robbed by cantillon cities are likely to get mad 3:48:13 - Fed now is a CBDC no matter what they say 4:05:15 - Civil unrest precursors 4:08:24 - Hiding insolvency 4:11:13 - History mirroring 4:17:04 - Reflecting on a long show, doling white pills Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce the longest rip we've ever recorded logan what's the final i've been mic jacked oh you were mic jacked the meat mafia guy stole his mic so he can't talk into it how long was it four hours five hours over four i think over four four hours with bellagio trin vonson it was uh hell of a rep i didn't talk that much last two episodes i didn't talk that much but i feel like bellagio just went into a flow state for five hours really deep episode about the fiat crisis the cultural problems that we have here in the united states we live in a

a two we don't really live in a country we live in a two-party state how do you describe it yeah it's just it's just two tribes fascinating rip i think this is going to be one of the most memorable it was brought to you by our good friends at river if you're trying to get away from the fiat crisis which after this episode if you're not trying to i don't know what's going on with you uh you're going to want to go to river.com slash tftc set up an account and get on board and start buying bitcoin if you dca using river you don't pay any fees they have river mining so if you're looking to get into mining you want to diversify sats flows outside of just purely buying bitcoin and you want to mine bitcoin river mining makes that

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Andy, right outside this door. You're going to need to take sovereignty over your healthcare too, freaks. The health insurance industry is probably in the eyes of the fiat crisis that we have coming on here. CrowdHealth is not health insurance. Health insurance is notoriously expensive, opaque, and impersonal. CrowdHealth is trying to change that. It's cheaper.

uh, it's very transparent and, uh, it's personal. You get a personal healthcare advocate. You pay a monthly fee builds up in an account. If you ever have a medical expense, uh, you tell crowd health, Hey, I'm going to the doctor. I said, cool. Connect us with them. Uh, you get the bill crowd. I'll takes that negotiates the price down with the doctor, gets you a lower price. And you pay the first $500 of that bill and the rest gets crowd funded by the crowd health community. It's a healthier community. Uh, they're going to be lowering monthly payments because the community is so healthy, they don't have as many healthcare expenses

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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 You probably should be. Balaji, welcome to the show. Marty, good to be here. I'm very excited for this conversation. I mean, we've been having a few sidebar conversations on the state of the world, the fiat crisis, and the future, what's going to happen here in the United States and globally.

So let's just jump into it. The fiat crisis, I mean, big in the news right now. We just had the debt ceiling raised yet again. Not surprising. People, particularly the Republicans, will LARP like they're going to hold the line. But the ceiling always inevitably gets raised. Excuse me. And so it looks like we've got more trillions to be added to the national debt here.

What does the debt ceiling, how does that contribute to the fiat crisis that we find ourselves in right now? Yeah, so the debt ceiling issue itself is just one of like 30 things. you know, at least at the time of this pod, there's like some procedural vote. The actual deal hasn't gone through. Who knows what will happen? But just to engage that specifically for a second, they're about to issue something like six months worth of treasuries to try to refill the Treasury general account and try to basically make up for lost time. And that is going to flood the market with treasuries. And this guy, William Middlecoop, observed that the last time that happened, where there

was a kind of last minute debt ceiling, and then they issued a bunch of treasuries in 2019, it caused this whole reverse repo crisis. And the Fed actually had to start printing in September 2019, even before all the COVID stuff. So it's quite possible that the debt ceiling thing, you know, the deal is actually just the beginning of a series of dominoes, you know, if anything like 2019 happens. So that's A. But B is really the thing about this year's debate, which was good, is that it actually focused much more attention on the genuine long term problems facing the USA. It felt a little different than in previous years. I'm not sure if you had the same feeling where, you know, that it wasn't like this procedural kind of drama over previous years where it's just a political thing.

This did feel like something where folks were engaged on both sides, at least among the Twitteria, the commentariat. And maybe that's the difference, is in previous times, with even 2011, you didn't have social media to the same extent. So you didn't really have authentic commentary. You just had the melodrama horse race of the mainstream media. But I think just keeping the debt ceiling aside for itself, the national debt has gone to something like $30 trillion. Have you seen that graph that EX John has made where it's like just kind of going exponential? Yeah, just the red. It's like exponential to the downside.

Maybe we can bring that. Actually, let me see if I can project that or we can find it in the show notes. Let's see here. Here we go. Can you project that? Send it. If you send me a link on Signal, I can send it to Logan. We can get it out.

Oh, yeah. Here, actually, I can also just – can I share the screen? You should be able to. Okay. Let's do that. Boom. Can you see that? Yep.

All right. So, you know, some people say, oh, it's not a fair graph, you know, et cetera. But basically, this is the accumulated debt over many different presidents. this is the revenue and this is the deficit. And that's like the one, a few set of years where there was like a surplus, right? And this is due to bond issuance and also deficit spending, where the deficit is greater than revenues. But essentially what you're seeing is people talk about debt to GDP ratio, but I think debt to revenue ratio is actually sort of more realistic. Like if you have $500,000 in debt and you have $100,000 in annual income, you're basically never

going to pay off that debt. You know, like if it's five total years of you doing nothing other than paying debt, obviously you have to live. So, I mean, even 10% of your income going to debt is quite a lot, but 100% going to debt is just too much, right? And paradoxically, what's happened is as this has gone more and more, whether it's exponential or quadratic, whatever the actual form of the curve is, but it's going quite crazy towards the end here. As this has gone crazier, You know what people have concluded? They operate as if deficits don't matter because it's the longer and longer the time since they've been chin checked by reality, the more they think that it doesn't matter. I mean, this is the MMT thesis, right?

That is just money we owe ourselves. Well, it's even more than MMT. It's basically something where even if you weren't an MMT-er and you didn't think you could print infinitely, you just think, well, we've done it and nothing happened, so let's do it some more. We did some more, nothing happened, so let's do it some more, right? And so this is actually – Dalio makes this point that the further away you get from a crushing global sovereign debt crisis and deleveraging, paradoxically, the closer you get to the next one because people become incautious. Right. They just assume, you know, you can literally never, you know, have a problem here. Right. So this is one graph. OK. The second graph that I sometimes show people, if I'm showing people, you know, this one is something where it's like people are just totally unrealistic in some ways, I think. and um and sometimes these graphs are like helpful to uh just kind of anchor but like the other day

um this one got like a few million views or whatever but it's basically uh hold on here i'll show you a few a few more just for like a reality check just to anchor people you know what i mean um okay so if that if that's a graph of u.s debt okay here's a graph of chinese um steel production which looks like the total opposite graph okay so here back in you know people will will always give me and probably you these historical metaphors and i'll say oh biology oh marty you know you underestimate us we won the world wars and you know we beat the Japanese. And Churchill always said that we do the right thing after doing everything else.

And you underestimate our capability to reinvent ourselves. And, you know, the 70s were bad, but we got past that, blah, blah. And all of those historical analogies just don't actually reckon with, you know, you can only do a historical analogy if there's time series similarity. Right. The numbers constrain the letters, you know. And so here, if you look at the numbers, um the u.s was like you know 70 and actually like 110 something megatons of steel in like 1968 or something like that right and china's like 14 megatons of steel that thin little red thing tiny tiny thing now today you know 50 ish years later the u.s is down like 30 40 it's like 72 megatons of steel and china is a billion megatons of steel more than the entire rest of the world

combined okay yeah and that's it's like we were discussing this too is like you had the peter the hands of the world will like point to china and be like china's gonna fail but i think a good way to approach this is just like to take the names off the chart and just look at the chart and say all right on this chart who do you think is going to succeed massively whether it be steel production or increased energy production in places like china and india if you were to take the names off the chart and just look at it you'd be like oh these countries are are going to succeed that's right and the thing is look if you think about this as like an executive at a company OK, there's a lot of people who will try to frame it as, oh, my God, you're talking bad about America.

That means you must hate America. Well, you know what that's like saying is like, oh, let me show you one more chart and then I'll come back to this point. Here's one more chart. This got a lot of views. And this shouldn't have been a surprise, honestly, to anybody. But this this chart was like a huge surprise to people. And it should be like, you know, just table stakes. So this is the one where it's like, you know, trade with the world, right? In the year 2000, can you see the screen there? Yep. In the year 2000, blue are the countries that trade more with the USA, and orange are the countries that trade more with China.

So China had like some African countries and Central Asian or whatever. 20 years later, and this is actually like three or four years ago, basically, everybody trades more with China than the U.S. pretty much, right? Right. And, you know, I think there's like one country that flipped the other way, like Estonia or something like that. OK, but and I love Estonia. It's a great country. But I think that's the only one on this graph that like flipped the other way. So for the most part, I mean, that's like arms or I don't know what it is. Point is, though, that broadly speaking, if you're trying to get people, if you're forcing people to decouple and you just look at this graph and you're saying the U.S.

is trying to force you to choose between the U.S. and China, and the U.S. is forcing the issue, which countries don't want the issue to be forced, who are they going to pick? They're going to pick China because China sells them their chairs and their screws, right? Like a lot of people, you know, look, I love high tech, okay? I love high tech. I've devoted my life to high tech. But you know what? China can crush you on low tech. They'll screw you on the screws. They will literally just deny you screws. You know what I mean? And, and their scale production is just bananas. And so, you know, the thing is, as, as I was just mentioning, and you and I were just talking about with Zion is like, I have no beef with Zion, by the way. Like, I think

he's like a well-meaning guy. Nothing's zero, nothing personal. I just want to say that because sometimes people are like, Oh my God, you're trashing him. Not at all. Um, but I do think in 2008, for example, remember when the mortgages were rated AAA? Was it beneficial to either the lender or the borrower to delude the borrower into thinking that they were AAA mortgages, like that these people actually had good credit? Go ahead. It was bad for both, right? It's bad for both because the borrower is stuck with a loan they can't pay, and the lender is stuck with a loan that's going to default. And both of them are essentially, it's just a trade

that doesn't make sense for either side and cause massive damage to everybody else, all third parties, everybody who got a job on that basis of the substance of that economic transaction, they're all wrecked. And this is the same issue. It's like, you know, do you know what happened in 2011 with the S&P and their downgrade of U.S. debt? Just like the mortgage. Downgrade of what, like A? Well, that's the thing. Just like mortgages were faked AAA, the U.S. government debt was fake AAA. And the S&P downgraded in the last debt ceiling debacle in 2011 to, I think, like AA or something like that.

It's still AA. Do you know what the U.S. government did to S&P? They ordered a federal investigation, and their president had to step down, and Obama tongue-lashed them, right? And that's the thing is, like you've heard the saying, too big to fail, right? the entire u.s establishment it's all too fake to tell all this all the financial stats have been faked for the last 15 years okay it's not just triple a mortgages see the reason is that double a rating is like the observed unobservable because if those agencies were free to actually give freely throwing ratings like they do for like

El Salvador. That's actually a market-determined rating. If the agencies could actually give freely floating ratings to the USA, they would have downgraded its debt. But they can't because there's a gun to their head. And this is true not just for mortgages, not just for U.S. sovereign debt. It's true for the assets that the Fed bought back at 100 cents on the dollar, whether it was mortgage-backed securities that they were purchasing after the financial crisis. It's true for the stocks that they're propping up with the exchange stabilization fund. It's true for, you know, some people have thought that the VIX itself, that the Fed is, you know, putting puts and calls on it to try to keep it in range so that it can't actually bounce up too much.

And, you know, it's like Greenspan's plunge protection team in like the late 90s, you know, where like, OK, just like what it sounds like, they would just buy assets and prop it up. And on and on and on it goes where inflation is transitory. They fake that until they couldn't fake that. Crime is down in San Francisco. Oh, because crime reporting is down. Obviously, your window is smashed, your car is stolen, nothing happens. In the early days of COVID, they said that there were no – now, I know this will be a controversial case among maybe some folks here.

But like February 2020, people were saying there were no COVID cases in the U.S. And part of the reason was the FDA was blocking tests. It was literally like people had to do civil disobedience to actually run the tests to find out that COVID was actually present in the U.S. People are saying it wasn't. And and there's so many things like this. I mean, another example is just, you know, accrual accounting versus cash accounting. If you're familiar with the distinction. Yeah. The government, you know, or many governments exempt themselves, state governments, federal exempt themselves from accrual accounting. They don't actually take into account the current – the obligations they have taken on in the form of pensions and so on. If they did, they'd be obviously massively and totally bankrupt.

By the way, if you're a public company, you have to do accrual accounting. So it's forced on you, right? That's market accountability, but the state exempts itself, right? So like the totality of this, it's like at the end of the USSR, all the factory stats were fake. at the end of the usa all the financial stats are fake like the whole thing you know like this without the printer um you know the exorbitant privilege right uh check your exorbitant privilege when that thing goes down you know what happened to the soviet union when it went down all of these factories that were uh like selling cars you know what happened those

cars are actually worth more if they're melted down as like raw metal okay like the lada's lada i think it's like the soviet car i'm not sure if that's the exact brand but like the soviet factories because they weren't in a competitive marketplace were literally adding no value negative value okay to the cars they were making and the entire soviet system had been distorted for so long that everybody was trained on the wrong signals and that is basically where we are in the ussa and it's predominantly with financial products, right? Yes, it's with financial products. I mean, it's interesting because this is part of a, should I riff on this for a second? I think there's an interesting digression

here. Should I talk about this for a second? Definitely. Okay. So one of my macro theses is that history is running in reverse. And so like 1950 is like peak centralization and you have one telephone company, AT&T, and you have two superpowers, the US and USSR, and you have three TV stations, ABC, CBS, NBC. And if you go forward and backward in time, power starts decentralizing. So you go backwards in time, 1890, you have the American frontier closes, but forward in time, the internet frontier opens. You go backwards in time, you have Spanish flu, forwards in time, you have COVID-19. Backwards in time, you have the captains of industry, the robber barons. Forwards in time, you have the tech billionaires, right? And I think the reason for this, there's

like many, many more examples, a few more. Backwards in time, you have Russia and China are in a partnership, but the Soviet Union is a senior partner. Forwards in time, you have Russia and China in a partnership, but China is a senior partner, right? You know, go backwards in time, you have um you know the uk is is running india now india is arguably the senior partner in the india uk relationship just like the china russia flip right and and it goes down to like really granular levels like you know 70 years ago you had um you know british origin guys supervising the partition of india now you have an indian origin guy in the uk and a pakistani origin guy in Scotland debating the partition of the UK. And by the way, I'm not triumphalist about that

or anything like that. I think both those would be bad in different ways. I'm just saying it's like this insane thing where many of the same hinge points in history are coming again, but with the opposite outcome. One more example. In the 1930s, the New York Times sided with Stalinist Russia against Ukraine. In the early 2020s, the New York Times has sided with Ukraine against nationalist russia okay and in in the 1930s the new york times tried to essentially and did successfully suppress the news walter durante managed to choke out ukraine and they assisted russia in choking out ukraine um this time they tried to work with ukraine to sanction russia but it didn't work okay so you're seeing it's almost like an origami thing you know have you seen these

complicated origami things you fold them up one way and you fold them back the other way right I'm not wise enough to understand the fullness of what I just talked about. There's like 50 more examples like this. It's actually bananas, you know? I mean, the specificity of them is pretty remarkable, you know? But what I think the macro of it is, is that going into 1950, we've had several hundred years of centralizing technology. You've had mass media and mass production and, you know, the factory.

And this, you know, going all the way through American history up till about 1950, from Washington to Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Roosevelt, and of course, Teddy Roosevelt as well, you have generally increasing centralization going into roughly 1950. And then with the invention of the transistor, you start going in reverse, gradually. It's not obvious. Some things have more momentum, and they keep centralizing, more federal regulations. But things start now moving in the opposite directions, like the second derivative. So you go to the transistor, you have cable news, you have personal computer, internet, smartphone, cryptocurrency, AI. You start decentralizing. Okay. And so that's like one dynamic. And the second dynamic is

ideological ricochet. So one of the things I have in the Network State book, and this is just, I'm just mentioning the Network State book because it's like a placeholder for some of the concepts here, you know, like longer version, if anybody cares. It's all free. You can look at it, you know. But related to that, all the, you know, in 1991, okay, to first order, the USA was on the capitalist right and the soviet union was on the communist left okay let's let's say 1988 before the you know everything fell apart and that was kind of acknowledged that the economic axis was the primary axis in the world and you had the communist on the left and you had the capitalist on the right okay and russia and china were far left communist and the usa was on the

right capitalist and then you had like western europe kind of clustered with it and then you had like soft socialist you know india and um israel actually was like it had its kibbutzes and whatnot. It was like soft socialist, right? Okay. And Switzerland arguably was in the middle as the neutral party. And now, 30 years later, after a time of sort of ideological ricochet, now, I would argue the farthest left group in the world is the U.S. establishment, as distinct from red America. Let me partition out red America, right? But the U.S. establishment with the progress flag, you know, like Blinken, you know, raising the progress flag on the official twitter account um that's the one that's like the pride flag but with the triangle on it okay yep um

you have so the us establishment is the farthest left group in the world and uh the um can you see me you just kind of blanked out for a second okay um your connection let's see uh okay so your internet you you want to maybe connect internet or something like that Yeah, just FY. Okay. So the East Establishment is like the farthest left group in the world. And the Chinese, quote, communists are actually like, in a sense, the farthest right group in the world. And except now the axis is not economics, but it's culture. Because the wokes are culturally left, and the Chinese are culturally right. And this is a caricature, but I think to first heard it's true. The woke ideology is, you know, white people are the worst.

And the Chinese ideology is Han Chinese people are the best, where what's in the middle is Bitcoin and the Internet, which basically is everybody is treated equally according to the rules of the Internet. And it's neither negative nor positive discrimination on the basis of unchangeable characteristics. Right. And I think of that as actually the general genuine successor of like the the constitutional order or what have you. But that flip where the U.S. went from the capitalist right to the woke left and the Chinese and Russians went from the communist left to the nationalist right is like this crucial thing to decode the world that most people don't even understand has happened. Right. Once you can see that. Go ahead. I was going to say it's just been like death by a thousand cuts slowly but surely. Over the course of decades. That's right.

It's gradual, you know, but I think now at this point it's undeniable. And now actually much of the rest of the world has flipped, where now India and the Visegrad countries, all the Warsaw Pact countries, all the countries that were socialist-ish, you know, they weren't communist, but they were socialist or they were under the Soviet Union, you know. Those countries are now like center-right. They're not like all the way nationalist-right, like, you know, chest-thumping, you know, like the Russian Z and so on are. but they're center-right. And then conversely, the Western European countries are arguably center-left, which means they're actually to the cultural right of the USA. If you think about it, you know, the New York Times keeps denouncing Macron. They denounce many European leaders for, oh, they're too close to China or, oh, you know, they want to control immigration or something

like that, right? Oh, they're less enthusiastic about some of the cultural transformations. basically woke america is just all the way out here on one pole when it comes to some of this stuff right it's the farthest left culture in the world and um the thing about this is uh you know it's not it's not a complete mirror image obviously there's some countries like north korea or cuba that are like stuck in a time warp or whatever right um but uh but it's it's enough of a mirror image to kind of say okay uh that plus the fact that we're now decentralizing I think we have a lot of the same conflicts, but with opposite outcomes. So, for example, I mentioned that The New York Times is now siding with Ukraine versus Russia, whereas 90 years ago they were siding with Russia to choke out Ukraine.

OK, last time they were successful. Russia defeated Stalinist Russia, defeated Ukraine. This time we'll see if Ukraine defeats Russia. It's looking it's looking like a tie or whatever right now. Who knows what's going to happen? But the initial huge wave versus Russia didn't work. the financial nuking. And now it looks like a grinded out kind of conflict. And Russia isn't going anywhere because it's literally there. And like because the U.S. can bow, it probably will

at some point. But we'll see. Right. Blinken has talked about, you know, having a white flag on this. Charles Kupchan of Foreign Affairs is writing about how they need an exit strategy. And Foreign Affairs itself has admitted the world is now multipolar rather than unipolar. Their experts have. And this woman, Fiona Hill, who's like a national security person who's like big into Russiagate and so on. Glenn Greenwald talked about how she has also essentially admitted that the U.S. has lost much of the world on this Ukraine thing, right? Now, how does that all affect the fiat crisis? Basically, if kind of the ascent into 1950 was the U.S. essentially like winning every single battle and things centralizing, now it's like kind of happening in

reverse. And just the fact that the world is multipolar, that foreign affairs is admitting that, because we kind of knew it was for a while, but the fact that foreign affairs is admitting it, do you know what I'm talking about, by the way? Did you see that, that poll? Here it is. It's, it's phrased in a weird way. Okay. So like, like the poll is not, um, here. is this i think i might have seen it the poll trying to gauge the yeah so here we go willingness of americans to be involved well it's a slightly it's like it's phrased a little weird it's like a double negative the global distribution of power today is closer to being unipolar than it is to being bipolar or multipolar so if you strongly agree

you're saying it's still a unipolar world if you strongly disagree you're saying it's bipolar or multipolar. Okay. Now foreign affairs is like the, you know, the most establishment of establishment kind of outlets. Okay. And when they have overwhelming agreement or rather overwhelming disagreement that the world is unipolar. Okay. It's now, it's now a multipolar world. Now here's what that means. That that's not just like some random ass statement. Okay. that has immediate implications. Like this entire thing, the unipolar moment from like roughly 1991 to 2021, it's like basically about 30 years. It's done. So here's what that means specifically. All these countries around the world, from Turkey to Russia to China to India,

are now setting their own policies and the U.S. can't stop them. okay so the state department in that country can say something but that country can just ignore it and do what it wants which was not true for the last 30 years i'll give some concrete examples even for allies by the way so uh with the arab league they all went and met with assad even though the u.s threatened sanctions for normalizing relations with with syria In Japan, there was a soldier named Reid Alconis who was detained. And even though a U.S. senator was yelling at them online, they still prosecuted that soldier. I'm not saying that's good or bad.

I'm just saying that the country is disobeying the U.S. Brazil went and it housed Iranian warships. Again, the U.S., like some senator yelled at them, nothing happened. OK. Taiwan, when again, whether it was a senator or congressman, I forget, but somebody some some senior muckety muck said, oh, the U.S. should blow up TSMC if if China invades. Do you see this? OK. Yes. And Taiwan said, if the U.S. tries to do that, we'll shoot down the U.S. plane that does it. OK, so those are like, you know, that's Taiwan, that's Japan, that's Syria, that's Brazil. Okay. The establishment is just losing control of events. I mean, there's many more examples. It's China negotiating the peace treaty between Saudi and Iran. Now, all three of them are on the same side with the US on the outside. It is China negotiating the end of the Yemen war. It is, you know, Erdogan winning. You know, who knows, like, what exactly happened that election? You know, Byzantine politics or Byzantine, who the heck knows what happened? All right. I don't know what's going on in a country with 30 percent inflation and he's he's got roaring crowds. Who knows? OK, still.

Well, Blinken through grid teeth was was forced to basically say, well, congratulations to you. OK. And, you know, you have France going to China and shaking hands with Xi and saying he's not so bad. You have Xi convening all of the guys in Central Asia, like who are basically Russia's backyard is now China's backyard. You know, all those Central Asian post-Soviet countries are now like basically in China's camp. Russia itself is trading in yuan. You have Southeast Asia, like all the ASEAN countries, the 10 of them have declared that they're going to de-dollarize. The president of Indonesia said that that's a priority. They want to make sure they have local card networks rather than Visa and MasterCard.

You have the ACU, the Central Asian group of nine countries saying the same thing. We only have one overlapping country. I think this is Myanmar. And you just have you have South Africa saying that, you know, if it was up to them, they would not enforce this international criminal court thing on Putin and that they side with Russia basically in this. And they're saying that to a BBC guy. You have you have Egypt, you know, obviously defying. You basically have country after country after country where it's a global revolt against, you know, Americans want to think of themselves as being independent from the UK, and that's obviously a real thing. All these countries are declaring their independence from America. That does not

mean that they're anti-American. That's a crucial thing. It means that they're just moving on their own axis. They're pro-Brazilian, or they're pro-French, or they're pro-Indian, or they're pro x or y they're pro saudi whatever right um they're pro themselves and they want to basically operate on their own axis and they don't want to do what the state department's been telling them to do and now because so many of them are doing at the same time the establishment doesn't have the power level to force them to all do what the establishment wants that is the impact of multipolarity now that actually has a domestic impact sorry i know i've been going on should i was that was that go ahead no i mean it's it all makes a lot of sense obviously hindsight's 2020

but you consider the first two decades of this century with the war in iraq afghanistan the pullout the financial crisis like i mean the u.s is obviously in a weak weak spot you know the thing is one of the things that's remarkable to me is there's absolutely no discussion of afghanistan and Iraq. There's no discussion of it. It was like, you know, we got into a rebound war six months after the Afghanistan pullout. I think in part because the blob was embarrassed. Yeah. They wanted to sweep it under the rug. Yeah. Or it's like, oh, we can't lose twice or something like that. Right. And like in a real sense, Ukraine was like, you know, a more proper had been wounded. And, you know, of course,

It's more complicated than that, but that's certainly one of the motivations, you know. And the thing about the Ukraine thing, obviously, like, innocent Ukrainians are being killed. I can't endorse this stupid invasion. You know, like, I'm very sympathetic to the Eastern Europeans, the Estonians, and so on, who just got their independence from the Soviet Union and don't want to be forcibly reintegrated. I get all of that. The thing is that the U.S. is about, or the U.S. establishment, I should say, because the U.S. is not a unitary entity anymore.

You know, the U.S. is actually at least three warring tribes. There's Blue America, Red America, and then like the tech guys, which are currently Gray America, but they're really like a global group that is just alighted in America. And the reason I say that is Blue America for the last, I mean, one way of writing the history of the last 10 years is the Blue Tribe has basically been in both decline and simultaneous war with everybody else, right?

For example, Blue Tribe is at war with Trump, obviously, every single day, and Republicans. It's at war with tech and Zuck. I mean, again, headline after headline after headline, attacking tech guys, whatever. It's at war, obviously, with Russia, literally now physically, but digitally for a long time with Putin.

It's at war with China, yelling at China all the time. And you may agree with some of these things, by the way, but I'm just saying they're fighting tech, trump russia china but also to a lesser extent but a real extent israel india brazil france hungary like saudi um i mean iran obviously everybody they're taking on all comers it's like you know like a they're basically and for for a time until about let's say 2021 it actually looked like they were winning okay because they'd inherited so much institutional oomph that they had you know the new york times and they had the fed and they have you know harvard and they

have all these institutions and all this money and they could just go bam bam bam and spend down their trust to accuse this guy of you know like like oh my god zuckerberg is so evil for for what's called cambridge analytica was totally fake russiagate totally fake right um and many of these things that they've accused people of are basically totally fake a lot of the cancellation stuff but ultimately what's happened now is once you see it that way by the way rather than as quote the u.s versus russia and china or just democrat versus republican but you look at as a network and you look at blue tribe just fighting a bunch of other tribes in the same network right some of those tribes obviously have enmity with each other red tribe doesn't like chinese

tribe either. But a big part of what blue tribe tried to do is it tried to keep the other tribes from ganging up on it. For example, at the end of 2016, do you remember when Trump had that meeting of tech CEOs? Right after that, Travis Kalanick got singled out to just get purged and attacked because blue tribe did not want gray tribe and red tribe to gang up on it. so put a wedge between those two just smash make sure that travis is like humiliated for saying something lukewarm about trump or whatever then okay so they want to put a wedge make sure their enemies and by the way when i i i describe this as if it's intentional and it might be intentional at the level of some senior editor somewhere right but a lot of it is emergent network behavior you

know in the same way that you don't tell your white blood cells to go and fight something off Right. The queen colony, the queen of an ant colony doesn't give instructions to every individual. And there's an emergent behavior as well as totally centralized. We understand decentralized networks. So blue tribe, you know, when gray and red were maybe cooperating, boom, they flying wedge in between. They go after Kalanick, purge, purge poor Travis. And then, you know, when there was some hint maybe of Putin making some positive noises towards Trump or whatever, They had this whole fake Russia story so that that, you know, Trump and Russia couldn't couldn't pair up. And, you know, then the you know, there's various other kinds of things like that.

Another example was like tech guys in Saudi. Right. Oh, we're tech guys going to take Saudi money. Oh, now we're going to be so outraged about this one guy, Khashoggi. Do you know how many people the Saudi government like before MBS took power? the Saudi government was a lot nastier. They killed a lot more people, right? MBS is actually relatively, I mean, he has reformed the country. And so, you know, it's actually like, you know, it's similar to is how you hear so much more about Tiananmen than you do about the Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward. Like the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were far, far, far, far worse. They killed millions and millions and millions of people,

Right. But while Tiananmen or, you know, something like that is bad, it's bad. They're not saying it's bad because it killed a lot of people. They're saying it's bad because they did something that the U.S. didn't want them to do. Whereas with the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, that was just China churning in internal chaos. It was not actually going to be a threat to the U.S. Now with this, you know, the Tiananmen thing, that was something where they were, quote, anti-democracy. They weren't flipping over to the U.S. column. They were the only country that didn't really do that in that, like, 89 to 91 kind of era.

Again, that's not to say that, you know, what the Chinese did during Tiananmen was good or anything like that. Of course, it's bad. What I'm saying, though, is basically that the incidents that you hear about are those that are favorable to the U.S. establishment. Another example, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Did you know, Russia in 1993, that Yeltsin shelled his own White House? No. Yeah, exactly. That's an attack on democracy, literally. OK, but you didn't hear about it. That's not that's nowhere near as well known as Tiananmen. I don't know, one ten thousandth of coverage. OK, because the U.S. was backing Yeltsin during that period and they weren't backing Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin in China. Right. So if the U.S. is backing you, when they were backing Saudi, all of those crimes at the – I mean, the 19-9-11 hijackers were Saudi.

Like, all of that got swept under the rug. There was nothing there. Oh, you invaded Iraq and said – once MBS turned against, you know, the U.S. or wasn't fully with them, then anything he does is magnified or what have you, right? Again, this is not to say that one is good or bad. It's just to say that the magnification changes depending on whether it's in the interest of the session. All right. I know I'm digressing, but I've just talked straight. So I expect you to just kind of interrupt or whatever, but why don't you go?

This is the way I like to do it. Just let you run. No, but I completely agree with the selective spotlighting of things that are beneficial to the narrative. And the one thing I could think of when you're going on that monologue was like, this is dangerous for our democracy. Like how there's no like direct orders. It's just like a light nudging of propaganda that gets put into people's minds and then yeah so on this on the whole you know just just to deconstruct that for a second there's several ways that one can you know because this word democracy is um it's like

christianity or communism where it can mean both like x and its opposite okay for example with christianity christianity and i'm not i'm not anti-christian or anything like that i'm sure there's some listeners who are atheists some were religious christians no offense is intended by what I'm about to say. Okay. Christianity at the time of the Romans was like the revolutionary religion that tore down the Roman empire, right? Said, you know, a rich man will sooner go through an eye of needle than, you know, get to heaven. And, you know, like basically it was just a revolutionary thing that was, that was about, you know, the last shall be first and the first shall be last and tore down the Roman empire. And then several hundred years later, Christianity

he served as the basis for, and I know it's not a direct successor, but a spiritual, or at least they styled themselves successor, the Holy Roman Empire. And then it became the basis for Christian kings and it became the basis for order. And it became like exactly the opposite of what it was. It was now an ideology that supported the establishment as opposed to being dedicated to overthrowing it, right? Similarly with communism, communism was a revolutionary ideology that tore down the establishment killed all the landowners and so on but now for example in china don't they call the descendants of senior communist party um revolutionaries princelings okay so just like like the christian king right that revolutionary ideology became a

ruling class ideology like when you win you become the king and now all the same slogans are used to justify a hierarchical rule. And so, you know, one of the most bizarre things is this revolutionary ideology that Karl Marx, you know, dreamed up in, you know, Central Europe, that hammer and sickle, where is it flying proudly in the South China Sea, 10,000 miles away by somebody speaking a foreign language on a Chinese worship, right? When you just think about how far that's, right, That moved from 1848 to, you know, it's amazing the medic evolution, right? It became essentially its opposite from this revolutionary ideology to essentially an ideology that justifies Chinese nationalism, you know? And so the same with democracy, right?

Basically, there's like several different, you know, angles you can have on this. The first is that today democracy in practice means rule by American Democrats. OK, why? Because if you vote for a Republican, you must hate democracy. You're a white supremacist. Well, right. But and a fun thing you can try is. Oh, I am for democracy. I am I am so for democracy. I will only vote for Democrats because the other party is against democracy. So you'll never vote for Republican because they're against democracy.

So you need to build a one party state because that's the essence of democracy. OK, so if you if you think about that, that's an epistemic loop where essentially they have gotten themselves into believing that a one party state without Republicans is how they protect democracy. OK, so that's let's call that one observation. And what's funny about this is you can actually get them in an interesting loop where you say, would you vote for a Republican? They'll say no. Why? Oh, because Republicans are against democracy. Okay, so democracy means a one-party state. And they actually kind of can't choose either, right? They kind of want one-party Democrat.

And what that means, by the way, in practice is California. It means one-party Democrat blue states. Okay. There's a second interpretation. And what that is is basically that everything that blue tribe does is democracy. So if they sanction you, if they deplatform you, censor you, surveil you, even invade you, color revolution you, whatever, that is protecting democracy. But if you win an election that they don't like, that is an attack on democracy. OK, whether it's Orban, whether it's Trump, whether it's DeSantis, whether it's Modi, whether it's, you know, it could be on the left, too.

It could be, you know, like Maduro or something like that. I mean, does he win an election? He's a rigged election, right? Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, exactly. So they have a window which they define as, quote, democracy, and then anything outside that is an attack on democracy, it's democratic backsliding and so on, okay?

Here's a third definition, which is, quote, democracy means U.S. military ally. Because it's very difficult to find a country that has high ratings for, quote, democracy that doesn't have a U.S. military base there. For example, Germany, Japan, South Korea, right? Like essentially a democracy usually has a U.S. military base or is like a former U.K. colony or something like that, right? If it's got high ratings for democracy. And that's a totally different filter on the world because obviously, you know, Japan, Germany, South Korea, these are like occupied countries with thousands and thousands and thousands of troops there, right?

um the fourth definition is there's actually at least three democracies out there or four um there's blue democracy there's red democracy which is like republicans there is indian democracy which i'll which actually i think is going to be very very important in the years to come and there's like tech democracy the democracy of exit and online voting and so on and so forth Right. And, you know, at the end of the day, I do think there is absolutely something to a free system where you should be able to choose and so on and so forth. And the exact weights of voice and exit and so on TBD. But just like Christianity could be interpreted to mean both X and the opposite of X or Z. You know, I mean, Christianity is such a big word.

Communism is such a big word. It can contain so many things. Capitalism, also a huge word. It can contain everything from the agrarian capitalism of the 1800s to the industrial capitalism of the 1900s to the tech capitalism of the 2000s, right? Democracy is a big word that can contain many interpretations. And what I think, you know, just also, you know, I've beaten up on the blues a little bit. I mean, just like the blues have concluded that what they actually mean by democracy is a one-party state, the reds have concluded the same thing. They want, understandably, they're like, you know what?

if this is tribal warfare, we're going to have one party Republican states. And so that's why, you know, a lot of the, I think a lot of the stuff on abortion, for example, is not so much on abortion. It's actually on immigration. You know why? It's because red states want to keep out blues from moving from blue states to red states if they aren't fully aligned culturally. So by passing these things that are shibboleths that will keep away some kind of blue, they are keeping Florida red or whatever, right? I think that's like, I've seen some people tweeting about that. I'm not sure. I don't know what percentage of the motivation there is. I'm not saying it's solely cynical or anything like that, but I think that's,

that's part of it. I can confirm in Texas. I know people who won't move here because of the abortion laws. Right. And so, so if that's something that's, so what's happening is make America states again, you know, states are diverging. It's again, that thing about the decentralizing arc, you know, the, the same kind of conflicts are happening, but in the opposite order and the conflicts of the 1930s and the 1860s even, but in opposite order. And this time it's like a freedom revolution um there's there's another aspect so i mentioned like four different kinds of blue democracy red democracy and red democracy is like republicans at the state and local level passing these bills building republican strongholds and so on right um

the third indian democracy is worth noting and the reason i note it is uh again with the like history of running and repeat filter. For most of the 20th century, Chinese communism was an also ran and a secondary note to the Soviet Marxist-Leninist variety. But what happened about 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the Chinese started to do a more pragmatic version of communism, right? 1978, Deng Xiaoping said, you know what? You know, famous saying black cat white cat doesn't matter if you catch the mice it's trite it's cliche but it's it's true that dang turned around the entire country ezra vogel has this great book on this how china became you know capitalist and so the what happened was in 1989 to 91 the leading brand

of communism totally face planted and most communist countries went to zero around the world there's a few that were holdouts like north korea cuba whatever but most of them once the funding from the Soviet Union was cut off, all the flags went down, all the trumpets stopped, right? The KGB guys, they weren't being paid anymore. All their psyops just went down like this, okay? And this, you know, the thing is, a regime never announces that it's going to die. You know, there's a great book called Everything Was Forever Till It Was No More. And it's basically about the last Soviet generation, where the system, they knew the system was collapsing, but it also seemed eternal at the same time. And it's worth reading, because

the number of parallels to say, I'm going to come back to this point. The number of parallels today is bananas. I mean, down to like really small things. Okay. Um, but my, just to return to this India democracy point. So Chinese communism took a pragmatic turn about 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet union. And it was a strong enough state to make its way through the choppy waters of 89 to 91 and make it through and come out the other side and now i'm not sure this is something you'd want but it is the quote leading brand of communism right in the sense of like it you know like russia is now the junior partner and so and so forth okay and vietnam is also ostensibly communist and there's there's only a few communist states like it's china vietnam um north korea cuba

I forget the other one. There's one other one I'm forgetting. Maybe it's Laos. I forget the other one. So I think it's five. I'm going to look it up. Hold on. Yeah, Laos, right?

So, okay, fine. So the point is that China is, quote, the leading brand of communism, right? They're not exporting their system, but they're the leading brand. So I have a feeling that in the same way that, like, the Chinese became pragmatic about 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, OK, the Indians have a pragmatic version of democracy where they can build. And they took that turn about 10 years ago. Like, just to give—there's something I tweeted recently, which is—and by the way, I say this. look, yes, I'm of Indian ancestry, but I've never been like a huge, I, I, I, I like to think I call them as I see them. Okay. It's like, you know, somebody who's born in Italian American and they

go back home, they're like, Whoa, Italy is executing, you know, Italy's buildings. If Italy was doing that, that's kind of the, that, that's a framework that I'm going into this with. Okay. The first, you know, uh, I don't know, 30 something years of my life. I'm, I'm, I'm like 43 now. Okay. But first 30 years of my life, I mean, I like, uh, being Indian was like, again, being like, um, John Salvatore or whatever. You're just like, it's just like a last name. It wasn't like something that I paid a huge amount of attention to, to the old world. You know, it was just in tech. I'm doing math, doing all that type of stuff. But over the last 10 years, And especially like the last five, I was shocked by how well India was executing.

Like it's, it's hard to, you know, the thing is you can only really sense this if you've gone back every few years and you've kind of seen what it is. Right. And then you just see, it's kind of like San Francisco, but in reverse, you know, San Francisco was like this beautiful city and just became a complete shithole. Right. And it didn't have to be that way, but lots of blue cities have decayed like this. I don't have to tell you this.

You've seen it yourself, right? It's like that in reverse in India. Okay. And that's not to say that it's like totally clean or anything like that. It's not. Okay. But it's improved so much over the last 20 years, and especially the last 10 or last five, that something really good is happening there.

And just one way I can kind of put some numbers on it, like the new parliament building was built in two and a half years and cost 125 million. And you can see it. I tweeted about it. Okay. you could like for a thousand X, that amount of money, you, uh, like, I mean, I think Salesforce tower, how much was Salesforce tower? Salesforce tower was like 10 billion or something. How much did it cost? Um, okay. It was like multiple billions. Okay. Uh, you know,

the embassy in Hanoi by the U S is like 10 X that costs. And it's just the embassy. And it's not the, not a full parliament building india that can build is a completely new thing or rather it's an old thing that is again new right like like india was i'm not saying this in a oh chest thumpy kind of way or whatever but like you know columbus in 1492 he wanted to get to india right that's what he called the american indians he thought they were indians or whatever he wanted to trade with them right so in europe india was actually a big trade center that they wanted to trade with. It was thought of as something you'd want to go and seek out. So India was not in a chess-thumpy way, but it was a formidable player civilizationally for a long time.

And then it was just laid low for a long time. And so was China, laid low by the opium wars and whatnot. But now both of those two are just coming back with about a 10-year delay. And India is just executing. And my point is that just like Chinese communism became the leading brand of communism after the Soviet collapse, I think there's a chance that Indian democracy becomes the leading brand of democracy if we see a serious financial crisis in the West. I think that's good because at the end of the day, I do think we need an alternative to Chinese communism because that's the thing. Like, I don't say, I mean, at the beginning, you know, when we talked about those graphs in China, I'm not a China triumphalist at all. There's some people who will go and show

those graphs and be like, yay, China, and so on. I respect China. I fear China. I mean, fear, let's put it like that. Let's say I'm apprehensive about China, right? I'm not like, oh my God, like, you know, but like genuinely concerned about how powerful they are. They are not just going to go away. They execute really, really, really well. They're bleeding in cars. They've just launched their own domestic plane competitor to Boeing and Airbus. They build more than anyone than the rest of the world. And here's the thing. Right now, they are playing nice. That's the thing. They've learned to flex a diplomatic muscle. That's the thing they didn't have. They were doing this wolf warrior stuff where they were yelling at everybody. They just learned how

to flex a diplomatic muscle. And once they just started playing nice, they rolled up Saudi, Iran, France, Brazil, all these guys all at once. They're the obvious alternative economic model. Here's the problem. Just like the U.S. was, I think, overall good from 1945 to 1991, But once the Soviet Union went away, the U.S. by degrees gradually became very nasty, you know, because there wasn't that constraint anymore. It's not that the Soviets were good. It's that their presence meant the U.S. basically, the U.S. played win-win, right? Ultimately, the justification for the U.S. from 1945 to 1991 is West Germany was better than East Germany. South Korea was better than North Korea.

Hong Kong and Taiwan were better than the PRC. uh chile was better than cuba and while the groups that the us backed were not always nice they were a lot nicer than the other side you know like you know you know what the term for left-wing death squads is it's communist yeah right and so left-wing death squads killed 100 million people in the 20th century and fighting them off while it wasn't always nice was on balance better than than the alternative, right? So on balance, you know, even though I was only alive for a portion of that, like I think America during the Cold War was on balance good. And then by degrees, it sort of lost its bearing. Maybe the 90s, you can argue, maybe Kosovo was like an early version

of that, right? There were still good things the U.S. was doing during the 90s, in particular, was helping the Eastern European countries get back on their feet. It was, you know, and build them up economically. The win-win America that I think you and I both respect was still there, right? Like that was still in evidence in the 90s and even the early 2000s. But then after 9-11 and Iraq and, you know, it started to lose its way. And now it's completely lost its way. And so the thing is that without that constraint, and now multipolarity is bringing the constraint back okay now here's a problem maybe multi-polarity is only actually a transitional phase maybe if this fiat crisis is as serious as we think maybe the us is actually going to financially face plant

like just like svb just like these banks just go digitally to zero when you've got financial wealth and it's all zeros on a printer it can just go to zero it's like much more like flaky than than uh the factories in china right so if that happens and if that face plant happens we can talk about the mechanics of it then um well uh china's really strong in that world it's a beast out of a cage the russian bear the chinese panda boom they escape all constraints and everybody who is mean to them is going to get you know oh shoot right come up because you know what go ahead But it's just very frustrating because I do think Americans, particularly the establishment, is severely discounting the strength that countries like China, India and Russia are gathering right now. Again, going back to what we said in the beginning of the conversation, if you just take the names off the chart and look, energy production is what I think is the canary in the coal mine.

If you look at increased energy production in China, Russia, India, particularly, they're exploding while we're shooting ourselves in the foot and putting in unreliable energy infrastructure. Then on top of that, again, the propaganda about Chinese being communist and we'll never make it, just like the nature of being in the Bitcoin mining industry. I've interacted with a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs and capitalists, and they're arguably more capitalists than a lot of the people over here in America. And that's just, people don't like to admit it, but just look at the major manufacturers in Bitmain and MicroBT. They're two Chinese companies. Obviously, MicroBT's moved its headquarters, but it started in China.

And they were arguably the most capitalist actors in the Bitcoin, the whole Bitcoin economy. I mean, the ASIC industry they spun up themselves is one of the most impressive things that's happened in the last two decades. And people just don't want to acknowledge that. That's the thing is, like, you know, so let me show something here. And first of all, you're absolutely right. You just, even if it's a rival, especially if it's a rival, you have to respect them in a sense of you need to actually have, you know, the greatest strength is to know one's own weakness. like the USA did not win. The USA of mid-century did not win the Cold War by saying the Ruskies

suck. They'll never do anything. When the Ruskies were out, when the Soviets were out executing the U.S. during Sputnik, the answer wasn't, no, we've got the Great Mississippi River, right? Instead, JFK pushed, you know, the moon landing, right? There was the admission that the other guys had gotten ahead and there was the redoubling of effort and dedication to get back ahead right that's actually it's not denial it's not like oh well we're a democracy and we've got the mississippi river therefore we're going to win that's stupid you know like lots of countries have rivers the reason i say this is all the geography stuff so to your point on the energy thing uh so do you see my the slide that i kind of put up here yep yeah so someone was like i'd

like to hear biology's rebuttal to uh zion's main pillar is bear thesis 100 relying on the u.s led world order if that is true china cannot secure their own energy you know you right and it's like it's just totally false because pg and e is doing rolling blackouts and china's scaling nuclear right to your point on energy and then someone's like oh china also had a blackout or whatever and i'm like okay fine why don't we look at the graphs right this is electricity production by source in u.s do you see that graph yep and this is what it looks like this is what it looks like in china obviously like you know one news report is not the same as like the the growth where it's now at 7 000 terawatt hours and growing right um and this is what it looks like for india as well

uh not like this but more like this okay and so um you know the issue is with all of this stuff that, uh, people, you know, it's like they are in, it's, it's a difference between founding and inheriting, you know, if you've built something right. Um, and you know, you built the TFTC podcast and you know, a bunch of entrepreneurs and have you, are you also an investor? Yes. Okay, great. So you're close to entrepreneurs, you know, I, you know, I was, I was both the founder, I've been a founder, I've been an investor and whatnot. It's really hard to build something. All right. And the difference between somebody who's founded something and someone who's just inherited something is the difference between the men

who built America, who didn't take anything for granted, who were not, did not think number one was their birthright. And they built it up from scratch versus, you know, I don't think everybody, but a lot of the effete children of empire that inherited the superpower and it's like taking a mclaren or whatever and running it into the ground you know like the to mix metaphors okay i know you're and whatever mclaren's a car okay running into the wall you know right um because you know in 1991 the usa was a hyper power that won everywhere without fighting and by 2021 it fights everywhere without winning. Like the decline in 30 years is very, very, very dramatic. And, you know, what could they have done differently, right? I'm not sure they could

actually have, I think it's stupid to say, oh, you could have held back China. I don't think you could because they just execute incredibly well. I mean, at least domestically, what they definitely could have done is the establishment could have essentially taken stakes in tech and not fought tech tooth and nail. It could have taken a more win-win posture versus conservatives and not alienated its entire police and military, right? But instead, it, you know, for a variety of reasons, did that, right? So it's alienated its tech guys and its conservatives, and they're different, right? They're overlapping, but they're not the same. It's alienated its tech guys and its conservatives domestically. And, uh, it also has fought guys globally. And so it doesn't have

any home base beyond like Brooklyn or whatever, you know, and, and even then those people are all stabbing each other. Right. Um, so, oh gosh, it was, oh, one thing I, you know, one point I made, I want to kind of actually talk about this analogy for a second in a more depth. So, you know, talked about like the fall of the ussr and i mentioned the ussa okay now woke america is to america as soviet russia is to russia like there were you know russians were in many ways the greatest victims of the soviet regime you know it was this right go ahead yeah yeah easily i mean objectively well it's it's complicated because they were also turned by the soviet regime into victimizers and they're you know like russians were used to invade estonia and all these other

places and impose locally right and so it's very complicated and even now today there's a lot of russians who pine for the time when they were big and strong under stalin you know even if he killed lots of them or whatever right so it's very complicated thing the difference between like a country and like this globe-spanning empire you know it's kind of like uh you're seeing venom the movie venom or right you know the venom symbiote how it like powers you up but it like devours you from within right that's what like empire is okay in a sense it took russia from just a country in europe to the soviet union right like the venom symbiote version of itself which had propaganda appeal everywhere and could launch nuclear weapons and had satellites and

conquered all these people around it it gave it gave like the russian superpowers because it gave them ideology but it devoured them from within and it left them like a shell of their former self when the whole thing left and then they had hyperinflation and they had all this chaos and they had states break away and then they they had like have you seen the post-soviet conflicts have you seen that wikipedia list yeah there's like 30 post-soviet conflicts it's like the tajikistan civil war or whatever okay there's like a ton of these things right and everybody's just like shooting each other in the post-soviet atmosphere and the us is just looking over to make sure the nukes aren't flying around okay and uh the point is that basically um that's kind of what i think

of the ussa is like right like woke america is to america soviet russia is to russia means like the The current regime oppresses the average American, and they're in many ways one of the biggest victims of the regime. But they're also turned by the regime into victimizer, especially abroad. You know, lots of people in the Middle East, lots of people abroad, you know, their only encounter is with either the Pentagon or the State Department. And it's either at gunpoint telling you to do something or it is, you know, imposing sanctions and this and that very high handed. And like the rest of the world has seen the pointy end of, you know, what the establishment is. And now you're seeing some of that coming back because they've got voices online. They're like, no, I don't want to be bossed around like this anymore. Right.

And it's not so much like it's very complicated because just like the Soviet case, there was also, you know, look, as anti-communist as they come. All right. But it is it is empirically true that the Soviet Union did have massive technical accomplishments during the 20th century, like from Sputnik to, you know, some of their scientists and mathematicians were like absolutely world class. It's it's it's just complicated, like any giant empire is. Right. And I think the U.S. delivered a much better life for its people over that time period. So it was the better of the two by far. But now at the end of empire, uh, we've got a situation where the parallels to the USSR are actually, there's a lot, let me go through them. So first is both had a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Okay. Both of them have something where there's crashing life expectancy for men, right? Deaths of despair due to, you know, drug overdoses and

things like that, okay? Both of them have had basically about 10 years of massive internal conflict and confrontation with a very powerful outside superpower, okay? Both have a guy who took office who essentially overturned decades and decades of policy, and so it's Gorbachev and trump okay um both of those were totally resisted by the establishment in fact six years after uh gorbachev took office there was um a a coup against him by the communist hardliners and it's you know arguably like uh whether you you know whatever you call jan 6 it's like that but in reverse okay um and um also 1985 and you know 2015 one of the things gorbachev did is he allowed glasnost and perestroika and glasnost was truly free speech and perestroika was more free markets

right and he thought that this would like gradually reform the soviet union but actually it unleashed these forces that led to the collapse because once people had freedom of speech they could started talking about all these things the regime had done, and all these secrets that bubbled up. And then free markets started to show how terrible the actual standard of living was. In the US, we have digital glasnost, which is uncensored social media. And we have digital perestroika, which is Bitcoin, and truly free markets. And so for the first time, actually, in generations, we have truly free speech in the West. And why did we not have it? It's less obvious in the Soviet Union where they actually put photocopiers under padlock. But until very

recently, you essentially had to inherit a newspaper to be able to get your word out. You know, you had the freedom of speech to go and talk to your next door neighbor or something like that, but actually go and broadcast, you need a radio license or a TV license or inherit a newspaper or something like that. So yet you didn't have practical, you didn't have freedom of reach. You couldn't easily build up reach, right? It's very capital intensive until basically about the last 10 years. And after an offensive and a counter-offensive and so on, with Alon getting Twitter, and now we've got multiple decentralized social networks with Jack, with Noster, and there's Farcaster, there's Blue Sky and whatnot, it looks like we actually have

digital glasnost and true freedom of speech on the internet. And, you know, the battle for Bitcoin, that's still to come. Obviously, you and I think about that a lot. But as you're aware, just like we didn't have truly free speech in the US, we didn't have truly free markets, because gold seizures. Right. And, you know, one thing people think, by the way, is just like the Fed has been gaming, you know, the plunge protection team has actually admitted they're gaming the market. Right. And people suspect they're gaming the VIX. People also suspect they've been gaming the gold price with like puts and stuff like that. But now central bankers outside the West buying physical gold seems to be driving that up. Luke Roman is the expert on this. I'm not like a gold expert,

but he's talked about this. OK. But now with Bitcoin, we actually have truly free markets. And since the introduction of Bitcoin, as you know, if you look at USDBTC, I think Bitstein, you know, Michael, Michael, Michael Bitstein, Goldstein. Yeah, I know he calls himself Bitstein on Twitter. Right. So I like him. But he sometimes posts this graph showing the U.S. dollar collapsing against Bitcoin because it's lost six, seven orders of magnitude, you know, from from one cent to ten thousand dollars. okay one order gets you point one two gets you one dollar right three gets you ten four gets you a hundred five gets you a thousand six gets you um ten thousand right so the us dot the smart money has actually been once bitcoin is out there here here's a graph i'm talking about um that's well while you're pulling the graph up too that's like one thing i wonder like

with the internet, truly free speech and truly free money and free markets, is this manifestation of this version of free speech and free markets more powerful than the free speech and free markets that were unleashed in the Soviet era? I think they are.

I think it is, actually. And I think also, it's not, so here's a graph that I was talking about. Oops, that's BTC, USD. I want the opposite. I want to do that. There we go. There we go.

Okay. Since the inception of Bitcoin, the dollar has been collapsing against Bitcoin. Right? Yeah. It's got a couple more orders of magnitude to go, too, I would say. And it's almost invisible on the chart, but it'll be highly visible in real life. You know? So it's just a funny way of thinking about it that once people had truly free markets introduced, they started opting into them.

And all of these bombs and stuff that were so dramatic for us, like this is an enormous vote of no confidence against the Fed, which I'll come back to. So going back to that analogy, right, so there's Afghanistan, there's a life expectancy drop, there's the Gorbachev-Trump parallel overturning decades of policy, there's Glasnost and there's Perestroika. But it even goes down to smaller things. For example, once there was glasnost, you had subcultures forming within the Soviet Union that weren't necessarily opposed to the mainstream, but they weren't aligned with it either. OK, like that's to say, you know, this is an unusual thing for a Soviet Union that for decades had been so centralized. OK, now you had cultures that were into, I don't know, rock and roll or something like that. Right. And rock and roll is American coded, but there are other things that were not Soviet coded. And that's similar to the Internet subcultures that have arisen that are not necessarily anti-regime, but they're not like explicitly pro-regime either. They're their own thing. So they sort of hollow out the total alignment of the 1950s, you know, with the state, if that makes sense.

OK, even more than that, like the Soviets had a word that is very similar to our term clown world. I'll find this term, it's in this book Everything was forever till it was no more Here's the book Their clown world word was probably much more beautiful Well, it's funny because they would joke about the absurdity of the contrast between the official propaganda

and then what was actually Here, let me see if I can show this to you so this book everything was forever until there's no more the last soviet generation okay is worth reading because um the collapse right soviet socialism so the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising at the moment of collapse suddenly became obvious that soviet life has always seemed semis eternal and stagnating vigorous and bleak and full of promise. Right. And it's it's because, you know, the Soviet Union didn't just like to just go down, you know, in one straight line. There was all kinds of thrashing and other

kinds of things that they tried to do just to just kind of, you know, discuss that a little bit more. Basically, you know, my thing about how history is running in reverse, but we're seeing like the opposite outcome, right? One of the big things that Gorbachev did was detente. Because for 40 years prior, the Soviet Union had been locked in this head-to-head with the USA. And, you know, everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam all came out of that. And Gorbachev cooled that down. Trump actually did the opposite. Why? For 40 years-ish prior to Trump taking office, the U.S. had been in detente with China and Trump escalated it. Right. So Gorbachev took escalation to detente. Trump took detente escalation. Now, you might say that's good or

bad. Right. But basically, it was very counterintuitive at that time for Gorbachev to deescalate with the hereditary enemy, the USA, and is very counterintuitive at that time. You remember in 2015 when Trump was saying China, China, China, China, everybody was making fun of him. That was an extremely non-consensus thing. You had to be a, you know, a working class guy to care about China. Why did you care about China? Or you're racist or whatever, right? That was absolutely the attitude in 2015. If you just work back, it wasn't that long ago, you know? And even as late as like 2016, you know, I found this, here's just like an article just to show you like the temperature at that time. Nobody, nobody cared about China. Nobody cared about

Taiwan. Okay. Let me show you. All right. Just, just a few years ago, right here. This is 2016. Okay. The you can, you can Google the headline, but basically it's from December 2nd, 2016. And there's other headlines around the time. Trump speaks with Taiwan's leader and a front to China. Okay. Here's a quote. Among diplomats in the United States, there's a similar shock. This is a change of historic proportions. The real question is, what are the Chinese going to do? Okay. So as late as 2016, NYT was upbreeding Trump for talking to him on angering China. That was mainstream sentiment back then. This is not that long ago. You with me so far? yep and if you go back even a few more years okay here 2011 to save our economy ditch taiwan okay write off one trillion dollars of u.s debt in exchange for a deal you know what like this is actually the kind of hard-headed real politic that should be on the table as a consideration rather than you know look after you've just burned eight trillion dollars in iraq and afghanistan

maybe avoid a giant war and have a peace and some treaty or whatever where you can get chips and, you know, so on. I'm not saying it's like the ideal outcome. I'm saying, though, that the U.S. was in detente with China at that time. And then they went to escalation after 2015 with Trump. Right. But the parallels go even deeper. It's like, you know, one big thing towards the end of the Soviet Union is a huge portion of their youth were actually obsessed with foreign culture right blue jeans and rock and roll okay now here's the twist actually a huge portion of american youth are into chinese culture you know why tiktok or exactly tiktok that's right yeah like tiktok can't be banned or whatever that's too popular among the youth yeah that it's not like

k-pop is big too k-pop exactly foreign influences in general this is the thing like the whole russiagate thing is actually actually part of a broader thing which is that for the first time you know uh the us has gone from the coolest country in the world to the holiest country in the world okay what i mean by that is exactly holier than that like when you and i were growing up i mean just think about like okay not to pick on him like jimmy kimmel okay his transformation from being the joker of the man show to this blackface and yeah you know not only blackface he he uh he painted up his whole body oh yeah he made fun of carl malone and all this right so jimmy kimmel was like a boorish you know clown i mean whatever that was his persona okay beer

Deer and Tits was the show. Exactly, right? Or, you know, Jon Stewart was very un-PC for today back then. And, you know, all of them have become essentially extremely holy. Or Jim Carrey, another great example, right? All these guys who were funny men have become holy men, which is a non-obvious thing. You know, it's a non-obvious transition to go from irreverent bawdy humor to totally worshiping the state. Right. It's like not you would not think that those two things connected in like ideology space.

But somehow that happened. And I think where it happened is these are people who want very high status and are good at getting it and are great actors. And as that changed into like this neo state religion, they just changed that. Right. But what that left open was true comedy. And so Dave Chappelle and others have kind of taken that kind of role. Right. But it also left open coolness and interesting things. And you can argue, it may be a little different than cool, but SpaceX is wow. Rockets taking off. The cool stuff, AI, I think that's cool. Maybe you call that wow. Cool versus wow. It's cool as the turning of the head and wow is like jaw drop. It's kind of a different thing. Right. But they have left that domain open where there's people who are doing cool things, people doing wow things. And it's no longer, you know, the NPC is just saying what NYT is saying is not neither of those things. Right. But actually, I'll give you a puzzle. All right. The biggest here here is the biggest riddle. And for me, at least, it's a skeleton key that explains a lot of the last eight years.

towards the end of the soviet union the ussr was copying the usa and one of the reasons it failed is because it changed from we are going to build communism to uh we're going to be like a shitty usa okay we're going to be like a crappy clone of the usa okay and that was everything from you know, Gorbachev trying to have free speech and free markets to allowing blue jeans to, you know, to like, loosening up, right? Here's my question to you. What country is the US copying? I mean, if we're really going down like the CBDC route, it would be China, right? Exactly, exactly. This is the non obvious clue to the last eight years. Republicans and and I'm not saying this as like a diss on any particular group. I'm just saying is a different lens in

the last eight years republicans are rejecting free markets to go to industrial policy economic nationalism tariffs trade war all this type of stuff because they think china is a competition they're going to out china china democrats have rejected free speech there's literally articles saying um here i'll just show you just to show you one um china these guys saying china was right in the atlantic yeah china's actually doing something good by curbing speech should have more control over the money yeah here hold on look see these guys in the atlantic their entrance speech will never go back to normal and debate over freedom versus control of the global network china was largely correct and the u.s is wrong okay that's in the

That's an explicit statement. OK. And, you know, often you'll see it said implicitly. But basically, the things that, you know, made the U.S. the U.S. and even if it was not fully free speech and free markets, those principles were rejected. Right. The right rejected free markets to go to this trade war, economic nationalism, chest thumping kind of thing. and and by the way like i'm not saying that you can't do trade policy well okay i think you you can but it's hard to do it well and simply doing it doesn't mean you're doing it well okay and let me come back to it's kind of like once the soviet union decided to do capitalism it did it in a terrible way because there's a graft and retrofit on top of the the system that wasn't built for that you know um industrial policy is like venture capital it's really hard to do profit it's possible but hard to do properly. Okay. Similarly, when the Democrats were trying to do speech control, censorship, cancellation, deplatforming, you know, even cancellation

has its origins in China. You know what that's called there? Human flesh search. Have you heard that before? Not human flesh search, but I do remember the dunce caps from the Cultural Revolution. You know, the parallels, you know, I observed this actually years and years ago. Here, I'm going to show you this. um, so years ago I was just observing this, like basically, um, you see this, we chat users block from sending six, four, 89 or 89 64, right? June 5th, 2018. Do you see that? Okay. Facebook scrubs, any mentions of Sierra Mella, right? So basically, um, when you send politically sensitive stuff on

WeChat, they censor. When you send politically sensitive stuff on Facebook, they censor, right? This is three or four years ago. And I was observing it then. Neither side wants to admit, but the U.S. and China are converging in some weird ways. Internet censorship, nationalism and socialism, state takeover of tech companies, okay, social credit and cancel culture. And cancel culture is just a decentralized social credit score, you know?

And then human flesh search is the Chinese thing for Twitter mobs. Okay. And this was November 2019. Now, you know what happened just a few months later? The ultimate copying of China. Yeah. Yeah. Lockdowns, all that. Exactly. Right. So, which is a bipartisan copying of China. And the thing is early on, by the way, you know, it is true that in the past quarantines by a well-functioning state have at times been used to control the spread of disease. Didn't work for COVID. You know, that's a whole kind of separate discussion but the the point is that on a variety of issues as we've just gone through from rejection of free markets to rejection of free speech to the cbdc to uh um the uh

speech controls to thought controls to cancellation all this kind of stuff the u.s has been copying china it's a bipartisan thing and it's not admitted okay it go ahead well i think it's not admitted by the establishment but i think people like us bitcoiners particularly recognize and that's why they focus on bitcoin this is like hey we're gonna get china here with the social credit score if we don't figure out bitcoin true but but i'd say the full scope of it um i i think people will sometimes see one piece of it or another they'll see it's a cbdc okay or they'll see it's um a cultural revolution or Yeah. Yeah. For example, Republicans will see the Democrat incursion on free speech and they'll say, you don't want to be like China there. But then many of them will support industrial policy. And that's like also, you know, to compete with China, we need to do this. Right.

and uh you know actually you know another big example you know something else that the u.s didn't care about at all you know you know peter teal's concept of memetic rivalry right so something you know what the u.s didn't care about at all for years and years and years taiwan right okay as i just showed just a few minutes ago in 2011 new york times ran an op-ed saying sell taiwan to china for forgiving the debt okay that is how little it's like kazakhstan or something okay well no and similarly but ukraine like you had all the uh there's that picture going off the juxtaposition of the different headlines in the same newspapers like three years apart like ukraine was an untouchable corrupt oh yeah yes well actually even better is who cared about

the invasion of korea in 2014 like we were all online then do you even remember that like that was like a one-day headline at most right nobody cared about the invasion of korea in 2014 um that's a whole separate thing you know like mccain and others started arming up you know ukrainians after that became like a whole cause to kind of but the point is that on all of these different issues on uh the u.s has been copying china over the last eight years and been copying them in a bad way. It's not like the U.S. is not going to be a better China than China. It's not going to be better at trade war. It's not going to be better at tariffs, economic nationalism, surveillance, building a censorship state, doing a CBDC, doing lockdowns,

infringing on civil rights. It's not going to be better at those things because that's not the soul of what it is. That's not the soul of the country. That's not the soul of the people. Right. So free people. And so that's that's like a it's kind of like trying to graft the USA onto the USSR. It's going to it's causing a collapse. I mean, one of the reasons you know how like the arms race was part of the reason the Soviet Union collapsed. Right. All of this industrial policy that is happening now, you know, the amounts that are being allocated are like hundreds of billions of dollars in some cases. And it's not it's it's all being spent in the same way that the 300 million dollar bus lane in San Francisco or the the 50 thousand dollar bus stop, you know, like all of these things are just wildly, wildly, wildly over cost there. it's like legal graft you're just employing 100x the number of people or or uh environmental consultants or whatever on the project but it's like the late soviet union where it's so inefficient that it cannot compete and when you look at have you seen those videos i post about

like how fast china builds stuff yeah right they can so a whole bridge and overnight a whole highway yeah exactly like um it's like here it's like uh the eight hours why are you looking this up i do want to go ahead yeah we've got a bunch of other stuff to talk about i've just been well that was like what it like what is the soul of america like how do you think we should be competing i'll tell you my thoughts in a second so for what it's worth basically china builds a train station in nine hours california can't build a bus shelter because like they're actually saying typical bus shelters often cost 50k or more and require coordination among eight departments okay these are the guys who are defending their

thing okay this la non-profit bus shelters cost fifty thousand dollars or more and require coordination among eight departments to build a freaking bus shelter right and essentially what they're saying is the regulations are so arcane that a government funded nonprofit working with a government has to do regulatory arbitrage to get around the other agencies. Do you see what I'm saying? Right now, but now there's actually a good to that. You know why the good is red tape usually prevents other people from doing things. But at a certain point, the red tape ties up the organization itself and prevents it from preventing people from doing things this reminds me i'm sure you've seen it to the meme of there was an individual who built like a staircase at the

park across the street from him and then the government came and tore it down he built it for like 60 bucks and they came tore it down and built a staircase that costs like eighty thousand dollars or something like that oh really i hadn't seen that but that's a perfect example that's a perfect example exactly right and by the way that gets to a deep point which is like the the ability here's here's an example you can watch this video trying to build a transition in nine hours they just go through whoosh like this have all these guys team up and it gets done overnight right um that's just that's not like 10 better that's just completely different culture that is something where they have been it's like people will hearken back to when america did manufacturing but it's like a

75-year-old guy thinking back to when he was 25 and thinking he can just walk over to the bench press and knock out 225 for reps. And you know what? You at least need some warmups. Even if you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, you're not going to have the strength you did at 25. This is like an old regime now. It needs to regain strength gradually. It took China 45 years of working out every day to build up the muscle tone that it has now in terms of building stuff. You're not going to be able to just regain that overnight. Plus, they did hide your strength and bide your time the whole time. But your point on the staircase is actually very deep because so and it relates to the rebirth of America, which is because history is running in reverse.

I do think that there is going to be a serious clash with the federal government in the years to come, many months to come, who the hell knows. And here's one sci-fi scenario. Okay. Sci-fi scenario. The sci-fi scenario is that the red states and Western, so, you know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Baltic states and the Eastern European satellites did better on their own when they left the Soviet Union. And in the same way, the red states and the Western European satellites of the U.S. empire will probably do better off on their own. France is already trying to break away, right? Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, all these states are already breaking away from the federal government, you know, make America states again. That's already happening. You've got divergence

on gun laws, abortion laws, immigration laws, you know, sanctuary cities, but in reverse. And actually, blue states are also going further blue. You know, they are going without a federal thing to kind of do dispute resolution. States are rapidly diverging on policy. And in fact, even during 2020, COVID was like a preview of what is to come. Because in early COVID, I don't know if you remember this. Do you remember the interstate compacts? No.

Oh, it's actually something that exists in the Constitution. But because the federal government was like MIA in early COVID, like in a true national emergency. OK. Here, like the state capacity just wasn't there. So here we are, interstate compacts. Right. So California, Oregon and Washington announced Western States Pact. Massachusetts joins New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, multi-state council. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joins compact with Midwest governors to reopen economy, joining six other ministers to collaborate, right? So the chaotic onset of COVID, when the states just had to fend for themselves, was like a dress rehearsal for governors to start becoming actual governors.

Yep. Okay. And, you know, there are other things as well where there were like state checkpoints and so on. I think 2020 is like a trial run for what is to come. OK. And, you know, this is actually this is an article from 2018 that talks about interstate compacts and actually predicted them before they were used in 2020. OK. And, you know, divided we stand, the country is hopelessly split. So interstate compacts, you know, she actually noted them before they were even used by the government. OK, so and states had hard borders during COVID like you couldn't get from you couldn't get into Florida without like a I forget what it was, whether it was 14 days of quarantine or something like states had various rules like that, if you remember that.

Right. All that, I think, is a dress rehearsal for what's coming, which is, as we're seeing, fortunately, there are Democrats who are pro Bitcoin and more generally pro cryptocurrency. It's like Eric Adams is pro-Bitcoin and Jared Polis is pro-Bitcoin and Ro Khanna is pro-Bitcoin. So it's not like purely partisan, which is good. RFK Jr. is pro-Bitcoin. But on the right, you have Vivek and you have Ron DeSantis and you have many governors who have come out as pro-Bitcoin. Right. And then you have on their side, you have Elizabeth Warren and others who are, you know, anti right there, her anti crypto army. And so as opposed to exactly left versus right. Have you seen my thing on dollar nationalists versus Bitcoin maximalists?

It's like. No, essentially, I think I have that one. So here that's the other tribe. they're on the uh the losing side well i mean here's the thing something is big it's like it's like the roman empire something sometimes something really big doesn't just totally go to zero it has some successor state you know like the soviet union had russia right um roman empire had the byzantines uh so so basically today it's red versus blue tomorrow will be orange versus green bitcoin maximalist versus dollar nationalists the decentralized network versus a centralized state okay so today you have um if i if i do the i'll go to the initial frame

of this today it looks like uh this right you know have you seen the political compass before yep yeah so this is like the right and this is the left and you know this is left authoritarian left libertarian right authoritarian right libertarian okay tomorrow um looks like like something maybe like this and that's like rfk jr okay and this is like you know you can argue where desantis fits you know but um certainly a lot of maximalists are you know arguably over here somewhere over here the you know and then you have uh like elizabeth warren types are up over here but actually there's a fair number of like republican militarists slash authoritarians who will at the end of the day side with the dollar over bitcoin it's a non-zero number might

be one of them trump might be one of them exactly so it you know it doesn't it you know jack dorsey is an example actually of somebody who really is kind of over here right jack dorsey rfk junior basically you pick up a bunch of tech founder type people okay left libertarians and you lose um some folks who will just reflexively side with the institutions they were born with who i i understand those people i'm often sympathetic to those people but they're like the soviet conservative you know there's somebody who defends the system they were born in my country right or wrong does that make sense right so yeah now the other thing about this which is interesting is this term dollar nationalist uh actually i think it communicates a lot

in just those two words basically one of my theses is um you know how in the and then I'll kind of explain what, what I think the scenario is where in, in 2010, the Arab spring had happened. Okay. And, you know, Twitter and Facebook had been important in that. And so people knew that social media could like overthrow governments and so on. okay but still it would still have been considered crazy to say um you know oh uh in in 10 years um we're going to have the president of the united states the most important political issue in the world is going to be whether the president united states can tweet right okay that would have still been considered totally crazy right and um

even knowing that twitter was important for governments that had literally overthrown governments it was thought okay that's something that's happening over there it's like a weak government it's not i mean like obviously it's not gonna happen to the u.s government it's not gonna have the same kind of chaos but it did it took a little while longer it took a few more years to build arguably it started in 2015 you know not too many years later right and so i think it's fair to say that all politics in the 2010s became social media right easily and it's been completely normalized now i mean desantis doing his campaign announcement on twitter spaces last week that's right okay so now here's my analogy similarly in 2019 2020 cryptocurrency bitcoin

has gotten to the scale that every bank is aware of it. Every government is aware of it. By 2021, a country, El Salvador, had even adopted Bitcoin as its national or co-national currency. So clearly this was something where every head of state, every bank, every CEO had heard of it. And yet, even most Bitcoin maximalists

don't truly take it seriously. because to take bitcoin seriously and there's still a bunch of things that we need to leap between here and there and there's still it's a bitcoin experiment it could still lose in a few ways which i'll get to it's not inevitable you have to work to make it work right but if you just like the most important thing in 2021 was could the president tweet which was a big leap from 2010 eventually the most important thing is going to be does this government have enough Bitcoin to fund operations? Okay.

Like if the price actually does rise, if, you know, they do devalue the dollar with the digital devaluation of the dollar, things start to get really real. And a good precursor for that is thinking about what happened with Twitter. So long as Twitter and Facebook were just toys, right? Because it's always a fad, a bubble, nobody cares, blah, blah. And in fact, you know, through the early 2010s, they were basically dismissed in this way, okay? Even as people were using them more and more, right?

But after they became important electorally, because it's really Twitter that elected Trump. Twitter elected Bolsonaro. Twitter elected Orban. Twitter elected, Twitter did Brexit, right? Twitter essentially led to also BLM and other things. Twitter led to deviations left and right from the consensus. And to stop is particularly the right deviations. After 2016, this gigantic counteroffensive happened where the state tried to, and more generally the establishment, constrained by the First Amendment. So the state couldn't directly regulate free speech. So instead, it tried to decentralize censorship by pressuring all these companies using social media, ironically enough, to censor social media, right?

Using Twitter cancellation campaigns and so forth, as we all lived through. Literally quartering Twitter's offices with FBI agents to censor particular individuals. But they just couldn't keep up the energy, or they left a door unlocked, because it's still nominally a corporation. And one guy was able to walk through that door. I mean, you basically had to be Elon Musk to do what he did, right? because like you know a 44 billion dollar hostile takeover there's not too many people in the world with the capability to do that and the will to do it and to hit the wall of fire that that he did you know because he hit quite a lot of flack right oh yes and then to fire go ahead oh no yeah i mean

he he got the shit storm thrown at him absolutely and then firing all those people and turning the thing around and stabilizing the thing and everything that he did net net now six months later seven months later we have true true freedom of speech right or at least we have a law in moderation as different from blue moderation right every other platform you can post and you'll be blue moderate and if you want to post that way you can but at least you've got a different version here which is a law in moderation go ahead you're gonna say yeah no it's uh the transition to Twitter. I mean, obviously like the stuff with Turkey a couple of weeks ago, it's like, ah, well, yeah. I mean, the thing is he can't fight,

he can't fight every single country at the same time. And in, in a real sense the U S establishment is the most committed enemy of civil liberties and free speech around the world. And Turkey just doesn't have that power over everybody else in the same way. Right? Like literally that thing where like China was right about internet control or here's another example. Like let's see if I can find this one. Um, you can, by the way, you can cut out my reaching forward. Okay.

I hear you're a little weird. Uh, there we go. Here, look at like NYT literally runs headlines like free speech is killing us, you know? Um, and, uh, here you can just, you can cut out my little Google prompt or whatever. there. Free speech is killing us. Noxious language online is calling real world violence. What can we do about it? AKA censorship, right? So like there's the most committed enemy of freedom around the world, free speech, you know, civil liberties is the blue American. Like that's it, right? Turkey is downstream of that. None of that actually matters in my view. It's literally

NYT that is advocating saying free speech is killing us, right? The Atlantic saying China was right on internet censorship it's not even masked or hidden it's like right out there you know um so that's why you know elan is basically husbanding his political capital to fight the battle that matters and uh you know because other ones are all downstream of that um with that said like different countries are going to have different norms and different levels of moderation they're all going to build their own sovereign social networks like a lot of the stuff will become commodity over time, right? There'll be some, you know, remember Orkut? I don't know if you remember Orkut. Orkut was, I think it was a network by a Turkish guy that was, was Orkut big

in Turkey? Orkut was big in like Turkey and Brazil, I think. It was an early social network that was popular, you know, around the time of Facebook. It got pretty big. Anyway, so they may have their own like Orchid 2.0 for like Turkey or something like that. So coming back to the SAC. So basically, I think it is it is possible as a sci fi scenario, it is possible that if red states really lean into Bitcoin, and as you know, I'll just enumerate most of our most of viewers probably know this, but like Mississippi and Montana, thanks to like Satoshi Action and with Dennis Porter, they have Bitcoin Miner Protection Act. It's not just him, but a lot of people, but he's worked hard on that.

Texas has the right to hold Bitcoin, shall not be infringed. Colorado accepts Bitcoin for taxes. New Hampshire has very friendly cryptocurrency laws. Tennessee and Wyoming have Dow laws. Florida is against CBDC officially, and DeSantis is officially pro-Bitcoin. Suarez and Mayor Adams of Miami, Mayor Suarez of Miami and Mayor Eric Adams of New York accept Bitcoin for salary and so on and so forth. There's quite a lot of red states, purple states that are pro-Bitcoin now, legislatively,

as you're aware, right? So I think the next step right now, when we talk about the fiat crisis, the establishment is waging war. One way of thinking about it is the U.S. is not one country. It's two parties. Did I show you those graphs? Yeah. I mean, let me just bring that up if I haven't shown that.

Well, yeah. I mean, you're seeing these trends pop up, too. I'm not sure if you've been paying attention to what's going on in Idaho and Oregon with the— Tell me about that. A lot of the counties in eastern Oregon are seceding to Idaho. I think they just had— Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

That's right. Right. So, you know, the dynamic geography is going to happen, right? Where people are the big sort, right? So here, let me show you some graphs, right? You've probably seen this, but just see it in one place. It's not one country, it's two parties. Like you can't have nationalism if there is no nation. Like what's a nation? A nation is like, you can think of it as a lot of things, but a good way to think of it as a nation is a group of people that think of themselves as a people. But right now, Democrats are nationalists for Democrats, for the Democrat nation. What I mean by that is, this is a seven-year trend, by the way. This has been

happening for a long time, even by 2011. This is congressional votes, by the way. All blues vote with the blues. All reds vote with the reds. This is like the 9-11 votes or whatever, but it's very partisan, very little overlap. And what I mean, and this is also now visible, by the way, at the level of individual social networks, even by 2017, the red network was over here, the blue network was over here. They didn't friend each other, didn't follow each other. Okay, they're growing apart. Also, Democrats don't marry Republicans. Okay, only 4% of marriages in this study are between Democrats and Republicans. Okay, that's pretty insane. That means ideology becomes biology in one generation. These are ethnic groups. Go ahead. I haven't seen that stat before. That's

pretty jarring. Yeah. So that's the thing is, this is becoming something that's more Sunni versus Shiite. It already is Sunni versus Shiite or Hutu Tutsi than it is like a difference over policy. It's tribal, literally tribal. Okay. Also Democrats don't hire Republicans, right? If any Democrat controlled institution, like whether it's universities or it's like the New York times or something like that, they don't hire Republicans. Okay. And like 91% of faculty were Democrats and 888, 808 departments do not employ a single Republican in this study. Okay. there's lots of other studies like this. Okay. So Democrats don't marry Republicans. Democrats don't hire Republicans. Democrats certainly don't vote for Republicans. And now Republicans are

returning the favor. Okay. So blues and reds have partitioned at the level of both network and state. Like blues have built one party Democrat states in Washington and California, and reds are now doing the reverse in Florida and Texas. Okay. So sociopolitical divergence is accelerating And you're seeing states, you see this graph like gun laws are diverging, abortion rights are diverging, marijuana, drug legalization is diverging, homeschooling, education, post-COVID, that's a huge issue, that's diverging, right, with me so far? School choice. School choice, exactly. It's going to be a political or a campaign. It's already huge.

This guy, Corey DeAngelis, is a great person worth following. So so basically, these these states are becoming as different as different countries. And so they may be. OK, now, both sides have actually made attempts to put the country back together on their terms. Like woke is on one way of thinking about it is it's a Democrat attempt to make Republicans knuckle under by accusing them of being insufficiently anti-racist. And nationalism is like, go ahead. Yeah, it's just hilarious. I mean, it's hilarious how comical it's gotten. like the memes like you're a white supremacist you're i mean it's a latino white supremacist or whatever yeah exactly it's ridiculous right what they actually mean by that by the way

is if you want yeah again it's obvious but the secret decoder ring is um within the u.s when they say white they mean republican yes right that's actually what it means right so you're republican he's a republican supremacist you know like against they're against republican supremacy, meaning they don't want Republicans to run things. And the way you can tell is all of the blues that in 2020, they tore their shirts and they said how guilty they were. Oh my God, they feel so guilty for their white privilege, blah, blah, blah. It's a systemically racist country. They tear down George Washington, all of this shit, right? They did this in 2020. Then two years later, less than two years later, okay, they are telling Africans and Indians that their country is the champion of democracy and that all people of color should trust them and side with them.

Okay, that was the pitch in like March 2022, right? So not even two years after saying that the U.S. was a systemically racist country that was horrifically – that no personal color could ever trust, they went with a straight face to India and Africa and so on. And they said, oh, you need to back us to the hill because we're like the good guys championing democracy, right? And now what's actually happening, by the way – what's funny is when you point this out to these blues, they're actually often shocked. They actually didn't even remember. It's very convenient that they didn't remember. Well, a couple of that was like Biden going like, you're not black if you don't vote for me. That's right. So what's actually happening here is they're genuinely surprised that you would bring up something from two years ago.

But if you actually just look at it from the tribal lens, they were, quote, against white supremacy when they were attacking Republicans and they were in a tribal war with Republicans. Once Blue Tribe pivoted to fighting Russians, now they're the champion of democracy. right now they're obviously the champion of human rights and all people of color should trust them and they're on the side of the good guys right um and so you know of course this propaganda is so like anybody with a you know an ai there's a concept of context window like how much how much history you have right and like the smarter the ai the more history and context it has on something so if you have a context window that's more than like like a month like a week okay you can now just totally cut this propaganda to shreds by simply quoting them from like two years

ago against them today right go ahead again it's comical it's comical there's no logical consistency there's no retrospective introspection there's no and what it is is i think they are selected actually for being you know the concept like a method actor yep like a method actor same character oh no that's that's like a character actor like a character actor yeah yeah so it's like a method actor you know they inhabit the the the spirit of the character they're playing it's like um i am batman i growl even when i'm offset go ahead yes the dude who played elvis i was still in brooklyn when they were uh they were filming that and he was like wearing like tight jeans and a in a tight black shirt with cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve he was method acting that's right

So these guys are many of them are method actors. They're NPCs where they get the software update and then they instantly now believe the same thing. And they've always believed it. Right. I mean, I can find things from like 2020 or earlier where I talk about Walter Durante and how the New York Times choked out Ukraine and how the Oxelsbergers profited from from this. And they didn't return the Pulitzer or anything like that. Oxelsberg, that's a family that owns the New York Times. By the way, like, they trash everybody as being, for a decade, everybody else was, you know, white and this and that. And I'm not the kind of person, by the way, who thinks white is an insult, okay? But these guys are, you know, the family that owns the New York Times is literally rich white nepotists, you know? And, like, you know, in particular, they trash, like, Mark Zuckerberg so hard. But you know what? Zuckerberg built his fortune and Salzberger inherited his. like they just like hate merit and so on anyway point is uh before 2020 i used to sometimes talk

about waltz durante in ukraine you know what i'd get back often on twitter or else you know people would tell me to be like policy nobody cares about ukraine that's what they would say okay they'd be like yeah i mean they thought of ukraine as like if i said bolivia today who cares about bolivia right they literally honestly truly didn't care they had no emotional reaction to it whatsoever someone would even deny to me that you know oh stalin didn't actually even mean to do it or this kind of stupid stuff right we obviously choked out the entire country then a couple of years later stand with ukraine you know like with the flag and so it's flagging the energy yeah flagging the profile i'm actually i'm actually i'm sympathetic to i mean the ukrainians

had a tough century like they're like the polls you know they got crushed by multiple people overrun, starved. I'm sympathetic to them. The average Ukrainian has had a pretty tough time of it. But this really cynical regime operative who don't even think of them. You know what they're actually like in China? And this is actually a funny parallel. Most people have done this. Do you know how many... In China, by the way, they don't call it CCP. They call it CPC. And CCP is a tell that you're hostile to China. CPC is what they call it within China, Okay. Communist Party of China.

Do you know how many CPC members there are? No. What's your guess? 800? Yeah, it's actually. So that's a really good question, right? There's actually 100 million CPC members. CPC.

It's about. So on the one hand, it's like a huge number of people. On their hand, it's like 6% of society. Yeah. Okay. And it's like a. I thought that would have been flipped. well i mean it's 1.4 billion people or whatever so even even 100 million people it's actually a

relatively small group okay yeah and what does a cpc member do well first they're expected to kind of be like an example to their community they're constantly watching out for deviations from the party line um they will keep they will read the official things from like journals like qxi which kind of explain what xi and and the the central committee have decided and then they will explain them in their own words they'll write longhand interpretations of them and so on and so forth right and that sounds really boring until you realize that america is an analog you know the the nyc subscriber is almost exactly analogous to the the cpc member in china okay millions of people subscribe to that official regime outlet and then they pass opinions off as

if they're on their own and they're looking for deviations from wrong think within their company right and just like the di officer in the u.s that's like the ccp officer at every company in china to make sure you're not too divergent from the party line yeah okay and it's it's like it's amazing how you know obviously there's some differences in the systems but it's really kind of impressive how it's like evolved to be the same type of thing you know oh and it's and go ahead it's insane how they'll get the message and they'll run with it like learn to code is my favorite example like when they were telling all the coal miners to go learn to code then as soon as there were layoffs and uh in the media sector and people were like that was banned on twitter

holding up a mirror literally banned the hashtag right right exactly right and you know the thing is that um i actually you know some of them i assume are good people right so to speak in the sense of what i mean by that is um i think most of the media is just like has become or genuinely evil. But there were people who just liked to write about travel or something like that, you know, and those all got filtered out. And only those people who just enjoyed knifing people for the regime, those became like the dominant voices within the media, especially by the late 2010s. You know, part of it is because the pay in media became so poor after the financial crisis, like normal people couldn't actually have a job in media anymore. You had to be a totally

status hungry sociopathic usually born rich kid so that's the secret by the way lots of these journos have trust funds of some kind right it's not just ox salzberger you know arthur salzberger the ox salzberger family it's like kara swisher is born rich right so many of these journos went to like expensive private schools and so on and so forth and you know who they hate the most new money yeah the new right exactly the first gen you know like like lots of tech guys right founder not the inheritor exactly that's right so that's actually by the way just to talk about that for a second this is one of the least documented i think it's actually even more important in some ways than the blue red political axis is the blue gray political axis okay so blue

read we hear lots and lots about that that you know a lot about democrat republican but let's talk about like establishment versus tech because obviously elan is a huge part of this whole thing and it's kind of you know gray is its own small but very high strength to waste your race your tribe one way of thinking about gray tribe is it have you heard the term gray tribe before by the way no okay it comes from like scott alexander uh his blog in 2014 one way of thinking about it is know how like yale split off from harvard right grays are like blue defectors you know raised in blue cities often went to blue colleges but did math and science and computer science not humanities and other stuff and what happened and then a lot of them came from abroad okay and so silicon valley

was like the main gray outpost but now it's decentralized like now gray is global there's tech and entrepreneurship and venture capital worldwide. Most of the unicorns are now outside the United States. Most of the investment is now outside the United States. A lot of that stuff is happening outside. I'm not saying San Francisco or California isn't still a center. It is a center, but there's other centers. And so the thing is that the blue versus gray split is worth really understanding because that's the elite and the counter elite in the sense that Of course, these are these are porous boundaries. OK, but. Essentially, if you think about how blues relate to reds, Jon Stewart is just contemptuous of your average southerner, OK, that he's constantly shitting on them. And part of that, part of the reason is that the Red, I mean, what is a Republican Harvard?

Is it like Hillsdale, right? What is a Republican Hollywood? It's some, I don't know, some people making memes online, you know? In many ways, the Reds are just, you know, they have Fox News, I guess, right? They kind of have like the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. But for the most part, the Reds are playing at a huge disadvantage relative to Blue's control of institutions. But grays set up their own institutions or their new things. And so, you know, like what is a competitor to Hollywood? Well, actually, YouTube and Netflix and so on are actually better than Hollywood in some ways. And what's a competitor to Harvard? Well, online education, again, YouTube, but also Coursera, Udacity, etc. Now, the counter argument is blues have recaptured some of this gray territory. The counter counter argument is grays can keep founding new ones and they are doing so. And you're also seeing, especially post Trump, that gray kind of founder CEO spirit assert itself against Elizabeth Warren types.

You know, one way of thinking about like the gray kind of founder, CEO, and like Jack, Jack Dorsey is kind of like this, um, not to call out any one person, but many of them just couldn't really respect Trump because they didn't think he was as good a CEO or founder as they were. You know, that's like, that's, that's reductionist, but it's funnily, they didn't want to report to a man that they didn't think of as like better at executing than they were, you know, but they also don't want to fold into like, like this extremely stupid regime that, that is in power now. Right. So they're just like, you know, you don't become a billionaire founder CEO without a very strong will to power. You know, some of them, like the older ones, you know, they become like, you know, Bill Gates and they go and do the giving pledge or whatever. And they just kind of they accept the establishment bridal, you know, but enough grays have gone rogue, as you've seen. Right. And it's it's a lawn, obviously. That's that's that's the most public one. But Dorsey, obviously, Mark Anderson is being very public. You know, Saks with all in. Right. Quite a few grays have now, you know, they're not, you know, and I think I think in my own way, I think I've contributed to this, you know, hopefully a positive way.

I would never go to the south and like, you know, or even Texas and pretend that I was like going to be shooting guns and one of the good old boys, something like that. Right. That's your culture. That's your people's culture. I'm not saying that in a patronizing way at all. Just like my people's culture is those and fire chatham and Vada from like South India. All right. Right. Of course, there's aspects of American culture that we both share. But for lack of a better term, the gray or the tech libertarian-ish kind of person, the tech CEO, the tech founder, and the red, this is actually also in some ways crypto and Bitcoin in terms of those two different cultures. There are overlaps, and there are shared areas of interest as opposed to blue. Maybe that's all obvious. But I think one thing that is underappreciated by lots of reds is how much gray and blue have fought over the last 10 years.

The very explicit is the political fights, you know, which you see it's labeled between Democrat and Republican. But it's incredibly visible within tech, at least, that the establishment also hates the tech guys. They hate and they managed to capture the big tech companies. Right. They managed to capture Amazon and others with blues. And actually, if you notice, many of those CEOs have left because the organization is overrun with blues. But they haven't captured the brains of the next generation. And a lot of the folks who are founders of 100 billion or 10 billion dollar companies are just pure gray and they're not blue. Even red sympathetic in some ways. Right. At least today. however i think enough reds are now mad at gray because they i saw this during svb a lot of reds have been convinced that all grays are blue i mean particularly with like the censorship during the election exactly with all that and it's left a really bad taste in everybody's mouth of course and i totally understand that what basically happened is over the course of the

See, the original kind of gray spirit, like early 2000s, even before gray tribe was like even a thing, was like Linux and open source. And it was like a fight the man kind of culture, right? And it was Twitter called itself the free speech ring of the free speech party. And Google, it would laugh if you ever said that anybody would censor their search and so on. This was how they were in the 2000s and the early 2010s before it was considered a threat to the regime. what happened in the mid 2010s especially after 2012 is and that was actually the exact moment starting in spring of 2013 is when the tech lash by blue against gray began and basically what happened just to show you this chart um

well as you're describing all this i think what many would define as like bitcoin maximalists they're like the red and the gray coming together getting back yeah yes there is an aspect of that the thing is that um i think yes there's absolutely an aspect of that now let me talk about that uh here here we go ready look at this this is like a really important graph to keep in mind to understand the just degree of economic warfare between blues and grays. Okay. Can you see this graph? Yep. Okay. So this is newspaper advertising revenue adjusted for inflation. Okay. 1950 to 2014. So for most of the century, like it was good to be blue, you know, like peak was like 2000,

almost $70 billion in ad revenue. And what this meant is you could write like five or 10 articles a year you could fly around smoke cigars being like a time journalist was like an awesome job you had a lot of influence you had um you know a pretty easy schedule uh you could write about what you wanted it was actually a pretty good job right then you know things were kind of flattened after you know the financial crisis the dot-com crash right uh but they were okay And this was the period where like tech was ignored after the, you know, dot-com crash. And this was like the period of, um, you know, Iraq and, and, and all this type of stuff. And, you know, it's media was just kind of doing its own thing.

Then suddenly once a financial crisis hit their revenue, Google had been scaling during that time. And at this point, all these advertisers were like, let me look for a more efficient channel. it was 2008 the internet was still actually pretty new but it wasn't brand brand brand new and so all this money suddenly went to google look at that look at that absolutely massive drop off okay this thing all the print media all these journos saw all their money go to google like overnight do you see that yep okay and then facebook zoom like this okay so by by you know It took them one election cycle to adapt because in 2012, right, the, I don't know if you remember this, Facebook was still considered to be, and social media was considered to be pro-Democrat, right, meaning, you know, when the nerds go marching in, right, like, you know, how a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's re-election, okay?

November 16, 2012. Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. Hope, change. Hope, change. Well, actually, no. This is a re-election.

Okay? All right? And even in May of 2012, okay, they were writing articles like, there's no such thing as a brogrammer, May of 2012. Okay? Okay. But by the, oops, by the next year, okay, but not even one year later, okay, or maybe like, it's actually sooner than this, but by August 2013, would you just look at all these rich people? that's valuable editorial vision and that should be so much more essentially they were just um attacking tech people every single day in very slanderous terms for anything they did very

personal attacks right bitter venomous attacks okay and uh you know we're talking like lying about them stalking them all this type of stuff you could just be an executive at any company you could be a random engineer they just target you for cancellation okay were you aware of this all that stuff Peter Thiel yeah exactly that's right all those guys right and I think you were probably aware that they had done this like Peter Thiel but you may not be aware or your audience may not be aware that they did this to like everybody in tech okay and the reason they were doing this is because they lost so much money to tech and they couldn't build search engines or uh, or, or write social networks, you know, what they could do is they could, uh, create stories

and shape narratives. And so they essentially wrote a story where tech guys were bad and they were good. And, you know, tech was uniquely vulnerable to this. You know why it's because in the two thousands, uh, the very early two thousands, there was this guy, Terry Semel, who ran Yahoo. And he was like an old media guy. And he tried to do like TV on the internet way before broadband was feasible. And what everybody in tech learned from that was you don't do content. Instead, you build a dumb pipe. Google, YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, all of them are based on just all the technical problems. And we're not building any content ourselves. The users are bringing the content and we're just totally neutral. Maybe we filter porn and spam, but

that's about it and let them go for it, right? First of all, that was a good thing to do because content has risk. You know, when you fund content, you're paying money for it. User-generated content, no risk. They're taking all the risk on it. You know, they're generating the content, whether it's a video or a post, right? So user-generated content was this amazing innovation. And for basically 12 years, it was awesome because tech could just focus on the tech and then other people brought their own content. Until 2013, when now media still controlled content and decided to go to war with tech basically was after tech had helped get obama re-elected that the knives came out with me so far okay yeah so then so for the next six years

um you know you can see it by the way it's not something you know i uh well this is why the trend of like own your content strategy or distribution is becoming bigger at least that's exactly that's That's right. So, I'm going to get to this. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, here. Can you see that? Facebook Things and New York Times coverage of it has gotten more critical. It has. January 2019, okay? So, you know, generally, NYT articles were positive on Facebook. And notice they started trending down before the election. And then they got really negative, right? So, that trend line is happening before you know um october 2016 or november 2016 okay and the reason is the tech clash had already begun and um you could see it burgeoning and uh so essentially what was the

consequence of that by stalking all kinds of people in tech by canceling them this is actually why san francisco became such a shithole anybody who pointed out the homeless problem in san cisco was hammered online so all the tech guys learned to not talk about it and so just got worse and worse and worse and uh this is also why all kinds of wokes got pushed into tech companies because you're constantly trolled for your quote lack of diversity by you know and look this this honestly feels like uh multiple generations ago at this point but um what's funny about this here look at this tech look i i'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult but the journalists are and they would constantly call tech white white white white white oh my god

you're so white blah blah and there are 40 30 to 40 points wider than than tech is which is like mostly you know immigrants you see this graph yeah right so it's a complete inversion of reality to go after tech for being quote, you know, racist or cliquish or whatever, when this is basically an entirely a thing the journals were just projecting, right? Nevertheless, that race trolling was successful in getting a bunch of DI type people into tech companies in the 2010s. And that is how the internet censorship stuff was affected. Okay. So blues affected essentially a social war hostile takeover of gray institutions and partly of course there were grays i mean one way of thinking about is lots of grays are math guys and they went to

college and alongside like the math and programming stuff that was installed in their head they also got humanities malware okay and so it's like you've seen the movie the manchurian candidate Yes. Right? So they had this latent blue malware that they've gotten installed at Harvard or Stanford or MIT. And they didn't take it too seriously. But then in 2013 or 2014, when, you know, the New York Times started broadcasting the signal, right, their eyes started glowing blue. And within these organizations, they became like blue zombies.

Yes. Okay. It was like awakening that latent malware. all the moral premises. Because the thing is, most people don't go and wipe and reinstall their moral operating software too many times in their life. Very few people do that. Most people keep the default installed that they had in K-12 and college, and they just don't think that deeply about it for the rest of their life, especially lots of tech guys. It's just sitting there like a zero day. Exactly, right? So they had gone to these woke madrasas, right? That's what Harvard

and so on are that we should install this humanities malware and you know to mix metaphors and so then hitting the right button at the right time their eyes glue glue blue and they didn't have counter arguments against it right they didn't you know there's a few people who are like born to argue like like you or me or whatever not too many people are like born to argue right and to be good at math or whatever it's actually a relatively rare combination so so that is how gray got this is the thing i was mentioning before where blues at simultaneous war with trump tech russia china and blue is good at getting groups to fight each other so blue got gray to hit red and now red i think in a in a kind of reactive way thinks all tech

is woke it is true now i mean it's good that like sax and elon and dorsey and anderson and others are out there in different ways of course they all don't agree with each other you know um that's the thing they're not um it's not like a movement like uh like the books the books are one borg that has one party line right the the grays all have their own character and they have obvious disagreements with each other or whatever at times but they are human beings you know they have their own opinions and so on so anyway that's while while digressive i think it's really important to understand for people to understand that there's lots of grays tech guys who are not blue They may not be red either. And why might they not be red? It's because more than 50 percent are immigrants, you know, so like they're, you know, they're Korean or they're Chinese or they're Indian or they're Persian or they're, you know, like from the Middle East or something like that.

And, um, they just, you know, they weren't raised like five generations in America or something like that. This also, by the way, is actually why, um, you know, the reason the blue gray divergence is so extreme is, well, first, grays were in Silicon Valley and blues were in, you know, the, the New York, Boston, Washington corridor. So geographically, they were separate. Second, demographically, blues didn't really – if you were in a blue household and one of your – your spouse went to zero because their advertising went away, if you married like a Google executive and it balanced out, you might not have been so mad. But they were across the country. So they didn't have like inter household kind of thing, right? So demographically, they're different, because blues are like disproportionately old money, northeastern establishment, and grays are disproportionately like tech, especially Asian immigrants, Indian immigrants, and so on. And the third is ideologically and just kind of personality-wise, blues are verbal and political and media-oriented and so on. And grays are, you know, quote, autistic in the sense of, you know, good with computers, good with math, literal, you know, numerical, et cetera. So those three differences, the geographical, the demographic, and the psychological, led to like a partition here between like the, quote, elite and the counter elite. And it didn't necessarily have to happen that way. Um, you know, there's alternate realities where if Steve jobs hadn't died, for example,

it's possible that Bezos bought the post jobs, bought the times and Larry Page or Zuckerberg buys the wall street journal. And if so, we'd be on Mars by now. Okay. Well, I really do. I really do believe that. And the reason I do believe that is a huge part of the last 10 years is, um, so have you seen the graph of like woke words going through the roof? Oh, yes. That's what I was going to say. Like talking about the blues attacking everybody at the same time that in 2013, they were coming after tech for DEI stuff. They were the utterance of like anti-racist and white supremacy started going through the roof. That's exactly right. And so the thing is, the way to understand it is the New York Times in particular caused a trillion dollars or more of damage to

a social fabric to make a billion dollars in stock revenue, okay? So here, this is New York Times word usage frequency, okay, 1970 to 2018, okay? And this is the, let me see if I can zoom in on the graph. So sexism, misogyny, all this stuff, right, goes out, I mean, and you've got control words by the way like amazon is like on a natural exponential right um you know but there's other things that are on fake exponentials like intersectionality that's an editorial decision right these words don't appear there by accident it's an editorial decision to appear there and now recently they've made an editorial decision to remove it okay they're there if you notice they're much less woke in the it's like it's like pouring chemicals into the water

supply, right? One way of thinking about it is, um, if you've seen the NYT stock price, I have not checked it. I can't imagine it's doing well. Well, here we are. So ready? Um, basically they, so especially after the financial crisis, they got absolutely crushed. Okay. They're down, they're down from like, you know, um, pre financial crisis, they were like 26, whatever. right and then afterwards they just tanked all the way down to like 442 okay can you see my cursor there right yep and then they were kind of like just bumping along the bottom and they had to take out this whole loan from carlos slim and then in you know it's huge it's a big loan from carlos slim they kind of rattled up a little bit and then they discovered like you know woke trolling

and political warfare with trump in particular and whoosh all the way up over here right they They basically, you know, essentially to late 2021, mid-late 2021, they basically, I shouldn't say 10x their stock price. I don't know, it was like 5x or something like that. And so the Ox-Sulzbergers that own the New York Times made hundreds of millions of dollars from this, but they did so at the cost of tearing the social fabric. okay and just to you know put not to find a point on it um here is uh you know here's like a whatever here's like a graphic of this okay so they published their proxy statement so you can actually see right and um and by the way you know what's funny is you would recognize mark zuckerberg right you've seen mark zuckerberg's face a thousand times right you would not

recognize arthur g salzberger the guy who owns the new york times nope all right and yet isn't that amazing this guy who is surrounded by a thousand journalists at all times you've never heard of him it's the only person who has privacy in the world yeah it's kind of amazing right like i don't agree with every decision zuck has taken but zuck is at least like the man in the arena taking the hits and you know one thing again to know about like zuck and facebook is a lot of his people went became blue zombies at the same time so he couldn't like fire half his company in fact i'll show you something that he did in 2019 zuck gave a talk on free expression in 2019 where um which he did not have to do right basically here

that's zuck's interesting particularly right now it seems like he's He's, I don't know if you would call it a mea culpa or something like that, but he called out the FBI and their pressure. And now he's getting called jacked, doing combat sports, like finding his man. Exactly. This thing, I'm trying, I mean, there are folks within Gray. I mean, Gray is a spectrum, right? There's folks like, let's say, Mark Benioff or the eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, who are just true blue all the way through, basically, right? With exceptions.

It's complicated. sometimes they'll you know they'll support somebody else but like zuck really is zuck was somebody whose hand was forced and wasn't in full control of his org in my view right someone like jack okay and yeah you can see like zuck lifting and you look at bezos getting jacked and so on these guys you know these are wilt power founders who did not like knuckling under to the establishment but in many ways invisible to the public had a gun to their head i mean in in its own way, like, you know, you might think, oh, this guy who's like super rich has all this optionality that, uh, like a, like, um, an employee of some company doesn't, right. That's actually

often not true. And what I mean by that is, yeah, sure. They can buy like a bigger car or something, but if you're a CEO of a very large company, you're very constrained in what you can say and what you can do. There's so many people who are paying attention to every word you say. And in fact, um, especially if you're like a really famous billionaire, uh, there's people who spend an entire year or multiple years trying to get like one meeting with you, you know, and they're there, they are like analyzing you like a, like a, like a CIA officer. And, and, you know, so this is actually why, for example, why does, uh, you know, both Zuck and G do this, they maintain an impassive expression.

The reason they do that is even like a smile or something like that in a meeting will be like, oh, he endorses my thing. He's going to invest $10 million, and people run off half-cocked like that. Right? Yeah, it's like Janet Yellen wearing a purple jacket. She's wearing royal colors. Yeah, yeah. She's very confident right now. Exactly.

It's kind of like that, where you cannot really – the larger the organization you're running, the harder it is to just actually be a human being. Elon is the exception that proves the rule, you know, and maybe we're going back into the time of actual individuals running something. But at least during the period I'm talking about in the 2010s. Anyway, I'm just explaining that lots of gray isn't blue. It's not necessarily red, but it's definitely not blue. And now that there isn't one clear leader in the US anymore, they don't have to knuckle under to Trump. It's kind of a free for all. It just feels like a totally different world than even 2020. Like it is digital glasnost. Like some icebergs are broken. because I'm not sure exactly when it happened. But sometime in

2021 2022, it became difficult to cancel people. I think good. I think you have to do one of its vaccine. It's like going from safe and effective to obviously not effective and arguably not safe, really set off something in people's heads where it's like, wow, you just lied to us locked us down. It's something where it's funny, it's I would love to see a quantification of this, but I feel it's something where blues have just lost so much support from so many different groups because they fought everybody at the same time, you know,

like lots and lots of tech guys, for example, just like a small thing, some like a, you mentioned the vaccines. That's, that's a big thing in your neighborhood, right? A big thing in my social neighborhood was the, you know, New York times attacking Scott Alexander. okay who writes writes this popular blog journalists versus rationalists and from that tons and tons and tons of very smart people who are good at arguing on the internet got for lack of a better term red-pilled because they're like wait a second the new york times is lying about scott alexander what else are they lying about they're like they're they're wildly distorting him right and that's that's the thing that breaks the illusion the gentleman amnesia people have to

see a falsification of something that's close to them to see that they're lying about everything. But anyway, so, so yeah, I think you're right about, you know, COVID lockdowns. I think it's fighting with other tribes. What it is, is they've blue can only defend blue. Now blue can no longer blue, no longer has, you know, in football, like there's a free safety, like run and just tackle somebody, right. Blue no longer has free safeties. I started noticing this around the time of uh the joe rogan thing with spotify right blue used to have enough troops that on social media if one person liked a comment defending somebody who's being canceled they would get pile drive too right so blue used to just have total you know just just a bunch of enforcers

running around right and then they just the thing is to do that you have to be like 99 one but by the time of the rogan thing with spotify yes they could grind out a win they did manage to get spotify to pull down some rogan episodes or whatever but they couldn't cancel everybody who supported rogan and so if you graph it right you're going from 99.1 to like 55.45 because i graphed some of these things right yeah it has like a diminishing diminishing marginal return on utility essentially yeah exactly their ability to cancel was dropping off right also another example of this in 2020 for years before they had been canceling tech execs left and right okay for anything and everything oh my god just they

literally they have some slack room or they find the latest tech guy they just attack them like rabid dogs right and then in 2020 we had just an absolute donnybrook back and forth between tech in media. And the crucial thing was, the tech now had a spinal column, and was actually pushing back gray was pushing back on blue. And there's like, I won't bore you with every single back and forth there. But the fundamental thing is blue is waving that cancellation one really, really hard. And when it doesn't work, and when other people see it's not working, and when the target of it is not apologizing and not backing down, and crucially has enough social support that they're not fired or whatever then it like it kind of breaks the cancellation one's power because it

has to be like one shot one kill you know so blue is now kind of retreated to uh like their media power their soft power is gone but they still have two powers left the money power and the military power yes the intelligence apparatus which is it's going to be crazy right do you want to pause for like uh two minutes i'll just get some water then let's talk fiat crisis yes we can do that okay okay good so basically uh to to quickly summarize the last few hours of a prelude right a um we're now in a multi-polar world china is actually quite strong foreign affairs has admitted that it's a multi-polar world um you know uh folks like fiona hill have given speeches saying that. So A, it's a multipolar world. B, the U.S. media has exhausted their, it's spent

down all their trust. Like the graphs look like this, you know, they spent out all their trust and Blue Tribe used U.S. media to capture good parts of the U.S. establishment, like especially at the federal level and big parts of tech, but they spent out all their trust to get that. They just exhausted that weapon. The soft power is gone. And there's a significant difference between gray and blue, which we talked about. And gray is not blue, but gray is also not red. It's kind of like a third tribe or whatever. Sort of like, I don't know, Kurds and Iranians and Sunnis, you know, all in the Middle East are like actually different tribes. Some of them might be small, but they punch above their weight or whatever, right?

And fourth, it's not one party. It's not one country. It's at least two parties. I showed those graphs where it showed how pulled apart the parties are, right, socially and cognitively. It's not really one country. You can't think of it as a single unit anymore. So now putting that all together, that's like the state of affairs, right?

blue tribe is losing abroad because losing control of the world and it's losing at home because losing control of the country and it's used its media weapon and it's exhausted that but it has two weapons left there's media there's money there's military and so right now we're in the middle of blue using the money weapon and when i say blue is using it right uh what people immediately jump to is like oh my god what is a conspiracy theory blah blah and the thing about this is when it was like communism, right? Then you had Stalin, you had Mao, you actually had a guy in charge, and they did all kinds of KGB subversion, you know, type stuff. And we found out later that actually, you know, the Soviets had riddled the US government with spies, there's

a Venona decrypts and all that type of stuff. So that those quote, conspiracy theories were real. Today, it's we're dealing not with communism, which is centralized left, but wokeness is decentralized left. And so it's adapted in a different way where it doesn't have one single guy in charge. There's nodes, there's influential groups or whatever, but there's no one single person or whatever, like a Stalin who's like directing things. So it's not a centralized thing. What it is though, I think is it's tribal in the following sense. If you just give one premise, which is that every blue in the U.S. establishment, whenever they make a decision, they're thinking about the politics of it. OK, and that's not a big premise. OK, that's a pretty

reasonable thing to say. They're not simply thinking country first. They're also thinking party first. Remember, 96 percent of Democrats are not married to Republicans. They are nationalists for Democrats, increasingly just as Republicans are becoming nationalists for Republicans. Right. It's not one country. It's two parties. Once you think about it that way, if every decision that you're making as a government official, you're calculating, does this help blue or does this hurt red or gray or ideally both? Okay, example. Remember in late 2021, there was like just the notification on COVID that went out and they were like, I hope you die, Republicans.

Do you remember that? Yes, the winter of death. The winter of death. I forget the exact language, but it's just not something that you would expect a government agency to ever put out, right? If it was like for all the people, but it's not for all the people. It was like Sunni talking to Shiites or Huru to Tutsis or whatever, right? It was, it was Democrat to Republican.

That's, that's like a, those are two different tribes, right? Democrat doesn't value Republicans in the same way as they do to other blues and increasingly vice versa. So once you just have that one premise, that blue is calculating the politics of every decision, does it help blue or hurt gray or red? And by the way, anybody who's in a position to make that decision has to be very good at blue politics to get there, right? They're usually a political appointee, you know, or they're somebody who is favored enough by the blue establishment to have that position today, right? So they are a political calculator. They're good at that, okay?

this multiplied across 20 different agencies is how you get something that looks like a coordinated attack against gray and red. Okay. Because the guy at the SEC, now crucially, there's sometimes door jams where the SEC guy and the CFTC guy are calculating blue interests and red and gray hurt, but they're also calculating their own self-interest. And so SEC and CFTC both try to regulate the same product and they have a door jam, right? So this accounts for the degree of disorganization and collisions we often see where these agencies get in each other's way, right? Still, once you have this premise, now you see, okay, that's how it looks like the SEC and the Fed and Warren and this and that and so on are all attacking Bitcoin banks and the crypto

industry at the same time. They kind of are, but they're taking cues horizontally and tribally. Okay. And, and I think that's a good model for how it works. You literally only have one premise, which is they're politically calculating decision. And when you do that, you get something where, for example, let's take the tribal filter and apply it to the current banking situation. So as your viewers may know, um, banks started dying about, you know, eight weeks ago with, uh, with the collapse of SVB, Signature, Silvergate, Credit Suisse, and First Republic. And there's others that are now, quite a few others that are now publicly struggling. And this is a quote, you know, somebody called it a bank walk rather than a bank run at Bianca Research.

because banks don't have other numbers on chain. So you only get them with quarterly reports. So deposits are moving, but you don't get really great real-time analytics until every quarter. So as quarterly reports come out, there's a huge update to the system. Everyone's like, oh, my God, that bank has huge losses, and you'll see more banks collapse or have problems.

So that's kind of why the tick-tock clock of this is sort of quarterly. Right. And if you look at the stock prices, it's literally like they're walking a plank. They'll like drop. Yeah. Teeter off. Exactly. Good. That's right. As more information comes. Exactly. That's right. So for your viewers to understand what happened, I can give like a short version and more complicated version, more complicated version. One of the things the system is set up to do is make simple things complicated. You know, it's not a mortgage. It is a they'll put it, they'll tranche it and they'll slice it up and securitize it and collateralized debt obligations and all of this mumbo jumbo. So they can lie to themselves and lie to you about, you know, whether this toxic waste is actually valuable. Right. And so the whole system is set up this way. We're not just printing money. Oh, it's quantitative easing. We're not just printing money.

It's a, it's a BTFP program. We're buying it at par. It's a loan. All of this alchemy and abracadabra mumbo jumbo is meant to make a simple thing complicated. So the simple thing is in 2023, it's not just a financial crisis. It's a fiat crisis because in 2008, um, you know, the, you know, time was bought by pulling the crisis up from the level of banks to the government. now there's no more level to pull it up to right it's like the currency itself the government that takes the head that's kind of a that's a very macro way of looking at it um another way of thinking about this is this is not just a banking crisis it's a bond crisis if mortgage-backed securities were the toxic waste in 2008 where they were rated triple a but they were actually

extremely unsafe treasuries themselves are the toxic waste of 2023 and dalio has said this by I've got a few tweets on this, but look at Ray Dalio. This is not just a bank crisis, not a single bank thing. It's a bond crisis, right? It is something that every institution that bought bonds in 2021 got wrecked by the Fed. Essentially, what happened is, just like the banks in 2008, they sold mortgages that were not worth what they said they were worth or thought they were worth. They were marketed as AAA. The Treasury in 2021 sold bonds that the Fed then devalued in 2022.

Basically, if you think of the Fed and Treasury as one unit, the government sold an asset to its best customers that it then massively devalued. Sticking all of these banks, all these institutions, all these loyal blues, just like Stalin killing his most loyal communists, Powell killed his most loyal banks. Yeah. And if you go back and look at like the dot plots in December 2021, the Fed governors were choreographing like, oh, we're only going to raise rates like one and a half percent and five percent. Right. That's right. So through 2020 and 2021, inflation was transitory. Actually, you are first. You were a moron for saying inflation was going to happen. Aren't you some stupid mouth breather who is telling us for 10 years that inflation is going to happen after the printing? Don't you know, Ben Bernanke proved inflation can never happen. Right. Every zero hedge guy was wrong for 10 years. It'll be wrong for an 11th.

Inflation is transitory. We need to stimulate. We need to recover from covid. It's a bite and boom, baby. Build back better. This was everything that they were saying. Just to show you that I'm not imagining this. Here. yeah while you're looking that up i mean the treasury's also implicitly admitted this too with the introduction of the buyback program next year yes i'm rolling out that's right you know that so you know there's not going to be demand here we go so this guy is like oh nonsense that the the interest rate shock rate rises weren't that big and they weren't a shock the fed telegraphed every move it made. This is completely false, right? Here, back in March 2021, stop worrying

about inflation. Inflation fear lurks. Powell downplays inflation risks as Yellen foreshadows future spending. And then, boom, to the moon, right? Fastest rate hike in relative terms ever, right? In one year, higher than it had been in the last 10 years. Everybody was not positioned for this basically what happened was and and you know part of the skeleton key on this is um here essentially the establishment lured banks into binging on bonds right this is what happened in. So in 2021, this is August 2021, banks are binging on bonds, but not because they want to look at that. They're taking out these massive positions in government debt because all the printing meant that the normal commercial loan supply was pushed down. So look at this enormous

gap, right? They're taking tons of even the New York Times saying not because they want to. And Powell was saying even until November 3rd, 2021, Fed is patient on hikes, can act on inflation if needed. So they're fooling people and saying, look, take out huge positions in these bonds. We're not going to be changing interest rates for a while. And we don't think that inflation action is necessary. But they lied. Fed lied. Banks died. Right. That's literally what happened.

Fed lied, banks died. Trust the Fed, end up dead. Every institution that bet big on U.S. government bonds in mid-2021 is a dead man walking to first order, right? Depending on how big a position they took, okay? And the thing is that these are considered, these are like supposedly the backbone of the whole system. These are the things that, you know, what do they call it? Risk-free rate of return, right? The safest asset in the world, the U.S. Treasury, it has no risk at all. And everybody will say this, they'll repeat these things like stupid mantras, there's no risk of default. Okay, yeah, maybe they'll print the money to give it back, but

they've literally just, first of all, they devalued it dramatically. Everybody today is like, oh, they're experienced bankers, they should have known about duration risk. Nobody in mid-2021 was saying, oh, okay,

the Fed is going to hike rates to a historical level. The Fed was lying about this the entire time. Here, I'll show you just like, look at this. Basically, it's like, hold on. You've got to have master Twitter search skills to be able to pull these up. Yeah. It's an art form, not a science, the Twitter search.

Here we go. basically this post summarizes it right just as in 2008 the bankers lied okay uh this time the central bankers the banks the bank regulators have lied to all dollar holders and depositors and fundamentally what happened is um the fed and the treasury tricked institutions into buying huge amounts of bonds and then devalued them sticking them with gigantic losses. And we're talking like historical losses, right? We're talking, this is just the unrealized loss and gains up until Q4 2022. Just look at these absolutely massive hundreds of billions of dollars in losses, right? These are all caused by the Fed

totally U-turning on the policy and sticking these guys with the bill, right? And this is across, you know, this is the big banks, here's the community banks, they show similar losses, And by the Fed itself, because paying out all of this interest, it's not, quote, profitable anymore. The entire system is just totally, totally, totally broken. And it's breaking in more visible ways. And so, as I said, they make it intentionally complicated. But once you realize that treasuries are the new toxic waste and treasuries are the backbone of this entire system, then you can go further on that. I can, I can show you pensions and insurance, you know, like AIG and how AIG went bust in 2008,

like lots of insurance companies bought tons of bonds because it was the safest thing, right? So they all got destroyed. And as rates keep going up, because they look like they're going to keep going up, they get more destroyed. And they hope that nobody comes asking for the money, because if they do come asking for the money, then they have to get printed money from the Fed to back it up and uh you know of course what happens is when when this is you know we've got this weird thing that's happening where rates are being hiked still and then banks are dying as a consequence and the fed selectively prints to just help these guys somebody called it rate apartheid where the average joe is crushed by both high inflation and high rates means you know like their mortgage all

if they have adjustable rate mortgage something like that you know they're toast but lots of things they're toast on. They don't have the pull to get the selective printed money of this BTFP program, right? So it is an absolute disaster. And it's also, it's on top of, you know, this mortgage crash. Actually, I've got a pinned tweet, which is, you know, it's a video that I go through all of this on, right? So you can kind of look at that. But just to quickly summarize, I've got a, If you go to bolgis.com front slash fiat, okay, and I've got a bunch of links here, but it's like here. What did I call it? It's a banking crisis, municipal budget crisis because the blue states are bankrupt, bond crisis, commercial real estate crisis.

Just that alone, by the way. Here, I'll show you one more. visual of this that's as you're saying this too i'm actually reminded because as all this is going on you have banks consolidating up into the big four predominantly jp yes okay and like if you remember in 2019 the repo spasm that fall was driven by the fact that jp morgan rotated out of cash and into treasuries particularly so i don't actually know that part of the story I wasn't paying as close attention then to this particular aspect. So tell me your vantage point on the 2019.

Well, what I'm wondering now, just as we're having this conversation, is like, is there just a massive amount of projection like J.P. Morgan's the safest bank in the world? Yes. They actually had that huge rotation in 2019. They're still sitting on those treasuries. And it's actually just a big con game where they're trying to make everybody feel like they're safe and the safest bank. Well, I mean, they're safe in the sense of like, they're going to try to become like the Bank of America. And what's essentially happened is, it's like this 30 odd too big to fail, globally systemically important banks worldwide. We saw what happened when when it too big to fail fails with Credit Suisse failed. It's pretty messy. Right? Yeah, depositors evidently kept their money, but it was absolute mess. And they had to like violate every law in Switzerland and destroy Switzerland's reputation as a financial capital in order to, quote, save Credit Suisse, right? So that's like what happens when a quote too big to fail fails. It's not fail, fail, but it's pretty

bad. And coming back to the thing about like blue tribe, red tribe, if you analyze the banking system tribally, they've set it up in the following way. The gray banks can go to zero, or they can die like basically you can have chaos envelop uh the you know svb and first republic and so on the red banks can also die uh in a different way where um the red banks get access to this btfp program that the gray banks didn't but their deposits are leaving anyway and they're going to money market funds and so on okay and to the big banks but the blue banks get all deposits right so you've just set it up whether intentionally or not such that the the big four blue controlled banks get all of the deposits in the entire banking system and all of the

community red banks are choked out and the tech banks are choked out and best of all you have some reds getting mad at grays when it has absolutely nothing to do with tech whatsoever and it's 100 percent with the fed like this is this is just something where everybody bought bonds and it so happens that like uh you know one way to think about it is you know powell keeps talking about a soft landing soft landing right well that means powell's a pilot it's a metaphor he himself has chosen powell's pilot plane he's crashing the plane and svb and others were like guys were just positioned near the front of the plane but everybody's gonna everybody's still in this plane is going to get crushed.

They're going to crash. Unless you have like the Bitcoin parachute or outside money of some kind and get the hell out, right? This also, by the way, lots of people, man, you're probably aware of this, but there's quite a few people

who will get mad at you for pointing this stuff out. Have you noticed that? Oh, yes. And they're like, why do you hate America so much if you're... And I'm like,

Powell, why does Jerome Powell hate America so much? Why does the Fed hate America so much? It's like saying, You know, the guys who got the U.S. to invade Iraq hate America so much, not the people who are against it, right? The Fed hates America so much, not the people who are against the Fed destroying. We are just literally the passengers on the plane who are observing that the pilot is crashing the plane. Yeah, the wing's on fire.

Yeah, and people are mad that you're pointing it out, you know? Go ahead. Give me your thoughts on that. I mean, it's just cognitive dissonance is rampant. people don't want to believe it. That's the other thing. It's like a fish in water. People have grown up in the system operating a certain way and operating somewhat functionally. They don't want to recognize that it's dysfunctional. I actually, you know, I actually reduced it to maybe two premises and you might, you might try this on, uh, may not, may not a guess because

they might be there, but so I actually put out a tweet and maybe you saw this, but does the u.s have um so can the u.s print infinite money does the u.s have an invincible military right do you agree with the first premise the second premise both or neither uh i don't believe invincible military do believe they can print as much money as possible well okay so what i'm of Of course, they can, but really what it means is without consequence. Oh, no, I don't believe either of them. Okay, right. So, I mean, it's just like a tweet, so it was like I had to be compact, right?

But the premise is, can it print infinite money without consequence? Because the MMT people believe it can print infinite money without consequence, right? And here, to my surprise, maybe some people read it the way that you just did, right? But can the U.S. print infinite money? Does the U.S. have an invincible military? And maybe it's a phrasing, but I was actually a little surprised that only like a little less than 45% of my audience said no to both. Most people agreed, like 30% of people thought that it had an invincible military.

Yeah. Okay. Actually, I mean, I had an intelligence officer analyst, excuse me, on a few weeks ago. It was after that conversation where it really drove home, like, our military is not invincible. Like, if we wanted to do a ground war in Ukraine or if we wanted to do something in Taiwan to protect them, we literally don't have the training or the weaponry capabilities to do that, either of those things, let alone both. I mean, the thing about this is everybody is forming their opinions. So, you know, the first thing you'll get when you talk about this or even look at this is,

oh, you're an expert in the military now after being an expert in X and Y and Z? Ha ha ha, right? And the thing is, are the military guys actually experts at the military? Because Iraq and Afghanistan are massive losses, a series of massive loss. It's like the entire Middle Eastern wars in the last 20 years have been gigantic losses. Maybe you can fire a gun, but can you book a win? No, they couldn't, right? Or at least they didn't know what a win was. Like, what is a political resolution? War is politics by other means. I was just tweeting about this. Like, what was a political resolution of that conflict? It turned out Assad won. It turned out the Taliban won. Right. It turned out that, you know, bin Laden even achieves objectives in the sense of burning eight trillion dollars in the desert. Iraq is now selling oil in yuan to China. Iran is not isolated there with Saudi. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Essentially like a total, total strategic defeat for the U.S. militarily. That's why if the U.S. I mean, look, if it's Dwight Eisenhower, of course, I'm not going to say anything about the military with respect to I mean, he's obviously booking wins. Right. If it's kind of like, you know, if I felt it's like during COVID, you know, did if they were doing a good job, would you care whether you know what Fauci was saying?

You know, like during swine flu, did anybody really care? Nobody really cared. Right. There's still like a functional establishment at that time. Okay. Point is, I'm not sure there is like a Western military expert in the sense of someone who's like winning wars. Right. I would listen to somebody who is, I don't know, part of Operation Desert Storm 1, maybe. Right. But that's a long time now.

Right. 30 years ago. The information is absolutely A. B is, given that like certain kinds of, so what is observable? What's observable is $8 trillion lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, total defeat in the Middle Eastern wars, right? And just to kind of show that, I went through this thread on this. Let me show you two threads. Oops.

By the way, have I projected more than anybody else on the podcast? Maybe. Up there, definitely. Up there, okay. So here's the war on terror retrospective. $8 trillion spent, Iraq is now trading in yuan, Assad won the Syrian civil war, Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, Saudi and Iran aligned against the U.S., millions dead and displaced. What's the conclusion? Fight Russia and China next.

Right? This is absolutely – it's insane, okay? But just to show, here is the $8 trillion and $900K debts, all right? Here is Iraq is now settling in yuan. Not yet oil, but everything else. Assad has won the Syrian civil war and the U.S. threatened sanctions on countries that renormalized relations, but seems not to have worked. The Taliban now controls Afghanistan. Blinken calls on them to do things. They are ignored. China brokers peace between Saudi and

Iran. The U.S. is completely frozen out and surprised by the deal. And like the CIA guy Burns actually is mad at Saudi for making peace here. And of course, tens of millions of people dead and displaced by this insane set of wars, right? After all this, we are suddenly taking on China and Russia at the same time. Okay. Now, I mean, the thing is, all this stuff was sold with fake news, literal government conspiracies saying that there were weapons of mass destruction, and all these attacks on patriotism. And, you know, so this is something where basically, I mean, if you just I mean, this is such a massive cost. There's absolutely zero reflection on this whatsoever. Right.

So this is kind of the second point is, you know, the first is just are there military experts? Right. And relatedly, you know, this this war was just massively lost. And we should we should reflect on that. Right. There's total strategic loss, total. I mean, just caused death and destruction with absolutely no benefit to anybody. right? So, I mean, one way of thinking about it, by the way, is it's actually relatively easy. Just blowing something up is, destroying is not actually power. You know why? It's like, if you have, let's say there's a house and you tell, and you've got a crowd in front and you tell a hundred people, go and burn down that house. You know what? BLM showed that some,

you know, blue American, they can still execute on that. Okay. One guy grabs a bottle. One guy grabs a rock smash windows thing is on fire it's ashes by you know 9 p.m okay but if you tell that group of hundred people to go build a house that's a lot harder first of all they might not be able to do it you know foreman you need like you know blueprints you need lumber it has to go in in such a place and that's because destruction paralyzes right everybody can go in and destroy something without coordinating with anybody else and you have no you need no experience you can grab a piece of wood and just start hitting the wall or something like that right so destruction is easy it's anarchic building is so much harder it's a thousand x harder ten thousand a hundred thousand

x harder we're very fortunate that it's profitable but there's a huge number of people who mistake the fact that america still can blow things up for the idea that it's still quote powerful in the true sense of power, which is to be able to build something, you know, just still be lots of things. A lot of people can blow things up and kill people, cause chaos, cause anarchy, cause shooting. There's a million ways to smash glass into pieces, to smash a country into civil war. It's much harder to keep it together. Right. And so there's like a juvenile kind of rightist or militarist or whatever, who thinks that the fact that you can still blow things up indicates that there's still some power there.

Actually, that's like the last bit of power. You know what I'm saying? It's a whole might is right thing. It's might is right, but it's also something where it's like, it's fleeting because it's like the Soviet Union at the end. They would just drop arms into conflict zones. I mean, that's what I say. The USSA today is like the USSR,

where it would drop arms and slogans into conflict zones, but it couldn't build, right? I mean, the U.S. during the Cold War built up West Germany. It built up South Korea. It helped build up, you know, Taiwan and Hong Kong, right? While the communists on their side did a terrible job, right? They drove their population into dirt. The U.S. helped build them up.

That was the good U.S. Now the U.S. is like the USSR then where it just shouts slogans and it gives democracy and hands out rifles and everybody shoots each other in Syria and they foment chaos. And now what's happening is now there's peace in the Middle East. Now the U.S. has been driven out of the region, basically. That's the insane thing that's happening. The U.S. was actually pushing for Saudi to not make peace with Iran. The U.S. was pushing for Syria to not make peace with the Arab League. But now the U.S. has been pushed back.

And no one cares what the U.S. has to say. So there's not peace in the Middle East because the U.S. was actually part of the fomentor of chaos. So I know that sounds like, oh, my God, you hate the U.S. That's not actually, you know, like the thing is the empire. one way of thinking about it is there's like imperial core right like the imperial center there's like a lot of americans who are drafted in different senses of the term you know into various roles support that and there's like the victims of empire around the world and the empire is just not doing good things abroad a lot of democrats used to be able to see

that a lot of republicans can see that it's not doing good things at home and then when you have binocular vision you can kind of see both right yeah um go ahead you're gonna say yeah that's the most frustrating thing about being an american citizen right now is the fact is the fact that nobody wants to recognize the objective truth of what you just described like we're losing consistently we're expanding trying to expand our empire military might certainly too quickly spreading ourselves thin not getting wins anywhere and yet doubling and tripling down literally insane literally doubling and tripling down that's right and and the thing about that is um, there's still a lot that is, there's still a lot of individual Americans that are highly

admirable. So here's, by the way, some other stats. So I just showed the Afghanistan numbers, right. Um, and, and all the Middle East numbers. Here's something more, right. This is this great cartoon. Uh, you know, first, let me tell you, uh, you know, the law is powerless to help you. And then she gets arrested. She's like, I thought you said the law is powerless, powerless to help you not punish you. Right. That's an arc of tyranny. Okay. So So a declining state has trouble building a bus lane, but it can still destroy someone's life, okay? And just to show you this, like, for example, literal combat ship. I'm not sure if you can see this, okay?

23 ships cost around $500 million to build, astronomical operating costs, cost of ruins, delays, mechanical failures, right? Okay, the Navy's $13 billion supercarrier still can't do the one thing it's absolutely required to do. What good is an aircraft carrier that can't reliably launch and land aircraft, okay? How about this? you know, there's just so much there on this. Hold on, there's more. There's a few more, actually. so here are basically it's just not the same country right world war ii america could make a b-24 bomber in 60 minutes 2022 america needs 20 years to reopen a bathroom it's just not the

same country you know and uh it's like um here's you know f-35 is a failure massively expensive um there's there's so many of these things where you know so i just mentioned literal combat ship zumwalt four class air carriers f-35 i'm sure there's people who are quote procurement experts or whatever who could give a longer list but the same government that's doing the 300 million dollar bus lanes that's doing, you saw the loss in Brita, the bus shade, right? The toilet paper ribbon cutting. Do you remember that in San Francisco? Yep. Yep. Right. Um, here. Idiocracy in real time. It's like, it's, it's actually, it is idiocracy. Right. And here I was like, um, so for the last 12 years, blue America has been in total control of California.

What is their greatest accomplishment in the field of public infrastructure? Solar-powered metal pole, okay? Toilet paper ribbon cutting. Literally, they had a—this is like a state senator. They had a press conference to celebrate the opening of a one-stall bathroom with all these people there. For them, that was like the moon landing. And you know what they're doing with their fingers? They're cutting a toilet paper ribbon, okay?

Crack smoking billboard, okay? Have you seen these? These are in San Francisco. Injecting drugs carries the highest risk of overdose, so try smoking or snorting instead. Let's take care of each other, San Francisco. And $300 million bus lane. 27 years, $300 million for a bus lane. Now, actually, what is their greatest accomplishment? None of these are the greatest accomplishment. The greatest accomplishment is the $100 billion high-speed rail project, 15 years later, not a single mile of track late. Where is all that money gone? It's a great question, and it's probably legal graft, which is to say it's like bureaucracies and environmental impact projects where it's all legal, but it's just – right? The point is, if you can't build a bus stop, you can't stop China. It's like, duh. You're fighting your factory.

And of course, look, what I just gave were, A, numbers on the entire Middle Eastern disaster. B, numbers on construction. civil construction, and C, numbers on military construction, like the Zumwalt and the aircraft carriers and so on, right? The four-class carriers and all this stuff. We also have D, which is the U.S. is effectively suing for peace in Ukraine. We'll see what happens on that, right? But you're seeing articles like here. I'll show you a few of them. so as you lay it out like this it's all

it's like taking the black pill i'm sorry but but it's like that's the frustrating thing especially that's why i focus on bitcoin is like i recognize all this but i've never laid it out in as elaborately as you have over the last three hours, connecting all the dots. It's just making me want to double and triple down and just exiting via Bitcoin. So that's the thing.

It's basically, if I have one message for your audience, I think it is, look, obviously, I believe in Bitcoin. You believe in Bitcoin. Let me just pause this for a second. I think it's really the three things. It's allocation, location, organization. Right. So allocation is, yeah, financially, you know, I actually like Odell's thing, like be humble and stay humble and success. Right. Where God knows what's going to happen. Right. So stay humble and success. It's actually a pretty good slogan.

I like that, you know. And so allocation, that's kind of, I mean, you can also ask further, OK, beyond Bitcoin, what else? Well, some people, some people like gold. Obviously, some people like other cryptocurrencies. But I think Bitcoin will be a shelling point in all of this. In terms of other fiat currencies, like the Swiss franc used to be a stable safe haven. It's not anymore. Switzerland isn't. And, you know, I think maybe, you know, some combination of Dubai, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand is interesting for fiat because, you know, Dubai's currency is pegged to the dollar, okay? But, like, you know, maybe they would unpeg it.

And those four countries are the ones that are attracting, like, global millionaires and what have you, right? So other people have done diligence on them. So since you have to hold, like, some balance in fiat, that might be a place. You could also, of course, hold a half in USD and half BTC or whatever it is you want to do or whatever. I'm not no financial advice. They're just saying, OK, that's allocation. Location, I think, is less talked about location. I basically get out of blue states, in my view. And the reason is blue states are massively bankrupt. Blue states will be like the center of like the gravitational vortex. Like if and when they do try to print gigantic amounts of money and they're kind of already started on this.

And, you know, they've talked about this Treasury buyback thing in early 2024. I showed you several of these different crises. I mentioned the bond crisis. I showed the commercial real estate crisis. But it's also auto loans. It's a trillion dollar thing. Credit card crisis is nearing a trillion. Medical debt, student loans, payments are going to start again. Insurance crisis. Trade wars cost hundreds of billions of dollars. europe has spent 800 billion on the energy crisis um and then of course there's ukraine that's another hundred i mean a hundred billion dollars is so much money it's like and it's like uh every single thing of these i mentioned is like a hundred billion to a trillion or more well that fact's being like desensitized everybody's being desensitized that you just throw around billions hundreds of billions, trillions, willy nilly. I know, but it's also like, I mean, one way to just bring it back to earth is, I mean, look, you and I have funded companies, built companies. I know how hard it is. Like even in the, I compare the last 10, look, it's hard to build companies,

just like it's hard to dunk a basketball. But the last 15 years has sort of, especially the last three not not 2022 but like especially 2021 was like dunking on the moon okay it's hard to dunk but on the moon you can jump a lot higher right so they were giving anti-gravity and a lot of companies especially in 2021 were just like dunking the ball that couldn't otherwise right um point is though that basically if you i mean a hundred hundred billion dollars it's like that's like a hundred unicorns it's really hard to build a unicorn even when you're dunking on the moon okay it's hard to do that to a hundred of them just like thrown into the wood chipper like that you know like you know a trillion dollars that's a that's a google right there's only like

you know there's five i mean maybe add nvidia you could add netflix right there's not that many great american tech companies and that's actually where all of the stock market growth has been have Have you seen how consolidated it's been this year? Everything else is sucking wind. It's all in just those few companies, right? Massive concentration there. All these things that are found in the last 20, 30 years, right? All the old American brands are just still zombie companies because they've all just gotten bailed out.

They're not, right? And so you take all of those giant tech companies and you throw them in the wood chipper, and it still doesn't make a dent because Druckenmiller estimates. You know, Dr. Miller's thing is like, if you add up all the entitlements, it's not a $30 trillion debt, it's $200 trillion. Like, Social Security, all this stuff is not being booked. So there's absolutely no way to pay. Moreover, like, just on the Ukraine thing for a second, I'll show you three links. Oops. Yeah, that's, I mean, I did an interview yesterday, too, talking about, like, the debt ceiling.

then someone had two young children and that's what really scares me is like if we keep kicking the can down the road well like i think for good or for ill i think it's going to be resolved sooner then i don't think it's going to be of course i may be wrong but i don't think we've got a decade i think it's going to be a giant crisis in in sooner than later but so here for example you see this the west needs a new strategy in ukraine a plan for getting from the battlefield to negotiating table this is april because they're seeing the writing on the wall okay this is a senior guy charles kubchin writing about this you should read this article if you want there's another one where blinken is actually saying uh that he would welcome um china's role in

uh resolving the ukraine war and it's officially in the washington post so that's like a you know regime a regime outlet and uh just warms to a role for china in resolving the ukraine war because zielinski went to china and what the what blinken definitely doesn't want is china you know negotiating the ukraine russia peace deal without the us involved yes which is possible right just like the saudi iran deal was right the private for any effort so that's why he's like like potential American and Chinese cooperation. Here's the thing. This alone means the world is not unipolar, right?

Just the fact that it's an admission of that, asked about working with it. In principle, there's nothing wrong with that. If we have a country, you know, we would welcome that. It's certainly possible, blah, blah, blah, you know. So, and then there's this really good lecture, actually. It's funny because it's quite good, And yet it has, I think, incorrect conclusions.

Yet still, I'll take it. So Greenwald talked about this. I cannot recommend highly enough the speech delivered by longtime anti-Russia hawk and U.S. foreign policy elite Fiona Hill. She prescribes how and why Ukraine has become a full-scale worldwide revolt against the U.S.-led order. OK, it's the Lenart Mary Lecture 2023 by Fiona Hill. Now, this whole lecture, honestly, it's rare that I say, like, actually read every line.

But there's like 30 lines in this that are very quotable simply because I mean, they're actually well, it's well written, but simply because it's coming from somebody who is an extreme establishment figure like, you know, Russiagate, all this type of stuff. This is her. Right. And so here's just some of her lines. The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of Pax Americana apparent to everyone. OK. And the rest of the world seeks to cut down the U.S. to a different size in their neighborhoods. They want to decide, not be told what's in their interest. In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and marked appetite for a world without a hegemon. on. Now, by the way, there's plenty of Republicans who agree with this. And they're like, you know what? Let's stop sending our people to die overseas and spending all this money on foreign wars. Let's just take care of our own people. And there's plenty of Democrats who used to say

something similar, which is let's stop killing all these people overseas and let's instead go and, you know, build up our own roads and bridges and whatnot. Right. So there's been that Jeffersonian impulse within the U.S. And I think that's going to hope. I mean, hopefully I think that's likely to happen after Russia and hopefully it doesn't escalate to war with China. And I think actually you might see like U.S. financial collapse before it escalates because it's gone from like Iraq and Afghanistan to Russia. And then it was like, and we'll fight China next. I think the system might come apart before then, but we'll see. So here we are. So the next iteration will not be framed by the United States alone. It's not an order or a disorder. It's like a range of countries.

It's basically everybody's having like local orders and little deals, right? Regionalization. So like little, you know, it's like the Southeast Asian nations and the Latin American nations work amongst themselves. Right. And there's a few other really key points here. And blah, blah blah blah this all just putin stuff right so see the ukraine war highlights the decline of the united states itself this decline is relative economically and military but serious in terms of u.s moral authority she even admits like bin laden won as bin laden intended after the 9 11 attacks uh their their own reactions have eroded his position right and uh you know for some the u.s is a flawed international actor basically many many countries don't look at the

u.s as a model because it's got endless it's got blm riots and you know like the capital stuff and you know jan 6 and it's got all of this fighting everybody's fat everybody's unhealthy yeah it's like it's basically like and here this is this is you know the problem is people will hear this and they'll be like oh my god why do you hate america so that's not where it's coming from it's basically like that's hard love like if you actually love america you want to be yeah it's like it's like it's like basically somebody who said in 1977 1978 china hey you know those like 30 years of communism you just killed millions of your own people destroyed your economy um like it's it's not that bad yet of course but getting china off of communism was tough love and positive for china

and getting America off of empire is, it's like, I mean, here's what I think actually happens, okay? I think it's probably going to be maybe similar to the fall of the USSR, where I kind of, I feel the events of March are underappreciated in terms of how big they are, because, go ahead. It's ABC, well, it's ABC, AI, banking, China. are the abcs of economic apocalypse or ai bitcoin china right and uh the reason for that is ai takes blue america's jobs bitcoin takes their power over money and china just takes their power militarily

and so they were already kind of on the ropes and now they're just getting hit by three very powerful forces at the same time and then of course like russia is also at least fighting to a standstill in ukraine if even if not winning and not losing is a win for russia in some ways Right. So, I mean, one of the things is, is possible to disrespect the establishment publicly without being canceled in a way that is just completely impossible. Even three years ago. Right. It's like it gave its all in terms of propaganda and shrieked, but it's just kind of fallen off on that. Right. And people aren't listening. You can tell that people have tuned out from the regime and so on. It's like a it's like a change in wavelength. It doesn't mean they don't still have loyalists. they do but what i foresee here's the key thing that most people aren't thinking about

when you know when the soviet union broke up do you know the first countries that broke away not the baltics is it yeah yeah that's right i mean well actually arguably it's a warsaw pact that the rattling happened because you know formally there's a soviet union and then there's the, uh, the Warsaw Pact countries that were nominally their own countries that were a little bit less under central control. So the rattling happened on the outskirts of empire first, and those broke away first. Right. Um, and that's kind of like France today breaking away and going to, you know, work with China or whatever that kind of thing is. Right. But, um, here, just to show you this so basically this is a key thing the countries that exited the ruble the earliest

namely the baltic states performed the best while the laggards suffered the most okay last guy out pays all the debts that's an incentive to leave right so the baltics were small can you see the screen yep yeah so baltic small they were first to exit the soviet union they showed as possible and everyone followed suit and the thing is even as late as march 1991 the ussr held this fake referendum which they tried to show 76 support they were doing fake votes 76 support for staying in the soviet union right this was a vote they held to try to stem the tide but you can see these black you know things over there basically um these these regions rejected the the all-union vote they held their own and because the baltics broke away they showed

it was possible and then the whole thing came apart like in like nine months okay and the thing is this is key when the baltics left the ussr they got a fresh start they didn't inherit any of the foreign debt. The Baltic Republic has inherited neither the debt nor the claims for the assets of the USSR. So if Florida or Texas or the red states as a group or some subset of them break away first, they don't inherit the $30 trillion in debt. They get a clean start. that is the economic incentive on i think which the union breaks and i think basically what you get are i think you know one thing that could catalyze it is if in florida and texas they've reopened the gold window or the digital gold window like for example here's just a thought

experiment you could imagine bitcoin.florida.gov okay imagine and so at a gov website and it's like 2013 Coinbase. So it's just buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin. That's it. And it has its own little order book. Okay. This is like an exchange that's run by the state, just like a gold window used to be run by the state. You know, you could literally go to the gold window and like exchange your dollars for gold. So you run this digital gold window. And the crucial thing about it is it works with state chartered banks. Okay. It works with, because DeSantis has talked about having state chartered banks bank crypto because the feds are harassing all of these banks that are banking crypto. So that's the second banking system in the US, the state chartered banks. He

can order them or tell them that you have to bank crypto companies, right? And other red states can follow suit. And now the fed is put in a tough position because either they can blink and allow DeSantis and others to do this, or they can say, hey, I'm going to cut off ACH, SWIFT, and other things to these state chartered banks, but that shows their hand. It shows what the oppression of a CBDC would be. And it's a pretty big step to try to unbank Florida. Yeah. Right. That's a lot of collateral damage. I don't think they would do that. I think it would force their hand in a useful way. Right. So you make the state chartered banks real. And so if he did that and if other states followed suit, well, what happens? Well, Fed blinks. Now you can do ACH, SWIFT, WIRE,

et cetera, into a Florida state chartered bank. Maybe you open a bank account there. Maybe you have to be a Florida resident. Maybe it's easier to do this in red States. You have to be, it's like local banking again. Now you've got a reason to bring some of your deposits back to local banks. So all the deposits are flying up to the big blue banks. Now you've got a reason to bring them back to red banks. That's big, right? You've got a, you've got a revenue stream for those red banks because these trades are happening. You also have a revenue stream for the state where it can take, let's say, I don't know, half a percent, 1%, whatever they think is reasonable of transactions, and they start accumulating a Bitcoin position of the state of Florida, right? And the exchange

itself might be set up where it's like, I don't know, a $10 fee to hold your coins on the exchange. They don't want you to hold your coins on the exchange. You're supposed to take your coins off the exchange, right? It's like a parking space. It's intended to be cash and carry. Just get it off the exchange. It's not meant to be custodial. So by having a daily fee, you incentivize people to remove their assets. So it's engineered different than all the other custodial exchanges. It's meant to be, get your Bitcoin, get out. Now, that order book can take the liquidity from the public, Coinbase and Binance and Kraken and other order books, but it can also share liquidity with the Texas order book and the El Salvador order book and other

government order books as they set them up right and in this fashion like have you ever seen the movie pacific rim right so the reason i bring it up is when these giant monsters you're like why does it come from out of the water you know these giant monsters come out of the water humans can't fight them they need to build giant robots right so when this giant monster of the federal government comes out of the water a normal company can't fight it you need another state you need Florida, you need Texas, right? You need El Salvador, you need Oklahoma, you need UAE, right? Basically, both red states and purple states and foreign states can stand up to these federal regulators. They've got way more hit points, right? They've got the legitimacy also.

You know, they represent a lot of people. It's a much tougher battle, right? And so if those red and purple states can keep that digital gold window open, here's where things get really interesting. Going back to that USSR analogy, at the very, very, very end of the USSR, they finally had the true vote. Because, you know, the Soviets, they pretended to represent the people. They talked about democracy all the time, right? And the true vote at the end was not the vote against a communist. It was a vote against communism. It was basically like these people, even though the soviets like they tried to tear down posters and stuff like that a fair vote was held and it was so overwhelmingly against communists they couldn't fake it and they lost and they were out of power

the first vote that had been held really in 70 years now i think the equivalent of that that happens in the u.s and in the west more generally all the stuff you know like the dxy do you know what that is yeah it's like the dixie index all in my view all that is fake because it's like the dollar versus the yen and a bunch of other currencies where, um, they're, they're basically us protectorates, right? So the only true trading pair in the world is USD BTC, or arguably maybe there's three there's, there's USD RMB, RMB BTC, or rather let's say USD CNY or the foreign version CNH, whatever. Um, so dollar Yuan, Yuan Bitcoin, Bitcoin dollar, those are like the three polls of the world, right, where they've got billion person economies or whatever

underneath them in theory. OK, it's like 400 million crypto holders or something like that. And the true vote at the end of this regime, in my view, is Bitcoin just going vertical. That's actually the real election, because just like the communists purported to represent the people, the capitalists purport to be a free market. And when that free market votes against the Fed and the Fed buy Bitcoin when all these Republicans realize that they can't boycott every single store, but they can boycott Bitcoin, right? When all these Democrats, the disaffected Democrats, the guys like, you know, RFK, you know, they're realizing, oh, actually, you know, if we want a future without, you know,

with civil liberties and without censorship and so on, you can't just vote in a new government that's going to do that. You need to decentralize and go to local and state governments. There are local and state Democrats who want that, who are not like the federal Democrats. So as those disaffected Republicans, disaffected Democrats do this, they rally behind BTC. And if the USD-BTC price moons, that indicates a vote of no confidence in the Fed. Because after all, Powell is a real president, right? Even Bill Clinton said the Federal Reserve Chair is more powerful than the president.

And did you ever vote for him? No one ever did. Have you ever been able to vote against him? Now you can. and the Fed before it ends you. And I think that is actually how the whole thing winds up because as BTC starts really going vertical, as that printing goes crazy,

blues will try everything they can to shut down the exit from the system. And the way to understand this, by the way, is like, do you know what Checkpoint Charlie was? No. Okay. So, basically, all of these failing states try to bar the exit. So, here, let me show you.

All of these failing states... Let me see if I can find this. Yeah. That's the other thing. Yeah, you can't vote for the Fed. It's a private institution. So, you have to fight it with private money. Exactly. So so the first true vote, just like the Soviets had the first true vote in 70 years. Right. Since the 1910s. This is the first true vote that Americans will have. It's like if in 2008 you couldn't vote against the bailouts. Right. You couldn't have a forked parallel system where you opted out of what they were doing.

now you can if the states can keep the usdbtc window open right and just to give an analogy here like basically one way of thinking about it is exit is like a fundamental human right right so article 13 of the un declaration of human rights says everyone has a right to leave any country including his own do you see this right to hop okay but it's not just moving your country it's moving, you know, everything else. This is translating to 80 languages. Here's the thing. All of the really bad regimes block the exit, okay? For example, the Reich flight tax, okay? Anybody who is leaving Germany, you know, Jews who left Germany were robbed of their financial assets, okay? The diploma tax in the Soviet Union. Basically, when Soviet Jews and others

were trying to leave to the West, they tried to fine you 100 months of salary. OK. In East Germany. OK. Basically, they called Republic looked desertion from the Republic. You're an unpatriotic person. If you tried to leave East Germany to go to West Germany. And in fact, the border wasn't secured. Millions of East Germans left. And so that's why they built the Berlin Wall to point the guns in and to keep people from leaving. And this is a famous, you know, example of a soldier just leaping over the barbed wire of the Berlin Wall to leap to freedom and checkpoint Charlie. OK. And of course, Cuba, a difficult task of exiting the island because everybody wants to get the hell out. OK. And they have the so-called wet foot, dry foot policy where if you're a Cuban and you are, you manage to, if you're caught in the water, you return back to Cuba. If you manage to make it to land, then you're OK. You can apply for asylum. All right. So which is just ridiculous policy, but whatever. That's what they ended up on. So the point is, all of these communist states, socialist states, failed states, they block the totalitarian states.

They block the exits. They don't let you leave or they don't let you leave with your money or they just don't let you leave at all. Right. And so as you know, one way of thinking about it is and here's one more piece of the puzzle. Very important piece. Did I show you the graph on who paid for 2008? This is like a skeleton. Yeah, you DM'd it to me a couple of weeks ago. Okay, let me put it up, though, because it's really important. And then what I'll do is I'll look at the transcript and I'll order some of these arguments because, you know, they're all, it's consilient if you see it all together. So did Republicans pay for 2008? All right, so here's the graph. Let me first explain the graph. Can you see the graph there?

Yep. OK, so. The solid line is that. So what are you seeing here? This is the amount of GDP in a congressional district. So this is a congressional district that produces like 10 billion or less, 20 billion or less and so on and so forth. OK. And in 2008, the solid line shows the outline. And so in 2008, the blue distribution of congressional districts and the red distribution of congressional districts were pretty similar. The blue outline and the red outline look pretty similar. It means Democrats and Republicans were roughly socioeconomically similar. But by 2018, the blue dots have pulled way ahead of the red dots.

like here is the blue average is something like or median is like 50 billion real gdp and the red median is like 30 billion gdp which is a huge difference by the way a and b all of the richest districts are blue right and so what happened was a gigantic shift in 10 years with red and blue being equally matched to suddenly blue having all the money right yeah so republicans paid for 2008. we know that inflation is dilution but it wasn't randomly distributed dilution it went to the coasts first and the blues first and some poor like oklahoman cashier got that printed dollar last because the candle in effect meant the blues got the money first and you know the thing about this is 2000 2009 to 2016 is the democrat administration and you know the whole thing

was done in such a way that it was deniable and invisible. It's unconscious, probably even to those doing the imposing, but it just so happens, like the cost of the print was imposed on the political opposition. Democrats became rich, Republicans suddenly became poor. And of course, this had knock on effects, because all of this money then went to, you know, woke capital, And it went to blocking Republicans out of jobs and censoring them and so on and so forth. This also bit up housing prices. This is also what's caused, you know, student loans. And there's a bunch of different things, which that printed money is really the plot of the entire 2010s.

It's the actor behind everything. But once you realize actually, because Republicans were in the system, and they couldn't exit the system, they got diluted by the system. And they didn't know that they were. Is that pretty crazy? It is. And then you had the shale bust going on during this too. So yeah, gas companies weren't making as much money. well so okay so i mean fracking actually didn't fracking happen in the mid-2010s like that was like probably one thing that was going well for republicans during that time period but it drove i don't know all this down though so when boob and boston ah okay all right i've i've not followed up very closely so you're i'll defer to you on that but let me tell you something else you know there's another group at least that was diluted down and

paid for 2008 you know they were some of the arabs why because food price spikes helped trigger arab spring so inflation was exported outside the u.s and uh you know it's one thing if you know you find that your cost of groceries is doubled it's another thing for someone who's like close to subsistence it's like too much right so that guy who set himself on fire who helped trigger the Arab Spring, you know, was doing it in part because of food prices. And so all these countries were pushed into chaos. You know, Libya is still in chaos. And the thing about this is, yeah, ostensibly, they got, quote, freedom out of this. But just think about this, right? Like, inflation, invisibly, deniably, was pushed to Republicans, and to Arabs, and to essentially those people who

were like the official enemies both at that time and in some ways today. Right. And so once you realize that, you're like, oh, everybody who's within this system, the dollar holder is the bag holder. Because when they do this giant print, they're trying to bar the doors, you know, whether it's the Operation Chokepoint that that Nick Carter's talked about, whether it is just shutting down red banks and gray banks and consolidating the money at blue. It's even, they're going after fintech, as Caitlin Long has talked about. They're trying to roll out this FedNow and they call it not a CBDC when it's got all the functions of a CBDC. It's central bank digital control, even if it's not a central bank digital currency.

Do you see what I'm saying? Right? So, because it, you know, just to show you that, I wrote this post on this and I was actually pleased to see that RFK Jr. actually quoted it and RT'd it because here, I think the reason is what they, what they always do, what the establishment always does is they change the words and they think that changes the meaning. So it's like, oh, FedNow, it's not a CBDC, therefore it's fine. Actually, no, because if you look at the, if you look at their own documentation, can you see this visual? Yep. FedNow is in the middle of every single transaction of everything, right? So the sender, the sending financial institution, the receiving financial institution, the receiver,

all of them are now choke-pointed through FedNow. Now, of course, there's some of this already with FedWire, but it's not as granular. They're not seeing every transaction and all the metadata on it, A. And B, when you read their documentation, it's a little small, okay? But what does that say? Step three, okay? And they'll always basically lie until you can find the exact line in the documentation. Okay. And then when you find the exact line, here's what it says. Hold on. Let me find the, zoom in here a little bit. Step three, the FedNow service validates the payment message and complies with applicable controls. Ta-da. In other words, they run code over that transaction and check the metadata to determine whether it's approved, right?

Whether you are approved, whether your pattern of transactions is approved, whether, like, you can, I mean, you've got every data point here. You've got the sender, the sending, you can do all kinds of stuff with this if you have that data set, right? So impose applicable controls. And then moreover, they talk about the different types of transactions. And they include consumer to government and government to consumer. So consumer to government is your account can be drained, right?

And government's consumer is they can do stimulus, boom, like that. Air drops. Air drops, exactly, helicopter money, right? So central bank, you know, FedNow, it's like a virus. This is what a lot of what they do is. It's a virus that has evolved to evade recognition by changing its sequence without changing its function. So you say, oh, FedNow, it's not a CBDC. Oh, then it must be okay.

No, it's not okay. It's still central bank digital control, right? Right. So it's essentially the full scope of what they've rolled out is. And again, I say it's like it's like, you know, woke America is like chaotic evil. The communists were lawfully evil. Woke America is like chaotic evil. So it's not like I'm not saying it's like coordinated because a lot of them are too dumb to know how to coordinate. It's coordinated in the way I said. It's like tribal. You know, every every actor is looking for what advances blue, what attacks red and gray.

So you put that all together, and what do you get? You get something where it's already hard for American citizens to open foreign bank accounts. It's like a lot of reporting stuff or whatever. A. B is lots of red banks, gray banks are being shut down implicitly by having their funds move to money market funds or blue banks. Incentives have been set up for slow death. C. They're going after crypto with checkpoints and stuff like that. d the rolling out fed now e the treasury buybacks have you seen that yep right yeah okay so here's the thing all right look yeah companies are not the same as governments

but if you take a company a um a poor company has to pay high rates if it if it's trying to if you're a poor company you don't have a lot of money and you go for a loan you're going to get a high rate. A really rich company like Apple can borrow at low rates. And an insanely rich company like Apple can do stock buybacks. But how the hell can you be both really poor and giving out high rates on your, you know, on your loans and really rich at the same time right with what money is treasury going to do these buybacks you know the entire stupid rule goldberg system where you're issuing bonds and of course they're saying oh all we're doing is changing the liquidity you know the maturity structure and we're adding liquidity to the

system what's actually happened and i think linald and others are on top of this here um this guy otavio actually had a good thread that's i mean just opening the buyback window up and even signaling signaling that like a year before they plan to do it is just like oh we know there's going to be no demand for this we're going to be the only buyers that's exactly the point like essentially here let's see the there's a foreign buyers this is like the big one foreign buyers are just opting out of the market um this guy tavi costa has some good graphs on this let's see Let's see if I can find this. Here we go.

So, see this? Foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries is a percent of total debt. back to what 2003 levels yeah so and it's plummeting right it's accelerating now so like in a sense 2013 was peak america in this sense like the most confident then people started just divesting divesting divesting i mean you're 2008 like basically up until this point you know maybe a little bit more there's like a flight to quality and then people like uh no thank you very much and started divesting. This is also when Wokeness started, you know, right. And now it's accelerating because there's, you know, you can, you don't have to save in treasuries, you know,

you can save in obviously Bitcoin. They're not there yet. I think El Salvador hopefully, and, you know, others can get them there, but what they're doing, which is also fine and good is gold yeah gold is just going i mean this is his arrow over here but it's gone way up right um like here's the um gold purchases like visual capitalist has a better thing on this if you go back to like the beginning of the century russia and china have just been stacking gold like crazy yeah and you know what's interesting india has been too at the individual level It's like, I'll show you a graph on that. So what's interesting is in Russia and China, it's at the state level.

India, it's driven at the individual level because of demonetization and a few other things. So you see this 30 years of central bank gold demand, kaboom, just going vertical over here, right? And so the thing is that you have, I mean, here's basically what just happened. Putting it together, the Fed has killed its own banks. It's killed many of its institutional bond buyers. It has driven away foreign buyers of bonds. And it's about to issue tons of new bonds. And it's got a treasury buyback program.

So now they're finally doing the thing where they're getting rid of all artifice. And they're just connecting the Fed's printer to buy the bonds from treasury. So the government issues bonds. And the Fed either buys them directly with printed dollars. or they get some straw purchaser like JPMC to do it and pretend that the Fed isn't buying them directly, right? But obviously, if the Fed is just directly buying bonds from Treasury and just printing the money and putting it in the Treasury general account,

without, you see, part of the thing is the participation of foreigners and others in this. I mean, imagine if, like, if you just set up a company or you set up, like, your own cryptocurrency and you issued a ton of it and you said it was worth a million bucks, it is somebody else's participation in that that actually makes it have some value. And the more people who participate in it, the more it actually has value. Let's say it's a share in a company, right?

Obviously, the more people who think that thing has value, the more it actually does. And the fewer, the less it does. So putting all the pieces together, the U.S. has just contracted on the global stage. It's not a unipolar world anymore. It's a multipolar world. blinken is talking about negotiating with china over ukraine the us has lost control of the middle east it's lost control of brazil it's lost control of india it's lost control of certainly um you know the um like like uh countries like france and so on are breaking away from it if not fully

out of its control it's fighting the you know it's lost control of twitter it's fighting you know grays and reds the blues are fighting grays and reds domestically and it's about to do these treasury buybacks in early 2024 which they've announced so so you know you you have something where they're going to just either directly or through a straw purchaser print the money to fill up their own treasury i think that's that feels like end game to me right because there's to be a huge amount of pressure to use that printed money to or to print more uh to to fix these mortgages or mortgage-backed securities commercial real estate all these things are crashing um to help people with student loan payments to um help people with credit card debt

you know this concept of people's qe if you've heard that and i i don't know how long it takes um as i said i think it's like 10 months 70 years 19 decades one percent centuries but i don't think it's like very long if all that comes together then putting it all together you have something where every the economy is like swiss cheese with more holes than cheese because you can't like it's like there's like a healthy uh personal savings you know sector that you can tax to go and bail out the other parts people are indebted up their eyeballs right many households don't even have enough to pay a few minor expenses. So if everything is Swiss cheese, the only healthy sector you have is the tech sector, maybe. And even that, if you just mulch the whole thing,

it wouldn't pay for everything. So what happens, I think, is like a gravitational black hole type implosion. Everything and anything, what the printing really represents is everything that can be seized, will be seized. It's like this black hole of blue, right? Everything just gets dragged into the maw, not just your dollars, like every stock that's on a blue exchange, certainly every bond, probably blue real estate. And by the way, you know how like this is a scenario, right? But I mean, real estate seizures were actually very common in the 20th century, like the Soviet Union, Russia, like many countries had real estate seizures, land seizures. I think the chaotic version of that is – I mean, this is, again, a sci-fi scenario.

After all, the Fed has done – it's bought your mortgage-backed securities, right? So it owns a big piece of your house. So you need to allow unhoused people to go and live in your house. Got that extra bedroom still, don't you? Right. And the thing is, anti-squatting – or like the squatting laws and stuff in California, they keep weakening them. I mean, is this that far away from allowing a homeless person to sleep in the doorway of a guy with a small business? That's common in San Francisco, right?

And you just take it one step further and you say, oh, well, guess what? The Fed bought a piece of your house, so therefore you need to open up the garage for these people who don't have home. Like, that's one way you can do property seizures. There's probably 50 other ways you can do it, okay, if the government is really getting creative with this stuff. But, I mean, Credit Suisse showed that property rights are not sacrosanct, even in Switzerland. The bondholders, $17 billion in bonds, destroyed. You don't have to care about those bondholders to know that even really rich, well-connected people in blue America and blue-controlled territory, like blue G7 states, their property rights, these multibillionaires are getting totally wrecked by the state they trusted. That means that the average Joe has absolutely no chance unless they get out.

Right. That's what that's a lesson really of SVB or whatever is every one of these tech guys, all of these CEOs, 40,000 tech CEOs, many of whom are blues, just got absolutely blindsided by the establishment. Like essentially their life savings. And, you know, there's no heads up. There's no warning that, you know, you have this notification on your website. oh, like, I've got cookies. Okay, the regulators push to see that you've got cookie, you know,

that you know that you've got cookies or not on your bank website. You know, they don't push the notification saying your bank is insolvent. Do you know what I'm saying? Right? So it's all the regulation, none of the protection. It's anarcho-tyranny. And it's true for not just, again, as I said, not just SUV, all the banks have this problem, or let's say a very large percentage of them. And so if you put all that together, this thing is just, I mean, one of the reasons that I, you know, put out the video and the stuff that I did, like, you know, a few weeks ago is when you, can you kind of look at the synthesis or anything? It's Wiley coyote world. It's literally just over thin air, right? You know, and again, I can, I can say it study after study, but I'll just give

you a few more. Here's the Stanford study, the 2.2 trillion number. Many banks face the same risks that brought down SVB. A sobering new analysis finds the banking sector's unrealized losses. I mean, $620 billion was big, but they're thinking it's 2.2 trillion. Who the hell knows what the actual number is, right? They looked at 4,800 U.S. banks and they found SVB is not an outlier. That's the thing. It's not like some tech guys doing crazy things, okay? Many other banks have these issues, okay? Rubini, who hates crypto and is coming at it from a totally different direction, is saying something very similar, right? Most U.S. banks are technically near insolvency, and hundreds are already fully insolvent, right? And basically, here is Dalio

again saying some of the same things that I've been saying, which are it's not just a banking issue it's a global issue all sorts of entities pension funds insurance companies all around the world there was a lot of buying of these government bonds which have gone down in value and it wasn't by the way like people will keep talking about interest rate risk and so on duration risk it's not risk in the sense of like being hit by a tornado it's not duration risk it's devaluation policy the fed has a lever where they devalue the asset that the treasury just sold to people you know it's literally like you sold some people something you said it's worth a billion dollars and i hit a button it's worth 800 million dollars

and now you're totally destroyed and then when you go bankrupt it's blamed on you right that's basically what's happened so so this system i i it's like it's this wily coyote system where everything is is basically just no it's fake and there's like only air beneath it and i don't know when people are going to look down but when they do they're going to be like okay can i grab onto some something hard so you know some some territory some um some firm like piece of land emits this just total descent right that's bitcoin that's gold that's the allocation i think location is if you are in America, be in a red state, but I think it's going to get, I mean, I think it's going to be potentially quite nasty. Like I just got to say, it's like, you know, it's something

where a rich country that suddenly becomes poor. I mean, you know, like I look at BLM and Jan 6th as, as like a flash forward, like a preview of the future. Go ahead tremors before the big earthquake. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, there's this thing. You know, it's hard to track this stuff. But these guys did a good job. Like civil unrest has just been rising in the US. It's stochastic. But you have the general sense of the place being just more disorder, look at it here's you see this gif over here right so there's like shooting riot etc and um

you know it's like there's a few and then uh you know it's stochastic so it goes up and down but it does seem to so here's like BLM type stuff starting then more more shit these are all major instance by the way and it ebbs and then I mean this is like this is way bigger than this right like this is just you know just some of the George Floyd instance. And, um, I mean, there's another map, like the, uh, I mean, there's, there's a few of these, but yeah, they can feel it too. Who knows if it's the Twitter algo or if it's real signal, just like the amount of videos you see of people fighting in the streets and

yeah each other yeah it's like it's like not look at this this is like how many different you know protests and rallies and so on were there right that's like hundreds it's like all the way to alaska and hawaii and whatnot right um so exactly you just feel a society that's it's not even necessarily all ideological it's just disordered right it's guys with face tattoos And it's just like, look, I mean, you can be pro Second Amendment, but there's a lot of shootings, random shootings, you know, it's, you know, it's something where this is also before an economic collapse has happened. Right. And unlike 2020, there isn't lockdown. So people aren't kept in their houses or whatever. Right. So I don't know.

It's one of the things about all this is a lot of these things are digital where they're so everyone's everyone, for example, like after SVB, you know, and the banking stuff, everybody became they were like, oh, of course, you don't keep more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars in a bank account. The FDIC limit is there, blah, blah, blah. And you know why? That's actually totally bullshit. It's bullshit because the FDIC itself. you see that clip that i played where they themselves talk about how they don't want to tell the public too much about the fdic limit war gaming it like they're war gaming it they're like the public thinks that these banks are more safe than we do and we wouldn't want them to get the

wrong idea we wouldn't want them to outside everybody in this room can understand the legalese but outside this room they they shouldn't right so it's like intentional that people were kept unaware of fdic limits or it's not top of mind in the same way that the banks hid their insolvency. They tell you that they're, that you've got cookies on the website, but they hid their insolvency. Right. So, I mean, I'll just give you one more thing on this, which is like, basically, Janet Yellen did not sound alarm about the mortgage crisis. Yellen or Bernanke subprime isn't contained, or are we talking recently? Well, there's a few of them here.

Yellen feared housing busts but did not raise public alarm, right? Essentially, they're not going to tell you, okay? I collected a bunch of links on this, right? But basically, those who can see the analytics, they're only going to tell you there's a quote crisis if it's like the debt ceiling thing where it's like in their interests, right? Here's another example, like April 10th, 2008. Do you see this?

Bernanke says US could be facing a mild recession. Yeah. Okay. April 13th, 2023, Jerome Powell says a mild recession. Okay. Now remember, by the way, he said this after, basically what happened was on April 10th, 2008, after his Fed intervened in a massive bank failure, which was Bear Stearns, Bernanke reassuringly

told us we might be facing a mild recession. Within 158 days, the world realized it was actually in the midst of a devastating global financial crisis. Wall Street ran to the exits before Main Street even knew it was happening, and then the printing of trillions began. 158 days, okay? Almost exactly 15 years to the day later, on April 13th, 2023, After his Fed intervened in a massive bank failure, Jerome Powell again reassuringly told us we might be facing a mild recession. This time, the world may soon realize it's actually in the midst of a global fiat crisis. But this time, the world might get to the exits before the Fed uses them as exit liquidity if they can get there before the printing of trillions begins. Thank God we have that.

That's why. Exactly, right? So that's allocation. Location, I think, red states or foreign states. I mean, if you want to live in an Anglo country, Australia and New Zealand are actually the best managed. I showed some numbers on this, but they have surprisingly good debt to GDP ratios and other things. Maybe it's the China influence or what have you. Australia actually still digs stuff out of the ground and sells it. They're like more in contact with reality to a greater

extent. Like in a sense, Australia's conservatives are actually cutting spending and restricting immigration to skilled immigration and australia's liberals are actually against war with china like kevin rudd you know so it's like a functional right and left where you know in in the ideal circumstance they complement each other it's like a steering wheel you know and you can argue okay maybe center right or center left but overall i feel like they're they've just got a higher state capacity you know down something about down under right and in a sense it might be like australia New Zealand are to the Anglo world this century, what Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore were to the Chinese world last century. They're like the relative islands of relative stability, when a

lot of the rest is just totally melting down after this, you know, whole thing. Another analogy, by the way, one more analogy here is, is Argentina. How much you know about Argentina? Yeah, no, they've had a crazy hyperinflationary crisis after crisis, but they seem relatively stable all things considered well i mean not so i mean uh i actually don't know where they are as of right now but they were censoring inflation numbers recently the main thing about argentina is they were a rich country that became poor okay argentina's unprecedented economic boom to bust history okay riches in argentina was once so like in the early 20th century remember my thing about history running in reverse a rich country that became poor riches argentina was a commonplace

when it was one of the wealthiest in the world now it faces bankruptcy and staggering debt in a saga it can't seem to escape do you know how it became poor it went from among the very top economies to the very bottom of the list right can you see the screen yeah but buddy it up with the imf too many times no is that well i mean maybe nowadays yes but essentially until the middle of the century, such a scenario is simply unimaginable, right? And at the end of World War II, it was considered one of the most stable currencies in the world, alongside the pound and the dollar, okay? And then it was nowhere in sight. It was a magnet for, you know, even in the 1950s, it was significantly higher than in Germany. But then what happened was,

Archie's decline was well underway, okay? And what happened was this guy, Juan Perón, what did he do the piranhas guiding principle was profligacy and then when nothing else worked to go into debt print money and let inflation gallop triple c expenditures and double numbers in place does that sound familiar right but now here's the other thing the other thing they did was right-wing stuff as part of an argentina first policy tariff barriers were put in place to protect the country's weak industrial base the aim for argentina to be as self-sufficient as possible gas plants were purchased a staggering number of inefficient state companies were founded and uh nothing symbolized more than the purchase of great britain's ailing railway system

150 million gbp 487 billion for expensive junk equipment fireworks were set off you know the disaster was celebrated as a national triumph by the time a few years have passed argentina slipped his first deep economic crisis right and then master so the point is like this rhymes a lot it rhymes a lot with the current moment yeah where it's a rich country that thought it had infinite runway and it combined like the worst of left and right like the nationalism of we can build everything in the country and the socialism will print all the money and and and give it out there it didn't have the same worse that's true not to the same extent but uh it did have like you know 100 billion dollar inefficient train go ahead it's mechanically the same similar right so

um and then finally i think the third thing i was saying allocation location organization meaning store of like the ultimate you know store value is really a high trust community because if you're just like us this is why i mean like i'm sympathetic to the book the sovereign individual i like it it's a good book but i do believe in the sovereign collective you know the startup society the network state right where um it's not just somebody on their own because humans are social animals you know like uh you know that steve jobs emailed i was making the rounds a while back where he's like i do not go and cut my own wood i don't um you know i don't provide my own power like i i'm all these people around me are this web of people

that I'm dependent on. Right. And if anybody had a right to be like, you know, that obviously Steve Jobs is an amazing person and does a lot more than most people, but even he understood that he had to be cooperative with other people on things. Right. And so I think that's the third thing is to not just be every man for yourself, but after you take care of yourself, after you win, then figure out like, ideally you start building your community now. Right. So that's organization, even literally 10 person meetups, building local community and trust or whatever, you know, 20%, 30, whatever it is, right. That's way better than, um, just like not having a community to fall on in the event. Like

there's, you know, some issue of some kind, right. So it's like allocation, location, organization. All right. Let me pause here. I know I just, that was a big download. Go. Yeah. We just did four and a half hours. This is going to be i think this might be the longest podcast we've ever recorded and all right probably one where i spoke spoke the least but i'm happy it turned out that way because just letting you run with all this stuff again because like i said earlier like the um the way in which you connect the dots so elaborately and i i really like that that history like uh we're moving from the central point if you go backwards in time forward in time we're seeing this sort of reflection in this rhyming and i

mean i completely agree with all pretty much everything you just said like again i think this is an important conversation to have it needs to be had more out in the open because again i'm a big believer and we just need to confront this reality as quickly as possible rip the band-aid off get as many people on the lifeboats and bitcoin and red states and smaller communities as possible as quickly as possible so thank you for putting this all together i mean thank you sir i have a couple of questions one or two for you if you wouldn't mind which are um so you know you said i um oh one thing i would just say history of running in reverse executive order 6102 you know the gold the gold seizures and so on i think they're going to try something again

but history is running in versa this time they fail yeah right and so that's like another way of like thinking about the hour of history or what have you um i'd like to know you know you mentioned that me putting it together was a was like a black pill or something i didn't mean it like that because i actually think like red states and western european countries will probably do better afterwards um you know like as independent kind of things but i'd like to know what you found most interesting or what do you feel like connected or what was novel that'd be you know you can cut this part if you want but just you know for my now we'll keep it in the uh i think the what i mentioned like the history rhyming uh if you go backward in time and forward in time

from 1950 and look at the sort of reflection really try something because that's something thing we say a lot is like uh history doesn't repeat but it rhymes and a lot of people point to weimar and uh the roman empire comparing it to the u.s empire but tying in like soviet russia um china i think that really it shows like the magnitude of of what this is it's not just some isolated uh empirical downfall like that's happened uh that happened in rome and weimar it's like much bigger than that i think that's what i got from it and then the other thing is just how oblivious most people are like they don't think uh wiley coyote sitting out in open air most people do not understand and which is scary it's yeah it's you know what's weird about that is

i think there's a big gap i think the single biggest binary predictor is actually like u.s citizen versus not because like people outside this is the thing all right ready here's the most here's the weirdest thing i might say okay you're like oh my god i'm prepared for this right okay so here's a weird one um and you might you might disagree with my framing OK, but just bear with me for a second. In early in like January 2020, most people at the time didn't, you know, like journalists would call you a racist, et cetera, for saying that COVID-19 might become a thing like, oh, you know, I can't believe you're talking about a virus from China as if it could be a risk. It's a non-issue. You know, I can't believe you're stirring up, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right.

They were attacking. I don't know if you remember that time period, January 2020. Right. OK. And so that was like the mainstream opinion. This is nothing to worry about. Nothing to be concerned about. Citizen, shut up.

You're an idiot. OK. And then there was a contrarian opinion that, hey, actually, this thing that China shut down an entire city for might be concerning and we should pay attention to it because there's like a physics of this, or a biophysics, or a biology that suggests that virus could go really vertical, and it seems to be infecting a lot of people. But what's happened as of today, and again, this is where your audience or you might disagree with the framing, but two or three years later, the numbers reported are 700 million people

infected seven million people died including one million americans a but b people don't think it's that big a deal which means like this this thing like if i had said in january 2020 one million americans will die seven million millions of people worldwide like that would have been considered so extreme i was like very measured actually i think at the time in the public statements right that would be considered so extreme and so crazy that's like an end of the world scenario you're saying millions of people are going to die from this are you crazy you're stoking panic etc but now today that's not only in the rearview mirror we're like who cares right now you may people may disagree with the death counts or i get that there's folks

in your audience who may disagree with me on this my point though is like the magnitude of the kind of thing that one can process and then say hey it wasn't that bad is actually surprising and i actually kind of think that while this upcoming fiat crisis will be quite disruptive i actually think that like the world will actually get on okay because most manufacturing is actually outside the u.s most like oil and stuff is outside lots of stuff is outside it's kind of the opposite the zyhan argument much of the world is actually decoupled in reverse right i show you that graph with all the stuff right yeah and so what that kind of means i think is that like the economy will kind of keep ticking i mean it'll take a hit globally but it'll kind of keep ticking

and the worst hit places will be those that are closest to blue america i think red america will do okay when it gets back to you know like for for example it can actually build a pipeline again or it can uh maybe it won't have property rights but we don't know um but it can it can cut things down without like federal regulations blocking it from things and uh western europe can do things without these crazy carbon credit kind of things they're all pushed top down they can rebuild their energy production um but it's it's one of these things where i don't know if that's quite a white pill but it's like the bounce back yeah it's like i i kind of think blue america is going to get the worst of it that is my hunch because uh they they will be the last they'll be in this case

the ones that hold on to the dollar and the institutions all the way down and others are exiting already before them and building so it's like the opposite of the 2008 pattern go ahead yeah they're they're already building the new world too yeah exactly so in 2008 it was republicans and foreigners that paid the price now it might be in reverse yeah i completely agree it's not a black pill it's a white pill we're gonna and i've been saying this in the newsletter and publicly we just need to rip the band-aid off come to grips with us sooner than later um it seems like you believe that it's going to be forced on us sooner than later whether people want to delay it.

Yeah, I think there's a non-zero probability of that. We'll see. Stay humble, stack sets. I guess we can end it there. I have to run to a lunch. This has been an incredible, probably one of the best episodes we've ever recorded. Thank you so much for spending so much

time with us. I think, again, this is an extremely important conversation that needs to happen and more people need to listen to. And keep fighting the good fight. I know you've been getting a lot of shit for it, but I think it's important to get this view of the world out there. Yeah. I think, I think people are coming around to it, but we'll see. Let's see. Let's see. I mean, I actually don't want to be proven right,

but I do want people to build their local communities. So let's see if that happens. All right. Cool. Thanks. Talk soon. Peace and love freaks. Thank you.