TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #444: Fiat Ruins Everything with Jimmy Song

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Marty sits down with Jimmy Song to discuss his new book Fiat Ruins Everything. Jimmy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimmysong Crowdfund page for Jimmy's new book: https://fiatruinseverything.com/ 0:00 - Intro 5:38 - Writing with ChatGPT 10:59 - Degeneracy hazards 12:54 - Jimmy’s book and writing process 20:39 - Structuring a book 23:36 - Fiat’s influence on individuals with corps 30:28 - Strong families and low time pref life 35:01 - Fiat world built on ossification 44:19 - No stores of value, can’t buy a house 50:15 - Reality takes hold, how long till it breaks? 59:38 - How to explain to people when it breaks? 1:03:03 - How do individuals protect themselves? 1:11:02 - Rent seeking more harmful than welfare 1:14:40 - Wide and narrow gate, drivechains 1:26:45 - Plugging the book Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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 this rip at tftc i sat down with jimmy song to talk about his book fiat ruins everything talked about a lot fiat man it's also tiresome isn't it logan isn't it just a little tiresome big yawns big yawns it's a great rip uh before we jump into it have to read the top four boosts from rip 443 q2 2023 monetary base update with our good friend matthew mazink shis at eric 99 gave us a hundred thousand sat boosts first six figure boost in quite a while stay humble stack sats thank you eric great advice at blockchain boog 5000 sats big fan thanks for the update i'm

a big fan of the updates too thank you for the boost at paez 1000 sats great rip always enjoy when mesinxius is on cheers cheers to you and at doom dumasum 521 sats and then just two periods not even a full ellipses uh great rip matthews i think one of the most underrated analysts in the sector go check that out this rip was brought to you by our good friends at river River has a new referral program. If you go sign up right now using the code, or excuse me, go to river.com slash TFTC, you're going to get $5 for free when you sign up and buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. It's the most Bitcoin. They don't have the most Bitcoin. It's the most secure Bitcoin exchange. Since they don't rely on any third parties, they built everything in-house, their

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when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. It makes all the difference, like being able to get that quick feedback. Because you don't realize how annoying that was until you're freed from it. It's kind of like fiat money.

Did you notice any hallucinations? Was it pretty accurate in its editing skills? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's not, I'm not asking it to do like really complicated stuff. It's here's a text, correct grammar, spelling, all that stuff. And maybe rephrase something if it's like very murky or not understandable. And, you know, it'll maybe restructure a couple of sentences, but mostly it's, you know, like it's your words. It's just, you know, what a good editor would do and you get it back and yeah hey if you give it more freedom sometimes it'll it'll like come up with random references that don't exist and stuff like that but mostly yeah so it's it's very powerful

if you're putting good like prompting guidelines it's yeah like you have to prompt it you could even train it on your own text and say you know make it sound more like this because i i did a good job on this um you know but mostly like if you define for it what you want and as long as that isn't like creative if it's like very technical or like just like it's very good at it yeah yeah it's faster it's cheaper yeah the faster is the key um very cheap and um yeah and you can try lots of different things right like the because the feedback loop's so fast and because it's cheap you just try different things and hit on whatever it is that you want i i have it editing a lot of my stuff just in general just because like it's it's embarrassing when you post something

and there's like an obvious spelling mistake or grammar mistake and so so yeah i just put it through there and what's the uh the workflow like when you say put it through there you so i write i write it and then i take it and like give it instruction and say okay you're my editor like go go edit this like a good book editor or blog editor of mine so you're doing this in the browser or you have like a local instance that you're running no uh in the browser yeah yeah so i i i subscribe to chat gpt i think like for 10 bucks a month or something yeah yeah use it all that's great and it's that's one thing i need to that's what i'm looking for like i use ghost to publish everything i would love there to just be like a chat gpt yeah bot within the editor so

yeah i think uh microsoft word has something like that jarvis or yeah it's something that uses chat gpt to like correct your stuff as you go or whatever i've noticed it in google docs too yeah that that might have something too yeah yeah do you think uh what's the balance of like hype first actual signal in the ai well i i think there's a lot of signal and here's how i can tell um everyone's scared of it and that that's how you can always tell with new tech is uh the first thing people think of is how it's going to be awful that's just how people are so um you know when the internet first came out it was you know oh it's going to be all porn and it's gonna degrade everyone's morals and stuff like that um cell phone first came out it's gonna

give you cancer and you're you're gonna you know whatever and like the microwave going all the way back to like electricity or even writing you know like people always fud things that they don't understand or the incumbents you know have have an interest in or whatever they'll fud it um you know that that's basically what is happening to ai right now is oh you know what if it destroys humanity or whatever and you know most of this stuff it's gonna seem completely ridiculous in 10 years what the heck were you talking about with um you know like a machine doesn't have uh you know a will of its own that's you know that's not what it is you need to tell it what you what you want and then it just sort of like serves you but yeah that's how i can tell

there there are congressional hearings all that stuff and unfortunately fiat tends to sort of ruin anything new by trying to put regulations around it and ossifying it yeah yeah no i mean i certainly i don't use chat gbt as much as i use mid journey yeah after the thumbnails and it's incredible it's quick it's cheap yeah and it and it does such a good job right it's it's extremely detailed and um and you don't have to pay anyone other than mid journey for something i i've seen a lot of videos that use mid journey you know like stills for a lot of that stuff i mean wait until we get video that's gonna be yeah insane yeah i've already seen some um some of the examples of the video stuff yeah it's uh it's pretty mind-blowing

yeah yeah i i would say so i it's it opens up another vector of like complete degeneracy i feel like but in a sense that that's what you get with every tech yeah it's all double-edged swords even i mean porn is still a big problem on the internet there's um people are addicted to their cell phones now but it's just having that mental fortitude to really leverage the tools to increase your productivity and the quality of your life instead of letting them consume you. Yeah. I wonder how much of that lack of fortitude is due to fiat money

because in many ways, the tech that we have is absolutely incredible, yet so few people use it to add value, really. It's mostly like, okay, now I can watch more porn or something. It just seems very self-centered. And I wonder if that comes from a fiat mentality. Well, does fiat ruin everything? I guess that's the question. Including new tech?

Yeah, probably. Yeah, I would say so. But yeah, it is this, like we complain about it as if the technology is the problem, right? Like we have these cell phones or whatever. What if it's us? What if we're not like sort of good enough to handle this tech, right? We're Prometheus with fire or something. And we use the fire to burn things down rather than to cook food.

You know, in a sense, like fiat degrades our morals. So like we don't have that fortitude, the mental fortitude that you were talking about, that, uh, patience and virtue that would let us maybe use these things in a beneficial way. Mm-hmm. And so, I mean, this is a good jumping off point to talk about the book, Fiat Ruins Everything. What prompted you to write this? Well, um, several prompts actually. So first the podcast that I do is called Bitcoin Fixes This. and the more i did episodes the more i realized it's not that bitcoin is so amazing although it is it's amazing but half of the stuff that bitcoin fixes it's just sort of like

what fiat ruined right it's kind of like um you're eating poison all the time and you change your diet and so you're not eating poison anymore and you're suddenly a lot better was it the new thing that you were eating that's made you better or is it just the removal of the poison well it's the removal of the poison and a lot of things that bitcoin fixes are like that it's fiat ruins a lot of stuff and you know being able to get rid of it or abstain from fiat is really the the main power of bitcoin you know it's the main thing that it gets that gets things fixed yeah reintroduces that good food that you can decide to eat instead of sugar or something high fructose corn syrup yeah yeah so that that was definitely part of it uh the other one was um i took david's uh rite of

passage class he wrote the foreword for this book and uh and i felt really empowered to go right and i feel like now i can just write any about anything for you know a couple thousand words without too much of a problem now i'm talking to somebody that writes every day so you you kind of already had that power me i i didn't really have that power like every thing that i wrote was kind of um like a hard birth right like and but i i felt empowered after taking that class so i started uh publishing on bitcoin magazine a lot of these articles and you know i i've modified them But, you know, a lot of the original ideas came from those articles and compiling them was, it made sense at a certain point. So, yeah, that's the result.

What was it like taking David's class? I've been following David for years. He's a big inspiration about just getting out there, writing consistently. And you're actually the second person I've met that's worked with him and gotten extreme value from the classes, from the perspective he brings to writing. what were like a couple of things that you picked up yeah uh so first it's you know the the thing that he teaches is you know you don't want to write from a blank page you want to have ideas already and you get that by taking good notes on the content that you're consuming so if you consume an article like you take notes on it right then you get uh you get

like the gist or the ideas that come to you during that and you store them somewhere. And if you have like a backlog of good ideas, then it's a lot easier to begin instead of staring at a blank page and going through sort of that writer's block, uh, that, that comes from that. Instead, you're, you're sort of taking an abundant amount of material that you already have and organizing it. And that's, that's much less daunting. Yeah. just thinking about my own writing process without knowing that process that you just described. It's sort of how I do it. Cause I usually anchor to tweets. I've either liked

retweet or quote tweeted articles connected to them, but I don't write notes down. I just have them in my head or something I need to get better at. Yeah. And the notes are kind of nice, especially if you have a good search function on your notes. So like, okay, what are, what are some thoughts i've had about you know some topic and then you can you can go look through them and now now you have material to to go do that um and you know being able to start from somewhere is is that that's half the battle for me is is being able to start what note tools you use uh evernote is the main one but you know i i also use like ia writer on mac to just sort of write write random things i i write a lot that i don't publish um and that's that's like uh more of a habit that

i've gotten into uh the other thing that i thought was really insightful that from his class was um um if you write like how you talk you'll get things out much better right like so uh you know i i uh he recommended this tool otter ai and it's like um it's like a tool for your phone and you can just start recording and then it'll transcribe everything and then you can copy that and put it onto something. And that process, and I don't necessarily do it this way, that process of just sort of being unfiltered and talking and, you know, like, because when you're talking, it's very linear, right? But you just sort of get out whatever thought you have. Using that in your writing is very powerful, because now you're not thinking about, all right, well, how do I organize

all of this in a specific way it's you're just sort of like having a conversation with somebody and that that's very useful because oftentimes that's how people are receiving it anyway it's not oh here's like a very specific logical argument it's if it's conversational it's a lot easier to read so yeah that that that was also very helpful yeah that's the one thing i try to bring to the bent and it's produced by sort of um sort of hard boundaries i have for myself day in and day out it's like oh i have work to do outside of the bent with 1031 um the podcast obviously running the site and i always want to write every day so i have this time constraint where the only way i can actually get something out every day is just write how i speak

like have it be like a conversational thing going back like i have always wanted to incorporate like an editing process but i've never i've never done it i literally just write it's like a stream of consciousness and then i hit send that's why i want like the publisher to have chat gbt to do like the small yeah grammatical and spelling errors that they can catch on the way like i'll do one swoop for for spelling errors before hitting send but it's not robust or thorough yeah i i will say though that the editing um like ups your writing significantly so uh if you go you know first draft you know it's okay but you edit it a couple more times like it can it often turns into a home run from something that was mediocre yeah pretty fast so the the

The key to that process is just being willing to read your stuff again. And for whatever reason, that's not too difficult for me. It's just sort of like, okay, well, I want to make it sound good. And you almost get different eyes the second and third time that you look at it because you've maybe thought about it more or you have different ideas and you want to incorporate them. So, you know, that's helpful for me too. Yeah, that's one thing.

a promise freak, so I'm going to start editing more. No, you're saying you're going to tease me to write a book. You're not the first person to tease me to write a book. How does a person that writes every day not have a book out? You've been doing it for like three years, too. What the heck, man? Six years now. Six years.

Okay, yeah. It's a long time, buddy. Why don't you have a book out? I don't know. I think I've, I don't know, maybe I've pigeonholed myself into this medium of like 500 to 2,000 words a day. and yeah you do that for like a month and that's a book yeah well i guess that's the thing like looking at this how many pages is this 340 340 like looking at this and thinking

about writing this much is almost daunting where like sitting down and writing again 500 to 2000 words is much much more I didn't write all 90,000 words at once it was 500 to 2,000 words at a time and you know I think all books are like that I know very few people that can write more than like five pages in a day anyway yeah and so I think so that's the other thing like how do you structure a book yeah that that took a while because I had a lot of individual ideas uh and i wasn't happy with like the first two sort of layouts or a table of contents or how how it was organized and it wasn't until i got to georgia and i was uh talking to some bitcoiners there and uh and one of them was like hey you know how you should organize it remember that talk you gave

like four years ago i was like yeah i remember that talk he's like you should organize it like that because it like clarified for me like all the different incentives and the talk that he was talking about was when i gave a bit block boom like a few years ago and it was all right here's how it changes you know fiat changes things at the individual level corporate level national level global level he's like you should structure your book that like that i was like hey that's actually a really good idea so i went and tried it and i was like you know i like this sort of like way of thinking uh or way of presenting because then you can sort of build on it and it's uh it goes down to the micro level of the individual and the lack of savings vehicles that we have all the way up to

the global level with the dollar hegemony and how that changes the geopolitical incentives uh at play so you know that that that was a very insightful thing and thank you for that by the way i can't remember that guy's name but you know he you know it was just dinner and we were hanging out and that's what he told me i was like oh it's a good one so you know it could come from anywhere i guess but yeah no like structuring it in this way like starting from the individual working up like the nation state geopolitical level i think it just highlights how again fiat ruins everything like in a fractal right it really does because it really does come down to you know the ability to print money and how that pushes all of this badness everywhere um and it does at the individual level

and the corporate level and the national level and the global level yeah i mean so let's just run through some examples going through that structure like okay in terms of the individual What do you think are the worst ways in which fiat ruins the individual's ability to have a better quality of life? Yeah, first of all, fiat money means that we're all living on debt instead of savings. So I think it corrupts the character of people. Because, I mean, you have kids. Like, what's better for your kid if you make them go save up to go buy a toy? or if you give them the toy right away

and make them do chores afterwards, what's better for the kid? It's that saving and getting what you want at the end is what you want to teach them. Yet, the debt-fueled system that we live in is completely backwards. We get what we want right now and then we pay it off over a long period of time.

And this is true of almost everything now, right? So you can finance anything that you buy, pretty much. Housing is the obvious one, but even cars or even stuff on Amazon, four easy payments of $39.99 or whatever. This is what's been happening is that we get into this like slavery mentality of, okay, I can indulge in whatever high time preference desires I have and just pay it off later. And then we're surprised when we're miserable paying it off for our indulgences, you know, way back when. So it corrupts our mentality. It makes us very high time preference. And not having a good savings vehicle also means that we're sort of ushered into that, you know, high time preference mentality.

um it changes how we work uh or or like the types of work we have and it's getting more into sort of like the corporate level you know everything every organization is enormous there are incentives at play that basically make it a winner-take-all game and that's because if you're a big company then you have access to way more loans. So the bigger, big companies get bigger and can crush smaller companies because smaller companies don't have access to these giant loans, to the corporate bond market,

to money printed out of nothing. So that means that most people work for giant corporations in one way or the other. And that means that you have one customer for your work. and uh and if you if you have all your eggs in one basket well you're going to make sure that that egg doesn't get cracked or something you're beholden to that basket yeah basically and you you have to do you sort of make your beliefs aligned with that and because corporations get very political because of the presence of fiat money and non sort of market incentives that

come from that um means that you have to play this political game it's not all about merit i mean there's some merit involved but you know there there's a lot of rent-seeking positions in these places now where you don't have to do anything right if you're a dei officer and have the right race or whatever like it's gonna be hard to fire you so you you know you kind of don't have to do whatever so um changes the incentives uh for good work right um so your work becomes less meaningful um yeah yeah walking through that just the topic of like the managerial class and having access to all this cheap debt and a lot of vc money and it really skewed the metrics that companies used to gauge success one of which became headcount it's just like you just grow

your headcount and your company is successful and that led to creating this managerial class of people who really didn't do anything to add productivity and utility to the company's underlying good or service at the end of the day it just created a bunch of bloat and more meetings and more time wasted for everybody who's actually doing productive things like yeah and thinking about like that headcount thing right that's that's another artifact of fiat money because in a sense uh when when you're a central bank when you're uh thinking about unemployment as one of the metrics that you have to make sure of sure doesn't get high. The secondary incentive there is, okay, make sure that you're hiring enough people.

So governments end up subsidizing businesses that have more employees rather than the ones that might be benefiting society. So we saw, for example, in 2008 with the GM and Chrysler bailouts, that it was more about saving the workers, the UAW, rather than any sort of domestic industry or creating more and better cars. It was just, all right, let's just make sure that we keep these people employed. We have to keep them employed and happy or whatever. So headcount becomes a thing because it's a political calculation in a democracy, especially because those people vote. So you have to subsidize them or you have to gain their favor by bailing them out. So even at the nation level, you start getting these weird incentives where because the government can essentially print money,

they give out stuff for free all the time. and you know it's it's all money extracted from people that are actually productive yeah no and that brings up the topic that we should definitely touch on like i wrote a newsletter yesterday on labor day it was just reflecting on the labor numbers that came out last week the jobs reports and uh another very fiat thing is data revisions at the bureau of labor statistics it was really ironic they're sitting uh on my day off at the house and just thinking it's labor day and i think people don't really reflect on what is labor day liberty is a day for laborers to rest and reflect and um to enjoy time with their family but i kind of hope but think considering where we are here in

the united states particularly with the economic situation that a lot of the laborers that were off yesterday were not really reflecting and resting they're probably under an immense amount of stress because of the state of the economy and the jobs market um and the the final thought of that letter was like the way out is sound money and strong families and then like gets back to what we're talking like when you corrupt these incentives like you and you have the state replace very important parts of the family, particularly the father, with these handouts, again, it just creates these terrible incentives

where you're not really incentivized to build a strong family because you have this weak money. And then that has compounding effects throughout the economy. Yeah, and the family thing is particularly interesting because, in a sense, the state wants to induce dependency. They want people to depend on them.

because that's what gives them power. The more dependency there is from a particular class of people, the more power they're willing to give them because, hey, you're taking care of me, right? Like, that's the least I can do is to vote for more power to the government. And that in turn means

that there's less dependence on everything else. And traditionally, the dependence that we had outside of ourselves was your family, right? Or your community, your tribe, um, all of those things, like we're, we're not dependent on those things anymore. And in fact, like, uh, you know, I, I begin the book, uh, you know, talking about like sort of the modern lament, right? Like what happened? Like when you were a kid, you probably knew a lot of your neighbors and, you know, their families and stuff like that. A lot of people just live in a house and go to work and they, they have no idea who their neighbors are. And they're,

they're very sort of disconnected part of that is you're dependent on something else you don't you don't depend on your neighbors for anything you don't depend on your community for anything you depend on the government you depend on the people that are providing you stuff so in a sense there's way less incentive for bigger families for more families in fact like having a family period is is too much of a responsibility because if you're dependent on something you you don't you're kind of saying i don't want responsibility i want i want someone to take care of me and that's that's where they are yeah yeah no i mean that there was a viral clip going around twitter this weekend of a little woman she's 29 years old and she was bragging about being a single 29 year old without

of family and just talking about how she was able to go out to a beyonce concert stay out partying until 1am sleep till 10 15 and then learn how to cook a particular recipe and watch tv all day like she didn't have any responsibilities and she was comparing that to people with families like hey you're missing out on all this fun it's like oh man you've completely missed the mark here but for better or uh unfortunately that's the state of many people's lives right now particularly millennials that are coming of age entering their 30s they're sort of been psyoped into believing they're like oh just living this hedonistic lifestyle of just going after your every want at any given point in time is is much preferable to raising a family and i think subconsciously

there's a blocker there because of the economic burden that people believe comes with raising a family, which I think is overstated to a certain degree. But, but it is there. And in a sense, like, uh, the, the sort of inward focus, hedonism and narcissism, the, you know, like navel gazing, I guess, of, uh, of the last 50 years, right? Like think about like social media and stuff like that. And, you know, how many likes am I getting

on my Instagram picture or something like that? Those are all focusing inward. And this is what happens when you have no responsibility. You just think about yourself. And what that woman is doing is thinking about our own happiness and using that as sort of the metric by which she measures our life.

And in that sense, it maybe doesn't make sense to go and have a family. But is that all there is? That's a very kind of shallow and fickle sort of goal to have. If you have some other goal, that's a lot more noble, I would say, but also just long-term. Thinking about the legacy that you're going to leave or the changes that you want to make into the world,

then yeah, like having a family is a large part of that. And unfortunately, people don't think about any of those things because in a sense, they're part of the dependent class. They think only about being taken care of instead of taking care of things. Yeah, and it goes back to that line of instant gratification versus delayed gratification that we started the conversation off with like in this case like you have a lot of emotional debt that you're building up in return for that instant gratification but

down down the road and if you don't delay any of that gratification it's pretty dark life you wake up in your 40s you don't have kids you don't have family you're not viewed as particularly cool if you're going out and doing those hedonistic things going to concerts going to bars by yourself and just partying like that's again weighing that opportunity cost i don't think people my age and a bit younger recognize that that opportunity cost exists or or that or how high time preference they're being because they they only think about now um and this is the thing about fiat money is it sort of suspends reality for a while right like it uh it lets you believe that you don't have to live by the rules of reality in many ways.

You can sort of suspend it by getting into debt. You know, money is usually the solution. And you get into debt and bring consumption forward and you don't think about all of the payment that you're going to have to do later. And it's interesting that you phrase it as emotional debt or something else, it is in many ways like just stuff you're going to have to pay off later with misery. Because if you are 50 years old and you don't have any progeny and maybe some of your

friends are like that, or I mean, you're hanging out with a few other single friends that are just as miserable as you are and that is not a good place to be and i mean most people live till they're like 70s or 80s that's it's a long time of misery that you're setting up for yourself so you can have a few years of fun in your late 20s yeah like we were discussing it before we hit record like just looking at my kids like sent my son off to school today and he's three three and half he's almost four and it's crazy to think of how big he is and how quickly he's grown and then apply that to my own life i'm like holy crap i'm already 10 years out of college like it goes like that like this like life it's true what they say i'd never forget in high school we were

uh beginning of my senior year uh it was around thanksgiving and all the kids in the grade above us came back from college and played football like around thanksgiving like at the field and we ran into them and like it was hilarious because they they came to us and they were like boys like enjoy this year like it's uh it's things change quickly when you get to college like enjoy it like bask in it and we were like all right losers just trying to live your glory days but no they were like trying to it was funny because they're only a year older than us but they were really trying to get the message across like savor this enjoy this like do not waste what you have here because it is special that's we went to a pretty tight all boys prep school um and once you leave

that sort of confined space in culture and then go out spread into the world you realize like uh it's really special what we had like we should enjoy it while we're here um and likewise the topic that we're talking about like yeah your 20s are cool early 30s are cool but that should be like a time where you're investing in yourself and beginning to build a family because it passes you by and then you wake up and you're not the cool 25-year-old anymore.

Yeah, and that's suspension of reality, right? And this is something that fiat money sort of like deceives you into thinking will be continually true. The entire fiat structure is built on ossification, right? Whenever you have a company that gets to a certain size and they want to stay in the position that they're in they get all sorts of regulations and stuff like that built for them so that they can keep keep their um place in the

economy uh even like politicians right they they they're like really old because they don't want to leave and they they figured out ways to sort of um make it so that newcomers can't get their position. The entire structure of fiat is sort of, you get to keep what you have right now and it'll just stay static, right? Because that's the most comfortable and safe thing. And in a sense, like when you're thinking from that perspective, you don't think there are any consequences to any of the things that you're doing now. So you do think in some weird way that you are going to be cool at 45 as you were at 25 it's it's sort of like this weird mentality that's sort of pushed on you because everything is built around keeping the status quo yeah and then that leads to

complacency like not only at the individual level but the company level too like we talk about emotional debt like but like at the company level to corporate level like the amount of zombie companies that are out there just because they've raised a shit ton of money and have been able to ride the zero interest rate gravy train for 15 years like now the interest rates are where they are at five and a half six percent wherever the fed funds rate's sitting right now like those zombie companies are really having to come to grips with the fact that they actually build anything a sustained sustain they didn't build sustainable businesses at the end of the And I mean, WeWork probably being the greatest example.

Their corporate bonds are trading at like 90% right now, which is a signal that like, oh, this business actually doesn't make any sense. Yeah, a lot of it. And well, like if you look at something like IBM, right? They used to make a lot of stuff. It's international business machines, right? They used to make machines,

but they've sold off or used um you know used fiat money to let you know basically sell off various units and they're now like almost purely a services company right like they're not providing value to anybody they're they become a zombie in large part because of this availability of debt And that means that they can bring consumption forward. So from what I understand, they've used debt to pay out or to do stock buybacks mostly. And that's a way to sort of prop up their stock price, not through having better cash flows or profits or inducing demand, but by shrinking the supply of their stock. Reducing the denominator. Yeah. And this actually turns out to be a viable way of surviving in a fiat economy because if you're a large company, you can always get lots of debt. And if you can use that to prop up your stock price, then that ends up being a reasonable play. But they don't produce anything. It's all rent seeking.

Yeah, which gets to an even deeper problem, which is that these vehicles, these stocks are typically a way in which people try to preserve their wealth over time. Right. And those things all are way overpriced and they've taken on something of a monetary role as a store of value because there aren't good stores of value. So when you, when you don't have money as, as a good store of value, everything else sort of takes on some of its characteristics and does kind of a bad job at it. But that also means that the actual utility of, of the thing is now compromised because there's this additional utility that it has to serve as money. So, for example, housing, right? We're talking about families earlier. Why is it that so few families or why are birth rates so low everywhere? Well, part of it is because of the presence of so many rent seekers, both parents have to work. So both parents are working. You're just not going to have that many babies, right? Like you're kind of limited because, well, who's going to take care of the kids, right? That sort of thing. So maybe you can get to two, maybe three, but, you know, at four, you're starting to really push it and it gets very difficult. The other one is housing, right?

If you're going to have a big family, you need a big house. But guess what? A lot of housing has this store of value premium. So the people that want to own a house so they own a big house so they can have a large family, they're priced out by the people that are owning a large house because they want to store value. So housing costs have gone up significantly because people don't trust the dollar and they want a good investment. So it's not being used for its intended purpose, which is housing people, right? Like giving people a place to live. So this is especially bad in Asia, right?

Korea has the lowest birth rates in the world right now. 0.78, yeah. 0.78 children per woman. So it's like way below one. And that's like demographic. It's way, way past the point of no return. And you go there and you realize exactly why. almost every couple that has a kid both parents are working so you're i mean most couples have

like one um two is very unusual and three is extremely unusual because again both parents are working and besides that all the real estate is really really expensive there because you know um you know first of all there's not as much land and and second asian people like use real estate as a, have traditionally used real estate as a store of value, which is why you get entire ghost cities in China, because there's so much demand for housing that even if no one lives there, people are willing to go buy it. So you, you have these confluence of factors and therefore you get very, very low birth rates and that it's, it's fiat money. It's, it's really kind of you know the the big families of yesteryear don't exist because fiat money has priced them out

yeah now the housing situation here in the united states is actually pretty scary yeah where it seems like the markets like at this it's like floating in air like waiting for like a free fall or a melt up if the money printers get turned back on but it's literally insane like i'm from philadelphia and uh i mean i was back on the east coast all summer and talking to friends like trying to buy houses in the area not even in the city like in the suburbs it's like there's 40 to 50 bids per house people like offering up a hundred thousand dollars above asking with no inspection just to get a house because they just want to raise their families like that's a lot of the people i grew up with and that live in the area i grew up they're they are

trying to keep the tradition going come from like pretty strong irish american italian american like big catholic families and like the people my age are trying from where i'm from are trying to keep that that trend going and it's just like literally becoming impossible to like actually house a family. It's just insane. Yeah. Because of the store of value premium on real estate. Yeah. And that's just one of the many, many ways in which like families are disincentivized on their fiat money. But I mean, even something stupid like child car seats, right. And this is from the child car seat lobby that has essentially bribed all the, all the different state and national legislatures to say okay well you have to have one for anyone under this age i mean i didn't have

that when i was a kid i i don't know about you but that that was like like no no one had car seats and if you can't transport them because like the housing that you need you're able to afford is like so far away you need a car and if you if you need like a giant passenger van or you know a car that costs like 70 000 instead of 20 or 30 yeah that that that's another cost too and yeah these are the subtle ways in which you know families have been basically disincentivized everywhere yeah it's terribly sad like do you think i'm gonna get uh picked on and made fun of for even bringing this question up because cloud world doesn't have a top like are we getting close to the limits of the insanity of fiat do you think what are the limits of it are we getting close

like how long can we sustain this yeah economy because it seems like who knows it's been said many times in the past but i don't know i'm not going to say this time is different but i think the amount of stress that people are under is so immense that it's hard to imagine that something doesn't break structurally within the fiat economy well it's already breaking right uh the thing about raising rates is that you know fiat money especially under zero interest you can suspend reality in all sorts of ways but uh when rates are rising you're bringing a lot more rationality into the market. And what we're seeing right now is rationality being put into the market. A lot of companies that have to go on their merits and not on cheap loans, they're starting

to break. And even at a consumer level, we saw Bud Light and Target. Well, they would have ridden this out just by issuing more paper or something like that and using money as a way to go against the boycott and probably killed it early. But because of the high interest rate environment, you don't have access to that. You can't just sort of borrow your way out of your problem. So rationality is sort of being put back into the market. And in particular, you know, I was reading an interview with the CEO of Waste Management. And what he said was very enlightening because he said, I can't find garbage truck drivers for $95,000 a year. he's out of houston i think and he's like i can't find them like there's nobody willing to

go drive trucks for 95 000 a year but you know like a graduate from a mid-tier business school for 65 000 i can hire them and i can hire them all day long so what does that tell you that there is i think at a certain point like emphasis being put on actually providing value because if you're driving a garbage truck you're doing something that is clearly adding value to a lot of people but if you are manipulating excel spreadsheets on a project that's not going anywhere in your company anyway well that's that's a rent seeker and those people are you know like they're they're starting to get priced appropriately like even like the ups thing recently you know the average price uh average salary of 170 grand 170 grand and i

think they deserve every penny because they're doing something that is actually providing value to everybody right so in a sense the like as interest rates rise we're seeing some rationality come back in and instead of you know some hr professional getting paid 170 you know you're getting the ups driver that's getting 170 and like the the hr professional that was at twitter you know probably got fired during the elon musk takeover this this is i think like healthy this this is where where we should have been going and reality is like reasserting itself as as you're getting higher interest rates but of course like when does that break absolutely everything i i like if they keep raising it it'll probably bring way more rationality into the market and in that

sense i'm i'm very happy about it but you know there there are there are just so many things that are broken well like does everything collapse probably at some point but i i don't know exactly when yeah i mean we saw last year was or earlier this year not even last year feels like a year ago but all the bank blow up so you had to step in with the btfp yeah um so it's certainly breaking something but it was like even in those instances people were a bit pissed off it's like hey just let the markets clear like this is what you're supposed to be doing but again that's another problem with fiat is that it has these levers that are controlled by men who are easily manipulated by emotion and politics particularly and that's that's obviously what's likely to happen is

especially when you consider like the rollover of treasuries at these interest rates and they're probably going to explode above 1.5 trillion dollar in interest expense at some point next year at that point you just look at the numbers you're like there's no way out of this like we have to lower rates and print more money well and they they're gonna want to suspend reality because reality is going to be just so painful and that that's that's kind of the thing that we've been doing for i don't know like 70 years or something right it's just sort of all right this is too painful let's just print print more money to take care of it this is too painful let's take print more money to take care of it and that's you know that that's happened

over and over and over and finally they're now raising interest rates so they have some room to go do that later um but you know first of all i don't know if it has the impact that they think well they will like so if right now rates are around five right you drop at a full point i know how much that stimulates the economy right um it used to be that a tiny move in interest rates was enough to stimulate everything i think after the crash of 87 i think it was um they they lowered it from like 5.25 to 5. and that was enough to just stimulate everything and then 92 they had to lower it from like five to like yeah like two full points or something like that before it's stimulated and like 2001 they they had to like go close to zero and then 2008 they put it to zero

and that wasn't enough to actually it's like the the bombs you need are getting greater and greater so i i don't i don't even know if any any of that will work like five five and a half like you need to keep it at this level for a long time for it to um you know have the effect that the fed wants it to have like where the market's so sensitive to interest rates again and then again do they have the political will to hold it higher for longer yeah which seems like to date they seem to be standing pretty steady but you have to imagine rolling into an election year if things get pretty bad the attacks from the elizabeth warrens of the world are going to get so so loud they just cry uncle well is it though because in a sense i'm i'm not sure um

because the people in power are um well first of all you you do need to raise interest rates to clear out all of the junk because there it is like the market is just completely full of junk and if you don't get rid of that then you you have no industrial capacity as it is we have like trade deficits with lots of countries especially china like you're the prospect of bringing any of that back depends on interest rates being staying kind of high because you know you you get way more rent seeking the lower the rates you have so it's it's a weird problem and because like politics has changed so much it used to be that democrats used to um represent mostly working people but now it's like all the big

corporations and rich people like if you're rich you become the war party yeah yeah i mean it's it's completely turned over where they're like the pro drug or pro pharmaceutical pro big business kind of party and it's like completely unrecognizable from 25 years ago like this this is the way you sort of like start healing an economy like that i i don't know they they might hold these rates for a while um even past election day um because i don't it just seems like they they need to do something drastic to correct for all of the stuff that's gone before yeah yeah and how do we articulate this to the people that are going to experience the pain that comes with this market cleansing yeah reality i'm not sure but i suspect it'll be

distraction distraction like i don't know maybe maybe we start a roar with russia or something like that or and maybe that's enough of an impetus to you know um lower rates maybe or like put it on a different footing well i'm talking about like a hypothetical where we run with the idea that that we're going to hold them higher for longer let the market clear and articulate to people like hey this is going to suck but it's going to be good in the long run yeah i i don't know what the political um move would be there but i i suppose blaming somebody for it would be the way to do it um yeah it's hard to say because they they suspended reality for so long like the amount of time that they need to hold higher rates and i don't i don't think five's high enough

it needs to go to like eight or nine before all of that stuff like really clears but then you have like very high you know like one of the one of the things that i i saw recently was that you know and since the debt ceiling has been lifted the treasury has spent like an extra trillion dollars Yeah. They plan to issue $1.85 trillion for the rest of the year. So that's a lot of money entering the economy. But the rest of the non-government sector has been shrinking. The money supply everywhere else has shrunk significantly. So they've actually, if you think about it,

you've transferred corporate debt into treasury debt Because consumer debt's going up, corporate debt is unwinding, and that debt is essentially being taken up by the treasury. So if that's what they're doing, then they're trying to provide something of a softer landing for the corporation somehow, and sacrificing individuals essentially to do that, and taking on more debt as a government.

but like you have this middle of corporations that are benefiting out of this yeah yeah so i i don't know how it plays out though like or how they spin it or whatever it it does seem like they're trying to help the businesses as much as they can by taking out more debt though yeah it's pretty precarious situation we find ourselves in yeah well it's a lot of debt to unroll right like a a lot of leverage to unlever i mean yeah the headline national debt is what like 33 trillion now but then you factor in unfunded liabilities that balloons like 250 trillion and quarter of a quadrillion dollars and then you got state debt you got local debt you know muni municipal bonds and stuff like that it's it's an enormous quantity of money and it's it's a significant percentage of

of basically the money in circulation. And so at the individual level, like how in your mind can individuals begin to sort of like detach themselves from this and inoculate themselves from the negative consequences that'll come from either the market clearing or more of the same madness that got us in this predicament? Well, if interest rates are rising,

you need to get out of debt because it's just going to cost more and more, um, as you roll it over or take on more or whatever. Unfortunately, most people are going the other way. They're taking on more debt, um, in terms of credit cards and things like that, which is, uh, which is the wrong way to go. Um, so get out of debt, uh, start saving and say, we have a great savings technology. i'd love to tell you about it right um that that that is is the saving grace in this whole scenario because you if you have a savings tech uh you have a savings vehicle that's not getting debased well then all whatever happens you'll be okay because you you have a certain amount of savings that's not going to debase that that that's a large part of it but the other one is get out of

your fiat job and start providing value because that's what the market is rewarding anyway um you need to provide real value if you're a welder in south dakota right now you're making easily making six figures and even the ups truck driver or whoever those people are all going to get paid more um as you suck the capital away from the rent seekers i mean and ai probably plays a part of this too, is these companies are going to need to cut cost. And what are they going to get rid of? Well, they have to play more rationally in this market because they don't have access to cheap loans. They're going to cut the unproductive people. These are the rent seekers, the people that aren't contributing anything. So getting out of a fiat job and providing value and maybe

providing a good or service directly to the market, I think is probably the best position that you can be in to sort of handle this uncertainty that's coming. Yeah. It's really disheartening when you think, too, like going back, like fiat ruins everything. Like the university system has set a lot of

this rent-seeking class up for failure. like that's we sort of have to feel for people where they were fed this idea particularly millennials you go to high school you get into a good college you take your student loan out and go get a degree and you'll get a job and work your way up the ladder eventually be making six figures but the university system completely set people up for failure and fed false promises and unrealistic expectations into their minds you know oh like by a lot right because you're not only are you saddled with like an enormous amount of debt like the first job out of college that you're gonna get is gonna pay like forty five thousand dollars like you you you could have gone to gone

and learned like welding or being an auto mechanic and make like triple that right it's there there's so many things where if yeah you're actually providing value to people you would have gotten really paid and like a lot of these jobs they're they don't have anywhere near enough people right like there there's a giant shortage of welders for example um and it's uh unfortunate because the fiat system has said uh has basically made it so that the high status jobs are the ones that are in many ways the most rent seeking, whereas the low status jobs are the ones that provide value. So, you know, this probably will get flipped somewhat because already, like, a lot of these jobs are kind of seen as more steady. You know, if you're driving trucks,

like you're doing pretty well um and yeah i i think that's the direction we'll be going is less rent seeking more providing value yeah does that mean we have to retrain a whole workforce a whole generation of people probably i mean like i was talking to my cousin when i was in korea and he had done some business stuff in america and he came back after he got divorced and he started learning how to um operate some construction machinery and like he's like that's what i'm gonna do because that's what's paying and it's something that i can get into without too much training you don't need like you know an advanced degree or something like that and i like that's just practical right it's like okay yeah that's the way to that's the way to do

it and maybe you're not considered part of the elite or something like that but what's why do you need to be part of the elite anyway like it's it's not getting you anything uh at least at this point yeah yeah is that another psyop like how much is enough like you don't need to go yeah make a million dollars a year you can be completely content in a sane world with a humble salary and a good family you know the reason why people want more money or feel like they need it is because of the uncertainty of the money itself because you don't know if that million dollars is going to be now like have half the purchase purchasing power in 10 years or something like that. And historically that's been true. Like a million dollars used to be a lot of

money, but it's not anymore. It's because the money's continually debasing. So people, the more uncertainty people feel, the more money that they're going to want. And in a weird way, having an inflating money means that more people are sort of beholden and worship money instead of having it serve them. Yeah. No, it's crazy. I had Matthew Mazinkshus on last week to go over the global monetary base quarterly update. And he's run the numbers for the compound annual growth rate of the physical stock of cash globally. And I think over the last 50 years, the CAGR has been 13%, which means you have a doubling of the monetary base every 5.7 years. Yeah. I was actually reading a very similar statistic in Principles of Economics, which I've been reading. And Saif Deen says that the best currencies are expanding at around 7% or 8%. And the US dollar, I think, is right around 7%. But if you weigh all of the money from different countries and how fast they're expanding, the number he came up with historically is 14%.

Yeah. So that, I mean, that's a lot. And, you know, for every United States, you got somebody like that's at 25%. And because the U.S. is so big, I mean, you have lots of little countries that are like 25%, 30% of, you know, monetary expansion. That's a lot of value being stolen from people. Yeah. What does the world look like if that's not happening?

It means a lot less rent seekers for sure. But, you know, it's a great question. and i i honestly don't know exactly what that looks like because so many people i think are kind of useless in this economy they're they're like public leeches in many ways and does that mean to say does that mean i think that's true like like we we tend to like denigrate like the welfare queen or whatever and you know to some degree they deserve it but you know the rent seeker is far more pernicious because they're, they, they're making money that, and they're contributing no value. So they're, they're like a serious negative where welfare queen, you know,

maybe, maybe it's like however many kids and it's, you know, 500 a month or something, but the rent seeker, this is like a hundred thousand a year, you know, it's, it's, it's way more so you know we don't need to be worrying so much about the bottom uh the the people abusing things at the bottom if we can fix the managerial class yeah the the bullshit jobs right the the the rent seekers the the people that aren't providing anything and what's even worse is these people think they're doing something beneficial and they get lots of good status right like if you work for a washington think tank that's like the hoity-toity get invited to all the parties and stuff but they're they're not contributing anything no they're actually adding

to the uh if they disappear tomorrow nothing would be different nothing would be maybe maybe there's like one less article that's referenced in an msnbc like feature or something but that's it Well, I think that's probably like the biggest hurdle socially and psychologically is, again, the complacency. Again, going back to my generation, 90s kids. I was born in 91. It's like the fish and water story. You're just born in water.

You don't know what water is. There is multiple generations of people who were born in the water that is fiat and expect life to be a certain way, not realizing that. they came up in a completely manufactured reality with no connection to like actual value or proof of work and it's going to be very hard to come to grips with the fact that they've been living a lie for decades or that reality has been suspended and then okay here's the real reality it's coming up right now you have to provide value and you're not getting paid yeah that um but in a sense that that's the lesson we kind of need to learn because the longer you suspend reality the the

more civilization gets broken down so the very thing that is being held up or being drawn from like the we're going to have a much worse world if we continue down this road of rent seeking um and you know bitcoin is that hope for that reason because if it does collapse then here you you have a new economic system that's not based on rent seeking and that that's that's the key yeah and then the big question is how do we get people on that lifeboat as quickly as possible yeah and this is this is where we've been debating a lot of people on twitter because like there there are all these people that are like oh you know what like a lot of people come into bitcoin from all coins or whatever i'm like no no i don't think so because

there is sort of like to use a biblical analogy there's a narrow gate and a wide gate right there's a narrow gate and a wide gate the wide gate is what everyone enters through it's just oh number go up and you know there's like 80 different other cryptos that i'm going to invest and it's the fiat door. The real door, the narrow door is learning about economics, learning about how money works, what fiat money does and how it corrupts everything. And that takes a long time.

It takes most people a few years, even very smart people like Russell Kuhn and Michael Saylor many months to go down that road. and that's the door we want people to come through the narrow way and not the wide way because the wide way just going to make you a degenerate gambler and probably more fiat than you were before uh unfortunately those two are conflated it's like oh as long as you own bitcoin you're a bitcoiner not exactly because the things that you value the mentality that you have and the sort of like the change in values that you need it's only through the narrow door

um and that's that's unfortunately like uh not that common although it's becoming more common i think the community that we're in mostly have entered that door um how do we get more people to come in honestly it's it's just getting slapped by reality and pain is probably the only way they most people find it yeah yeah no the whole conversation going on with drive chains right now it's funny right because it's like the whole idea that like trying to bend bitcoin to the will of a particular user and their view of what it should be instead of just bending to the will of the rule set that is bitcoin and working within that framework it's like very the former is very fiat where it's literally what got us into this problem why bitcoin exists in the first place is

because we had the levers to basically imbue our will on the fiat monetary system and it got us to end state and when it comes to drive chains and bringing all coin functionalities to bitcoin or narrative's been changing whatever just we just need uh merge mine side chains like i don't think i honestly truly intuitively don't think that's true i don't think the whole security budget kvetching doesn't make sense to me because you're trying to use bitcoin's historical usage project down to the future where i just think that's completely asinine right now yeah it's linear projection of a non-linear system and i the whole like tactic that layer 2 labs has been employing is is very fiat it's very cheesy yeah it's you're you're gonna have to agree with us because

you know we are going to meme you into it or something like that they're not going to meaning either no and it's uh it's unfortunate because they are funded and they have money and they're going to probably try this for a while um but you know the this kind of what you have to deal with with fiat stuff is you have people coming in from the outside that are obviously very influenced by fiat thinking that the rules in bitcoin are the same as fiat and it's simply not and a lot of people don't realize that until it's too late i think even paul knows that to a large degree because he's been trying to get drive chains in for like seven years but it's not happening it hasn't happened because consensus is very different and the only

way you're going to get in is by convincing a lot more people and honestly he hasn't done a very good job of doing that he's he's not doing it right now um so i don't think there's any hope for this thing uh and in the meantime we're just gonna get more drama uh and yeah i've been trying to stay out of it because i do think it's noise matt brought this up on rabbit hole recap like if you just run the probability announce analysis of actually getting anything uh merged into bitcoin let alone drive chains specifically like the probability is very low And with that in mind, you can just most likely ignore it. Potentially be surprised to the upside in the future.

And yeah, I completely think the security budget kvetching is just asinine. It doesn't make any sense. And it's been a narrative around Bitcoin for a long time. Remember how I said that whenever you have a new tech, there's always FUD. This is one of those like persistent ones that comes up almost every halving, right?

it's oh what are we going to do when we run out of uh you know block reward uh okay like first of all that's not for a long time and second you know you're you're linearly projecting out various things and this is the other thing about oh you know on chain you're not going to have be able to serve seven billion people it's like you know people are going to build other stuff thing is if it's if anything has a lot of use people build new things to make make it possible for other people to participate because there's a lot of demand for it and there's profit to be made. And if it's not there,

then we were wrong in the first place. Like you can't manufacture the demand. I think it's got to be there. Yeah. So it, in a way it's, it's very fiat, right?

Linear projection is extremely fiat. It's, it's okay. Well, you know, this happened over this small amount. So therefore we can project it out to however much this, why we get peak oil scares every like five years or whatever.

It's, it's always sort of a linear projection. Okay. We're using this much and we're not going to find any more and blah, blah, blah. It's, it's, it's asinine because they're not taking, they linearly project something as if the world is going to stay the same in the meantime. And this is, again, what fiat does is it gives the illusion of everything staying the same through weird monetary means, because that's what people find safe. But that's not how things work. And that's not how reality works. Fiat tries to give that illusion, but that's not how it works no i don't know if i have uh the energy for another like four core but i don't

think uh i'm not again i like paul i respect paul i've had him on the show a couple times i've met him in person and really liked interactions in person but like separate the man from the idea i'm not a big fan of the idea i don't think it's necessary i don't think it's yeah well the ironic thing about this whole thing is that a futures market would settle that very quickly but and that's that's why he's been advocating for drive chains he he's had this idea for high for a long time and he's like well i want it on bitcoin and then therefore i i i really don't think that um that it's do you need to merge my chain to do i don't efficient futures markets yeah i really don't think so because really you just need like uh and this is this is an idea that a lot of people

have had and a lot of projects have tried and somehow paul thinks that his is going to be the one that captures everyone's imagination and change the election because people know who'll get voted in because it's i don't know like he he's uh he's a very smart guy and but in a way like when when you're really smart you're you also have the ability to rationalize a lot of things rather than be rational about certain things um and yeah i i just see that about both drive chains and hive mind he you know he he projects success for those things where i i don't think there's any evidence that they're going to be yeah like he's like oh it'll it'll mean that people won't use all coins or something and he said that multiple times so like he keeps telling people

that it's a straw man it's like you dude you had an all-coin pinata at your at like bitcoin 2023 like you're you're why would you do that unless you were saying you're going to kill all coins with drive chains and yet he's like you know this the slippery kind of arguing that's very common in fiat which i really have very little tolerance for yeah and i just think about it from like a practical sense when you think about something like liquid it's not exactly a merged mine side chain um but like the abstraction like all the wallet compatibility that you need to add once you get something like this live like and putting yourself in the user shoes like i'm going to send it over here and i'm gonna have another token yeah another wallet and then like that gets turned up

with drive chains and just from a user experience perspective like it i just find it hard to believe that you can create like an experience that's intuitive we're comparing that to something like a lightning channel like hey i lock it up in this 202 multi-sig and i have sats i have bitcoin lightning wallet um i think the abstraction of like merge mine tokens is a stretch to think that people are gonna intuitively grasp that and understand the trade-offs that come with it and obviously the biggest worry for me is like the mining messing with mining incentives yeah that that that's a big one yeah i like the thing about paul is that he doesn't come from like an austrian perspective so like a lot of it the assumptions that i've seen to make are that everyone is

homo economic economicists that they make hyper rational decisions and stuff like that and that's that's not how people are it's based on stuff like you were saying like the user experience and how easy is it and those are all hand-waved away by non-austrian economists everyone acts rationally no one's gonna spend if uh if there's deflation because it's worth more later it's like yeah but we need to live dude like that we're like these are the sort of errors that you get into if you're not um thinking of economics from what i think is the correct perspective it's it's just you get into very weird situations where you assume everyone's homo economicus and get confused when they don't act like it yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see how this develops

i think a lot of it's just middle of the bear market claws come out yeah people get restless um before we wrap up here we've got the book where can people find the book number one and then once they do find it what is your hope in terms of what people get after reading this what did they walk away understanding or how does their view change or all right to answer the first question you can go to fiat ruins everything.com um so up until september 6th which i think will be before this show airs we're going to drop this tomorrow so beyond september 6th okay all right so if if you go uh on by september 6th there's going to be a crowdfund so you can buy signed copies and things like that. But what am I hoping for with this book? I specifically

aim this book at Bitcoiners, people that are already in the space. A lot of my other books, they're aimed at outsiders to come into Bitcoin. This one is specifically for people that are already in Bitcoin to grow their conviction. Because I want to convince them that fiat money really is deeply evil and that to stay in bitcoin to advocate for bitcoin is a good thing um and you know i i give them them a lot of ammo on a lot of different topics and try to come at things from first principles on a lot of stuff um to not fall into that fiat mentality of trusting experts or authorities or whoever um and sort of judge things for themselves and you know some some of it may land some of it may not i had to put a trigger warning in front of like the chapter

on art for example um but that that's that's the idea is that uh you know fiat ruins everything and i'm going to show you why and after you read it hopefully you're you're more convicted than ever that sound money is what this world needs and that you'll be an advocate for Bitcoin. Go read the book, freaks. fiatruinseverything.com. Jimmy, it's great to have you back in the studio. It's good to be here.

Thank you for your time today. And I think we have another podcast to record after this. Yeah, yeah. And you better write a book. I'm going to write a book. At some point, I'll write a book. Look out for it coming. Uh,

2028 having, no, who knows? Maybe I'll do it in 2024. Peace. Love freaks. Sticky.