TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #486: How Bitcoin Can Solve The Competency Crisis with Axel Raven

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Marty sits down with Axel Raven to discuss the the root causes of the competency crisis in fiat currency. Axel on Twitter https://twitter.com/FinancialPhys Axel's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@financialphysics7541 0:00 - Intro 5:05 - Competency crisis and essential work 22:09 - Sound money 30:05 - Time and the purpose of money 36:35 - Keynesian trickery 46:28 - Real estate and northern weather 50:38 - Trucking 1:04:44 - Automation fantasies 1:09:37 - Gradually, Then Suddenly 1:10:16 - Technial debt 1:16:36 - Nuclear 1:21:44 - Fiat delusion and scrooges 1:32:16 - Bitcoin replacing the dollar 1:38:57 - Truth For The Commoner 1:46:27 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Gradually, Then Suddenly 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

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you probably should be Axel, welcome to the show number one thank you for having me on, it's a pleasure to be with you thank you, thank you for joining us because I think the content that you're putting out I think I discovered you on Twitter it had to be around Thanksgiving

maybe after you started your TikTok some people listened to the show or tagging me in the videos that you were doing about the economy and the state of the world as it is today and since then i started following you on twitter watching your videos and i think

you're putting out some of those high signal content in terms of speaking to the common man about the problems that exist within our economy particularly here in the united states and i really just want to have you on the show to to shoot the shit about all this because it's pretty fucked up beyond belief this is a bitcoin podcast i've seen you've been talking about bitcoin a lot But recently, particularly the fact that the fiat system is a complete scam and people don't realize it is undermining the ability of an individual to actually live a life of quality at this particular point in time. yeah when um when i started working on this idea it was um inspired by by bitcoin well more specifically hard currency so for me years ago um after right before 2008 before 2008 happened we all anybody who was in business at the time saw kind of what was coming if we were paying

attention there was like there's no way this is sustainable what was happening and then when the banks got bailed out this um created you know and of course as you know the history as far as like you know bitcoin came about and at the time i didn't understand any of it because not not that i didn't understand hard currency but because the person who described bitcoin to me in early 2010, I think. So right at the beginning, when, when Bitcoin was like 50 cents or something like that, um, had told me like, check the way he described it was list was this, you're going to think this is comical, but he says, man, this was, um, uh, it's, it's like this really cool thing. And it's like a stock and the way he described it. And I'm like, I'm not interested.

because of the way he, he had explained it to me. And, you know, he, he kind of made it sound like the Hollywood stock exchange where it was kind of arbitrary. And I said, well, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm kind of, I blew it off, but the, it was, my talking about this was inspired by actually an old friend of mine who he quit voting and he wanted nothing to do with politics or voting or anything. He says, listen, man, I don't even want to hear it. He says, until you fix the money issue, I don't want to hear anything from anybody ever again about any of this stuff, because none of this, um, it's going to be long-term solution until that gets addressed. And he's right. And that kind of germinated in my mind for, well, really for a long time. And it was later on that I decided to put it into a Fibonacci sequence or use a Fibonacci sequence that's distorted to explain what he was trying to explain.

because he kept saying you know that like and this this was you know a younger friend of mine he just he was very perceptive and like me you know a high school dropout the whole bit but he understood all of this and and that was what inspired this so later on that's when i decided to actually start doing this and it just again it became an outgrowth like you mentioned with the uh podcast that started off as a new letter it was me trying to explain this to a handful of people and then constantly having to re-explain the same thing over and over and over yeah and that's what we have it right outside the studio here in um so neon light neon sign fix the money fix the world i think all the problems that you talk about uh on your videos like really the stem of them

the root of these problems not the stem the root is the fact that we've completely fucked up the money and it's created these massive ripple effects of negative externalities whether it's the inability of millennials to to go and actually make enough money to to build a sustainable lifestyle uh the ability of um not the ability of but it's completely corrupted the real estate market which you talk a lot about and then it's leading to a massive competency crisis which is putting the state of the economy in a very precarious situation perhaps one of my favorite videos actually i mean i don't have a favorite because i i i frankly i hate watching myself so i when i edit this stuff i i cringe when i edit things but i you know i i know that other people

see them and they say no no this is really good and so i just take their word for it and leave it but yeah the competency crisis video that i had done which i'm sure you've seen that i reposted it in fact on twitter i think two days ago and i want to just point that out really hammer that home that this is going to get worse if we don't um address this problem and you know i i don't see how this is going to be addressed until we actually start working with the money itself and so to describe the competency problem to people who are unaware of it what what is happening right now in terms of people can actually get things done not doing so so if i were to uh to explain it this way to try and encapsulate the competency crisis

when when you have your currency breaking down it leads to the overall breakdown of the division of labor and without division of labor the default setting of humanity is really quite terrible and it's because the reason we have had this bounty for so long has been because we were able to divide our labor. So one guy is able to get really good, for example, at being an electrician. I'm just picking that arbitrarily. And he's able to really focus on that and get his 10,000 hours in. And he becomes an expert at this. he's able to do that because he doesn't have to go and also farm crops and then also have to milk cows and then also like there just aren't enough hours in the day for one person to try and do all

of that and maintain a civilization like a particularly a complex civilization like we have And when your currency starts breaking down, the people that do these jobs, this is particularly true for foundational jobs, the types of jobs that used to be seen as absolutely essential, right? And how do you know if it's essential? One good litmus test you could use would be to say during Convid, it was kind of said, hey, only essential personnel should show up to your job. Well, how many people were considered essential? Now, I'm not trying to give people who were considered non-essential an existential crisis, although I'm sure that that's going to happen or did happen for a little while with some people but the most essential people seem to be being paid the least they're doing the most work and eventually those people start saying fuck it um i'm really tired of

doing this job that i don't like and i don't mind doing the job but not if i'm going to be paid very little uh that's not commensurate with with the amount of effort that i'm putting in uh and then insulted you know for my troubles and so you're competent people and ayn rand in her in her book um atlas shrugged she points out that that's kind of what happens and i realized that the you know the book itself you know i'm not a terribly big fan of her fiction but but she makes her point that the people who are truly competent decide that well if i'm not going to make any money why the hell should i take on any responsibility why should i do any of this? Why should I work my ass off for a bunch of people who don't appreciate anything

I'm doing? I'm better off just checking out. And I use the example of a dispatcher that I knew years ago, and he had worked his way up to $18 an hour. This was a trucking dispatcher. And the amount of stress that those guys take on a company level. So we're not talking about the wildcats. We're talking about guys who work in a, in a, in a structure. Those guys are under constant stress all day long. They're constantly being yelled at and they are, you know, time is their enemy. It's, it's the worst. It's a, it's a, it's a shit job. And he was making $18 an hour. And there was this big push at the time. There was, they were going to do some kind of like they were, the rumor was they're going to raise minimum wage 20 bucks an hour. And his point was, listen, if you're

going to make minimum wage $20 an hour. Unless the company gives me a raise commensurate by percentage, which would have been, I guess, like a 300% raise. So in other words, he would have to go to like 40, 45 bucks an hour. He says, unless the company's going to do that, I'm going to quit and I'm going to go work at a 7-Eleven. I'm going to, you know, like, why should I care? I don't have to do any piss testing. I can work at a 7-Eleven part-time. I can deliver pizzas and have the same basic life and have nowhere near the stress i gotta put up with now and that's an example of what i mean by the competency crisis when when people realize that that if they're not going to be really compensated for their efforts the most competent people

check out and say forget it why why would i bother with that yeah and it's it's gotten to a boiling point here because i hear this all the time you're even beginning to hear it in the uh the white collar tech sector as well there's people that are working in the tech sector what are some examples if you don't mind asking i just out of curiosity because i see it from the from the blue collar side predominantly every business i've owned has been blue collar or retail or something so i don't have a lot of experience in the white collar side so i'm curious if you don't mind it's it's really it seems like an existential crisis of people are predominantly doing either excel monkey jobs where they're just putting numbers in excel sheet and making reports

it's really monotonous work that doesn't give them a fulfilling life or they're your idiot the idiot or no what was not idiocracy was it office space yes the the mindless sort of drone type job is that what you're referring to is that yes that uh sales jobs give your your cold calling doing all that and you're not really getting fulfilled for it there's a lot of people i mean particularly with the rise of tick tock and social media i think it's a bit misguided a bunch of people are saying hey i'm gonna go try and create a social media presence and develop a side hustle and hopefully a career that way spend time on that um seeing more of that but it seems like there's particularly in the white collar side a lot of a lack of fulfillment even though you're making

some money that is really driving people away from me again the fiat system print a bunch of money throw it at a bunch of stuff that really doesn't make sense and probably shouldn't be invested in the first place and then you're checking the box if i have a job but it's really not fulfilling you at the end of the day yeah that well and fulfillment's important um to you know um and that's where I, I, let me hearken back to this. So the competency crisis also factors into the guys who used to do once again, all those jobs that, that many consider to be what I hear this term all the time, you know, low skill or, or low pain entry level, et cetera. But the thing is, is those jobs, once again, they're necessary. People have to do them. If, if you, if you don't

have somebody who is i use cleaning septic tanks if you don't have someone doing that then you know well i mean there's no way to put in a no way i mean you have you have a really big shitty mess in the most literal sense in in that example that extreme example and so with the uh you know the people that are not that are the the fulfillment used to come from being paid and then your currency wasn't losing value certainly not to the the level we're seeing now like i mean like to the tune of probably upwards of 25 30 annually in terms of real inflation not not this fake cpi bullshit but um and the fulfillment because obviously you know you're not going to be fulfilled you know cleaning somebody's septic tank right i mean i would not be fulfilled however

that i i can that can be overcome if i have enough money on the other side of that to go do shit that i want to do and which is once again and while i never watched a lot of mike rose stuff i'm aware of his existence and i'm aware of what he talked about and so one of the things that for example in my case. I love flying. I'm a big aviation guy. I would love to see a resurgence in private aviation personally, because it would also bring prices down for others if more people wanted to play that game. And so the cost of flight per hour is somewhere a couple hundred bucks an hour for, for private aviation, for, for flight. And like, well, if you can, if you can do the stuff you don't want to do, and this used to be the deal, the deal was I'll show up and I'll work in

your, your sweaty factory, or I'll do whatever job it is that you, you know, you don't want to do that job, but I will go ahead and do that. But I want to be able to go do stuff I want to do. And now you have people that can't do any of that, right? They're just working. They're showing up to work. And it doesn't make any difference, you know, as you point out, because you're pointing out the lack of fulfillment in the white-collar jobs. It is. It's becoming pervasive.

It's starting to hit every industry now where more people are becoming less satisfied. And I think it has a lot more to do with just their, their currency being devalued to an extent that they can't do anything with it in the, there's nothing, there's nothing palpable they can do with this, with this money they're being paid. They're being paid. You know, I think there was a Stitch video I did like two, three days ago. The guy was talking about like, why is it people in my comments want an economic collapse? And I answered him. And I said, well, dude, I mean, probably because people are working harder than they've ever worked right now. And they're making more dollars than they've ever made. They're turning more dollars they've ever returned. And their lifestyle is still going backward faster than it's ever gone. and so yeah so to your point with fulfillment it's like that is it's it's happening kind of everywhere and i really i i genuinely think it is a currency issue if if you do that now the downside of course and i'll go into this in another segment with you but the downside is of course that means that there's a responsibility meaning that you know that that prices and wages will come down relative to to a hard currency but i'll go into that a little bit later on no and that's why i'm

very happy that you're getting this message out there particularly on tiktok because i think people need to hear this is because i've seen you talk about this multiple times the concept of voting harder and voting your way out of this problem is just completely asinine and nonsensical and that's why i dedicated my life to bitcoin for the last seven years with this this media company i'm managing partner at a venture firm we're investing in bitcoin companies to make it more accessible and usable for individuals is because we're not going to solve this problem i've come to the conclusion individually that we're not going to solve this problem from voting in a new boss republican democrat really doesn't matter the way the government debt is set up they all have to

perpetuate that problem there's really nothing that they can do to stop it and therefore the currency is going to continue to be debased and the only way out of this i believe is to begin adopting a currency that is outside the control of the state and the central banks which is bitcoin and really driving home to people that you're not going to vote your way out of this whether it's biden trump gavin newsom michelle obama rfk whoever we get in november they're not going to to fix these problems you've got to take agency over your life and fix it yourself and adopting a harder currency i think is the most effective way to do that yeah i i would tend to agree i i think that the not to inject too hard into a political note although it's almost impossible

to ignore the politics of it because anytime you know i was in the gun industry for many years and in that industry of course you can't divorce politics it's a political business and you know you kind of i got my belly full of it years ago but and then of course as soon as you talk about money or currency in particular if you're especially talking about hard currency and hard currency not only not only that but the hardest currency that's ever been invented and that is a direct existential threat to central banking as an idea, as a business model, it threatens to pull the power of a lot of people away very quickly.

And where it's like you can have your politicians, you know, rattling their saber about we're going to do this, we're going to have free this, free that, more military spending, more endless wars endless welfare etc etc etc but when you inject hard currency into it it me it's it's it's asking the direct question it just says how you hell are going to pay for that how are you going to pay for all that i mean that's great that you have all these ideas but how do you intend on paying for this and that's the part that when when i point out like you know yeah you can vote for any of these people that are making all these crazy promises to you

And they can't keep any of these, just like with, you know, all the migrants that are coming to the U.S., you know, all the the illegals come across the border, which is a big problem. These people are all you. Does anybody out there think that they're they're being told they're going to eat bugs, live in a pod and live in a 15 minute prison? Of course not. They're they're being made all kinds of promises. And there's no way to pay for any of this, with the exception of just printing more largesse, just just creating more money, more counterfeit money and then shoving it into the economy. And, in fact, it's actually one of the hardest things I've had to try and explain is inflation, you know, how monetary inflation precedes your price inflation. And it's probably one of the most frustrating topics to try and explain. I mean, it really – and if you've done it for any – and, again, if you've been around the Bitcoin space for a while, you know what I'm talking about. it's very frustrating to try and explain how that mechanism actually works because so many people

have been so abused for so long that you know it's um they were rewarded in school for answering multiple choice questions rather than really truly understanding this the sort the subject and source material in a lot of cases and this is true for all of us okay so this isn't me just pointing a finger from the outside looking in i mean i'm actually i mean i was there too but the topic always gets ignored and that's the money topic gets ignored um when so when we learn about for example world war one very briefly of course i mean in school i mean any of us gen xers you know we you know yeah you heard about world war one it existed right but you didn't hear anything at all about you know any of the the meat and potatoes of it but what they

don't talk about is that every country abandoned the gold standard in Europe in order to wage that war. In other words, it was completely impossible for them to have a war and have a hard currency at the same time. That tells us something. Same thing, I referenced this and I don't want to over-talk this, but I referenced 1865 in a video that was very brief, and it was me just pointing out that in the case of the North, slavery notwithstanding, so taking that out of the equation, the South had created a currency that directly competed, the Confederate dollar competed with the Yankee dollar. And that right there was the cardinal sin. That's, in my view, what actually caused the real problem. Because the South would then have the privilege of exporting

their inflation to the North. Just like, for example, in the case of Putin in Russia, if you want to buy Russian oil and gas, you first have to buy rubles. And this gives them the opportunity to adjust their currency values and make more money off that trade. And again, it is really frustrating to try and explain this to a large swath of people. 10% maybe of people that follow me really understand this stuff.

20% get it. The rest of folks, they kind of, I think, get it. And this isn't a criticism, by the way. Don't misunderstand. This is hard stuff. And it's deliberately not talked about by media. The only people that you hear talk about this stuff are guys like you in your situation or maybe the von Mises people, you know, Jeffrey Tucker and a few others that maybe bring this stuff up. Most everywhere else, it's almost a taboo subject. So, yeah, it can be a little frustrating. that certainly is i mean you mentioned russia another good example is libya gaddafi wanted to um tether their economy their their currency to gold yeah he's another one we came we saw he died um that happened pretty quickly and it's funny because you think people would grasp the importance of the money because it is literally one half of every transaction

that you're involved in throughout the economy it's the most important tool we use as humans arguably and that's why i think it is it's hard for people to grab or not hard for people to grasp i think once you grasp it i just think the context in which they view money is completely corrupted by the fact that they were just born into this fiat system and they expect that's the way the world works they don't understand what a money should be they were just born they're like oh, this is money and never questioned it. Yeah. Um, I see this with some of the younger folks that, that are out there that, um, it, there were, they're questioning, why do we need money? You know, what, what, what is, you know, why are we needing money for something? I see this quite

a bit actually and it comes from a i'm trying to think of how i want to say this because like i said this is this has been a vexing topic for me for a long time money is a supposed to be a unit of measurement a unit of what i would call monetary measurement and if you've seen if you know as you mentioned, you know, you've been binge watched a few of my videos and despite some of my rambling, cause I do have a tendency to ramble occasionally. Um, you know, it happens when you get a little older. And one of the things that, that I notice is that, that I personally noticed is that, so the only currency that you're actually born with is time. It's the only currency that you're given when, when you, when you hit the, when you hit this world, whatever this shared reality is,

this five cents reality whatever it is okay for better or for worse you're here and we have to make the most of it while we're here and the only currency we're we're really given is time and we don't know how much we have we make an assumption we can look at the odds but we have no guarantees um for some people that that time is very brief unfortunately for others you know we get 90, 100, 110 years. Um, but it does come to an end. It is finite, just like our existence. You know, human beings are finite beings. Our existence is finite. Our planet is finite. Um, everything about us in the physical world, right, which is where I get financial physics from is because I'm actually dealing more with the physics, the physical existence, as opposed to

the the philosophical i mean though i do go through the philosophical to arrive at the physics and i i do that for reasons that i won't go into here because it's just that's too long a conversation but but when you have when you when you concede that time is your currency you have to be able to measure that accurately and we're not adding skill to that yet that's that that comes a little later that that's that's people who get really good at something then you could add a premium for skill but in the meantime you still have the the transactional nature that exists with time and so the more accurate your your your currency is your your your unit of measurement the more accurate your economy will be and more because all an economy is is just people it's

just people engaged in commerce. That's it. And I'm famous for saying like an economy isn't the NYSE. An economy isn't a building somewhere. It's not the World Trade Center. An economy is just everyday people doing stuff every day. Every day we wake up and we go do shit. We buy shit. We sell shit. We do all kinds of stuff. And that's an economy. And the more accurate your money is, the more accurate your market becomes. And, you know, especially if you don't, if you have a zero inflation, if you've got an economy with a currency that has a zero inflation, then all you need to do is just save your money. You don't need to make a big return on anything, actually. You can just save it. And then, in fact, if you have a zero inflation economy,

it makes banking you know near impossible if you think about it because it gets rid of the idea of of the ponzi the ponzi scheme idea of interest you know which is again that's another i mean i've covered that ad nauseum i don't know if you want to go into it or not but i mean like that's in terms of banking when you're printing principal there is no interest to pay that back you could do that with gold for example because you can always just send somebody out to dig dig more more ground gold out of the ground and smelt it but in the case of something like bitcoin bitcoin ends that because you can't mine anymore you know you've got 21 million coin units so you've got 2.1 quadrillion satoshis that exist presumably forever so you have an action something

that matches the existence of human beings it's finite you you have something that matches the existence of this reality right whatever it again to whatever extent it means to whatever all this means if it means anything it matches it it matches at least our our perception of it our our existence of it that we and that we as finite human beings understand of it to that to that extent okay so again i don't want to get too existentialist but that's that's really what it is and so if people understand that you know then they understand that like well okay so why do we need to have have money well you have money i mean for a very simple reason um which gets it gets even more prosaic because you're like well if you're doing a job and some and i'm doing a job

we're doing the same job and then eventually i get lazier and lazier eventually you're going to to resent, you know, that we're doing the same job. I'm getting the same amount of compensation as you are, even though you're doing more of the work. And this is where the idea of money comes in because it creates this idea of saying, hold on, if someone's actually doing more work and they decide they want to spend more of their time doing more of what somebody, you know, needs to have done so again i'll go back to our septic tank system you know somebody who's willing to go out and do these these really shitty jobs the pun not intended then they deserve to be compensated and then that's and then they want to be able to use that later on and that's that's the whole goal

that's our whole goal with for money in general and unfortunately this topic just just this very simple conversation that you and i are having right here just in the last 10 minutes this is not talked about. I don't think there's a university on this planet that has that conversation with anybody that I know of. So you're dealing with almost an outlaw topic. It's really strange that way. Well, as somebody who's studied economics and got my degree in economics at college, I can confirm that we did not talk about this at all. We were just told about Keynesian policies and interest rate targeting and monetary base expansion and contraction to control the economy

and the jobs market and target. And when you think about it too, it's insane. The economy we live in and the mandate of the Federal Reserve is dual faceted, price stability and full employment. And maybe you could throw in lender of last resort when things hit the fan. But the first, price stability. How do they achieve price stability?

They achieve it by targeting a 2% inflation. rate price inflation rate which is just double speak in and of itself like so from first principles if you actually listen to what the fed is telling you so i guess we're gonna our mandate is to stabilize prices and by doing that we're gonna ensure that they rise by two percent year on year it's just completely right so they're they're they're they're immediately telling you they're going to create two percent inflation yes so you're you're losing two percent of your your spending power and they're admitting to that right off the bat and like well okay so you're you're you're inflating the currency by two let's just let's let's say for a moment that it would

that they were being honest and it was only two percent let's say that that was the case but that's still at the top of the pyramid it's two percent at the at the at the wholesale level at the at the beginning of the fountain at the fountainhead it's two percent but percentages are one of these really devious, devilish little things that when you add 2% to 2% to 2% to 2% to 2% and you go down the ladder of the chain of distribution, before you know it, your prices are either, either your prices are much higher

or your quality is much lower. It's, you know, it's because it only goes somewhere, right? I mean, you squeeze a water weenie in the center. I mean, it either explodes, right, or it squeezes out one side or the other side. That's what ends up happening. And that's what ends up happening. So I see this with more people. this is why you have a certain segment of the population a large a growing number of the population working harder and harder and harder to keep up with inflation not not just with you know um the dave ramses of the world i mean you know i you probably know my thoughts on dave um i i think that yeah you shouldn't you should yeah you should not get a credit card and go buy a jet ski i agree with him on that yeah sure we

agree on that. But to suggest that, that, that, that people are just lazy or trying to keep up with the Joneses when they're trying to keep up with inflation, that's, that's checked out as far as I'm concerned. That's it. That's actually, that's intellectual dishonesty. Uh, you know, at its, in a best case scenario, that's, that's intellectual dishonesty because that's not the case. Um, especially when you have younger people that have been sold this bill of goods for a long time. If you've seen some of this stuff that I've gone over before, you know that my thoughts on this is that, well, it's one thing if somebody makes a bad call. It's another thing if you have the whole of society pitching this idea that you have to go wildly into debt to get an education

or to go to a university and with the idea that that's going to be the shortcut right that's that's what gets sold to people is this shortcut idea that okay if you go to if you go to a university when you get out then you're going to be able to be put somewhere in the middle of the pyramid somewhere in the middle of the you know the jordan peterson's dominant dominance hierarchy for lack of a better explanation but if you don't go then you have to start at the very very bottom now that you know of course the idea is that oh well if i go to school you know i go get a you know i go to the four-year drinking contest or something and i have a giant bar tab at the end of that then i'm going to start off in the middle somewhere and more and more people are being

they're finding out they're being disillusioned that was not the case i just as a gen xer i heard probably a hundred times just dude axel just go get a degree in anything and a company will pay you to, you know, sit in a corner office and, and, and do whatever, you know, work that you're, you know, whatever they want you to do. And that's just not the case. Um, more and more people, I mean, it was a 37.7%. I looked at it the other day of people in America have degrees. Well, that would mean that all of those 37.7% should be making, you know, top tier money, right? But they're not. And in fact, I mean, we see it, I'm sure you've seen it too. You, you, you have the same internet i have and you see what what it looks like you see these these jobs that are

paying you know we're paying 15 an hour and you need to have four year degree and you need to have like nine years of experience and i don't know i mean all this like weird fantasy land it's like it's it's like reading it's like reading the the text version of some of these these girls that want the they want their men to be six foot tall and make six hundred thousand dollars a day and it's like you you guys are just this is just stupid like how where are you getting these numbers from um and and that's just it and it's this this raising the bar of of these impossible standards that that that these people and it's just and so it's an excuse to say okay well we're going to we're going to pay less in terms of dollars because you you'll know that i don't

blame my capitalism for any of this i think largely because none of no one living today has ever seen an honest currency i don't think anybody alive today has never experienced anything like with a um you know with an honest currency wherein you know you have to pay for something at the cash price and there's not endless amounts of credit being issued um and by cash price i don't mean dollars just for anybody who lest you lest anybody take my words as meaning like paper dollars i don't mean cash in that sense i mean cash as in no debt attached to that transaction in other words that transaction is final that if i've if i paid i mean for instance if if you want to buy my jeep not going to happen but if you wanted to buy my jeep um you know and i wanted

uh you know 0.5 bitcoin for it right that's the cash price that's it the transaction is done there's no more debt attached to that you don't owe me anything and and i don't owe you anything after the transaction it's over with we're we're going our separate ways and when we have an economy like that these things can't really happen as easily you know these these wild speculations and and these wild distortions in the marketplace where it wherein it tells people you know to go go get a degree in whatever and it doesn't make any difference what degree it is anymore i mean like personally i don't think it makes any difference i i think if you i think there's going to be an influx, by the way, a flooding of STEM, believe it or not. I think

that's coming because so many young people now, you know, the, the younger people, your, your younger Zoomers now who have all saw, they all saw what a lot of millennials did, any good chunk of Gen X, right? Uh, we never, who, who, who in the right mind would say, okay, I'm gonna go get a degree. So I'm going to take the hardest possible, I'm going to go take astrophysics. Like, dude, no one's going to do that. They're going to take the easiest classes they can, they can get away with because they're just after a degree. They were just told to go get any degree. And then we find out that all those degrees are worthless. So now we're going to have this huge flood into STEM. This is the next shoe to drop as far as I'm concerned. Because what happens if we have

engineers? What if we do graduate another million engineers in two years? What are they going to do? What are we engineering? Does the market need a million engineers? Probably not. so then those jobs end up becoming you know they by default end up becoming lower wage jobs because by virtue of the markets flooded and on top of that the saddest thing is is that now you have a bunch of people who've got a shit ton of debt that they can't they can never fucking pay back they just i mean i just ran my um i just ran into this anecdotally um a young man that uh that was a friend of my son good friend of my son's you know he's working on his fourth doctorate his fourth doctorate what the fuck is he gonna do i can't i can't even imagine how much he owes now

it's it's probably half a million bucks like or more you're you're never gonna pay that back that's that's just i i just don't even know what to say when i realize this you you got me man i i i i just i when i heard the fourth when i heard fourth doctorate my mind just kind of shut down because i was sitting there thinking what in the world are you going to do with four doctorates you know and and even if you could find something right would it pay you enough money to you know to to pay back any of like what's the roi on that how is that supposed to work it's a it's just it's just like my criticism of real estate with the real estate bros out there paying $450,000 for a house that after it's all said and done,

it cash flows 400 bucks. You took damn near half a million dollars worth of liability to make $400. You're out of your goddamn mind. Anybody would tell you you're out of your mind. Any old school veteran real estate investor would tell you that, dude, that's crazy to spend that kind of money um one of my um one of my followers is is actually fairly heavy into real estate and she um grew up in real estate so grew up and actually not just real estate but grew up in developing you know uh land developments you know large developments and she said the same thing she says i am not i haven't bought anything in years everything is just way too out of control and the rois just aren't there yeah that's somebody a millennial with two young children currently

renting a house we moved to austin a few years ago the real estate market was screaming i was like yeah we'll rent i'm comfortable renting right now it just seems yeah you're just over in austin okay good deal okay i'm in i'm in houston so uh it's it's it's it's warm today It's also very humid, so my hair, you can tell the humidity. Coming from the Northeast, I'm from Philadelphia, lived in New York before moving to Austin, and I can tell you I do not mind 85-degree February days at all. No, no, no. I know what you mean by that.

I grew up in Seattle, ground zero for Gen Xers. I grew up there in the 1980s and I left there and then moved to the eastern side of the state, which is high desert. You know, it's lots of snow, lots of cold weather and so on. And I stayed there for a number of years before moving to Texas. And yeah, on days when I see some of the stuff this year with the ice on the roads and what have you, even though I have to drive in it, you know, professionally, I still, uh, I still don't mind that I don't have my pipes bursting, you know, at home. So I don't have to worry about that. My wife doesn't have to worry about having to call, call a plumber because the pipes broke

or something like that. So, because, you know, because winter, you know, winter in, in, in Houston is like, oh, it got down to 40, you know? Yeah. And as somebody who spent five years in chicago during college i think seasonal depression is real and uh if you have 90 straight days where the sun doesn't pierce the clouds and it's negative 30 degrees it's gonna it's gonna weigh on your psyche i've worked many times in chicago during the negative 20 degree uh temperature you know um securing a load of steel so you're out in the elements the entire time you know it's negative 20 and you're having to work in that and um so everything gets done at a snail's pace and because it's also because everything is slippery so you have you have to go very slowly otherwise

you will probably break a limb or or or end up you know oh we lost him what happened there wonder if his uh browser is cut out there we go am i back yet yes sir okay did did it did it skip on your end or was it just my end yeah you went dark on our end weird okay well i i apologize there i don't know what happened it's all good you were you were explaining how uh you have to go slow because you could break a limb oh yeah oh that was just because you know when you're working out there and that with all the snow and ice which again if you've been you know in in chicago and that and that weather you know what i'm talking about it's not a great city uh especially during the hundred days of summer that

they get in winter it really uh separates the wheat from the chaff yeah yeah um but speaking of that mentioning that driving trucks and what are your thoughts on the the global trend of truck drivers standing because that's like the broader question i've been asking a lot of my guests and just really trying to grapple with internally is like are we at an inflection point where inflation has reached such a point that people are noticing that the political situation is such where people recognize that the options are not as good as maybe they should be or could be and then thirdly that the kleptocratic elite that run the world are really trying to shovel us towards this digital surveillance panopticon where we live in we live in the pod we panopticon is the that's

the word right there yeah and it's it certainly feels that way like so i'm like internally um struggling with like i i like i'm probably people would describe me listening to the show as an idealist maybe a bit naive too optimistic but i do feel like tides are beginning to turn in terms of awareness and to solve a problem you have to first recognize that exists in the the first place and it seems like more and more people are beginning to recognize that there's a problem i mean you mentioned that you see people in their cars complaining about inflation on tiktok every day and it feels like particularly after the covid lockdowns people are like wait a second what the fuck are you guys trying to do here back off like let me live my life well the the

observations are becoming near ubiquitous and it's at all levels that i'm seeing of the the of the strata where you've got you've got not just young people talking about this but there's there's now even finally starting to hit some of the older generations some of the boomers where you've got some of that is even happening and where they're they're guys that are saying hey you know what hell i i can't afford any of the stuff that i was doing two years ago so we're not talking about somebody making a complaint about oh i can't afford to fill up my tank with ethyl you know uh you know in 1975 you know it now we have people saying hey you know even just two years ago i can't do the same even close to the same stuff and so the older forces so

To your question, I need to break that down, actually. Can you go back a tiny bit? When you were asking about trucking, you asked the first part of that. Can you go back and let's isolate that? Yeah, so to me, observing, I go back to the Canadian Truckers Rally, not being talked about a lot, but it seems like there's a big farmer slash trucker rally happening in Europe right now.

There was talk of that trucker rally to the border here in the United States last month, but who knows? how overblown that was or how much signal was actually there. But it does seem like, at least in pockets of the world, the truckers, the farmers are standing up, the people at the base of our economy who are affected most by the raw input prices on the front end of the economy are standing up and saying,

hey, something's wrong here. You guys need to take a step back. You've got a couple of things to unpack with this. Um, so with truckers and I don't want to go too much into a trucking seminar because I don't know how many people are really interested. Some people are really interested. They're fascinated by truck driving, uh, cause it is, it is a, an odd profession. Um, it's a, it's a strange profession. If you think about it, you know, here's a guy, you're going to have a guy who's going to drive a, you know, an 80,000 pound truck down the street, you know, doing, you know, like

In my case, about 75, 80 miles an hour for where I go. And they live in a little box in the back for a period of time. For some cases, for some guys, months at a time. So it's a strange life. So some people are fascinated by it. Others are bored to tears by it. So I'm going to try and – I'll try not to go too far into the boring. But when we look at truckers, you have really roughly two distinctions.

You have your owner-operators, and then you have company drivers. Now, company drivers are guys who work for another company. Now, there's an offshoot of the company driver, which is called the lease driver. And I don't want to tear into the specifics of that, mainly because, once again, it'll get boring very quickly. but suffice it to say a lot of the lease drivers are just glorified company drivers who get to pay for their own maintenance and their trucks aren't governed in a lot of cases that's it that's really kind of the only benefit well your owner operators have maximum freedom these are your guys like if you watch if you go back and watch old smoky and the bandit you know from 1978 if i remember right

or Convoy or any of these old trucking movies back in the day, you'll see that most of it's centered around owner-operators. And the reason it is is because owner-operators had maximum freedom, right? They own their equipment. They own their truck. They own their trailer. They own all their gear. And they are true business owners, right?

So like in my case, they're a business owner. So for them, they have to treat it like that. Now, they have freedom to be able to go do things. For example, for instance, the truck convoy, the truck strike, the go down to the border and do whatever they were going to do down there or the or the truck strike for New York, which I covered. That industry has been the bane of government, of DOT, of, you know, just the idea of centralized control. It's been the bane of their existence. And so, in fact, on the broader scale, your owner operator truck drivers believe it or not um because of because logistics they need to have product go from point a to point b they have to have that and if someone is in the middle of that the driver and slash owner he has control over that over over rates and centralized Authorized authorities hate this.

They absolutely hate this. They hate that freight is a market that does this. They hate that. They've been trying to get rid of owner-operators for decades. In the industry, they do everything they can. The latest iteration of this we're seeing is the, once again, the same thing we're seeing across multiple sectors. So not just trucking, but the idea of constantly bailing out and propping up and inflating the balance sheets of large competitors. And, you know, you're probably sophisticated enough to figure out how this is done.

You know, you have a bunch of opaque investors, quote, investors that put money into large companies. And so their portfolio, their stock price looks like their company is just fine, even though the company is like wickedly unhealthy. It's massively unhealthy. They fired all their competent people decades ago. And now they're just there because of inertia. Well, that has been the case in the trucking world for a long time. And, you know, they've gotten rid of a lot of guys. The guys who don't have notes on their equipment are kind of okay.

But anybody who owes money, particularly in the trucking industry, because the interest rates are not gentle, they're not 7%. They're 29%. They're crazy. The lease rate factors, in fact, that some of the lease drivers make, 29%, 30% lease rate factor. It's absolutely fucking crazy how much these companies juice everybody for. and so to your point the number of owner operators are dwindling while the number of company drivers are increasing and this of course is also happening because well you can get a cheap guy a really cheap guy to throw him in there who hold

the steering wheel now these are guys they don't know anything about trucks they don't know anything about the mechanics they don't know anything about about tire wear. They don't know anything about the air system in your truck. They don't know any of that stuff. They just know that get in the truck and you're going to point it in this direction and go here, go to this place. And we see that. And of course, I talked about in the competency crisis video, we see it even last night, even as of last night across the Sierra Nevadas up in Northern California, you have this huge dump of snow. Well, that wasn't an unknown thing. They've been talking about that, like telling guys, hey, don't go up there. Don't take I-80 through, you know, through California because you're going to get stuck in 10 feet of snow. And sure as shit, thousands of trucks are stuck up there. Well, yeah, you were told not to go, but it doesn't matter because the companies that that own these guys. Right. They tell them, you know, you have to go there.

uh you have you have you have got to go do this you know or you're fired uh and for some cases you know you're fired means you're it also means you're deported and this type of power is i mean it is completely antithetical to you know what you would want to have in terms of an actual again a market that functions properly um but when you can can control a market like that well then you get this shit. And so this is why, of course, I mentioned in a video I did, I think I did a trucking report video like two, three weeks ago or something like that. I mentioned that when the trucker strike was going on, the truckers for Trump or something like that. And I'm not one way or the other on Trump on this one. I wasn't taking sides. I was just pointing out that there

aren't enough owner-operators nowadays to really make that big a difference in this. It's not like the 70s where in i want to say 73 if i remember right uh independent the owner operators out there the independent truckers association uh which was a i don't want to say a union but it was a loose confederation of of owner operators were protesting the gas taxes you know or excuse me the diesel tax because they wanted to add a bunch of diesel taxes and it was just it was it was punitive it was it was really to try and get rid of owner operators to bring in more centralized control to bring in more large companies where they have direct control over everything they have direct control over the rates they can do all this kind of stuff and back then the guys had a

lot more power they would shut down the entire east coast you know they would just go out there and park their trucks and and you now had to listen you know you you had to listen to the what they were saying now because you had hundreds of thousands of people stuck in traffic you know and of course, you know, a good chunk of them are going to be so-called important people who probably gonna take a shit. And so they're stuck in traffic. They can't do anything. Well, now they got to listen. And that doesn't really exist as much anymore. It's still, it's still out there to an extent, but not quite as much. And on top of that, of course, you also have a large number of them who were boomers and many of them retiring. They're just getting out of the industry.

they're they're like they're up in their 70s now and they're saying no i'm gonna go do something else but the the rates haven't kept up with any of that and just again given this is this a bitcoin podcast that's another problem because the the rates are being distorted so heavily that now it's getting almost impossible for owner operators to turn a profit a lot of the loads that are getting offered, they would almost be what we would call them in retail. We would call them a loss leader. But you can't do that in freight. You have to be able to make a profit because you have a lot of costs to keep those trucks on the road. Combined with, again, not to bore people, but combined with you have the industry is being flooded um it's not there is no shortage of truck

drivers there has never been a shortage of truck drivers back 10 years ago there was um 10 10 12 years ago there was this big thing oh my god we were short 80 000 drivers oh my god what are we gonna all do there was never a shortage there's never a shortage of 80 000 drivers there's there's been tons of guys what there was a shortage of was a shortage of guys who were willing to work for six dollars an hour that's that's what there was a shortage of you know so there's no because there's no such thing as a labor shortage this is again if you've seen any of my earlier work you know you know my thoughts on this if there were if a labor shortage existed that would mean that price gouging existed and it doesn't there's no such thing as price gouging so therefore there's

no such thing as a labor shortage you can't have you can't have you can't have it both ways and so to that end uh you know as far as what i think is happening in the industry i think the industry and we'll we'll see how this plays out but i i think that i think there's going to be more carnage on the road and i think there's going to be progressively larger and larger insurance claims um and and endless lawsuits as a result of just putting anybody behind the wheel of these trucks and um and hoping for the best you know hoping that it'll all work you know and then of course the the technophile guys out there who who don't have any experience in the industry or in a lot of cases in any industry i'm not trying to pick on you but there's there's some truth

for some of these guys um they're saying well no the self-driving trucks like that's that's a fantasy dude that's a fantasy that that guy went to jail um that or was that the battery truck uh the guy was gonna auto yeah yeah the the dude went to jail for fraud i mean it was like it's like that he was part of the forbes what was it that 30 under 30 under 30 or something like that it's a good list to uh to um to basically find who the next big fraud is going to be of spf yeah it really almost elizabeth holmes this guy yep yep yeah and it's like because it's like well no that that technology doesn't really exist and you know i think some some folks watch a little too much star trek and star wars and think that like no dude the thermodynamics man you you there's

physics and thermodynamics you got to throw into this and if there was a way around all this stuff somebody would have done it a long time ago it's a very it's a very clever um it's like what was what's the name um maybe you know this the i cannot for the life remember the the the chess plane machine uh it was the turk or something like that uh no not watson that was uh you could answer questions on jeopardy what do you say logan something blue logan will look it up no not not big blue there was the it was a it was a machine it was in the i want to say in the 13 or 1400s that somebody invented it and it was called the turk mechanical turk i think is what it was Yes. Yeah. And it was going to what it was. It was actually a guy inside the box doing all of this. It wasn't a machine doing this. It was a it was a guy that was playing chess. And like and it turned out that the guy who invented it was just paying chess, you know, like these world renowned chess players. He was paying the money to get him a hustle.

You know, that's all it was, was just a con. And that's how I see a lot of the so-called self-driving trucks and all. It's like, dude, it's a hustle. You're taking a bunch of people that come from the tech world and they have a lot of money. They've made, you know, these young people have made a lot of money in tech, but they don't have a lot of experience outside of tech in the physical world in that sense. And so they don't know what it's like to cross, you know, the continental divide on a sheet of ice in a semi truck and all that goes along with all. They know most people, majority of people have never done that. So they play on ignorance. And so there we go. No, it's really leading me to a state of dismay because being in the Bitcoin industry,

I've been involved in Bitcoin mining. I was one of the first team members of a company called Great America Mining. We did flare gas mitigation up in the Bakken and upstream. We don't gas wellpads. We take the gas to otherwise flare, run it through a generator, and mine Bitcoin with that right on the wellpad. and through that experience i have a finance and a little bit of a tech background but it was a baptism by fire into the world of energy and how it works and so i've been on that

educational journey in getting up the snuff on how the energy sector works and just hearing like that like um auto thinking that you can have a fleet of electric trucks is just insane like not only the fact that there probably isn't enough lithium on earth to develop the batteries that would be necessary for that but then like the logistics like how long is it going to take to charge all these trucks and what's the backup going to be like at these charging stations and things like that these knock-on effects that people really don't think about it's unless you have done it you you know uh you don't think about it you know and that's just like just like pointing out like i would have no idea if i like in terms

of energy production if if i went there too i might see some stuff that there's a little bit of crossover in terms of like some of the physical stuff but having never done it like i mean i'd actually have to i'd have to i'd actually have to do the job for a while personally to to really understand it and get something from it. Especially before I invested in it, you know, but once again, you know, if you're playing on people's ignorance, you know, then, you know, ignorance is one of those things, right? It's not really your fault. You don't know what you don't know. So yeah, there's that. Quick break here, freaks. This rip is brought to you by Gradually Then Suddenly, a framework for understanding Bitcoin as money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the

forward to the book. I'm honored to have done so because it's the best zero-to-one primer if you're looking for a logical explanation of why Bitcoin obsoletes all other money. Buy one for yourself and maybe a few for your friends. Go to thesafehouse.com slash gradually. That's thesafehouse.com, safe spelled S-A-I-F, thesafehouse.com slash gradually. Use the promo code TFTC for $5 off at checkout. Buy it now, freaks. The price of Bitcoin is going up you need to understand it this is the best zero to one primer back to the show yeah it's just like this competency crisis comes back and back and again there's so many areas of our economy where exists whether it's the trucking industry seeping into the airline industry the energy sector with

and again it's all driven by bad incentives you print all this money you say hey we're going to transition to this green economy so people don't go get petrochemical engineering degrees and you have this buildup of physical technical debt and the energy sector side this exists in the housing market as well and know if you're familiar with charles marone and his strong towns concept and his book strong towns but in that book he basically explains like the easy money that led to the development of sprawling suburbs filled with cheap houses yeah yeah yeah like you have a bunch of Prior to 08, I remember that, yeah. Yeah, and you have, like, a bunch of infrastructure that's been built out,

and it's building up this physical, technical debt that is going to need to be dealt with, like sewer and plumbing systems that need to be maintained and updated over the years. Like, we've, again, all of this, I think, stems from easy money, the zombie companies that are allowing people to basically perturb the trucking industry. Like, we're building up this massive technical debt

in many different areas whether it's intellectual debt physical infrastructure debt um it's it's pretty scary it's it's a theory that i have um about the industrial industrial revolution is it's a theory that i actually kind of have in that the amount of largesse that it took to fuel that there is no possible way that that there was that much gold or or currency there was no way that there was that much gold in on deposit to cover as much currency as was printed to fuel all of that the enormity of it all and i don't think that that was that was possible i don't think so i i personally don't don't think that's the case i think that a lot of the gold got moved from and we well we know historically this kind of thing happened

where you would have gold move from bank to bank to bank to bank, you know, trying to outrun the regulators. You know, so when the regulator gets there, he counts the gold again. And it's the same bars. And so, you know, not to just harp on the Bitcoin thing, but it's true. In Bitcoin, it ends that shit. There's no double counting Bitcoin, right?

Gold is, in fact, more fungible than Bitcoin. it is um that's actually somewhat bad in my opinion because of that very issue because you you can end up counting the same bar of gold twice now i don't care how many serial numbers you put on it you can melt that gold down and put another serial number on it so it's like you can just keep counting the same gold over and over and over that is not the case with bitcoin bitcoin ends that shit like a motherfucker it ends all of that shit and i think that that's actually quite terrifying it's it really is one of those things where when i when i saw that the michael saylor interview what was it uh tucker carlson did um and i sent that that interview to friends

you know who who asked about bitcoin i'll send them that i'll forward that on to them and i'll point out like this ends all of this. It ends a lot of madness here. Now, it also ends a lot of jobs. It also ends a lot of illusion of wealth, which I talk about quite a bit. I mean, if you followed me for any length of time, you know that I talk about the illusion of wealth all the time because it is an illusion. A lot of what we're seeing is like this wouldn't exist. Now, you can say, well, instead of what? Well, I don't know, an honest economy and prices coming down and lifestyles increasing. Many hands make light work. And if you have an honest currency and an honest economy, excuse me, and if you have that, then you have an opportunity to really have a true

accurate assessment of what your time is worth. And then I think that's where, and I think that follows it all the way back up to what what you've been talking about this whole time not just competency you know because you you want a hierarchy of competency you want your most competent people to be able to to to feel as though they can be competent and and not be punished for it because we see that how i'm sure if you've been in corporate america at all for anything you've seen this the most competent person if they if they do something that's you know they can be punished for it just just for doing that it's sort of like it's the asking for forgiveness and asking for for permission right i mean i think that you know um i don't think i think

our founders saw that as as as probably supreme in their existence where like in america the idea being that you shouldn't have to ask for permission to to be human nor should you have to ask for forgiveness and i think that it corrects that that's where and i i really think that i it's it's why i don't give a shit how much bitcoin goes to what is it like 67 or something like that 67 68 000 or something like that now today i don't care i mean like that that's i i think that it needs it needs to replace fiat and by doing so to your point i think that it will correct that that competency issue um if we correct it in time now the scary part is in my opinion will we catch it in time when while people still know how to maintain all of this infrastructure

that we've built so we've built all this massive infrastructure will we catch it in time to where we can still maintain all that shit that's the big question that's that's what worries me too is because we are in a race against time and again going back to like the perverse incentives of the green transition if we could wake up in a generation and not have enough petrochemical engineers or drilling drilling teams actually go get the oil and gas which we're going to need into perpetuity if you're listening you don't believe that you're absolutely crazy yeah but no you're right the economic incentives are so corrupted right now that you're disincentivizing people from going to learn these extremely important skills and i mean

nuclear as well i think we should be spinning up as many nuclear power plants as possible but due to uh the nrc and the red tape they've thrown on the industry since the 70s like we don't have any competent or we do have some but not arguably not as many as we need in terms of people can actually build and then run a nuclear reactor and run them safely and and yeah and you know that's it's interesting you bring up nuclear because i i i have a good friend of mine that is big pro-nuclear power and uh i i am for lack of a better term anti-nuclear power but not for the reasons that people think it isn't because i don't think it's efficient i understand the physics behind it i absolutely get that um i i question the ability going forward especially

well unless things change right if we continue down this this once again competency if we continue down this road i think adding nuclear power to this you know and then of course how do you dispose of your of your waste and so for them you've got you have a lot of you know nuclear powerhouse has its downside as well and it requires not just skill but it requires a fairly hefty amount of competency to make to to not only build but to maintain that shit for a long period of time and if we lose that then you end up we end up kind of dooming future generations with something they have no idea um what it could be doing to them um it's the only i just i just wanted to comment on this you know you're you're one of the first folks that have

ever brought that up and uh um and i i wanted to point that out there was like that um oh what do they point what do they call that i don't spend a lot of time in the corporate world so i don't de and i that's what it is um where you're you're hiring people based on like completely physical characteristics that have nothing to do with their ability to do a job accurately or or safely and that's the only challenge that i have with it is because the the long-term repercussions of what happens if you we you know as a society forget how to manage all this shit what happens to to folks that are now handling fissionable material yeah that you know they could be irradiating people like what that that kid uh what's his name oh god damn it that kid

who built a reactor in his backyard i don't know if you you read about he's got like the crazy hair I don't remember. He was a young man and he was a Boy Scout and he went to get his his nuclear power badge. And it was it was supposed to be just a learning thing where you learned about it. He took it to the next like beyond the next level and started getting his hand on hand on fissionable material through a whole bunch of just corporate incompetency. got actually got a hold of fissionable material now he's irradiating the whole neighborhood by doing this right i mean um and he actually he actually did die um unfortunately i want to say but it was from alcoholism actually it wasn't from you know it wasn't from but the radiation but you could see his skin i mean he was he was he was fried you know he he fried himself and i cannot for the life of me remember if you if david on that's who it was thank you And it's a fascinating story. And, you know, and here was a guy that, here was someone who was supremely competent, like supremely competent. How many, what, 19-year-old kids build a nuclear reactor, right? I mean, unsafe as all hell, but how many people would do that, right?

he wasn't even 19 he was he was like maybe 16 or something like that well how many people have have the ability to do something like that and yet nobody had the presence of mind to hire this young man and say hold on let's let's you know you got everything down let's hire you nobody the presence of mind to do that because competency recognizes competency and if you have a whole bunch of incompetent goddamn managers which is people that are in there you know which is what our economy runs on right now the manager it does it does it's and and like like it's to your point it it is a bit scary where where some of this is going because you you have to wonder how is this going to play out you know and then of course compounding that is birth rate

what is it 1.64 and that's what the current the current numbers show 1.64 i would be willing to bet that it'd be it's gonna be 1.4 but then or 1.43 or something like that next time the the demographers actually or the statisticians and demographers get together and they figure out what the what the birthright is per female and well that's not good i mean what is it japan is doomed as a country at this point now they they would have to they'd have to have every woman there like out to here with a kid you know for the next 10 years to bring those numbers up uh and yeah and it's because of the the this fiat problem fiat causes this this this is so destructive what it does because it and it it creates once again these weird illusions of wealth

and then as we all see on the internet we see those the the delusion calculator right the girls interview what do you want a man and they all say this ridiculous shit that isn't even possible it's like that doesn't even exist you know like you're you're asking for you know you've got like what you know 80 of women chasing like five guys it's like it's like seriously you can name them practically you know like elon musk dicaprio and like three other guys it's the same fucking guys are all chasing nobody else is in that position right i saw a bell curve distribution of women versus men like on a scale one to ten like who could you see yourself marrying like could you marry a five could you marry a ten like 95 percent of girls wanted a nine or a ten where

you had a nice bell curve distribution for the men or it's like more more realistic yeah i i can't remember where that where that was either i know that i know the story you're talking it was from match.com or one of the dating sites tinder or something is one of the dating sites that they did the note they they were able because they had that data you know that of course that's who would have that data and and they look at it and yeah and most men are pretty pretty even-handed with it they're like ah you know i mean uh i'm a i'm a six on a good day so you know i'd be good with a five or six girl and but but like all the women wanted to have like you know they all wanted nines and tens yeah it's it is strange it is yeah we are very different people and that's the thing

like things like dei and esg initiatives try to ignore these very stark differences in the psychological makeup of men and women which is just insane it it creates a huge distortion and And that has been, once again, going back to your fiat or the topic of fiat. That's what I keep seeing. The more, in my case, so I can only speak for myself on this. I can't speak for anybody else. But, I mean, I think anybody in the Bitcoin space, you know, who's seriously not just trying to have Bitcoin go up so they can buy an exotic car. I don't give a fuck about that.

But anybody who sees it for what its potential is as an alternative to a fiat currency that has fungibility, but not so much fungibility like gold, that you can actually keep a very accurate measurement. I think that, um, that, that is what will correct a lot of this. I really do. Um, because of, because of so much distortion that has happened, uh, within the marketplace and again, socially, you know, just like, um, you know, you, you may have heard me mention this, the idea of a, a social mobility. So social mobility is supposed to be a two-way street. It's not just supposed to be where you're working your way up. You also have people that are coming down. And we have a frozen economy in that right now we have an awful lot of people that are holding on to all this enormous amounts of largesse.

It's caused an enormous distortion in the marketplace. It's caused this huge gap between rich and poor that shouldn't exist and didn't exist before. and this is this and this is not a socialist rant it's really not this is as a free market guy the more you bail this out the worse this is going to get and it's it's it's these people not willing to take the l and realize that like yeah you you you gambled big and you let it ride but you let it ride to the extent of you lost sight of the reason why it is you wanted money in the first fucking place um dickens does a good job of this charles dickens he in his book a christmas carol and i love breaking this book down i you know the movie is easier to break

there's any one of like 50 movies they made about the book but um but we all know the story of scrooge that's exactly what it seems like a lot of the world has turned into right now and once again, like I said, this is not an anti-free market rant. I'm speaking from a very specific free market. The free market punishes hogs, right? What's the old saying? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And that really seems to be what we've distorted. We've created this distortion where the hogs are not getting slaughtered. They're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And there's no natural consequences. Whereas in an actual free market that's actually punished to do something like that it's like hugely punished and you're

punished with failure you're punished with your your outgo exceeding your income and then your upkeep of course is your downfall and that's the part that's missing so so in the in the case of dickens he does it's a really good job of of using a a character a fictional character like scrooge who is after money for the sake of money he's not even making his life good with it right he's not even making himself comfortable with it he's just after money for the sake of money which is the most absurd pursuit that you could ever have um you know that's that's a it's that's an illness if you're just after that like i mean the reason of course i mean the reason we all work for money is so that we can exchange it for what it is that we want to do we want presumably the reason you

earn a living is to live a life right that's that's that's we presume that's what we want um but at what point do we say okay you know most most of us i think most normal people once we get to a certain point we max out right and you may have heard me say this before too you know beds only get so so big and soft cars only ride down the right hand side of the road so nice um you know houses only get so big and beautiful and pieces of only get so good looking at a certain point you you top out of all of this and you then go okay well you know hey let's uh you know let's go do something else let's you know hey let's let's raise decent families how about that you know let's let's raise the next generation to be you know good good kids

you know and um you know because i in my view that's where the real legacy comes from you know another thing that fiat destroyed the the strength of the nuclear family um oh it gutted it completely gutted it there there's it doesn't even it's not it's not even recognizable uh now i mean especially you know figuring that even what prior to the federal reserve what did the house cost three thousand bucks what is it now it's a hundred times more than a hundred times that now a thousand times yeah i mean well you're in austin oh my god i mean houses over there are crazy um you know uh or at least they were for a while i don't know how it is right at this very moment but for a while austin was just nuts i don't even like where do you even get the money

to buy these places like holy shit it's yeah it's come down from the top and i think uh it will come down more i was talking to somebody there's like they're building so many goddamn apartment buildings in the city are supposed to be like an influx of like close to a million units over the next five years which jesus christ wow which is insane yeah and who wants to who wants to rent any of this stuff that's another very destructive thing you know you don't want to have a bunch of people um you know the united states was never designed or intended to be a nation of renters it was never designed for that the founders didn't didn't envision that that you're supposed to be just renting perpetually uh they would have thought

property i mean property taxes that would have been a hanging offense you know to even suggest property taxes like are you kidding you know that was that was that was completely against the idea yeah let's see yeah do you i mean that's one of the memes that's been going around in uh the libertarian austrian circles is like um do you actually own your house if you're paying property taxes yeah i don't think so yeah and and that that needs to be dealt with that is a problem it really is yeah it's a surprise moving to texas like no income tax all that but like property taxes is the big thing down here it's like i thought texas would be would be better than the lean on property taxes you know and um and with you know and property taxes income tax property

tax and death tax i consider those to be almost unforgivable that that those have been imposed on anybody because those are right out of the communist manifesto i mean they're they're so incredibly punitive and they they give you know once again it takes away it robs from your legacy and i think that's it's just really problematic those three should be dealt with um that's there's just no and it requires again largesse to keep that shit going yeah and i do think bitcoin fixes this and i do want to wrap up yeah by expanding on the comment that you said earlier i agree i think michael saylor has done an incredible job of helping educate people about bitcoin but i do agree with you and disagreeing with him that bitcoin is just like this inert

asset that is a hedge against the melting melting ice cube of the u.s dollar like we need to be using it as a transactional currency um and the for some reason or another i imagine for michael saylor being the ceo and one of the largest shareholders of a publicly traded company has to be particular with his words um there's a lot of people in the bitcoin space that have a lot of bitcoin that are afraid to say bitcoin's going to replace the dollar they try to use um less aggressive language and who knows whether they truly believe that or it's a it's a way to sort of hold the government at arm's length and say hey we're not competing with the dollar but intuitively um and in their mind they they think in the long run yes it will replace the dollar

but they can't say that because if you're too obvious with it up front the government will fight back but i i'm not afraid to say it like i think it needs to wholesale replace the dollar as the monetary base money then the transactional currency um and i do think that is going to happen as well um you shouldn't be afraid to say that i i think that i think that that's i think you're probably right about sailor in that because of fiduciary responsibility laws he he probably can't come out and just point blank say that because if you know of course if his if his company he has investors and they could sue him if i'm they could probably allege something about like well you know you're deliberately trying to tank the company or something like that or

manipulate um your uh earnings by who knows what they could is there's there's what is it there's 80 or 90 million laws on the books now. So who the hell knows what they could invent as some reason to haul him into court and cost millions of dollars and five years of his life, you know, arguing about something like that. So you're probably right. Um, but that's what it is to your point about, uh, cause I, I still see a bunch of folks saying that, that Bitcoin can't be a replace the dollar and i disagree with this i think that um no i mean obviously from the technical side you've got you know first tier second tier but you know there's nothing that says that you can't do your settlements you know this is where of course i'm not big on third

parties but if you're going to have third parties i would think that this would be one of the few space is one of the few items that because unlike gold it isn't as fungible and because it is specific and fairly trackable um in that if i if i send your company you know you're you're you're a a company that is a an aggregator and the settlements you're doing are monthly so i in other words as a consumer i'm out spending my sats for example like dollars and cents you know I'm spending those in the marketplace, and I'm using my card, and at the end of the month, as an aggregate, we settle that, and that way to keep the fees as low as possible, so that way you're not just having to do constant fees and have to run the network ragged.

That part is where I think that maybe your third parties, maybe there is room for third parties on this, on a small scale. Obviously, Bitcoin doesn't require third parties, you know, but maybe in this case, in terms of day-to-day stuff where you're aggregating, even at the end of the day, for example, you know, that maybe there is a case for some of the third parties. But then, of course, there's also a way to keep, there's a mechanism because by virtue of the way that Bitcoin functions, you have an ability to audit that anytime you want. you don't have to wait for a banking regulator and then worry if he's on the take, you know, you have the ability to, to, to regulate this stuff, you know, right there, everybody does. So if, if I spend 50,000 sats, you know, in a month, for example,

on personal lifestyle or whatever it is, and then I settle that up, you know, like, like an American express bill, for example, full disclosure, I don't own any part of American express. I'm just saying that, I mean, That is their business model. Well, that would be, to me, it would seem like that would be where you could make it fairly simple to where you could have Bitcoin being used in day-to-day transactions and everyday stuff that normal people engage in all the time. Although, because, you know, and I'll kind of close with that stuff, but although when a hard currency like Bitcoin or something, because we've never seen anything like this, I'm really curious to see what the economy would look like in a Bitcoin world. i would love to see it because i think it'd be really fascinating i think it'd be very fascinating to see how transactions change and what i mean by that is the amount of the amount of day-to-day spending that may not happen as a result of the currency not being

devalued so because you know like your my theory is is that attention spans follow money printing the faster you print money the shorter attention spans get because people are incentivized to to spend their money fairly quickly and whether they know it or not consciously it seems to happen and then of course the algorithms feed all that back to us and of course it just creates this vicious downwards downward spiral of you know people have the attention span of a goldfish and i think that that would change because i really do think it brings back long-term thinking to people where they start thinking about you know not just legacy of money not just that but legacy of what kind of world you are leaving so because it does go outside of just the the mere

dollars and cents to me um but we have to fix the money first and then it's much easier to focus on all these other problems that have been ignored for for for eons these are these are real problems they've been they've been around for a long time but we just don't think about them because we're too busy trying to survive yeah stuck on the hamster wheel yeah axel yeah you uh you're speaking my language i think we align pretty much perfectly on all these topics that we've talked about because um well i hope i wasn't boring uh i try not to be not at all i think it's hard for you to be boring you may think you're coming off as boring but i can i can assure you you did not this was a fascinating conversation and hopefully the first of many because i think things are going

to evolve pretty quickly and i think the way in which you break down all these problems and explain them is extremely cogent and um helpful thank you even to myself as somebody who's seeped in no the understanding the fiat world what bitcoin presents as an opportunity i think going as deep as you do and a lot of these problems uh has illuminated me to just the extent to which we've completely fucked up the world but we can fix it i think what was uh if you don't mind my asking what was uh what is something that you found that was that was interesting this isn't for my own self-aggrandizement this is just so that that way i know because i'm always curious how someone found what i was saying or or thought that something i was saying

was interesting i'm always curious like what you know because i don't think about it that much Right. I mean, my wife is tired of hearing about it. She's heard me say this for 20 years. So for her, she's numb to all of this now. She can say all this stuff in her sleep now. But but I'm just I'm curious what if you don't mind what what what you found to be interesting or that it was something that was specific to that to you. I think your takes on real estate really, I had the intuitive sense that this house flipping and going to insane amounts of debts and making $400 a month after going 500 grand in a debt doesn't make sense the way you break that down. But I think more generally, broadly speaking, TFTC stands for truth for the commoner. And I think for most of my life, this fiat world has fed us the idea that the experts know best. And I think what you do, whether you're in your shed or your garage or maybe that's the back of your truck. That's my garage, actually. It's just my messy garage right now.

I was doing all changes yesterday. I think it's optics because I think the way I connected with you is like, hey, this is the common man working a blue collar job explaining problems that most people think can only be explained by the expert class doing it better than many of those so-called experts. And I think the, the form of your content is such that it could inspire. It certainly inspired me to be like, Hey, if this guy in his garage, who's a high school dropout can understand and explain these problems, maybe it's not the experts that, that have all the answers. I think that's very inspiring. And hopefully for others, um, instills a sense of confidence that like, Hey, maybe I can

figure this out. maybe i don't have to be um dependent on an expert to feed me the answers yeah and that's that's the well that's the hope i have for for for anybody that actually follows my my research because i mean everything i do is in the field you know i don't you know there was a an anthropologist i cannot for the life of me remember his name but he was he was a field researcher so you know and he He was a British field researcher, and he always had a bit of a problem with a lot of the academics, the academic researchers, because he's like, you know, look, by the time as a field researcher, when I find all this stuff and I go through all of these things out here in the real world, by the time it hits academia, it's 20 years old. You know, that information, by the time it actually gets there and it starts getting filtered through peer-reviewed study after peer-reviewed study and blah-de-blah-de-blah, the time gets boiled down, it's 20 years later. And so you're on, you know, you try to be on the cutting edge in the field because that's where you're going to find, that's where you're going to find everything.

That's where you're going to see all the real stuff. And, of course, nowadays you can't even really trust the Internet anymore, as we've seen with Google recently. You can't trust anything. Who the hell knows? Like whenever someone looks up a statistic, I almost go, why bother? Who knows if that stat is real? Who knows? These things can be just made up for all we know.

and i mean we we want to try and find good source of information but i think the best source of information you have is just living your own goddamn life and looking around going my god i mean my neighbors aren't doing anything with their for example my neighbors aren't fixing their house and i can't afford to fix my house as an example i'm just giving this just as an example here i'm not saying anything specific i'm just saying like that's reality that we're looking at that's the actual reality as opposed to what the experts on tv you know the paul krugman's of the world are telling us like oh no look inflation's gone away we've defeated inflation the fuck you have because everybody don't believe your lying eyes axel don't believe your lying eyes that's what

they're telling you it's like hey i know you i know you're saying your neighbor's house is dilapidated and they're not fixing it but uh you're you're lying to yourself i have in my other business i i install and maintain generators uh electric power generators for people and i um you know i deal with customers that they're living in like two million dollar houses for example and they don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of they're they're they're they're insanely broke they're hyper broke i don't know how the hell they live in these houses um because of that and you know and you have people like and they make up every crazy excuse in the world and then argue. I'm not kidding. I actually had a customer argue about a hundred

dollar difference in price after after spending, you know, two hours telling me how how much money he made. It's some executive job. Like, really? You're seriously argue. You're going to grind the tits off this to the point where we're arguing about a hundred bucks. It's costing me more than hundred dollars to stand here and listen to you argue with me about that are you fucking kidding me like that but that's real shit like it's just bizarre so no when i see that kind of stuff i don't believe any of this shit yeah the illusion of wealth is real freaks it is it's i think it is i think it is completely illusion i think more people uh out there pretend to be something that they're really not at all um and you know yet when if you were to if you were to really dig

it's social media of course you know how this works i'm not trying to monopolize your time but i mean but social media feeds into that where you've got you know the picture that somebody takes they take like 60 60 or 600 pictures until they find the perfect one and they post that one right yeah or or they have the the picture in the background of some exotic vacation that they went on one time 10 years ago and they would have you believe that's their everyday life like that's just not the case that's the uh the hyper real if you will yeah yeah hyper realism is a good way to look at that that's that's a great way to look at that and stuff i'm by the way i'm i'm thankful that you had me on your show it's a pleasure um and you know i i like i said i hope i wasn't too

terribly boring and i uh hope you weren't at all i want to you were so non-boring that i would love to do this again maybe in person maybe uh we can make this happen that's why not too far if you're over in austin that's not that far um i i travel all over to i'm usually hauling ass all over texas doing something so you know and hauling something so it's not a problem at all so sometime if you want to just schedule i need at least a good two weeks notice on something like that okay i'll be sure to give you good notice yeah you'll have to come by so i work out of the studios in the bitcoin commons in austin okay and uh so we've got a bunch of companies building the bitcoin space and i'm optimistic that we're going to build the the infrastructure that gets us away from this fiat

madness because if we don't uh the world's going to collapse in and of itself because uh we have a massive competency crisis a massive delusion of of what the real world real wealth in the world is and um i don't know bitcoin gives people agency which gives me a lot of hope i think people are beginning to recognize that avenue towards agency which is good i think i think you're right and i'm i'm hopeful with you on that i'd like to think that that we're making a difference um kind of one person at a time because it is going kind of slowly but at the same time it is picking up traction and i am glad to see that more people are starting to ask questions that's actually the biggest the biggest thing and which is why i don't mention if you'll notice i

don't mention a lot of bitcoin and a lot of stuff that i do it's because i'm more interested in try to draw people in to the idea of at least ask questions if they can ask questions they'll eventually figure it out they'll figure it out on their own um people are smart they'll figure it out if they but if they start asking the question of like you know what the hell why the hell is it i'm working you know 70 hours a week and my life sucks that's all it takes that first question now i got you now i can say well why do you think that is your money and we can go yep that's exactly right it's because your money's becoming worth less and less and less and if we can fix that we solve a shitload of other problems fix the money fix the world it is it really is yeah

axel i can't wait to do this again thank you for your time you were not boring at all if um how do i get a copy of this by the way i'll send the recording will you okay please thank you i'd really appreciate it because i'd love you to use a few pieces and stuff and post them here and there too yeah we'll send uh we'll send a dropbox link awesome thank you so very much thank you peace and love freaks