TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #574: Strong Cultures and State-Proof Cities with Tuur Demeester

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Marty sits down with Tuur Demeester to discuss his visit to the South African city of Orania. Tuur on Twitter: https://x.com/TuurDemeester 0:36 - Why Tuur went to Orania 8:02 - State-proof cities dealing with crime 14:29 - Orania's origins 19:24 - Fold & Bitkey 21:19 - Population growth and businesses 26:21 - South Africa is devolving 29:54 - Unchained 30:54 - Sentiment toward Orania 32:15 - Scaling Orania’s model 34:49 - Diversity and conflict 43:50 - Bitcoin fixes this, not MAGA 50:44 - Narrowing focus to weather the storm 1:00:54 - Cultural conflict makes family pairings difficult 1:05:45 - Meme coins 1:12:06 - Ethereum delenda est 1:17:28 - Bitcoin market and Bessent 1:23:10 - Tariffs and eliminating IRS 1:28:07 - Glass half full Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://foldapp.com/marty/ Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Let's just explain it, sir.

I don't mind some sweater weather. I was just in Costa Rica for 15 days and it was 85 and sunny. Great for your circadian rhythm. Sun rises at 530, sets at 530 every single day. Yeah. It's great for scheduling. Yeah. You were traveling too.

That's why we're here. Yes, I did. I went to South Africa. Yeah. and you visited uh orania yes i did and then briefly pretoria as well you know why did you want to go make this trip yeah i had some very specific reasons so i think i told you about this but um earlier last year i did a presentation in belgium and it had been 10 years that i did any kind of presentation so and it was a beautiful location

bitcoin conference i wanted to make it something serious so i did research into what's going on in belgium and i thought i was going to be talking about the banks and inflation and you know that kind of thing but as i was digging into the just the data i was more surprised to see that um immigration has been really on the rise in belgium and uh you know i'm i'm raised very progressively you know thinking like people assimilate and you know you teach them the language and and you know life goes on but one of the things that really shocked me to find was that not only are the immigration numbers like quite staggering like right now 37 of the belgian population is of immigrant origin meaning you know either your first generation second or third

and um and the thing that shocked me was to see how how people vote you know it's it's so it's it's really not that obvious that the civil liberties that i took for granted are going to be reflected in the voting patterns of the people that came and immigrated to your country especially if they come from you know north africa or turkey and and and and you know from outside europe and so really seeing that 80 of of that cohort votes very very left and even cast a marxist vote right we have the communist party as the highest vote since 1948 right now in belgium over 10 percent and so yeah it really was like a shock because i realized well this means it's possible that the whole country could change you know the whole the institutions like

everything and uh and also demographically that the the people who used to be the the natural majority like the local population they could become a minority and so for a while i was like man i want to do something to help uh there's you know i i couldn't figure out what i could do like and the best i could think of for quite a while was like well there's going to be a massive diaspora out of western europe out of belgium maybe i can help channel some of that so maybe we can i don't know start like a colony in argentina and i was actually planning to you know go down there again and and prospect and see what what could be done um but then um uh some friends um uh showed me some some things that were happening in south africa which is interesting because in a way it

it is kind of that scenario I just described. It's as if that already happened in South Africa. Of course, they have a very different history. The Afrikaners who landed there in the 1600s, if you look at the territory of South Africa, I think they've always been kind of a minority, demographically speaking. But ever since the early 90s, which was, you know, the end of apartheid, the rainbow coalition, all of a sudden, everybody who lived there had a vote. And then the kind of European descendants, they became, I think, 20. And then now it's probably more like 10% of the population.

So you're in a situation where it's just impossible to ever vote your way to a different system or a different way of doing things and where ideologies like Marxism just go rampant. You have very blatant parties that totally align themselves with that kind of thinking. But nonetheless, they've been able to build things there that are really impressive. and so the first thing that caught my eye was Oranya which is an Afrikaner only town it was started in the early 90s by just like 13 people in the middle of nowhere it's called the Karua

which is a very very arid land very very difficult to do anything with if you're close to the river you can do some irrigation you can actually get some decent crops but only through irrigation other than that you can you can raise some cattle you know think like Patagonia or think, you know, West Texas, like that kind of climate.

And so, yeah, they just struck out there in the middle of nowhere with just very few people. And they've managed over the period of 40 years not to grow it into a town of 3,000 people. And it's just super interesting to see how they work. And I was intrigued. So I went down there and spent eight days in the town. I talked to a lot of people, you know, some of the founders,

The CEO of the Oranje movement, I spend a lot of time with him. And then also the entrepreneurs that are building, because one of the challenges as well is that when you have a failing state is that all the services that we take for granted, you know, sewage, security, electricity, obviously schooling, media, you know, all those things, they all just decay more and more and more. And one thing I did learn is that when we in the West, when we think about collapse, we like to think of it as like some kind of meteorite type event, like a big thing. And then, oh, yeah, now we're living in the collapse. But the reality is more that, no, you wake up and today is going to be 0.01% worse than the day before. And it's just this kind of gradual grinding. so what's happened in south africa is that the because of the copper theft um a lot of that's only one reason and also just general mismanagement but there's so many brownouts like

it's there's not a reliable electricity network anymore and so what they've done in aranya is gradually build up more capacity because one thing they do have is sun and so um right now i believe 50 percent of the the money that the inhabitants spent on electricity goes to the local producers like so solar panels either on your own roof of your own house and there is one company orasol who has um a big production capacity they also have a giant battery that they bought and uh and so they basically can iron out almost all the brownouts by now so so yeah you know there's a lot more to say but um it was really special to be there yeah the i mean the reason i saw you tweeting about it and i dm'd you immediately because this idea of free cities

free states whatever it may be a municipality that decides that it wants to sort of separate from a federal government whatever it may be and just sort of inoculate itself from everything and run a private society something that's been talked about quite a bit i mean um what's his name begins with an r he's been on rakim um i'm not familiar yeah he's um i think he's with the students for liberty there's a lot of words nowadays there's free cities there's charter cities there's bitcoin citadels um people think about declaring independence like that's another idea um maybe like we'll buy an island and things like that yeah there's a lot of it there's this whole concept of just distilling it to individuals getting together and saying we think

us as a free market can produce the goods and services that the state typically provides and provide for ourselves and it seems like irani is doing yeah and the super cool thing about south africa is that they uh there wasn't some kind of you know civil war where all of a sudden this you know ethnic group they won and and and uh they were able to carve out this you know giant space for themselves they just basically started doing like doing it and and one of their mantras is man maximum achievable non-compliance and and uh also um state proofing is something they talk a lot about which is basically you try and organize yourself in such a way that um the government has a hard time messing it up because you're just less and less reliant

on government services yeah the amish are a great example of that here what is the amish oh yeah absolutely yeah they're very state proof absolutely yeah and and so one of the one of the things i think i'm learning is that if you're libertarian inclined it's tempting to really boil it down to the individual and think like all right i'm gonna sit on my ranch and do my thing and i'm gonna be you know i have solar and everything be totally independent but um you know once you start talking about crime for example um it's not that obvious to just be on you're lonesome uh it's actually rather impossible like in in south africa for example um not that the government is actively going out and murdering farmers but there's such a lawlessness and there's

such a kind of a almost like permissive culture when it comes to that like the criminals basically don't go to jail so uh every week a farmer gets murdered and tortured and uh sorry a booer yeah the boer is the name it's it's that's the original name for it meant farmer originally but now the boer are more like a people yeah they they're the ones who are mostly descended from people who landed in the 1600s and then they were those are mostly dutch and then later you had huguenots from france and portugal i believe and then you know blending together they're called the boer or the african or yeah yeah and these criminals have pretty sophisticated technology that they're using like increasingly yeah signal jackers and yeah they know what they're doing they go in with those

those wi-fi jackers with the antennas and blackouts well and they also have the advantage of numbers right if you have a gang of five and you're gonna attack you know a farmer who's there with his wife and kids you have a lot of it and then also you choose the time of attack like he doesn't know when you're coming um so so one of the other things that they start doing in in south africa is is on a like almost like nationwide they have this organization that i visited it's called afri forum and they really try and meet the afrikaners where they're at in terms of the needs and so they start organizing neighborhood watches for example they have 170 of them And they use a lot of modern technology, even drones and things like that, to monitor.

And then they have a control center where all the information comes in. And so they're able to send private security to those places and help out. So there's a pretty amazing collaboration between the non-profit, which is AfriForum. They have like 215,000 paying members. and then the for-profit, which are more the private security companies that are on the ground providing services. And they even have a kind of a VC role in that sense where they, you know, if there's a need in a certain community for more security,

they may, like, invest in a startup, a startup private security firm, have some equity in that firm, and then their incentives are aligned to to grow together you know not that it's a it's a big source of profit but it does make make it so that incentives are more more aligned and resources can be allocated i mean all this blew my mind i was like wow like you know we're so used to the government being performant and we have been for especially i think in the us in in europe the decline has happened more quickly and and and things were more brittle already uh 10 20 years ago but uh but yeah you can see how fast things go awry once the government is just like overwhelmed yeah and and i think a

lot of that has to do with the justice system right once you get a two-tier justice system where i don't know they want to prosecute speech crimes because they're afraid to lose power and then they're gonna they make it so that carjackers only only get a one-year sentence and and then they would get to walk free well then that means the most hardy hard criminals they just they're roam free even if that's only one percent of the population it's an absolute menace for everybody else yeah it's an asymmetric intolerant minority in the wrong yeah wrong reasons yeah yeah and so did you i mean you talked to a bunch of people over the eight days that you were there how did iranian evolve to the point that it is today obviously they started in the early 90s it's been

a slot and i don't know if it's a slog but they've been iterating and building and expanding for for 40 years yeah so one of the names who's who's most often associated with the apartheid regime is vervoerd he was a i believe prime minister he actually was born in the netherlands and he was a a statesman for a long time and um and he he had a a vision to develop south africa economically and one of the one of the ideas he had was that along along the orange river uh there was going to be lots of they're going to make the flow a lot more predictable because water is very scarce in in that country and so if you build dams uh you know in in in regular in um in a very calculated way uh then you create a lot more opportunity for irrigation and and cities to

grow along that river so that was his plan and they already started with some projects and so along one of the dams there was uh the beginning of a development which is basically just some housing for the workers who had been building the dam and that was completely abandoned nobody was living there but you know there was some road type structures and also because of the dam the flow of the river becomes very predictable which is great for irrigation and so then they identified that as a you know the start startup group as as a good place to maybe buy some land and and by some fluke they were able to buy it it was actually um not obvious at all that they they they were going to get it but then they did they were able to buy it um quite cheap at the

time and then what i believe just 13 people they started building and one of the first things they did was um build and you can still see it like a pipeline of water through the city um which would then provide the the houses with the basic sanitation and things like that i don't even know when they start purifying the water right now it's incredibly potable you can just drink all the water it's it's very very fresh they have two water systems so one is just directly from the river for irrigation and those kind of things and then the other is more expensive is the purified kind but so yeah um they told me that the the the actual pipeline was welded together by a couple of 15 and 16 year olds you know who who had picked up the skills and and were able to do that over

time and uh they had to remove so much um so much so many rocks just to make the the plots viable to put a house down um it's it's uh i saw the boulders they're just enormous boulders that you have to pull out of the ground before you can you can dig uh the foundations for any kind of building so it's it must have been incredible like the amount of work that they did it's just very, very salt of the earth type work. And one of the things that makes Oranje unique is that they only use their own labor. And so they don't go around and get cheap labor from around the country. Only the people that actually are residents there do the work. And so I think that's also why they had a slow start. But it was very deliberate because they realized that

if you pull in a lot of that labor, well, then those people are going to live around where you live. And if they have a different culture, well, they're just going to keep voting along the lines of their own culture, which is understandable. But so that can jeopardize the kind of cultural project or the vision that you have for your town or your city. And so that's one of the things that really sets Orania apart from other towns in South Africa or around the world, really, where the two restrictions are restriction of labor and residency so so it's only open for people who are afrikaners and protestant christians and so basically if you're like an italian catholic like you you're not going to get residency there you're allowed to visit like

it's very open there's a big road riding through town one of the debates that they've been having is like huh should we should we make that a toll road like should we have like a toll booth there because we kind of work to maintain the road and things like that um but uh you're free to just anyone can just go on vacation there and very very hospitable there's lots of little hotels and or i guess they call it costa house guest houses and restaurants all those kind of things sup freaks this is natty you don't want to skip because fold has a great offer for you everyone knows about Fold, the app where you can earn the most Bitcoin rewards for everyday purchases. I did this yesterday. Me and my wife, we use Amazon to buy quite a few things. And instead

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there's programs to help people buy like it's like a almost interest-free loans where you you you get to they structured it so that you basically only pay the equivalent of what you would pay for rent anyway a little bit more and then over the course of i think five years you've financed your own house uh because you've also helped build you know with your own hands you've helped build it and it's a relatively small plot and so but people get enormously motivated by the idea of you know if you're a young family you can actually own your own home it's very motivating and especially in a safe town because that is really a perk it's it's an incredible i mean a perk is a bit too pejorative it's it's um what do you call it it's an incredible

feature of that community that it's so safe that kids and you know little girls and whoever can just run around free no matter what time of day it is just really safe um and that's very rare in south africa what were the conversations with the citizens though well there were all kinds of people i'm trying to see um some people had lived there for 20 years other people just arrived like a year ago um some people were scoping it out still they they had i talked to several uh afrikaners who actually they had been on vacation for a few times to aranya and they were really starting to think about okay i think i think we want to come and live here and then they were always thinking in terms of their business like you know one guy i talked to he still had a a trucking company and

he had to be in other parts of the country and so he he was thinking of of uh you know passing it on to somebody else starting a new line of business um his his wife was um was very good with textile and embroidery and things like that so she was thinking about starting a business in town for that um i spoke to a company that produced jewelry because they they thought about the the the general challenge of the town is you know you're in kind of in the middle of the desert so how do you how do you generate economic output right how do you how do you make sure that there is more money going like being accumulated than you have to invest and so these people figured that a jewelry business could be a great thing to do because the the cost to import the raw

materials is relatively low there's not a lot of weight so you can transport it for a long way to get there and then they add a lot of value and they can sell online and it can be it can be sold anywhere so that business is doing really well um there's a like and so everybody apparently because society is so brittle there and so volatile um people don't assume that if you have a business that you're going to be operating it for 10 years so you very often you'll have a business for two years and then your market just disappears and you have to find another market or you know you have three activities at the same time so that if one diminishes you can focus more on the other ones uh because there's also the problem of um you could call it um reverse racism

where um there's a lot of quotas from the government uh to to hire uh non-whites um even if if you know if you're an afrikaner and you have a business in in certain instances you can be forced to hire a certain amount of black people um and then i think also because of the general atmosphere that there there's just there is a kind of an actual racism against uh the idea of you know hiring uh afrikaners who who are european looking and so yeah many people i talked to they said it's hard to find jobs um so that's why also they had a lot of over the years the last 30 years a lot of people moved abroad um to you know canada There's even a whole bunch of Afrikaners here in Texas working on ranches

because they're very good at running a farm, and they're very reliable, and so they find work here, for example. Yeah. It is crazy because I've seen a lot of posts on Twitter and other social platforms about the devolution of South Africa. Yeah. I've talked to some South Africans, and it's hard to discern what like how how bad the situation is like that's really bad is it bad

yeah i mean the i mean what i what i've heard is is that if you have a good job you can stick by certain rules and if you stick by the rules you you'll be okay like you know Although everybody knows, everybody has been mugged or has been a victim of some kind of crime and may know people that have been hurt or even killed. It's still, because they have high trust among themselves, there's a lot you can do to stay safe. But it's kind of like if you don't live in Oranje

and you live in Pretoria, for example, or another city, You go from, you know, your vehicle to your house, which has a big fence around it, to another place that has, you know, barbed wire around it. So there's walls everywhere. And that was something somebody told me is that in general, in society, you always need walls. The question is just where are you going to build them, right? And so with Oranje, they're like, well, we're going to have a kind of a perimeter around the town because they have a security firm with 10 people working in it full time. And they patrol the area and they keep people safe. Or you don't have that and there's just lawlessness.

And then you have to build walls everywhere, you know, from maybe you need even an armored vehicle or things like that eventually. Do they have individual gun rights in Oranje? Individual? Gun rights? gun yeah so they just abide by all the the laws of south africa and it's another one that is like makes you roll your eyes because obviously the gangs have the craziest guns and and and and other weapons but the laws are very strict in south africa and so it takes you nine months to get a license to even uh i think i uh i think i don't know if you can carry i think you can carry

it but basically get a license to own a gun like a nine millimeter and then there's also these laws that if somebody if you shoot someone who enters your home and he's not a direct threat to your life well then you can be prosecuted and get in trouble um so that you know there's it it's tough in that sense and that's also why this organization our free forum they've they also have a branch where they they have a judicial focus they really actively sue uh politicians or government institutions or really try to push back to um these these crazy counterproductive destructive regulations really so yeah that also actually gave me hope because that was one of the things that i was like crime is just going rampant in belgium and and you know people are not allowed to you

know but but there's always something that is allowed and you can kind of start with that and then and then push back um private security firms you know they they have people from ex-military and and they are better better trained so you kind of work with what you have you know this rep was brought to you by our great friends at unchained as bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves understanding its potential impact on your wealth becomes increasingly crucial. Whether we see measured adoption or accelerated hyper-Bitcoinization, being prepared for various scenarios can make the difference between merely participating and truly optimizing your position. This is important, freaks. This is why Unchained developed the

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unchained.com slash tftc how what is the perception of irania within the rest of south africa or parts of it apparently early on it was extremely negative um and ironically it wasn't so much you know the the black majority of the population who was you know who hated it because they they didn't really care about it it was so small but it was mainly apparently what you could call their version of the neocons you know the the pro-apartheid people who had been part of this big bureaucracy that had been built up this powerful state and who wanted to stay in power and then because basically if you build if you start building orania you're saying like look we think these cities are lost we're gonna build this little thing we're gonna try and save this

one person in the sickbay and we're letting these big institutions and and cities just we're not going to try and resuscitate them and i think that's why a lot of anger came because it's kind of in in their mind it was admitting defeat um and then gradually that changed and now i believe they did some poll 80 of the afrikaners are very positive about it you know it doesn't mean they'll live there but they're supportive yeah yeah and having spent time there and talk to a lot of people do you think this model socially scalable right now town of around 3 000 growing at 10 a year you think it reaches scaling limits yeah i mean they're thinking about that a lot because they they don't want to you know ruin what they have they don't want to

grow too fast um i think it's absolutely scalable because you have that cultural um homogeny is that that the word homogeny yeah um yeah and and so it it it just historically it's been scalable i mean we've we've had cities around europe where people had a similar culture and they just scaled it and they you know i grew up in a city with literal moats and and big gates you know like bruce where i grew up is that's that's i think how how people learned to work through the middle ages because really the middle ages was a period where you didn't have the roman legions to you know keep the vandals at bay and all the roving gangs and all that and so there was lawlessness in europe and the way to counter that was to kind of start small and gradually build out your communities

so yeah i think it's i don't think they're doing anything new i think if anything they're just reviving an old model that we've we had kind of forgotten in in in a time where we thought you know or a lot of people thought it's the end of history you know everybody's a liberal democracy now we can there's abundance we can always print more money if we need to and anyone can get welfare um anyone can live together always so we're fine and uh i think that that ideas or that illusion is collapsing now and so i think in a way we're going back to reality so yeah i think it's i don't see another model to be honest really if you're thinking about how to how to how do you restore order like you can't control other people like you can't control i don't know

like in south africa it's probably like 90 million people there now because they had because it was the wealthiest country even you know after the 90s there was a lot of wealth remaining in the country and it was by far the wealthiest country in all of africa and so they had so much inbound uh migration that um yeah what are you going to do like control 90 million people no but you can con you can't choose who you work with it's like it's the voluntarist idea yeah this seems like the pun intended a cultural shift is underway globally I mean, just look at what Trump signed over the last three days. First three days, not day three now, but a lot of the executive orders,

like the one he signed yesterday, essentially gutted affirmative action as put forth by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 60s, DEI ripped out of government. So, yeah, what is the essence of affirmative action? uh yet to hire um um among race oh it's like there's quotas basically really and that was in place ever since lbj i think so i believe yes i didn't know that um well it's funny right because because diversity has been such a buzzword but if you really think about it what is the opposite of diversity it's consensus i would say it's like when you agree there is a consensus and when opinions diverge you have diversity so in a way like maybe we've been enshrining conflict

more than anything else yeah i mean we're seeing in the uk you can't even talk about wanting to preserve british culture you can't um all throughout europe you're seeing all these right-leaning political parties begin to yeah we call them right-leaning from here but over there they're labeled extreme right or uh far right yeah yeah it's a tough conversation for many people to have because we have i mean um 33 that's been my whole life is this idea of diversity multiculturalism the melting pot makes us stronger and yeah and i mean and but but yeah so one of the things i've been realizing myself is that it's easy to be progressive if you're not in the midst of the actual diversity exploding around you uh like i grew up very sheltered um i traveled a lot

like i my parents took me traveling all around europe uh and and and uh even some morocco and turkey and places like that but but bruges was extremely homogenous as far as its own population and so it's very it's very easy you know to live in that kind of you know how i think that the criticism here in the u.s is like oh you know the liberal politicians they live on martha's vineyard and and and they get to hang out with their their their you know like-minded friends at the country club but they don't realize what it's like to all of a sudden have every year one percentage of the population gets added and they're from completely different cultures you know it's it's it's uh you know and so i've kind of become a little less naive as to what it actually does

yeah especially because it's often imposed like people don't vote for it they don't vote for like oh yeah let's let's you know where do we want to import people from it's like oh yeah let's let's vote in this country and no it's it's it's imposed and it's often a kind of a an attack on democracy as well because it's it's the more it's the socialist parties who want more votes and they know that they're going to get their loyalty from the people that they give welfare to and so in a way they're importing just votes it's very it's very uh it's it's really quite awful if you think about it like it's not respect like they they they talk a big deal about respecting everybody and respecting other cultures but when it comes down to it it's just they're importing cattle

in their mind it's just going to be cattle that votes the way they want to yeah turn texas purple then we're going to turn it blue that's yeah yeah yeah no i mean i experienced this i grew up in northeast philadelphia and um the first 10 years of my life and it's where my parents grew up met they went to the same preschool together and historically the neighborhood i grew up in was blue-collar Irish Italian Catholics and by the time we left

the neighborhood had completely changed and if I go back to Philly now and drive by the church that we used to go to Masses

isn't said in English anymore it's in Portuguese and Vietnamese and that happened in one generation my parents had a pretty

homogenous upbringing but by the time me and my brother were born within 10 years the neighborhood to completely change and and i don't know if it's the same for you but when i go back to belgium i i it's it really is painful to see the breakdown of trust you know like for

example you go to the supermarket you know you you buy your groceries and then you can't just leave there's actually a gate and you have to scan your ticket and then the gate has to open before you can exit it's because they have so much theft you know it didn't used to be like that like churches used to be open you used to be able any day of the week you just walk into a church and like you know sit down and have a quiet moment that's that's gone like none of the churches are open anymore uh so there's there's a huge price that comes with this uncertainty because that's really what it is like everybody operates on a completely different cultural operating system it's not about skin color at all it's really about what people's innate cultural programming is

and i think probably a combination of the media and academia and schooling and uh and and it probably was with good intentions but i think we've been we've been sheltered to an extreme as to what the negative consequences are of having mixing together dozens of cultures just like that and then diametrically opposed cultures right and it's also like you used to be able to go to paris and be like oh i i go to paris because i get a certain experience i go to a town in switzerland i get another experience and now more and more you kind of get a similar experience because everything is mixed um you know maybe that's a petty thing to be like oh well i want my vacation to be you know culturally

homogenous but um but but imagine living there it's like you know you you lived in a certain culture and then all of a sudden it's it's kind of a jungle like for example in the the circle around brussels i thought this was a interesting metric i've mentioned it a few times already um so brussels obviously a city it's like 1.5 million people something like that or 1 million kind of like austin in a way so then there's the the ring or the ring around brussels which is totally rural just you know small towns around brussels so 10 years ago already 75 languages were being spoken in that ring and recently they didn't update and now it's 104 languages in those rural towns like that's like the tower of babel yeah that is just literally the biblical nightmare

how do you get anything done right and go back to like diversity is the the opposite of consensus like how can you reach consensus well yeah and then you could say if you're very cynical you're like whoa that's just basman of cycle and this is the the stage of demoralizing like you just kind of try to create maximum demoralization so that then the next stage you can be like all right the central government is going to come in we're going to plan everything for everyone you know we're the religion now you can worship us um you know we're going to impose the homogenic culture and it's going to be extremely sterilized and depressing yeah i don't think it's conscious but but it's it's sad because that that's potentially the

direction it goes i think europe the the the danger is really that it becomes maoistic you know that kind of culture i mean it seems like it could easily go that way if things don't things don't change fast and you have i'm not sure you've been watching clips from the world economic forum but i caught a couple this morning and it seems like um the people who run the world economic forum have been pushing a lot of the policies um that have led to the results that we've been discussing uh seem a bit worried particularly with trump getting elected oh yeah yeah i saw it like they're getting i'm glad they're finally getting worried uh a friend of mine actually just yesterday pointed out like he's like oh it's no coincidence uh george soros named

his foundation the way he did and i was like what oh open society yeah yeah i mean like yeah it's it's it's it's it's so interesting to live in this particular epoch it's it's so much is changing um well so much is all right obviously with the trump admin coming in and um it seems like we're making a very stark shift here in the united states and i think there is an overt recognition of um the problems that have arisen from unfettered immigration uh illegal immigration predominantly over the last four years and there is a reaction to that highly encourage that the u.s leading the charge against this sort of imposition on uh american values american culture hopefully you can be a signal to the rest of the world

like get your shit together well that's one of the things that's not it's not that clear to me and i'm not trying to be a debbie downer but i i do i do agree as some people told me in south africa that that trump being elected on the one hand it's it's great for them because they actually now they know a bunch of people in the administration it's a lot easier for them to you know uh maybe get some support or something like that but on the other hand it it may lull americans into this illusion that big government is is is there to fix it for them and you can just you can just kind of vote your way to freedom rather than really get your hands dirty and build institutions you know uh because because because you and i can to a large extent probably agree on

like oh this is american culture but you know if we put all the american residents together or we do a poll i think the answers would vary a lot as to what is essentially american i think that's become more clear that there's these rifts you know and so hopefully it can become it can stay a structured enough umbrella to hold a lot of different cultures that can then maybe each do their own thing i'm not sure or um but but yeah i don't think because i think the the the the in a way technology is amazing but it also has caused this global confusion uh and i'm thinking about just transportation you know uh airplanes cars uh one i want somebody i heard someone say that you know the the apartheid regime or whatever the the regime that was there

before in south africa they worked so hard at building out all the roads the road infrastructure and uh and inadvertently they actually caused 30 million more people to just flood into the country because it's so easy to drive everywhere um and i i think that's really also something that we didn't expect that to to come together with the technological revolution right how cheap it is to travel yeah it's interesting you mentioned that because i was in a couple of cities in costa rica and the roads are terrible over there and you talk to some of the people on the ground they're like no we want to keep the roads terrible it's harder to get to we don't want to spoil interesting incredible piece of paradise that we have that's very interesting yeah yeah

And so we, I think, yeah, we can be like this techno optimism. It can really have a lot of unintended consequences, which, which I'm still waking up to. But yeah, and I think that it's, it's kind of like, you know, there's this comparison probably with Bitcoin and cyberspace where all the information wants to be free and in cyberspace, everything flows so easily. and that makes it all the more important to have cryptography so that you have some domains that there's some boundaries and that you guard them really closely

because otherwise you just get gray goo and it's all over. You can't preserve value if you can't preserve boundaries. Yeah, you need the ability to protect what you want to protect in the digital world and filter, I think. We need good filtering mechanisms for the information that we receive, distill, and try to make decisions based off of.

I mean, bringing this back to the Trump admin in America, and I completely agree with you, I think the potential for people to get lulled into this false sense of security that the MAGA Republicans in charge are going to fix the country is real. And my hope is that the administration, if it accomplishes anything,

would be that it just provides cover for people to get shit done. and engender that Iranian sort of ethos of, no, we're going to fix this ourselves. Yeah, one of the things they really think a lot about or try to embody is they want to build before the storm. They want to kind of be prepared for when the storm comes. And I still think there is so much,

if you just think in purely economic terms, I don't know. I don't know if all the banks and all the local governments and all the large governments are going to be able to balance their budgets the next couple decades. I really don't think so. And then all the people, all their savings are so depleted. So I really think that there's going to be a breakdown in certain ways. And you see that too where, like in Europe, for example, once it does start breaking down, it feeds upon itself, like the copper thefts. All of a sudden, a lot of regular businesses can't do business as usual anymore. Their cost of operating jumps up because of the damage done by crime and et cetera. so it feeds upon itself uh so i don't know if we'll be able to stave off um a depression maybe

the technology it's like oh well you know ai and robotics and maybe you know that that we'll be able to to do some of that but but anyway like i think it's good that we're we're getting a bit more time to build um and uh and and i don't think you only want to build defensively like you want to build something positive um but but also there is a level of scale that you want to achieve so that you're robust enough as a community to withstand whatever calamities are there and and you know buying a little apartment in dubai i don't know you know it feels like that seems to be the easy exit now for people that have done well in bitcoin or crypto it's like oh yeah i'm gonna just you know go to a sunny location and hang out by the pool um i mean that's fine but

it's not gonna save the west you know it's not gonna it's not gonna help transport these values that have been developed over centuries into the future for the next generations yeah well i guess that gets to the question like what do you think if we are being provided cover under this administration for four years people should be focusing on to prepare for a potential storm because it's coming i mean i obviously i think we think but yeah what do you think about storm storm wise um i i mean community family community i mean that's part but you think the storm is still coming yeah there's there's i don't know there's way too much sovereign day bitcoin bonds are gonna fix the debt or something i mean they can certainly help i think that is a low-hanging

fruit step in the right direction it's been incredible to see the legislation at the state level over the last few weeks i believe now we're up to 13 states that have presented legislation about a state level bitcoin strategic reserve i think but i really think people need and it's hard to say it's easy to say excuse me harder to do is really bunker down and create a tight-knit community of family extended family and like-minded individuals who who care about growing the nuclear nuclear family i think it all comes back to that and i mean that's part of the reason i mean we're moving back to the philadelphia area to be close with our family um at some point later this year and I think that part of that decision

is one, we miss our family and two, this calling to go back and to support our family and build out community there. The community is actually very good in Philadelphia. Get integrated with the community there and hopefully support it and help strengthen it.

Right. but yeah i think individuals at the individual basis like everybody should be saving in bitcoin be saving in dollars um yeah it gives you optionality um yeah and i i do think it's starting to crystallize more in my mind that just the basic services of the state you know that that there are all these parallel systems that can be developed to mitigate the breaking down of those like electricity is obvious here in texas with solar for example um internet you can get from the sky nowadays um maybe in other ways as well i mean i know people are working on mesh networks and stuff like that but um but yeah the redundancy i think is is important um also you

know in a way the food system has been polluted so that's in a way that also you could attribute that to state failure um so so having your own ways to produce food or or um acquire food yeah and then and then security i think is also an obvious one and a big one it's a little easier in texas because of the gun laws um but but probably you know around the western world it's going to be a huge conversation you know and and and of course startups are going to emerge and all kinds of technologies are going to help um but i do think these are things to focus on it's like you know it doesn't mean the answers are obvious but i do think if you focus on them consistently answers will emerge um because yeah it is true that we can be like oh bitcoin bonds

they're gonna save the government but that's only if bitcoin does what we think it does and that means 90 of people they're not gonna have any bitcoin exposure their bond portfolio their real estate portfolio is going to not help them um so yeah that is um i think in general unemployment is baked into the cake because because of the low interest rates the whole economy has been skewed for decades right it's like google should never have become as big as it is or facebook or the social media companies or you know it should have been more the agriculture producers the the mining companies the the basic technology the the the foundation of the economy has been underfunded brutally underfunded for a long time at the expense of

all the service industries um so yeah i mean that's going to be fixed and uh in that adjustment period we need we need we need robust i mean i think it's going to be good it's like it's like when you're ill you know like when you're ill it's like when you focus on the basics it's like oh yeah i gotta get rest i gotta go on a walk i gotta you know um look at my diet so i think in a way it'll be very healthy to go through this kind of fasting collective fasting period yeah do you think depression is on the table like economically yeah yeah probably both you know trump derangement depression um no i mean yeah yeah i mean it's probably yeah like i i do think so i think it's isn't it kind of already here like all these people they're like they're stunned

they're like hey but i i am doing all the things i'm supposed to do i have a job i have a little side job and i can't pay the bills like isn't that kind of the definition of a depression Um, I don't know. Maybe it's just the beginning. I really, it's weird, right? Because it's not going to be that for everybody. But for a certain cohort of people, yeah, things are going to be tough economically. And in a way, because everybody has to change into the new paradigm. It's only once we all change into the new paradigm that we can have a new era of prosperity. But if you're behind, well, I mean, that's also where institutions can do the work, right? If you build parallel institutions and then you have, you see that in Oranje a lot. Like they're building facilities for old people. They're helping out the newly arrived that don't have any money.

try and get a house for them and these very basic things um so in a way i think that's also you know if you're doing well it's it's a way to get more people on board with like hey like the world is changing um you can't just i don't does that make sense like you can't just have no rules yeah i think that's kind of where we're coming from is like ever since i don't know the 60s 70s like it's been this kind of hedonic idea of like oh we can just do anything there's no rules and there's no consequences well then if all the subs the the subsidies evaporate well then the people who are left that do have some money they're going to be like well yeah we can help you out but there's going to be some rules yeah right yeah

yeah that is um it is a massive problem to try to wrap your head around no i'm not sure if you've seen sam hyde's um recent monologues that he's he's given no but it touches on a lot of this and it's been interesting he's been pumping bitcoin as well but yeah this idea of like how do you how do you save yourself and how do you save your community and i think this hunkering down and really in the cross terms getting into the hole and getting back to basics like is is going to be important um and really focusing on the local yeah and also i think also like the you know that the the the scientific study where they found that um conservatives tend to care most about what's close to them and least about what's really far away like global

warming and then liberals care very little about what's local and focus almost all their energy on the world and the big picture um where is it getting with that well i think that possibly the lesson in that is that um focusing on ourselves is is has can really go incredibly far you know even if you like i don't know that somehow the answers will emerge if you like manage to take really good care of your family and think about what your kids needs and those kind of things that from that as you work together with more people like more and more organization structures are are going to emerge i think it can even be a bit dangerous for us to really speculate about like oh well then we're gonna do this and that and

um i don't know because that's that's been the trap of the liberals like you know the the globalist story we're gonna reshape the world and now we're gonna do we're gonna do what do they call it again when you change the climate uh geoengineer yeah we're gonna block the sun it's like dudes how's your family doing you're like bill gates like how's it going there behind the doors well that's what i that's like again whether it's here in the united states europe south africa wherever it may like that history undulates or civilization undulates throughout history and you know these dark periods i mean we've all seen the good times create um soft men soft men

create hard times hard times great good men blah blah blah um it seems like we're just at the the trough of of one of these bad times and trying to climb out but i think that's the one thing that really um upsets me about my generation the one coming up below me as well is this this idea that starting a family is possible because you don't have the economic ability to provide for it i think that is one key sort of variable we need to figure out how to reverse right create this optimism yeah yeah i think the money is the core i mean that's why you focus on bit yeah absolutely if people can save in bitcoin it just you're like sure i can have more kids because my money is going to grow yeah i do i think it's more than just that but i

I do agree that it's a significant factor because so many very poor cultures, they have so many kids anyway, so they're not constrained by poverty. I did read this interesting article on natalism and it was basically saying that if you just look at the kids that survive into adulthoods who are the kids that can themselves also have kids that actually the fertility had been pretty constant for centuries i think they were looking at the netherlands it was like three points something 3.2 or something like that and um and then you had a decline interestingly enough in the 1920s which was massive money printing which was the idea that you know you can just party and everything is great and everything

is just going up and uh and uh you know women can just lead their own life they don't need to be part of a family they can just kind of become dancers and you know whatnot uh and then uh the 30s came and there was already a recovery in the 30s and then uh in the 40s obviously because the war there was decline but he said that actually the baby boom was a marriage boom i thought that was quite profound and so that it's the long time pairings that is the key to fertility in society if you have people that get married rather young and they have a long time relationship then uh you're gonna have you'll be okay fertility wise and so that um what happened right after the war was just a marriage boom because if you look at the specific fertility within the marriage

wasn't even that people didn't have that many kids but there were so many marriages and so i think even more than economically the the challenges nowadays for young people to find a mate and to get support for the marriage and I think it's actually one of the side effects probably of this Babylonian confusion that we live in because you go on

a dating app here in Austin so many options but what's but maybe because of culture or whatever I think, I could be wrong but I think it's rather challenging to actually find someone of your own culture you know of that like and and it doesn't mean that you can never have a long i i have a you

know i'm not married to someone from my own country um so you can definitely bridge that friction but i think it is if you have so many people everyone is having marriages across culturally uh it takes years sometimes to get to to get to a place of stability and before you can have kids so i think that's maybe a under under under under appreciated factor you know the the the lack of cultural homogenousness in in in everyday life nowadays yeah that's a really important one the dating the whole from what i understand in the gen z years of my life it's yeah what are they saying abysmal like that the apps like you you meet somebody maybe on a date and or two but again the optionality that's provided it's like oh maybe there's something

better i'm just going to open the app again yeah yeah swipe right a few times and check it out sometimes people delaying long-term relationships um i imagine to a degree that that has never existed in human history and then yeah going back to this like babylonian sort of um theme like i think whether it's the dating side of what many would deem to be degeneracy or hedonism however you want to describe it or like i was on a podcast yesterday and i cannot stop after the trump meme coin thing i cannot stop thinking when money dies the particular paragraph where they talk about like the paper boys and the the people sweeping the floors in the stock markets they were all quote unquote getting rich and it seems like the the meme coin phenomena is oh yeah

very similar sort of degenerates like um the empty wealth that that people feel that that is manifesting and disseminating right now yeah like the the time preference becomes extremely high it's all about today or tomorrow yeah um yeah it is sort of a disease you know that that's running through society it was very unfortunate to see them launch that meme going oh yeah they didn't they didn't even get it they didn't they didn't like they they can't even run a proper meme coin scam like in their defense at least they didn't come out and say the u.s government is partnering with ripple and we're gonna you know that that would have been worse i'd rather have just a plain out scam coin that doesn't pretend to be anything else at least you know it's just a casino

thing yeah but yeah i do think it undermines their their kind of moral stature and their their reputation because because as it declines like think about all the trump fans all the mega people who bought this now and who think it's somehow whatever like imagine if you have like 90 iq and you're like oh i gotta buy trump coin i will show some grace i i because i have had experience with this and this election um i think they've they're probably surrounded by just pure grifters who are presenting things in a way that aren't as transparent as maybe they should be and what you were just describing like i had to explain this to rfk's team they launched like a an rfk solana coin it did like when he was still in the race oh oh and uh

the one of the individuals from the team reached out like will you will you post this like and help us get some uh energy around this meme i was like no and this is a terrible idea i highly advise against this and they had no concept they're like why why advise against this like it's a great way to monetize bobby's brand and it's like well if he doesn't leave the elect win the election like that meme coin's definitely going to zero i bet we can look up the price it's probably not trading very well right now yeah and you have a bunch of bobby kennedy supporters that don't understand the dynamics of this market and i don't think you guys understand it either and they're going to buy this coin

thinking it's going to accrue in value if he doesn't win the race. The attention around him and therefore this coin is going to diminish significantly and you're going to have a bunch of Bobby Kennedy supporters holding fat bags of 99% losses.

These people, it never occurred to them that this could happen. Yeah, that you're alienating your own base. Yeah. Yeah. Did you see that thread? balaji posted like a long thread on kind of like oh well let's assume okay let's just accept that

trump coin is here um trump coin is here well i forget the details but one of the things he said was it's sort of like a lottery it's sort of you know it's it's a zero-sum game lottery it's like well lottery is different because everybody has an equal chance of winning and there's no advantage for the insiders whereas obviously there is one if you launch a coin massive advantage to the insiders and the people who knew early on because they're gonna they're gonna buy a lot and then they'll opportunistically sell out um it's it's so different so um yeah not a good move at least at least he's kind of rug pulling somebody tweeted that it's his way to flex and be like uh if you're gonna do this i'm gonna show you who's boss i'm the biggest

and nobody's gonna surpass trump coin i don't think you don't think in the meme world no i mean for at least maybe not for the next four years but no it is like i tweeted this out it's like a signal of and this is what i said yesterday on this podcast like trump meme coin launch was like a signal of degenerate acceleration and i think that going back to this cover excuse me that could potentially be provided for by this administration it seems like all bets are off the table like you can just do whatever you want now yeah i think that was a signal that launch was just like all right we're just gonna go for it yeah degenerate yeah acceleration hopefully that also means like bitcoin innovation can flourish people can mess around with chami and mints and begin implementing

them and we can begin really getting um innovative and creative on the privacy and payment side of things and not have to worry about getting served a wells notice or having the doj come after you for being a money service business whatever it may be um and it it's like all right like i'm interested to get your thoughts like if that is the the cost of getting the ability to focus and build out bitcoin like is it worth it compared to kamala kamala yeah i think so i think that the kamala chill factor is crazy i mean now we have lawlessness but in a different way um you know it's like now scammers are not going to go to jail whereas under kamala honest people are gonna go to jail and uh that's just awful but yeah but yeah i do i have worried about that too

where so anybody can pump a num now like it's it's legal to just do pump a nums because the president did it yeah there are like other also ethereum well that's what i was gonna say they're feeling free all of a sudden to say oh yeah it is centralized we're in charge whereas under gensler they're always like being weaselly and like oh no we're so decentralized yeah but even like ethereum's what are your thoughts on the state of ethereum right now i feel like they're they're dying they're caught and it's been 10 years yeah i don't i don't think they're in a good state ethereum delenda est ethereum must be destroyed i mean it's not that project but the idea of you know a grift

where you can have a new narrative every year and a new story to pump your bags and you keep lying. Like they're lies. They've been lying for 10 years. And the market is showing that the market is sick of it. It's losing against Bitcoin big time. The secular trend has been broken for one year now

against Bitcoin. It's over. I really think it's over. Yeah, that's the sort of respectable part of meme coins is just overt. recognition that this is just pure gambling where ethereum had this like facade of oh we're legitimately going to build a world computer and yeah enable uh the decentralized future of defy and web 3.0 and it's interesting also how they rode that woke wave for nine years right they

really italic is quite brilliant at it like finding what is it in the zeitgeist that he could like latch on to and be like oh but we do that you know we we we're exemplary examples of that and now the narrative is broken and he knows like he's the soy boy like he can't just transform into open source decentralized libertarian like he didn't no it's over no he explicitly said that have to tweet is like if you think this means we're going to turn into like a bap loving uh right wing rah rah it's not happening it's not happening i'm charged but it shows that he's aware right he's aware of the tension yeah if i were him i would just fade i think he's probably trying to take my money and fade fade into the background so many people lost their shirts on

ethereum i mean it's not even happened yet i think it's the biggest damage is still to happen as it keeps declining yeah is steel man here people are dropping dot ease from their from their x handles is that is that a bottom signal maybe yes i mean they're barely getting any other than vitalik nobody's getting engagement who's tweeting about ethereum i i just think it's it's dead the only thing is that there's apparently a lot of startups that have built their technology to fit exactly on the ethereum virtual machine but it seems that the whole machine could be ported to bitcoin and so you know the the there's the guys at spider chain are working on that and maybe that'll happen though i guess another i'm

very convicted in the idea that the whole defy meme is just a siren call the actual signal is the bitcoinization of finance where you have like we were describing a massive debt problem both on the public and private side of of the market globally and you essentially need to restructure the financial system with better collateral and instead of creating these obscure complex defi systems with bridges and different tokens and treasury management systems and dals and liquidity pools whatever it may be it's like just go left side of the bell curve complete caveman like oh no maybe we just need to send bitcoin the other way into the financial system and help recapitalize a woefully systemically fragile credit system but marty

zeppelins could change the world and we have so many zeppelin engineers already like what are you talking about it's not because one of them burns down that we got to stop doing it yeah but i mean at 1031 we have a lot of these conversations with potential investors and a lot of that class is still stuck on this like defy yeah but 3.0 it's like yeah i think it's i think it's a siren call it's yeah it's also like cart before the horse it's like well you need something solid you need bedrock before you can build on it it's like oh yeah but we have this amazing structure and you're like okay where did you build it oh yeah out there in the swamp it's like all right well it's gonna sink eventually unless you you do like venice and you figure out how to

build in the swamp but i don't think ethereum has done that at all no they like they've hard forked 17 times like that and to me that's just that's enough yeah to be like it's a non-starter 17 hard forks what um what are your thoughts on the state of the bitcoin market right now we're oh yeah 105 105 or below this is like the lowest this is the worst post-halving performance that bitcoin's had believe it or not since it launched yeah my feeling is that it's because people have felt that global markets are overheated investors are a bit wary about global markets um interest rates are going up these government bonds are you know really starting to fade and and if you look at commodity charts as well they're kind of undecided like are we

gonna go higher or are we gonna really have a big pullback and so i feel that's what's holding investors back mainly so if we had a big crash then they could be like all right now we have a bottom in bitcoin like kablam like then we'd we'd go up hard um but yeah i do think it's it's gonna i still think it's gonna be an incredible bull market i really really think so um because there is so much lawlessness and uncertainty and decay and and it's like and then then you appreciate even more the thing that always every 10 minutes new block that is so reliable that is absolutely scarce so yeah i really think it's going to be a big big big big rally um but i think people want to know like is are we going to hypercharge inflation in this you know the next

four years is trump going to print like crazy or is there going to be some kind of crash and then we'll deal with that have you been following uh the remarks of treasury secretary scott percent or i don't think not really what does he say i mean he's i've done a couple episodes with people who've been studying his public remarks over the last 12 to 18 months and uh you know his history um not really he helped soros do the british pound trade so he helped speculative attack the pound he did a big yen trade during the uh the asian crisis and the consensus of people who've been studying his work of the course of his career and his comments more recently is that he if you are looking for uh to thread a needle on the level of global monetary reset like he's the

man for the job like he understands debt markets and currency markets better than most um and he has publicly stated within the last year that he thinks we need like a breton woods 2.0 like monetary reset um what would that look like i don't know um like maybe like a coming to the table like look this global debt situation's out of control haircuts haircuts jubilees whatever you want to call them yeah um in a resetting and maybe I don't think he's as up the curve on the Bitcoin thesis and particularly as a reserve asset as many of us would like him to be. But I think if the right people got in his ear,

he'd potentially be like, all right, we're going to have to re-monetize some of the system with this neutral reserve asset that exists. Right. Yeah. yeah i mean that seems good for bitcoin if if that's part of the story i think europe is toast so the euro is still a pretty big currency so it'd be interesting to see if if that one gets a big knock knock down it has to it's done and it was foretold when

euro zone european union and the euro launched yeah but now it's starting to get very real because if you know afd of course in in the in poly market the betting markets they're not really getting a lot of chance to win but but if germany were to pull out for example you know that's just so i feel europe is going to break up somehow that means the euro i mean probably the dollar would get stronger temporarily do you think the consensus among the citizens of europe is that breakups necessary or do you think most want to keep together you're probably afraid but also once once once you've heard enough this is only like a 30 40 year experience or experiment right yeah it's very young i remember in elementary school they were talking about oh the euro gets introduced

and and it was belgium like i was at the heart of it you know and and so it's very young maybe yeah of course the young people don't remember but now the euro eurozone the eu so i think that would also obviously be good for bitcoin because it's it's it's kind of showing the inherent fragility and failure of the fiat system it's different than like i don't know the turkish lira doing badly it's really europe yeah but yeah it's short term it's hard um it's hard to kind of know what's what's going on i do i do think the us is is gonna probably pull through because of the doge you know if they cut a lot of spending that would really make businesses very excited if they cut spending and i mean

I mean, partly confirmed, part rumor, but I mean, Trump announced it on day one about this external revenue service. Obviously, tariffs have been a big part of his platform leading up to him coming into office. But the rumor from somewhat credible sources has been he's literally thinking about eliminating federal income tax.

That would be amazing. if you're does that mean eliminating all the irs or not is there more to the irs than that i don't know yeah yeah it's in that direction it would be incredible yeah that's how cities used to operate right and you wouldn't really tax what's going on inside you just levy a toll on what comes in and goes out yeah and that that encourages local entrepreneurs to just add a lot of value. I'm thinking about the windfall of cash I would have for American citizens.

Yeah. Yeah, but it's still a presidential system, right? So I don't know how long the Republicans can kind of stay in control. Is it going to be eight years? Maybe Vance could win the next one. Yeah, I guess it's too early to tell. Yeah, yeah.

Until day three. be yeah but yeah i mean i think bitcoin is just a little bit weird though to talk back next time be like oh it's 300 000 what do you think like what but yeah i think it will i think we'll see 400 probably this cycle i think so yeah what do you think i think we go higher than that yeah yeah yeah i think likely yeah i guess it's highly dependent on the global macro situation do we go into a depression may be harder for bitcoin to get that high if not all systems go turn the money printer back on who knows that's the other thing just looking at going back to what we were discussing when we started this part of the conversation like can they actually fix it

with doge and all this stuff i think it is inarguably a net a net positive but you look at the the liquidity boogeymen that are sitting behind the scenes like you look at commercial mortgage-backed security and the delinquency rates of the underlying commercial real estate mortgages they're up at like 2009 levels wow percent um that's the other one right the real estate market i mean look at austin you know all these uh all these cranes in the sky and i know like the facebook building that they were building like facebook pulled out of that like how much inventory is coming online how much how much of that's actually going to be filled here yep how much of that debt was taken out in the last two years oh yeah yeah i think prices are

down residential 15 or something from that's all 25 earlier this year yeah whoa 25 from the peak yeah wow she has something to say logan logan's breathing deeply over there think hard about lost in real estate prices yeah i guess we'll find out paradigm shifts absolutely the idea of of a house being a store of value i think that's at least it it will still be but not in the places that we're used to looking like you know la new york that's i mean that could be a black swan you have 180 billion dollars of insurance claims that are about to flood of people that insured those houses in la like is that a black swan systemic risk like do they have liquidity is they're gonna need to bail out could that be the catalyst for the next big

print yeah i do have a hard time seeing trump as the big austere president i just feel like he likes to he likes to kind of be santa claus you know he likes to give people what they want and he's been real estate guy so he he kind of you know he's born and raised in in cheap money so i think i think higher inflation is really coming the second wave like we had that first big wave after covid it's already beginning to rear its head again yeah yeah i mean i've been stunned that gas has been so cheap for so long i keep saying like this is the last time we'll see it below three and then it keeps dipping we're like 250 a gallon right now yeah yeah i'll take that yep all right are we optimistic or pessimistic combination of both

i think it's incredibly special to be alive today because yes bad things are happening but also amazing things are happening at the same time and that's not doesn't happen very often that that So much change happens at the same time and you get to choose which story you're a part of. So I'm very glad to be alive now. Yeah. Choose the optimistic timeline. Adopt Bitcoin.

Peace and love, freaks.