TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #40: Joe Weisenthal

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Joe Weisenthal, Editor at Bloomberg and co-host of "What'd you miss?" on BloombergTV. The two jump into the mind of a skeptic. Joe was notoriously a skeptic of Bitcoin after writing an article titled "Bitcoin is a joke" in 2013. Since then Joe has become less skeptical and he explains why in this episode. Beyond Bitcoin, Marty and Joe discuss economics, the state of the economy, Joe's journey to Bloomberg, and the mainstream media. Follow Joe: @TheStalwart Follow Marty: @MartyBent Check out WDYM?: https://www.bloomberg.com/series/whatd-you-miss Peep Joe's Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/joseph-weisenthal

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's a hot wednesday night it's been a long day for me i moved moved today by myself it was uh it was an experience something i've done many times i've said this uh plenty of times but it's one of my least favorite things to do in the world but I am pretty good at it at this point. So it was very efficient with my time. Got it done in like five hours. So feeling good right now, a little tired, but very, very excited for the conversation

I'm about to have with my guest. For those of you out there who don't know, my guest is the artist behind SoundCloud hits like Pretty Good Looking, The Charlatan, and Black Coffee and Meat. On top of that, he used to be the executive editor at Business Insider and is now currently an editor at Bloomberg and co-host of What Did You Miss on Bloomberg TV. I'd like to introduce you all to Joe Weisenthal,

also known as The Stalwart on Twitter. Joe, welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled. Well, I'm thrilled. Already a life highlight. You sort of like went through my biography there, but this is now I'm going to add that. I'm not even being facetious. No, I mean, fanboying now a little bit. I've been a Fintwit fan of yours for years now.

Thank you. Going back to my days when I worked in finance in like 2011, 2012. I think I started following you on Twitter back then. Thank you. Watching you grow from Business Insider to now Bloomberg has been a fun experience. Yeah, it's been a pretty wild ride. And it's kind of fun thinking about how we're basically 10 years removed right now from the financial crisis. And I remember those were some of my first days tweeting.

I remember Twitter on the day when Bear Stearns collapsed and J.P. Morgan announced he was going to buy it for $2 a share. And I'm like, damn, 10 years just sitting here firing off tweets. Right? But, yeah, it's been fun sort of building, you know, meeting people this way. And I met you through Twitter and sort of watching this community grow. And, of course, seeing Fintwit kind of morph with crypto Twitter has been pretty wild. And, yeah, it's been a fun constant along with the various more official career activities. It's my favorite way to consume news.

yeah i was thinking about the other day um twitter the company has always kind of struggled a little bit they've never made a ton you know they've never really consistently thrived as a business the stock goes up and down and so many people on twitter profess to find it miserable and yet i kind of feel like it's actually the only social network that i have never even come close to reducing my usage of like you know i used to use facebook more now i find myself hardly ever posting there instagram i post there and stuff like that but in the end like twitter is just a constant and i don't see it changing anytime soon it's it's like the hive mind it's like you're just plugged into the pulse of the world yeah it's really it's uh that's like i found it like most

wild during like war like when things in syria were heating up like 2012 2013 you could like go follow syrians on the ground yeah exactly what was i remember very vividly that in the early days of the arab spring people in egypt people in tarir square incredible imagery and you just sort of realized that all of their media during those things was just delayed and behind exactly and it's um i think it's changing us uh twitter expect yeah twitter changes the people that use it a good way or bad way? I don't know either. I have an addiction. It's bad. My wife yells at me a lot. Same. But I'm happy that you brought up this sort of molding of crypto Twitter and finance Twitter because that reminds me of your talk at the Coin Center Gala. Yeah. But before we get to

that you originally started out as a bitcoin skeptic on november 6th 2013 you wrote an article on business insider while you were there uh bitcoin is a joke and you said bitcoin nada it's nothing there's nothing keeping it being a thing if people lose faith in it it's over bitcoin is fiat currency in the most literal sense of the word you know i kind of actually stand by that part in the sense that if people do lose faith in it it is over there is nothing backing it up i would agree this is uh by the way this is the tidbit that uh pierre rochard and michael goldstein posted on their bitcoin skeptics list yeah oh i'm still on the list of bitcoin skeptics i was told pierre told me i was um he was considering being i that i might be the first

person ever removed from the list but i guess i don't know if you should be removed or should just be an asterisk is no longer is now somewhat of a skeptic yeah just a moderate skeptic um well you know i think there were like i i think back to like when in fairness a lot of people were skeptics and very vociferous about it in the beginning it's hard to wrap your head around it's hard to wrap your head around why what is essentially a big distributed spreadsheet that everyone and this is this is your cell and you have or this cell has your name in it should be worth value and it's one thing to sort of say well it's this global computer and there's but there's not really that much you could do with it there never really has been it's just the belief that

the cell and the spreadsheet is a value fundamentally and it's pretty hard to wrap your head around and i sort of saw in bitcoin people and in the ideology essentially a rehash of gold bug argument that i didn't find to be particularly compelling a lot of warning about oh it there's the fixed supply fixed supply of them uh we're going to collapse and do hyperinflation which hasn't happened and i sort of did i basically i didn't it didn't it seemed like it sort of seemed like uh like a classic bubble in this and obviously you know if you were to look at a chart of bitcoin going back to the early days you can't even see that bubble because it's such a tiny blip uh and you know who who knows where we're at now but at the time it seemed like okay

this is beanie babies or pogs or gold or whatever and people from time to time get this fascination with things but because there's no inherent reason that the value would be anchored other than the belief i essentially figured that for a while there'd be people into it and then the belief would mean that eventually it would have to disappear and you know i think we'd have to admit like it maybe one day could there's nothing guaranteeing that always will no um but i'm but you know over time i've come to be less skeptical of uh some of the argument or bitcoin itself in part because i've sort of reconstructed arguments that i've made in my head that are sort of different than the sort of arguments that i didn't find very compelling

Mm-hmm. And so how did you reformulate these arguments? Well, so for example, I started realizing that some of my more economics-minded arguments against Bitcoin, I started noticing holes in my own arguments that made me a little bit uncomfortable. So, for example, it's been noted that if Bitcoin is rising, and for most of Bitcoin's history it is rising apart from a few periods of crashing, that it is inherently deflationary. And so that encourages hoarding and that is in theory not very good for a currency. But then I realized that in my mind, the mistake that I was making was I was assuming that prices of goods would be sticky in Bitcoin. So in other words, you might sell a bicycle for $1,000 in $1,000 US dollars, and maybe back then you might have sold it for one Bitcoin.

But if Bitcoin jumps in value to $2,000, then you can easily change the price to half a Bitcoin. And so I started realizing that this idea that the currency inherently discouraged spending was not really accurate because it's just as easy to take down the notional Bitcoin price. So anyway, the point is, I just started realizing some of these assumptions that I had about Bitcoin, they weren't quite working out in my head. I didn't feel comfortable with them. And then I also had the thought that, so I started revisiting some of my basic assumptions. And then I started thinking about actual use cases. And one of the most obvious use cases to me was the idea of circumventing capital controls.

So you think about, say, someone in China and they want to get their money out of the country. There's limitations. we know there's various things that they can do currently. So for example, they could buy Rolex watches or something like that and then take them out of the country. They can take a trip to Macau and gamble and accumulate chips and then cash those chips in for US dollars outside the border. They can try to buy real estate in Australia or Vancouver or something.

And then you start to realize, OK, well, this solves this is another way of solving the problem. There actually is use here. And so someone might want to transfer several million dollars, dollars worth of money from inside China to outside China. And something like Bitcoin could just be a bridge for it. So maybe they're not interested in just holding Bitcoin per se, but for a temporary transaction, turn RMB into Bitcoin, send Bitcoin to someone outside of China, have that person sell Bitcoin for US dollars. It's actually a very elegant solution. So it was things like that that started making me uncomfortable

with my previous analysis. One thing about that example, and of course, I'm sure as you understand, people are always talking about the fees of Bitcoin. It's like, oh, it's expensive, it's slow, and that's true. but think about the fees of flying to Macau and then or and having to stay in a hotel room or think about the fees of you know slowly moving money out of the country and buying a piece of property in Australia so actually if you think of you know if you're going to buy a cup of coffee the fees are prohibitive but if you're actually going to use it in a way that sort of makes sense

for what the technology can do then uh the fees don't seem very high at all yeah it seemed negligible to a sense right exactly and that's uh i think probably the net and we talked on about narratives with nick carter on the last podcast and probably the narrative i believe most is that bitcoin will become a settlement layer at the end of the day for large large purchases or even transfers of wealth between banks in the future and stuff like that and then right i he uh nick had a really good post recently about the history i mean yeah exactly that's the various narratives and this sort of digital gold narrative that and this idea censorship resistance so the i and i find that very compelling gold of course has never at least in the modern era has never

been something that people really spend very much but that and it would be pretty cumbersome to spend gold. But that doesn't mean that it still obviously is value. A lot of people like to hold it. It theoretically protects you against some sort of hyperinflation scenario. And so even if it's not a good spending currency, it might still have value for me. And I think that's more or less the case with Bitcoin. Yeah. Do you see or do you would you prefer to hold Bitcoin or gold? well put you on the spot i don't really i think the main so i would say this here's the difference between bitcoin and gold i think i've thought about like this idea of safe haven assets and

what characterizes a safe haven and to really understand that i think you have to think about what is the tail risk that you're protecting against so gold i think is a theoretically theoretical protection against the collapse of fiat currency um farmland has similar properties but i think that that might be protection against some sort of societal destruction so maybe if you think there's going to be a war or something like that or you just want to get out to dodge, then you go to a working farm. So land has similar qualities, but it's a different risk than with gold. And I think with Bitcoin, the primary thing that you are, the tail risk that you are really protecting against is not hyperinflation per se, is not some sort of

period of violence, but really about some sort of constriction on your ability to transact. So that's the importance of the censorship resistance aspect of it that ultimately if you fear for whatever reason and people in different societies may have very much to fear and some people maybe like in the u.s probably don't have a lot to fear but different people fear that uh they may not be able to sell a good or uh they may whatever it is um some sort of you know being able to sell something is kind of like a form of expression at times then i think bitcoin is sort of a protection against that yeah a protection against something like to happen in india last year when they just say hey these these uh these denomination of notes just don't work anymore right exactly you

could just you could just have a situation where you're like you're not allowed to spend that and so if you want to protect against something like that in theory i think that is where uh Bitcoin comes in. But I do think this is really important. And again, it's why I never found the sort of recycled gold bug arguments, the anti-Fed arguments to be all that compelling when it came to Bitcoin, because I've never really bought the idea of, and we can get into it later, of currency collapse and hyperinflation outside of extreme cases. And so I'm still pretty skeptical about gold but i think from like uh but i think with a different set of risks and a different set of uh tail risks uh that a different type of safe haven asset might make sense yeah so what uh

what are you still skeptical about bitcoin like you're less skeptical what are you most skeptical about when it comes to the tech side again the scenarios in which it would become successful or or just maybe even like user adoption barrier to entry to like i think the user adoption thing is still really massive and i think so here's i kind of think there's two issues one is the the tools to get it and to store it are still completely i think unrealistic for most people the ease with which people can be hacked or stolen very serious problem i think there's all kinds of issues with that. And then I think that in general, there's a lot of companies that are sort of dipping their toe into the water in some way that might make it more user-friendly,

financial institutions. But what I think is that if it really ever takes off, that we would see a pretty big regulatory response and that most of the companies who are sort of engaged in transacting it or engaged in converting it to fiat for people could easily be shut down or just back off. And they say, we don't want to be involved in this. So if it were to really grow and if it were to become a major vehicle for censorship-free transactions, and there's no doubt that a big category of those would be black market transactions, the type the government doesn't want to see online drug dealing things like that bitcoin is clearly good for that i'm not going to say that it's not perfect it's not perfect you could trace it right you can trace

bitcoin particularly monero and zcash are probably more suitable for although there are um efforts to make bitcoin more uh fungible fungible yeah and that but it's not it's not a it's not a given yet sure like that no it's true yeah but if i think that you know if spending in this way were to flourish you could easily just say you know what you it's very easy for me to imagine banks saying or the government saying banks no you can't do business with uh bitcoin exchanges anymore is there a threshold at which like bitcoin's around like it's almost a decade old at this point like say this doesn't happen for like another five years is there a point where it's like hey how the hell did you let this happen for for 15 years i've wondered about that whether there could be a

day in which governments, because I think if you look at government, you know, I'm kind of like a blockchain skeptic, as I know a lot of like Bitcoin people are like, I'm pretty skeptical that like blockchain technology, excluding coins or whatever, is going to be a real important technology on its own for corporations or whatever. But you do have this attitude, I think, that among regulators and among who are kind of like, well, we don't want to stymie innovation and we're nervous about or nervous about this, but we don't want to shut it down, whatever. and part of that maybe think them thinking that this technology is going to be really important in some way and it seems totally plausible to me that maybe like five or ten years or two years or six months down the road people are going to be like uh this technology really does not contribute

much to the existing financial system as we know it and we just think it's dangerous that people can transact in a way that we can't easily track and banks don't do business with the exchanges and i that i don't think that would like kill bitcoin per se but it would be a serious blow i mean there's no question about that yeah and that's it's interesting i mean because as every day goes by that they don't do it again the lindy effect comes into play but then you also have this interesting game theory play as well where like the emerging markets at the bottom of the barrel like the venezuelans yeah boys the argentinas irans blah blah blah they literally have nothing to lose and if they were to sort of adopt this do you think like the u.s and the west would let

would let them like take over this technology and run it and that's that's like i don't know see i see i think it's most likely i think the opposite and we've kind of seen the opposite in which the more risk the more authoritarian the country the less open they are to the less encouraging they are of the people using it oh well recently maduro has been telling people to mine cryptocurrency has he he had i met with uh santiago siri last week it's argentinian but he's got uh his ear to the ground in venezuela and yeah apparently maduro gave a speech recently it was like our currency such shit like like he literally couldn't say anything worse was like mine crypto but with that being said he was telling them to mine petro which is their their right oh he was

telling them to mine petro but you can't you can't mine petro it's all right already so like he doesn't even know what he's saying but he's well that's right like he's but like we have seen i mean it really obviously bitcoin really took off in china for a while and they've really cracked down pretty hard well the new uh the new china fud is the etf uh approval fud right and so there's always something but the china sketch turned out to be real right i mean yeah in the end like all all those huge exchanges are like not really a thing anymore yeah there's much less mining in china yeah all the miners got got spooked uh moved outside the borders bitmain's actually buying a bunch of like land in texas right now so china had a real reason to be anti-bitcoin

because again capital controls is and then they like acted on it so if it got to the point where i think the u.s government started saying oh this is becoming a source of tax evasion this is becoming a meaningful um you know meaningful black market activity it's totally plausible to me that they're like you know banks just don't do it i guess this is my follow-up question do you agree with that mindset from like the government like do you think do you think bitcoin is a utility that should be a public utility do i agree with it that's a good question i guess what i would say is it doesn't really matter whether i agree with it or not what i think i just think this is how governments are not going to be particularly inclined yeah towards a meaningful amount of

economic activity that doesn't pass through official entities that i could send something to you or you could send something to me and there would just be no easy way to know about it or stop it and um so i don't know like i mean i'm i think governments are legitimate and i think laws are legitimate and i think taxes are legitimate um but ultimately i think a governments are probably to do what they'll do and b i don't think that they would they could ever really kill bitcoin but they could really crush the liquidity to a point where its utility is diminished or it takes a very long time to build that back up it is i mean you could imagine a world in which bitcoin transactions are all done like in a back alley paper wallets for they do open dice yeah yeah

right it's good and so that's why i don't think that like even you know it would kill bitcoin completely if that ever happened um but one would have to admit that that would crush a lot of the speculative money that's coming into bitcoin the people were just sort of oh put a thousand dollars in a coinbase account like it would it would sting yeah no it'd be terrible but like but like but on the other hand like i on the other hand there is this sort of obvious anarchist streak in bitcoin i mean that's a big part of the sort of ethos and so i almost think that from like the hardcore bitcoin perspective it would be almost disappointing if the government didn't fight because that would mean that there was what was the point of it that's that's exactly what i was

about to say like being a dgen bitcoin or like people are already mentally preparing for this yeah governments are coming like what are we going to do then and it's like that people are starting to talk now like we should stop fighting with shit coiners and all band together because we have to fight governments like in the next five to ten years right like to some extent if it doesn't threaten regulators then what have you really what is the point of it all exactly go big or go home yeah but the thing that's right like and i completely agree with you like this stuff this is coming mentally preparing for it but like i do think it's it's an inevitability in a sense like people have been predict like sovereign individuals like the biggest bitcoin

nerd book out there yeah written by uh reese davidson and lee's mogs right some it's like there's like that current politician in the uk reese mog it's like his dad or something yeah something like that and but they wrote it in 1997 literally word for word there will be a future in which there is a currency separate of governments and central banks that's secured by cryptography yeah peer-to-peer so and that's like sort of the uh crypto anarchist manifesto too is like this revolution started 40 years ago and cryptography became a thing it's like everything is going to eventually build and that's another big theme on this podcast is that we're born at an inflection point we literally just from a human species at a chemistry level don't know

how to react to the the pace of change that's happened in our lifetimes yeah i mean i yeah completely agree and i think that there's no separating the rise of bitcoin from just the political developments the changing culture in terms of how people think about each other and how people think about the relationships that we've seen from the rise of the internet and social media like it's all part of it yeah no it's crazy how bitcoin in particular the community in bitcoin like has shown the value of these internet relationships like i went to a steak dinner in dallas and met people i've been speaking to online for years yeah for the first time it was like we were brothers like we knew each other it was crazy it was like it was like the first time

i ever like brought my like nerd internet self like to meet space to meet these people it was just like internet is a weird thing the internet how it connects that is a safe thing to say that the internet is a weird thing um but yeah like let's piggyback on bitcoin in the space in general he's talking about like private blockchains at all but what do you think about like ethereum my ceos uh so i operate from the premise that um if i if you're going to do something for me so if you're going to give me a good if you're going to perform something on your computer for me some calculation if you're going to store data for me whatever it is and you want to get paid you want to get paid in money right like i know that seems really obvious but i actually

i think this is really important to operate from like a basic principle yes that anything now people do occasionally do things voluntarily but let's just talk about actual commerce you want to get paid in something of value right so there's all these like people talking about like is our cryptocurrency should they be stores of value mediums of exchange blah blah i hate the whole debate is kind of weird of course something has to be a store of value first someone has to want to like hold the thing and say this is worth holding right right like then you can like build on top of that or then say like okay but it's impossible to spend this but the first thing that has to happen is you have to think it's a thing so for example like going back to um uh circumventing

capital controls out of china which i think is sort of continues to be what i think is a classic potential use case maybe actual use case you couldn't do it with napkins in other words you couldn't say okay i'm going to convert these uh rmb into napkins and you're going to take these napkins to australia and then someone's going to give you a bunch of money for them right not unless they're a load of peyote or something right like you couldn't exactly but you could say but but why not i mean like why can't they're actually napkins are really good because no one would think to inspect um your bag for them they wouldn't set off any dogs if someone did open your bag and they saw a bunch of napkins they probably wouldn't care they might think you're weird but

they wouldn't care um they are fungible so like no one knows the history of it like napkins have a lot of characteristics of a good medium of exchange if you think about it right but they know but the but the whole edifice of that idea is obviously nonsense on stilts it collapses because no one thinks a suitcase full of napkins are valuable. No one thinks they're money, right? So if you jump ahead of the money question, then you've completely, you can't jump ahead of the money question. And all cryptocurrencies, all like,

so I think, so they're basically all about paying someone to do something. So you have Ethereum and then you have a bunch of Ethereum competitors, which are about paying a network of computers to run calculations for, say, some distributed application to run a database for your token, whatever it is. But in order to establish that those computers are getting something of value, you have to establish that it's money. That's the basic thing. And I don't know that any other currency besides Bitcoin has yet achieved that or is really on pace to achieve that. And I think to me, that's what I would want to see.

And you look at, that's still the hurdle that I don't think any other crypto has achieved. And I don't even know if Bitcoin has achieved it actually, but I think it's the closest. It's the closest. And I think, wow, you really, we're on the same wavelength here, Joe. I love that you just said that

because I completely agree. like people so my biggest knock on the space you obviously not obviously but you probably don't listen to this podcast so i talk about this a lot like people are so fucking impatient in this space like and they don't realize that for money to become money it takes time it's psychological yeah there's a whole it's really hard to create money exactly um this was uh and you mentioned the uh keynote that i gave at the uh can we talk about that yeah so i gave i mentioned the keynote that i gave at the uh coin center dinner and it was basically about like what is money and how does crypto fit into it and it's really hard to create the conditions for what when a new money

can exist but i but i do think that if you look at money um and there's we could debate what money is forever and never come at an answer but there is one characteristic that is pretty consistent and there does seem to be a sort of mythical mythological mystical spiritual element to most money and so even if you look at a dollar bill the dollar bill is supported by a lot of things uh the requirement to pay taxes in it the fact that whatever the gun the military but there's like all kinds of weird iconography on it they want like everyone they want you to think there's like something of value there that is like deep and profound and only bitcoin basically has the great origin story exactly and i think there's it's funny because bitcoiners are often accused

of like oh this is a religion and i kind of think it's like yeah definitely exactly because obviously then there's not only um the origin story there's the evangelic evangelism of people going out getting fights there's the diet of uh the carnivore yeah as you mentioned your steak dinner and like it makes total like it's weird and people are like oh uh crypto carnivory but you see it's like yeah religions have a diet it's proliferating too yeah i see more and more people i'm not a carnivore just so you guys know i'm an omnivore actually on a no carb no sugar diet right now liquid doesn't count a lot of drink alcohol but no it is crazy how it is somewhat religious like the genesis block uh the white paper i mean it's literally like i it's it's like

it's like the Gideon's Bible and people leave them places. People do. Yeah. The Queen Center just hands them out. Yeah. They literally look like little religious pamphlets that a crazy person on the street would give you. You know what? Maybe that's the next big push we should. This is a side note for Bitcoiners

listening right now. We should push to get the white paper, the Queen Center version of the white paper in every hotel room in America. I think one of the points that I made in the Queen Center dinner was the spiritual origins of gold which maybe people don't appreciate but the ancient greeks yeah we talked about this the first time we met yeah so the ancient greeks no notice that gold was the

only metal that never tarnished and so they thought that it had divine properties which is really interesting because you start to think gold i mean gold has a lot of uh good qualities to be a money but that is one that so they thought oh this must be the money of the gods because it's the only thing that is not human it doesn't die gold is gold forever so yeah and it's those properties yeah and that's again like the big theme like patience like this stuff is going to take time and that's where i've come to like i've been i haven't said this in a while but i found my bitcoins then like last year middle last year a couple years ago where it's just like it either happens or it doesn't uh i believe it will happen but there's going to be a bunch of

noise in between and it's literally just trying to stay true to your convictions and knowing exactly what you like that's what i think bitcoin maximalists have in our favor as well is that we've been very straightforward with our ideals and what we believe this will become for for years where everything else has more of a shifting narrative i think this also really speaks to the flaws with the sort of silicon valley vc sort of like crypto narrative because the the uh the framework that like silicon valley types have is like iterate iterate try new things break things whatever that doesn't work with money no like that it doesn't actually make any sense and in fact have you ever heard of a bank run like right and it right and in fact it's you almost it's more

impressive when so when something doesn't change i mean what's impressive about bitcoin is how little it's changed and so people look at it like oh well ethereum is smart contracts and uh this has this and you know everything is like bitcoin plus but when i from my perspective it's like actually the impressive thing is that there's been virtually no change to bitcoin since day one it kind of emerged as a complete project that's another thing so you think about like ethereum like it has all this promise right for smart contracts platform distributed apps whatever it can't really do any of them yet because it doesn't scale and they're still

working on that okay they might solve that maybe not like Bitcoin it's already a complete thing I mean like even if the lightning network were to never take off and so let's say even like micropayments you just couldn't do it it still does its job exactly it's in theory

in theory yeah it creates censorship resistant peer to peer it enables censorship resistant peer to peer transactions every roughly 10 minutes yeah that's all it needs to do that's what like blows my mind is that people don't realize that like that's it doesn't need to do like there may be more it can do and maybe there will be distributed apps one day it could it because the idea of like a distributed apps is not inherently um it's there are appealing aspects of it you don't need a

blockchain for a distributed app though like the silk road was a distributed app like right tour and right right there that's it right there it already exists um things that we we already have censored other forms of censorship mastodon the new twitter competitor which have you used that i have it's uh i've been dabbling in the last week in particular it's fun is anyone using it some people like hardcore bitcoiners are maybe i'll check it they're not happy with the uh the censorship bitcoin hackers.org is the mastodon instance for for bitcoiners um no but it's like these like it's like every so actually this is perfect that we're falling into this conversation now i brought up a tweet by a good friend armed out yeah the uh the best person

on twitter best person one of the easily yeah certainly the best person on crypto twitter the most signal to noise like the highest signal to noise ratio in the world i would argue um but he uh he likes to draw analogies to past bubbles and past manias specifically dot com and the railroad yeah uh mania the early uh 20th century uh and he brought up somebody like sun microsystems which is like a very legit company like the ceo scott mcnally like during like looking back in retrospect on the dot dot com days bubble days was like do you realize how ridiculous those basics assumptions are you don't need any transparency you don't need any footnotes right what were you thinking and he was talking about like his own company and like was valued

at something where their revenues the amount of people they had like understaffed like would never be able to catch up to that yeah yeah and probably took them a decade uh our doubt had another great tweet recently talk about what capitulation looks like because obviously with the recent crash people's like oh is this the bottom is this the bottom it's like the bottom is going to be like when someone uh on bloomberg tv is too embarrassed to go on a crypto podcast like i don't want to have anything to do with that well like that'll be the real bottom when everyone is just completely ashamed to be associated with anything like that so if you think like a 20 decline or an even 80 decline is like a bottom like that's not what the end of a

bubble looks like complete demoralization complete demoralization is like what i was never i never spoke at the coin center dinner no like what that must have been that must have been someone who looks like me uh that'll be me in like a year or whatever i'll just deny that that ever happened that wasn't me i actually had a stunt double stunt double there's someone else with my ab testing myself yeah exactly that's how you know that's how that's when the bottom will be raised not just this i mean yeah not that well so that's the other big debate that goes on with like bitcoiners like at least that i have conversations with is like how many more of these pump and dump cycles will we have especially with like the altcoin scene yeah so what we're seeing

i would argue what we're seeing the last 18 months with icos is a repetition of what we saw like pre-mined altcoins in 2013 just rebranded in a certain way right um but again the the education barrier and the lack of education globally with what the stuff is like obviously dumb money is a thing and people can spin up new narratives around different types of cryptocurrencies in the future and it's like what is i mean i don't know if you're gonna be able to answer this but i'm just speaking out loud like how many more of these cycles do we have before people are like all right this is it doesn't feel like they're gonna end like it feels like like i was just looking at the top coins from 2013 and most of them are like completely dead

But it doesn't seem like people will ever, we're a long way, like we'll ever stop trying to be the next Bitcoin. Or if every time there's going to be an upsurge, it'll be a new thing we're not thinking about right now. So most of those ones, I think in 2013, were essentially like Bitcoin clones, right? Yeah. And as you mentioned, like coins. Like coins, yeah. Feather coin and whatever. And then then there's like the things this time.

It's like these platforms, these smart contract platforms and ICOs. There's always going to be like something new because it's unavoidable. It's one of the there was a really interesting, really interesting paper came out a couple of years ago. I actually had one of the authors of it on my podcast about how to actually identify bubbles. because it's harder than it looks but one of the characteristics of bubbles is a proliferation of new securities that are essentially and that's really you know that there's there's a few things so one is obviously rapid price increase uh another one i think was like people quitting their jobs and going into that space so check that box and there's also like the proliferation

of uh exactly uh of new securities and just the replicate and it's really the supply that swamps I was thinking about this. Something I was thinking about the other day, you know, it's always a fool's errand to say, like, oh, what pricked the bubble? Like, what was it? Because in the end, like, it's a meaningless question because a million tiny things could prick a bubble. It's just about. But I was thinking a pretty significant development late 2017 that I think was the clear beginning of the end was Coinbase's putting Bitcoin Cash on their platform. Oh, my gosh.

and i think like right i think it was like two days before it was it was festivus i think they did it they did on festivus but it was but what i think you know like it was all going to crash anyway because everything was getting completely insane by december and then certainly january but i think that was actually really symbolic because it was a very clear signal that there is no shortage of crypto so like bitcoin there's only ever going to be 21 million but there's certainly no shortage of cryptocurrencies or coins in general in the abstract that someone could put money into. And eventually, this huge wall of money starts to run into a wall of supply. And so I always thought that that was a kind of signal that everyone knew all this money was

rushing into the space. It was like institutional money is coming in the ETF. But we also saw the supply increasing to match the demand and i think that was a sort of pivotal moment yeah that's actually it's like what do you have like you know we're litecoin cash whatever you just you just start to you just you just sort of the opportunities then become endless yeah you can like let's go full price winners wiener spin up shit coins whatever but i also think again this gets to the silicon valley sort of ethereum mindset which is that it's good for there to be a lot of coins because it's a race for who can build the best platform. And if you think about it like a startup,

if you think about it like a social network, then it's like, sure, it's like, okay, Snapchat adds stories, then Instagram adds stories, then this, it's like, oh, where is your story strategy? And if you think about it from like the startup lens, then of course that makes total sense to say like, yeah, let a million coins bloom and we'll see which one is the best.

But I don't really think that's a very useful frame for looking at currencies. no not at all because what these people don't realize is if and i'm not saying this out of fear of competition or anything but i'm saying this just out of psychology if any of these coins were to overtake bitcoin like what is to stop anything from overtaking them in the future and you have like a never-ending there's always gonna be something shinier yeah and i think this was i remember when uh you know the sort of early this early 2018 maybe or maybe no i think it was late 2017 and people were really wondering whether like bitcoin cash would overtake bitcoin and also

you know there was that fear that if enough hash power went over to bitcoin cash that bitcoin would be vulnerable to a an attack um that bitcoin would be vulnerable to some kind of attack um which is you know maybe true maybe one day that'll happen but if that were to happen then you would have to wonder about like the entire edifice of anything because if And if Bitcoin were to go down, and again, it might, then how could anyone ever again say, well, this is secure and censorship resistant? Exactly. And so there is this irony that if they're all in competition and Bitcoin can lose, then you can never then again say about any currency, this will be the new enduring store of value. Exactly.

So I think your point is spot on. and it's a lot of people don't realize that and then so then but then the people that do realize that start to say like oh bitcoin and ethereum aren't in competition but i would argue they are because with the way blockchains work at uh like under the hood level like the only application they're good for is money i would argue my theory and i know we're recording this in williamsburg brooklyn but my theory is that like bitcoin is for meat eaters and ethereum is for people who live in the iceberg. And it's basically like...

It's true. Like Ethereum is basically the Bitcoin of Brooklyn. We're in the same building as coinfund.io. And so basically it's... And this actually gets back to like the sort of... I mean, it is... I am really interested in the sort of... What's the word?

Anthropology of the different coin people. But I do find it interesting that like the Bitcoin people are like all eat steak and Vitalik eats like avocados and fish and stuff like that which is fine but it is interesting it's it doesn't seem like an accident that he is exactly and he's tweeted about that and about like what he prefers to eat and it's like it's a different thing it's like uh it's a different scene no but it is crazy how these types trend towards each other but there are there are outliers we got we got uh sorry there's background noise freaks there's somebody cleaning

a cleaning something in this office or somewhere i don't know where hopefully it's done soon but uh it is interesting seeing people like trend towards like the different coin factions trend towards certain lifestyles but i will say there are outliers it might be uh it might be a little um confirmation bias like matt corallo who is i'm pretty sure he's like number three and ever commits to the bitcoin oh yeah core repository is a vegan and yeah and elizabeth stark of lightning who's one of the coolest people in all of bitcoin and i'm trying to get her on here oh really she's so busy she's so she's so busy she's so cool um but i think she's also a vegan so yeah you had a great interview with her yeah that was uh she came on my show on tv and that was like one of our most

watched clips was it yeah yeah i think people like you know i think so much and of especially last year so much of like bitcoin crypto coverage has just been about like price and it's like is the price gonna go up you know whatever and we just had a conversation like talking about the lightning network and the inherent challenges of scaling any uh blockchain and the idea and so i think people appreciated like a more technical conversation yeah and that's a shameless plug for marty's ben here we'll never talk about price we just talk about ideas that's a good that's a good commitment i i mean there will be one-off instances like during the boat like crazy run of last year's like holy shit like i can't believe it's at ten thousand dollars but try to focus on

ideas like price people get distracted by price but i think bitcoin success depends on people actually thinking about how to scale it and thinking about the technical aspect of it um this has been a great conversation so far how fun yeah having a blast 45 minutes in you sure you don't want any whiskey i'm good i'm good joe joe is uh withheld the whiskey i'm drinking alone like a degenerate right now um i need to i don't you know i need to sound coherent so let's jump into economics so yeah curious just don't know yeah were you a journalism major or a economics major finance neither um philosophy i was in political science i used to be really interested in politics i was a political science major actually at the university of texas at

austin where i went they called it government but you went to ut yeah oh yeah and um but i knew i didn't really know what i wanted to do i was always interested in markets um i think because i was in high school and i started becoming aware of them during the dot-com bubble and so it just became a fascination and i traded stocks uh in college a little bit and made and lost a lot of money um so it was always just an interest of mine but i never knew like that i wanted to like do anything with it and again you know economics and markets had always sort of been interested in the economy and economic theory and stuff like that um but i sort of stumbled into covering it it wasn't um in 2004 i moved to new york and i worked for a small portfolio management company doing research

that job ended because the company moved out and i didn't have a job or anything and i was like well um in the meantime while i look for a job i'll start a blog covering markets because it'll at least keep me fresh and keep me allow me to write and force me to keep paying attention and i didn't really think that would turn into anything but then that became professional writing jobs and stuff like that so that's kind of how i got into this that's uh very inspiring for me yeah exactly i mean i wouldn't i was unemployed when i started marty's bent it was like i need to stay on top it's exactly what it's just a good disciplined a good way to like force yourself whether it's blogging or having a newsletter or a podcast just a good way to like keep yourself

like a disciplining mechanism it has been the newsletter in particular has been one of the best it's great it's one of you know like i subscribe to a bunch of newsletters and most of them i don't open but i always open yours i'm not just saying that i really do oh thank you when you first shouted me out it was like oh my god no i'm a big fan i'm a big fan thank you i appreciate it um try to bring a vulgar voice to the space the barstool voice which is actually interesting so barstool i try to bring a barstool voice this space to make it more approachable for people yeah and what's funny though the barstool story i found this out when i worked at barstool earlier this year the person who built barstools first uh cms like prez dave

was literally not going to create a blog uh he was handing out papers at uh a boston uh train station at union station wherever it is in boston like outside every day it was literally a physical paper and one person that would pick it up every day moved to new york city and missed it so much and emailed dave was like i miss your paper so much that i'm gonna make you a website will you please post it here it's a great story i had no idea that person happened to be the first cto of business insider oh really yes oh that's pretty wild yeah yeah i think that's pretty cool i didn't realize that yeah so um it's funny actually i love that idea of distributing physical paper i kind of want to do that again because i remember when i first started my blog

uh it was called the stalwart.com i co-wrote it with a friend that's how i have my twitter name the stalwart um i had this idea of like every day i should just hire someone to print up like 500 copies of the day's previous post and like leave them around the financial district somewhere and by the bank i never did it but i wish i had it's good viral marketing yeah that's what i thought but i should have done it i still kind of like that idea and uh but again barcelona you should do that with your newsletter just leave it around you know what someone sparked an intern to like go to kinkos every day and print out 500 and just leave them around but um i think it's a testament like this showing up every day like what you did with the blog what dave did with barstool

uh you started your blog what over a decade ago or yeah a long time ago i started it in uh i think 2005 yeah and i and it's but like you are extremely successful now dave is extremely successful now i am not on that level by any means but i do see the value in showing up every day and challenging yourself and it's just it keeps you fresh and it gets your name out there and to some extent and that to me it was when i first got into it hey there were two things i just thought blogs were cool and they were but i thought like oh this is a cool new thing that everyone's doing so i want to be part of that kind of like podcasting now or newsletters podcasting's hot right now yeah and then the other thing is i just thought like if i don't do something i'm going to

stop paying attention to markets because i will have no real reason to i wasn't working in finance or anything like that after I, uh, that job ended and I wanted to stay fresh and I wanted to keep being interested. And I was like, so this is a way to do it. No, it's, um, now you're an inspiration. Thank you for spreading the good word of the bank. Thank you. It's, uh, everyone should subscribe to it.

Thank you. Thank you. It's a, it's a very humble, humble rag. Um, but let's shift, uh, let's shift to economics. Yeah. Cause, uh, very interested to talk about this topic with you. Cause I really, again, FinTwit fan. Thanks.

I love your views on economics in particular, particularly because I think you do a very good job of seeing all sides or seeing out arguments and basically being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. Thanks. I mean, you know, going back to what I was saying about Bitcoin and sort of evolving my view on that a little bit over time, I try to always stress test my ideas and more importantly, not get too attached to what I believe right now or think that like what I believe right now is necessarily going to believe. I mean, everyone, you probably have gone through this where you like had some worldview at some point in your life and then you look back. I was a total lib in college. Right. And then you look back and you're like, oh, I don't really believe that anymore or I don't find it compelling. And then you're like, well, OK, so if in two years you can change your views this much, then how confident can I be that in two years I won't change my views again? Like, do I really think that at any moment, oh, I've settled on the right answer?

It just seems totally implausible to me. So that's not to say, like, I don't have any core beliefs or anything. it's more that i don't pretend to think that like i've ever like arrived at some answer and i think so when it comes to economics it's kind of obvious to me that nobody really knows what they're talking about too much and that i would argue economics is you're talking to somebody who studied economic like that was my major in college i think it's a pseudoscience like i would say you know it's funny i i at first i was gonna say i chafe at that word pseudoscience but i actually think it's probably a good word for economics because it is not a science and yet

people treat it as such or the people the real adherence think uh to sort of mainstream economics think that lots of things can be boiled down into equations and uh sort of predictable relationships between inputs and outputs and equilibriums and stuff like that and it doesn't really seem like the world behaves that way so maybe pseudoscience is i i kind of think of it as a pejorative but maybe it's just a very fair um a very fair characterization of much economics so yeah and i mean that's sort of what disenchanted me again we were talking about this before we started recording but that's what disenchanted me from finance and then central banking in particular because i was working at this fund yeah so i it was 2011 to 2014 so that's three years so it was

yeah right in the middle of like the post-crisis and i was tasked i was writing our commentaries and yeah and running our quarterly calls with our clients and then we were a fund of funds so we indexed ctas and i had to talk with each cta cio and i had to ask some questions about what's going on in the world geopolitics and then central bank policy and like so i was a hawk on central bank policy for like three years and yeah it literally got to a point where i was like you don't know what you're doing like i came out of college fresh unemployment is at four percent and we haven't had much inflation and the stock market is at record highs and household debt is see this are you being facetious are you no are you being dead serious yeah being dead serious what about

participation let's talk participation right no there's okay like don't get me wrong like this is my problem with the sort of anti i'm anti i'm kind of i'm i'm anti-fed kind of but in a different way than you are okay but we hit the economy like still is like real like frailties and problems but so many of the predictions that these sort of like hawkish monetary types have made they just haven't been borne out at all i mean the only yeah another like that's kind of a problem don't you think well we lean on we lean on our arch nemesis uh john maynard canes and use his quote markets can remain illogical far longer than you can remain solvent okay this is great i was just reading him on the subway i was reading uh canes on uh the marginal propensity to consume

why people consume and it's interesting stuff but canes is great you should uh reread it don't tell that to say for data most i know but this is like i mean this is my only problem with like i studied economic i've read canes i've read my canes all right but this is the main problem with i have with like this sort of like gold bug hawkish inflation austria type is like it's great in theory it's just completely wrong in terms of anything that happened and here's the thing and i said that like i i to your point about economics being a pseudoscience i don't totally disagree with that i kind of upon thinking about it there's some validity but like we don't live like we live in like the wealthiest uh society the u.s right now that has ever existed in history i would argue

that's in spite of the policy i mean it's okay but then it's really hard to imagine like what is this counterfactual that's so much you know there's been so many different experiments there was the gold standard for a long time other for most of human history yeah and then we abandoned Most Americans live a lifestyle that people around the world or in a different era couldn't even conceive of. And if you look at country in sort of recent examples where countries try to tie their hands when it comes to monetary policy or fiscal policy, you see a lot of economic basket cases. That's true. But I would argue that success is confirmation. I get what you're saying.

Basing the success off the policy is confirmation bias. And there is, beginning in the 20th century, the combustible engine and cars and then eventually telecoms. I agree with that. There's a lot that goes into success. Yes. And economic success strikes me as something that is really hard to replicate. it's kind of like bitcoin itself in the sense that you just need the right the right conditions the right opportunities it's really hard to just sort of say these are the uh tools to get success

and replicate them but you know if you look around the world like there's certain aspects of governance property rights like basic sort of systems that tend to be work better than other places so you know there are countries that have gotten a lot wealthier through a our mix of a of a sort of market economy with significant role for government in setting rules in just in welfare in uh counter-cyclical policy measures whether it's fiscal policy or monetary policy like the countries that have like generally done that stuff well like strike me as having gotten wealthier i would agree and i mean like you have to admit like which is nothing but like could do like okay it's going back to like

the idea that the fed should have been more hawkish or whatever i agree like there will We'll never be able to have another Volcker again. Would you agree with that? No, I don't. We will never be able to have another Volcker who comes in and raises rates to like 8% to 10% and just says, hey, this is where it's at. That'll never happen again.

Why? I mean, if we had inflation out of control. It would destroy our ability to pay back that debt. Well, I don't really believe that that's a problem either. You are a believer in being able to roll whatever rolled over forever the government makes its own money that's just a fact i know no it's like i i know this sounds very simple but you know that like the government pays back debt in money that it creates right like that's not controversial but again it goes back to the psychology like

again and i would argue that not again i'm sorry like say yeah but i would argue yes it has worked up to this point but like any black swan event only works until it doesn't so this gets but this gets to my view about where i see the austrians being wrong and to some extent where i see the non-austrian mainstream being wrong all right let's back up here to preface this because i this is on like things to talk about this is gonna really offend 99 of the listeners but i can if you're if you're not offended you're not living i can handle it even though i don't think austrian economics is a useful lens for seeing the world economy and i'm not inclined to doomsday scenarios I appreciate that Michael B.D. opens this column by admitting that his assessments are mostly a function of his own gloomy personality.

Yeah. I like that. So, okay, so there's a lot here. But I'll start by saying one thing is that, okay, this is that a lot of like Austrians and gold types and Bitcoin types are, and I don't, they're not, typically they're not interested in being real nice or friendly. And I actually don't mind that per se. So I like, but they're usually people who, for whatever reason, chafe at the mainstream, right? Yes. And it's not wrong or inherently bad to not want to be part of the mainstream or not want to get along with people.

But a lot of people's worldviews when it comes to economics, I think, starts at personality. And so the personality comes first. And then from that comes some set of beliefs. And in many cases, being into gold or whatever is a function of that. This is getting back to our argument that economics is a pseudoscience. It's very economics and psychology. There's some. And I also would say that the sort of like current popular mainstream economics that's sort of promoted by people who work in D.C.

is also probably springs forth from a personality that's like very inclined towards conformism. Teachers pets. In many cases, I think that is a fair characterization. So that so I do. But I do think that like often the central banks are going to inflate the currency and we're going to be Venezuela or Weimar and blah, blah, blah. Most of the time that is not born, I think, from a very rational look at what's actually going on in the economy and largely born from people who are by their nature pessimistic or fear of doom. Now, I do think that, and this, to sort of broaden it a little bit, is that if you look at, so we're talking about money, the government, well, I'm not worried about the government paying its debts. And I said, oh, the government creates its own money, to which you might say, well, that's just printing money. Look what happens in Venezuela or Zimbabwe or whatever when the government just tries to print money.

Why is turkeys, are turkeys not, are they printing, were they printing money? No, which is no which is a good reason to like he's skeptical that there's some connection between quote money printing and inflation I don't think they're pretty good. They're not so that shouldn't it right there like make but anyway No, they're not and they have pretty low government debt as well. Um, but What I think it's actually the other way around and so it's not that governments get in trouble by Printing their money or expanding the currency. It's that really dysfunctional governments see cause people to abandon a currency and then the currency collapses and it loses its value so it's not the spending or the monetary policy or anything like that a really great example is

switzerland which has historically won the one of the strongest currencies in the world this was the longest period of time yeah and they their central bank does things that would horrify like austrians and uh hard hard money types like there's central bank literally printed up money and bought shares of apple with it they instituted a floor for the euro against the frank by which and that we had to stop trading the frank when i was yeah and so that means they just bought euros so like they're doing policies that many sort of hard money types would be aghast at and would make them their face run pale and the fact that the swiss franc through it all has been this incredible store of value very durable i just think should really make people rethink some of their assumptions

about the connection between currency strength store of value and monetary policy because there are so many examples of countries doing things that should horrify people and it doesn't matter and i think that these examples should be taken more seriously yes that's my point no and i you're making me think now joe i like this i'm happy i brought you on that's all i want to do i just want to make you think just want to make you know but and i would agree actually i would like i've never been able to articulate it that way but i would agree wholeheartedly like it's all psychology at the end of the day it's like again it's confident it's like if a country like runs itself into the ground by say being incredible having a incredibly corrupt administration

sort of destroying any sort of market functioning then you're going to get currency collapse in hyperinflation but it's not the traditional mechanism of expanding or decreasing the money supply and in fact if you look at countries that do that and sort of like within a prescribed manner you don't really see those hyperinflations that people are already worried about and look how much did the fed buy up of government bonds and mortgages several trillions and the cost of a loaf of bread is basically the same as 10 years ago so that should tell you something well that's another thing the cpi yes the the cost of a loaf of bread is the same as 10 years ago college tuition health care housing are not yeah and they are the most integral parts of our society right

And these are some of the most messed up markets that have nothing to do with monetary policy. They have to do with government. Well, yes. Government should not be subsidizing tuitions. It should not be subsidizing health care, I would argue. I think the health care system is too far gone when you implode it and start new. And this is coming from somebody who, when I was unemployed, I wanted health insurance. I wasn't married to my wife yet, so I couldn't hop on hers.

but i literally was unemployed living paycheck to paycheck trying not to spend any bitcoin and got fined by the government because i didn't have health insurance it was just like what the fuck kick me while i'm down like that and i'm opening up about my personal life here i know because trump removed the fine right i don't know there's no i stopped paying attention joe i stopped paying attention to politics see and i think there's more people becoming apathetic like me that's probably true which um i disagree on uh to some extent on all of those things everything you just said all right but if you look but i mean there's no question like look at like the inability and there's a lot of liberals and people on the left too who talk about um the inability of developers

to build new homes in a city and or to build because of zoning regulations things like that Yeah, Fran, get it together. You could be the next Tokyo. Right. So when you sort of like create these constraints in a market. Yeah, these externalities. There's all kinds of messed up things, I think, with colleges. And I don't know what the best model is for health care.

But the point that I would say is that none of these things are actually really monetary policy stories. No, no. So, again, it's about that link between, you know, you could say, okay, it's the fact that the, you know, government subsidizes although in other countries they also have huge roles for the government and health care costs a lot less in other countries so yeah like i don't know why is that like how could we not is it the single payer thing like what is it like i i you know like i don't know like if we could i'm not a health care policy expert but i do think that we probably have to some extent in our country a culture of corruption in healthcare and that there are so

many points on the you know whether it's pharmacy benefits managers so many different people who have figured out how to extract rents from the current system and well so this goes in again like bitcoinization might happen because people lose faith in the government like things like this are like small things that bubble up healthcare in particular like right now we got opioid epidemic in this country and again that's enabled by the healthcare industry in particular like the people that are supposed to be healing us are driving opioid addiction whether this actually whether you know whether you can draw a line i'll say this whether you can draw a line between all this in the future of bitcoin i have no idea but i will say that there is a lot of

stuff that's happened in the last 10 to 20 years that I think has caused a pretty serious crisis of faith in both government and large corporations. And so I think there's a really, one of my favorite books, there's this book Chain of Title by this guy, David Dine, who wrote about, it was It's just about the mortgage crisis. And it was about people who tried to deal with banks to get some sort of adjustment on their mortgage during the downturn. And this is the type of thing that banks want to do, because they don't want people to just default and walk away on their mortgage.

So if they can do a workout, and they're like, oh, we'll reduce your monthly payment and extend the length of the loan, they're inclined to do that. But the banks and the chain of title, which is where the book came from, like the title came from, the book, was so messed up and so disorganized in terms of like, who owns this document? Who services the loan? Who collects the money? It was essentially impossible for the average person in many cases to deal with that gigantic

corporate bureaucracy. You would call up your bank and they're like, oh, we don't own your mortgage anymore. Then you call up this. And they're like, yeah, we own your mortgage, but we outsource the collection of this company. And then you call up that company, and they didn't answer the phone. And so there's all kinds of things, whether it's the financial collapse, whether it's dealing with your health care company, which drives people completely insane even when you have good insurance, whether it's dealing with the banks during a time of financial stress, even trying to come to some mutual thing. And modern life is filled with sort of experiencing sort of, I think, one sort of large bureaucracy after another that I do think it has contributed to a disintegration of just sort of general trust and probably increase in alienation. And it is within that environment that I do think something like cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin specifically finds a welcoming home.

I couldn't have said it better. And it just makes sense. And again, this all ties together again with being born in that inflection point. People are just very confused right now. Like what is up? What is down? Especially there was a tweet. I think it was that Ed Latimore guy.

Do you follow him on Twitter? I don't know. I mean, I've definitely seen those tweets. I think he's like an ex-Navy SEAL or something like that, like sending inspirational tweets. But the tweet in particular is like, if you were born between the years of 1983 and 1993, like that 10-year period,

like you were literally the bridge between the industrial age and the information age. Like I remember caller ID becoming a thing and being like, oh, my God, I can see that Aunt Lisa's calling me right now. Like this is crazy. It's like, what? and now we have like smartphones like you can i can i could hop into a virtual reality and talk to you we could be we could be thousands of miles away having this conversation looking like it's

face to face like we have seen i don't know exactly how old you are but i would argue that you are in the same bridge yeah i'm uh i'm just pre-millennial by like one year oh yeah yeah lucky you yeah i miss being you don't get trashed and every other i didn't kill i didn't kill mayonnaise what was the last thing the millennials killed or something no it's mayonnaise that was the thing that was everyone was talking about this week was it millennials killed mayonnaise apparently i don't eat mayo anymore i love mayonnaise i i i love mayo too yeah it's all right i haven't had in a while i haven't had a sandwich y'all i'm on that no carb no sugar yeah i know so you don't have anything to spread i don't need carbs either i try not to look and

spell look and spell right now you got it for the tv yeah is it true what they say does the camera at 10 pounds so it's funny because early on when we um after the show launched and we would do you know periodic uh show reviews where we would watch an episode and uh you know sort of critique it and see how it went and all i could think about is like oh my god that double chin i can't believe i look like that i look like i'm bursting out of my suit so it's like i can't i can't even i can't even hear anything that anyone is saying in the show review because i'm just so focused on how i don't like the way i look i'm the same way i had i got a new york id to get a new um get a new passport um very particular story got a new york id but i needed to renew my license

which is a pennsylvania where i'm from um i was going to be okay with losing my license i don't need to drive but uh the new york idea was so ugly i had like a double chin looks so bad and i was like i'm going to pa i'm getting a new license and it was bad and luckily i got i've got a body type for podcasting so this is perfect that that we're behind the mics i do too but i never expected to be uh on air so i also have a face and a body type for podcasting but they stuck a camera in front of me so i have to at least put in the effort well uh yeah let's jump what like what was that like like becoming a tv like media host like it was it's really fun it's the best um i is not something i ever like aspired to do when i was sort of blogging and then writing

more professionally i've been business insider um i never thought oh i want to one day be on tv um i had gone on tv as a guest a few times from here and there i didn't love it i felt like it was short conversations that weren't in nice and in-depth like this conversation um but then uh so Bloomberg came to me with the opportunity to co-host a show there and I was and also do some editing and writing and I said to myself like well even though I've never really aspired to do TV how many people ever get a chance to say like I co-hosted a TV show so even if it totally flames out and I'm terrible at it I'll always be able to say like oh I hosted a show on cable for a little while and when I thought about it that like that I was like okay I can't like say no to this

opportunity but I honestly I love it and I like it way more than I expected I really like the co-hosts that I've had my colleague my colleague Scarlett she is like the most the coolest most professional person that I've ever worked with makes me feel incredibly comfortable and then I'm on TV for an hour and a half each day and every day I get to talk to smart people on camera about stuff that i like so every day i talk to people about economics and markets and politics and that's pretty great and if you just think about it like that like having a conversation with someone you respect about something you're interested in and then there happens to be a camera there it's pretty cool job is it and i really i genuinely enjoy it was there like an

adjustment to the camera or anything like absolutely so i was never really nervous but either it's one um it's one of those things where there are certain technical aspects to it that you just have to become comfortable with knowing what camera is on or the ability to talk it took it was really hard for me in the beginning to talk to someone i have an earpiece in my ear and someone says okay just 30 seconds or don't forget to ask about this and that would really jar me on air i'm like what uh but you just get better at it it's just like anything else nobody is except the truly gifted are really going to be that good at it the first handful of times but that was also another aspect of it that appealed to me which was just it'll be fun to

be bad at something and to try to get good at it and so it's been that's also been a fun aspect of it that's uh something that my mother taught me is baptism by fire is the best yeah it's great and it's in you do a great job like thanks i was actually that i would actually i appreciate you're saying that i don't know that i would actually say that i'm good at tv i'm definitely better than i used to be but i like the process of learning something new i think you're i think you're very good that's what i was actually nervous like prepping for this interview and having you like interviewing an interviewer is something very uh daunting for for a lowly podcast like tells from the crypt thank you um so i appreciate you coming in but this is a good

segue to the next topic we want to talk about which is like mainstream media coverage of bitcoin yeah cryptocurrency yeah in particular i will say this hands down again i'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass but you are the best journalist in the mainstream that's covering the sector i appreciate that yes um you know obviously i have a few thoughts so obviously mainstream media has come under like tons of criticism literally anytime you say anything about bitcoin or cryptocurrencies you're just going to be in for like tons of abuse but you know hopefully most journalists are used to getting abused uh so you sort of comes with the territory but there is a lot and people like you don't get this you don't get that whatever i think there's a few things i

mean it's still really new um so it's new things are hard to wrap your head around i still have a hard time wrapping my head around it um there's a natural inclination to try to fit it into particularly from a market standpoint uh fit it into an existing asset class bucket and i don't think it oh maybe a another episode one day you know it's a whole separate discussion like what is bitcoin from a financial perspective like what kind of asset class it is i can make this two episodes if you want to yeah it could be a whole other episode i have thoughts but that's for another time but it doesn't fit neatly into anything it's kind of like a currency but currencies typically don't go up like 10 000 in a year it's kind of like a commodity with the mining

process and but it's obviously but it's not really used for anything so it's before you go any further would you see this as a use case so we're talking about china and bitcoin in particular at one point somebody embedded information about the tiananmen square massacre into a bitcoin block so anybody in and china could access that where it's completely blacklisted is that a use case i think it could be the idea of the bitcoin blockchain as a repository of information strikes me is a plausible thing at some point in the future yeah so yes and that's i i haven't explored that that much but that does seem plausible ish the other idea that non-monetary information and that the network secures that strikes me as interesting yes yes interesting and it's and it's

it's a very very narrow niche use case which is like information in a block and you can only fit so much information where it's it's interesting yeah um but you know it's not really doesn't really behave like a commodity i also think um you know there's uh it has some equity like characteristic anyway people think you know we have these uh asset classes that have existed forever stocks bonds currencies commodities and it's really hard to wrap your head around something totally new and there's no real uh we're used to quoting experts in this field but there's a lot of people who are expert ish but turn out to be charlatans or uh just have something to sell you or whatever it is so there's no like real experts because ever let's be honest even the

experts are trying to figure it out themselves yeah the experts i speak to the developers matt karelog is it like a five percent chance of success right that's like an expert for you right right and then i think obviously the media likes things that are going up and down a lot in price and that's very exciting and so whether it's altcoins or ethereum whatever it's just like a compelling story but i also get why that drives people crazy but on the other hand like there's real money especially uh in this space even outside of bitcoin so like you have to like talk about that stuff so i get why people are frustrated in many cases but i think the media has got it continues to get a lot better by and large and that there's a lot of good at a lot of

different places i'm proud of our coverage of bloomberg uh but in a lot of places i think there's the quality of coverage has gotten better and better and it just keep getting better but i understand like you know of course it was pretty bad in the beginning because who knew what it was exactly i'm going to give a little flack to the at crypto uh account right now they made a vast mistake with the coinbase data earlier today with the 50 000 signups a day or whatever no comment but uh you know no that's the other errors happen now and speaking as somebody i always hate to consider myself media but obviously i'm media i'm speaking via audio and written media every day um but it like i i did it took me four years to build up the courage to even

talk tweet about this right let alone like write long form about it i can't imagine like the daunting task of being in a newsroom and like hey bitcoin's your your new uh your new um what's the word i'm looking for beat beat yeah it's really hard and there's a really steep learning curve and i think that uh you know the good coverage at various outlets has really been about like well last year and still is just a golden age for scams yes and there's so many people in crypto who just trying to rip people off and sell magic beans uh or whatever and i think uh we've done a lot of good coverage as of others of just like all the bad stuff out there yeah and again i want to repeat that i think you in particular as a journalist are doing the best job out there and

from and i hate to like i hate to agree like i always say like don't ever like label me or anything but bloomberg is a mainstream media company obviously um and it's interesting like being i don't know like in my indie indie whatever you might call yeah independent media and having like i obviously i have strong views but sometimes i see people writing like they have these platforms like oh my god like let me like reach out to you and like like help you out here but it's like well you should do that it's like yeah i'm shy i'm shy believe it or not i'm shy i'm very uh i'm selectively introverted and i don't i never want to impose my views on other people which i'm doing every day actually but well i'll say this you know bitcoin or crypto aside um people

they you know journalists are just normal people who want to learn more about are they yeah what I thought they were aliens. No, it's like people, I mean, it's gotten really crazy with politics. Exactly. So let's drop into this. Like, it's crazy environment right now. But the, I, people have imaginations of like what they think are like, oh, journalists have an agenda. Or like, if I say something negative about Bitcoin or something like that, like, oh, Bloomberg is in the pocket of the big banks.

And of course, it's like, you have no idea how it works. It's not how it works. No one has ever come to me and said, like, oh, you know, we have a lot of clients who are big banks, so you have to write about this. Like, it's just that fantasy that people have that there's, like, some agenda or some advertiser agenda and that everyone has these, like, marching orders. It just could not be more wrong. Well, and I completely agree because that's applied to, like, every industry. Every industry. Like, when I worked at a hedge fund, people were like, yeah, you're a scumbag.

But, like, I was like, no, number one, I'm not. like this doesn't matter whether it's not me it's not me like i'm not the one collecting money but like the ceo of the firm i work for dave cavanaugh shout out dave cavanaugh in chicago was the nicest most wholesome person i've ever met in my life and he would never try to like rip anybody off for a dime and yeah i do think people just have this idea that like or even bitcoin aside like the federal reserve like people just have this imagination that like journalists have these like ideological marching orders and that all stories have to back them up and most journalists are like pretty open-minded and want to learn about stuff and no one is like telling them to

advance some agenda so yeah it's it's not nearly as exciting as this is a conspiracy theorist make it exactly uh what a world we live in are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future that's a good question it's funny like i'm like a uh i'm a intellectual like optimist and like but i also have like this like pessimism in my gut and i've always had this my whole life like i was worried about like y2k but then i but i think like i really was i was like i i honestly i remember 1999 being actually anxious like is the whole like electronic system gonna go down of course it didn't but i can use that example because that sounds funny now like i was nervous about y2k and that turned out to be a complete nothing but i was probably more nervous than most people

but then i can go back and say okay well like this is just my this is my personality like i get nervous about stuff i got anxious um so i like sort of like temper that intellectually with like a knowledge that i sort of like am tilt towards anxiousness so i try to keep it in balance But it's, you know, it's, I wouldn't say it's like pessimism, but going back to what we were talking about earlier with the internet, like we do live in weird times and it would be kind of weird if in say 10 or 20 years, society looked anything like it did 10 or 20 years earlier or politics, just because we were going through such intense change. so much of it driven by i think communication and new media that there's i don't know whether it's pessimism but i guess i'd be pessimistic that things will be particularly stable yes which maybe could be good i mean it could be like a instability that leads to something great i don't know but well that's so that's what i wrote about yesterday in the newsletter tour de meester shout

out tour probably one of the most level-headed analysts in the space adamant research but he reposted a letter he shared with his investors three years ago um talking about building stuff in these types of uh societal changes so the last one was the industrial revolution with the combustible engine with cars yeah you got companies like ford porsche uh volkswagen being built at the depths of the depression like the worst parts of the depression and he thinks something similar is going to happen uh around this juncture of history is where potentially i mean we're seeing it happen like where you have sovereign debt crises and stuff like that and well potential to go into a global recession you will see

things emerge from from this desperate state i mean there's no question like if you look at a lot of what was built especially in tech like was is very different today than it was pre-crisis pre-financial crisis and i i just think that um the sort of anti-hierarchical nature of a lot of modern communication technology is just a big deal and that to some extent um societies and countries are defined by the media and we don't even really know like what a society that's sort of built on social media looks like because everything prior to it was like structurally similar to the state in other words you hit it's very top down you get your orders you get your news top down and then it's sort of like the structure of media kind of resembled the structure

of politics and now we have a situation in which the structure of politics is very different from the structure of media that's why trump won i would argue i i think the change of media is a big aspect of it and this is going to create just more and more tensions i think and it's it's fascinating man it really is like and that's like the only thing i say it's like fascinating to be alive during this time and and watch it happen is yeah who like who has control anymore and that's like what i worry about like i would argue that i'm an optimist but i worry about like like true anarchism like what bitcoin sign guy came on the guy that handled held up the buy bitcoin sign behind jenny ellen he de-alienated between an anarchist and an anarch which is

which is very very was a very new thought for me where like an anarch so an anarch is so an anarchist is somebody who's somewhat nihilistic in their views oh i see they just want anarchy for anarchy for like they don't want any structure at all but an anarch is somebody who wants anarchy for and i could be butchering this i'm not i have to go back and re-listen but like an anarchist somebody who wants anarchy for ideological reasons like this is actually a better way of with the technology that we've been giving of organizing our society and they proactively like the sovereign individual would be a book written by a couple of anarchs who are like hey the world is trending towards this direction and if we are going to go into anarchy we should be

true anarchs where we try to help everybody out by giving them access to this information and teaching them about these technologies got it i see what you're saying whereas an anarchist would just be like fuck everything like right that's an interesting distinction yeah and um that's something i've been thinking about more recently yeah but and then at the same time like you're talking to somebody so i think i have a very unique i would love to hear this you're almost a decade older than me how old are you i'm uh i'll be 38 in like two weeks that was that was very rude of me to ask but you're exactly i'm not offended you're exactly a decade older than me i'm 27 i'll be 28 in nine months and i love how we we put our wedding fingers on our thumbs with

my uh playing with my ring we're playing with our wedding uh rings i like i fiddle with my ring because um i don't want to well i don't i actually need to get it resized because i lost a little weight and so i'm the same way i went surfing the other week so so i actually now it like slips solved my finger a lot yeah i went surfing the other week it like it fell out i had to like dive to the bottom of the ocean you found it yeah yeah you know it's funny uh i lost my wedding ring like about a month after i got married because uh it also fell to the bottom of the ocean but i also found it it was in shallow clear water so oh yeah yeah um but going back to what i was saying what the hell was i saying something about how you're 27 yeah so i'm 27 and yes so i think where

so the financial crisis in particular to me like i was a senior in high school in the fall of 2008 i graduated high school in 2000 spring of 2009 but in the fall of 2008 i just so happened to be taking an economics elective while lehman brothers was failing while everything was failing which set me on a journey through college to learn more like so i went to a college with a know your enemy type mentality like how the fuck could it get this bad so i went to go study economics learn about money and stuff like that and so that's the mentality i have like being in that situation at that certain time and having like those emotions inflicted on me yeah and and following that in particular like am i biased because of that or yeah i mean i don't know if

like i would call that as bias like we're all like products of our environment in the unique moment And, you know, something that I think a lot about with regards to economics is how many people who are in power right now had their formative years in the early 80s when inflation was the biggest danger and the degree to which that guides people's assessments of the risks. and so i think you know even for years after the crisis it kind of seemed pretty obvious to me that like unemployment was still too high and that inflation was just not a thing that was happening we always say suck off the fed we gotta raise rates gotta raise rates inflation's gonna take off and i kind of understand that from the perspective of like if the most important years of your life we're doing the oil crisis we're during like surging inflation in which your cohort was part of the people that like beat inflation and stuff like that then that's always

going to be what you fear and so i think like again thinking back the last 10 to 20 years the financial crisis and the iraq war i think two things that just created extraordinary amount of disillusionment both with business with the banking system and with the government and And we are going to be living with the sort of scar tissue of that disillusionment, I think, for a very long time. Yes. I mean, I think I'm a product of that. I am a product of that scar tissue. Yeah.

For me in particular, I was 17 years old. Like, I was a young, I'm a young student. I was always one of the youngest in my grade. But, like, at 17 years old, the fall of 2008, we went through the TARP bill. And I was a 17-year-old. like these politicians in arkansas like to pass this tarp bill like an arrow has to be sharpened in a certain way like they had so many like oh they had so many clauses in it where it wasn't really about like saving the financial one of those things like where you don't want to see

how the sausage is made exactly and it was like at 17 i was like what the fuck is going on here and i think that's really what's driven my ideology since then yeah well i think i mean you know i it's funny i um it's for as bad as it is here i always think about like in europe and where you've had youth unemployment at times 20 40 25 30 like what that does to an entire generation that people in their formative years out of college for maybe a decade so elevated unemployment should extraordinary as extraordinarily depressing to think about the the long-term consequences that we'll have and this is why uh you know in favor of counter-cyclical policy one of the arguments that people make for like reducing government debt and spending

is they'll say oh like think of the burden of the next generation that has to pay it back i say think of what it does to the next generation if they grew up in a time of no jobs poor uh poor education and health care prospects so i think you could cut it both ways yeah it's fascinating though it's crazy how how intricate we are as humans like anything can change our our psychology and i'm not trying to pontificate on humanity or anything but it does like something i'm still trying to grasp like i i would argue like like you said like you change your political economics views like i don't know if i have like set like views on everything yet like i'm still it'd be weird if you did and you

know another thing and this gets back to my views on like um money and what is money it's like all of the interesting questions in life are impossible to answer and so it's like it's like answer saying like what is money is like kind of saying like what is love and if no one has an answer for that we know that nobody has an answer for that because people keep writing songs and doing poems and paintings to try to like capture that which like if if there was a clear answer you wouldn't have to write a poem about it you're just like oh what's love well here it is but it's clearly that so it's like what's money like we can kind of like approach an answer it's like a store of value medium of exchange whatever but it's like we know we're never really going to settle on the answer

because no one ever really has but you just hope that sort of like over time we like iterate to a view that we like kind of see the outlines of it and i think all these questions about like sort of the nature of humans and the nature of humans interacting with new technology and media it's like are we going to come up with some answer or some worldview that's right no but if we're lucky maybe eventually if we like squint we like kind of see the outline of the answer and that's sort of like my thinking on all this stuff deep joe goes deep no i like and i would completely agree and i'm i'm happy that i'm alive right now yeah i'm very happy too absolutely likewise in this particular time 100 i'm happy i uh did not have to grow up through the 70s and 80s like my

parents yeah and every and every and that's right like every generation seems to have their sort of like existential angst and like their thing that they're scared as hell about and you think about like you know the awful things the awful periods of discrimination and codified racism that we've had in this country you think about fear of nuclear annihilation you think about being drafted and being forced into a war like there's no generation that just sort of like oh yeah it's really good they just had it easy like there are people there's always gonna be something so obviously i think right now we live in a time of incredible change and it's not obvious that it's going to end or that it will lead us to some place that's much better maybe it will regardless

there's always something exact and that's you get lost in the sauce like while you're living yeah so you just gotta exactly gotta step away and sort of look at put it in context yeah that's one thing we talk about on this podcast we are uh we're getting deep into this conversation i think almost an hour and 45 in wow i think we could spend the last 15 minutes of this talking about your relationship with comfortably smug on twitter by the way for you got you for you freaks that don't know comfortably smug is um a non-twitter account and you know his name is out there i don't know uh yeah he was like a hedge funder or something like that it's it's out there you can find an article on it we're not going to

dox him right now but right joe wasn't expecting this at all but my favorite interactions on twitter throughout the years have been you and comfortably you know we have the same birthday do you really we're both born september 2nd this makes so we're sort of like twitter brothers twitter twins and we have the same birthday have you ever met him in real life i have okay and in fact that is there's actually for people who want to sleuth in google it that's all that's that's that's been written about has it yeah um again like i've never met comfortably smoke i don't want to put you in a spot but i just want you to know it's my favorite twitter ongoing twitter interaction thank you of all time thank you it's hilarious he's a funny guy he is is he

funny is it funny in real life yeah yeah he's a funny guy yeah yeah all right um do you have any questions for me well i am like curious like uh how did you get into why how did bitcoin become a thing for you why did you get into it yeah like i was saying like i was studying i think it was when i was a senior in high school actually let me rephrase the question when you first heard about it because like when i first heard about bitcoin i was like this is dumb but you didn't have that like what did you what what about it so like oh this makes sense to you so i was in chicago it was 2012 2013 i forget exactly which year it was but i was studying economics at de paul university and i just so happened to be taking a course on monetary or monetary policy like

specifically monetary policy and how it works and was writing a paper on monetary policy and literally googled like the googling stuff and stumbled upon bitcoin i was like oh this is interesting so that was like my first brush with it yeah like this is like a potential sound monetary policy i think like six months later the silk road started blowing up and stuff like that it's still in college and i think i'd started interning at this futures fund where i was getting more in depth with central bank announcements and having to follow that stuff and uh decided to like dive like fully in like my senior year of college and uh i just again i think it's because of the rebel nature of number one me being from philadelphia in general where

being from philly like you're naturally contrarian i would leave or naturally confrontational um and then having that experience as senior year high school being like this is like i just had like an innate feeling and like that yeah i was taking that class and while the while lehman brothers was failing when all that was going i was like this just like isn't right like yeah there has to be some other type of system and i was i wasn't actively looking but was like open to hey there there probably is something better out there and i found bitcoin it was like i think this might be better that's why i went down to it i do think that again you know it's interesting that there were the group of people the uh cypherpunks who are trying to create for years prior to

bitcoin some sort of digital cash and going back to this sort of um it when when was the white paper 2008 was the white halloween 2008 halloween 2008 yeah and so it's like in addition to like all of the there's so many um so many good aspects of like the bitcoin mythology like the fact that no one has ever been able to figure out who satoshi nakamoto was the white paper um i think it's it's interesting that satoshi's uh wallet like he's never spent from it he or she um we don't we really don't know there's a theory on that i'll well i'll let you finish and i'll tell um that's never been spent and so it's like in a way it's like this person arrived on earth created this thing didn't even like want to like get rich on it themselves and it disappeared but

also the fact that it happened at a point when again society was receptive to it and like if it had come in like 96 when everyone was getting rich it seemed like and the internet was booming and stuff like that and we hadn't gone through like all kinds of crisis who knows but they came it's like the solution arrived because it was people had been trying to solve the problem digital cash for so long the solution arrived on earth like at just the right moment and i think what you're describing with like you're receptive to to receptiveness to it is exactly right like everything is falling apart and here is this new thing that kind of made sense exactly and i mean satoshi whoever he she it they are like obviously knew that like right like embedding the

the times of london yeah yeah headline into the genesis block right right it's an overt statement like yeah this is this is this is uh this is a response to a very bad system exactly yeah and that that resonates with people it resonates with me still to this day and it's crazy to think like and like you were saying like you can't believe it's been 10 years since since like business insider like coming to bloomberg and starting a blog and stuff like that i can't believe i've been in this space like almost 10 years now yeah it's wild it's not almost 10 years like seven years but yeah it's or six years excuse me um but it's been like a huge it's been a quarter of my life now right like when you think about it like at that level

I'm like, oh, shit, man. Am I crazy? Am I like a crazy gold bug? I do not want to turn into the crazy gold bug. That is something that I'm very conscious of and want to avoid in the long run. I just want to be some dude that's able to save his money throughout time. You know, the saving your money throughout time question is its own interesting question because it is a form of time travel. Because what you're essentially, the idea of, like, saving wealth or saving any money from, like, point A to point B,

it's like you have X amount of purchasing power today, right, with the money you have in your bank account. And you would like to be able to have that purchasing, same amount of purchasing power at some point in the future, maybe more. But it's not a trivial question how to do that. And you're sort of asking society, if you want to do that, to say, like, hey, remember I had all this money at time point A. uh can you make sure that you let me have the same amount of but it's like it's no one's under any obligation to respect that per se and so people have always tried to uh solve that problem but something i think about a lot is like think of how big the wealth management industry is it's one it's one of the biggest most profitable industries in the world if saving money over

time was an easy task that would not be a very big industry because well they don't have the tools of sound money that bitcoin provides you know yeah well i think bitcoin has a long way to go to demonstrate that you're purchasing power at time a will be anything like or in time b will be anything like what it was at time a we have uh i i would say that is uh not proven but again you're talking to somebody who came from the wealth management industry and like we were working with high net worth individuals and preserving wealth but i'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus but the hedge fund and the mutual fund and the whole bdria like landscape it's a fee game at the end of the day like i would argue like they sure and but there's a little like

And I agree, but I think that people are willing to pay the fee because the central question of how do you preserve wealth over time is much harder than it looks. And I don't mean like beating the market or anything like that. Who knows if anyone can really do that consistently. I just mean that society is under no obligation to guarantee anyone that they can hold on to their wealth. like you could like buy land and hopefully the property that's something by gold but then you have to like pay someone to store it at risk uh having it stolen like there's things you can do but you got to pay up for it and so the deal is like you can kind of time travel with your money but no one does it for you don't get it there's no there's no free ride on it somehow you're

going to pay you could let's just say even even if you were to stipulate that bitcoin eventually became a stable store of value you were then going to take pretty significant risks of like losing access to all of it which numerous that's happened to numerous people so the costs are going to be somewhere yeah now you may like that may not be an issue eventually but the point is is like it is not a trivial question to preserve wealth over time but what if it became trivial like it there's very like that's why i like bitcoin it's dumb it's slow it does one thing what if you get depend on something like that and you knew was not going to be bastardized in the long run like how does that change society and we're like almost two hours in like we could dive

into like another 45 minute conversation on this in particular i'm uh are you okay with like a joe rogan three hour podcast i think i think uh i'm uh i think my brain is getting I don't think I'm quite ready to talk about how this is going to change society you're not even drinking I know but I'm not eating very much either that's true I need to eat so I feel like

the odds of me saying something stupid are starting to accelerate rapidly every second well that's the last thing I want to do is make you look stupid thank you I appreciate that I'm not some gotcha journalist indie media guy

um no i i'm genuinely curious to see what people think like that's what i like i i consider myself dumb like i'm like i i think like you know just on this uh question of like store value i think it's one of the most interesting questions right and we were talking about it earlier like different types of assets store value against different types of scenarios so some is about collapse of fiat currency maybe some would be uh personal safety like having land whatever um people always ask like if we go into a recession or depression is bitcoin an asset to hold i'm like no because people are going to sell their bitcoin for cash right because that's what's going to work yeah absolutely i always say like you always sell what you always sell into the currency that you have

to pay your bills so it's like your landlord wants cash and so if you don't have a job then have to start selling things for cash exactly and you know over time certain assets could become more durable less risky than others um but there's always there's always risks and so it's like with uh with land which is a might be a good store value like worry about flooding you could uh there's all kinds of nat you face natural disaster risk whatever it is you're on yosemite it could blow up any day yeah so uh i don't think we're ever going to solve the problem of a guaranteed stable store value that you can just set it and forget it and feel confident that it will hold its purchasing power from a to time b to time c it's all the risk has to be somewhere it's just

different and we're gonna get cosmic here maybe that's something built into our dna that forces us to always innovate and and think and think from our feet like the complacency of having that type of story value might make us might make it so that we don't innovate to an extent you get it just interesting joe we're close to two hours it's been incredible conversation i've really enjoyed it it's been it's a great discussion you're a really good interviewer so you're you claim to be anxious about interviewing an interviewer, but you are very skilled at it. I thought this was a really

enjoyable conversation. And I am very excited. You know what's funny? I like that I've enjoyed coming on your podcast. Thank you, Joe. It's humbling for me in particular. Again,

been a fan for years. Thank you. One thing on this podcast, we do a final note, a parting word for the freaks out there. What would it be in regards say anything bitcoin career-wise media whatever it might be final thought if you will um could be completely random a final thought on anything what am i thinking about these days um um reed canes man he's great i know no one's gonna like that but nobody's gonna like open your mind

I'll tell you what I want to say After we finish recording After we stop recording You're going to tell me what you didn't want to put on record That's my final thought That's what I'm into right now And that's a good final thought To find out more about Joe

I'm sure most of you are already following him on Twitter At The Stalwart Every day at 5pm 3.30 to 5 is my show 3.30 to 5 What did you miss? Bloomberg TV he's got robert keen coming on all the time yeah check it out he's a don always wearing a bow tie big bow tie tom keen tom keen not robert excuse me he's my idol he's uh he's a consummate

professional i would argue um freaks thanks for tuning in peace and love