The Breakdown - How Monopolies Sow the Seeds of Their Own Destruction, Feat. Tuur Demeester

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

Today on the Brief: A consumer spending rebound A new crypto regulatory regime in Europe A bitcoin warning from a famed investor Our main discussion:  Tuur Demeester is the managing partner of Adamant Capital, a bitcoin investment firm that earlier this year published “The Bitcoin Reformation.”  In this conversation, he and NLW discuss: The four preconditions for a reformation, and how they apply today How hyperinflation contributed to the French Revolution Why inflation is becoming a more significant threat today How bitcoin memes function like unifying doctrines from past revolutions Why millennials could be the Greatest Generation 2.0  Find our guest online: Twitter: @TuurDemeester On the web: Adamant Capital

And so I wrote this article in Dutch 10 years ago, which was called the most important history lesson you were never taught. And it was basically about how if governments accumulate debt to a level where it's unsustainable, eventually that can lead to hyperinflation. And so back then I thought it was scary, but now I'm even more scared because the analogies are just, I think, piling up. Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and CipherTrays. The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDes. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Friday, June 26th, and today I have a really excellent conversation with Tour de Meester from Adamant Capital about how major historical events from the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century to the French Revolution can actually help us understand the moment we're living through now. Before that, however, the brief. First up on the brief, consumer spending rebound. So what happened? Spending increased 8.2% between April and May as per a report from the Commerce Department. This is the largest increase since recordkeeping began in 1959. So obviously this is great news, right? A great sign for that pent-up demand that we were all hoping for. The problem right now is that it's only part of the story. Household incomes during the

same period fell 4.2% as stimulus money started to fade. And most importantly, infections are up in 33 states. Texas and Florida have both paused reopening plans as they deal with this. And realistically, the only thing that matters ultimately is what the balance or equilibrium of battling the virus and getting back to economic normal we can find. So this is a good sign and we should be buoyed by it, but we should also be cautious because it was from April to May and we're dealing right now with June going into July and things looking bad again. Next on the brief, the regulatory regime comes to crypto. So what happened? Two different stories in two parts of the world. First, the EU is planning a new regulatory framework for cryptos, including stricter requirements for

global stable coins like Libra. This came from a speech from the former Prime Minister of Latvia, who is now the EU's lead economics minister. In the U.S., meanwhile, the sordid tale of telegram sale has finally come to an end. The SEC has settled with Telegram, who will be expected to pay $18.5 million in fines, as well as $1.22 billion in discouragements to investors over the next three years. So what do these stories matter? They are yet one more reminder that as long as crypto continues to persist, the more that it will be brought into the regulatory fold. And there's good and bad about that. The bad is that there are significant constraints on innovation that come from regulation, especially when it's putting old regulatory frameworks on new types of technology.

The flip side is that the lack of clarity has created a real stumbling block for lots of entrepreneurs who want to build interesting things. And so hopefully the upshot of this is that the clarity creates opportunity. I believe that you'll still see really interesting regulatory arbitrage opportunities happen around the world, particularly to the extent that we get more multipolar power rather than a unipolar world that we've kind of been living in now. Last up on the brief today, a warning from legendary investor Jim Rogers. So what happened? Another one of those Uber-famous investors had made comments on Bitcoin and digital assets in general, and unfortunately, unlike Paul Tudor Jones, this one is not as bullish. In an interview with a Japanese publication,

he said that if cryptocurrency succeeds as real money rather than as the subject of gambling as it is today, the government will make the cryptocurrency illegal and eliminate it. He goes on to argue his point that basically, if anything is a threat to government money, it will be shut down. He says, the government likes electronic money, because with electronic money, you can track when, where, and who spent, and what amount. Governments will have more control over people through electronic money. The government wants to know everything. Controllable electronic money will survive, and virtual currencies beyond the influence of the government will be erased. Now, finally, he gave his rather pessimistic view of cryptocurrencies now and said, I believe that

the virtual currency represented by Bitcoin will decline and eventually become zero. This is a clear bubble and I don't know the right price. Virtual currency is not an investment target. It's just gambling. So why is this important to note? Well, I believe we can take this two ways. The first is the way that I've seen a lot of Bitcoin Twitter take it, which is screw this guy, he's just a relic from the past. And I do think that to some extent, this represents an old way of looking at things. He even at one point makes reference to the fact that the difference between virtual currencies backed by governments and not is that governments have guns, which is a very sort of 20th century view of the world. But the second way that we can take it is that he thinks a lot like a lot of the

folks in government think. And I actually believe this to be true. I actually do think it's worth being cognizant of the threats from governments who want to pick a real fight with Bitcoin, who want to make the on-ramps and off-ramps illegal, who want to really try to tamp this down. We can scream all we want about self-sovereign technology, and certainly as technologies go, the infrastructure around Bitcoin is getting nothing but more robust. And I'm not even one of those people who thinks that any one government or any coalition of governments could shut it down. But the reality is, for a huge number of people who interact with this asset, a full frontal assault from a government, especially one like the U.S., could be a serious detriment and a serious setback. So when we see

someone who seems to reflect a point of view that many in government do, it's worth paying attention even if we don't like it. Ultimately, the question is, will government surrender their monopoly on money? And that is a pretty open question in my book. It also brings us perfectly to our main conversation today with Tour de Meester. Turdemister is the founding partner of adamant capital and has long been one of the leading voices in the Bitcoin space. He got started writing a newsletter, advising people about it, and has continued to write and bring a really interesting and diverse set of perspectives to the space. One of the things that Tur and I share is a real strong affinity for history. And in particular, looking to history to try to understand what we're living through, to try to see where

historical analogies might apply. A few months ago, TUR's firm put out a report called the Bitcoin Reformation, which makes a parallel between the time that we're living through now and the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. More recently, TUR has been looking at the French Revolution, and in particular, the hyperinflation around the French Revolution that happened as another parallel that could be reflective of our current time. In this conversation, we use the framework of his Bitcoin Reformation paper and the parallels there to explore not just the historical analogy, but really to use as a jumping off point for a much wider exploration of Bitcoin in the world today. If there is a single theme, as you'll see, it's the idea of monopoly power and how, whether

it's governments or corporations, it tends to sow the seeds of its own destruction. As with all long interviews on the breakdown, this is edited only very slightly, so I hope you enjoy it. All right, I am back here with Tur. Hey, thanks so much for spending some time today. Oh, happy to be here, Nathaniel. So I thought that what would be really fun, you and I had to been talking about this a little bit, is one thing that you and I share is a real interest in history, I think for its own sake, but also in the context of how it helps us understand and explain or just at least make sense of current events. And you've been one of the more thoughtful folks in putting together some historical context for some of the things we're seeing now with

Bitcoin and the economy more broadly. So what I thought could be fun is to maybe dive into some of the historical moments that you've taken lessons from in the context of Bitcoin and today's economy and go into them in a little bit more depth and just sort of explore from there. Yeah, that sounds great. So let's talk about the Reformation. You guys put out this big paper earlier this year about a historical analogy with Bitcoin and the Reformation. And you said in the introduction, the 21st century emergence of Bitcoin encryption, the internet, and millennials are more than just trends. They herald a wave of change that exhibit similar dynamics as the 16th and 17th century

revolution that took place in Europe. And I really want to get into this a little bit. So maybe you could give first a brief background on the Reformation. I mean, you know, the two-second version, what happened for those who just? haven't spent any time with it. And then we could maybe get into the comparisons in terms of the four preconditions of a reformation. Yeah, sure.

I mean, for me to talk about what happened, of course, it's going to reveal some of the ways that I think about history in general or like, you know, what I think are the biggest catalyst. So it's always a bit, you know, even if I give you like the 32nd elevator pitch about, you know, what was the reformation? A lot of people probably still disagree. But I would say that one of the major kind of realities of even the Middle Ages all the way until the start of the Reformation was that there was this monopolistic service provider and that was the Catholic Church. And gradually that institution became kind of more and more bloated and it started like the tax pressure that it was exerting on people, all along Europe was really increasing and weighing on people.

And at the same time, in that period, especially the early 1500s, the printing press made a huge difference in that all of a sudden the production of ideas and the proliferation of ideas was kind of unbundled. And all of a sudden, instead of having to pay a year's wage to buy a book, you could buy a book for the price of a chicken. Like, that's what happened in that 100 years. So that was a massive revolution. And then, of course, also the structure of trade started to change around Europe, whereas before the main source of wealth was working the land, that shifted towards commanding the oceans and the waters. And obviously the spice trade, but then gradually with the discovery of the Americas, like it just became a much, much bigger slice of the economic pie. And so with that came this new economic class that didn't necessarily agree with paying so much taxes to the Catholic Church. So that's kind of, you know, what everything came to ahead in the 1500s where people just basically refused to play the game anymore.

And they just wanted to, you know, have a more direct relation with God. Like it wasn't like people turned into atheists all of a sudden. But more and more this idea started taking hold of like, well, you know, we like reading things in our own language. Like, can't we read the Bible ourselves? Do we really need all these Latin-speaking priests to interpret everything for us and to give us access to heaven? Maybe there's other ways. And so that's like in a nutshell what happened with the reformation. It was like the Protestants, initially it was not an ism. Like it wasn't like a particular church. It was just people who were protesting the Catholic system. It's super interesting.

So I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but for a while, I studied the history of Islam when I was in college. I lived in Cairo for a while, and there's a commonality, I think, in some ways is, I think this is kind of across all faiths, but when faith systems turn into political systems and economic systems, you almost inevitably have a backlash at some point where people try to reclaim that relationship with God. And often that is sort of the narrative or moral dimension or spiritual dimension of a larger question of the structure of power that has grown up around it. So in Islam, one, I mean, the religion itself was in some ways theoretically founded on that idea of having that direct relationship. But in particular in the 12th and 13th century, the rise of Sufism and sort of ecstatic mysticism was their version of, is very different obviously than Protestantism. But it was still at core about reclaiming this relationship with God. But it's also probably no accident that by the 12th or 13th century in Islam, the power structure around the religion, the faith, had gotten extremely dense and complex. And the place for the individual had gotten farther and farther away.

So it's interesting that in this case as well, there is this kind of, there's an economic and sort of a political power dimension alongside a spirituality dimension. Oh, it's interesting you say that because, like, I remember, I think from high school learning that, like, oh, the schism and Islam was basically a kind of like a hereditary dispute of like, you know, these guys said, we are the true heirs to Muhammad and the other guy said, no, we are. But then what you're saying is that it was bound to happen anyway. Like there was this kind of. That was a little bit different. That was the Sufi and Shiite split, which continues to be the most important in terms of the sort of descent into the modern political landscape. That remains. And it was an issue of of hereditary legitimacy.

The part that I'm referring to, though, is that in kind of either side, there was a movement, so this is where like whirling dervishes come from, where basically this Sufism, which is another version of this, is sort of like the Kabbalah in Judaism. I mean, again, I'm not trying to overly draw these comparisons, but they were reclaiming the idea that you were supposed to have a direct relationship with God. And the way that they pursued that was in the form of sort of this ecstatic dance, you know, which is where we got the dervishes and stuff. But it was a rejection of the power structure and the power system in general.

But again, I think trying to make the analogy a little bit more crisp and probably more crisp that it is, you had very extensive and dense hierarchies of power and political systems by that point, you know, six or seven hundred years after the founding of Islam, that part of the rejection, I think, was not just the, it wasn't just a spiritual, spiritual revolution, it was also kind of an opt-out of that type of system. Although with no real political ambition on its own, which is why it stayed sort of a mystical movement as opposed to a political power. And obviously, that wasn't exactly what happened with Protestantism. It kind of like, you know, it kind of illustrates how almost all monopolies are the seed of their

own destruction. It's kind of like, we have a great thing. And like, let's make, you know, let's just dictate everything that happens. It's like, oh, well, no, it was a great thing. But, you know, And once you guys start infiltrating all areas of our lives, like maybe we want to back off from that. And then there's the incumbents who start competing with that, which could just be like what you're referring to, like just some people that aren't even organized, but that just choose to opt out anyway. No, I think it's a really, really salient point. And at the risk of extending the Islamic historical analogy too long, if anyone's interested in this, they should look up the, the history of this concept called Ishdehad. And basically, there was a long period during which Islamic jurisprudence, right? So the nature of the law had a kind of a clear system. Stuff that was

in the Quran was supreme. Obviously, if God said it, God said it. Stuff that Mohammed had taught was secondary to that, right, because he had to fill in a lot of the gaps. And then after that, there was sort of this consensus among Islamic scholars, so things that they could figure out on the basis of what Muhammad had said was sort of the next in the line of authority. But then after that, there was a concept called Ishtahad, which was basically individual thought, rational thought, which said that everyone was possessed of the ability to make sense of things and where there aren't explicit teachings that fit in any of those other categories, use your own mind to figure it out.

In the 12th century, there was actually an official decree closing the door to Ishtahat that basically said everything relevant to be figured out has been figured out, which means we no longer recognize the legitimacy of individuals to figure things out for themselves. And again, it wasn't, you know, it was within 100 or 200 years that Sufism and this sort of, that type of rejection came. So really, really interesting. And definitely, I think, validating of your point that monopolies, whatever they are, kind of sow the seeds of their own destruction. That's fascinating. And it reminds me of, you know, how maybe the contrast between, the French Napoleonic Code and then the common law tradition in England, which common law

reminds me of Ishtahad a lot more, where there's this just, just a broad tradition of precedence. And so judges are free to just look into cases that came before and draw inspiration from that to try to rationally figure out what's going on now, whereas Napoleonic law is much more rigid, generally speaking, and that's why international commerce hasn't really flourished based on that system. It's been much more, you know, even like Hong Kong, like, you know, any kind of system that traces back to common law is usually more, you know, flexible and I think in the long run, probably more just as well. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know if you've talked with Nick Carter recently on his latest rant around Squatters' rights on social media, but he's been digging

into this concept of basically trying to pull, you know, historical analogy from squatters rights in the American West and in these Tomahawk rules where basically people would delineate their property on the basis of kind of, you know, marking it with, you know, a tomahawk or whatever they used to cut into a tree, an axe or whatever. And that later became sort of like the basis for how parcels were divided. But the key thing here is that there was this determination of if people sort of co-mingled, labor with the land for a sufficient amount of time, and you could demonstrate that it wasn't being used otherwise, you could potentially have legal claim to it. And a lot of, you know, the 18th or the 19th

century and early 20th century was about codifying that and kind of recognizing legally and, you know, with the full force of the law, what was practically already the reality. So it's really interesting just to see how these systems of kind of control and legality form or, you know, around or kind of try to fight against common sense and sort of normalcy of how people live their lives. Wow. Yeah. Interesting.

So let's talk. Let's go back to the Reformation now that we've fully gone down the rabbit hole. And this is perfect because this episode is going to be released on a Friday, which means it's like they're going to be the perfect companion for weekend, you know, relaxation and chill. But I want to dig into some of these preconditions. So you kind of touched on all of them in your introduction to the situation. but you identify four preconditions for Reformation and do a comparison like then versus now.

So the first is rent-seeking monopolistic service provider. The second is technological revolution catalyst for change. The third is a new economic class and people with something to fight for. And the fourth is credible strategies for defense and escape. Maybe we can go through those and pull out the example of within the Protestant Reformation. And then talk about what you see as kind of a parallel name. Now? Sure.

Well, so yeah, the rent-seeking monopolist back then was the Catholic Church. I think today it's the international financial system, which is a bit of a vague term. But if you look into the BIS and Basel, which is like the central bank, the central banks, they do have this term IMFS, international monetary and financial system. And it basically is this kind of web of central banks and then supranational central banking institutions. like the IMF and the BIS, like all that together. And in a way also, the commercial banks are also tied into that. Similar to how, you know, 500 years ago, the Catholic Church was also this, like, vast network

that went all the way down to the smallest villages where there was also a priest, and he was, you know, obeying the bishop, and then the bishop was obeying and so forth, this hierarchical system. And so, yeah, I mean, right now, of course, it's not about access into heaven, but it's more about access into financial heaven. It's like, you know, who's going to take care of your finances? It is the bank. And then who's going to backstop the bank?

If the bank gets in trouble, it's the central bank and so on. You see this with economists is that it's hard for them to think outside of this paradigm to imagine anything else than the Fiat paradigm that everybody thinks in. And that's probably part of why they're so insulted often or get really triggered thinking and talking about something like Bitcoin, which defies a lot of the conventions of the past 100 years. Yeah, and I think this is an important moment to hang on, too, before we move into the sort of technology revolution side.

You know, one of the conversations that I'm having with lots of folks who are on the show is this sort of continued claim of Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve that central banks and specifically the Fed's policies haven't had any impact on well. inequality, that it is somehow divorced from that and has been happening for 40 years separately and no one is really sure why. And almost everyone, frankly, whether they're a Bitcoin or not, has a really hard time stomaching that when literally expressed goal is to create a wealth effect, you know? Yeah, I mean, there's this website, WTF happened in 1971.com, which, you know, what that

refers to is President Nixon closing the gold window. detethering the dollar from gold. And you see, just go to that page and you see so many statistics that all of a sudden start to deviate massively. And that's the effect. I mean, it's basically, if you have a money printing machine in Washington, D.C. or wherever you want to imagine it, and then there is a small circle of people around it and then kind of like concentrically, people are sitting around that money printing machine.

And the people furthest away are, of course, the blue collar work. and the people with fixed pensions and stuff. And so that's how you see this like wealth disparity happen over the period of 40 years. And that's part of why we're seeing, you know, everything's connected. That's part of why we're seeing these riots because people are mad. They feel like something's wrong that they're being stolen from. And they often have a hard time pinpointing like, you know, why exactly that is. But it's no surprise, right?

If the wealth disparity is at the extreme, that's when you get iconoclasm. That's when you get riots. That's when you see revolutions happen. Yeah, I think it's so important to not be dismissive of people's frustration and sense of injustice and wrongness. Because when you are, what happens is that you have demagogues that fill the gap and explain it in easy terms that are often too easy politically. And I think we've been subject to that a lot. But, okay, so we've got this rent-seeking monopolistic service provider in the form of, of the Catholic Church then, the international system as it's designed now.

Technology Revolution, what was the catalyst for change then, and what are some of them now? I mean, I think these are probably the ones that people are most innately familiar with. The major one, I think, was the printing press. That was just incredible how this also enabled pseudonymous publications. So not only were books a lot cheaper in pamphlets, but there were a lot of pamphlets that were circulated and nobody really knew who even wrote them. So that was extra powerful as well. There was also double-entry bookkeeping, which accelerated international commerce. All of a sudden, you could have a multinational corporation and actually do the bookkeeping in a way that made sense.

There were improvements to the compass, the hourglass, and that allowed for people to not only venture out thousands of miles away, but actually make it back. Because the problem wasn't to discover new territory. the problem was to get back. And that's what these improvements helped and then helped with. Of course, there was the age as well of scientific research and the first kind of successful experiments in chemistry. So all kinds of improvements that would compound each other to really, it's a little bit like the internet, right? The rise of the internet, it just unlocked so many things that then compounded and accelerated. And so I gave the comparison or the example of the price of a book falling from, you know, a year's wage to the price of a chicken.

It actually, if you want to put that in numbers, it dropped by 2.4% per year for over 100 years. That was the price of books. But then similarly, the price of pushing digital data around the world has also dropped by over 99% in 20 years. So that's, I think, a powerful analogy to look at the price of disseminating information today. Like, that's kind of cratered once more. And so that is a catalyst. It's a really powerful catalyst. Data storage is a lot cheaper computation.

And of course, we have open source software, which means that the software itself is often free. And then cryptography is more on the defensive side. It gives us all kinds of things to do. And then, you know, meme posting on Twitter also serves a function. It's like it allows us to disseminate the information very rapidly. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors, trusted by over 4 million customers, including top financial institutions.

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Years of research have created the world's best cryptocurrency intelligence with the best attribution and deepest token coverage. So if your virtual asset business isn't using CypherTrace to manage compliance risks, you should start now. Learn more at cyphertrace.com. So we have a rent-seeking monopoly. We have a catalyst for change in technology revolution. Who is the new economic class with something to fight for in each of these situations? Yeah. So in the past, it would be the merchants, because they were the ones acquiring wealth. And they would also encounter these new cultures, and that brought kind of a sense of empowerment with them,

the fact that they were just free to just travel around the world and fund these expeditions. So I would definitely say it was the merchant class. Sorry, but don't forget back then, one of the things that all this travel allowed for, basically the price of travel was dropping. And so that allowed for specialization. So you had, you know, for example, where I'm from in Bruges, there was a bird, like a massive industry around textile, like very special, specific textiles that were unique in Europe and there was a center for painting.

And so basically you had the possibility for specialists from all over Europe to congregate in particular cities. And so today, I mean, in the report, I talk about the millennial generation in general. I think that's probably a bit too broad, but I didn't want to have a million footnotes in this report. So I did say the millennial generation because they're skeptical about traditional finance, they're enthusiastic about digital innovation, things like that. But maybe I'm wrong. And it's actually a more narrow category. Like maybe it's the bitcoins, right? Maybe because they are the ones who actually have that link to self-sovereignty and that ability to almost entirely.

live in the cloud. But let's say, like, I think that it's going to be a part of the millennial generation that will play that role. There's almost a speartip effect with folks like the Bitcoiners, right, in terms of where they fit. But I don't think it's necessarily, especially if we're zooming out in the kind of multi-hundred-year time frame, like of history, to identify the millennial generation as a whole, especially if you look at like there's this really interesting phenomenon where we're one of the first generations in history, so far as I can tell, that are natively better at the most important tools of economic production of their age, right? The millennial generation was the pivot from digitally native to not, right?

It was the last group ever, at least the oldest part, which I'm kind of a part of the older part of the millennial generation, to remember ever writing anything by hand in school. You know, that's kind of an artifact now, writing a school report. And obviously, the Zoomers are, you know, they can't imagine a world without this because they were born in many cases after Napster, you know. And so this interesting inflection point where, you know, they're natively better as a generation at the tools of kind of economic production in terms of coding and everything else, but they own none of the wealth comparatively, right?

If you look at where, and there's been a number of great tweet threads and articles about this in the last few weeks especially. But if you look at the percentage of wealth owned by millennials now as compared to the boomers at the same age, it's just, I mean, it's mind-boggling, right? It's something like 22% for the boomers compared to 3% for millennials. And you repeat that across every category. So even though this generation has theoretically all the tools to be really empowered economically, it's actually radically far behind.

And now you have this generation that's, coming into their 30s or even looking at their late 30s and saying, you know, we don't have the things that my parents had at that time. We don't have a house. We don't have any possibility of getting a house, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a real discontent and frustration there. And again, people diagnose it a lot of different ways. But I don't think it's wrong that there's that this whole group of people have something to fight for, right? If that's the real qualification that we're looking at. Yeah, I mean, the millennial generation has been a victim of this rent-seeking effect of the financial system where the chickens are coming to roost,

like this whole artificially inflated activity that's been possible because of that debt accumulation over, I guess, almost 100 years, debts have been on the increase. You know, now that that's failing, like the millennials are catching the brunt of that problem, whereas the older generation, they were able to profit from it and they have, you know, juicy 401k's and so on. And so I think, yeah, it is dangerous that the millennials don't have a lot to lose as a generation. And so, you know, things could get really ugly in that sense.

I mean, that's what happened during the French Revolution with the Saint-Culotte, which was the nobility were the ones. If you look at the paintings of the time, they had these like shorts, these kind of like aristocratic short pants. and so then the working class, they would self-identify as the ones who were not wearing short. So that's the Saint-Culotte. And it was just a really violent, I mean, of course, not everyone who was working class became violent, but there was a subsection that really took it very far.

And there was just a lot of destruction of buildings. And of course, in the French Revolution, it was beheadings and all that ugly stuff. So yeah, I mean, it is really a big problem. I do think that it's not, you know, the older generation is not going to keep their relative share of the wealth. Like part of it is going to be transferred via inheritance, but also that technology is a bigger part of the economic pie than it used to be. And you're already seeing that if you look at the top 100 billionaires in the world, half of them have a significant part of their wealth. thanks to investments or involvement in technology. And so, you know, add to that a Bitcoin revolution where Bitcoin does another 10 or 100x,

and you could really see half the world's billionaires deriving a significant part of their wealth from Bitcoin. And so very likely they will be younger than just because they were involved at a younger age. Like most older people don't get Bitcoin as quickly. Yeah, I do think it's important to, like, we can acknowledge. when there are numbers that show that something off without presuming that it's going to be that way forever, you know? And I think the relevant piece when it comes to millennials for your point is right now, even if that redistributive effect is, you know, coming down the pipe, right? There's a million scenarios that you can game out where that would happen, right? Like housing

crisis, you know, because all of a sudden, if the stock market turns over, these boomers have to sell their second houses, right? And all of a sudden, there's a glut of availability rather than a supply shortage, which there's been for many years and so on and so forth, right? We can game out all these scenarios. I think the important thing in terms of understanding this precondition for something big to happen is that right now in this moment, it feels far away. And it would take something, it feels like dramatic to actually do it or to have some shift happen. So the last piece or the last part of these preconditions is this idea of credible strategies for defense and escape. Can you talk a little bit about that in the context of the Reformation and then now?

Yeah, sure, sure. So back in the day in the 1500s, the kind of government arm of the Catholic Church was, you know, there were several kings, of course, across Europe who were very loyal to the Catholic Church, but the biggest empire at the time was the Spanish Empire. And the Spanish kings, they really, you know, they were really seeing themselves as like God on Earth. and nobody should question their authority. And there were horrible atrocities that happened in Spain at the time. I mean, the prosecution of the Jews and just really horrible events took place. But so they had this idea that they had this colonial empire.

And then also they were going to just annex a significant part of Europe. And they did that with – there was this whole marriage strategy where they would – marry strategically and then get claims on particular lands and territories across Europe. And then they would also impose their kind of hyper-Catholic reign there. And so they tried to push for annexing the Netherlands. And they tried for 80 years. And it basically made them broke. There was this massive army that tracked across land all the way to the Netherlands.

And so you would think like tiny little Netherlands with a lot of land that was actually claimed on the ocean, that wasn't even real land to begin with. How could they ever withstand the biggest empire in the world at the time? But they did it. And one of the main ways they did it was by using water to their advantage. So they had these dikes and they could break the dikes. Whenever there was an army coming forward to city, they could just flood the feet. and then all of a sudden all these Spanish soldiers with armor and they would just get stuck in the mud and then they would be easy prey for defenders.

So that was just a massively important part of the defense. And it's kind of like out of left field. Like it was like not really expected. And then Amsterdam was really the heart and it was surrounded by these rings of water defenses and fortresses that were strategically placed to communicate. communicate quickly and those kind of things. So yeah, water was just the secret sauce of the Dutch. And so today, the argument that I try to make in this report, I think it's cryptography. I think it's one of those things that changes the playing field drastically because with very few resources, you can build something that's almost impenetrable. That's kind of the point, right?

if you're up and coming and you're kind of you have a newfound wealth and you want to keep doing what you're doing, then you want a technology that allows you to cheaply and effectively defend yourself. And I think, you know, in combination with, you know, the fact that there's, that it's open source available and that it's part of an ecosystem of solutions, I would say cryptography is our best chance or the best chance for this. millennial generation to take that risk. And I added as well that water was not only a defense against a direct attack, but it was basically a gateway to escape.

You could jump in a boat and go to England or go to New Amsterdam across the ocean. And so similarly, you know, if you want to move to another country, cryptography and Bitcoin allows you to do that in a way that is where it's hard to be stopped unless you're being imprisoned. It's super interesting. I mean, I think about this a lot. I mean, how have you been paying attention to sort of the low-grade assault of the attorney general on end-to-end encryption?

I mean, is this something that worries you as you watch? Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit like the counter-reformation where, you know, the Catholic Church is trying to push back and challenge these things. strategies. I mean, ultimately, it's doomed to fail, but in the short term, it can, it can wreak some havoc. What ends up happening is that the market is smart. And so these, these measures to try and control it tend to only harden the existing solutions, because it's kind of like a, it's like a, it's like a test, right? Whoever tries to attack you, if, if you're strong enough and you survive, then your immune system is stronger.

And so similarly, the Spanish Empire really tried to control ocean trade harshly. But then the irony was that in order to fund that control, they had to tax their own merchant fleet. And so then that fleet became weaker and weaker, but that was the income for the Spanish Empire itself. So they were kind of killing the goose with the golden eggs. And then of course who flourished was the Dutch and the British, who just had a much more capitalistic system. So I think, you know, I don't know how exactly, but I think, you know, these attempts to control are likely going to backfire.

It's kind of like with the stable coins, right? They've been really trying to crack down and control the stable coins. And I'm not saying that Tether is going to survive in the long run, but part of what, why Tether has this market dominance, is that it's not controlled. It's the least controlled by, let's say, you know, the U.S. government. Whereas, you know, the stable coin by circle or by Coinbase or, you know, these other ones, they're just born and grown in the U.S., and that's why the international market is skeptical of them, whereas Tether is this kind of pirate coin that is offshore,

and there's a lot more appetite for that. So I think that that might be an analogy where there's this kind of, it backfires. If you try and control something too harshly, it happened with Portugal and Spain as well, you end up losing access to the market. You're like disqualifying yourself in the long run. Well, it's interesting. I mean, certainly what we've seen with stable coins in general, but tether specifically over the last few months during this COVID crisis is huge, huge uptick.

right, in usage and probably for exact this reason, because, you know, we have a situation where governments are likely to impose increasing currency controls, right? Argentina has increased its currency controls over the last couple months, for example, around, you know, dollar access versus the peso and things like that. And that is driving people into the arms of these sort of synthetic dollar equivalents, especially the ones that seem less likely to be captured by government interest. And one of the interesting things that I, you know, this is a little bit of, a little bit off the kind of narrative that we're plowing through, but it's still worth it, is what your take on, so I'm really interested in the inevitability of a shift in kind of

national fiat regimes as the norm. And what I think about is, you know, so I've spent a lot of time watching Lebanon over the last few months, even before the COVID crisis, because you started to see last year, you know, a peg that had been in place since the late 90s of, or roughly 1,500 Lebanese pounds to the dollar start to break. And as it broke, kind of the classic things that always happen in these situations happen, where controls become more strict. The official exchange rate is totally different from the black market exchange rate. The black market exchange rate becomes more powerful.

Certain types of issues like, you know, in a net import or country, all of a sudden you can't afford gas because gas has to pay for, you know, the imports in dollars, but then it sells in Lebanese pounds and so on and so forth. And you see this incredible frustration and despair. There was a journalist, Lebanese journalist who's based in Beirut, who works with AP and a number of other places, who is lamenting that she's worked so hard for more than a decade and has just watched her savings evaporate. And she's been punished for, she's been punished for her decision not to exert that physical mobility to leave. And the interesting thing for me is how could it possibly be the world of network effects with, you know, an entire. generation around the world of digital native and digitally literate people, how wouldn't you

see money flee to a different area, right, from a local currency regime? It just feels like it's going to be an impossible force to stop in some ways. But I'm interested in your take on that. Yeah, I mean, capital controls always fail, but they can make people's lives really difficult in the short term. Like, yeah, like, I mean, you mentioned Argentina. They just had So many, every 10 years, they have like their own currency crisis and they always try these terrible recipes. I guess the U.S. is a little bit of a special case because it's still this global currency so far.

I think it's a lot harder for smaller countries where you kind of get choked out a lot faster by the international markets. We're just calling bluff on, you know, your peg. It's like, we don't care about your peg, right? We're just going to trade. And if we don't think this currency is worth much, we're not going to pay much for it. So it's kind of weird how these countries really, you know, I think it has to do with that political cycles and economic cycles are never really in sync. Like a political cycle is a lot faster, right?

It's like the four-year election cycle, whatever. So the politician in charge, he's just thinking about his reelection. That's all he cares about. And so for him to then enact this crazy policy that's de facto choice. joking the entire economy. Because if you peg, think about what a peg means. It's basically saying,

like, I mandate that this coin is worth so much, which is nonsense, right? It just means that you as a central bank, maybe you will pay up a certain amount of foreign currency to keep that myth going. But eventually the story breaks down. But then you forced all the participants in your economy,

all the official, the businesses and stuff, to adhere to this value of the overvaluation basically. And so that's why eventually international providers just start saying like, dude, like I don't care that your government says that gasoline is worth this many Lebanese coins. I don't care about the Lebanese coin. I just want enough money. And so they just stop shipping the goods into Lebanon.

But it's horrible. It really is very horrible. Like, people literally die because of these situations. They don't get the right medical care. They don't get medication. They don't get gasoline. They can't heat their homes. The only silver lining is that, you know, politically, it's not sustainable in the long run.

So usually these things only lasts, you know, anywhere between 12 months and three years, these kind of currency controls. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to talk about because we're going to see it more and more. Yeah. I mean, we could spend the whole whole. whole conversation on just that. But for the sake of kind of finishing this analogy, because I think it's such a great, interesting lens, another piece that you draw the comparison to is the idea of unifying doctrines. Can you say a little bit about what you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, a doctrine is, there's like a belief system, which is like all the beliefs that

are alive in a certain culture, you could say. And then like the doctrines are more like the the pithy summaries of that. And then within the doctrines. Well, yeah, but I would say within the doctrines, there's even a subcategory of like, yeah, the more, I'm trying to find, I think there's another word even. But like, yeah, I mean, like the, you know, the Ten Commandments is an example. Like, they're just kind of like the elevator pitch of the whole belief system.

And so back then, Solafide was one. It's like faith alone is what is enough. faith alone is enough to get you into heaven. You don't need these priests. Or Sula Scriptura, which was scripture alone. So you can have a direct relationship with God by studying the Bible yourself in your own language. And so that's why I think it's important not to dismiss the power of this and to also look at what's alive today in the Bitcoin community.

And so we have, you know, viz enumeries, which is strength in numbers. There is don't trust verify. So it's like really emphasizing that self-sovereignty, the autonomy, there's Haudel, there's not your keys, not your Bitcoin. So all these memes are making it very clear to even newcomers what this is all about, right? It's about claiming your own individual sovereignty. And I think that's really powerful and it's working. It's interesting.

One of the ones that I, you know, I obviously think about narratives and memes a lot. And I think one thing that Bitcoin does is it's constantly testing new memes, right? It's trying to see, and this I think is not a, or it shouldn't be mistaken as a casting around for new narratives so much as trying to help simplify people's understanding on the basis of connecting with a wider world and a context of a wider world. So by way of example, one that has been coming up more recently for the last couple of months is this sort of fix the money, fix the world idea. You're seeing that a lot. Marty Bent is a big proponent of this meme. And like all memes, like all of these slogans, it's obviously radically oversimplified. But it really locates very quickly the stakes that the Bitcoiners who are using that are trying to bring to the conversation about economics.

And that's very different than the stakes of a lot of other folks, you know. And so if you're someone who's outside the community and trying to identify what it's about, you have very quickly, just if you've heard that a, maybe you don't buy it yet, right? you're going to have to convince me that if we fix the money, we fix the world. But at least all of a sudden we're having a very different conversation than, you know, payments technology or something like that. Yeah. And I think it's no coincidence that a lot of the, you know, shit coins and scam coins never really came up with memes that went very far that really were very sticky. Like it's more like a corporate slogan that's a bit hollow.

And of course, knowing myself, I can't drop the chance to, take a stab at Ethereum and making the claim that Bweedle wasn't the greatest meme. I don't know if you agree, but I don't know. I just think it's interesting. It doesn't mean that we're right, right? It doesn't mean that Bitcoiners are right because we have better memes. But at least it's a data point. It's something to think about.

It's like, why is it that Bitcoiners' memes are so much more sticky than some of these altcoins? I think there's a bunch of reasons for that. But I think that a lot of it has to do with the settling. in of sort of narrative market fit in some ways for Bitcoin or just kind of a, you know, I think one thing that it makes it interesting is that you are, you are not required to buy any of this we're talking about on this podcast or any other podcasts to be interested in holding it, right? It can be schmuck insurance for you like it is for someone like Chamath, you know. It's one of the things that makes it great. But it does have a home team, I'd almost describe,

that have this sort of shared set of kind of ways of seeing the world that are kind of highly resonant and I think particularly contextual for now. And I think that good memes emanate from real solid foundations, right? You can't kind of just have a marketing meeting and come up with them. It has to be from something. And so, you know, it's hard if there's not that clarity of what a project is trying to accomplish in some way. So I think inevitably all of the, especially kind of like a young coin that just

pops up. It's like you're not going to have, you don't have sufficient narrative power to memeify that, you know? What you have is it's fine to have slogans. It's fine to have marketing if you're trying to capture market share and interest, but that's different. Yeah, and it's hard to come up with a meme that doesn't already apply to Bitcoin, which again shows how strong that network effect is. Like, it kind of like sucks the entire narrative towards it because because it is a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, we can do all these things on the Bitcoin platform. And so you're kind of, if you have a new coin, you're kind of forced to to try and stay out of Bitcoin's orbit by having a new narrative. But really, yeah, it's really the question like,

what is that going to be? Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see, well, to the extent that this sort of surge or recent reemergence or resurge around defy is sticky. It'll be interesting to see if memes come out of that. I actually said on Twitter the other day, which did not get a lot of likes, but it was either because people didn't like it or because it was like 6.30 in the morning, either or possible. But I was like, you know, listen, you guys should try to reclaim financial engineering, you know?

That was a term that has become an absolute four-letter dirty word, you know, when it comes to Wall Street, but only because they're trying to be proper. And a lot of the folks there are absolutely obsessed with, you know, really novel, interesting financial engineering. Maybe you can call it permissionless financial engineering or something. But like I said, that did not get resonance. And maybe that's me just not getting it, but, you know.

It could be that it's just not the time yet, right? Maybe it needs another five years. Well, that's, I mean, that's, I think one of the things, one of the problems when, so I actually think, again, a little tangential, but my argument about Defy has been for a while that I think the folks who are most committed to and excited about it should be absolutely thrilled that it has been able to develop outside of the context of big flows of capital from people who don't get it and are just there for the speculation game. Because what it's giving it is space to become whatever it's going to become, whether that's something or nothing or some possibility in

between without the kind of, I mean, any idea of merit that had any sort of token around it in 2017, 2018 has just been burned into the ground, right, by the way that ICOs and tokens happened. And Defi so far hasn't suffered that. I think I'm always skeptical when people are really pushing for sort of mainstreaming of this, because these are incredibly complex, again, financially engineered instruments that could produce some really fascinating things. But right now, it's a playground for people who mostly know the risks and aren't going to screw their lives up because of it.

And that's, you know, to the extent that there's going to be a real real there, if I'm them, I want to fight away the outside hordes for as long as I can while that becomes real, you know? Well, it also raises the question of like, you know, how much of this stuff do you really need to try out with real money? And like, to what extent can't you just work on kind of, you know, a bit more of the Bitcoin tradition where you just test, test, test, test very regular? vigorously in a test-net environment, I just feel like it often speaks to the motivation.

Like, it kind of reveals the motivation of the founders. Like, are you trying to build something for the long term? Are you trying to make money right now? And I think the one excludes often the other. So, yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see definitely, you know, if things go wrong, the forensics are going to be really interesting to see. Okay, so let's round out this kind of historical analogy. So two parts, and maybe you can take this however you want, but one, the kind of last part about the Reformation argument or analogy was

the financial economy during a Reformation and some parallels you saw there in terms of deposit banking, enterprise insurance, liquid collateral, access to capital. So we can talk about that and that would be great. But then also, I know you've been looking more into this sort of period around the French revolution. And I'd love to see what, you know, you haven't fully crystallized those ideas, but what is the inspiration you've been drawing from that moment in history? Yeah. So, this is like going back 10 years ago. I read this little book by Alfred Dixon White. He's the, I think he's the co-founder of Yale University. Let me actually look it up real quick. Oh, no, Cornell. He's the Andrew Dixon White. He's the founder of Cornell.

University. So he wrote this little book in 1915 called Fiat Money Inflation in France. And it's this interesting take on the French Revolution where he really focuses on the monetary policy and the political debate around the debt situation of the time and so on. And so I wrote this article in Dutch 10 years ago, which was called the most important history lesson you were never taught. And it was basically about how if governments accumulate debt to a level where it's unsustainable, eventually that can lead to hyperinflation. And so back then I thought it was scary, but now I'm even more scared because the analogies are just, I think, piling up. Like not only is there this multi-decade history of the debt ramping up.

And also that being done in what's considered to be a very robust political system. Like France was a powerful nation. France was very reputable all, you know, among Europe and was considered to be very credit worthy. But so that was true until it wasn't. And then the French Revolution was just this incredible part of my French, but show. It was just, you know, horrible. And that's what scares me, looking at, you know, looking at the U.S. There's also these examples of, for example, the Minister of Finance, Mr. Necker,

he was well connected in the financial circles of the 18th century, and he wrote this report on the financials of the French government. And he was basically saying that everything was great and that France was very creditworthy. And based on that, he was able to raise more and more debt from emperors across Europe. But of course, eventually, you know, they called them bluff. And one of the other things that really strikes me as a parallel is just that this transition from initially when the ID comes to print money to solve a crisis, initially there's a lot of debate about it and there's a lot of politicians that don't agree with it and that are saying this is scandalous and horrible. So that also happened in France in the 1780s. But then that changed to eventually it was not about should we bailout.

It was just about how much and how quickly. And that is what I see is the difference between the 2008 debates about the bailouts, which was a lot of people were actually against bailouts altogether versus today. There wasn't even a question about whether to bail out. It was just a matter of like how quickly and how much. And so that, you know, I can read you a little passage if you want from the book that kind of shows this. Yeah, absolutely. So here's the first one.

So the first result of this issue was apparently all that the most sanguine could desire. The treasury was at once greatly relieved. A portion of the public debt was paid. Creditors were encouraged. Credit revived. ordinary expenses were met and a considerable part of this paper money, having thus been passed from the government into the hands of the people, trade increased and all difficulties seemed to vanish. So that's basically the 1780s, the first issuance of the asinias, which a lot of people don't know, but they were actually government bonds initially. They were not this paper money from day one.

They were really government bonds. And so then they kind of resolved this crisis, but then quickly there were new problems coming up. And there was a call just for more bailouts. And let's see if there's another quote here. Yeah, for example, like one of the main politicians who was very famous back then was Count Mirabou. And so, for example, in Congress, he said, you know, the second time around, he's like, we must accomplish what we have begun. And he said that we need another large issue of paper and that it's going to be guaranteed by the national lands of the church that we confiscated.

by the good faith of the French nation. And he was known to be a hawk before. He was known to be extremely skeptical of money printing, but they just turn 180. And I feel like literally the same thing. Like there's the same people who were against the bailouts in 2008 are now just clamoring for another trillion and another trillion. And that is just really scary to me.

It's scary. And I'm not saying hyperinflation will happen, but I think it's a significant risk. And it's weirdly something that will happen in the countries that are often the strongest. Like Germany in the 20s was actually, sorry, in the 1910s was actually considered to be very credit worthy and a strong economy. And that's part of why they just went so far. They just have this delusion that they can get away with it. And that's often what's so dangerous.

So that's my worry about the United States is that among, you know, Capitol Hill, politics. There's this delusion that they can get away with anything forever. Well, and I think it's exacerbated by this sort of there is no alternative argument. And I'm interested in your take on this. You know, the folks who are not worried about this are, or will either point to the idea that if you own your own debt, it's different, or they'll point to the fact that the system is so entwined with, with U.S. dollars at the center of it, that it just, there's incredible sort of deflationary pressure combating this. I mean, how do you see these other, you know, we've seen this story play out where

we print a ton of money and we see the money supply go up and nothing happens. What's your take on those countervailing pressures? Do you think it's the same sort of thing where it works until it doesn't, or is it more complex than that? Yeah, it's exactly that. It works until it doesn't. You know, it's kind of like with bankrupt. Like it happens extremely slowly and then all at once. So those are all just different ways to say the same thing. And of course, it's important to keep in mind that it's not like these money printing ventures have had no effect on the economy. I mean, we've seen one bubble after the other in the 20th century.

And now arguably we've been in the everything bubble, like at least before it was somehow identifiable where there was the dot-com. bubble and the real estate bubble, whereas now it's like everything was bubbling, including bonds and stocks and all the financial markets were bubbling up, which is why the wealthy are getting so much wealthier. But then if you look at just a very simple living expenses, to you look at living expenses and regular cities in the U.S., the past five years, they've gone up with 10% every year. That's just verifiable. If you calculate the CPI inflation, which is consumer price index inflation, if you use the older methods that the government's used to use in the 80s, because right now it's very opaque.

We don't know what the government is using to calculate their own inflation. And there's a huge incentive to underreport inflation, of course. But if you look at shadowstats.com, for example, they also are seeing 10% inflation is basically what they're seeing in consumer price products. annually. So that's, you know, think about it, like 10% inflation. It means that if you earn the same wage for five years in a row, by the time you hit year five, you're probably talking about, I would have to calculate, but maybe like 35% lower inflation corrected wages. So that's really not nothing at all, or pensioners that have a fixed pension or, you know, you name it. So if the official inflation is underreported by 7%, that's a massive, has massive impact on the economy. And so to me,

I'm more talking about, I think we'll jump from 10% to 50. If you do 10% 10 years in a row and then you jump to 50, that's not surprising to me. But a lot of people think that we've been at one or two or three percent inflation. And so they think it's crazy to that all of a sudden we might have 50%. Well, and I think, too, that it's important that you bring up like how we calculate these things and then how we sort of spin the narrative of them matters too, right? I mean, we're in a context where undeniably, labor share of capital is lower than it's been ever, you know, and has been sustained there for a long time. And for 20 years, Buffett, for example, was warning about this and said he didn't think it was sustainable. And, you know, it's almost like throw a dartboard at your pick of where people's real lives are impacted, right? Screw the sort of officially reported consumer price index. We come back to where we started with this sense of something being fundamentally often people getting farther and farther behind. And you have economists on the right, left, and center who come to the same sort of place with it, even if they have completely different

remediation for it. So I think it's a really salient point. But I guess maybe to, by way of kind of wrapping up on a theoretically optimistic note, you had a tweet a little while ago that said that the baby that posited that will, could the millennials in spite of themselves, in spite of our participation trophies and whatever other critique gets loved at us, end up the next greatest generation. And basically what you point to is this series of crashes and sort of rough experiences we've lived through. So a 2001 crash, 2008 crash, a 2020 crash and depression.

And then you said next, inflation, social unrest, et cetera. What do you think? I mean, if we make it through this, or could we actually come out stronger? Yeah, or definitely Generation Z, right? Maybe it's too late for us. At least we can, you know, we can we can support them. And maybe we'll have like, you know, our shield with the banner of the avocado toast that's going to be like, you know, our defiant signal to the others.

I don't know. I mean, so, but I do think like hardship does make people think. And it makes people question paradigms that they've been spoon fed since they were born. And so if anything, I really do think our generation and has been challenged in many ways. Like right now, I'm surprised, for example, at the extent to which higher education is being challenged today. Like, I always thought I was going to be forever marginalized with my, like, grumblings and misgivings about the university systems. But, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of discussion about that now. And I mean, people talk about, not that I'm advocating for that, but like just who could have thought five years ago that there'll be this popular slogan to defund the police.

It's like, what? Like, what kind of world are we living in that so many things are being questioned? So I think that in the short run that that means, I think a lot of people are not very well emotionally regulated. Like they kind of have trouble staying calm and reasonable. And so I think that means that we will see more. more unrest and more chaos in the next five to ten years. But I do think in the long run, it will, and it won't be equally around the world, but there will be places where significant changes and paradigm shifts happen

and where it'll be incredibly exciting to live and to just see that a lot of ideas that are extremely marginal for most of our lives, even until today, we'll find like a new forum and a new audience. and maybe we'll just become part of the curriculum. Like, it might not even be the same universities. Maybe we'll have a new generation of educational institutions or teachers, and then these new things can be taught, or we can revive some old ideas that were actually pretty good that got dusted under.

That is kind of the big picture that makes me excited to think that, you know, intellectual work today may actually be extremely rewarding because, you know, we're now in the seven meager years and there might be a couple decades of very fat and fertile intellectual decades ahead. Well, that is a perfect note to end on. I could spend all day talking about historical analogies and stuff, but I think that's a really great capstone to the conversation. Ter, thanks so much for hanging out today.

We'll definitely have to do this again as we reveal more about the own history that we're living through. Yeah, let's go prep or avocado toast. All right. My appetite. Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. I said in the intro that I really believe that the key theme of this conversation is the idea that monopolies always sow the seeds of their own destruction. And I think that that's true. I think that we've seen it play out over and over again. Whenever power gets calcified, and instead of trying to innovate and improve the lives of people who interact with it, and instead tries to suppress people who would dissent from it, it sows the seeds of revolution and foment that eventually turn it over and create something new. This plays out in both political and business cycles,

and obviously it doesn't take a savant to see that we're living through a radical moment right now. What's less clear is which of the alternatives being presented right now, and there are some radically different alternatives being presented right now, will actually fit this moment in the right way. This really is, I think, one of the most interesting and important questions of our time. But with that, guys, I will close for now. Thanks as always for listening. And until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other.

Peace.