The Wolf Of All Streets - Nathaniel Whittemore, Host of The Breakdown on Working in Conflict Zones, American Exceptionalism, The Power of The Dollar, The Case For Hyperbitcoinization and Mainstream Crypto Adoption and More,

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Nathaniel Whittemore, host of The Breakdown and lead of NLW&CO and Scott Melker discuss traveling and working in conflict zones around the world and lessons learned, the idea of American Exceptionalism and its effects on other cultures, hyperinflation in Lebanon and its effect on Bitcoin, the incredible strength of the dollar, Warren Buffett's take on the markets, the path to hyperbitcoinization, working at home through the global pandemic, creating content on a large scale, money printing and UBI and much more. --- ROUNDLYX RoundlyX allows you to dollar-cost-average into crypto with our spare change "Roundup" investing tool, manage multiple crypto exchange accounts in one dashboard and access curated digital asset content and services. Visit RoundlyX and use promo code "WOLF" to learn more about accumulating your favorite digital assets when making everyday purchases and earn $4 in free Bitcoin. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everybody? This is your host, Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Every week, I'm talking to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, and basically anyone else with an interesting story to tell. So sit down, strap in, and get ready, because we're going deep. Let's go. I'd like to thank my sponsors, Round the X and Voyager, for making today's episode possible. We'll hear much more about them later on in the episode. This podcast is powered by BlockWorks Group, the only events and podcast production company I trust. For access to the premier digital asset conferences and in-depth podcast content, visit them at blockworksgroup.io.

I promise you will not be disappointed. This is not the first time that I've spoken publicly with today's guest. I was fortunate to be on his podcast only a few short weeks ago, and it was one of my favorite recorded conversations that I've ever participated in. It was obviously a must that I return the favor and bring him onto the show. Every time you and I chat, whether publicly or privately, it seems to be more of a brainstorming session than an interview. So I'm excited to see where our conversation leads us today. I'm pumped to welcome Nathaniel Whittemore, host of The

Breakdown to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here, man. Hey, thanks so much for having me. So you have a really, really crazy background that I wasn't aware of. And I've never heard you really discuss it in previous interviews. You spent your early 20s traveling and working between conflict zones all over the world. Why did you choose such a dangerous path? Well, so it's interesting. So when I went to school, I was in college just after September 11th. So I was a senior when September 11th happened, went to school the next year. And September 11th was a pretty defining moment for people who are around that. I mean, for everyone, but for people who are around that, I mean, for everyone, but for people

who are around that age at that time, most of our like formative years were spent during the 90s. And the 90s was presented from a narrative perspective in America as like, well, the Cold War was over, we won, capitalism won, everything was great. In point of fact, the 90s was the most deadly decade since the 40s, right, since World War II. Because when you have a 40-year cold struggle, and one of those powers suddenly evaporates, there are enormous. And I was kind of shocked out of this idea of the rest of the world being someplace else and America being kind of distinct unto itself by that event. And so, a lot of my time as an undergrad was spent trying to reconcile those two things. And I had thought for a while that I was interested in doing conflict resolution or post-conflict stuff, particularly in the Middle East. I'd always been interested in the Middle East.

I thought I was going to go work in Israel and Palestine forever. And so I studied abroad in Cairo. And I chose Cairo both because I was interested in Egypt and had been since I was a little kid. And I saw these slides of my parents and my grandparents who had visited in 1987. That was part of it. But the other part of it was that it was the only program that I could do where it was just being enrolled in the university there. So like most study abroad programs that kids do around the world, particularly in places that are a little off the beaten path, i.e. like not Europe or Australia or something like that, are very highly programmed. It's like

week one, you go to this place for one day and you do whatever, right? And I've never been that type of person. I've never wanted that level of control around anything in my life. And so Cairo, it's like you literally, you roll up, you choose whether you're going to live in the dorms or not, and that's it. Everything else is like being enrolled as a, as you would in a college. And, um, so I got to Cairo, uh, there are about 400 kids studying there and everyone was split evenly into, there were two groups of people. There were like the save the world kids. And there were the future CIA operatives who are there to study their enemy, uh, kids. And, um, and, uh, and it was just, I mean, it's awesome. It was an unbelievable place. Like

when you are, it's so immensely older than anything we have here. And even in Europe, right? Like when you go to Europe, after you've been in the U S like it's, it's like funny, it's like the further East you go, if you, you know, if you're from the West coast, then you go to Boston, you're like, wow, stuff here is really old. And then you go to, you know, Paris, you're like, wow, stuff here is really old. And then you go to Cairo and you have, you know, a thousand year old mosque looking out across, you know, past a KFC to the pyramids. It's just this incredible study in contrast. And so, I loved Cairo, basically moved out of the dorms within a week. And we bought a, we got, we started renting an apartment, a bunch of us there and got hooked. And so that was kind of a jumping off point for me with a lot of different things. And so I got back from Cairo and I really wanted to,

I had this sense that there were a lot of people who were trying to go out and make a difference in the world, but having a hard time with it. Right. So go out and make a difference in the world, but having a hard time with it, right? So when I had been in Cairo, I started working with Sudanese refugees. So like I said, this was 2004. So it actually, you know, the Darfur crisis was happening, and it had been happening for about a year and a half at that point, or the kind of the part that we were recognizing. But there had been Sudanese refugees coming in from the southern border in Egypt for longer than that. And Sudanese refugees in Cairo are basically, or at that time, they were in a total no man's land, right? They could get out of Sudan into Cairo, but then they were just stuck

in the staging area for years and years and years, right? An indeterminate amount of time. Almost no one got actually placed anywhere. And so, this church was one of the random places that actually had programs there. And so, a bunch of us decided to start volunteering and seeing if we liked it. And it was an amazing experience because I think about one of the things, and this will be a common theme and is probably the most dominant thing that I got from everywhere I visited and traveled, is that human resilience is so massively more than we contemplate. And I think actually, even like, you know, we have seen that in small ways through these COVID shutdowns and the way that people have responded in certain cases and the way that communities have rallied. But in that context,

seeing people, I mean, literally, we would have lines around the block for 10 minutes of quick tutoring, right? Like literally, people would wait for hours to get like 10 to 15 minutes to re-up their language because language skills are an incredibly important part of that replacement process. They're also an important part of like, you basically can't work if you're Sudanese in Egypt. But if you're going to get any kind of informal employment, that's a really important piece. And like you see people who are willing to line up for hours to just have a shot at a better life for them and their families is very, very inspiring. But at the same time, like my feeling wasn't, oh, wow, I did such a good thing by sitting

there for two hours in between, like, you know, hanging out in my apartment and going on like Nile Felucca rides. I should get a pat on the back. It was more like the system that these people are in is so, so broken by nature that the only thing that's going to change it is actual at kind of this systemic level. And I felt like, and I was pretty sure that there were a lot of other folks who must feel like that. So I came back the next summer and I basically started a, I don't know,

an early kind of media project, I guess you would call it. Like I literally actually, so it was called just naive enough. That was the idea. And I basically found like 20 different people who were all going all around the world that summer who were staying with or actually working with local on the ground youth driven organizations trying to make a difference. And the whole idea, I mean, this is this is 2005. So like, we did not have like a big full internet infrastructure. I mean, literally, when I got to Cairo, and at this time, we still only had like a couple dozen schools on Facebook, it was not open, even to all colleges yet. And so, I actually, like, we set up some really

janky website that we kind of hacked together ourselves. At the time, there was this company called Odeo that was working on podcasting. And I emailed the CEO of Odeo, who's named Evan Williams, and asked if we could get some beta test codes and they let us in, which is random. I didn't even really kind of realize the Twitter context. I wouldn't join Twitter for like another three years. Odeo is the company that birthed Twitter, basically. And so we sent these 40 kids out around the world and had them kind of report back in about what they found. And for myself, I went between the

Balkans back to the Middle East and then into East Africa. And the story everywhere we went was exactly the same, which is that there is an entire generation raising their hand saying, we want to do something to make the world a better place and getting just totally blocked at every turn. And depending on where you were, the blockers were different, right? There were these youth organizations in the Balkans who were trying desperately to break centuries of cycles of violence from their parents' generation who couldn't get past local politics. You have American kids in Africa who are getting there and realizing that there's nothing useful that they can do, right? And there's these bigger, larger economic issues that they are part of a superstructure

that they can't change. And the frustrating thing is that all of these people, when they go look to their elders, right, to their mentors for advice on what to do next, at least in the case of Americans, the answer was, well, why don't you go get a degree in development studies, right? Go study more, go put more into this academic system

to only be frustrated again later. So that was enormously frustrating for me. The idea, like I said, that you have this entire generation raising their hand saying, we want to do something, we want to do it now. And in fact, we figured out how to get ourselves in places where theoretically we might be able to do something. And the answer to them is, well, go study more, right? And so you can get burnt out later, which is totally, totally insufficient. So anyways, this ended up with me doing a whole bunch of stuff. I started first an event that was trying to totally reimagine the way that youth engagement could happen. I spun that into a grant from my university to spend the next three years starting a program design center at my university.

I went to Northwestern. So I spent the first few years after school building this out. And the idea was to create programs that helped people figure out how to change the world in a very different way, total kind of departure from the way study abroad or volunteer abroad programs worked. And those programs ended up being the centerpiece student initiative of a center that later would get the biggest grant in Northwestern's history, $100 million grant from Bertie Buffett. So, that was kind of my formative time. And it's interesting because that process led me to meet Ben Retre, who was the founder of Change.org, when Change.org was just this tiny, I mean, it was literally Ben and a couple of engineers and an idea that the internet could be used for social

impact. And working with Ben, it pulled me out to San Francisco and I got sucked into tech. And for almost a decade, I was kind of fell down the tech rabbit hole. And it wasn't until I kind of, we decided to move back East, my wife and I, and I, and I stepped away from tech that I realized how fundamentally boring, uh, everything that I had been doing in Silicon Valley was after kind of falling away from, you know, from change, I got into education venture, which was interesting, but then I kind of got just further into normal consumer tech. And I actually got introduced to Bitcoin then, but it was super boring. It was presented to me as like payments, like Square or something, right? And it really wasn't until I fully escaped that and was reflecting on this origination for me and these pieces of myself that I had gotten

distracted from and recontextualized Bitcoin in some of those larger systemic questions. That's what triggered me to get back into it and pulled me all the way in. So it's a very long winded story. And I, you know, I actually have, I've been thinking a lot about how many different, how many lessons I learned from that time spent in those places that are far more instrumental to how I perceive the world than almost anything that I did in Silicon Valley. Do you think a large part of that is being an American? We obviously have a normalcy bias here. You touched on the 90s, right? Everybody thought that the 90s were such an amazing time in America because we were American and we don't really pay as much attention to the rest of the world or what's happening. It's one of those things where it's happening over there and it's not happening here. So it's basically not happening at all. Right. And so, you know, as an American, I think that we have this sort of

view that's been ingrained in us from our youth that greatest country on earth, the place everybody comes for freedom. And I don't think that we understand the impact of that thinking in our own policies on these foreign places. So is a lot of what you experienced in those places, do you think it was because of your American mentality that that was kind of shattered? Or do you think it was because of American policies and the way that, you know, foreign countries interact with America that it was so eye-opening for you? I don't know. It's really interesting. Like this question of American exceptionalism is a much harder one than it at first seems, right? You have a kind of easy dialectic between those who accept it blindly and those who want to reject it out of hand, right? Because if the people that are saying this are the people that I don't like,

it must not be true. And I do think that there is a lot that's exceptional about America and pretty fundamental. But I also don't think that that means necessarily that there isn't a lot that's exceptional about America and pretty fundamental. But I also don't think that that means necessarily that there isn't a lot to be learned from other places and a lot of critiques to be labeled as well, right? I don't think that the label of exceptional is a blanket pass to not continue to try to change, right? And that's the whole point of America is that it's not done. And so, thinking it's done just because it's exceptional, I think, is the mistake. But, you know, for me, when it comes to, when it was being in these places, I will say that being American gives you an absolutely

unique point of view, frankly. Like, that's not the right way to put it. It gives you unbelievably privileged access. And so, I'll use Israel and the Palestinian territories as an example. In Israel and Palestine, if you're there, everyone assumes that you're on their side, especially if you can speak Arabic, right? So, and I've been studying Arabic for three years. I'm terrible now, but I was decent then, right? I wasn't good, but I could have a little mini conversation. And so, if you're an American who speaks a little Arabic, your ability, and this, again, your ability was, it's different now. I haven't been there in a very long time, but I could kind of move unfettered between these two places, right? I could go through checkpoints and go back and forth. And if you're an American in Israel, it's like one of our strongest allies,

people are going to assume you're on their side. And if you go to the Palestinian territories, and you speak a little Arabic, like, well, what the hell are you doing here if you're not on their side, right? Like, at least to some extent. And I think that that like, was something that I was very aware that it was a privilege to be able to have and have so many people be willing to engage with me as though in sincere terms, right? And that was something that I was really conscientious about taking full advantage of just to learn. Did you ever find yourself in legitimate danger in those situations? Well, legitimate danger is a really hard, it's a counterfactual, right? So my answer is no. But the thing that you don't know is who doesn't like that you're there. So when I was in the Palestinian territories, we were spending a bunch of time with the, you know, civil society organizations, quote unquote, but there's a hell of a lot of overlap in, you know, when we were there in Ramallah and in some of these camps with civil society organizations and kind of, you know, jihadist groups. And there was a lot of talk about the martyrs, right? There's

big pictures of martyrs all around. And so, the people who we were there with were very invitational and very welcoming. And most of the people that we interacted with, though, but it's kind of like, it's not the people that you interact with, it's the people who aren't there. And there's a bunch of different situations like that before, right? Like, or in other places where I think that there's probably more danger around the edges. But I was also pretty conscientious to like, not overstay my welcome and to kind of, you know, be conscientious, listen, and then, and then get back to a, to a, to a better situation. So I, you know, I was never in a, I never experienced a really dangerous situation, but that doesn't mean that I didn't, you know,

there, there wasn't one that I didn't really realize was going on. Right. Much like you, I traveled a ton when I was young and I spent quite a lot of time in Israel. Actually, I was an archeology major at the University of Pennsylvania. So I spent my time doing digs. It was funny. I mean, I went to Israel as a child with my parents in the 1980s when it was the midst of the Intifada, like arguably the most dangerous time there. And back then we would just walk around in the Arab quarter. We went into the Dome of the Rock. I mean, places that years later, when it actually was much safer, you weren't allowed to go. So it was sort of interesting experiencing that as a child. As an adult, I went back to study Hebrew, actually at Hebrew University for a summer. And I was there for the biggest suicide bombing at the time in history at Machne Yehuda Market.

And not only was I there, like we had been sent to the market to do a Hebrew lesson. And, you know, like go order produce, find food in a foreign language. And we had left, you know, 20 minutes before, 10 minutes before, I don't know, we were around the corner and saw the explosions. And it was, you know, one of the famous ones where then the rescue workers went in and another explosion went off. And sort of touches on what you're saying, like Like I've always felt safe there, but that can be shattered very quickly. Well, and that's, I mean, I think that that's one of the things, again, I think the closer you get to places, the more I have a real, and you know, people probably sometimes see this through if they listen to my podcast or if they, uh, like watch me on Twitter, I have a very hard time with, um, with kind of stupid dogmatic

positions in, in the face of situations that are nuanced. And basically, almost everything is nuanced, right? And Twitter's not the medium for it. So, it's not like I go pick fights to like guard nuance or anything like that. But the closer you get to situations, the harder it is to easily lump them into things. And the bigger complexity that you find in how people are actually understanding things and living their lives. But I will say that terrorism is aptly named, and there's a reason that it commands such an outsized amount of attention relative to the people actually impacted by it. It really does create, like living in terror is one of the hardest things to do, like living in fear. I mean, you know, imagine, imagine like the little tiny pieces of it we felt, you know, if you've lived in cities, you know, in New York City,

where there's big outbreaks of Coronavirus, or if you're especially if you're older or something, like this, this fear of what might be out there looking this invisible thing, times that by, you know, people that you know, and really visual visceral pictures of what that fear looks like. Terrorism is hugely effective at eliciting the response that it wants, which is an outsized sense of the threat of a group that's committing it. So, we were lucky when I was mostly in Cairo, it had been the longest period without kind of any real violence for a very long time. But after I stopped going, there were a couple bombings in the Qaddafi Qalili, which is kind of the main market, the main tourist market that everyone loves.

And I mean, it's not just the tourist market. It starts with the tourist market, but it's this amazing, sprawling labyrinth where Naguib Mahfouz wrote, uh, Midan Ali and all these things, these books that are, you know, known. There's a, there's a cafe called Alpha Shawi. That's been continuously open for like 250 years. And by continuously open, I don't mean like, like it's been around for 250 years. I mean, like one or two exceptions, it's literally never closed. There has never been a time that you couldn't roll up to it and get, uh, get know, your, your coffee or your chai. So, but that, and it was right around there that this, this bombing happened. And that's scary to think about, you know, the number of times you

can picture yourself there. So it's, it really is the, well, I think this gets to another thing too, the, the veneer of the fragility, like on the one hand, one of the lessons is, like I said, the resilience of people. And I really believe that like the closer to hard, you know, challenging places or contexts you get, the more that you see people's resilience, but you also see the fragility of everything that we think is normal, right? And to your point, it can be a bombing, it can be your currency being just absolutely decimated, you know, 50% or 60% less valuable currency, if you live in Lebanon right now, then I was actually gonna ask you about that, because that was something I hadn't heard about at all until I saw you talking

about it. So it was interesting. So, you know, I only spent I only visited Lebanon a couple times. And it was Lebanon for for a long time was, I mean, it was in civil war, right? It was chaotic, but it had always been this kind of, you know, Beirut was the Paris of the, of that, of that region. Right. And it was very cosmopolitan. It was fashionable. It was like Lebanese. Like they think that their version of Arabic and a lot of people agree is like the prettiest, right? So like anytime we went anywhere, people were like, Oh, you're from Egypt, from Egypt, aren't you? Because they do a hard G sound instead of a J sound, right?

So there's all these things that like Lebanon really prides itself on culturally, right? And after the war finally ended, it had pegged its currency. And since 1997, it had been on this basically 1500 Lebanese pounds to the US dollar. And the reason it was able to maintain that was that it was a banking center for that whole region. So they could basically continuously bring in more money. The banking sector, I think, was something like 3x the rest of GDP. It's huge, huge. But over the last couple of years, because there has been increasing regional violence with what's happening in Syria, and because of just other larger kind of structural changes, the relationship with Saudi Arabia has been compromised in a big way. That money hasn't been coming in. And so the banking sector has been slipping, the peg has been

breaking. And this really started to crescendo last year. And so Lebanon, because it is a net importer, and by net importer, I mean like massively in every order, it exports almost nothing except this banking system and everything comes in. And when you're a net importer, and by net importer, I mean massively net importer, it exports almost nothing except this banking system and everything comes in. And when you're a net importer, the reason that this is so interesting to me is two parts. One is that I care about and I'm interested in the region. But two is there's a story here that is very relevant for the larger context of the world as it relates to the strength of the dollar. When you have to buy everything in dollars, when all of your debts are denominated in dollars, and all of a sudden, and then you sell everything in your local currency, if the value starts to get disparate, right? If the dollar is all of a sudden worth 25% more, that totally disrupts like what business in

Lebanon is running on 25% margins that can accommodate that different of a change, much less 50% or 60%, you know? The answer, of course, is none. And so, you started to see riots break out because petrol stations started to shut down last fall. And then coronavirus comes along and it gets worse because everything's shut down and banks are setting the rate. I mean, this is the classic story, right? The amount of money that you can take out, the exchange rate that you can take out, totally disparate from what the black markets, because all of a sudden the Lebanese pound is more like 2,800 or 2,600, 2,800, 3,000, up to all the way to 3,800 to the dollar, whereas the official exchange rate has remained unchanged at 1,500, although banks are allowing people to withdraw at a bank determined rate of something like 2650, I think the last that I read. And so this is just, this is what

it looks like when a currency fails, and there's no clear way out of it, right? Lebanon defaulted on a global international debt payment for the first time in history. And that was another thing that had kept it afloat is that it had such a good credit rating compared to, you know, other kind of similar economies. And so the reason that I wanted to talk about this was in addition to just kind of that general, I think that this, the dollar strength story and the kind of currency story is so important to the world right now, is that I saw there was a report that on local Bitcoins, Bitcoin was trading at like 2x, right? It was when Bitcoin was like 7,500 and it was trading for 15,000.

And so I was like, there's no way. Every time this is a story anywhere in the world, it's a currency conversion error. Every single time. Every time I see that headline, I'm like, no, it's not. And let me go figure out what it is. And it turned out that it was actually a much more interesting story, which is that the official exchange rate still said 1500, but it was trading at double that on

the black market. So that's how you get double the price is that the actual value to Lebanese who are dealing with their currency is, you know, the value of the Lebanese pound is half what it was, ergo Bitcoin is twice as much, which doesn't mean that it's not an interesting story. The idea that people in any of these conflict zones are using, whether it's Bitcoin or Tether or some other stable coin to escape a local currency regime that's in free fall is, I think, one of the most important stories and one of the most important narratives for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrencies more broadly. But we do ourselves a disservice when we tell the clickbait story because it gets around the actual interesting thing.

It makes it just seem like a stupid aberration, which it wasn't. Well, I mean, we've been seeing it in Venezuela for years. You know, that's a country where people literally survive on $50 to $100 worth of Bitcoin, you know, a month if they can get it. I actually read recently that now the price of eggs, because obviously price fixing, as you said, is higher than the average monthly wage. Yeah. Which, I mean, it's just absurd. So, I mean, obviously we have these spots all over the world

where we can see the Bitcoin use case playing out, but let's talk about if that could happen on a grander scale. What are your thoughts on, you touched on the dollar strength, obviously, but the Bitcoin maximalist theory has always been that the dollar hyper inflates, it fails, and here we are with our beloved Bitcoin. RoundlyX.com is one of my favorite companies in the entire crypto space. What they do is they take all your small purchases and they round them up to the nearest dollar and invest that money into any of 25 crypto assets of your choice. They integrate with your favorite exchanges so that you can round up into different assets all at the same time. And they do this all without ever holding any of your Bitcoin.

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let's actually go to a complete opposite reference point from currency crisis in Lebanon. Let's talk about Buffett on Saturday night. Buffett was talking about central bank action. And now Buffett is as in this, Buffett is the fucking system, excuse me, but like he is the system to a huge degree. And so he supports, he, you know, he was lauding Powell for, for this aggressive action. Right. And, and hold inside, whatever you think about that, he was kind of talking a little bit later about the Fed action going on more broadly. And he called it the most interesting economic experiment we'd ever seen. Basically, how much we can print without creating inflation, how much we can borrow against ourselves without creating inflation. He even said the trick is to borrow in your own currency.

And we are testing this thesis that you can just do this unlimitedly but the crazy thing is it's like and and we've been doing a a basically a mini podcast series on this in conjunction with um consensus distributed coindesks event which is happening next week about the battle for the future of money and uh and it's crazy because you start to dig into this and it's like well what the hell else are people going to move into? Right? Like, are they going to move over into the yen? No, Japan, the Bank of Japan pioneered what we're doing right now. Right? Like, this has been their strategy forever. No one wants to move into the yen. Are we going to move into the euro? No, that's certainly the narrative that China wants. That's part of why they're pushing so hard on their digital currency. But right now, the preponderance, the absolute vast majority of that currency is used inside of China.

What's more, there was just a report that was presented to the CCP from an internal report that was reported later by Reuters, that confidence or kind of anti-Chinese sentiment is as high as it's ever been since Tiananmen because of the handling of the virus. The CCP has never been on more fragile ground. So you have this like, very fragile environment, right? Which is to say nothing of kind of Peter Zahan, who's an amazing figure. He's a geopolitical strategist. He wrote a book called Disunited Nations. He was on the podcast a couple weeks ago. His thesis is basically that America has been withdrawing from the world, the unipolar order that it created in the wake of the Cold War ever since the Cold War ended. And as that happens, we're going to see a return to,

you kind of have to have, to regionalism, right? to a multipolar world in which you actually are battling for the means of production. You're actually battling for who has food production. And in his estimation, the countries that are suited to do well in that world are not necessarily the ones you would expect. There are places that have, you know, strongly defensible borders and rich agricultural territory in between and easy water access and, you know, competent militaries, basically. And China ranks very low in his estimation on a lot of those pieces, particularly because it has a hard time feeding itself. So the point of all this is, is that you have on the one hand, the system, which is really

very difficult for the world, the system, which is really very difficult for the world, the dollar being the only thing. But on the other hand, you have nothing there to pick it up. And so I do think in that context, you're going to see a lot, a lot, a lot more people hedge into something like Bitcoin. It is going to seem progressively less crazy every month that goes by. But I don't think that you're going to see some immediate shift to a hyper-Bitcoinized world. I think that you're going to see, one, a lot of what we're seeing right now, which is a massive expansion of the kind of digital synthetic dollar space, right?

Getting theoretical exposure or kind of synthetic exposure to US dollars in places where you couldn't otherwise, so you can kind of maybe deal with your debts in them. And two, I think that you're going to see kind of a lot of experiments and high level posturing and discussions about what it would look like to replace the US dollar with some sort of synthetic basket of currencies, bank or Libra type thing that comes from central banks. I would say that I would be really shocked if you didn't see those conversations. The problem is America's not going to want that. They're not going to be interested in that. Why would you give up power with your currency as the strongest? But it's going to be weird. It's going to be really weird. And the cleanness of a path from

where we are now to some hyper Bitcoinized world is going to be very circumspect. But at the same time, it is hard to deny that we are loading ourselves up with impossible obligations that is going to create some reaper, some cost come due at some point. I just don't know if it looks exactly like how everyone thinks it looks. It's interesting that you touched on Buffett, obviously, and he was definitely applauding the efforts of the Fed, but he's still in cash. So what does that really say to you? Well, I mean, that's the reason I actually liked is in the right word. I appreciated Buffett's posture. I appreciate the fact he's one of the only people that I think we've seen of influence basically do the closest thing he could to throwing up his hands and saying,

I have no goddamn idea. And no one else does either. Someone to admit it. Yeah. Like, like it really like no one else admits it. Everyone else is still talking about like V-shaped recoveries. And like,

we just have no idea. Like the way that these things are interacting with part of what makes markets such a, a fickle and fascinating mistress is that just when you think you have every input, right. And you've plugged it all into your, your algorithmic calculator of what's going to happen next or your narrative calculator, what's going to happen next. Something else happens. It's totally different than you totally didn't expect. And it's a butterfly effect that changes everything. Right. And so like the podcast that I did today actually

was, uh, basically I called it, um, uh it like taking stock of the carnage or something like that. And I was going through kind of industry by industry to look at where things are. And some things are playing out exactly like what you expect in the, you know, for example, in the, you know, hospitality that travel, the tourism industry, the airlines, cruises. Yeah, they're absolutely destroyed. Right. Whereas in the residential real estate market, prices are still higher, right? Like it's, and so you're like, what the, and they're actually like sensible reasons,

but it feels like something they can't hold. So I think- 7% increase this week in mortgage applications. So that means people are buying. Yeah, well, and you know, the, yeah, it's really fascinating. And, and, you know, the, yeah, it's, it's, it's really fascinating. And, and I think, you know, I don't know what, I don't know what it looks like when this bubble pops, but every time the, the wind doesn't come out of the system at all, it, it, some people are

going to feel more convinced that it can never, And another set of people are going to be more nervous about when it finally does and what that looks like. I think there's just a general awareness of what hyperinflation could look like or what actually not being able to trust your government could look like more so than ever in my lifetime, certainly, at least in the United States and our government. So whether it's bullish for Bitcoin or digital currency or digital assets in general, I do think that there's been this sort of grand awakening in the past few months because of COVID and whether COVID was just the straw that broke the camel's back or is actually the reason, it doesn't matter. I think it's just that we're starting to see real cracks in the foundation of

people's trust in the legacy systems. Yeah. Oh, listen, to be very clear, just because I don't think that we're headed, you know, in the next in the next noble term into some hyper Bitcoinized moment does not mean I don't think this is an incredibly strong moment for Bitcoin in particular cryptocurrencies more broadly to People, to your point, I think they are casting around in an aggressive way for what the hell is the alternative. And it makes actually the contrast with MMT even more interesting because you're seeing, there's going to be some set of people whose lesson from this is like, screw it.

Why do we have taxes? Why do people pay rent? Why can't we just take care of everyone, right? And I mean, Jesus, we had a congresswoman yesterday saying cancel rent and mortgages, right? Like what terms? I mean, whatever, it's on Twitter. It's meant to just get us all screaming.

But it worked because there's like, I don't know about you, but I have a bunch of, so we had this interesting moment a couple of weeks ago or a week ago where we have a group of friends where one of them is this, the quintessential classic small business hustler.

She has a fashion showroom, right? Where she sells indie designers into big stores. She built on that to have like kind of a bunch of different little mini lines herself that she helped kind of start with designers that she really liked. She put more money into it. She started this cool kind of curation store that had a face in downtown LA. And so, basically, all of those things just absolutely destroyed by this, right? Like the thing in LA shut down. No one's thinking about fashion, right? I mean, it just couldn't be worse.

Like every dimension. There's a person whose resilience came from the fact that they had multiple revenue streams. We're building that sort of environment. But when they all get flattened all at once, it's really challenging. And she was kind of lamenting to a different part of our group of friends who are in New York City that she had to pay rent and it was expensive and she couldn't, and they were just like, well, just stop paying rent. And she was like, well, I mean, that's not really how like business works. You know, I like signed this obligation and

they're like, yeah, yeah, but they can't possibly expect you to pay rent. Like you're a business, it can't possibly be legal for them to charge you rent. And it was just this like, she literally just stopped responding to the group and was like, I can't even have this conversation because there's this schism, right? Between, there's this increasingly very popular narrative that everything can just be provided, right? And honestly, frankly, like when you see what handouts we're giving to big corporations, like why the hell wouldn't you think like that? So I don't know.

It's going to be this, I guess going back to your point though, in either case, and this is where optimism comes from, there's some people who are going to be dyed in the wool on kind of like that way of thinking. I think far more is to your point, people asking questions. And so what our question becomes is, well, who can be there having a different conversation about the real roots of inequality in the system and what it would look like to design a better, you know, more just capitalism, right? And all these sort of things. Like, there are ways to talk to even the people who are going

to respond instinctively and emotionally to a cancel all rent argument with a different kind of rational structure. And I think that all of those conversations, to the extent that we have them, are a net inflow of energy into the space, energy into cryptocurrencies and in Bitcoin in particular. I mean, Bitcoin fixes this is obviously sort of the ongoing meme of the space and has been for years. But you touched on earlier, and I'd like to go back to it, that what brought you back to sort of the traveling and the conflict zone and all of those projects that you had been interested in earlier was Bitcoin. And we kind of

brushed over that, but I'd like to hear how you personally understanding and getting to know what Bitcoin was about kind of drove those future initiatives for you. One of the things that you'll hear a lot when Bitcoiners talk about a place like Venezuela, because it became almost a meme in and of itself at some point last year and the year before, is like, well, you're way overstating this. And there's not that many, but most people can't even use this thing, right? Like, come on. And there's a ton of legitimacy to that point, right? It is massively difficult to use. You have to be technologically enfranchised, yada, yada, yada. But the fact that there is for some small portion of people who are technologically savvy enough to actually do this and figure it out how to do it,

there is an escape valve from that system that they would otherwise be completely trapped in, right? It's kind of like it is a digital monetary equivalent to fleeing across a border, but you don't necessarily have to flee across a border. That is an optionality, a freedom that didn't exist even when I was traipsing around these places, right? Traipsing around the Middle East and in East Africa. You were stuck with the money system you had, period, full stop, with the exception of basically black market dollars. And so, the idea that there is this global permissionless escape valve on unjust monetary regimes that people find themselves in is unbelievably powerful, even if it just touches

a fraction of people right now. So, that's what brought me back into it. The fact that I could think about so many people that I had spent time with who having this ability to have their assets not seized, right? Again, it's not that it's going to change the superstructure that they're living within. Everything ultimately is politics and power and economics on a level that is supremely bigger than just where does my little money go? But man, do you remember the Disney, the classic Disney version of Robin Hood? Yeah, of course. So, I think that the saddest scene is all the little church mice have saved up like a farthing for this kid for his birthday. And the sheriff, who's this big bear,

comes waddling in with like this music, and he shakes out all of the people. He shakes out like the crippled guy to get that last farthing and takes it away as taxes, right? And that was the way that Disney presented injustice to us in the context of Robin Hood, in the context of the Middle Ages. And that doesn't happen with Bitcoin, right? And that sheriff is a lot of regimes around the world to this day. And it's going to be, unfortunately, a lot of regimes going forward, because if the world does get more rather than less chaotic, which I believe unfortunately that it will, if we do move away from kind of this global order into something that is a much more multipolar world, which I can't imagine how it won't, right? You're going

to see power vacuums happen and in power vacuums rush strong men and women and conflict and violence and authoritarianism and control. It is just the way the world works. It goes through periods of relative calm and then relative strife and chaos. And it's hard to imagine as we kind of dismantle this order that has been dictated primarily by an American security blanket for the last 40 years, that we're not going to see a lot of that. So having that start, having that painful process start with at least some valve to escape those inevitable systems is immensely powerful and a point of optimism in what I think is there's a lot of room for pessimism around. I agree with that. I just, I always kind of take the devil's advocate, not to be negative about it,

but as protected as you are, of course, when a strong man comes in, they take all of your assets, they seize the things that they can. If someone says to you, you're Bitcoin or you're life, what's your answer? Yeah. I mean, I don't think that you're wrong. I think that having this kind of base sense is not an excuse to then not take it farther and ask those types of questions. I think it's a starting point, right? I mean, getting to that specifically, that's a whole different conversation, I think. But my gut says that, I don't know, maybe the authoritarians of the future are going to be immensely good at capturing and seizing digital assets, and that's going to be a hallmark of a new generation. I think it's

more likely that they do what has happened before and they claim easy assets and they reprise legal terms. Yeah. So, I don't know. But I don't think it's an unreasonable devil's advocate position to have that. It's just, for me, that's part of an important set of questions that come after, I think, an acknowledgement of, of a different starting table stakes and the value in that. If that makes sense. So to pivot slightly, obviously we're all sitting around constantly. You and I both, I think, are somewhat content machines. To some degree, it's what we do and it's what we do all the time. But I mean, you put out a podcast. Is it daily? I mean, is that... How do you... And you have a newsletter and all these things.

How do you manage that, especially in the context of being at home and parenting and doing those things? Well, from a... I mean, from a lifestyle, we kind of set our life up to be pretty like quarantine already. I mean, there's like, you know, I worked from home and we kind of designed our life like this for forever. Also, we have an 18 month old, which is different because it's, we, it's, they are, they're still young. They're not old. She's not old enough to entertain herself per se, but she is old enough to do things and be engaged and engage herself even if you have to be around, but not old enough to need to have stupid school lessons and things like that, right? So, we didn't all of a sudden have the new added burden of a school schedule. a school schedule. So for, for, for you and for all the

other parents who are all of a sudden having to become teachers too, I, I feel a lot of, uh, a lot of sympathy and admiration. Luckily my daughter's still only five. So it's, I think we're in that crossroads in between where it would be like full on lesson plans, but we still do have to teach her something. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, so, so that's part of it. I mean, for, for mean, for me, I like producing content. I mean, it's something that I do. I do it for clients on top of the stuff that comes out publicly, right? I think just especially in these moments, content is the way that you engage with people and start conversations. I think actually for me in a lot of ways,

as weird as it sounds, I've always kind of felt like I was better suited to hard times than to easy times. And like these types of conversations are much more interesting and feel much more important to me than like the type of stuff we talk about when everything's going great. And it's not that I root for it because I don't in any way. I think that people have a real underappreciation for time for leisure and reflection and contemplation, even if I'm not the type of person who's well-suited to that. But I don't know. To your point before, people are actually having this type of conversation, right? There'll be some portion of people who turn on this podcast and are like, oh, well, you guys aren't really talking about crypto and I don't really care about Kyra, so I'm not going to listen. There's going to be a whole hell

of a lot of other people who are like, yeah, let's do this conversation. Let's actually dig into the Middle East and what that means and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, I guess when I get affirmation of that, it makes me want to do more, right? So the Lebanon podcast that I did last week, I've never had, I mean, in terms of like how many downloads it got, it's doing good, but not as great as like, you know, some of my higher kind of interviews. But I have had more people on that episode than any other episode I've ever done, DM me, email me, whatever, get in touch with me and say something to the effect of, I never would have thought that situation was A, interesting to me, or B, mattered to me.

And I listened and I felt like I learned something and it totally does. And it did matter to me. And that I think is, that's like fuel for so many more types of things, you know? Yeah. Have you found that, well, I mean, you somewhat answered it, obviously, there's more inspiration and more to talk about in this scenario, certainly. But have you found that your podcast and newsletter have grown as a result of this situation? Yeah, yeah. I mean, pretty significantly. I think, so when I, I always kind of had this intention of doing this broader, like for me, Bitcoin is a gateway to thinking about, for people, right?

For thinking about broader economic and power systems, right? It's a gateway for thinking about how the world is changing and how we want to exert agency over that process or how we want to try to claim agency over that process.

That's what gets me really interested in Bitcoin. When people come in the door of Bitcoin and then start learning about economic theory and start observing other areas of the economy, and they don't kind of limit themselves into this little corner of the world, they use what they learned in this corner of the world as the starting point to learn about everything else and try to incorporate that into their worldview. And so I always kind of wanted the podcast to be about the world, but with kind of a Bitcoin jumping off point or a Bitcoin lens. And when COVID hit, I just, I stopped, I didn't even think basically about like waiting to, waiting for some point to make that transition. I just started to, I just started to

have people on. Yeah. Like who, who, who I wanted to have on. I had you come on and we talked about, we talked about Bitcoin a little bit. We talked about markets, right? We talked about the larger kind of fragility of markets and why this was. And interestingly, I don't think at that time, either of us would have seen the bounce and response that this happened since then, actually looking back and thinking about what we spoke about. No, I mean, we hadn't, I mean, that was like, I don't know, six weeks ago, maybe or something like that. And yeah, I mean, what hadn't like, we hadn't had the Fed response yet. We'd had like these, we had a baby interest cut, right? I think at that time we'd had the first interest rate cut, which more or less just served to, actually, we hadn't even had that because it was, I remember, because it was the Friday after February 24th, I interviewed Caitlin Long. It was the first day

that the market reacted at all, which was just insane, right? Like that Monday was the first day that we saw any sort of bump down. Talk to you that. It was Thursday night, but we put it out on Friday. It was so early. And that was before FedAction. A week later, you had the emergency meeting. Or I guess maybe it was that weekend because it's February short. So it was that weekend. They had the emergency meeting on Sunday night. And the next day they announced a 50 basis point rate cut, right? And all of that served to do was to tell the market that this wasn't something that was just going to go away. So it scared the crap out of them more. And we kind of saw it sink further and further. So that's how long ago this was. This was way before,

you know, this was before Black Friday or Black Thursday with Bitcoin. It was before it crashed down. It was before the rip-up. And so, one of the things that was, I mean, it's interesting now how obvious the narrative, like the significance of the halving, this moment of a supply reduction happening at the same time as this massive stimulus is happening when it comes to fiat money and just proclamations of unlimited cash and infinite cash. It is so obvious now in retrospect that that is the narrative that is making sense to people or triggering people's interests. But literally, we were at the beginning of a three-week debate where we're talking about, is it still digital gold is it uh store of value or whatever right and um it's i mean i don't know it's it's it's one of those cliche quotes but uh you know the decades

there there are are years that can be minutes and or you know whatever like i forget the exact quote uh decades that happen in in in weeks you know right uh and we are definitely in a moment where we are living through decades in a matter of weeks. Yeah. What a time to be alive, as they say, right? You know, going back to helicopter money, it's funny, you were talking about canceling rent and all these things. And then obviously the Republican response was, why not cancel taxes, I think was the sort of joke that Ted Cruz made, which shows obviously how bipolar and irrational both sides are. But you touched on, I mean, when you see these corporate bailouts and you see what's happening, obviously, why pay rent? Why do any of these things? But I think you can even go deeper than that and look at the individual

when they're sending you money and you know they're saying hey listen we're gonna print money forever here's your first check you might get another one soon apply for this i mean why would anyone feel like they need to pay anything ever again i mean justin's son just received a two million dollar uh stimulus i you know i just don't see why i can't blame people as irrational as it is like for wanting their piece of it, I guess. No, I think it's a deeply human behavior. I mean, even like here's a contrarian opinion, but like Tron has an office in San Francisco, right? Like, of course they're going to apply for that one. Tron is an absolute goddamn vacuum. If there's money on the table, you can count

on that organization to, to scoop it up, which by the way, is a big notch in their cap for a lot of the people who are holding onto that token. Like we can debate that all the time and that's not necessarily what I'm kind of around here for, but that's just, I mean, it's very consistent, you know? And I think that it reinforces your point, which is like, of course, in these moments where once you open the floodgate, it's like, well, everyone wants to stand up to it, you know? Like what you're, you're basically asking people to stand on principle and turn away from resources, which is not something that's counter to people's interests. The problem is that the problem is not that people are going to respond to the incentive. The problem is the incentive. Yeah, that's true. And I just wonder how much more they'll be able to print when,

when Warren Buffett will buy and when those things will happen. But I guess that all remains to be seen in the coming weeks and months. I mean, I'm sure you share this sentiment with me that this ain't over. I mean, this has been a health crisis with an economic dimension forever. And we never, ever, ever, ever decided to actually address the health crisis with an economic dimension forever. And we never, ever, ever, ever decided to actually address the health crisis. And so, we're still here, like, you know, seven weeks or whatever after we talked. I don't think the thing has changed. I don't think the thing has changed.

Like, listen, if almost, you know, I remember uh, within a week of New York shutting down, Cuomo was already talking about how maybe if they had better information or they had been able to react earlier, like, or everyone had been able to react earlier, they wouldn't have had to have such an aggressive all out policy of everyone shut down, right. That it was heavy handed, but it was because it was, we were late to the party. Well, we never addressed the problems that made us late to the party in the first place, which is denialism about things, which is, I mean, more specifically,

is access to testing, right? And to processes for following up on that testing. Like we still haven't addressed these things. And so we're basically now opening up parts of the economy with no new information, nothing better, right? It wasn't that like the states that are opening up got a bunch of new studies and are like, oh, the infection rate's lower than we thought. They got bored. They got bored.

Yeah. It's just like, if you're going to do that, at least have the conviction to start with that policy from the beginning. It's so stupid. And the frustrating thing is that there are our big part well one uh we still very clearly have no idea what the hell this disease actually does to people because it is just you know every week uh there is new impacts it seems like it may you know we thought it was just going to be respiratory pre-existing respiratory conditions that was what people were worried about before now it seems much more likely that has to do with blood clot clotting and issues relating to obesity and diabetes. Like, like,

and from, from someone who like every person in my family who's died of not natural consequences has died of blood clotting and strokes. That makes me freak the hell out, you know? So, so there's, there's,

there's that whole dimension, but there's also like, if we, we are, I, I'm not saying I'm not kind of out here blanket arguing for just continuous shutdowns, because I don't think that's a sophisticated approach. But what we run the risk of, if we open up stupid, which is what seems to me to be happening, is that you'll have scenarios where some industries, the second time is even worse, right?

If you think it's going to be hard to get people to go back to concerts and movies now, wait till they've been told that it's safe again after being locked down and then outbreaks happening, you know? And maybe that won't happen. Maybe that'd be good. Like, fine. Like, if everything opens up and it's fine, great. Like, I would rather be wrong, you know, and eat crow. But it's, I just think that from the beginning, it's been a stupid policy in uninformed that wasn't willing to react to new information in any way and didn't want to address actual core problems. We have a very bad medical system when it comes to how laborious, cumbersome, bureaucratic, and stupid it is. But when it comes to actually care in person in terms of the training and quality of our nurses,

the quality of equipment in most places when we can get it, it's amazing. We could deal with this as a society if we did the very obvious things that we need to do, right? This doesn't have to be this all or nothing disruptive thing, but we're not willing to actually do what it takes and just get the fucking tests, man. Yeah. I mean, we've just kicked the can down the road and it's so frustrating to still be sitting here in my house, you know, eight weeks later and there's zero clarity on anything, but you know, that could be a entire podcast on its own, unfortunately. So I want to give people the opportunity to follow you and follow up with everything that you're doing after this. So

where can they find you? I am, I'm at NLW on basically every network ever invented, but Twitter's the one where I spend most of my time. Friendster? Yeah, probably. Actually, I definitely had a Friendster account, but I don't think I was NLW. It was probably like, probably like MEHC, SXC or something, main hardcore straight edge from when I was growing up. Oh, were you straight edge? I was straight edge in high school. X's on the hands and everything? X's on the hands, yeah. But it was like then it was in high school. So like, I'm not supposed to drink that. Nothing in high school counts. Yeah, exactly. Oh my God. I would hate for anyone to judge me. Uh, I've made a concerted effort to eliminate anyone who ever knew me in high school so that those stories will possibly

come out. I think we should all probably do that. Yeah. Well, thank you, man, so much. I really appreciate your time and look forward to us talking again. I think that things are going to develop one way or another, and there's going to be a lot to discuss. Listen, you know, the hard times make for strong people. And I do think, like I said before, I think that the resilience of the, even the average person is so much higher than they think. And the resilience of community is so much higher than they think. Like there's so much to be frustrated about right now, but I'm, I'm not down on things. I just think that we need to have a clear eyed understanding of where they are and what we do next. Well, your optimism is infectious. Hopefully it'll carry me through at least another day or two.

Thank you again, man. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. New episodes go live every Tuesday at 7am Eastern Standard Time. Links to our Apple and Spotify channels are in the show notes. You can also follow me on Twitter at Scott Melker to continue the conversation. See you next week.