We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC147: Fiat Ruins Everything w/ Bitcoin Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Bitcoin core developer and author Jimmy Song recently published a new book titled Fiat Ruins Everything. In this episode, Preston Pysh and Jimmy highlight some interesting perspectives on how the mone...y is not only changing the way businesses conduct themselves, but also how it’s impacting family values, culture, and relationships. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 02:59 - Why Jimmy doesn't need NFTs. 07:55 - How Alt-coins use Bitcoin to rent-seek. 12:04 - How fiat undermines work. 15:24 - How fiat ruins incentives for the individual. 46:39 - How fiat ruins incentives for the organization. 46:39 - How fiat has created the crazy VC environment. 57:14 - What is the Frankfurt School Conundrum? 01:01:52 - How fiat is impacting family values. 01:01:52 - How fiat is changing culture. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Jimmy Song's new book, Fiat Ruins Everything. Jimmy's book, Programming Bitcoin: Learn How to Program Bitcoin from Scratch. Related Episode: Listen to BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering with Bitcoin Core Developer, Jimmy Song, or watch the video. Related Episode: Listen to BTC050: Bitcoin Policy, Fundamentals, & Impact w/ CJ Wilson & Jimmy Song, or watch the video. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover Briggs & Riley American Express The Bitcoin Way Public Onramp USPS Simon & Schuster SimpleMining Vacasa Shopify AT&T iFlex Stretch Studios Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have back Bitcoin Core Developer and author Jimmy Song. Jimmy recently published a new book titled Fiat Ruins Everything. And as you'll see from this interview, he highlights some really interesting perspectives on how the money is not only changing the way businesses conduct themselves, but he also gets into how it's impacting family values, culture, and relationships. This is a chat you won't want to miss.
Starting point is 00:00:31 So with that, here's my interview with Jimmy. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here back with Jimmy's song again on the show. We are so excited to have you back, Jimmy. Thanks for having me again.
Starting point is 00:01:05 I think this is my third time being on your show, right, Preston? Yes, sir, it is. And I had the privilege of hanging out with you last week in Texas. You've got your new book. I'm going to put it up here for people that are watching the video. Yep. Fiat ruins everything. And it sure does.
Starting point is 00:01:24 And we're going to get into that. But before we get into it, there's something I want to start off with. So I see you last week and you're doing a book signing. And of course, I want to get a copy signed, which this one is. I'm going to show people this really neat and interesting people that are seeing the video. Here's what Jimmy wrote. And then you see that little QR code up in the corner of the book. And I said, you know, you handed me the book.
Starting point is 00:01:51 And I said, Jimmy, what is this QR code up in the corner of the book? And what did you tell me, Jimmy? Well, the QR code is a PGP signature that you can go download. It leads to a URL, my website, basically. And I wanted to sort of show my cryptography cred back when I wrote my first book, Programming Bitcoin. And the way I do it is not just physically signing the book, which I did for you and I do for anyone that asked me, but I also digitally signed the book. So how do I digitally sign it? Well, I take a picture of that very page. I take the JPEG and I shot 256 it and place it,
Starting point is 00:02:36 the hash into a PGP message and sign that message. And all of that is uploaded to the website, which is at that URL pointed to by that QR code. And it's something that you can download. You don't, you know, you don't need to go find the handwriting experts since it's attested to by me. And that's the entire idea. Well, this is a big idea because it goes way beyond. It is. This is a huge idea because it goes way beyond just your book.
Starting point is 00:03:05 It talks to something that I think is missed by so many people in this space, especially when we talk about NFTs and we talk about art. And we talk about an author signing a book and validating that I could go show somebody this signature and be like, well, Jimmy didn't sign that. Or call in the person with the big magnifying glass. I mean, when you watch, what is the show, the pawn stars? They call the guy in with the big magnifying glass, right? And he's there looking at the signature and he's like, I certify this is authentic. And like every time that guy comes in with that magnifying glass, I laugh my tail off. And I'm just like, this is so ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:03:45 This is so ridiculous. But this is if a person would take their smartphone out and scan that QR code, it literally takes you to that address. And you can see the picture. It was hilarious while I'm talking to Jimmy. He has his computer there. And he literally just wrote some lines of code and like, boom, this picture that he just took with a smartphone of my book that he signed is now on his website to validate and he cryptographically signed it. So, Jimmy, the next thing I said to you was, are you going to put this on the
Starting point is 00:04:17 blockchain? Right. And I've never heard, I've never heard Jimmy laugh so hard. Like, right in my face just laughs. He's like, no, Preston. I'm not going to put it on the blockchain because that would be idiotic. Explain why, Jimmy, because this is such an important point. Yeah, because in a sense, is a transaction between me and you. And really, anyone in the future that you might sell the book to or something or maybe your heirs will be selling it or something like that. And it's nobody else's business. I don't need to put it on the blockchain because it's attested to by me. And as long as you're in possession of that signature, you don't need anything else. You don't need it to be public. And in a sense, it's sort of unnecessarily exposing the fact that you own this
Starting point is 00:05:01 property. Why do that if you don't need to? There is. is no need for public validation because it's attested to by me. And I'm the author. So that's what matters. You don't need a third party to certify. Now, in the Pond Stars kind of like world that you were talking about, or, you know, even with like baseball cards or something, when you get something PSA graded, you know, there's a third party that says that maybe at that point it's important to certify and have things be public or something like that because it's really a third party. But if it's me, if it's direct bilateral transaction like it is between me and you, no blockchain is necessary. So let's pull the thread on this. So like let's say it's 50 years into the future. Let's say it's 100 years into the future. And somebody's like, oh my God, I've got a copy of this book. It was signed by Jimmy himself. And now he's a renowned author from the past, right? Would they be able to scan this QR code and say, well, this is the signature that Jimmy used for,
Starting point is 00:06:02 countless other books and therefore we know it's real. Is that how that would go down? Despite it not being, and it was never put on a public ledger. Yeah, as long as you have the file with my signature, it can't be generated without my private key. Now, this is, of course, like 50 years down the line, some cryptography might be broken or something like that. So it is possible that it's broken by then. But assuming that the cryptography on both, both shot 256 and ECDSA and I think I might be using RSA for my PGP key. Assuming those things aren't broken, then yet, 50 years from now, somebody has the file with my signature.
Starting point is 00:06:47 Like, it doesn't need to be public. As long as you can produce it, it's kind of like being able to appear in court and say, see, I have this guy's signature and it's a testable. And this is honestly a large part of how Bitcoin works, right? It's the ability to sign a signature with a private key. And it doesn't matter where you got the transaction from. It could be from a node or a satellite or whatever. If the transaction has the right signature, it's valid.
Starting point is 00:07:11 And it's not about who's in possession of it. It's about the actual fact that the signature itself. I guess my question is, why in the world aren't you using multidimensional elliptical curve key generation in order to protect against this in 100 years? Well, maybe there is going to be stronger cryptography. There's a lot of different, you know, factors vested. So, you know, who knows where we'll be going. Very disappointed, Jimmy.
Starting point is 00:07:38 For the person who's listening to this, I'm just trying to, you know, see it from their argument standpoint. They'd be like, well, Jimmy, you could be giving away other things with a token that's associated with the signatures and whatnot, right? It just really gets into, and if you really want to go down this, because there's a chapter in your book, chapter 29. that's titled Altcoin Delusions and Naivety. Explain kind of your viewpoint on why you think a lot of that is immoral or a distraction or, I guess,
Starting point is 00:08:13 use your own words as you describe it. I thought a lot about this stuff because I was a color coins developer back in 2013. And we thought about this way back in 2013 and all these people that are thinking, oh, NFTs are brand new and stuff. I was thinking about this stuff 10 years ago. And a lot of other people were. And in fact, the protocol like counterparty had rare pipas in like 2015. So it's not anything new.
Starting point is 00:08:38 But the main reason why I see it as highly immoral is because you're selling something that's actually not scarce. And it doesn't give you rights to anything. The fact that you have a piece of art, right? Like a lot of artists like to say, okay, here's like a monkey JPEG. And, you know, it's attested to by this blockchain. There's no, like, the JPEG and the row in the database are not related except by convention, by somebody saying that those two are related. And supposedly the artists or the people issuing it say that.
Starting point is 00:09:10 And it's really not worth that much, right? Like, you don't have any copyrights to the monkey JPEG. Somebody uses it. You can't sue them or anything like it. There's no real rights around it. Really, it's a road in the database. And this is the thing. It's going to be a road in a database.
Starting point is 00:09:27 It doesn't have to be on a blockchain. It could be on your website. It doesn't matter. Because it goes back to the issuer, right? So, like, you're the author of this book. You're the issuer of this book and the signature that's on this book that would give it value that the author signed it. It doesn't change whether you're talking about a piece of artwork or anything that's non-fungible. I'm sorry, I interrupted you.
Starting point is 00:09:52 I just get frustrated. No, no, that's it's true. And the thing is, like, when you're a third part, party issuer, and you're doing it on something like Ethereum or, you know, Ordinoles or whatever, the entire idea is to sort of get people excited about it in a way that's completely illogical. It's a way to get people to buy your stuff that, you know, buy what they think is your stuff, but it isn't. You know what I mean? It's saying, okay, I have this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, and it's not really the bridge in Brooklyn.
Starting point is 00:10:27 It's some piece of paper. So that's where I see it as immoral because it's giving people the wrong impression. That said, like a lot of the people buying are fully aware of the reality, but a lot of people aren't. And this is where the suckers sort of like lose their money in a sense because they're not informed.
Starting point is 00:10:46 But it's immoral because you're trying to issue something that doesn't represent anything. It's entirely by convention. I think if you talk to a lot of the people that are participating in these, they would tell you, I know I'm speculating, I don't care that I'm speculating, I'm just trying to make more money so that I can get by day to day, which really kind of gets to the crux and the thesis of this book, right? Because we're talking about incentives. And those people are what I would call rent seekers. They're not adding value to anyone.
Starting point is 00:11:22 They're not like an investor that's actually like providing liquidity or getting equity or something. So some business can provide more goods and services. It is pure speculation. It is pure gambling. It's a zero or negative sum game where, you know, a lot of money gets wasted. A lot of resources get wasted in this stuff. And what ends up happening when you have enough rent seeking in a society is that it tends to crumble. And this is how Rome fell.
Starting point is 00:11:53 This is how a lot of civilizations break down because you don't have enough people producing goods and services and you have lots of people rent seeking and leaching off of the rest of society. I'm going to jump around a little bit here in your book because there's certain themes that I really want to kind of talk about first. That being one of them because that was just such a fun experience for me last week to get through with the book. And I just love your response. It's like, no, Preston. I control my own website. Everybody can see. It's my website.
Starting point is 00:12:24 And I don't need a blockchain to do that. It was just such a great example. But chapter 13, you say Fiat undermines work. Yeah. Like, really bring this out for us. A lot of work, at least historically, was sort of like more craftsmen, you know, like artisans and people that actually made things. Right now, I would say that a lot of work is more. or email jobs and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:12:51 And we can see sort of a little bit of a shift as the Fed raises interest rates where, you know, money is going more towards the people that are actually providing value and less to the rent seekers, right? I'm sure you're aware of what happened with the UPS negotiation. I think a UPS driver now makes like $170,000. And in a sense, I think they deserve it because, you know, they're doing like backbreaking work every day.
Starting point is 00:13:15 whereas, you know, the MBA graduate from a mid-tier school that's, you know, making Excel spreadsheets that get read by two people and don't do anything. Like that, I mean, does that really deserve even like $70,000? I don't think so. They're not really necessarily providing value. So work has been debased in many ways because of the presence of the money printer. And what we've seen is that instead of having lots of customers as a craftsman or an artisan would or somebody that's actually selling goods and services to the market would.
Starting point is 00:13:49 A lot of people just have one customer, and that's the corporation that employs them. And it has a tendency to change a lot of your behavior. It makes you way more political. A lot of work is very political anyway because of the various incentives of fiat money. The corporation gets a lot of money from the black rocks of the world who might have certain agendas, and they, through corporate governance, demand certain kinds of policies, which are not related to the business, but end up affecting the business nonetheless. And those are things that don't provide value to anybody, but end up becoming a large part of
Starting point is 00:14:29 work, right? Like how many people spend many hours doing like HR compliance training of one kind or another? These don't necessarily add any value, but this is something that a lot of people have to go through. And this is all waste. This is all rent seeking. This is all essentially destroying value from civilization. And in a way, like as people get into this stuff for a long time, it, it undermines the very nature of work itself to the point where it's much more about politics and compliance and less about providing goods and services. And I argue in the book that this is a large part of why people are so depressed at work or feel so stuck and just depressed about where their career is.
Starting point is 00:15:11 going because it's not satisfying at all. You're not making people happy with your goods and services. You're doing some agenda of some faceless person way down the line that essentially controls you through the money printing. The way that you laid out the book is really awesome. So you really kind of walk the dog for a person of incentives and how Fiat destroys it for the individual, for the company, for the nation state, and then from a global perspective. I want to talk to you about from the individual's perspective, you say in the book that at the individual level, you have to talk about outracing or outpacing a 7% benchmark. What is it that you're talking about with respect to the 7% benchmark? Yeah, so the 7% benchmark is sort of known in the investment community as sort of
Starting point is 00:16:02 like the goal, right? If you can beat 7%, you're doing a good job. If you're under 7%, then you're not doing such a good job. I investigated where that came from. And it turns out that that That's almost exactly the rate of monetary expansion in the M2 money supply since 1959. And that's as far back as the records I could find go. And this is published by the St. Louis Fed. I believe like January of 1959, the M2 money supply was $289 billion. This is all the money, one measure of all the money in the world. Currently, it's somewhere around $23 trillion or something like that.
Starting point is 00:16:39 It's some insane number. and if you annualized that from 1959 to 2023, it ends up being about 7%. So if you're an investment manager and you get 7%, you are just keeping up with the monetary expansion, which is very interesting, right? Because like that's just to this. Treadwater. Treadmills. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:59 All you're doing is just keeping up with everybody else. And you have to beat that in order to actually, you know, make a profit or get more value out of it as a proportion of the entire money supply. So that is the crux of why savings is, like savings in a fiat economy, is itself its own job. You have to go find investments and investigate and, you know, it's, and you're not really even getting paid for it. You're just trying to tread water. Not even to mention, if you're paying some professional to do this for you and they're taking 2%. Right now you're at 9% just to tread water. water. Yeah, and it's not a coincidence that those are the numbers that a lot of pension funds
Starting point is 00:17:46 go for as well. It's, all right, let's try to meet the 7% benchmark. A lot of them are underfunded because they weren't able to meet 7%. And now they have to assume like 9% or 10%, which is going to be very difficult for a long period of time. Literally this morning, Lynn Alden had a post where she had the M2 money supply growth rate. And I think she did this through the Fred website. She had the M2 money supply growth rate next to like all these different types of consumer goods. And all of them were below the M2 growth rate. And most of that can be attributed to technology basically inserting itself and making itself more efficient. But I looked at the numbers and I was like, I want to see what the calculation is. And in the time frame that she had on the chart, was from 2000 to today, which is 23 year period of time. And I did a compound annual growth rate. It went from 100 to 450. And sure enough, after I did the kegger on it, it came out at 6.75%. And I just, I literally did this this morning before this interview. And I smiled because in your book, you talk about 7%. And I mean, it was on the money, the calculation there for the M2 growth rate. So it's pretty insane. And I think people don't think about how, destructive. 7% can be because you're losing half your buying power every 10 years with that percent, right?
Starting point is 00:19:14 And if you're paying somebody 9%, it's even, it's every eight years, right? Every eight years you lose half the value of your savings. Yeah, I joke that this is sort of like the inverse of the Sabbath year. Instead of your debt being wiped away every seven years, this is like your savings gets wiped away every seven year or something like that. And this, it's even worse. Like, we're talking about the U.S. and the West in general. You go to a developing country, you know, it's way worse. It's, like they love, you know, 7% or even losing 7% a year on the dollar is considerably better than the 23, 70, 140% that they're losing on a yearly basis. Let's take a quick break and hear
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Starting point is 00:24:17 what does this look like if we move to a Bitcoin standard and you don't have? Because, I mean, we're not even talking about the frictional, clawing away of taxes on top of these percentages, right, which are huge when you compound them. So do we see, in a Bitcoin-Iized world, do we see taxes really blow out because that's the only way they're going to have to actually pay for things? And do we see a shift in what people are willing to pay for taxes because of this? Yeah, I think tax policy will definitely shift significantly because the implicit taxation that we're talking about with inflation is a huge part of the government budget. Basically, the deficit any given year is funded by inflation.
Starting point is 00:25:03 So, you know, $6 trillion of spending and $4 trillion of tax revenue, the other $2 trillion is straight inflation. That's a lot that they're going to have to make up. And generally explicit taxes are extremely unpopular. I remember I was living in Boston and, you. years ago and there was like a property tax vote. And this is in liberal Massachusetts. And there was a little vote for property tax increase of like quarter percent or something like that. And that was a really close vote in a very, very liberal state. I mean, the quarter percent increase ended up going through. But like even in very liberal places, very few people like
Starting point is 00:25:45 raising their taxes. So I suspect that government sort of is forced to. to shrink because they don't have the money printer. You're not going to be able to hire 87,000 IRS agents, you know, at the drop of a hat. Like, that's like the increase of the bureaucratic state, I think it at least slows down and probably shrinks as a result because they can't afford it. Like, where are you going to get loans for a trillion dollars? Like at any price, who has a trillion dollars in a sound money economy to lend you? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:18 This is the problem that we get into. Or the solution we get into. Yes. You're correct. If you lined up 100 people on the street and you ask them a simple question of, should a rich person pay higher taxes than somebody who's poor, I think those 100 people would probably say, yeah, I think the rich person, if you've got a billionaire, they should pay more in taxes or a higher percent than somebody who only makes 20 or 30,000 a year. And what's interesting about this conversation is when you look at it. taxation through inflation of 7% annualized. That is being applied equally to the person who's making 20, 30,000 a year as it is to the person making $5 billion a year. They're paying the
Starting point is 00:27:03 same tax rate when you're talking about a taxation through inflation. So it's kind of interesting to me that I think it's just such a hidden tax that people just, they don't even think about it. Or they just. And think about how unfair it is because in a sense, the billionaire has a lot of stores of value that the people down at the bottom don't. You know, I point out that, you know, a house in the habitants gets way better than 7% a year. An NFL football team gets way better than 7% a year. Facebook stock before, you know, it went public, which you have to be an accredited investor
Starting point is 00:27:41 to get in on, got way better than 7%. a year. Like the rich people have this ability to use the wealth that they have and kind of store it. So they can keep up on this monetary treadmill. The poor people can. In fact, it's even worse for them because you take out personal loans. It's way more than 7%. You take out credit card loans. That's way, way more than 7%. And you get payday loans, which are even higher than that. So it all ends up screwing over the poor people way more than the rich people. And I, I kind of sympathize a little bit with the people that are saying tax the rich, because in a sense, a lot of these rich people have access to these cantalong games that the poor people don't.
Starting point is 00:28:24 And this is the justice of Bitcoin is that none of this like crazy games to sort of make the game completely unfair for the rich people. And that, that I think is what we really need to be talking more about is this thing. Because it forces elected individuals that if they want to pay for their government, they have to do it through tax revenues as opposed to this hidden tax that just soaks up tons of buying power out of the system in a way that most of the market participants or the citizens can see. What's interesting going back to this chart that Lynn posted. So we just talked about how like the real hurdle rate 7% based off of, you know, decades of data of monetary expansion. But it's hidden because they're showing 2% inflation, right? For this 5% up-and-smoke kind of hidden tax that's actually taking place.
Starting point is 00:29:21 And when you look at what 5% is across the whole spectrum of money itself, this is a massive number. This number is huge. And it's not equivalent to somebody saying, oh, yeah, I paid 20 or 30% in taxes off of what I made for the year. This 5% is like on par with that amount that they're paying. And the percentages don't kind of make sense when you're just kind of looking at the face of them. But when you actually dig into the buying power that's associated with those percentages, they're like on par with each other. I just find it really exciting that we can disclose reality through the populace,
Starting point is 00:30:00 through money that is actually sound because it forces us to say, no, I don't want to pay for this war in Ukraine or this war wherever, right? If my taxes are going to go up 20 or 30 percent to fund this, and that's what that's obviously what Bitcoin does. Sorry to talk so much. I'm just really passionate. That's an excellent point. And I want to build on that a little bit because last time I was, or two times ago when I was on the show with you, you pointed out that the inflation this time was very different because it was hitting the consumer goods, right? Because of the stemmy checks and, you know, direct to consumer almost level of money just going to them, all of these consumer goods went up and priced
Starting point is 00:30:47 significantly. And I think there's something very important about that that's different this time around and this part of the inflation curve or this deep into this inflation than previous. Because in a sense, all of that money printing went to a lot of rich people earlier on. But they were putting it into House in the Hamptons and boats and things like that, where there was asset inflation in those things, especially equities, but not in the consumer prices, which is why you see this disparity between the 7% in monetary expansion and the 2% that they've been claiming for, you know, consumer goods. And that is no longer the case because we're seeing it where the consumer prices have gone up enough that people are really feeling it.
Starting point is 00:31:39 And there is sort of like this dissatisfaction with the economic games that are being played. And they're trying really, really hard to bring down the consumer inflation, the grocery store inflation to quell some of this stuff. But it's not really working. which, and, you know, Lynn Alden, I think, said something about this in an article a little while back about how, well, what if you raise rates and inflation still goes up? What happens then? And I, this seems like a real possibility to me. I'd love to get your take on this. That's my base case. Yeah, that's my base case for sure. And for a person to be saying, well, why? So when we look at over the last 40 years and you see how all this fiat's getting added into the system, right?
Starting point is 00:32:26 And you're seeing cooperation amongst companies. It's going up. It's getting more efficient. They're making all these investments on and how to be just in time manufacturing. You have globalization taking place. And what that really means is if it took me 10 times the hammer widget X, now it's taken me five times the hammer widget X to make it. And I can sell it at a cheaper price because it only took five units of energy versus
Starting point is 00:32:55 10 units of energy. This all works as long as you can continue to accelerate and build this global cooperation and efficiency system so that everything is humming along without any defects or mistakes. You get to a point where it becomes too saturated. And so when I would say when Russia and the Ukraine really kind of kicked off in COVID, you got to this point where the global harmonization and optimization of supply chains and everybody globally working together to produce the most efficient product possible kind of hit its fever pitch. And now you're starting to see some of that unravel. And I think it's actually going to start to accelerate because as they add more of these Fiat units into the system, what they're doing is they're actually incentivizing more
Starting point is 00:33:47 polarization into the hands of just a couple people. You ever watch the I Love Lucy where they're on the they're on the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt, right? This was a perfect example of, like, society for, like, the last 40 years where they started getting clever. They're, like, figuring out ways to, like, still do their job and get the chocolates off the conveyor belt. But then after it had accelerated too much, and there weren't more people to do the job,
Starting point is 00:34:15 like, everything just falls apart and it just turns into pure debauchery. And I think that's where we're at where they've added so much money. They've incentivized so much optimization. and now the conveyor belt's going so fast that it's just like throw your hands in the air because I don't think we can get this back under control again. Yeah, and that's something that I talked about in the book with the entire company level incentives. And the one thing that you get out of enormous companies is, you know, scalability, right? Like exactly what you were talking about.
Starting point is 00:34:44 You can make things very efficient. But that leads to a winner take all dynamic, in which case everything becomes very, very fragile because you have like one supplier of computer chips in the world for a lot of different processes. And, you know, this is why Taiwan is now strategically, yeah, strategically important. Amazing, by the way. And there are so many things like that all over the entire global supply chain where there's like a specialty resin that auto manufacturers need and it's only produced in one factory in Germany or something like that. like hard drives and memory are produced in like one place in Singapore or something.
Starting point is 00:35:26 And this hyper efficiency is necessary to keep that number down to 2%. But really, like, it just makes everything fragile. And once you have war or any kind of disruption, it's just, it goes down. It's like space balls where he's like, we're going to go ludicrous speed, right? And like this book, I would highly encourage people for the audio listeners. I'm holding up this book called Chip Wars. If you want to read about how supply chains in this just one particular area are literally going ludicrous speed, read this book because it talks about exactly what you're saying is this lithography process of etching these chips and how like one machine is $100 million. The next one that they're getting ready to make is a $300 million machine, all the parts and pieces just to make this one machine.
Starting point is 00:36:15 And then the only place in the world that's like, well, not the only, there's very few places in the world that can actually afford these and have the infrastructure and the facilities. What are the facilities called where you can't get any of the dust in there? Oh, it has a certain name. Like that. You know, you know what I'm talking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The actual chip manufacturing facility. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:36:38 The facilities in the process to make this is so specialized and so custom that if one of them goes offline, Well, truly, one of them goes on, like in Taiwan, if it goes offline, you're going to literally lose 30 to 40 percent of all the capacity in the world for these chips. And the demand for the chips are just going through the route. So it's this analogy that we're trying to create where we're trying to push so much energy through this pinhole that if there's even the slightest mistake, it's going to allow all this printing and this debauchery that Fiat has done through the decades to truly manifest itself and express itself.
Starting point is 00:37:13 and everyone's like, I don't understand why prices are blowing out 200%. Well, you know, the food that you're checking out with has the truck that ships, it has microprocessors, and it has this dependency and that dependency, and it's all intertwined, and it's just, it's breaking down. Well, and not only that, but we had significant amount of money printing and labor and all of this stuff was, all of the markets just sort of regittered. And if you think about how sensitive the entire supply chain is to price and the contracts that you might have for chips or something like that, they're very sensitive. So any sort of disruption there and like you lose your entire profit margin, well, what are you going to do if you have to, you're under contract to produce something and you can't produce it at the cost that you promised and you're going to lose money?
Starting point is 00:38:06 well, you're going to slow walk that delivery as much as you can. So you make something more efficient so you can make a profit again. Well, this is what the entire supply chain had. And this is why we got a lot of delays and we're in a sense still getting delays. And we're going to see only more of this as we do more money printing going forward. In your book, you say banking is the pinnacle of rent seeking. What are you getting at here? Banking really doesn't add anything.
Starting point is 00:38:36 thing, right? Because at least the modern conception of banking, which is all printing money out of thin air, like the loans that you get from the bank are not somebody's savings. They create the money to lend to you. This is one of the dirty secrets of Fiat money is that it doesn't work the way you've been taught in elementary school. Oh, you know, somebody deposit $300 and gets 2%, and they lend it out at 5%, the same 300, and they make 3% at a profit. Just do the numbers. That doesn't work. There's no way you can have a significant percentage of the U.S. economy, make enough money
Starting point is 00:39:18 doing some sort of like interest rate arbitrage at those levels. No, what's actually happening is when you get a $500,000 mortgage, that comes into existence for your benefit. And this is what's happening all over the economy. And not just at the retail level, but at the commercial level, a lot of, you know, commercial bonds. Certainly at the government level, treasuries and things like that, these are all loans that are, this is money created out of nothing.
Starting point is 00:39:49 And this is the most rent seeking because in a sense, the people that have the power to print money for their purposes can push whatever kind of agenda that they want. One of the reasons why Black Rock has so much power in the economy right now and why they can essentially tell Bud Light or Target to hold the line is because they have this power of money printing, right? They control so much money and they can create so much more into existence that they can bankrupt any company that they want just through the games that they want. So they're not providing value.
Starting point is 00:40:28 If they went away tomorrow, the system would be much better off. And this is why I say it's a rent seeking. It's a pinnacle of rent seeking. You say Fiat reduces the need for reputation. And I think for some people that are looking at social media, they would be like, that's all people are trying to do is create like these social reputation type personas. What do you mean when you say Fiat reduces the need for reputation? This is when you are working, right?
Starting point is 00:41:02 For people that have to like compete in the market and, you know, even stuff like social media, that's actually a real market. If you can't get people to follow you, if they can't, they don't subscribe to your channel and stuff like that, you lose. And I mean, you know this, Preston, because you've, you've had to deal with this in the market where you're trying to grow your audience and things like that. That's real work. And that's real value you're providing to your listeners.
Starting point is 00:41:27 But, you know, you work in, uh, at Black Rock or something like that. Like that's not what you're judged on at all. In fact, it's, it's based on how much money that you have under management. And that's given to you basically by the people in charge. And it's, it's not about your reputation like in the market. It's way more about reputation with the very few people that actually control everything. So I mean, this is also, uh, obvious in a lot of bureaucracies where you're clearly not providing much value, but you have the right political connections and they're not going to fire you because you are in good with these right people. That's what I mean by it's not about reputation at all. Like there are lots of people that, you know, like think about Hunter Biden, right? Like, worse reputation possible. Like there are very few people that would trust them with their dog even. Like there's there's no way he gets put in charge of anything. Yet he's worth many millions of dollars, gets paid lots of money doing various things because he's the son of the president. So he has this ability to, like,
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Starting point is 00:46:38 This is a lot of rich people trying to beat. that 7%, either through their family office or, you know, direct investments into hedge funds or VC funds or whatever. And what ends up happening is that they need to put it somewhere. And if they just hit one, right, if you have a Facebook in your portfolio, it makes everything else fine. But what's ended up happening is that there's now an ecosystem of startups that really are not doing that. Like, they don't make money for a very long time. They don't care because
Starting point is 00:47:15 they don't make their purpose. They don't make. Yeah. They don't even make revenues. Their entire purpose is to attract new money. And if you have the right story, that's more important than profit or cash flow or any of the other stuff that traditionally you would, you would want for a good investment. And it's become like that over the years because of the continuous money printing. I still remember in the mid-90s, right, when a lot of these internet startups were going public and they were like, they don't have any revenue. What's their business model? They're not making any money. But they skyrocketed because the growth was what mattered. And this ability to grow quickly and get to this place where you have these advantages,
Starting point is 00:48:04 that's all of, all of them are aiming for those advantages as a large company because then you have access to new loans, you can get access to the commercial bond market and so on. You get lots and lots of money. So that's become sort of the playbook for a lot of startup. So you get, you get weird stuff like Theranos and we work and even FTX,
Starting point is 00:48:26 where it's way more about selling to the, these investors and like not at all about the business model. So and it becomes way more focused on retail because having sort of like some buzz in the retail market is way more important than actually having a sound business. So you pay lots of celebrities like FTX did or go sponsor, you know, or something like that. Look at these eight pictures. I mean, the whole thing was about like, let's put it in, let's give these things away to these celebrities. And then, have them go on Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy will have one too. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:49:06 This is the, this is what it's become. It's now become, let's dump on retail. Like Uber, I don't think has ever made a quarterly profit if I'm not mistaken. Or they might have once or twice or something like that. But that tells you like they went the entire way without having to actually provide value
Starting point is 00:49:26 to the market. They're actually subtracting value. that's how much money is being printed. And this is the entire startup world now where it's not about your good or service. It's about your ability to attract further money down the line. And the VCs that invest you in early, they're not evaluating you on your business model. They're evaluating you on your ability to sell to retail. Like sell your business to retail.
Starting point is 00:49:53 It's, okay, let's get all of these suckers that think they're going to get 7% off of your company rather than, you know, the good or. service that you're going to have. Yeah, it's pretty insane. They've become professional storytellers of like the highest magnitude. Like instead of like storytelling by writing a book, these people are storytelling by coming up with this really complex narrative, raising a bunch of money with it, taking this enormous amount of money, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars, and then investing it into marketing to grow the top line. There's no bottom. line. It's negative, right? And grow the top line so that then they can tell yet another story
Starting point is 00:50:37 or compound on this story to then suck more fiat into this thing. And then it's interesting that you say it's a negative value. So like, let's just take Uber, for example. I like Uber a hundred times better than a cab service. I think everybody's going to agree with that, right? They haven't made any money. And they've been around for what feels like a decade, but I don't know that it's been that long. Let's just say that if they actually had to be profitable and be self-sufficient, the prices that you're paying might not be anywhere near what you've become accustomed to. And if they destroy every other competitor in this process of storytelling, they then become a monopoly and can drive down the throat of all the consumers any price that they want.
Starting point is 00:51:26 And so like some of the antics and the behaviors, because the fiat is so prevalent, really sets us up into this monopolistic style system where you don't actually get competition taking place. Now, people will say, oh, there's lift and there's these other ones. And there is lift, right? But I guess I'm pulling the thread on if this continues to perpetuate itself. And you go further and further down the timeline. You're just kind of creating these market dynamics that aren't. in harmony with what I would describe as nature where you have a competitive landscape, they have to actually generate a profit, and then they have to compete in that space by creating profit, and they can be slim profits. But if they're slim profits, then they can't grow as fast in investing in marketing. So it just warps reality, and it's pulling technology forward, and it's monopolizing certain sectors. And it's creating, again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, Jimmy, with supply chains breaking down because you have such consolidation of enterprise.
Starting point is 00:52:28 You see this everywhere you look and once it starts to unravel and it'll aggressively start to unravel when they add more fiat into it because they're just amplifying and fanning the flames of this consolidation. Sorry, I just, I normally don't talk this much time. That's exactly what is happening. Is that when you grow to a certain size, you have access to so much more money, either through additional equity that you bring in through another round or through. the commercial bond market or even the public market.
Starting point is 00:52:59 And you take all of that money and what do you do with it? Well, you're going to crush your competitors by underpricing them. And this is why Lyft is almost out of business. And, you know, like people talk about it as if it's like a major competitor. Talk to a lot of Uber drivers. They're like, yeah, I used to be a Lyft, but, you know, they're letting a lot of us go because they can't afford it anymore. It does become this winner take all market because you have this ability to underprice
Starting point is 00:53:24 everybody. And this is honestly how Amazon behave for a very long time. It's not an unknown strategy to use Fiat money, the newly printed money, as an enormous advantage over your competitors. This is why we have these monopolistic sort of companies that dominate the market. I'm sure you heard about the SMP7, right? Like seven companies have accounted for most of the growth of the S&P 500 in like the last five years or something like that, it's getting actually worse. The dynamics that we see at the individual level, like we were talking about, where you have a few billionaires that control a lot of stuff and the rest of us that don't, those dynamics happen at the company level. And it's, I would argue, at the nation level as well, where you
Starting point is 00:54:15 have a few, you know, like when you have this dynamic of the ability to print your own money, you only have a few entities that end up controlling everything. And that's the dynamic we have at the individual, the company, nation, and global levels. Well, just if you're a Lyft executive and you're listening to this, and we're talking about how you've got to be a better storyteller, I'd recommend a book on Amazon. It's called Fiction Writing 101. Just go in there and then maybe you'll be more competitive with your competitor at Uber.
Starting point is 00:54:47 Okay. You say that freedom is an illusion from this corporate organizational standpoint. What are you getting at with that? Well, freedom is, well, so which part of the book are you? This is in the organization incentives breaking down. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So you don't have that much freedom, right?
Starting point is 00:55:06 Like, if you're part of a company, there are all sorts of restrictions on what you're able to do, you know, what you're able to say. You sort of represent the company. I talked to a bunch of people over the weekend after my presentation at Bit Block Boom about how they were like, yeah, it is really kind of way more stifling than you think because if you're not representing the company, then you know, you're at risk of not being promoted or maybe even fired. Like, they're watching your social media way closer than ever before. But the freedom that I'm talking about is your freedom to go and do what you want, right? Like for me, it's,
Starting point is 00:55:47 being able to say what I want and do what I want. And a lot of times the company will prevent you from doing something that would objectively be good for civilization, your ability to provide goods and services as like a side gig or something like that. But they want to prevent you from doing it because for them, your contribution to the company matters more than anything else. In many other ways, the corporations themselves are restricted because, again, they have the black rocks of the world that demand certain things. They have governments that demand certain things. And the way companies survive now is by being compliant to the demands of those few companies, few authorities that sort of demand everything. And that's unfortunately sort of like handed down
Starting point is 00:56:35 to the employees themselves. And we get that dynamic all over the place where, you know, even at the nation level, the U.S. tells certain countries what to do and they kind of have to comply because the money rules everything. There's a part in your book, kind of near the beginning, and you bring up this Frankfurt School Conundrum. What is this? And just kind of explain why you bring this up in the book. I wanted to talk about sort of the societal degeneration, the moral morality of fiat money
Starting point is 00:57:08 and all of that. And of course, it comes largely from Marxism, the fifth plank of the communist manifest. was a central controller of the money, something like the central bank, and he sort of envisioned it. The problem in the 30s, the 20s and 30s for Marxism, was that there were a lot of economic crises all over the world. You know, we had the Great Depression here in the U.S. You had the Weimar Republic hyperinflation, the Hungary had inflation, Austria had inflation. All of these were predicted by Marx as sort of ushering in social.
Starting point is 00:57:44 The entire thesis of Marxism is that you go from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism. And here's when the transitions would happen. And it's like he doesn't really give justifications for any of that. But it was always just sort of like, it's going to happen. And here's how it's going to happen. And so a lot of Marxists were excited because it was, okay, there's an economic crisis. He said you transition from capitalism to socialism when capitalists. fails, when there's crises and people will rise up and you'll have a violent revolution that
Starting point is 00:58:21 brings in socialism and then that will in turn bring in, have a few things happen and then communism will come and then we'll have workers paradise. Everybody that was a Marxist in the 20s and 30s was waiting for this revolution to happen all over the world. They thought that the Russian Revolution was the first of many and that it would happen everywhere just pop up like that, except it didn't. It didn't happen at all. In fact, it went backwards in a lot of places where people were like, this isn't happening. And the reason for this is not capitalism. It's like back government policy. And, you know, there was almost no interest in a violent revolution. So there were a few Frankfurt scholars at that time that were thinking about this dilemma, the Marxist dilemma,
Starting point is 00:59:06 and saying, okay, what is the, why is it that people aren't rising up to revolution? And they came up with a solution and they sort of married Freud and Marx in that way. Because Marx had said that the family unit is not the ultimate form and that it's like sort of evil for not progressing through this thing that we were talking about. And Freud gave like a very good explanation of sort of being bound to your family. And, you know, he was all into explaining a lot of your behavior through your childhood and the relationships that you had in your family, they came up with this theory, the Frankfurt School,
Starting point is 00:59:48 that in order for Marxism to truly, or the next stage, for socialism to come, then we need to break family bonds. And this became a part of Marxism from that point on. And their argument was that people needed to be awakened to the reality of oppression. And if you don't know that you're oppressed, because you've been deceived by your family ties, then people would never wake up. And that language is still with us today.
Starting point is 01:00:18 The entire idea of woke is being awakened to your oppression, the rulers of capital, the controllers of things sort of like oppressing you. And that was their argument. And it's evolved a lot since then. But that's the source of a lot of the leftist stuff. Like, you know, critical, by the way, the Frankfurt School called all of these theories like critical theory, from which we get critical race theory, queer theory, intersectionality, and all the modern, I guess the postmodern take on colonialism and stuff like that.
Starting point is 01:00:52 All of these have roots in the Frankfurt School. So this has become sort of like married with a lot of Keynesian economic dogma. And the social institutions around government, particularly funded by Fiat money like academia, a lot of media now, government bureaucracy. They've shifted towards this over time as Marxism or as Fiat money has been printed more and more because it's so in line with what they want to happen. Jimmy, you talk about how Fiat destroys family values. This is something that's near and dear to me. I know it is to you as well. So for kind of our last point, I want you to kind of talk about the really important points for you.
Starting point is 01:01:40 personally when you think about how Fiat destroys family values. Fiat basically makes it so that you don't, you're not dependent on family anymore. And, you know, people think of it as an act of compassion to provide somebody with stuff when they're down. But really, if you're stealing from everybody else to do it and not doing it voluntarily, I think it's just as unjust. And in a sense, the current system is, is very much not dependent on family. It's dependent on everything else, whether the company you work for or the government handouts or something like that, very few people are that dependent on family. That said, there are pockets of, you know, the West where, you know, you have closer families.
Starting point is 01:02:30 I know a lot of Indian families, for example, are very close-knit and they have sort of like culturally this idea of supporting each other and things like that. They even do like a arranged marriages. But the main thing is that we're not dependent on each other. We're dependent on central controllers. It's much more centralized. And that has led to sort of this very weird, has gone off in kind of a very weird direction where we're getting more towards this sort of Frankfurt School philosophy of breaking down families and making them assets of the state, where you serve the state instead of being self-sovereign or wanting to do something for yourself. And this is something that I think has historically been one of the pillars of Marxism or any form of Marxism
Starting point is 01:03:21 is that you need to break down family bonds in order to make things that they're hoping for to come to pass. And I don't think that works. I really think it's horribly immoral to separate the children from the parents. or to take them or give them up for state control. We're kind of halfway there already with the entire public schooling system and education and the influence that a lot of these institutions have. And they are all funded by fiat money. And in a sound money economy, we're way more dependent on our families.
Starting point is 01:03:57 We're way more incentivized to create more people, like have more children. Sadly, the Fiat way of framing this is that we need to have less children because it's destroying the planet. Really, they see everything as sort of like a zero-sum game where if you have more children, then there's less for everybody else. Instead of each person is somebody that can produce goods and services for everybody else. So it's a very different set of mentalities. and it's ended up destroying families. We're seeing depopulation all over the world. Jimmy, just my personal thoughts on this particular matter,
Starting point is 01:04:39 when you have people that are constantly being stolen from through the debasement of the currency and through the taxation, I mean, you have to pay some type of tax. Who's going to build the roads, Jimmy? Right? That whole meme. But on a serious note, when that is accelerating, the amount that's continuing to be clawed away from individuals.
Starting point is 01:05:01 And you combine that with the idea that most don't understand that it's being clawed away at an accelerative pace through debasement of the currency. What you find is the parents don't have any excess energy that they've saved. In fact, they have a depletion of energy. They don't even have enough for themselves, let alone for kids or for others. others or to they're just trying to make it by. They're just trying to make it to the next day with the knowledge that tomorrow is probably going to be worse than today because I'm going to be stolen from through the night into tomorrow. And so at a very core and fundamental level is this idea that how can families grow and how can
Starting point is 01:05:50 anything grow when it doesn't have any excess energy that it can store? it's impossible, whether it's a plant or a person, it's impossible, right? And I think that that's the incentive that's driving this actions that we see so prevalent throughout society is nobody has any excess energy of any sort that they can't grow, they can't prosper, they can't participate, they can't coordinate with each other. They just want to get theirs because if they don't get it right now, it's going to be even less tomorrow. It's interesting that you frame it as like excess energy. Because really, we're talking about savings.
Starting point is 01:06:27 And because we're being stolen from everywhere, in most families, both parents work. Right. Like, it used to be. Multiple jobs. Yeah. And, you know, 30, 40 years ago, you had maybe one parent work. Well, that means you have more energy, more savings and things like that to afford more children. A lot of the money has gone into real estate.
Starting point is 01:06:50 So if you wanted to have, you know, four or five kids, you need a larger place. But because of the store of value premium on housing, well, you can't afford it anymore, right? You're being stolen from and that money has gone into housing. So you can't afford the things that you need. The long-term things that you need to plan for if you're going to have a family have all just sort of gone up and priced tremendously, making it less affordable. And, you know, it's a form of being able to steal from you because you're, dollar doesn't go as far as it used to.
Starting point is 01:07:27 And that ultimately means that you focus on short-term stuff like food and how is it or like having a roof over your head or making sure you have gasoline in your car and things like that, which ultimately means that you neglect the more long-term things that bring satisfaction like having a family, having children and grandchildren and things like that. Thankfully, Bitcoin is bringing that back and we can kind of see it. I know you and I have a lot of friends in the Bitcoin community that are having way more children and more families, more people getting married, more people dating. It's a beautiful thing to be watching.
Starting point is 01:08:05 It really is. So for folks listening, here's the book. Fiat ruins everything by Jimmy Song. He also has other books, one that I particularly like as an engineer, programming Bitcoin is another one. He has Bitcoin in the American Dream, the little Bitcoin book. you're quite the writer, Jimmy. I love this, but we'll have links in the show notes for people that want to check out the book.
Starting point is 01:08:29 Jimmy, anything else you want to highlight. I am doing a crowd fund for Fiat Ruins Everything up until September 6th, if you're listening to it before then. It's, you know, Fiatruins Everything.com. And you can go and support my work on this stuff. And hopefully I get to write more books. Maybe one with you someday, Preston. You know I hate writing, Jimmy. I hate writing.
Starting point is 01:08:55 Chat GPT. Can help us out. All right. Thank you so much for making time. Jimmy, this was a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Preston. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use.
Starting point is 01:09:10 Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something, new or you found it valuable. If you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes,
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