After Thoughts
After Thoughts
After Thoughts: Politics
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[A.I Generated] Embark on an introspective journey with us in 'After Thoughts,' where we cast a light on the seldom-seen corners of our podcast universe. Here, we reflect on the extraordinary time between our spoken words and their journey to your ears, the evolution of our show, and the complexities that shape your listening experience. From the transformative potential of Bitcoin to the daunting reality of a debt-based economy, we navigate topics that promise to reshape our economic and societal landscape.
With a blend of optimism and a keen eye on the global elites, our conversation delves into the intricate dance of politics, power, and manipulation. Michael Saylor's poignant bloodletting analogy sets the stage for a critical analysis of our financial ecosystem. As we dissect the implications of blockchain technology and challenge traditional banking norms, we also contemplate the societal transformations that could arise from improved parenting models and economic reforms. Our dialogue weaves through these themes, spotlighting the fragility of our systems and the media's role in this delicate balance.
Looking ahead, we envision a society that leans into honesty, powered by technology that demands verifiable truth. The rise of NFTs and blockchain technology heralds a potential revolution, not just for the music industry, but for how we engage with creativity and commerce. As we close this segment, we share our hopeful gaze towards a future enriched by integrity and transparency, inviting you to ponder the blueprint for a brighter, more honest world alongside us.
After Thoughts
Speaker 2All right , we're recording .
Speaker 1All right , good , crack open this drink .
Speaker 2The time went everywhere . Nice .
Speaker 1Oh well , welcome to After Thoughts , Welcome . This is kind of a new format .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1Been doing this for the episodes , Although I think something important to call out is that for this specific one .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1We recorded this during the summer , so like over six months ago , and we're the actual episode and we're recording this now , the night before the episode comes out .
Speaker 2Right , yeah , god , you're right , it is tomorrow , geez , oh yeah , so there'll be a little bit different .
Speaker 1But the prim is behind it . Now hang on a second .
Speaker 2Sorry , I just feel like I'm so much quieter than you . Do you think that ?
Speaker 1In general , we're right now .
Speaker 2Right now . Hello , hello , hello , hello , hello . Yeah , I'm a little quieter actually . Let's go up .
Speaker 1Ah , here we go .
Speaker 2That's a little better .
Speaker 1And we're keeping all of us in , by the way , because the right , the whole purpose of this is that normally what ends up happening after we record an episode is we'll hit stop and then essentially have a conversation about the episode .
Speaker 2That's a whole other episode together , for like another 20 minutes , or at least sometimes an hour or two , that's true .
Speaker 1And then when we do that , we're like , oh man , we should have recorded that , because we forgot to say this in the episode , or we have this new thing come to us , and so we just decided to start hitting record again after the episodes , but doing it in a more sort of casual way . Yeah , no video no video , not that anyone ever sees that anyway .
Speaker 2And they will this season .
Speaker 1They will this season Damn right . So this is the unstructured , unedited stream of consciousness of us . You get a good sense of what the episodes are really like before Cody edits them , because it's a lot like this . A bunch of nonsense .
Speaker 2It is . Yeah , I mean they're the same entire times in regular episodes where we go on like a 20 minute ramble and I'm just like all of that is coming at it . It had nothing to do with this conversation .
Speaker 1Yeah . So if you were under any illusion that we were like intelligent or good communicators , it's just because Cody edits the episodes .
Speaker 2I get to choose , sometimes literally cutting into sentences like and putting a whole sentence together out of multiple lines . But yeah , I mean , it's part of it , it's just part of how it goes . Nothing's completely real except for this . This will be David .
Speaker 1This is really real , yeah , so the other thing that's funny is the plan then . So we started doing this kind of halfway through the season .
Speaker 2Yeah , I kind of came up with the idea of doing this , but it was not that long ago , because we did most of the season all in a row in like just a few weeks , like a couple months or whatever , and so we had the first few episodes are all spaced out really far and , I think , go back further than the summer .
Speaker 1I feel like they were . Oh , the first one did , yeah , but the first one we recorded was in like January . Is this not the first episode ? Well , this is the first episode of the season , but it's not the first episode we recorded for the season . The first episode we recorded was commitment , because we did it in like . December 2022 or January 2023 .
Speaker 2Like it was . Yeah , it was during the holidays , yeah .
Speaker 1And then we're like , okay , we're gonna get ahead on this season . And then , like , we didn't record again for another six months .
Speaker 2This was all supposed to come out literally a year ago . Sorry , audience , we got so many comments to people being like are you guys still doing this podcast ?
Speaker 1We actually get reviews on the show on Apple podcasts and I'm like we love this . Where are the new episodes ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I actually talked to somebody in our community was DMing because he had sent a bunch of video or not videos , audio cuts for the responses for different episodes and none of them were usable because it was like Bluetooth and cutting out constantly .
Speaker 2And I just reached out and was like , hey , really love that you sent this . Is there any way you can like re-record these ? And he was super cool about it and we went back and forth for a couple of days talking about things . But he was just like , have you guys ever thought about doing maybe just like a season ? Not , instead of doing seasons , just do like one episode a week ? And I was like , yeah , that's never gonna happen .
Speaker 2Well , lucky you get two fives together to do this and we would be burned out so hard . I was like topics are a lot harder than you think they are to come up with and it makes a lot more sense . And I was like , but to be fair , we used to come out with two seasons a year , or at least we did once . Yeah , we did that once .
Speaker 1And that was a little tough . That was tough . Well , I think I mean that's why we started doing after hours , right ?
Speaker 2and that's what I said . We actually do have that show . It's just you gotta be in the community , yeah .
Speaker 1And I think all of that is changing , which we don't have to get into right now . But the so we started , we decided to do these afterthoughts , quick recording things after the episodes , kind of halfway through the season , and then the plan was for the ones that we didn't record this for is to go back and listen to the episode once it was done and then gather our thoughts so that we can go into this conversation having done that and we have not done that . Well , Cody has , because Cody had to edit it .
Speaker 2But that was a while ago .
Speaker 1Oh my God , I spent all weekend trying to get the damn thing exported so I could get it uploaded . Oh right , and I still , and so I could listen to it . Like you know , I always do like a quality check and make sure that- . Wait , so we haven't done that . No , we'll have to do that tonight .
Speaker 2Oh my God , like the olden days .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , I have to get you to export it here and so that I can get it , and then hopefully we don't have to make any edits too .
Speaker 2Well , yeah , I just gotta like the occasional like slip of , like whatever cues that we have where we need to edit them , like I'm afraid that I've edited less of the , so go back to the beginning of this conversation . I've edited less this season than I've ever edited , so I left a lot of content in there . But the problem with that is I'm doing it while listening to like my last like run through . Is it listening to it like 2X speed ? Yeah , it's easy to miss some of those cues and so , yeah , that's the only thing I'm a little bit afraid of . It's just like I don't wanna , or like there was a time you know where you said people's names that you didn't mean to say . So I cut that out , and stuff like that , and I'm afraid that I'm gonna miss something like that . That's like that should have been taken out .
Speaker 1Right , yeah , I mean I always listen to everything at 2X speed , so it's okay yeah but you do everything at 2X speed or 3X speed or whatever . My brain is used to listening to that .
Speaker 2Yeah , you're used to it . For me it's like I do it and I get used to it after about an hour or two .
Speaker 1But I cannot handle things at normal speed . It just sounds like everyone's talking so slowly . Yeah , drives me crazy .
Speaker 2That's true If you listen to this podcast at 2X speed reach out and let us know Cause , that'd be curious . But yeah , I mean , I do that with YouTube videos now for sure , I get to some people like really intentionally talk slow and I'm like stop it . I just want to get to the meat of this video . I don't want to watch it for 15 minutes .
Speaker 1Anyway , so let's talk about politics .
Speaker 2Yeah , this is like half politics after thoughts and half like catching up with us over the past year . Cause I know that all of you have . Well , I hope that all of you have missed us . We've missed you . We have missed you . That is yeah , and releasing these it's always so fun in season stuff .
Speaker 1Yeah , I'll say last year so much happened . Yeah , yeah , we had quite a year and that's one of the main reasons why the podcast didn't come out like the season didn't come out last year , but I also think that it made the season so much better because we were going through some like real shit . Yeah , we were in the thick of it and we were talking about it , so Right .
Speaker 2Yeah , it did actually end up working out better , for sure , and this would not have been the season that it turned out to be , had we done it when we wanted to . Yeah , yeah , I agree . So yeah , politics .
Speaker 1I will say , even though I didn't listen to the episode before this because I knew we're going to do this . After that episode I jotted down notes from like six months ago Tune your own horn over there .
Speaker 2No .
Speaker 1I'm saying this because probably a lot of this whole conversation will be me reading out my notes .
Speaker 2Oh .
Speaker 1And then me trying to decipher what I was going to do , what I was meant to say , like six months ago .
Speaker 2So that'll be fun , so it's a lot like the high fives episode , which you guys have to look forward to , that's .
Speaker 1Yeah , I will say the one thing that the I don't know my sense after leaving the conversation for the politics episode was , and I don't know how this ended up coming out and editing . But I was really glad that we had the conversation and I felt good about the conversation , at least between the two of us .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1And I feel like the other piece that was , I don't think I communicated super clearly why I started talking about Bitcoin and like how that really fit into all of that .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1Cause it kind of probably seemed like it was coming out of left field . But I have an explanation for that . That kind of would probably help with the context if we want to get into that , yeah .
Speaker 2Yeah , this was also the first episode we did in the series . We started out with like easy to talk about topics for the most part , and then we went into like it was this one and then conspiracy theories and it's like all these different topics that were like really intense and so this was like the primer for that . So it was good . I was happy with how it went and made me definitely feel like less anxious about the other conversations and how they would go and how that would translate into a podcast format . So , yeah , it was a good episode . I definitely walked away from it , glad that we did it and then going , being able to go back and listen to it and editing was also kind of fun , cause it I literally edited this like a month ago , started editing all the episodes , so it's been like a year . So some of this I had no idea what they well , I guess politics . Yeah , it was just six months ago I had still had no idea . Like an Etch-a-Sketch . Once we do them , they're gone , yep .
Speaker 1I get it .
Optimism and Global Elites
Speaker 1I also I think I don't know if I remember if I mentioned in the episode that I kind of have this whole at least sort of framework that I've been constructing in my head on kind of how to solve some of the problems Definitely not all of them , but that was one of the things that I know I did get to listen to a little bit of the episode before this and that was one of the things that you had mentioned is that you just sort of walked away from politics or like gave up on politics cause it didn't seem like anything like was ever getting done and that there's so much confusion and so much polarity and so much tribalism that it just feels like there is no path forward and , honestly , like I'm probably the most optimistic I've ever been about the future of humanity , which is weird . It feels weird for me to say that because that's not been my natural bent at all until like probably within the last six months .
Speaker 1And so yeah , as long as you don't think about the climate , yeah sure . This isn't the conspiracy theory episode , okay .
Speaker 2Climate change is not conspiracy theory . That is real . I read a on the flip side of that what you just said . I read an article , or at least part of an article , yesterday about that's why I said climate change where climate scientists are and different not climate scientists virologists and different people who have discovered that there are like thousands year old viruses in frozen ice that are now melting . That and the ones that they've of the ones that they have found , they've tested many of them and find that they're the general makeup of things , one we have nothing like in the world so today and they're all quite lethal . So it's like plagues in ice that we're melting right now . Fun times , which is only one of the things to be concerned about when it comes to thinking about climate change . So many , so many things , anyway but yeah .
Speaker 2But in terms of like , I wouldn't say I'm not optimistic . How are you optimistic ?
Speaker 1Well , that's hard to . It's not a short conversation .
Speaker 2To explain this Sure .
Speaker 1But what I was trying to get at , I think , in the episode was that so much of the discourse is a red herring . It's for us to fight over these things that are a distraction from the real cause and the source of our issues , and as long as they have us fighting over here , we're not ever going to turn and unite and look at the real culprits in all of this , which is like the global elites and the people who run the banks and the people who fund both sides of the war , and then the people who profit from all of the war and the big corporations that profit from the slave labor around the world and keeping poor countries poor and taking resources from the global South and things like that .
Speaker 2Right and yeah and even for those that do look that way and try to make noise about it , it gets lost in the white noise of all the garbage that's out there .
Speaker 1Yeah and like one of my big learnings is just how much I think we talked about the sunlight , how much we actually have in common across both sides , but then they highlight the differences so that we can't ever come together on things . And I think that's changing . Like I get a sense that like , honestly , I feel like they overplayed their hand with COVID and people are waking up to things don't actually work the way that we're presented to work on the surface , and there are , there are agendas out there that don't have our best interest in mind , because , because you know , I quite the opposite .
Speaker 1Yeah , like there is a subset of humanity that views itself as pretty much a different species in the rest of humanity , yeah , and so like I you know , out of context it probably sounds kind of nutty , but like that's just what I'm coming to realize the more I learn about shit that's going down . And so I think part of the reason why I'm more optimistic than I was is because , in my own journey of not paying attention to anything , spending a year to completely feeling like the world was turned upside down and then realizing like , oh , I have been fed all this stuff my whole life , or some sub , you know , some portion of my life that I didn't have the tools to dig into and unpack and really understand why certain narratives were being pushed and why other narratives were being suppressed . And there's agendas behind all of it , and there are agendas for people who don't really care about me , and so , yeah , I and I'm not the only one who experienced this , so many people have experienced this , and so that's part of it . The other part of it is what I was trying to get at with going through that whole spiel about how money is created and what money is , and all of that was I . That , honestly , is one of the big things that so few people understand , and that's by design . They make it complicated when they talk about it . It's really boring and they don't want us really looking into understanding how that stuff works . Because when you realize how it works , you're like shit , they're just stealing money from me . Like they're taking my life force and they're stealing it from me .
Speaker 1Like , if you think about , like , if you just look at taxes , right , you're you know , if you live in a state like ours where we don't have a state income tax , we're being taxed some around probably 20 to 25% , depending on what brackets that we're in , and stuff like that . If you think about that on the low end every Friday , you're not working for you , you're working for the government . One day out of your week is not going to you , and that's just like looking at taxes . You don't even think about the rate at which they're debasing the currency . That's the sneakier one , because essentially you're constantly like you're working for less and less and less and then , and so really like , realistically , probably over the course of your lifetime , half of what you're doing at least half is working for them .
Speaker 1It's providing resources for them to go out and do a bunch of shit that none of us want that profit . You know a small group of people and that's , and people are waking up to that . And then the nature of that whole system is that we're in that exponential curve , which means shit is over this next decade . Shit's going to start falling apart and you can already see , like , if you follow this stuff , you can already see the groundwork being laid for a new system they're trying to migrate us into , but for the first time in history , we have an exit ramp that is not controlled by anyone , and that is Bitcoin , and that's why I'm excited about it is because it's fully decentralized . Nobody controls it , and for the first time , we have money that is separate from the state , like for the first time in our , you know , in our society's sort of existence .
Speaker 1We have money that's separate from the state and that's extremely powerful , and it's designed in such a way where the game theory is starting to kick in and as the adoption grows , the more it goes from . You know the thing that was Gandhi quote of like first they ignore you , then they laugh at you , then they fight you and then you win and we're in the . Then they fight you .
Speaker 1But they're now starting to realize that if they're not on the train like they're going to get left behind , right , and so , like , when you and I talked about this stuff last summer , I think Bitcoin was around like 25 , 27,000 and it's going up to well , we went all the way up to almost 50 and we're at 40 right now .
Future of Bitcoin ETF and Banking
Speaker 1But the big development I was going to say there's some big news that's happened . The big development was like , literally the week after you and I talked about this , blackrock announced that they were filing for a spot ETF for Bitcoin , which basically means that it opens up a really easy channel for all this corporate money to flow into the asset , because then it can be traded on , you know , like any other security and or not security , like any other stock , right , right , and it can . Like right now , there are a bunch of rules and , just logistically , things that prevent , like companies from investing and pension funds from investing , and retirement accounts and all of that stuff . Now they're like they just launched and we saw an insane amount like I think it was like almost $4 billion , and first couple of days flow well , like in terms of flow , and everybody's freaking out because the price dipped after that . But it was just because I don't want to get into the weeds of why that was , but it'll even out and then it'll start to take off again .
Speaker 1But to me , this is more of a sign of like they're they've had to change their narrative about it , because now BlackRock , which is the biggest asset manager in the world I think it was like $10 trillion assets under management , something like that like larger than most countries yeah , like they have and them , and it's like there were 11 ETFs that launched the same day and like Fidelity has one , and you know , all these old school institutions are developing products in the space and then those will get pushed out to you know boomers and the rest of us to start investing in . And for me , that's just a sign that they they can't stop it and so they have to do something that I think they're trying to co-opt it now , but I don't think that's going to work either . And so the reason why that's important to me is when I was trying to get down to the bottom of things in politics , of like how stuff happens and what enables certain things , and central banking and the debt-based fiat money system , the implications of that and what that allows , the incentive structures that it sets up and the things that it enables to happen make this . The current state of the way things are makes so much more sense . So the endless wars that we have , all these proxy wars even World War I and World War II would not have happened to nearly to the degree that they did without the central banks , because they were funding both sides and then , as we started to get more and more into this debt spiral of printing money , that money goes to the . So , if you think about it this way , if the banking I'll be really conspiratorial and I'll call them the banking cartel If the banking cartel controls the price of money essentially and they're the ones essentially that are choosing on average who is getting the loans and who's getting the money coming from the money printer essentially there's so much that can be influenced by them , which means that as their power grows and as they have different ideologies , they can see those ideologies come to fruition just by directing the money flow . So it's a really sneaky way to shape society because you can .
Speaker 1This is an oversimplification , so I'm not saying this happens all the time , but in general you can say this is an objective I have for society and over the next 20 years I'm gonna be looking for opportunities to invest in these places for this future that I wanna see create . Whether or not that's good for the rest of humanity , I don't know . Yeah , it benefits me , but it doesn't ever . We on the other side of that don't think about it that way , where we're not seeing how , the people controlling the money flow are the ones at the source of where things are getting directed . So obviously they can control everything , but they can set up the incentive structures to make their outcome more likely , which is what they've done over the last however , many decades . And so if we have an off ramp for that , are you adjusting your mic ?
Speaker 2Yeah , sorry , hang on , except I can't . Okay , here we go , beautiful , I'm really just wanting to lean back .
Speaker 1If we have an off ramp for that , then essentially we can exit the game . We don't have to play their game anymore . Right , yeah , and then their power gets greatly diminished . And that's the beautiful thing about it is it doesn't require trust , because right now it's like hey , trust us , we're doing what we say , we're doing and we have your best . We don't have to trust anything because with Bitcoin and just the larger blockchain technology and all that , everything's on the blockchain . You see the records . There's no hiding from it .
Speaker 1So one of the things that they've done with gold , for example , is they did a gold ETF , I think in 2004 , a spot ETF on that , and it's like how do you know if , essentially , they've been accused of suppressing the price of gold because they're creating a bunch of paper gold and the paper gold supposed to be one to one with the actual gold . But how do we know that that is the case ? Who's going to verify that ? Right , yeah , and we know that . I think it was like JPMorgan . I was reading an article . They've been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating the precious metals markets by doing stuff like that . And I think they bought . There was a one story where they bought so many tons of nickels and when they Like nickel , like the mineral , and when they went to verify it or audit it or something , I don't know how long it'd been there , but it was just sacks of rocks , oh my God .
Speaker 1So there's all kinds of shenanigans that happen in the financial system because it's so easy to confiscate things and so easy to hide stuff because it's so complicated . And all of that complication , all of that stuff has been solved now with technology and it's fully transparent and we don't need anyone in the middle to hold a ledger to make sure that when I I say that I gave you $20 , we can prove that right , because my bank has a ledger and your bank has a ledger and they have a system for communicating and double checking between the two . All of that infrastructure , which comes in a lot of overhead and cost and marketing and sales and regulatory shit all that stuff is no longer necessary for most things or for at least the exchange of value between people .
Speaker 1Right , we now have a new technology that allows us to do that without a middleman , and that's a huge threat to the whole system , and so that's one of the reasons why they're trying to co-opt it . But I am really optimistic because I don't think they're going to win . And one I don't actually think they're smart enough , and I say that because the more I watch decisions being made that don't make any sense , the more I'm realizing they're so out of touch with humanity that they think that their plans are going to work out , and I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist now , I'm sure , but this is where I'm at , and this is actually afterthoughts for both of us together .
Speaker 1Like , I just feel like we're entering into a new age and it's going to take us a while to get there , but I'm excited about it and I may not ever see a lot of it come to fruition , but my kids and my grandkids will .
Implications of a Debt-Based System
Speaker 1But it has to start with the money . We have to fix the money first , because there's this guy named Michael Saylor who has this analogy of bloodletting , where it's like if you're an athlete and I'm coming and taking a pint of blood from you every week , how long before you start feeling really drained , how long before your performance starts going away , how long before you get sick ? Right ? And that's essentially what's happening to us and to society at this scale . And , if you think about it , one of the things I said was the byproduct of having this debt-based system is growth at all costs . We have to keep growing because otherwise the system falls apart , because we've made our credit cards bigger than our income , right ?
Speaker 1So we have to keep trying to increase the income , and we can't , but at the same time , the credit card is growing bigger than the income , essentially , and that's what's happening . And now it's gotten to the point where we are . I think we've passed a trillion dollars a year in just interest payments . So just servicing our debt has surpassed our military budget and is about to be our number one expense as a nation is just the debt . And so I think and I'm just gonna go out and say I think there's gonna be some sort of event this year that's going to . There's gonna be .
Speaker 1It has to be some excuse . I don't know what it's going to be . There's gonna be some excuse for them to print a shitload of money and drop interest rates really quickly , because we have so much debt rolling over this year and the interest rates , at the rate that they're at , are going to roll into a rate that's like two or three times higher than what it was , which is , I think there's like a third of the debt is rolling over this year , and so it's just like it's fucking crazy and so it's going to fall apart a lot more quickly . I mean , I don't think this is something that's gonna like happen tomorrow , but you know , I think over the next five to 10 years it's gonna become very , very obvious that they don't know what the fuck they're doing and people are gonna start looking for an off ramp and people are gonna start exiting the system and it's probably gonna be a lot of chaos .
Speaker 1But I think that what I'm , what I'm optimistic about , is like the human spirit to , once we get all that bullshit out of the way , we can actually start solving problems and we can actually start building societies the way that we we want and and so that's that's why I'm optimistic . But , like , if you going back to this idea that growth of all cost , like there's the , it's the incentive structure that I was talking about . So if you think about , like , let's say , you want to buy a new guitar and right now it's a thousand dollars , it costs you a thousand dollars and you know that next year is gonna cost you $1,200 . When are you gonna buy the guitar ?
Speaker 2Now .
Speaker 1Yeah , you're gonna be much more likely to buy it now If , instead , you knew that next year it was gonna be $800 . Got to wait , might you wait yeah .
Speaker 1Now it's gonna be . Might you wait ? You might wait , like , but you're gonna be more likely to , unless you really need it right now . But if it's something that you want , you're gonna be more likely to wait . Which means that spending goes down right , which they cannot have , because when spending goes down , gdp goes down and what they're taking in goes down , and it becomes very , very obvious that and that's called deflation .
Speaker 1By the way , when prices go down , right , and we , because of the system that we live in , we think that prices always going up is normal . We think it's like a law of the universe . That is not normal . Yeah , it's actually the opposite . Prices should go down because as new technology comes out that makes things cheaper to produce , it should become cheaper . Things are supposed to lower to like the cost of production , essentially like the margin should shrink almost to the cost of production . That's what happens over time , and so the reason why that's not happening is because they have to inflate the economy at the same rate or greater than what technology is deflating . And so then you get these weird sort of things where houses double in price in 10 years , but the cost of a plasma TV goes down to like a couple of hundred bucks from like a couple of thousand right .
Speaker 1And so it shows up differently in different industries . But the TV example is how most things should work , but they don't because of the system that's set up . And then we are much more likely to like always feel like we just can't get ahead , we can't get our head above water , no matter what we do . And a big reason for that is that because and we don't even like consciously realize this , but we know intuitively that our money is worth less in the future than it is right now . And so even if you think about retirement , you can't , you probably don't .
Speaker 1It's one of those things that , like before I learned all this stuff , the way that I had thought about retirement was , like I'm not going to worry about that because , like , basically I have to . I have to kind of get to the point where I can get ahead of the inflation rate before I can be able to survive , before I can even think about accumulating things and having a retirement . And I don't know if I consciously thought that , but I definitely unconsciously believe that and was making decisions kind of based on that reality . And now it's weird because now that I have understood this , these concepts , I make decisions completely differently , like I don't want to buy things because I'm like I could use that money to buy Bitcoin , and or I could , I could wait , you know , for a few years , and then the amount of Bitcoin I would have to sell to buy something that I want is much less than if I do it today .
Speaker 1So I can hold on to more of my stuff by just waiting through . You know and we buy so much shit we don't need . And so it's not for sure , but it's because that is that's necessary for our economy and for our society because of the way that it's set up . And so the unfortunate part is like it is inevitable that this is going to come crashing down in some form , and that's going to be painful for a lot of people . But the more we are aware , the more we can prepare and the better we can handle it .
Speaker 2you know , whenever this stuff happens , All I got from that last bit was that you said the more that we are aware and the more that we prepare and I want you to say them and the more that we share . I just needed like a third word . I know I couldn't think of one .
Speaker 1In the moment .
Speaker 2Yeah , the better , the better we fare .
Speaker 1But I think that , like even just something as simple as the way like our time horizon changes when we , when the money changes yeah , because we stopped thinking short term and we started thinking long term , and I experienced this personally and I know that , if I experienced it like , other people are going to start thinking that way too , the more that they understand these concepts , and so it's going to take a long time for that to permeate throughout society . But that's one of the main reasons why I'm optimistic , because we've just the fact that Bitcoin exists has changed the game .
Speaker 1It's changed the . It's basically created a new game with new incentive structures , and it's gotten past its point where it can't be squashed , and so it's like this is going to get real interesting .
Speaker 2You know , there's already .
Speaker 1There's apparently like big talks that the what is it ? Qatar , their sovereign wealth fund . They're talking about putting a half a trillion dollars in Bitcoin . You know what that would do to the Bitcoin market . Yeah , geez . Like people are saying if that happened there'd be like a $100,000 God candle , where it that price jumps a hundred grand in one day . Like I don't know how realistic that is . I have no idea .
Speaker 1But . But this is but this is . It's a representation of the game that's now starting to be played , because it's like nobody wanted to be the first country to do it because it's risky , but then El Salvador did it and then at first everybody was making fun of them and now they look like geniuses because they're making money on it and and it's changed like their whole . That's been a big part of what's changed that whole thing . They're now safe . It's a safer country than the United States . It used to be like one of the biggest in terms of murders per capita , and now it's less than the .
Speaker 1United States Like it's safe .
Speaker 2Wow .
Speaker 1There's a lot of reasons for that . It's not just Bitcoin , but like that was a , that was a piece of it . So nobody wants to be the first , but now that's happened . No , you definitely don't want to be the last .
Speaker 2Yeah , Definitely yeah , for sure .
Speaker 1There's this meme that's like everybody gets Bitcoin at the price that they deserve , and so there's this really interesting race that's going to play out of , like what big country or corporation or bank is going to jump in ?
Speaker 1That's going to make everyone else be like , oh shit , now I have to do it too .
Speaker 1And then it's like it's a very limited supply , like , yeah , and when it's the hardest asset in the history of humanity , because there's only ever going to be 21 million and 93% of that has already been mined and the next 7% will take 110 years or something like that , because the rate at which it's mined is cut in half every four years and that halving is about to happen in April and like a few months . And so then the daily new Bitcoin that comes onto the market from the miners goes from like 900 a day to like 450 a day . At the same time , we're experiencing inflows from these ETFs and other things that Bitcoin hasn't really experienced before either , and so it's just as weird , like we've never had an asset that has had a demand shock and a supply shock at the same time , like it's a global asset in this way . This is going to get real interesting , like what's going to happen , like even if you're not invested in it . It's just really fascinating to watch this play out .
Speaker 2Sure , yeah , it's like a massive , like very strange social experience .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's going to be really weird , but I'm excited because , like , whatever happens , I'm really optimistic about it . And then I also want to tell you about we're going to do a futurism episode , but we didn't . I'm not doing it but I do want to tell you about because it kind of fits into this like my whole vision for the music industry and how that could change completely with from blockchain technology and some other technologies that are coming up or that are out .
The Politics of Optimism and Manipulation
Speaker 1But I yeah , we can make a case for you on why you're not optimistic if you want , but like that's , there's some of the reasons why I am .
Speaker 2Well , no , yeah , I mean , and I agree with all that there's so much exciting things happening in terms of , like you know , anything technology related to , especially in how it affects us in terms of , you know , daily life . I think all that's that's incredibly optimistic , and you can find optimism in news all over the place . That's easy to miss because they want us worried about the dumb shit , and that kind of brings us back around to the idea of politics . It's hard because you and I have conscious differences in the way that we're defining the word politics and oh yeah we didn't really talk about that , yeah .
Speaker 2Right and we got out very much in terms of , like the beginning of the conversation versus where it ended up right . So it's like we started out with my definition of politics and moved into your definition of politics , which is , I , arguably more probably more accurate to the original meaning of politics , but does not represent what we think of when we think of politics . And I think that's also accurately represented in the responses we got in the episode , because people had no idea what we were going to be talking about .
Speaker 2Oh , you haven't heard those yet . Yeah , so all everybody's just like I don't want to deal with politics because of who gives a shit about one person versus the other or one team versus the other , when all this is flawed anyway , and like , why do we even ? And so I thought like that was kind of the general sentiment and I'm like , yeah , and that's the kind of conversation that I was afraid of having and didn't want to have and was so nervous about . So finding out a little bit in pieces ahead of the conversation , but then obviously very quickly in the conversation , about how you were defining politics as a much more like holistic approach to it and how it affects all people in all communities every day , but not in the sense of like what you know . I think both sides of this are . This definition would say the same thing that it affects things and people every day , but it's a matter of I don't know , rights versus Worth . I don't know . It's like a bigger thing , it's a much bigger , you're a bigger picture .
Speaker 1Yeah , I guess when people think about politics it gets boiled down to the left versus right debate , which is just a bunch of and they're right , it's easy to be cynical about that , because it's very fair to say that it's just a show .
Speaker 2Nothing ever changes .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's not even about it , and here's another thing that's really fucked up about .
Speaker 1It is that and this is one of the things that really pissed me off when Because I , like I said in the episode , I've gone pretty far left and then because of the story , the narrative that's created around the left of they care about marginalized people and humanity thriving and all of this stuff , and then realizing that the opposite of that is true .
Speaker 1And so , if you think about it , when you create , I think that there are good intentions behind doing things like creating protective classes , because you see people who have been repressed and you've seen people who have been treated poorly as a group and you want to do something to change that , and I think the intention behind this is honorable .
Speaker 1I think the mechanism for the way we've done that is a Trojan horse , because what ends up happening is , when you create any protective class for anything , you then create political leverage , and so what ends up happening is that class gets used as political leverage , which means that it has value to stay repressed . So the incentive structure is upside down , because you actually don't want to improve things , or you want to improve things just enough , where there's not a revolt , but you don't actually want things to get materially better for any group of people that you're using , because you're using them to get ahead , and if things change for them , they're not going to be as united and motivated to support you and your cause . You're not going to be able to use them in the same way . It takes away your power if they have power .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , I see what you're saying . I think my only thought about that , though , is like and this is something that I feel like I remember kind of heading down this direction , and then we got turned in a very hard left , different direction , and so then I never came back to it . But you're also talking about the both sides , based on their leaders , of people who are supposed to be in authority , but what about the everyday person ? You know what I mean . Those values that you're talking about , that are all fake to the politician , because all politicians don't have a side , they're just whatever works for them .
Speaker 2But the values of a political party , people , everyday people , identify with and try to be those things , I would think generally , or at least say that they at least think they're those people , and while also missing out on the shortcomings of that ideology too , because there always is on both sides , and so that's the harder part , and I think that's why , especially , you think about people on the left , or I think it's starting to become very evident that no politician is on anybody's side , because we're starting to realize , like , well , except for the right , now we're in a very different time than when we recorded this episode , and it looks like we're definitely heading right towards the cliff of Trump all over again , and so I feel like it's just one of those things where the right is like we get the leader we deserve .
Speaker 2We get the leader . Yeah , I completely agree with that . If Trump wins again , we deserved it . But I think that this is more the conversation everybody's trying to expect , hot take , hot take .
Speaker 1I'd rather have Trump than Biden . Really , why is that ? I don't think . Well , if you look it really into this , I don't think that if Trump had been in office in 2021 , I would have worried about losing my job and had that threatened because of personal medical decision , and I say that because the Trumps . So Trump's a weird phenomenon and you and I actually talked about this after the episode , but we didn't record it because it was like two out there I think , yeah , I don't remember .
Speaker 1So here's my theory on Trump , and I say this having kind of come to , like I said , there's no certainties on the probabilities , right ? So the probability of this has increased the more I've learned and the more I've kind of watched things . I think that Trump was planned as controlled opposition in the primaries , so it's very clear that both sides wanted Trump to win the primaries , and as soon as that happened , well , but as that was happening and so I say that because there was a narrative that was started that I think that Clinton had wanted to use , in anticipation of being president , to start taking control of some more things around , like the right being the greatest threat to national security that whole narrative and so that was the plan was to sort of show that support for Donald Trump and use that as sort of a springboard to start highlighting these other things that are happening and even causing some things to happen . And that would then justify taking this whole apparatus that we built post 9-11 to go after terrorists globally and all of the really shady shit we've done , and turning it inwards to then start using those same tools to start taking away more and more freedoms from citizens . And so what happened , though that was not in the cards , was like he wasn't supposed to win , and I think , because Trump is such a narcissist and he started getting all of this support , he started doing his own thing more and realizing that , hey , maybe I could actually have a shot at the White House . And he went for it and it happened .
Speaker 1And it surprised the shit out of the people who were on the left and who would put all these plans in place . For when ? Because the Clinton administration was just going to be a continuation of the Obama administration . The same way , the Biden administration has been a continuation of the Obama administration , and that was the plan
Trump, Russia, System's Fragility
Speaker 1. And then Trump upended all of that and they were scrambling .
Speaker 1And then they went through this whole like Russia gate thing which , if you think about all of the craziness of the 2020 election and the way that the media talked about the right for questioning the election , the left did all the same shit from 2016 and it was all fabricated .
Speaker 1It was all paid for by Clinton . This has come out since then and she , like the whole , like Russia Trump was a Russian agent or Trump was Russia helped him like . All that stuff was complete bullshit and the media ran with it for three or four years and I bought into it . I was like , oh yeah , this makes sense , until I started to learn more about how this shit works and I'm like , what is that ? That doesn't actually make sense . And there were some people calling this out that it was bullshit . But they kind of got pushed aside and the people who were agreeing with it were plastered all over televisions , everywhere and in the papers and stuff and it's just . It's so crazy to see how easy it is to influence a large group of people when you control the flow of information .
Speaker 2Yeah , well , to see the thing that I would say that's different from this time , well , I'm actually curious . So I feel like I said , a bunch of stuff there .
Speaker 1I don't know if I lost track of where I was going .
Speaker 2Yeah , and there was some things you said I wanted to circle back on . So you think that explain the one line that you said about your four Trump over Biden , because if Trump was president for 21 .
Speaker 1I'm definitely not four Trump in any way . I would never vote for either of them , yeah , same . But if I , I will probably never vote again , honestly . Yeah , you've said that before . But I honestly I think that because Trump is a wild card , it makes it a lot harder to push certain agendas and well , he's pretty forceful about pushing one now .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , I mean , he has his own shit and you know he didn't know how to in the first . His first term was him learning how to do certain things .
Speaker 1Here's the thing , though , dude Everyone always wanted to call Trump Hitler , and the reality is like that . That could never be possible , because Hitler wasn't like a singular entity . Hitler had the whole sort of the apparatus of the media and the like the propaganda machine was like behind him . That's how he was able to influence the way that he was . The majority of the propaganda machine is against Trump , and so there is and they can't be before him , and so and you can see this play out in like you know , I'm sure you're familiar with the Trump derangement syndrome phenomenon , where it's like , no matter what Trump does , like that is bad and the opposite is good .
Speaker 1And so then you started seeing like media twist itself and to justify these really weird things just because Trump was for it or against it , and then you could watch him play with them and just like before or against certain things that he knows they're for or against , so that they have to flip flop and it was just so weird to watch and so like there and that causes chaos . And it's hard to unify forces when there's all that chaos on their end . And I would rather see chaos on their end than have a propaganda machine that's in line with the group that's trying to push the agenda , if that makes sense .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , I think at the end of the day I know that we're kind of on the verge of burning it all down anyway , like I don't think that this system can operate very much longer . It's just a matter of how it's going to go down in flames and really , and how that will benefit and who's going to hurt .
Speaker 1We want it to be a slow burn . We don't want it to implode . I'm like that does concern me , that it's going like it's not the falling that kills you , it's the rate at which you stop falling , and so we want to try to figure out how to have a soft landing . We don't want to completely crash , because then a lot of people will die Because I'm full on anarchy .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , just like in general , we have . So much of our society is reliant on a globalist economy that has been set up that we , if that went away so much would be fucked Like . People don't know how to grow their own food . People know how to get the shit that they want , and as soon as there are shortages of things like that , that only lasts for so long before people start getting desperate . I'm not saying that this is going to happen . I think they have a lot of tricks they can do to keep the illusion going .
Speaker 2Kick the ball down the street , yeah .
Speaker 1Kick the can down the road . Whatever now do you want to use here ?
Speaker 2That's not what .
Speaker 1I'm saying , but I'm not saying like I . I think it's a non-zero probability that that could happen , like you know it is a house of cards .
Speaker 2It is a house of cards .
Speaker 1Yeah , even if you think about the derivatives market , which is like all the , did you ever watch the big short and how the ? Yeah , the great financial crisis was basically because they took a bunch of , they started lending out money to people who really couldn't afford it because they were desperate for growth , right , and then those got packaged , the subprime mortgages got packaged into and with other ones that made it look better to invest in , and then people were placing bets . Essentially is what the derivatives market is and , like you know , that's how like $1,000 turns into like $100,000 on top of it and whether or not the $1,000 is gonna get payback . Like you think about that kind of scale of what the derivatives market actually is , no one actually knows how big it is because it's so hard to keep track of . And if that falls apart , like what is gonna happen ?
Speaker 1I don't know , man , like it almost did in 2022 . Like in the I think it was 2022 . Yeah , this is definitely like way in the weeds and I'm not gonna pretend to understand the details so we won't go into it , but like , if you look up the guilt G-I-L-T over in the UK , yeah , yeah , if you remember that whole thing , yeah , like if they hadn't stepped in , like there was gonna be , like someone was gonna , it was gonna be a domino that was gonna start cascading the rest of the global economy And- .
Speaker 2Wait , what do you mean ? I was just saying , I know the company .
Speaker 1No , no , no guilt . Wow , what does this stand for ? It's like they're pensions or something . I mean . If anybody's from the UK , like you have , you can tell . I don't know what I'm talking about . I don't remember the details because it was a while ago , but essentially it was something along the lines of like defaults were going to start happening or like they couldn't cover the pensions , or something along the lines because of the rates have been increased so much and essentially , if they didn't lower the rates , the system would crack and that would cause cascading effects on people's pensions , which goes like , if I remember correctly , that's how this is what it was about , but it was .
Possible Planned Events and Suspicions
Speaker 1When you start messing with people's pensions , you're also messing with their ability to do a lot of other things that affect the economy .
Speaker 1It's all these cascading effects right throughout , and so there are several of those kind of things right now that are just kind of teetering , Like we're like we think it could fall off the cliff at any moment , but , as of right now , it's still there and we're going to try to prop it up , but , like we don't know how long this thing is going to last Like the commercial real estate markets another example of this it's like yeah , so what's going to happen ? I don't know , but I would put money on the fact that there's going to be something that happens this year that is going to give them the excuse to furnish a little money and they're going to call it something new . But there was a crisis . This is another . See , they make it sound so boring .
Speaker 1It's like the reverse repro crisis that happened in the fall of 2019 . And there was this whole thing that happened like I think it was . Blackrock came out with a report that year talking about how there's going to be , within the next year , there's going to be a need for a huge injection of stimulus into the economy , and it was going to have this . For the first time , it's going to have to be directed , like , directly to people .
Speaker 1And this was in 2019 and , magically , within a year , we got STEMI checks right , right , and you can argue back and forth and whether or not the things that caused that to happen were planned .
Speaker 2Right , well , it was certainly a good opportunity .
Speaker 1It was a good opportunity .
Speaker 2I think I feel like those kinds of things . It's more like certain people , at certain levels , know there's always going to be something that comes along that they can use . There's going to be another crisis , there's going to be another , whatever .
Speaker 1You know what ? I think we can have this conversation a little bit . I actually would . If I weigh the probabilities now , after everything that I've learned , I think it's the higher probability that it was planned Really . Yeah , I didn't used to think that . I thought that was a bad shit , crazy . But then when you dig into the details of how everything played out , I'm like this , just this , it feels orchestrated and the thing is I'll just give you an example . So , like it's pretty clear at this point , this was a created virus , right ? Yeah , it seems awfully , awfully .
Speaker 1There is no natural origin for this thing and I feel like that's been all but proven conclusively at this point . If you look at all the evidence that stacks up for that side of the case versus the evidence that stacks up for natural origin , like they're just night and day , and so if we kind of take this premise and you look at all of the events that happened around the lab earlier in the year , it starts looking really suspicious . They bought a shitload of PCR machines , like in March of 2019 . And certain things like that Stuff started happening where they had to upgrade their air filtration system and stuff . And like the fall of 2019 , like something was going on and it was definitely earlier than they originally said . So there's at least that , yeah , but the other thing that happened in 2019 and like October of 2019 was event 201 . Are you familiar with that ?
Speaker 2I don't know .
Speaker 1That's where the WHO , and like all of these different organizations , do a simulation , and this simulation was for a coronavirus that became a global pandemic .
Speaker 1And how all this happened . Right , and they run simulations . Sure , yeah , interesting timing that this one happened , but the real fucked up thing about it was the CIA was there and they had representatives , and the media had representatives and almost the whole narrative around , or , at the event , the simulation was it wasn't how are we gonna save lives , it was how are we going to control the narrative ? That was what the whole thing was about . And how do we combat misinformation ? How do we take out certain channels that are proprietors of misinformation and all this stuff , right , right , so , okay , fine , maybe they were just running the simulation , like , maybe it's just a coincidence that this happened .
Speaker 1The thing that really I cannot get over is that , if you remember , back in like early 2020 , they like everyone freaked out about this thing because we started seeing videos coming out of China of people like falling over in the street and them like spraying down the streets and like locking everybody up and like people were freaking out , yeah , and then find out that those videos are fabricated , they weren't real . Why ? Why would they want ? If this happened , naturally , why would they want everyone to freak the fuck out , especially if it was clear like it came from China , and they would probably be blamed for it . Like , if you're thinking down these lines , it's like , okay , this is clear , we're gonna have to say something about this . They finally say something in December .
Speaker 2And it's like who announced that this was fabricated .
Speaker 1This is like it's . I don't know if there was an announcement , but there were journalists that like went down this path and it was like investigated where these videos came from , and a lot of times they came from like different things , yeah , or it came from an earlier time .
Speaker 2Okay , yeah , yeah , or like it's very clear .
Speaker 1people are not falling like people were not falling dead in the street from this thing . This was made up and so , like what's the purpose of that ? Why ?
Speaker 2would you orchestrate ?
Speaker 1that it's weird and that's just one little thing , and like this huge list of things that just seemed to weigh the probability more towards a planned event than a coincidence of something .
Speaker 2Well that's always a terrifying thought . People planning things that kill lots of people . Yeah yeah , and I wish there was a . There's probably a word for something that people do , where they plan this thing that kills a bunch of people , right ? War , yeah , yeah .
Speaker 1I mean state sponsored genocide .
Speaker 2Yeah , so many things . Yeah , war , definitely a planned event . Well , yeah , that's all crazy . I don't know what to say about that . Yeah , I mean there's definitely . I mean I was talking to Madison just the other day actually about this and I was talking about I think it was probably after I was editing all these episodes . It was on my mind and I was like I mean there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there and a lot of like shit that rolled around them around . Just like I don't know about that . I can poke holes in the idea pretty quickly . It's real hard to poke holes in the lab leak theory . It's just so because I'm like , if I know no details at all about it , I'm like , except for that there's a lab that studies thousands of coronaviruses in Wuhan in China and it's apparently like the center of all of those things , and then a coronavirus comes out of China , not far away from the lab in Wuhan .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2Yeah , in the same town , in the same country , in the same part of the world .
Speaker 1Yeah , a couple of months after their database of coronaviruses mysteriously went offline .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , I'm just like , without knowing any details , it's like of course that of course , like yeah , okay , the coincidence is too high .
Speaker 1It's too high of a coincidence , yeah yeah , if you wanna go down the rabbit hole even more .
Speaker 2This is not supposed to be that , because seriously there is . I'm literally we're gonna have to re-record .
Speaker 1Whenever you wanna have this conversation , cody , it's really interesting . Okay , yeah , yeah .
Speaker 2I'm literally gonna have to . I'm just the afterthoughts will be . I'll take out the section where we actually talk about politics and then the rest of it I'm just gonna piece together .
Speaker 1No , we can't edit these .
Speaker 2But I'm just well . I mean like just take that one section out as a whole , don't edit it , and then just push it all together , and it's actually the afterthoughts for conspiracy theories also .
Speaker 1No , we already recorded . That though Did we . Yeah , we recorded that one .
Speaker 2Yeah Well , you guys are just in for it , these next couple weeks .
Speaker 1No one's listening this far into this . What are you talking about ?
Speaker 2You know I'd be . You'd be surprised People . They say that the most popular podcast is this , like just people's talking and hanging out . I mean , you think about like Joe Rogan , you think about like Two Bears , one Cave , like there's all these comedian podcasts nowadays where people are like just literally hanging out in a room and doing shit , you know . So maybe we're on to something . Maybe , if you guys like this format better than the actual podcast , I'd be interested to hear that thought . Actually it's definitely a lot easier to create , that's for sure .
Speaker 2This is right , yeah , seriously . Oh , okay , so you wanna hear my these were also only supposed to be like 20 to 30 minutes , which
Ideas for Society Transformation
Speaker 2is funny . Oh , were they ? I don't remember saying that Originally . Okay , in my mind I thought they would be like a shorter little , like literal afterthought , you know .
Speaker 1Whatever . Yeah , that's not gonna happen . So I wanted to tell you , well , a couple things . Okay , so I had I don't know if I wanna get into this . Actually , this is very applicable to the politics episode , though . Like I was thinking about like a framework , like what is a North Star , that we could sort of orient a new society towards . Mm yeah , and I was uncomfortable with it because it probably sounds very conservative on the surface .
Speaker 1Okay , but I was thinking about it and the only thing I could think of was orienting a society where everyone is brought up to be the best parent possible . So , even if they never become a parent , the principles and the characteristics that it takes to be a good parent and the process you would have to go through in order to become a good parent would benefit society greatly . So if you think about , like , all of the stuff that we've talked about , you guys are definitely in for a treat this season , because you know all of the traumas that I've been uncovering in therapy and process obsessing through , like in order to heal , like that's part of the process . It's learning how to like to have patience in the midst of chaos and how to have empathy and how to treat people like meet people where they are and not try to force your own desires for their life onto them , and things like that . All these things that make up a good parent are the way that we want to treat each other anyway , and the other benefit is , like , if everyone's a good parent , then the people who actually become parents will raise good kids who have the least amount of kind of trauma and bullshit to deal with and will be the most kind of like creative , productive , like people who build awesome things and do awesome things in the world right , and the more that happens , the better the world becomes overall . And so , like I , so that just kind of sent my brain down , like , if that's like , let's just sort of take that premise for a second , what are some things we could do in a society to make that easier ?
Speaker 1Like make being a good parent easier , and so things like you know how we go to like like how the college can be such a formative time and it's not really about what you're learning in class , it's about all the stuff that you experience outside of class and like you're you're it's like the last time in your life where you'll be with , like a peer group of your own age and that kind of setting . Yeah , and and what if we , you know , oriented it more aware in your 20s ? It's about raising kids . That's crazy . That sounds to us now . It didn't , you know . It sounds crazy to us now because of how hard it is to raise kids now and how expensive it is and what's required of us in the rest of our life that make you know , make it difficult to be a parent Right and like it sounds crazy to us now , but like , if you like , how amazing would it be where , if you're in your 20s , you're only expected to work like 20 hours a week ?
Speaker 1With that you know , and you're in communities where a people this year , same age , also having kids around the same age , and you know , and then over time , you know , as you're going through these phases , you can adjust life accordingly .
Speaker 1But you're , you know , maybe you're not really expected to like fully enter the workforce until your 30s . Like that would be really interesting , but people can't do that now because then there'll be a decade behind everything and they're going to have to work till they're 120 . Right , so it's like Right , yeah , and so you know , just , I'm just thinking about different things like that , and I love the idea , too , of one of the things that they do in Japan is they have these mixed use resident business zones so that you can have a business downstairs and you can live upstairs . I think that's so cool , like I would . One , I love the idea of you know more people owning their own small businesses . But two , like being able to do it in a way where you know you're you're not commuting , commuting an hour each way , every day , to like go to your job and like that sort of thing .
Speaker 2And certainly would spread community out all over the place Community and you can stay in your community invest in your community . You don't have to everybody taking it one location in a big city or whatever Exactly . Yeah , it would spread things out instead of being so concentrated in cities and and a lot already started to happen .
Speaker 1Yeah , a lot of places used to be more like that . Yeah , and part of part of the whole money thing is like , if you think about and we talked about how banks can direct you know society over a longer time frame , but if you think about it too , as sort , certain companies are closer to banks . They get better deals on capital and as they get bigger , they get even better deals on capital , which means that you can like it . We look back and we see how corporations have put small business Out of business over the you know the course of several decades across the country . Yeah , that would not be possible , at very least that wouldn't be possible at the rate that it's happened , if it wasn't for the way our money is set up , because they have the advantage of having cheap access to capital , which means that they can cut prices , they can run razor thin margins because they're , you know , operate . They can operate at a loss for a while and they'll be fine and they can . And then and then , the more they do that , the more that they can , the more that they can spread out and the more the market they can take over , which means the more volume they can do , which means that the lower they can keep their margins still and like all of that , that sort of like centralization of things .
Speaker 1The opposite happens in a world where , like , bitcoin is a standard Right and things start getting decentralized again and and it's it's easier to run a business . I mean , I , you've probably experienced this some too , but like because you've done a lot of freelance stuff and but I know running , trying to run my own business for three years is fucking hard , yeah , and it's like you know , a third of it I have to set aside to pay the government . Like think about not having to do that , like how much easier it would be . Or knowing that , like you know , I am what I'm like . The other thing I've thought about is like we , we work so long to get to a point where we're supposed to retire and then the money that we've like at this point , the amount of money that you will need to retire , like it will be double what it was 10 years ago . Like that's a huge fucking deal , yeah .
Speaker 2And especially when everything else is also going up .
Speaker 1So it's like right , that's what I'm saying . You need that much more because of the way that the currency has been debased , which which we call it prices going up , but it's really the currency debasing for the most part .
Implications of Economic Factors on Society
Speaker 1And , if you like , if you map the real estate market over the M2 money supply , which is , like the global money supply , something like 98% correlated , which means that if the money wasn't inflating , the price of housing wouldn't inflate , right , and even that that wouldn't be that big of a deal if wages kept up with it . But they don't .
Speaker 1And so there's this chart that I saw for most of last century , or for a long time , it was a house cost . I think it was like 2.5 times an annual salary or something like that , maybe it was 1.5 . It was somewhere between like one and two and now it's up to like 4.5 . That's how much currency debasement and wages have separated , and that really started to take off , especially when we went off the gold standard and went full like fiat money in 71 . And you can see that . And the same thing happens like most of the stock market , with the exception of some disruptive stocks . Like you map it over that and it's like it looks flat , because it's really about liquidity coming into the system and being redistributed from us to big ass corporations and banks and the government and things like that , the state that has evolved over time to just suck up more and more and more of our life and give us nothing in return .
Speaker 2Yeah , Well , that makes it going back to your original point , because literally we just rewound 45 minutes in this conversation back to what you were saying earlier . But going back to the parenting topic of that , it causes people like me to go . We don't make enough to have kids . We don't have room in our lives to have kids . We literally don't have room because we're in survival mode . Right .
Speaker 1And the other part of this , too , that most people aren't talking about . But I think depopulation is a huge problem that we are not having an honest conversation about as a society , and it's one of those things where it's like , once the trend starts , it's really super hard to reverse , and I don't know what that's going to look like . It's another thing , too , that growth at all costs , and one of the growth that has happened is human growth of people population .
Speaker 1And that's always sort of increased at a certain rate , and now that it's not increasing at that rate anymore , how are we going to make up for it in other ways in order to have that growth ? Well , there are robotics , but hey , guess what ? That also creates unemployment , and so it's just this whole sort of spiral of like . What the fuck is going to happen , I don't know .
Speaker 2Maybe that's why there's . It's like , I feel , like the AI conversation , the robotics conversation , has both sped up and slowed down a little bit , Like it was like oh , all this stuff's happening , we come so far , why have I not heard about this ? And then it's like they go dark again . I think that it's like this idea , maybe that they're just trying to slow the release of this concept and this idea down to when it's like we don't have enough people to fill these jobs . You know what I mean . It's like then we won't be asking the unemployment question because it's like we actually don't have enough people to even , you know , operate the things that we also love . So of course , we want to figure out solutions for that . We'll put them in the positions that we don't want to do , but it's not going to take away our jobs because we don't even have enough people for the jobs . They're waiting for that maybe that tip , and then it'll all speed up and get a lot louder .
Speaker 1Yeah , I don't know . Yeah , Well , it just feels like there's a race too , because whatever happens has got to happen before the money falls apart and it's like I think it's like no fiat currency has lasted more than like 80 or 100 years or something , and ours started and ours is about 80 years old , I think 90 years old , something like that , and so , yeah , I mean it's bound to happen at some point .
Exploring Economic Trends and Technological Innovations
Speaker 1I mean , if I were guessing , just based off of what I know , which obviously I'm not an expert on the stuff , but I would probably put it inside of this decade , it seems reasonable based off of the rate at which things are increasing currently is insane .
Speaker 1And if what happens this year what I think is going to happen happens , that's only going to increase even more . If you go back to I think we talked about this right 40% of all US dollars in existence were created since 2020 . That is insane .
Speaker 2Yeah , that's wild , we were operating with 60% of what we have now for the last , however long Crazy .
Speaker 1And then you look around here and you look at the housing prices and it makes really fucking a lot of sense , right ? Yeah , houses have doubled . Housing prices have doubled since 2020 . Like the houses that I'm looking at because we're looking to buy and we're just waiting to see what's going to happen in the real estate market but all the ones we're like man that feels way overpricing . We go and look at it and literally it was bought in 2019 , 2020 , 2021 for half of what it is now . Yeah , and it's like come on .
Speaker 2That's just crazy . It'd be interesting to see , just as an experiment . I think we've talked about it , probably this season . I can't even remember what it was about the computer simulation that they keep rechecking with every few decades or whatever . We were right on track up until the early 2000s . I wonder what it would look like now , with the exponential arc of stuff resources being used up , and if it'd be different .
Speaker 1I don't know . I would have to say that it's that there's any kind of accuracy in that thing . I would need to anticipate this , because it's pretty obvious . When you look at an exponential growth rate chart like we talked about , it looks like a hockey stick . It's suddenly and then all . I mean it's slowly and then all at once .
Speaker 2Right . But yeah , and I guess that's the thing is , it's like when that hockey stick happened , that was probably the point that wouldn't have been predicted right , because that was way too fast exponential growth . It was like a sudden change in resources .
Speaker 1I mean , if you look at it on a logarithmic chart , it doesn't look like . It looks more steady , it's just what was expected . Yeah .
Speaker 2Well then , I guess in that regard it would probably still be the same then .
Speaker 1And that's what I'm saying .
Speaker 2Well , that had us running out of resources within this decade . Okay , cool , so there's data to support what you think . I remember reading about that and about how they were saying like based on it had said all the way from the 70s or 80s that the time that we would run out of resources is between 2020 and 2030 . It could be around that time , or I don't remember the exact dates , but it was like a 10 year back window of like this is it'll be around this time .
Speaker 1Kind of then makes you think about why there's this whole agenda 2030 thing , where Elon Musk is wanting to get to Mars by 2030 and we're wanting to have a moon base by 2030 and the WF wants us all like locked down in 15 minute cities by 2030 and like all this crazy stuff , because they need to maintain control and if we start getting hungry , they're not going to be able to do that .
Speaker 2That's true .
Speaker 1Unless they figure out a way to fix that problem before that happens .
Speaker 2Yeah , that doesn't seem like a lot of efforts going into that .
Speaker 1The problem of control , not the problem of helping us . We don't want to do that ?
Speaker 2No , definitely not . This has been real positive .
Speaker 1Oh , here's , a positive .
Speaker 2Okay .
Speaker 1Okay , we'll talk about my vision for the music industry . This kind of fits into it . Okay , all right , and I use the music industry as kind of the use case . But it applies to like art , like any kind of creative .
Speaker 2Oh , okay , we're thinking about different things then . Okay , go ahead .
Speaker 1Okay , so there's multiple layers to this , so I kind of have to like build it up , so the first one won't sound as impressive , but then you'll start to see how it all fits together . Okay , so the amazing thing about the technology that's being developed it really is like the third wave of the internet revolution , where the you know , they call it web 1.0 was a distributed network that allowed you to essentially like , read information , and so , like the early days of the internet , it was mostly just like blogs and things You're consuming stuff text mostly . And then web 2.0 came along , which is where , like , if you want to get real nerdy engineering about it , it was like where JavaScript really took off and allowed interactivity and the ability to create web applications in the front end and essentially have an interactive web where you're not just reading but you're reading and writing . All right .
Speaker 1So , that's when we got the birth of social media and e-commerce and all of the stuff the internet that we know today . But there's another component that , while it's parts of it have kind of been brought into the fold , it's still sitting on top of really really old architecture , and that's the commerce part . So I think most people don't realize this . But the actual banking system , where things are settled , is like written in like Cobalt , it's like this old language and it's these old databases .
Speaker 1That's why working with banks is so slow and they're so risk-inversed and they don't want to change and so , like what has had to happen is like that settlement layer is really really slow and they built systems to kind of talk between banks , but that's kind of slow and so they had to build other layers on top of it . That happened faster and then . So that's why when you make a purchase with your Visa card , it happens in a second or two , right , but that doesn't actually come out of your bank account for a few days . And it's because Visa's basically fronting the money and settling at the transaction level , or like making that record at the transaction level and allowing it to go through , but the money isn't actually settled until the banks settle it right , and that is a slow process .
Speaker 1It's an even slower when you start talking about international transfers and sometimes they have to go through multiple chains of banks and things like that , and it's a huge pain in the ass and I know this because I've built technologies that have to deal with these limitations and I'm going to tell you it's a huge pain in the ass . So I actually do kind of know what I'm talking about in this regard . And so we now have technology that removes all of those limitations , and so there are , like Bitcoin , still fairly slow .
Speaker 1It's not as slow as the banks , like you know , it can take up to 30 minutes to do a transaction , sometimes when a network's really busy , but like that , fully , it's fully settled , right , yeah , right , and so I think I can't remember the , but it's like 13 transactions per second or something . It's pretty low . Yeah , the VISA network , if I remember correctly something in the ballpark of 2,500 transactions per second . That's what it does . So there are other technologies out there . One of my like the one that I'm really rooting for , is one called Solana , and the ecosystem is being built on that because of the technology is amazing and they have , like they can currently do like 50 or 60,000 transactions per second , and then the new upgrade that's going to be coming supposedly has like a no theoretical limit on it where you could do millions of transactions per second , and if you think about that , what that opens up in terms of what all the things that it could power , it makes a lot of things possible that aren't currently possible . So let's start at this sort of like base consumer layer . Let's say you have an app like Spotify that right now you pay a subscription for , because what they do is they work through all these licensing agreements with these labels and artists and then they store their the music files and things on their servers and then they give you access to that , and then they put an interface on it and algorithms and all this stuff right , to create this music experience for you , and you're paying them a fixed rate and then , based off of what you consume , they're paying . They have to do all this accounting to then pay out the royalties , right ? Okay ? So imagine , instead , you have a generic account , a generic library , or we don't even go to the library yet .
Speaker 1Let's say you want to stream music and rather than pay 15 bucks a month to Spotify , you only want to pay for what you listen to . All , right , so you can have a wallet that you've put 20 bucks in . You're like I want to listen until this 20 bucks runs out , right , and so every song costs a penny or a fraction of a penny , and then you are essentially paying as you go listening to music . But when you and you're essentially paying for access in the moment to that song , right , there's what are called smart contracts . On the back of that that says , okay , this particular song is , it has a smart contract attached where it's going and it's looking at who owns the NFT for rights to this song , and then it's saying , okay , who ? And then it's going , and then it's looking at , okay , which player is playing this song ? Right , like the app that's playing it , yeah , and it's saying , okay , I'm going to in this transaction so say , let's say it costs a penny , I'm going to give a third of that to the person who owns it . So a third of a penny , a third of it goes to the player and then a third of it goes into the network for the people who are running the network .
Speaker 1And so that's why , like on Solana , you can what's it called ? I can't believe I've forgotten the name of this but you stake your Solana , which basically means like you are sort of putting in a pool and you still own it , but you're letting other people use it to provide liquidity to the system and in exchange , you get a yield on that . So you get like 7% a year kind of paid back to you , and that comes in through these sort of fees as use of the network . And so that's how this works is like there isn't a company that owns the servers . The servers are distributed , right , and this would actually require something in addition to Solana .
Speaker 1But we don't have to get into all this , but for just the payments piece of it and the running of the smart contracts , you could set it up to where you're cutting out the vast majority of like the music labels .
Speaker 1In the industry of like , there's so much overhead and like figuring out the accounting , figuring out all the deals , figuring out all the stuff and making sure that everyone gets paid what they're supposed to be paid . That's a huge lift . This all does it in a fraction of a second and it's all transparent , right . So you as an artist , then , can ensure that you're actually getting paid for people using your like listening to your music , and so then you could set it up to where there are rules , where it's like , if you want to stream it , it's this amount , but if you want to actually buy the album , then you get . You're essentially purchasing an NFT that goes into your wallet , and so whenever a player asks for like , that song comes up in rotation , it can look at your wallet first and see if you have rights to play it , and then you won't get charged per play because you've already bought it .
Speaker 1And still then the artist if you buy it , the artist gets more of that money because they're not sharing or whatever Something along those lines .
Speaker 2Yeah , it takes us back to a time where we're going to be buying albums . I hope you would want to . I fucking hope so . Yeah , you would want to .
Speaker 1Yeah . So then what a Spotify do , right ? So , if you think about it , it's taking out a bunch of those courses . So then , essentially , do you remember Winamp back in the day ? It was basically like then you're just creating players that hook into an existing system . It's way less overhead , which ?
Speaker 1means it's a lower barrier of entry and people can create better user experiences .
Speaker 1There's a whole lot of competition for new user experiences and new algorithms that work better , and there's a ton of competition because they don't have the overhead of maintaining all the rest of the stuff and the labels and all this stuff . It's just kind of a poll that gets accessed and you're crafting the experience and then it's based off of . The better experience will attract more users and that's how you make your money . And so imagine this sort of world where that's happening , where a large portion of people are listening to music this way versus the old way . So in this world where that's happening , there's stuff that is way cooler that you can start to get into . So imagine , I thought I started thinking through all of this when I was helping you with your Kickstarter campaign , because , if you think about it , what you're offering is you're offering people an opportunity to invest in your art , but they don't get a return on that investment other than the ability to interact with your art , which , for most people , honestly , is not worth the investment .
The Potential of NFTs and Blockchain
Speaker 2Not talking about your art specifically , but I mean , just like I guess you're saying yeah , yeah , if you're talking about me , that wasn't a dig . Which , honestly , is not even worth it . That's in general with you , just so everybody knows .
Speaker 1So it's going to attract the people who just are really into the music , and so they do it because they want to see this music created and the return on their investment is just that it gets created , which those people are awesome .
Speaker 1Thank you to all those people , but that's a small subset of people . What if , instead of funding your album and you give them prizes or whatever , depending on how much they give you , what if , instead , they invested in your album and bought a piece of it , as if they were buying a stock in a company ? So think about this . You're doing a Kickstarter launch and rather than saying like I want to hit these tiers , you're saying here's my goal and in this round , I'm going to mint this many NFTs and I'm going to put them in a marketplace and you guys can bid on what you think that they're worth , and this round of NFTs gets a certain percentage of payments . They're like worth , like 25% , versus the next round will be worth like 15% per year , and then the next , the final round , will be worth like 5% or whatever .
Speaker 1So , what you're doing is you're incentivizing people to jump in early , and so they're investing in that , and then you're getting the funds for them purchasing the NFTs from you . So then smart contracts are set up to when that album goes live and it starts playing . When that third of the artist funds come in , a portion of that gets distributed to all the NFT owners , so they have an NFT in their wallet that is says , hey , I own a piece of this album and then every time that album gets listened to , I make a fraction of a penny . So if you think about the incentive structure that sets up , you're going to get people who are looking for new artists , who want to invest in new artists , not just because they want to see their music being made , but because they could actually get a return from that investment . There's an incentive to find new artists that you think are going to make it big and actually invest in their albums and getting their art out there . And if they , if you're right , then a lot of people will listen to it and you'll make a lot of money off of it because you invested early . And so then you get this . You get this world where people are spending much more time discovering new artists , supporting new artists , sharing new artists , because if they believe in it , part of the success is getting other people to listen to it , so they want to spread the message . So then you're going to get a bunch of free marketing and all of a sudden you start to see how you can actually make a living as an artist , because you're not giving up so much of your life force to this huge infrastructure that was built to try to support this thing Once , now replaced with a few lines of code . And so then it just comes down to like can you produce good art ? And if the answer is yes , you've got a much better shot at actually creating a living from it . And then there's this whole other aspect to it as well , where you're creating economies around your art .
Speaker 1So people can buy the NFTs , but then they can also resell the NFTs . So if you think about that , then you get this whole marketplace where people are buying and selling shares of art , and the bigger an artist becomes , then the more those shares are worth , right . And then so you can also set it up to where , every time an NFT is resold , you also get a portion of that sell as well . So as people are buying more and more and an NFT is worth a dollar when you start out and then it's worth $100 , and it gets sold for $100 , you are getting a portion of that 10X and increase in value , right , Every time it's sold as an artist . And all this has happened programmatically , right ? You see how amazing this world could be . We're like , yeah , and I actually I was thinking about this and I was thinking about what company right now could actually pull this off , because it's there's not really incentives for , like Spotify or Apple to do it .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1Or any of the other kind of major ones . The only one that came to mind was Napster . Yeah , because they have deep roots in the industry . They have a reputation for disrupting an industry , right , and they were hiring for a VP of product and one that , like , had a vision for crypto and NFTs and stuff , and I was , so I almost applied , like just because I wanted to talk to them . I want this vision to become a reality . I don't necessarily want to be the one to do it , yeah , but I want this vision to become a reality . Sure , you know , over the next decade or two , and there's a ton of obstacles in the way , but that's the vision that I see , like that's what is possible in the sort of new world where we are removing the overhead of these banking institutions that just leech off of and financial institutions that just leech off the rest of us .
Speaker 2Mm-hmm .
Speaker 1And instead that starts to get returned to our life force and the energy we're putting out is invested back in us , rather than invested in all these things that are just like profiteering . You know , the top 0.1% or whatever . Right , yeah .
Speaker 2No , that's really cool . I mean , I know there's like I know I've heard so many conversations about like blockchain and how that can change the dynamics of in so many different industries . You know , like thinking about like inventory and warehousing and how that's kept in check , versus how we do it now with our slow ass , terrible inventory systems that are built from terrible code and not even remotely efficient . Same thing with the entire freight industry Like all of that would be revolutionized in a way that , like we can't even possibly imagine .
Speaker 1Here's another one . So there's a meme in like , the crypto industry is like the tokenization of everything , so , essentially , like everything becomes on the blockchain , yeah , right , and so thinking about this is an extreme example . But like , your house has an NFT associated with it , right , and so , like , buying houses is as simple as purchasing an NFT , essentially . So there's like because there's so much .
Speaker 1there's so much overhead . That's just that is required to make the system work . But then that gets turned into code and they get standardized through code and it's like it's so easy to make things happen that are so slow to happen now , and so there's so much potential for disruption in so many industries . But it's also like that's another thing that's going to put people out of jobs honestly , because you know , accounting becomes way more simplified because everything's on chain right .
Speaker 1Things like you're talking about , like logistics and stuff like that . But the other thing that could be tokenized is stocks , and that's what they're looking into right now and I could see that that's the path we're going down . And the big deal to me about that is , honestly , there's little transparency into that whole world . So , like , I can get on Robinhood and I can buy you know so many I can buy a bunch of shares of Apple , right ? Do I actually own those shares ? No , I have a Robinhood account that tells me that they owe me those shares , but I don't have those shares , right , and I don't know what the mechanism is that holds them accountable for saying , hey , when I buy those shares , they have to actually purchase those shares and hold them all right . So how much of the stock market even is built up on this sort of like paper fake money ? I don't know the answer to that question .
Speaker 1Another thing is you know our politicians are not supposed to be insider trading . Obviously they do that and they don't have to report it for 60 to 90 days later , and then at that point it's like , well , who cares ? And there's actually like I think there was like an ETF set up for like Nancy Pelosi's trades or something like that , because she does better than like nine of the 10 top hedge funds in the country . Yeah , you know , and so she . So like , let's say , ok , if you want to , if you want to trades , you know , as a member of Congress even though I don't think that should be allowed you have to do it with this wallet where everybody can see what your trades are . So they're going to be , everyone's going to be watching it . And if you buy a bunch of shares in this defense contractor and then the next day we announced that we're invading , you know , syria or whatever that could probably be Yemen at this point , but , like you know , there we're going to see that and there's more transparency , more accountability , and that in itself is a change in the incentive structure .
Shift Towards Verified Trust and Honesty
Speaker 1All right . And so as we move over into this world where we can verify , we don't have to trust , all right then it's a lot harder to get away with shit , and so then you're more incentivized , to be honest , because those are the people who are going to get ahead , whereas right now , where everyone is just trying to keep up with the rate of inflation , you start trying to figure out how to cut corners and that eventually leads to people doing shady shit , and then the people who have the higher tolerance for , say , shady shit are the ones who are going to get ahead , you know . And then this is all turning that on its head where , yeah , you know , the incentive structures change completely . And that's why I'm optimistic , because I can see how , over time , that's going to change society for the better . Like we've set a new trajectory and we're just kind of in the beginning of that , and so we have the opportunity to help build the things that are going to enable that world , and that's why I'm excited , yeah .
Speaker 2Hopefully we make it that far . Yeah , I think we're done . I think we're done All right . See you on the next one . See you .