Solving the Problems by Creating More Problems! - Ep 017

Dive deep into why society continually addresses problems with the very instruments causing them. Our hosts unravel this paradox, exploring historical examples and critiquing Western monetary policies.

 

Watch this episode on YouTube

 

Hosts:

JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏
Anton Seim - @antonseim on 𝕏
Cory - @PykeCory on 𝕏

 

 

Sponsors:

Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of Storytelling - @indeehub on 𝕏

What is Better By Bitcoin?

Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.

Hey friend, listen. I know the world is scary right now. Corruption, war, inflation, demographics,

degeneracy, disease, unrest, hatred, and despair. We didn't come here to tell you how it is,

but that it's going to get way better.

I wish we could just play that music for like four minutes, because it's just such a jam.

Yeah, it's great. Gets you rolling, gets you in the mood. All right, welcome to the show.

Today we wanted to talk about, well we got, today we got myself, Bondar, JD, Anton, and Corey with

us. Today we wanted to talk about this crazy phenomenon that permeates our civilization,

our society, which is this need, proclivity, or really need to solve the problem with the

very thing that is causing the problem. Why do we do this? Why do we go down this route in the

first place? Why do we kick the can down the road? Anton, before the show is on, I think you had an

example of this phenomenon. Do you want to lay that out for us so we can get the ball rolling?

Yeah, absolutely. So if people don't know what the cobra problem is, this could be apocryphal for

all I know, but it's a really good metaphor. So in India, during the British colonial rule,

there were a lot of cobras, and cobras are this dangerous animal. And so they said,

hey, if you bring a dead cobra, we'll pay you, you know, a few pence, essentially,

rupees. I don't know what the currency was at the time. And so people very quickly realized if they

bred cobras, then they could just bring these extra cobras. And so it ended up like 10x-ing

how many cobras were in India. And the same thing happens in a city like Los Angeles with

homelessness. There's a billion dollars to solve the homeless problem. They appoint all these people

to head up these organizations. So the more homelessness there is, the more money that gets

thrown at the problem, the more these people can make off the homeless problem. And so that if they

increase homelessness, they're just going to get more money. And that same thing happens with a lot

of... it's basically a fiat creation. It's interesting. It's actually the lack of quality

problem, right? Like the reason we had... and the answer to this, or rather the current term for it

is planned obsolescence, right? This was something that was coined by some of the bigger behemoths of

the day, where they just have a planned launch schedule for the different products, you know,

Samsung or whoever. And as they expect you to upgrade your phone or your watch or whatever

annually, they are incentivized to make an inferior product. It's the exact opposite of, you know,

people who build a cathedral, right? If you're building, you know, St. Mark's Cathedral or

whatever it is, you're building something in the physical world that is meant to stand the test of

time, you know, thousands of years, hopefully, you're going to put everything into making sure

it's the best, highest quality thing. And so, yeah, it's interesting. It's a total

upstream incentive problem of like, people didn't think this all the way through.

Yeah, I started my career in healthcare, and it's all over healthcare, I promise. I was at the

biggest kidney dialysis company. I was working in their corporate office. And the way that CMS,

which is the counterparty negotiator for healthcare payments for the government, the way that they

negotiate is they determine how much money they're going to spend on it. And then they tell

the companies how much money they're going to spend on everything. So there's an entire operations

department in this kidney dialysis company of about 1000 people that literally just fights with

the provider with the reimbursement for Medicare and Medicaid, about how much money they're going

to make on each treatment. It's this massive inefficiency. And the way that that negotiation

goes is the government says, well, how much money are you making from private insurers?

And then the private company has to tell them, well, we make this much per private insurance

patient. And then they say, we're going to determine how much profit we think is worthwhile

for you. And then we're going to give you, we're going to underpay that. So that was literally how

the negotiation went. And it was shocking to me, because absolutely nothing in those negotiations

with the private insurers or with CMS had anything to do with how much the treatment cost

to perform, or whether or not it was done well. It wasn't tied to patient outcome. It wasn't tied to

anything. It's literally an industry that sustains itself from people who have the job so that they

can continue to have the job. The incentives are completely misaligned. And in that case,

in particular, that's 8% of the US healthcare spending is negotiated that way, right?

You could reasonably say you have spent, you know, a couple percent every year of your

tax dollars on that nonsense, that absolute nonsense. And it can make you, right, it's hard

to find a tidy villain in that. It's just a complete mismatch of misincentives that perpetuates

itself just to perpetuate itself. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the

Upton Sinclair quote, which I'm trying to find, but oh, here we go. It's the,

it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not

understanding it, right? The idea that, man, if we did this correctly, none of us would be employed.

So we're just never going to do it correctly. Do you guys think it's a pendulum? Do you think

innovation and advancement is actually the reason we have so much inefficiency because we, or rather

so much efficiency and so much of a lack of quality? Like, have we swung so far over on

the efficiency side of the pendulum that we've just left quality behind? And do you think,

do you think we'll go back? Hard no, but somebody else can field it.

I think it totally depends on what field you're talking about, right? And which generation,

because our parents said that boomers were all about quantity over quality and millennials and

younger are kind of the opposite. They'd rather have a 10th as many things if they were higher

quality things. So whether it's a pendulum or not, or just a generational issue, I think we'll

see it change demographically over time. Yeah. I don't know if it's a pendulum or a circle.

If you think of the book, The Fourth Turning,

that idea is that history is a cycle and there are these epochs that keep happening.

And when you talk about, I don't know, the thing that was brought to my mind was,

I remember my grandfather who was born in probably, let's see, he fought in world war two.

So he was probably born in maybe like 1917, 1918, somewhere around there. I just remember that he

was a kid during the great depression and he had a good job later in life. He worked for 50 years

for a college and ended up retiring. And, and, uh, I remember he used to make a cup of coffee

in the morning and then he would only drink half of it. And then he would fill the other half up

with water. And he would eventually later on in the day, microwave the cup of coffee, drink the

rest of the coffee. Whereas for my parents, my mom could go to Sam's club and buy, you know,

giant tins of Folgers coffee. And, and so there was this like extreme abundance,

but it was this really crappy coffee. And I don't know, I don't know. I don't really have

like a full way to tie all that up, but that's just all to say it's a, it's a, it's a cycle.

Well, I think actually, so let me, let me posit this as an idea. So if people are familiar with

some of the currency things that have happened, right. Uh, we'll use gold because it's the

easiest, an easier store, a better story would be the, the stones of Yop, but that's kind of

a cycle thing, but let's just go with like currency. Right. Um, when gold was first kind of

like started as a currency, um, it was this thing that was really hard to make. It's like, cool,

this is valuable because it's really hard to do. And then, you know, the next part of the cycle is

like making it more efficient. And so what they did was they made it efficient and then they made

like, you know, okay, well, let's just all put it at one place and do banks. And so it went from,

you know, you have all this gold, but it's really hard to keep safe. Then, all right, well, you can

just put in the bank and we'll issue you like paper treasury notes. So you can like have a receipt

that says you have all this paper and then, well, now let's centralize all of those banks and not

just make them private entities, but make them a, you know, a government. And so now this government

has all of this thing, and now they're going to put it under the fed or some type of centralized

entity. That's going to issue, you know, we're going to do more paper, but by the way, we don't

actually have to have enough gold in the vault to actually get to this point where you can redeem

it. Like we're going to read, we're going to give you more paper than we actually have gold for.

And so then you kind of get to that next part of the cycle, which is that one. And now you kind of

need to go back to the reinvention part where it's like, all right, well, so now we have more

gold or more paper than we do gold. So we're on the opposite side of the spectrum where we had

started the paper here, and now we have a crap ton more paper than we do gold, which is the opposite.

So we're in this imbalance. And so it's like this imbalance is kind of driving us to this next place

where we are now. We come to Bitcoin. So it's really interesting to see kind of how this

abundance cycle with is kind of like, you know, go back to the Folgers on your mom

is like, all right, we have really high quality coffee, but I want to like make sure it lasts a

lot longer. So I'm going to probably water it down. It's like, well, now we have a crap ton

of really crappy coffee. And it's like, well, now nobody cares about coffee because it's not

even coffee anymore. It's grown in the lab. And so now we're going to get back to it's like, well,

I want to make real coffee again. Right. It's like I think I think you are right. Like it's

more of a cycle, a circle than it is a pendulum. I tend to think about it more deterministically,

as in these are technological advancements that provide real value and they build on each other.

So in getting back to the original thing, why do we solve all the problems with create by creating

more problems in a fiat denominated world? We do this because one of the core natures of the money

we have is that we can just always print more of it. We can always just get into more debt like

paper over our problems. We can always kick the can down the road, even if even if it's like the

most insane. Biggest can you never think you can kick because it's just it's just paper currency

that, you know, oh, well, just whatever more debt, more inflation, et cetera.

Now, you're you're still eating those costs and some in in the inflation. Right. But.

When you look when you look back at gold, well, did they have that problem? Not really. They had

different a whole different set of problems. And those problems had different consequences. One of

the things I was thinking about today was that like under a gold currency, you have.

A robust return for colonialism, if you have stronger weapons, you can just invade somebody's

nation, take all of their gold. And because you already have the stronger weapons,

like one, the war that you start won't destroy any of the gold. And then two,

because you have the stronger weapons, you'll be able to defend the extraction of all that gold

back to your home base. Right now. Think about Fiat. Well, in Fiat, it's all these weird debt

structures and all this other kind of opaque backroom deals and all that. So it's not really

like you can't really invade a country like you can with a military and expect that you'll get

a return on that. But you do need to use your military to invade countries to enforce that the

Fiat currency you have and that you use retains its value. Right now, you jump into Bitcoin.

It's a totally different dynamic. It's OK. Well, you have a Fiat or you have a currency that is

predicated on information entirely, kind of like debt is predicated on information,

but you don't need the violence to support the information or you don't need the violence to

support the currency at all. So there really is no return for like the colonial expenditure at all,

because there's no way to extract the information. And if you go to war to try and get Bitcoin,

there's a high likelihood that you'll randomly bomb the wrong place and destroy the private keys.

So you can kind of see this like it's not necessarily cyclical. It's determined by the

technology, the state of the technology determines the outcome of the system. So

you're getting back to the original question of why does why do we solve the problem with just

papering over the problem? Well, because the state of the system determines the outcome of the system

and we can just print more money. So that's what we do. It incentivizes that behavior. Right. And

I think and for the past little over 100 years where we've had term limits, we haven't had a

single person ever, including the people who started fractional reserve banking, including

the people who oversaw fully leaving the gold standard, who have had to pay for that decision.

No one has no one who made that decision had to pay for that decision. It makes it incredibly easy.

And that includes the citizens who voted for those people and who bore those costs.

Right. If you can print the money, people say tax and spend. But in reality, our system is spend

then tax. You determine how much you're going to spend and then you determine how much tax you're

going to. There's no counterparty negotiator with the with the government. So if you don't have the

tax dollars and you can just invent it, you're you're essentially just taking on a very, very

long term loan against the value of your people's assets. And no one feels that within your term.

So if you're on a four year term or an eight year term within 48 years, if you if you keep the

inflation below 25 percent in four years, which is what Biden hit, this is when it became a huge

problem. You can just keep it below that. You're going to get all the way through your term doing

what you want to do and your citizens will bear the cost of that. But they won't really feel it

until whoever succeeds you. And I think that level of being able to promise while disrespecting

your own scarcity has led to this kind of repetition of this problem over and over and over again.

Anton, I want to ask you kind of like a follow up to what Corey was just saying of like.

Do you think. Do you think the problem is innovation and kind of like we're moving so fast that we're

not really realizing that we're solving like we're paving over things or do you think the problem is

a lack of reflection? Bondo and I were talking before we started, there was a sort of a debate

that he's been in on X, somebody essentially complaining that they are not able to make enough

money to survive in this this cycle. It's like a downward spiral into homelessness. And Bondo was

very general, generously saying, essentially, what amounts to you should start saving your money in

Bitcoin so that you see the value of your money go up. And when you try to tell people that you

And when you try to tell people of the generation that we're in that we have the ability to reclaim

our sovereignty and it gives us the it's a responsibility that we have now because we now

can see the value of what we have growing and then we can deploy it how we see fit.

But for an entire generation prior to us and the generation that we're in now,

there has been so much money printed and given out that people are used to it. And they just,

in general, people don't want the freedom because the freedom is scary. They want to be taken care

of. They've witnessed money printing. They've witnessed social programs that they've benefited

from. And they've liked that because the money just appears out of thin air and it gets distributed.

And sure, a few people get rich, but it eventually trickles down. It eventually gets to me.

And so it's like the innovation is here. The innovation is Bitcoin. But that innovation

gives you freedom. And people, our generation are afraid of the freedom that Bitcoin provides

because they're like, well, yeah, I could get Bitcoin. What if I lose it? What if it loses

value? What if I don't understand it? What if I don't? And they give a million reasons and they're

like, I would rather there was modern monetary theory where the government just prints enough

money to pay the debt that we have. And then society just functions. And if I'm unemployed,

I just go and get unemployment. And if I need a house, I just go get Section 8 housing and

on and on and on. And so the problem, I think, is this generational thing that

my belief is that Bitcoin just exists. It's going to continue growing, continue being integrated

into until it takes over. And so you better get in because Bitcoin is here and it's not going away.

Yeah, well stated. This is like a real, like actually real argument that's being posted on

Twitter in response to what I'm talking about or the thread Anton's talking about,

which is the person is asking if you give I offered to give them Bitcoin like through the

Internet, which, of course, they were like, oh, if they asked if you give me Bitcoin,

will that show up on my what do I have to like deduct that from my like child care, like

whatever thing or like the does that mean that like my stipend will be less or just like,

how does that affect? I'm like, I have no idea. It's five dollars. But like,

like, that's where their mind goes. It's like, wait a second. If I make that extra money,

that's going to push me a little bit further out of the welfare cliff zone, which is going to be

harmful to me because I'm not going to be getting the same amount of money. Right. Why would I go

through the effort of jumping through all these hoops of working, blah, blah, blah, when I can

just do nothing and stay on the welfare, like stay on welfare forever? Like, why would I ever do that?

Oh, yeah. Unbelievable. I just can't sometimes. Corey, you mean. Oh, good. As you say,

you have you experienced real estate. So I'm curious, you know, on that whole thing of like

that mindset, like that. I'm going to call it the renter's mindset. But like,

you know, do you think that like where does that come from? I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think I think

the the the welfare program, as well as as Section eight is, you know, is a big one. And then the

ways that we incentivize we disincentive, we financially disincentivize the family.

And there's a direct correlation with when we did that to the dissolution of the family,

especially in the poorest communities. You can look at all of those things as a fundamental

misunderstanding of human nature, in my mind. And I think they're they're very principled people.

And they're probably very compassionate people who thought they were doing really, really good

things. And there are people who have received that money who really needed it at the time.

And if that were to all go away, I would weep for those people that didn't have that. I'd say,

by and large, when you provide value without someone giving value, in a collectivist way,

you've demolished their ability to ever provide for themselves. Again, I think it's incredibly

hard to repair that. So there's a lot of good discussion to be had on each one of those policies

in which what's the best way to make it effective. But if you commit the original sin of providing

value for someone who was able to provide for themselves, and now they don't have to getting

them back to providing value for themselves once they're off of that, you know, once they haven't

had to just unbelievably hard. I don't think I don't I don't know that it's possible in any sort

of real way. And you can see it as, you know, post World War Two, as the wealth of America

started to grow, our poverty rate fell from something like 40% to about 17%. And then we

added an enormous amount of programs to take care of the poor and the poverty rate stopped falling.

And I'm so curious what would have happened if we hadn't done that? I don't know. Honestly,

you know, I think there is a minimum that it can fall to. I think, you know, like Jesus says,

the poor will always be with you, there will always be a bottom 10% of society who is very,

very incapable of providing for themselves and in society. But it's a shame. And we've never

been able to reduce the poverty level since we instituted all of these policies to take care

of the poor, because it didn't incentivize them to get out of the poor class. So it's just to me,

it's just sad. And it comes from just a wild misunderstanding of human psychology and

motivation and responsibility. Another thing that's fascinating about it, intellectually,

is that it has these practical implications, right? Like, as we've just described,

these are real tangible rubber hits the road incentives that cause people to change their

behavior. But those don't just, it's like, doesn't stop there. It like works its way through

the intellectual edifices of everything. That's like you get it's, oh, it's not necessarily like

the homeless thing, etc. But like, no, actually, it's so complicated now. And like, we, you

basically, it's the building on the cornerstone argument, if we put together a visual image about

what this looks like, if you haven't built a house, and you remove the cornerstone of that

house, all like everything else in the house is going to be like, start cracking, the roof is

going to be sagging, like, there's going to be pooled water in weird places, it's going to start

mold, and then you're gonna have to, you know, repaint these things. And the foundation is now

like, not even so you have to put in new concrete, like, you have to do all of these things, right?

It works its way through the entire house, the fact that you don't have this missing piece that

is part of the foundation. And when you don't, like the consequences of that are, well, now you

got to hire a guy to do the painting, you got to hire a guy to redo the roof, you got to do mold,

like mold control, you got to redo all your pipes, you got to plaster everything again.

And like, all of that manifests itself in getting back to the reality of it is like,

the economic institutions in all of our higher education, all of them have bought into the system

of fiat as the normative, regular way that everything should work and function. And so,

oh, why would we ever replace the fiat system with a system that works? Instead, we need to repair

all of the little cracks and all crannies and do like, unbelievable amounts of work when we

could just do the one fix that solves everything. I think the biggest stain on humanity is equality.

And, or sorry, excuse me, is equality. Because I think, like the biggest stain is equality,

not equity. Because at the end of the day, if you have forced equality, then you can never have

any equity in anything, period. I think we would see a very different Los Angeles if we did not

have such a lurch towards equality. Because at the end of the day, there just are unsightly people in

some ways. I mean, that's just the truth here, right? It's like some people are miserly, some

people are scoundrels. And then there are a lot of people who are really great and some people who

can be taken advantage of. There's a lot of putting, like the notion that equality is important

is essentially saying, I need to build a box that can hold these two magnets that are diametrically

opposed to each other right next to each other. You're just asking for something to break or to

go wrong. Because the thing is, if you have two of the same magnet trying to push up against each

other, they don't want to do it. What's going to happen is they're going to flip over and snap you.

And so it's, now it's a terrible analogy, but I just think, I think a lot about this as I'm

driving through Los Angeles. We went and saw a house today, just kind of like looking around,

because there's like random things that pop up. And I go, I want to go see that,

because it's like an ancient house from like the 1920s. And like those don't come up on the

market very often. And so we want just to kind of go and look and see if there's like giant

Hacienda estate. And that was built in a different time. And it was built on top of a hill. And it

was built at the time when to have that piece of property and to have the opportunity to build that

thing, you had to have impacted a lot of people's lives because you had a hard asset, you had

goods that you were able to transact with that got you enough equity in your assets or in your

contribution to society to afford you the opportunity to do that. And so the problem is

we're losing out on so many great inventions and innovations because we're telling people,

you know, oh, we have to give the same number of equal outcomes to these other things. And it's

like, you know, equality does not guarantee success, but meritocracy can at least give

the opportunity for it. Anyways, diatribe over. Well, I was just going to say there's a bell curve

and people are of a, in general, people are generally average intelligence. And then you

have geniuses on one end of the bell curve. You have complete idiots. I was going to use the R

word on the other end of the bell curve. Well, maybe it's a better analogy actually to say

there are extremely bad people on one end of the bell curve. Most people are generally pretty good.

And then you have like geniuses on the other side of the bell curve. The problem when you have,

when the government mandates or a corporation, we're going to have equality. And so we're going

to shake everybody up and we're going to make sure that we have equal representation of blah,

blah, blah, instead of meritocracy. Well, if you just stick a genius in there, if that was going

to happen, that's great. The genius is going to do great. If you stick a really bad person in there,

that person can cause catastrophic problems. And the reality is whether there's meritocracy or not,

the geniuses, they're going to go and be geniuses no matter what. They're probably

not even in the equation. They're doing their own thing. And so this idea of taking

meritocracy out and doing equity or like forcing equality causes catastrophic problems because

those extremely stupid or extremely bad people when they're just forced into an organization

or into a government or it just causes really bad things to happen.

Yeah. I think, and I'm going to just caveat the word bad because I think you're, you know,

if anybody is like listening, I think that the word bad in this context is ill-equipped,

right? Like there are, there is no reason I should drive a Formula One race car,

period. I just don't know how, I don't know how, but if we want equality in Formula One,

yes, I will be the idiot who gets in that car and like, we'll go 250 miles an hour straight

into a wall. Like I volunteer, that sounds like fun. But I am not the person, like if you want

to have a working business of Formula One, like you just don't do that. And so I think that's the

problem is a lot of times, you know, people start to look at the equality equation and they just,

you know, equality feels good. It feels good, right? I don't disagree with that, but the problem

is, you know, if somebody doesn't know how to fly an airplane, you probably shouldn't put them in

charge of 350 people's lives, right? You shouldn't, you should put somebody in that chair who

understands and is equipped mentally, emotionally, you know, physically, relationally, like there are

different temperaments for things that are actually like really, really good, right? There's a reason

that, you know, women are really good maternal figures and that we have that name of a maternal

figure, because at the end of the day, like that's what they were hard-coded and programmed to do

just by God. But anyways. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, to bring this back to the original

question we had, why do we keep doing things the same way when it's causing the problem, is I think

there's a real humanist angle to the way that America has operated for about 100 years and

increasing measure and the best outcome for humanity, if you don't believe that humans are

God-breathed sparks of the divine, the best thing that you can hope for is equality because any

difference in outcome then is an indictment on the value of that person. And especially in America,

we've made the value of a person very similar to their net worth. We've also made it similar to

their power, to their efficiency. And what's that that's done to women is said, if you want to be

as valuable as a man, then you need to be as valuable to the market as a man is. And almost

all of them are not, some of them are more, some of them are less, but they're definitely not equal.

You know, we're all, we're four guys who have fairly similar backgrounds with fairly similar

worldviews. And we're also wildly unequal in almost every way that you could, that you could

cut it up. And we're probably four of the most similar guys in LA and we're still wildly unequal

from each other. So you have this worldview that says, if it's completely humanist and says,

what's the best thing that we can do for humanity? Well, if there's no God-breathed spark of divinity

in every person, then we need people to be on the same plane. And let's try to do everything that we

can to make that happen. What happens when it all breaks? I guess we didn't do it hard enough.

Let's do it more. Let's do more. Vote harder. Let's do more forcing of equality of outcomes.

And that's where you get things like billionaires shouldn't exist, or that person shouldn't have that

much money. That's logically consistent with a humanist perspective for the utopia of humanity.

It's also hell, right? Like that utopia is what we would identify as hell. No one has any

individuality. No one has any difference from one another. So I would, I have to lay that,

you know, that kind of Christian worldview on top of it and say the only way out of that, like

generation to generation of Christianity can't do things the same way because God has continually

revealed in new and new, interesting, you know, beautiful, glorious ways across generations,

like our children should not grow up and be dealing with the same things that we're dealing

with, like a continuous growth. That to me is the antidote to trying to solve the same problems

with the same solutions and just causing more of the same problem. But while we're in a humanist

environment, I don't expect that to stop anytime soon. So I think this is probably a good, good

place to like transition to, okay, how does Bitcoin make this better? How, like Corey,

you just mentioned what you think a solution might be. And I think that's totally correct.

How does Bitcoin make this better? JD, you were going to say something. I don't know if it's on

this, but I'm curious to know. I was just going to talk about equality and the fact that I would

like to have as amazing of a hairline as all of you guys, but I do not. So the, the quality of

hairline here is really frustrating for me who has equity in my grandfather's hairline that is going

to see my hair back here very soon. So that was the main thing I was going to say. But yeah, no,

I think the positive spin on this is I think actually Bitcoin is the first attempt at equality

ever. And what I mean by that is it's equality is truth. And I think that's not to be confused

with the quality of outcome, but like the only thing that we can all be equal in is the binary

of truth. Something is true or it is false. And like equality is the equation, right? Like it

needs to be one, you know, one plus one equals two. Like that's like, that's true equality.

True equality is balance, right? But I think that's the issue is a lot of too many people

confuse the desire to instantiate balance in a system with the, and like trying to predispose

a balance in the equation with you know, the fact that you cannot ignore all of the variables

within that system. And so the biggest issue with equality is people and why Bitcoin is great.

And the hope that I have is when you use code that's open source, everyone can read,

you have a quality of seeing the whole framework play out. It's all there. Everyone can see it.

And yeah, you have a quality of understanding of there are 21 million of these things and there

will never be any more. And so it's the first opportunity for us to look at truth, equality,

at true equality as something we can put into the system of humanity of human society to make it

better. It's like, that actually does make me really, really optimistic that, you know,

with this utopia that people want could actually come about because the only way to get there is

through equality and equality is actually like having all the cards out there for everyone to

see. Can I give you a hypothetical? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Anton. I don't want to jump in. No,

I'm good. Go for it. So like a hypothetical, as we look at like from the formation of central

banking where you see most of this modernism and postmodernism and progressivism rises from there

and then accelerates in 1971. If you imagine that we were on a Bitcoin standard from 1913 on,

there's no central bank and all of those policies, everything top down that we've done,

that we've voted for in order to force equality of outcome had to be actually paid for by taxes

by the people in that moment to make those things happen. How many of those things do you think

happen? How big do you think we let USAID get? How many wars do we actually fight, right, to

liberate the people of the Middle East to take their oil or, you know, whatever that thing is,

right, Department of Education, right? How many of those things do we do if you actually have to

be truthful about what they cost and then you have to report back to the people who actually

paid for it, the citizens? Did it work, right? And then you have to be really, really honest

about saying, all right, you know, what if that actual tax rate was there and we hadn't printed

any money and we spent the same amount of money? One, that would have been impossible. But two,

we would have higher than Norway tax rates. So you'd have a population saying, all right,

70% tax rates in order to get to elevate the poorest and to bring down the richest. Is it

working? Are we happy with this society? I think the level of tolerance for that from normal people

who are productive in society would be basically zero. And yeah, so that's, well, how does Bitcoin

fix it? We can't do it backwards for the last 100 years, but we can do it for the next 100 years

and find out. I think it'll be dramatically different. You can actually like do the

numbers on that, Corey. Essentially just take the national debt and something like

divide it by the number of households and it's whatever, over $200,000 of debt per household.

It's like that cost, which is a rolling cost we pay interest on. Just imagine that was just

applied. Everyone owed that today to get out of the debt, right? That's literally what the

economic political cost is. It destroys so much of America. It's just gone.

I actually think though, not to cut you off, Corey, but I actually think that is the solution.

I think if you sent everyone a $200,000 tax bill and said, by the way, you're on the hook for this

and just started us there and everyone in America had to now crawl out of a $200,000 hole,

it would immediately change the worldview of everyone overnight because of just like, oh.

I agree. But that's what I'm getting at. This is my first question for people when I start

orange-pilling them is how do you feel about our government spending? When you look at the national

debt, that's for the stuff that you already have. That's not even for the coming promises.

That's for everything that you have right now. Are you happy with your infrastructure? Are you

happy with your education? Are you happy with your healthcare? Are you happy with your military

spending? No one is. No one is happy with any of that and it's cost you $200,000 per household in

debt. That's insanity, right? So I think how could Bitcoin not undo that, right? For the people in

charge to actually have to get permission from people to pay for these things and then report

about how it went? And not even just report. Ideally, it would all be on publicly known

Bitcoin addresses so you can actually have any autist just go through and look at every single

cent that was spent and who it was spent to and how it works through the system and what it touches.

It's mind-boggling the amount of transparency you have all of a sudden. Anton?

Yeah, did you guys see, this is going to date the show a little bit, but Ben Shapiro interviewed

Vladimir Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine. And he was asking about the $200 billion

that the US has given to Ukraine and asking about an audit. And then Zelensky just went on and on

like rambling. I don't even know, I could not follow what he was saying. It sounded like he

was just trying to cause a distraction because he was like, please don't audit. I have no idea

where this money went. And when there's a Bitcoin standard, you can't just print $200 billion.

That's such an asinine, huge figure of money that we have no idea if it did anything to stop a war.

It definitely killed a lot of people. And in the future, we will decide

if we want to spend that money to give to a foreign country to fight a war. And the reality

is we're probably going to be like, no, we'd rather just have peace. So we're not going to

give you money for tanks and for drones. Anyway, there was one other thing I wanted to say about

this. And that's just that the progressive idea is that there's systematic racism and there are

these systems that oppress certain groups of people. And Bitcoin is the exact opposite of that.

Nobody controls it. And so there is no systematic oppression or systematic racism in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has no idea what gender you are, how you identify, what race you are, doesn't even know

what country you come from. And I can use the example of a friend of mine from Bhutan. He's

a Bhutanese citizen. And there's like this stuff in the news about Bhutan is like the next country

like El Salvador that's going to use Bitcoin as a currency, which is not true at all. Their

government is mining Bitcoin. They supposedly have 8,000 Bitcoin or something like that.

But citizens have no ability to get it. I don't know why, but the Bhutanese can't even

interact with the credit card systems and the rest of the world. So the Bhutanese don't even

have a way to get Bitcoin. So I sent him some Bitcoin just because I just think it's cool that

I can just instantly send value over Facebook Messenger. I just said, hey, send me your

receiving address. Boom, he got it. He sent me a screenshot of the Bitcoin. Now he has Bitcoin.

It doesn't matter that he's a Bhutanese citizen. And that is equality. It's incredible

equality in money that has never existed. It doesn't care about your citizenship,

doesn't care about anything. Yeah, love it. For me, I think the answer is that,

how does Bitcoin make it better? It's like immediately goes to the Cantillon effects for

me or however you pronounce Cantillon. I think that's French and I think he was Irish, but

whatever. It's kind of the same thing. I'll just say Cantillon. The Cantillon effects basically

say whoever's closest to the new money, the new money printer gets access to the new money first.

And because of that, they get to spend that money first, but they have to go through the process of

organizing budgets and getting contracts and breaking ground and building and spending.

It's a whole cycle that slows down how the money makes it to the next closest circle of influence.

Now you just play that through and each time somebody gets more money, they can then afford

the next best greatest thing that they were going to buy. So they bid up prices. And when you bid

up prices, that's what inflation is. So the inflation is working its way through the economy.

And then by the time the new money gets to the people who are the most disenfranchised,

the most homeless, the most disconnected from abilities to make work or not make work, but

make money, do work and make money. By the time the new money gets to them, not only is it

significantly less because everybody took a cut along the way. So there's hardly any money that

gets to them if it gets to them at all. There's also inflation that they now have to deal with.

So it's almost like a slap in the face. And you can think about this very practically,

which is, well, all the money inflates. The only way, you know, before Bitcoin,

the only way that you could save money was by hard assets. For most people,

the only accessible hard asset you could get was buying a house. Sure, you could do gold,

but you're going to run into all sorts of problems that they've gone over ad nauseum.

For most people, the best way to save would be to buy a house. Okay, but what does it cost to buy

a house? It's like $400,000 on average anywhere in America or average for America, which means

you're going to have to pay something like a $3,000 monthly payment. So for anybody to save

any money, they essentially are, if you can't do the $3,000 payment, you're precluded from

saving any money. Right? That's where you get this crazy welfare cliff. That's where you get

the crazy, like, oh, well, you're just completely precluded and then you have to, by time preferences,

I need to make decisions about my survival because I don't have the money. I don't have

the backstop. I don't have the savings or anything else that allows me to participate

and make quality wise decisions. Instead, I need to sleep with this person or I don't have a place

to sleep. Right? It's like a messed up system. Now with Bitcoin, anybody who's homeless or

otherwise can immediately start saving money without any other pretext or any other

requirements to get there. And that just completely levels the entire playing field.

The person who's homeless has the same access to the money as the person who is literally

the insider at the top of the game, worth hundreds of millions. It's just a

completely even playing field. Yeah. And I think one of the ironies of the Biden

administration was that it was intended economically to bring a more level playing field.

And what he did by printing $10 trillion, and Trump did too, right? It's not really a partisan

thing, but Trump wasn't trying to level the playing field in the same way. Basically since

08, we've had a blanket print as much money as possible. It's not really a Republican Democrat

thing. Why I find it ironic with the Biden administration was that the intention was

to level the playing field. But specifically because of the Cantillian effect with 25%

inflation in four years, the things that inflate the most are the things that are closest to the

money printer, which are houses. It's the number one way that the money printer gets money into

the American economy. It makes the middle class feel wealthier nominally, education, healthcare.

These are where the costs go up the most, car insurance. So the costs rise faster for

the lower and lower middle class, everyone who doesn't have an asset. And the felt wealth

are everyone in the asset class. You go from low middle upper class to asset class,

non-asset class. And the divide that we saw over that same time period between the asset class and

the non-asset class is the one that got the biggest. It grew dramatically. And that's the

devil of it, right? So how does Bitcoin immediately fix that? Very hard to say. How does it fix it

over time? It prevents the inequality gap between asset class and non-asset class from happening

because everyone's in the asset class at all times. It takes away the ability of the government

to drive that wedge between rich and poor. I was going to say, as far as that goes,

a few years ago, if you wanted to have the asset, you had to buy a house.

And that was impossible for some people to buy the house. And so they're saving and then the asset

price goes up. After all that saving, the house is even further away from them than it was before.

And so they keep saving and then the asset goes up and it's even further away from them. So as

they're saving, this idea of buying a house, buying this asset is becoming more and more impossible.

Bitcoin lets you buy fractional amounts. And so as you're putting your money into Bitcoin,

even if you're just putting in $10, $15, $25 at a time, you are getting a piece of the asset

that is going up because even with the Cantillon effect, that money also goes into the value of

Bitcoin and more so as time goes on. And the Cantillon effect is just one of the items.

Another item would essentially be the education that comes when trying to understand Bitcoin,

because as everybody experiences when they do their first Bitcoin transaction,

it literally breaks your mind. Everything you thought that was the way that systems

could function, when you encounter Bitcoin, it does not fit into any of the molds that you've

known to exist. Until you send a transaction, you do not know how to think about it really.

And because that breaks your mind, so you have to figure out, or I mean, you don't have to, but

in many cases, people will then sit down and be like, wait a second,

I don't understand what I just did. I need to figure this out.

And then it turns into this, I got to get educated about what is this? How do I protect this?

How do I steward this well? Because how do I understand this? You have to start asking and

answering all these questions. And a lot of those questions lead a lot of people down the rabbit

hole of, wait a second, what I thought was communism or what I thought was capitalism,

those are actually just totally reversed. I was completely wrong about that. Or what I thought was

helpful was actually just harmful to hundreds of people because all of the structures and all of

the values in our civilization are completely flipped on their head. And Bitcoin forces you

to actually connect reality with the truth and value and go through that process of understanding

all this stuff. Okay, well, what's going to happen as a result of that? Well, you're going to start

to see people not, they're going to start to get to root solutions to problems because they're all

going to be on the same page about what the actual problem is and how to solve it. So we got, oh,

we got root solutions now as opposed to just kick the can down the road because we can't afford that.

And everyone knows that it's a total fucking lie. So we shouldn't do that. It's politically

and economically and every other itty, like just infeasible. And we just can't do that anymore.

And everyone knows it. So there you go. That's good. Can I, this might be a little bit of a

a little bit of a rabbit hole, but I'm fascinated by this in the Christian community as well,

because we rip on commies a lot. And as we should, they deserve to be ripped on. But I'm curious

about this in the Christian community because there's this idea of what you do as a Christian

and it's informed by your eschatology, like what you think of the end times. And we don't have to

go far down that rabbit hole. But this idea of dispensationalism is about a hundred years old,

150 years old, maybe this idea that the whole world's going to go away in a rapture. It's all

going to burn up. And then everyone who's accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior,

Savior flits away to a far off heaven. If you follow that logically back to today,

the only thing of value that you can do as a Christian on earth is to make another Christian.

That's it. If everything else on earth burns up, if there's nothing else eternal that you do,

that becomes your entire value proposition. I personally think that that mindset,

which has completely taken over American Protestantism and it's taken over just

about nowhere else ever. It basically just exists. It's a total fiat. Yeah, it's a total fiat.

That's what I'm saying. I think that mindset among the Christian community has been

allowed to happen because we're in a fiat system where generally things are not made with quality

and increasingly are made without quality. So generally they do pass away. It's kind of a

logical thought, right? We keep trying to fix the problem of the issue of degrading culture

by evangelizing people to American Southern Baptism. Evangelizing people to exit culture

entirely. Literally, we're telling them, become a Christian so that you cannot care about anything

that's going on with culture. Then 50 years after we implemented that strategy, we're like,

why is culture so far away from us? Why are you so far away from culture? I don't believe you

were ever called to disengage that entirely. So that to me is the Cobra problem on our side,

right? To call it out on ourselves. That's the one that really bothers me. I think Bitcoin forces

you to recognize the physical reality that is also God-breathed, right? I think we'll start

to unwind that mindset naturally. Absolutely. It kind of touches on the idea of with the measure

you use, it will be measured back to you. If your measure is just like, well, everything's broken,

none of this matters. The thing that matters is just evangelizing the lost. Well, the only

measurement there is the number of evangelists or the number of people you evangelize.

That's the success measure. Yeah. Yeah. So what's going to happen is that your success

will be measured and you'll have more people evangelize, but evangelism, it will be returned

to you in the same way that you measured it, right? Instead of the quality of the evangelism,

you'll get the quantity of the evangelism that you wanted. The results will be

culture falling apart, right? It's just unbelievable.

Anton, do you have thoughts on the Christian perspective?

Yeah. I mean, my last thought on that, just going off of what Corey said, is that

it's kind of two sides of the same coin. So you have in America, what you're describing, Corey,

you have this dumbing down of culture, an escape from culture, an escape from the things beautiful.

It's like, it's still Christianity, but it's the polar opposite of like, if you go to Europe and

go to cathedrals and look at the art there and look at the architecture. And you look at that

and you're like, something was going on during this time period. This is incredible.

Something was going on during this 150 years to build this thing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There were literally multiple generations

building this thing. The people who started it didn't even get to see the finish of it.

And maybe their grandchildren didn't get to see the finish of it. So that's beautiful.

But then now there's a massive amount of secularism in Europe and there's a lot of atheism.

And then you have, or you have like a country like Albania, you'd have to look this up, but

I want to say it's the most atheist country to ever have existed. It had what was essentially

a communist dictator. I think they burned down over 2000 churches. It's technically

more of a Muslim country, but it still is very, very secular and very non-religious.

And it's all the same thing. It's all fiat. Fiat is what essentially destroyed culture.

And we are going to see this circle come back and Bitcoin is going to drive that. And you see it

like in the Bitcoin community, there are so many people who are focused on creating things that

are going to last multiple generations. They have a low time preference. We are preserving value

for our children's children. And we're very conscious of it, that Bitcoin is this thing

that can't be destroyed. And the value is going to go up. The number is going to go up. And we

have no idea when that's going to be, but we're confident in it. And so we are slowly, whatever

your strategy is, if you're dollar cost averaging and if you're just working your job and saving in

Bitcoin, you just know that you're preserving that wealth for future generations. And yeah,

somehow this is all related to Christianity. Well, I mean, going back to what I think JD was

talking about earlier, which is this idea that like, oh, well, we had the thing that mattered

was that, like for other generations, was that it existed at all. Then it was like

the quantity mattered a lot. And then the quality matters for us.

But you kind of, that kind of harkens back to this other idea of

good, fast, or cheap. Choose two, because you can only choose two. If you choose good and fast,

it's not going to be cheap. But if you choose fast and cheap, it's not going to be good.

You can only choose two under that paradigm. Of course, it's a simplification, but it's

a useful simplification. In a fiat-denominated world where your money always loses value over

time, you try to build a new house, for instance, that new house is going to cost you

a lot of time to build. Therefore, if your currency is being devalued, the house is going to

cost you more if it's not built fast. And that kind of applies to everything in the entire economy

at various levels, because all inputs and outputs take time to produce. So everyone always chooses

fast. Now, they'll then have to choose either good, fast and good, which means it's super

expensive, or they'll have to choose fast and cheap, which means it's not good.

And you can kind of see, well, that explains our culture. We have, essentially, very few things

that are really, really good that very few people can actually afford. And then, by and large,

everything else is just fast and cheap, and it just gets faster and cheaper, because everything

is predicated on efficiency. Safening talks about it in the fiat standard, or the Bitcoin

standard. All the new inventions, all the quality inventions, all happened over 100 years ago.

And since then, we've just been pushing on the efficiency. Make it go faster. Make it go faster.

Make it go faster. Make it faster. How do we produce this faster and more efficiently?

Okay, so under a Bitcoin world, we no longer have to choose fast. And everybody who's into Bitcoin,

has the low time preference, understands. Actually, choosing fast might be a problem.

It actually might harm me, because if I get that house done as fast as I can, and I spend my

Bitcoin on the fast house, and it's poor quality, it's not going to retain its value as much as a

house that's a high-quality house. So, it immediately changes the dynamics of how people

think about how they interact with reality, and how they create culture. They get to now choose,

do I want it to be fast? Do I want it to be good? And everybody gets to choose,

do I want it to be fast? Do I want it to be good? Do I want it to be cheap?

And the outcome of that is that we're going to see a heck of a lot more things that are actually good,

that are beautiful, that are true, that resonate with people,

that last a long time, that are high quality. You know, it's going to be awesome.

I agree. That's good. Yeah, that was awesome. Yeah.

Right. I mean, that's also an hour. We could cut it off there, if you guys don't have anything else.

Yeah, absolutely.

Final thoughts, Anton, Corey?

The only thing I'd add to that is that the value proposition under a fiat world has to be money.

What's beautiful about what you're saying, Bondor, is the value proposition for an individual

has money somewhere, but for the majority of humans, money is not the top of their value

proposition. So, for an individual who wants to build a house, they would rather build a strong,

sturdy, beautiful, enduring house for their family than they would have the marginal extra dollars

of, you know. So, when the costs come down under a Bitcoin standard to meet that,

then you get to see the individuality of people's value feed through into the goods,

into the architecture, into the culture in a way that they've been flattened by forcing money

and speed and efficiency to the top of everyone's priority list, artificially

forcing it to the top of their priority list. And that's not where it should be. It's not where

it normally is.

And just as a gut check, you actually see it in the architecture, like architecture or any,

like go to any place that has like any downtown. Yeah. It's ridiculous. You basically look at

the architecture for anything that was built over 115 years ago, and it has these intricate

ornamentation and the stone and the staircases. It's like gorgeous, beautiful stuff. And as you

go forward in time, like the Bauhaus kind of art, like design, ultra minimalist, A-frame, like

just the, all of the ornamentation just kind of exits and you get to the, you know, you get to

our modern office building, which is literally just a sheet of glass and concrete floors, right?

Like there's absolutely, and they're like, oh, we're going to do a pointed roof.

Ooh, that's, ooh, that's, uh, that's some ornamentation there as opposed, it's like,

bro, there's, it's like literally just a flat sheet of glass. Like there's, there's absolutely

nothing interesting or intricate or human scaled about any of it. It's just as cheap and as fast

as we can go. So any of that, all of that goes out. We get to see the ornamentation again,

we get to see the individual, the individuality of it, like someone's perspective they can

actually afford to produce their perspective of reality in reality, whereas they couldn't before.

It was just, you got to do the A-frame or whatever. It's going to be awesome, man. So, so stoked.

Can't wait.

And I want to say, I want to say one, one last final thing about this.

Let's say that you want to, so Altadena here in Los Angeles, just burnt down. Let's say you want

to build a house. Well, if you don't do it quickly, the cost to build that house could be double

next year. And so the, if you want to build a house, you're like, I got to build it now. Well,

if you have to build it now, you have to build with, with what you have. And you are, you can

be sure that that style of architecture is not going to be a popular style 30 years from now.

You don't even know if the house is going to last 30 years, but what does it matter?

Well, if you put your money in Bitcoin, you can be sure that over the next year, two years,

five years, the value of what you put into Bitcoin is going to 4X, 10X, 100X. If you can wait,

you will be able to build classic architecture. You can take the time to think it through.

You can build a house that is going to be valuable a hundred years from now, because it, it is this

classic architecture. That house to build now is going to cost you millions and millions of dollars.

You do not have the ability. Bitcoin is going to give people with the patience and understanding

to put the value of their toil into Bitcoin. It's going to give them the ability to build things

that last. And that's beautiful. Love it. Correct. All right, guys, we should call it there.

Thanks for coming on. This is Better By Bitcoin. Thanks for listening at home, everybody. Peace.

Thanks for tuning in to Better By Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes everything better. Like,

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Not financial advice. Mathematical certainty.