What the hell HAPPENED?! - Ep 036

Explore the social and economic consequences of departing from the gold standard in 1971. Our hosts dive into issues such as diminishing personal agency, inflation leading to socio-economic stress, and the shift in societal values towards high time preference behaviors. Learn why Bitcoin might be the key to reversing these trends and restoring stability.

 

Watch this episode on YouTube

 

Hosts:

JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏
Anton Seim - @antonseim 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. Better, buy Bitcoin.

Good.

Morning, everyone. The early morning show. We're just talking about how we love it.

They hate it.

I just got blasted by that song. First thing I've heard this morning, just like everybody else.

It's. It's a good way to get you up. That's a good way to get you up and rocking and rolling. But Bondor, you want to check it? take us away and hit us with our topic this morning. Yeah, indeed.

So I've been thinking about this. You see this all over Twitter, social media, which is this constant click baity kind of like engagement farming question. But it's just it's so persistent. It's like you just got to talk about it, which is what happened. You this this question has been just permeating social media for at least a decade. I first remember seeing this question in like 2010 or 2009, something like that. And it was framed like, Men, what happened? And it was an image of like, Cary Grant dressed Dapper AF walking through the streets of New York City, right? And juxtaposed against like some broccoli top, like puffy sweater, jeans and like flip flops, some like average 20 year old circa 2010. And it was just like, men, what happened? And we see this refrain over and over and over again. What happened? Like, what happened to civilization? What happened to us? Like, why are we, why did we have all these beautiful buildings? then just stop building them. Why do we have, like, why is it that Christianity and, and all these other, like, really, you know, lift up the human spirit kind of systems? Why did they all just, like, fall to the Wayside? Why? Like, what happened to us? Like, what, what's going on with civilization? So that's what we want to do for the show today, just to try and answer various answer. Answer the question. What happened? Right. Obviously, we know what happened between the guys on the show. We know what happened.

A pretty good idea.

Yeah, but. But, yeah.

So, yeah.

If people haven't been to WTF happened, in 1971.com. I suggest that people go take a look at it. I wish that that website is all screen captures of various graphs. I feel like it could be done better than the way it is. It's a one page website and it just goes through all these things that have fallen apart. Divorce rates skyrocketed. The age that women have children. moved later in life, the amount that you have to have to retire, the amount that a house costs compared to average salaries, everything starting around 1971 just skyrocketed out of control and got objectively worse and has just been parabolically getting worse since 1971. Did any of you guys know why?

Well, something to do with 1971, I assume. Geez, this is a difficult one.

What happened in 1971?

No, but that, that website's crazy. If you, if you've never been there, you have to go check it out. And it, it's literally just goes on and on. I've got it pulled up right now. It is just every single possible metric you could think of. Worker pay, real GDP, income gains.

Growth.

Shares of domestic income, just every single thing and on every single graph, there's a knee or a turning point, it was like the graph is going this way and then all of a sudden 1971 hits and just flat lines or changes or there's obviously a considerable difference between pre 1971 and post 1971. JD, what on earth do you think happened?

Well, this particular instance, I think what happened in 1971 was we came off the gold standard. If you're not familiar with what that means, is that means your money is now worthless. That's it. That's what that means. Because our money is not backed by anything. It's just backed by violence. We are actually incentivizing the world to be more violent. If you want a world that's actually peaceful, you actually want a world that is backed by something that's hard and something that's finite. Hard money was originally gold. Before then, it was these like Yap stones and a bunch of other things you can do. Safety Analysis has a great book called the Bitcoin Standard. There's a bunch of other people, monetary scholars who can kind of talk about it. But at the end of the day, if your money is backed by nothing except for a big stick, you should not be confused when people start hitting each other.

I was driving through Burbank the other day, and LA is not known for its architecture, but one thing that LA has is incredibly temperate weather. And so things that were built a hundred years ago look the exact same today as they did then. And we were just driving by some buildings and I was kind of pointing out these awnings and they had an interesting shape to them. They just had these sort of waved arches. This building was probably built in the 50s or something like that, but it's impossible to know when it was built. It looks just like the day it was built. And I was kind of pointing at a new building, one of those, what do they call it, stick frame constructions where they have the bottom floor is cement and then the next two or three floors are made of one by fours, which used to be two by fours. And every single building looks the exact same, and every building is a rectangle. And we were like, why does no building have character anymore? Why is everything just a communist block rectangle with a little bit of a modern take on the exterior? and you can go anywhere in the country. Everything looks like that. It's all made very cheaply. And even in California, those buildings are not going to last 100 years. I'm not sure that they're going to last 30 years. So that's just another thing that's broken down. The Aesthetics of everything around us have broken down. You look at pictures from the 1900s. Everybody's wearing a suit and tie. why did that change?

So.

Getting to a real answer and you can like look this, you can just, I mean just go on X and search for what happened, right? And you'll find just post after post after post. It's crazy. So Brian Johnson, big guy, Mr. Don't Die, right?

Mr. Don't Die.

Mr. Don't Die. asks like yesterday, what happened to our kids? 100 million US children, 100 million US children study had five point drop in IQ, 3.6% decrease in intellectually gifted, 3.4% increase in challenged children. And it's just unbelievable amounts of stats that just go on and on and on and on.

Right.

But like what happened? So JD, we went off the gold standard. What does that have to do with anything? Like why? Who cares? What difference does that make? Well, the thing that like there's a lot of steps you have to jump through to get to an answer. And I think the first step that you have to jump through is what you said, the gold standard. We went off the gold standard. Why does that matter? Second step. well, if you went off the gold standard, you can just print money and it's just backed by violence. Okay, but who cares?

What?

What does that. What does that matter? Well, if you can print money, then your money is going to inflate. When your money inflates, your agency is constantly being eroded away. And now we can. We can kind of connect the monetary system to the psychology of. of money. If your agency is constantly being eroded away, well, how do you interact with reality? You basically think that reality is out to get you. You are constantly in a corner, constantly defensive posture. You do not have like this ability to think that your dreams are going to come to fruition, ability to plan for the future, to you discount the future. You think about, well, if my agency is just eroding, the only thing that matters is what I can get and do right now today or in the short medium term. Because the long term, I'm just, I'm not going to have any agency unless I really just dig in and do stuff right now and like actually I don't know, like ask the girl out or do the thing or like go through the process. Now, you could just stop there, but I think there's even more steps to it. Uh, yeah, we'll get into it.

What's interesting about the topic of losing your agency, right? Water flows downhill. water is the incentives. So at the end of the day, whatever the incentive is, it will find the shortest path to paying off the least number of people. And what I mean by that is water flows downhill, it'll find somewhere and it'll pool, and then the rest of it will keep going. And so it's this whole thing of like, you know, the trickle down economics that they always constantly talk about, like, oh, it's going to trickle down. It's like, no, it's not. It's going to stop at the first big hole. and fill that hole and then keep going. A perfect example of this that people don't really realize is, you know, a lot of people are mad at corporations for being big and evil. Did you know that actually the corporations in the beginning of the, you know, the turn of the century in 1900 legitimately just wanted to make better products, but then the government told them they were not allowed to. So 1919, Dodge versus Ford, there was a case where Ford Motor Company, and Henry Ford talks about this in his biography, they would take profits and they would reinvest them in the company. Shocker, weird thing to do, but take them, they would reinvest them back in the cop and dividends too. Reinvest them in employee wages and then also to constantly bring the price of the product that they sell down. The goal for Ford was always how do I get to like a $250 automobile, which would be shocker in this day and age. But that's what they kept doing is they were reinvesting and making a better product, a better product, a better product. They can't do that anymore.

Why?

Because the Supreme Court of Michigan and then now layers and layers and layers and layers of more crappy law has told corporations that, no, your number one incentive is to be an incentive company for your shareholders. You're not an incentive company for your customers. It's your shareholders. And so they're not even allowed to service their customers in a way that's actually going to benefit them the most. They have to service their shareholders and their board members more than they service their customers. And so it's this entire, the bastardization of incentives is what has led us to this ruinous world that we're in right now. And it's only getting worse. And it's only going to continue that decline until we figure out the big problem, which is we all know is the money. Yep.

So I can't say for sure that people were happier a hundred years ago. I do look at the time period of the 1920s just aesthetically, and it looks incredible to me. I mean, I live in Southern California looking at the Craftsman houses around San Marino and Pasadena and Northeast Los Angeles. I mean, I just imagined growing up in one of those houses and it would have been an incredible time. But most people who were born today, if you gave them the option of, do you want to live today when the internet exists and when iPhones exist, or do you want to live 100 years ago? I think most people would say that they would prefer to live with technology. And you can't really go back in time and ask people and compare, are you happier without all of the broadcast television and things that are digital, computers, that type of thing. So it's hard to know, were people really happier back then? But you can look at charts of depression and, you know, people being medicated for various things, and things have gotten worse recently than they were back then. So, yeah, then there's one other thing about this. One of the reasons why we don't feel that things have gotten so much more expensive compared to our incomes is for that same reason because of technology. When there is technological development in manufacturing and in the components that go into manufacturing, it has a downward pressure on prices. So if there was no inflation, prices on goods would actually go down. They wouldn't go down forever. They wouldn't eventually become free. But things would get cheaper. You know, if televisions didn't exist, and then all of a sudden somebody invented televisions and the manufacturing process of the televisions got better and better and better. People invented new things to make the televisions thinner and out of materials, you know, have a piece of glass that all of a sudden is a television. Eventually the price would get really low on that product. So we've been experiencing that. Throughout our entire lifetimes, each of us is around 40 years old. So we've seen this downward pressure on prices. At the same time, everything around us has been getting more and more expensive in terms of dollars because of inflation. And so the two things are competing against each other. But eventually, because inflation never stops, it just keeps going up forever. Eventually things will start to get much more expensive again. even as they reach a lower price because of new technological developments.

And you can see this actively happen in food. A strawberry, what's the end product of a strawberry? It literally is a strawberry. It hasn't changed over the course of 100 years. I mean, obviously they've figured out how to grow the strawberries better and bigger strawberries and more flavorful, right? But it's still a strawberry. The only thing that's changed here is one, you have machine inputs for harvesting and growing the strawberry. Those have all improved. So the technology behind the strawberry production has dramatically improved, and that includes transportation and all of the chemical inputs. Fertilizer, et cetera. All of that has gotten cheaper because of technology, as you just said. And yet the cost of a strawberry over the last 100 years has, I don't know, it's gotta be like 100x, right? It makes no sense. The cost of a strawberry.

The $96 strawberries at Air One.

Yeah, I was gonna say at Air One, they do sell a single strawberry. I think it's 20 bucks.

So you apply that to your entire, it's the same dynamic across your entire basket of goods that you consume just to stay alive for your housing, for your food, for everything, right? Boom, all your agency goes towards that. And it's just every month or every year, you have less agency unless your income, and we talked about this on a previous episode, unless your income keeps pace with that, but it can't because your income is also subject to inflation. And so you're just hit on both ends and your agency is completely strained all the time. Now, what's the next step? I think so we had the first step, which was gold, like we went off the gold standard, but what does that matter? The next step is creates fiat currency, which allows us to print money, which causes inflation. What does that matter? agency is eroded. Okay, well, why does the agency matter? Like, yeah, we all, we all get it. Like, we're all in the same, the same thing. We all hate our lives and we hate, like, we hate our reality. What does the agency erosion do? Why is this agency erosion matter? Because it forces your time preferences higher, which is to say you value that me here now, drugs, sex, violence over long term us together, all at one, like us everywhere all at once, or not all at once, but us everywhere globally. And instead of sex, drugs, violence, you value long term stable relationships, you value sobriety and thinking about the world philosophy and peace. So when you erode your agency, the next thing that you're going to have to, the next thing you're going to start to value is these really high time preference behaviors about, oh, well, this kind of explains why we have these crazy fentanyl problems, because everybody is basically just like, I can't make rent. I can't, I'm basically homeless now. The only up I'm ever going to get is if I start doing drugs. The only up I'm ever gonna get is if I just get a porn addiction, right? So the agency dramatically affects your time preferences.

It also makes people reliant on the government. Another thing that people do is they say, why would I work when I can literally have a higher income If I just declare myself disabled or mentally disabled and take a payment from the government and they measure it versus CPI, so they will just move that amount up over time goes by. So I'll just remove myself from the workforce, go on the government dole, even if it puts me in poverty. And even if it puts me in poverty, that's actually a good thing because then I qualify for more. of the government assistance. And so people completely give up in life. And that makes everything worse because people who could be productive, who could be adding to our society are just like, you know what? I'm not going to participate anymore. So the government's going to give me a check. The government's going to give me EBT to pay for my food. I can just get a drug addiction, sit around all day, and that's my life.

It's interesting about the people who are getting a check and, you know, just kind of we've lost our Edge because we're not as violent as we used to be. And what I mean by that is video games are more violent than they've ever be than they've ever been.

Right.

But it's really interesting to, to think through. It's like, who are some of the baddest? people, you know, and by bad, I mean, like, just like that guy's a total BA. That guy's a total badass. People who do MMA, people who do things that are physical and violent, you know, people who play rugby, people who do really physical and intense things. We don't do that anymore as a culture. You know, we have, like, six people who play football, like, two who play basketball, one is LeBron, and he just cries the whole time, like, We have started to live through this world where, you know, in the 1960s, like 1966, Lyndon Johnson put in the physical fitness exam, like the super intense one that we all took probably when we were in elementary school. And then in 2012, they took it out. They phased it out of schools.

Why?

Because it was too hard. Well, the pacification of our kids is happening because we don't, care to push people to do things that are too hard. Like that is a problem. And that entire thing is actually based on the money being broken.

Why?

Because at the end of the day, it's the incentive. The person who is taking care of your kid, i.e. the doctor, is being incentivized by the administrator who's being incentivized by the insurance company who's being incentivized by the money printer that's just printing a bunch of money that that administrator can get as the water, the money falls downhill into their pocket before it goes everywhere else. And so we're in this really interesting. I know it's sad when you can just kind of constantly go back and be like, hey, that's the one problem right there. But if you think about it over history, there's been a lot of things that can just be solved or created or looked at by one instance. Like World War I was said to have happened when, and I'm blanking on the guy's name, but, you know, when the Austrian Austro-Prussian king was assassinated, right? Like that guy was assassinated that sparked a world war. You know, World War II started when Hitler invaded France, right? So it's like there's single instances in time, single things in time that kind of blow up and create these giant moments that we can all look at and be like, hey, that thing happened it. But for the whole world right now, we're all experiencing this thing that we were born into. And the It's problem is, really easy to solve, but the problem is it's really hard to solve because there's a lot of people who are looking to lose a lot if they actually allow this problem to be solved.

Yeah.

We often look at the problem being like, just siloed. Oh, well, there's an issue in healthcare, and that's the insurance companies in healthcare have an outsized input on how somebody can get their needs taken care of in terms of their medical needs. Well, how do we solve that problem? Oh, we gotta do, do, do, do, like move these things around and do this and like, and that'll solve the healthcare problem. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We, this is that, that's just putting a bandaid on the broken arm. There's so many inputs and all of the inputs ultimately just go back to the fact that we're printing money. Like, oh, well, we have health problems because we're feeding each other Poison and the incentives in the system say, yeah, you gotta add all these additives, you gotta make everything out of corn and soy, you gotta do all the seed oils and all the rest of this stuff because that's what the incentives say. Oh, okay, well now we have all these health problems. Well, they're not getting any better because the insurance is preventing us from taking care of the health problems. So there's like this escalation, right? And then like on top of that, well it's like, yeah, I have all these health problems. I can't work out, I can't do things anymore. So for me to get my endorphin high, I'm gonna like do drugs, right? So the big pharma gets involved and or just recreational drugs get involved too. And you have all of these inputs kind of coalescing. So I think the next thing for me is like, okay, so there's high time preferences, but then the next thing that often goes overlooked is psychological reinforcement, which is the dopamine hit that you get when you do the thing that finally connects, right? Oh, getting into debt, a whole bunch of debt gets me a house. I got the dopamine hit from getting a house that if I had done the savings path and like gone through the hard way to do it, I would never get the house. I'd never get the dopamine hit, right? And you can apply that to everything else. I, man, I could do the workout and get the dopamine hit, or I could just take the drugs and get the dopamine hit. So there's a psychological reinforcement that goes through, and it, it's the whole incentive system has the same psychological reinforcement mechanism. Everybody's basically on this treadmill.

I want to go ahead and turn things to the positive. I know it, we're jumping into it a little bit early, but we have a shorter time that we can do this today. So what is the solution to all of this? Are things just going to keep getting worse until human civilization extinguishes itself and people just stop giving birth and the human race just dies out and, you know, the planet just gets so polluted that it can't function anymore? I mean, that's not I want to think positively and think that there is a solution. After over a decade of looking for the solution desperately, I believe that I found a solution to all of the problems that were caused when the fiat money was taken off of the gold standard. And that solution is Bitcoin. So you talked about saving for a house. Saving for a house is hard. It's much easier to go and get a mortgage, putting as little down as possible, getting a manageable payment, and just figuring out how you can generate enough income each month to just pay that mortgage that is going to be because of the amortization of the loan. It's going to be majority interest. for the first 15, 20 years of the loan, you're just paying interest. So you're just hoping and praying, please, please, home equity just keep going up.

And.

Right now you can't save money because house prices, because the equity keeps going up, are going up faster than people can save because your salary doesn't go up with inflation. First inflation happens, you figure it out, and then you got to go figure out how to get your salary higher. Bitcoin solves this. Over a long time period, the value of Bitcoin goes up. I'm not saying it goes up in a straight line, but Bitcoin is limited. The dollar is unlimited. If this is true, it gives people a little bit of hope. Because if they save in Bitcoin rather than saving in dollars, the chances of the value of what they've been able to save, whatever their strategy is, if they dollar cost average in using their fiat salary, chances are Bitcoin will appreciate faster than real estate appreciates. And so it gives people a little bit of hope. It gives people a way to actually save for the things that they want.

Yeah.

And that just applies to the savings aspect of it. As you apply Bitcoin to all sorts of these other inputs, it necessarily changes the incentive structure in those inputs. We're no longer printing money to solve the problem. We now have to save money to solve the problem. We now have to create value to solve the problem. And, and, you know, it starts at the bottom with just the individual being retooled with regard to how they make individual decisions about their lives. And, like, I, like, have personally experienced the retooling in my mind. It's like, I could do that or I could do this. Well, yeah, I would have used to really enjoyed getting the dopamine hit of doing quick, easy thing. But now it's like, no, I'm gonna.

I'm gonna be.

It's gonna be way better if I do the hard, long thing, right? That's what she said. Now, this applies to everything in the. Everything in the whole economy. It applies to all the inputs. It applies to. It applies to the food industry, the medical industry, the education. Like, everybody. Everybody, as they start to understand Bitcoin and every single person. on earth is on this Bitcoin journey, whether they like it or realize it or not, as they go down the pathway of trying to understand their own reality, all of the incentives get inversed and switched. What is the solution? The solution is Bitcoin because it changes the incentives economy-wide. The whole economy's incentives get changed. They don't change overnight, they don't change linearly. But they do change over time for the best.

What do you guys think comes back when the incentives are fixed? Like what do we regain? If you guys were to just give like a quick list, like when the money is fixed, what happens, how quickly and why is it better?

I'll tell you one thing real quick. One thing that gets fixed when the money gets fixed is quality. When you have inflation, it creates a velocity to spending. You get money, you have to spend it fast. Let's just take clothes, for example. You get fast fashion when this happens. You want to keep up with the trends. You don't have a whole lot of money to spend. And so manufacturers make clothes that they can produce quickly that are very, very low quality. You get money, you go to the mall or you go online, you shop, you buy the thing. It looks kind of good and then you wash it a few times and it disintegrates. It's made by children in the third world, put on a container ship shipped across the ocean, and that's what we buy. When the money gets fixed, people will save their money and they will wait to buy really, really high quality goods that will last a long time. And just, I'm just talking about clothing. It will make the clothing better. And if people aren't just trying to keep up with the trends all the time, they're just going to generally dress better.

Judy, I love the question. What gets better when we get in Bitcoin? What are the practical Implications of this. And yeah, the clothing gets better, but the health gets better. The education gets better. The relationships get more stable. Parents get to hang out with their kids more because they don't have to be on this crazy treadmill of work all the time. Families get stronger because you only need one income to support the family. Like and, and this is just, just, this is just tip of the iceberg stuff, right? And you can touch almost everything. The architecture gets better for the exact same reasons the clothes get, clothes get better. People are thinking about, well, I don't want to invest my money in some garbage dump kind of warehouse that I can build as fast as possible, like a shed, right? No, I want to, if I'm gonna, if invest in real estate. I want that investment to outlast the return from that investment to outlast or at least compete with the money that's being invested that I'm using to invest it.

Right.

And then you can apply this to every kind of investment. If you're, if you just sit on Bitcoin and do nothing, you have zero risk, zero carry cost. And let's say your CAGR, your yearly return is going to be something like Right now, let's say 10%, super low, but like, okay, 10%. So for me to invest in something, I gotta expect that it's gonna yield a larger return than 10%, right? As opposed to a fiat paradigm, which says, if I invest, if I don't invest my fiat currency, I'm going to lose 8% guaranteed because that's what the cost of inflation is. So anything I do with my money is going to be better provided it's not, I'm not throwing my money in the trash. I can just build a shed that's going to be better than losing 8%, right? And you just apply that to across all investment. And then boom, you get companies that are very efficient. very innovative, care about creating value for humanity in the world, right? Because if they don't, they won't get investment. Whereas now it's just shoot the, you know, throw the shit in the wall and see what sticks. It's like, because that's the incentive. So what gets better? All investment gets way considerably better, way better. I mean, the whole treasury company thing, it's like, yeah, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Like maybe that's going to be a huge bubble and everybody's going to blow up and the whole rest of it. But if we can convince companies throughout this absurd market cycle, if we can convince companies that Bitcoin is a better store of value than treasuries, it's going to start to change the way companies think about investing in the world and paying their employees and valuing their reality. It's going to be considerably better. Man, no more crony capitalism.

Everything gets better when the money is fixed because we actually lose a lot of government programs. And I know that's going to piss a lot of people off, but it's actually really good. Before we had this mass hysteria around government budget cuts or, you know, I need my payment for XYZ from the government, People used to give charity to one another directly. That was actually one of the things that, there's a book called, like who Really Cares by Arthur Brooks, who has now become like resurgent again on the scene with, like love your enemies as his new book. But the moral of the story for that particular book of who Really Cares was the people who care are, you know, the Christian Christendom essentially, because one of the Christian virtues is charity. It's like going out and making sure you're taking care of the other people in your community. When money changes forever, charity decentralizes. And right now, everybody looks at their form of getting some charity is from a government handout. They feel like it's charity, but it's not actually charity. Charity has become synonymous with free money. That's not true. Charity originally was giving from, you know, you have your 10% that you would tithe, you have your 10% that you would save, and then you'd have your 80% of money that you would to your life with. Charity came from that 80%, not from the 10% because that wasn't yours, not from that second 10% because you're putting away for posterity and you're storing away for a rainy day. But charity came from that 80% of overflow of like, wow, like even though I have already given away 20% of my money, I actually still have so much more that I want to give to my friends and my family and my community and like I want to keep investing in where I am. Money being where it is and money being bastardized in such a way where, you know, it's not real. Legitimately the Fed can push three buttons on a computer and then double the monetary supply for the entire world and no one knows. that's a thing. When money becomes real again, charity actually matters. And when charity actually matters, because money actually matters, government programs that don't matter have a way of going away because people are going to actually look at things and be like, hey, is this actually a good use of our money? And when the answer is no, there's only going to be one solution. It's remove it. And when you remove it, you're not actually removing anything that people cared about. You're removing waste. and when you're removing waste, you're actually making things that are actually efficient more efficient. So what gets better is everything. But I think the biggest thing that gets better is government becomes more efficient. Doge happens naturally. You don't have to have somebody go in there and then have this big political show of like, oh, you cut my government program. You hate women and children. It's like, no, actually, there's just a lot of waste here. And by the way, this administrator, Joey, who's been working here for 40, 42 years at this he point doesn't in time, have a manager, the he doesn't have a boss. He actually doesn't even do anything. He just shows up and watch Facebook videos. That's a thing, by the way. All that goes away. And all that goes away when money actually matters.

Charity, ideally, is an investment in the world that you want to see in the future. When there's Fiat garbage money, the majority of money that goes to charities just goes to operating the charity. So you get the money and you just like, oh, what's a charity? I just throw it in a charity. And that all that's going to do is let that charity continue to exist. When the money is solid again, people are going to really think about what thing do I want to invest in? And then the charity that they invest in is going to really think about What is the best way to spend this money to benefit the thing that our charity exists to serve? In the same way, for the last, I don't know when, I guess it's 1971, divorce rates skyrocketed. For now, multiple generations, families have been disintegrating. As a result, people are not thinking intergenerationally. Boomers compared to their parents don't have as much of an interest in the legacy of their children. I realize some boomers obviously care about their children, but in general, they're not investing in future generations. Bitcoiners tend to think intergenerationally. One reason why we want to invest in quality homes is not just so that we can live better. We're literally thinking about our children and our grandchildren. We want to pass down an inheritance to future generations. So when the money gets solid, the quality of everything, not just manufactured goods, the quality of family life is tied to the quality of the money.

JD, I love what you said about how the government services get cut. And I just want to like, as you say, double click on that because it sounds like harsh, like, oh, you're on a welfare system because you have a disability and that's going to get cut. Like, well, what are you going to do for food? You're like, you're not going to, like you're not gonna be able to survive, et cetera, et cetera, until you realize that the person who's on the disability in the first place to get the welfare, like the problem, their disability, let's say it's diabetes and they adopt a hard money standard and they cut out all of their, the garbage food that they've been eating and they reverse or even cure the diabetes situation, which is Completely doable in many situations, not all, but in many situations, and there's like hundreds, if not thousands of these cases at this point, they fix their underlying disability, and then they don't need the government assistance anymore. This is not a top down, we're gonna cut everybody off and destroy everything. Bitcoin doesn't work like that. It's all bottom up. It's all, wait a second, we're going to fix the individual incentive, and that's going to fix the individual's life, and that's going to allow them to take more ownership, to have more agency, to lower their time preferences, to impact their own specific community in more impactful ways and build a better future, regardless of of whatever the government says. And then as those number of people increase, and every single person in this show right now is one of those people who's seen their agency increase, who's seen their impact increase over the lifetime, as opposed to everybody else who's not on Bitcoin, who doesn't get it yet, where they just are constantly losing agency. As we gain agency, we're impacting our communities, and making a better world at a small local level. And that compounds to larger and larger and larger communities. Everything gets better from the ground up.

Do you guys think we're going to have better Spider-Man movies when the money gets better?

Why is every.

Oh, man.

Every movie is just a redo of a movie that already existed. How many people have played Spider-Man now? And, hey, if you like Spider-Man, that's cool. My kids, they love all the superheroes that I loved as a kid. That's fine. But not every single iteration of Spider-Man, Superman, Marvel characters, DC characters. are as good as the other one. We're not building on these franchises. What I would love is I would love for the money to get better and for there to be new characters, movies that are completely new stories.

And we will see that. We'll totally see that because, again, oh, if I just. if I'm losing money to inflation every year, well, I like this new Spider-Man 85 is going to be the sure bet, right? As opposed to, no, no, no, I can't do Spider-Man 85. I need to invest in something that actually adds value. I need to really think about the story that I'm telling. I need to really think about the script, the casting. I need to do all of this stuff to really dial in and add value to to the world without doing that. Nobody's going to spend the money on it because they're like, I mean, I'm already to this place where it's like, no, like, why would I spend money on a, on go to a movie theater? Because none of the movies are, are, I know that none of them are going to be interesting or worth the money or time or, or the rest of it. And I know this because it's literally just Spider-Man 85. So why would I spend my money in that? I'm a bitcoiner. I'm interested in adding value to humanity. Spider-Man 85 doesn't do that. It's just pumping out the same thing.

Over and over again.

So, yeah, we're definitely gonna see better stories, better acting, better filmmaking. It's gonna be awesome.

I take issue with what you just said because I know there are at least 84 people who have been Spider-Man who disagree. legit other question, though, on, on this of, like, what do you think is the most unexpected thing that's going to get better? Like, what is the thing that you, you know, and it's like, if you, like, dig into something that you know better than anybody else, like, what is something that you think is so unexpected that's going to get better? That's going to blow people's minds. I think one of the things, I'll start really quickly on this is, like, one of the things that's going to get better that people are not expecting.

Is.

People are legitimately going to enjoy being in real life again. Like, there's going to be an interesting twist that happens is we're going to get to a dead internet when money gets better. We're going to whether it's AI that takes us there or whether it's just kind of a A disenchantment with the internet that happens. But I legitimately believe that when money gets to a place where people can be thinking on a low, slow time preference horizon, it's just not going to be exciting or valuable for people to be spending their time online, which is really exciting for me. That means outdoor spaces are going to get better. That means people are going to think more about the parks and they're going to think more about their front yards. They're going to think more about All of the things that are outside and then when they're putting more effort and thought into it, the world's just going to be a more beautiful place. So I think, you know, being outside is going to get way more appealing as the money gets better. What do you guys think?

I got a crazy one. As money gets better, people are going to start getting married and having families. and valuing monogamy at a much earlier age. I could see people starting to get married and have kids around 20 years old. Over the last three generations, I think the age that people have started to get married has started creeping up on 30 years old. People are having kids between the age 35 and 40 years old now. Your body is primed to have children at 20. And if you have children at 20 and life expectancy increases, you can be a young parent and live an incredible life and participate in life with your children and even live to see your grandchildren and possibly your great grandchildren. And in order to do that, you need to get married and stay married to one person. I could see younger generations as hope is re-instilled in humanity because the money is something that you can actually have trust in again, that values going into the future will remain consistent because the money is consistent. And it will free people to commit to each other at a much younger age.

And.

I'm excited for them. That's going to be so awesome for parents to be young with their children.

And I think we're already seeing that, especially in Bitcoin circles. It's like people are literally vocalized, yeah, I'm getting engaged at age 23 or whatever, because I recognize that dang, I have, like, a really strong, hopeful outlook for the future, and I feel like committing to somebody and, like, having kids early is, like, the way to capitalize, the way to. To literally lean into all that and figure it out. I think this ties into my answer, which was.

And.

And ties it back to the. The start of this conversation. Like, what happened? All of those questions, like, what happened? Like, why did it all go wrong? It's. It's this Doomer Loop. Right. Of, of like everything is pessimistic about the future. And it's like realistically pessimistic. It's realistically pessimistic because everybody's losing agency. Nobody has any hope. Right. I think the doomerism as we, as more and more people come, come to Bitcoin just becomes the idiot take.

Right.

The, the, the real take, the, the real like, the real take or the, the realistic take, I guess that's what I'm saying. The realistic take going forward is that of optimism. Yeah, well, of course, of course things are bad or whatever, but like, think about what we're doing and think about what, what gets, what, how this gets fixed. Like, well, yeah, but then, but then this solves that problem. That solves this problem. It's like, wait, the realistic take here is optimism. We no longer see the, like in terms of what's unexpected, well, an optimistic take on reality is going to be unexpected. The idea that being critical of everything and just, oh, it's just bullshit all the way down, like that's, you're just going to look like an idiot having that perspective in a future world denominated in Bitcoin. It's like, can you imagine the returns to like, hopefulness, the returns to like, oh yeah, we can solve that problem. Oh, drought California? Yeah, let's solve that problem like forever, right? Like just, it's everything like the, the optim, the optimism is just going to compel people to do incredible things.

Bitcoin is a return to hopefulness. I love that.

I think my last word, because I know we got to wrap up, but I think think about the thing you love and think about the thing you hate the most. Both of those things will get better when the money is fixed.

I'm so optimistic, I can't even think of the thing I hate the most.

Mine's definitely salad. Salad will definitely get way better when we get into Bitcoin standard.

Just meat salads.

Just meat salad. It's just gonna be meat salad and raw milk to be so good.

Everybody's gonna be a carnivore on the Bitcoin standard.

You'Ll be able to afford to be able to. You will be able to afford being.

A carnivore on the bitcoin standard, that's for sure.

Yeah.

Steak will get cheap again when the.

Money gets good again. I love the Canadian commercial going right now. That's AI generated, but it's like the.

One was like 84 stake.

What?

We need to leave Alberta or Alberta needs to leave Canada or whatever.

They're all the same.

It's America's top hat. Don't judge Thank me.

Cool.

You, everybody, Well, hey. for jumping in. Does anybody else have any other last thoughts before we jump out? And also, you know, everybody who is listening and watching, like, we would love feedback. You know, we're on our path to 100 shows, but tell us what you like, tell us you don't like. If you don't like our faces, we can't help with that. But if you want us to try and cover something, that's probably more doable. AI can help us with the faces, but if you meet us in real.

Life at this point, oh, gosh.

I do have one last thing to say. The title of the show is what the Hell Happened? Well, Fiat happened. But I have good news. Then Bitcoin happened. So the future is looking bright.

Indeed. Correct.

Everything.

Well stated.

We'll get better by Bitcoin. Cheers, y'all.

Peace. Thanks for tuning in to Better Buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes everything better. Like, subscribe and follow us on X@BetterBYBTC, YouTube@BetterBYBitcoin, not financial advice, mathematical certainty.