The Fourth Turning Revisited with Brandon Quittem

yo brendan how you doing i'm doing great peter thanks for having me thank you for coming thanks for flying in for this dude really appreciate it we uh we did an interview just a bit over a year ago proved to be super popular at the time it was one of the biggest shows i'd ever done like top 10 i think it was a topic a lot of people were talking about at the time fourth turning so i think it's a good time to revisit it so thank you for coming back and doing this i know you've done a lot of prep but how have you been anywhere you've been well i've been great yeah it was very easy uh question do i want to go to miami in the winter where i live it's quite cold there's snow on the ground no sunshine so easy easy yes for me and i'm very passionate about this topic it was actually a personal thing for me last year you know chaos lots of transition lots of change and i'm sitting there like what's going on and so i just went in the cave and started reading and learning and trying to figure out what's happening and out of that process came the fourth turning i read it a couple times and that thesis seemed to be the best tool to view the change and after sort of internalizing that idea first i fought it i was like it kind of sounds like horoscopes for for intellectuals in a way um and the deeper i got i realized that it does feel like this emergent human thing it feels like ground up this is how humans operate and it is just a model right like the map is not the territory however it felt so useful and you know having a sense of these cycles gave me some peace in a sense that okay the world looks pretty grim but i don't think it's going to end right we've been here before there's so many parallels to the 40s and you know that sort of gives you some cautionary things but also yeah like i said a little bit of peace for the future like we'll get through this well anyone who hasn't heard the last one they won't necessarily need to go back because i think we're going to revisit part of it but the reason i wanted to cover it with you again is because we made that show so much more weird and crazy [ __ ] has happened since it felt like a good time to go back in and like use that there's a lens back into the fourth turning i was going to save this bit until later on but actually let's do it now uh danny uh mentioned because i'd forgotten about it i've raised the fourth turning in my interview with eric weinstein and he was like he didn't want to talk about it he's very critical of it the point he made is uh he's got this thesis of snap to grid what is it danny snap to grid yeah so like something there's a theory or something happens and then people just attach themselves to it rather than like dealing with the fact there might be new information or whatever but uh so he he he himself isn't a fan of this he didn't want to talk about it and i guess there are other critics of the fourth turning you've probably uh read them yourself you've probably dealt with them but could you kind of summarize the main criticisms and what your kind of view is on those criticisms yeah i would say let's see i get two main criticisms one is from the bitcoiners and in our beautiful arrogance we say well now bitcoin's here the cycles are over and to be honest that was my fir first read through the book that was my my thesis okay okay um yeah but technology changes things and then i went a little bit deeper with the material spent more time listening to one of the authors neil howe and then then it became clear that this is just a human thing and we kind of talked about it earlier like yeah the technology changes but human nature doesn't change very much and so it's really about looking at the mood and i think that's the important part it's not predicting exactly what's going to happen it predicts how humans in a group respond to catalysts and i i think that's kind of like my answer to the bitcoin thing is yes new technology but there was new technology in the 40s there was new technology in the civil war and the revolutionary war and a lot of things have changed and yet this process continues and so that that's criticism one another one would be it's just like horoscopes for intellectuals and what that kind of reduces down to as an argument is that you're just sort of looking for patterns that don't exist and i am a little bit sympathetic to this right which is why i wouldn't say i only use one lens to view the world that's obviously a mistake map's not the territory and so yeah i think there's credence there but again the people who make those critiques they have only a 20 understanding and so and i was there i know exactly what that feels like and i've yet to meet someone who grasped the material well enough in order to make thoughtful critiques very similar to bitcoin and the deeper i went the more i started to see this these patterns playing out started to make sense cancel culture made sense right why is humanity trying to collectivize right now why why is everything political that all makes sense through this lens and i guess to counteract my own position there you could say the more i learn about it the more my identity attaches to this thing right and so i sort of have a little reputation attached to this book which was not really intentional it's just what happened um so yeah that's what i would say and i'm still bullish on the thesis but it's only one tool in the toolkit okay so how much do we know about the author neil howe yeah so he's a long time historian he's a classic dc intellectual author guy him and his co-author the late bill strauss they wrote their big book was called generations in the early 90s presidents said it was the most influential thing they read and so they have a long-term history um you know they were sort of i guess they get they were given credit for calling it the millennial generation so deep thinkers in that world um now neil works for hedge which is kind of a funny tension point he's not very bullish on bitcoin but explain hedgehog um hegei risk management is a investment shop i don't know exactly what they do but you send them their money and they invest for you okay and he's sort of the demographer or the guy who studies demographics for them but i'm blanking on the guy's name um oh shoot the ceo is is very tense with bitcoiners someone needs to look this one up but daddy who's that ceo of hedgehog okay you'll find it for us yeah um anyways so neil's a demographer he's bare shawn bitcoin sorry keith mccullough yes keith mccullough everyone on twitter knows this guy ah yeah hold on he came unhinged with bitcoin and he owns some and he trades around it but he just had a little tussle with the bitcoin community yeah i remember him yeah did he was anyone like like bought and then sold it and like everyone quad four yeah that was his model why he sold yeah i remember i remember okay well whatever yeah so yeah neil neil's a classic dc guy i would say he's bitcoiners would call him a statist i would say he has much more optimistic views of government than bitcoiners do and so that might be the one tension point or difference in ideology ideology that matters um they call me a status so i'm okay with that yeah i mean if you're to the left of the bitcoin mass you're a statist yeah well i mean i say i'm a reluctant status but we can get into that later maybe if it's part of it okay so i think like i said like the the audience of the show is bigger than when we made this last time so a lot of people wouldn't have heard it they might not have read the fourth turning do you want to just do like the tldr definitely yeah i think it's important and to preface it's really hard to do a tldr i know and so i'm going to do the shortest version and then try to drop little bread crumbs along the way and we'll kind of make a picture by the end okay and so book was written in the late 90s right around the same time as a sovereign individual i consider them very good companion pieces and the main thesis is that humanity goes through cycles roughly every 80 to 90 years and at the end of that cycle people look around and they say all our institutions are crumbling so think government think economics think healthcare all the exterior world starts to crumble and we decide wow we actually need some institutions we need some order in society and so humanity collectivizes at that crisis moment usually a war and then we sort of reimagine the world and it has many effects um one of the effects is that it tilts the the game board back to the young people and so essentially wealth consolidates over this period the institutions decay and then we just rattle the cages and reset the game board giving some hope back to the young people and they need hope in order to drive humanity forward so that's kind of the key point uh previous fourth turnings would be the civil war the american revolution and the period between 1929 and 1945 and so that's that's the best example for where we are today right you have the stock market crash fdr's new deal all these new centralization of of power and government that we've never seen before world war ii and then on the tail end of that bretton woods right redo the financial system out of this we had imf world bank nato fdic insurance so many so many different things that were crazy at the time and we're kind of going through that same thing right now and so if you look around our institutions are failing us inequalities high populism rising you can feel collectivism coming in cancer culture is essentially a response mechanism to there's a big problem we got to fix it and if you're not with us you're against us and so they just cleave off the non-believers right climate change is going to be the same way it's like big problem got to collectivize and so it makes sense but it comes at a high cost right there was a lot of communism and young people were pursuing that in the 30s as well and you know you sort of flirt with losing markets and you flirt with losing the the emergent organizational properties that i think makes a society good and so it's kind of looks like we're trending towards china right now and that's because we are it doesn't mean we're going to go that far right there's different forces at play but i think that's the main risk um and then the other thing to mention here is that there's four stages in one full cycle you can think of it like uh first second third fourth spring summer fall winter or he gives fancy names like the high um the unraveling the crisis et cetera and at the end of the cycle we redo the exterior world halfway through the cycle we redo the interior world so the second turning is the awakening that's when we have religious movements that's when we have the civil war or sorry the civil rights movement psychedelic 60s right that's essentially young people realizing everywhere around him is boring and lame and white picket fence and young people rebel that's the baby boomers and another thing that matters here is the line histories history creates generations and then generations create history what do i mean by that so let's say we're all millennials we grow up in one period of time so we're a generation that was forged by history we're all born at the same time we have the same hopes wishes dreams we're all parented kind of the same context the same so we kind of create a generation with similar characteristics individuals unique the group is not unique and very predictable then they turn into adults right young people go to old people what do they do they rebel against their parents and you can sort of follow that generation and track them over time depending on what stage of life they are and predict the mood predict how they will respond to catalyst that's the key so history creates generations generations create history you can just build that principle from the ground up and then each generation is given an archetype like a hero nomad etc etc which is just a useful again a jungian human thing that we do and so you add all that up together and it's about how does humanity respond to a catalyst that's kind of the key point um that's probably enough to start that's a good start um i don't really want to cover first and second turn in now we might cover first only towards the end because that's where we're heading towards a new dawn but i definitely want to cover third and fourth turning i think both of those are kind of interesting points because essentially we are now within the fourth turning right correct uh and that was uh in the book neil talked about that in this in 2005 we were discussing earlier we think it's probably more like 2007 with the start of the financial crisis uh that being the trigger point but i think it's useful to talk about what happens in the third turning you know and how that takes it like like that period of time what is happening definitely um and i think we should actually do all four to make sure yeah i'll do it super quick though so the last fourth turning was world war ii okay new deal stock market crash okay we redid everything chaos world war everything like that then right after world war ii we had the the first journey that's the high we're sick of fighting white picket fences inequality is low people are generally happy and we just don't want to fight anymore and the boomers who are born during that generation they grow up and they rebel against the sterile white picket fence there's no music there's no culture so they rebel that creates the the second turning the interior world's reimagined okay then it carries over into the third turning which is a period called the unraveling that's where economically things are okay right the getting's good we deregulate this is the 1920s it's champagne nobody cares um then the fourth turning strikes around 2008 and we realize okay the world's burning institutions are failing and it's time to actually do something about it right in the third journey nobody cares i think problems were happening but nobody looks at politics nobody really cares about economics because it's just working fine right the fourth turning catalyzes all this civic engagement that's a really key point today is going to be civic engagement in the fourth turning we get rid of religion and we replace it with civic engagement or politics that's why everything's political right now um because collectively we realize there's a big problem and so every election matters and we all focus in on politics and so it gets really tense and it causes problems but i think it is a natural response to trying to fix the big things um yeah okay so let's let's talk about third turning though i think that's an important focus point so i'm taking a quote from the book uh today's third turn in problem crime race money family culture and ethics will snap into a fourth turning solution okay um and when we talk about a fourth turning solution we're not talking about that these are going to be positive solutions we're talking about the societal response to them which they think is a solution so as an example if we talk about race which i know you haven't gone hugely into but we were just theorizing the race issues of the third turning uh one of the inflection points was the uh the riots in la following the rodney king the acquittal of the uh the police who beat the [ __ ] out of him um the war on drugs um and the prison system the three strike raw they've been pretty punitive towards black communities so there has been a race issue we've seen that manifest manifest itself as a crisis in this fourth turning with blm and black lives matters is that a fair kind of summary of one of those key points yes definitely and you touched on a really important point which is that this thesis looks at opposing forces in a pendulum right is capital strong is labor strong okay is are we individualists are we collectivists are we globalists or we isolationists and um i think that's just important framing for all these things because your point was in the third turning uh there was a lot of race problems but what the response is nobody wants to fix anything so politicians downplay all the problems in the third journey and they will just try to minimize any issue to sweep it under the rug you know just here's another glass of champagne go on your way then in the fourth turning that shifts and instead of minimizing problems politicians lean into the problems that's where you get make america great again hope and change build back better right all of those slogans embed the ideology that there's a problem and i'm i'm your savior i'm the politics guy i'll come and save the day and so with race it's the same deal prior we would say there's no race problems in the 90s obviously there were now we're seeing even the slightest thing that could sort of smell like racism is the most racist horrible thing imaginable and so politicians lean into that and they they kind of again pendulum swung back the extreme opposite way everything's racist now and politicians use it as a tool because people want to latch on to problems right now that's just the mood we're in and so yeah they just slurp up all the the popular support populisms everywhere in the world right now and that's just how the fourth earnings go but but as politicians you know pick up these ideas and lean into them they are still non-partisan issues right there is still conflict in politics around these issues so is it is it parties are particularly picking specific issues and there's a reason why the opposition party yeah we're talking about the u.s and the two-party system that are always opposed it's like there doesn't appear to be anything that democrats or republicans agree on right now i mean they agree on money printing well yeah what they do and they don't brendan because yeah you say they do because under the trump administration they were printing money he was sending out stimulus checks but now that biden has his infrastructure bill wants to print money there are republicans who are you know coming out against this they are opposing this and they were saying look at inflation look at these inflation numbers under the violent administration not realizing that actually this is it takes years like this is years of uh money printing that's led to the inflation now so i think they i think they're being a little bit disingenuous yeah i mean i i think your points valid that there are of opposition to these ideas but i think the key point is that the center of mass and politics shifts a little bit right the noise is always there on the fringe but i think that the center yeah where all the masses shifted towards collectivism and i mean i think i think if a republican was in charge we'd still be printing money maybe a little bit less and it would go to a little bit less uh social justice warrior-ish items but we'd still be printing a ton and we can get into money printing because but i think that's really a social thing but i think then the democrats would be challenging and opposing this it's a bit similar to how prior like very early on in covid the democrats were very much against vaccines now they're very much for vaccines and the republicans there's some well i wouldn't say very much against it but there's been some challenges regarding specifically mandates which i do agree with what i'm saying there's a lot of flip-flopping between these parties now i agree yeah 100 and i think your point about i think kamala harris is the best example she was tweeting um don't take the trump vaccine this is horrible we got to do it the right way i'll never take it neither should you and then you know six months later a year later she's saying the literal exact opposite of her position and there's tons of examples like that and our administration has done this tons of times right like don't wear a mask they don't do anything okay now you have to wear a mask and we can list endless examples and it all comes back to the fact that we don't trust our institutions anymore and they don't deserve our trust the media is is more or less useless or harmful government feels like a disaster who's in charge here um even international institutions all trust has been lost in the world health organization specifically i mean there's multiple things you can point to uh but specifically remember that interview with the guy and they were talking about taiwan and they just kind of cut them off wow remember that danny i don't remember that i love look yeah look that one up um anyway let's go back to the money printing yeah so i guess the tricky part here is that if i'm a central banker we can demonize central bankers all we want and there's probably good reason but in reality i think they're acting on their own incentives and they don't have a choice the interest rate's at the zero bound we have too much debt we can't pay it off and this happened in the 30s as well what happened a giant expansion of the monetary base and you know that gets our percentage of debt to gdp down a little bit which we need to do now we have aging demographics so increased liabilities coming in the future so even more pressure and they essentially have three choices they can go into austerity mode which there's no political capital for no we can go into a increase the gdp which could happen if we had like a white swan event where we invent nuclear fission or some crazy technology that changes everything unlikely or we go into a period of soft default right where we just increase the money supply which devalues the real value of debt for everyone and it sort of just resets the financial system so you know a decade or two of financial repression and you know if you own hard assets you're going to do okay if you own financial assets bonds etc you're going to do pretty poorly and from their perspective it's print money or have a revolution and that's a pretty easy choice for politicians and you know they're going to con the downside of this is we're going to see inflation and so we're going to be gaslit the whole time and bitcoiners have been calling this out for years but you know you can't even say the i word on twitter right you know you get called a crazy person now the omnicron variant is to blame not that we increase the monetary base by 40 percent or the inflation is good for us that article that came out i think it was in the in um i can't remember what's called inter whatever it was the article the inflation is good for you like that moronic article in the intercept intercept yeah and the intercept exactly yeah they're going to gaslight us the whole time and and so what does that do i mean if you're ahead of the curve you can ride this out and do okay but most people don't have time to look at this stuff and so they're going to be hurt pretty bad and i think bitcoiners make that point often but i think there's something here that bitcoiners miss which is that it actually might end up being a good thing for the little guy okay um i think you might like this one but neil howell calls it equalizing forces okay and so the the general thesis is that right now we're going to go through chaos right and the the big guys with all the money they have more to lose the little guy has nothing to lose no wealth and so the big guys need to navigate this a little bit better and during fourth turnings we have to tilt the game board back to the little guy and so um yeah okay inflationary decade's inevitable we're going to go through all that kind of stuff financial assets get wrecked but the outcome is at the end of the fourth turning okay the little guy's gonna get wrecked all through the next decade and they're going to really struggle but if they can get through this period theoretically we're going to reset financial asset prices we're going to reset the game board and in the first journey let's say the 30s through the 50s i do predict a period of increased equality economic equality okay um more opportunity and i'm not going to put a lot of weight on this thesis but this has this is what happened every time during fourth turnings and so there's a little bit of optimism for the little guy if we can get through the hard part okay i mean it's tough to justify though it's tough to sell that i agree yeah okay so the money printing part that is is this the crisis moment of the fourth earning one of the crisis it's a good question um it feels like it feels like the big one um but at the same time i don't i don't know i i foresee we have about five years or so until the peak and so i i'm it's really hard for me to put any confidence on a prediction right now yeah um i could see china encroaching on the west and we have some sort of conflict over different ideological points right china is saying essentially we're ready to take our role as a leader and we're we play the long game and we're here and the us doesn't really like that and so i could see some tension there i could see tension over the monetary base um i could see a u.s civil war happening sort of like a states fracture you know your neighbors fighting each other similar to the revolutionary war or the civil war or the spanish civil war um that's that's all possible i hope that doesn't happen well well let's work through them because if there isn't like can how does this model fail how does the fourth turning model fail that what there is no giant end crisis there is no war there is no reset yeah good question and i think taiwan would be an interesting point to go through this it's like does there need to be a war or not um and i think the answer is that you don't need a war but what you do need is a catalyst strong enough to collectivize the people in order to actually make a big change right humans are lazy yeah we don't act until we absolutely must and so war is usually the catalyst that we need um i don't know though like because because it could be another financial crisis but significantly worse than 2008 something where like 2008 essentially the banks were bailed out we kicked the can down the road and actually if you look at the money print in 2008 it bails into insignificance compared to what's happening right now um i i do forget the numbers i've brought them a few times but i'm pretty sure it's like 800 billion was the bailout figure for 2008. like it's been trillions this year so could could a massive global financial crisis massive financial depression can that be a can that be an end of fourth turning event is it does it need to be something that triggers that moment where the institutions are rethought and rebuilt so i think that the you're right about oa being small yeah i think it's a blip it doesn't even really matter yeah um i think that it's hard it's hard for me to say my gut feeling says that it's not going to be only a financial thing i think it's going to be much much worse than that sadly okay um and yeah the money printer is going to go exponential for the next decade and that's going to cause problems but you know the government essentially knows this and they're trying to manage the situation okay so they come out with things like central bank digital currencies right and this is sort of like the curse of the central planner they see a problem and they're like ooh i love problems i'm going to solve this and so you know they just get their hands dirty and try to fix everything from the ivory tower and so essential central bank digital currencies are essentially recognizing that there's a problem and all that we need to do is give the smart people more power and then we'll solve it harder and faster and better and and so i i see that being a tool that might actually work in the short term right that's what happens when you're trying to wrangle with these complex systems is central planners think they understand the economy and so they make all these hasty decisions which backfire all these unintended consequences and that's how i see central bank digital currencies they're going to be able to directly send money wherever they want they're going to have way more control we're going to give up all our freedoms and i think people are going to be okay with it that's the scary part here is that individuals in a fourth turning especially the millennial generation they're okay giving up freedoms for the greater good you can just feel it on the internet it's like because they don't understand the consequences because for them they see the world as a huge crisis moment and the only way to get through a crisis moment is to make collective sacrifice for the good of everyone okay it's a pretty rational position but if it goes too far right we have a lot of problems like the virus temporary giving up our liberties that's permanent and so i fear for the millennial generation which i'm among because that is the mood that's what they want and it's really hard to fight against that and so at bitcoin kind of comes in here as a immovable rock it's a strong force that it doesn't matter what the millennials think um what they feel about collectivism bitcoin's not going away and so it also plugs in it actually fills our two biggest problems one financial system breaking two from the fourth training perspective we need strong institutions we need order back to society and that could look like central bank digital currencies social credit scores you know eat the bugs whatever great reset model or it could look like a new financial layer bitcoin which is sort of like a new government new institution that's immovable that cannot change and i think millennials will latch on to that because it actually fulfills their needs they most of them just haven't realized it yet it is a fair system millennials love things to be fair and equal and so to me that that's the optimism here is we're gonna go through a financial crash it could have war involved i hope not could have civil war i hope not um but this bitcoin thing is sort of a life raft it's sort of a pressure release valve to get people onto a new system before it gets too bad and i don't think we've ever had anything like that this is outside the system right this is bucky fuller's you know to obsolete the system you have to build something new and well it's it it is a new institution but it's all a mostly incorruptible institution correct that that's the important part yeah right and if we look back through the for like okay svetsky always critiques me and says okay the bitcoin will destroy this the model right and there's some potential there because the difference is um all of our financial systems and all of our political institutions throughout history they only last 30 50 70 80 years um they're human run they're they're very very politicized um that's what always happens with the money right satoshi quoted this you get the money and you know you get corrupted and you abuse the trust and theoretically bitcoin is a monetary system to last a thousand years instead of 50 years and what does that do to society what if this institution doesn't decay what if it lasts what if we can build on top of it a greater more collaborative society that's entirely possible but then you have to be conscious of the risk which is that what if bitcoin grows up and then it gets neutered by the state we let our we stop running nodes we let supply concentrate in banks we we give up kyc for everything and it's sort of just okay they let us have a hundred trillion dollar asset but the important properties of bitcoin decay over time as we just give up um the good parts of bitcoin and i think that is possible okay how much of the the full cycle the fourth turn cycle do you think is linked like intrinsically linked to economics like is it an entirely an economic model or is it entirely linked to an economic model yeah good question i i think that it's not an economic model i think it's about how humans respond to their environment what is the mood at the time but it is the underlying is the underlying uh mood created due to the financial situation i'm trying to try how do i best word this okay so i get what you're saying so yeah i'm trying going back to that like tough times great you know strong men strong man create good times yadda yadda so post world war ii uh there was a lot of debt a lot of rebuilding um you know tough economic times but after the rebuilding there was abundance so good times correct so i'm wondering like i'm wondering how much money and time preference plays into the cycle you don't think it does it no i mean it definitely does i think economics is as as powerful as any force in society um and so what i would say is it's the mood and the environment upon which we act is part of economics it's part of just generally politics it's part of family life it's how are our parents raising the kids do we go and are we religious are we not religious all of that combined creates the mood and so i mean like i i'm on your team here with economics being super powerful and probably even more powerful but i don't think that economics alone describes everything with how humans respond to the world okay and so what would be a good example um let's take the dot-com crash right end of the internet boom in the late 90s we crashed there but it didn't really matter that much it was just it was a symptom of the excesses of the third tourney it's like oh yep we we gambled too hard um a couple boomers lost their pensions and their retirement accounts but nobody cares [ __ ] it yeah move on um then in oh eight okay now that's the what we would define as the transition point no wait financial crisis the world's ending everything is in conversation now all the politics change right you can see a very different response to a similar catalyst maybe maybe it was bigger in a way and more global but we responded differently right uh similar in let's see in the 19 teens um i think the germans sunk the lusituania boat however how that's pronounced and nobody really cared then you go to pearl harbor okay lucituania is in the third tourney in pearl harbor's in the fourth turning as soon as that happened it's global war tomorrow right and why is that because the people actually didn't want to go to war on the third journey because we don't recognize the problems yet in the fourth turning we're ready to go to war it has to be decisive we have to make bold action to save the world and so everyone was in support of the war similar to going to the middle east right nobody wanted to go to war in the early 2000s that we had to have uh 9 11. then we had to have our politicians lying about weapons of mass destruction just to convince us to go to the middle east where now if let's say taiwan taiwan yeah china something bad happens globally i think the the appetite would be greater um but it has to feel existential it has to be a real catalyst okay let's talk about taiwan because that's a good lens for this because [Music] certainly we've seen china completely destroy many of the freedoms that people enjoy in hong kong hong kong now is not what it was it you know under i think when did british rule end something like the 90s when chris patton left is it chris padden i'm trying to remember things for my childhood but um yeah i went to hong kong a couple years ago i had a great time i wouldn't be going there now because everything i've heard they're they're replacing local hong kong laws with chinese laws and um it's now just part of the chinese state now the rhetoric is taiwan is next and taiwan itself is expressing concerns this is going to happen um and i think the the one interesting factor for the west is with regards to the uh is it the taiwanese semiconductor company like there is this global chip shortage and i'm i'm you know i'm not sure what the catalyst is or why yeah it if whether china just wants to reclaim what it thinks is it's part of sovereign china or it's because it's feels like it needs to protect its own supply chain by having control of the semiconductor company we also have uh potential of build up of troops on the russia ukraine border so there's two scenarios there that potential uh potentials for wars that multiple countries would get involved in my only my only thing there when i consider my war happen my war breakout is that it feels like the stakes are too big for for a global war now yeah yeah i mean from china's perspective they're ready to take their place yes right and xi said he i forgot what it is but he like classified himself on the same tier as mao right so he's essentially saying i'm a supreme leader i'm the man and if i'm him thinking through his lens i want to leave a mark on the world and so what one what's one way to do that unify all of china claim more territory right and so hong kong and taiwan in my mind it feels like they're gonna be china i don't i don't think that there's any way out of that at this point um and okay the petro dollar is fraying around the world the us is not in the same position as we were um after world war ii right we're way way way behind and u.s foreign investment is declining um you know afghanistan made us look horrible lynn alden had a great tweet which was essentially that u.s trade deficits flow to china primarily and china doesn't buy u.s treasuries anymore with that excess extra money they buy hard assets and so we're essentially funding china to take a stronger position geopolitically and china plays for keeps right they they use the confessions of an economic hitman model of like the imf and stuff where they'll give loans to a recent example uganda uganda couldn't pay their loans so china says great we own your airport now there you go yeah and so they're doing this all over the world exactly they're doing it very fast and so i don't even see i mean i think our allies might not be our allies forever right china is the trade trade partner for most of the world now they're the largest commodity importer and you know to counter all this china it also doesn't produce any innovation china just takes what the west does steals it and scales it yeah and they're really good at it and they're ruthless and so yeah like i don't i don't think china's model is a good model and i think but i think it's a scary competitive model for at least a short term and yeah innovation has to happen somewhere for our species or we're going to screw this whole thing up and certainly not coming from china with regards to timing i think well beijing summer olympics next year so they're not going to do anything before that but okay next fall next winter what's stopping china from making steps and they'll probably slowly do it like they're doing with hong kong and pretty soon it'll be too late yeah tsmc chip fabs that's very scary normies are aware of supply chain crisis and normies know that chip shortages are bad right they see the car prices go up and whatever um and okay america is responding we're scrambling to put chip foundries in the u.s and arizona texas et cetera it's going to take a decade and they're probably not going to be very good for a long time right it's the most capital intense thing that humans do today it's really hard it's very it's also really bad for the environment all the inputs pollute really poor really bad and we'll see how the esg crowd balances that one yeah this that will be rationalized though i mean hopefully or maybe like mexico may we just export all the bad stuff to mexico i don't know so i i still don't see i still don't see international conflict over taiwan well maybe i'm being naive i just don't see it i i agree yeah but one scenario that does keep coming up uh you've mentioned it here i've had other people mention it is potential for civil i don't want to say war because it might not be i don't know how it plays out i mean i don't want to predict something that sounds ludicrous to some people but there has been a lot of talk of uh texas danny i always get this wrong don't i i would say it's just succeeding um but also i've heard a counterpoint whereby maybe in the next election trump comes back trump wins he probably wins if he comes back word california washington yeah would those with those democrat stakes they were not going to be part of this like is like is this something that's realistic that you're thinking about i think it is realistic okay um it's not in the central government's best interest and so i don't assign a very high probability of this happening in any short period of time however the mood is right for this right you can feel the difference between the coastal elites and the the middle of the country rural people they genuinely hate each other and the coastal elites take the position that we are the smart educated people so our opinion is true and and it's right and the trump supporter anti-vaxxer rural people are all racist bigoted dummies and so and and the rural people are like hey we're really not like that and so there's a huge tension and the recent poll maybe five years ago 28 of americans said that they support secession and that was five years ago it's probably gone up a lot since then and so let's say a third of the population is supporting that that's a large amount that's more that's roughly the same as what the revolutionary war what the patriots wanted compared to the loyalists so the conditions are right um then you have all these like okay covet is attention point you have um bitcoin mining and energy is a tension point other political things and so federalism in america is is coming out now right florida's governor is saying one thing new york's saying the opposite texas california opposites and so yeah i think that the tensions are real will it be some sort of like north for south big bloody war i don't think so i think it would be more like a chaotic fog of war decade of isolated incidents and escalating violence and eventually just having to redraw the lines on the map um again i would give this a lower probability what do you mean by reach all the lines like who's part of the united states yes yeah that's what i thought you meant are there separate states or are there not um i don't know like to me i'm very supportive of states rights i think that's the most important thing that america has going um like innovation comes from competition you need separate silos to compete with each other in order to produce good ideas and you also need a frontier which is another angle you need some place where the the innovators can go where they don't feel stifled right that's why all the brain drains coming into bitcoin space and the greater decentralized whatever we're going to call this space it's because the old world's dying and it's boring and it's lame and it there's just a tight box around it then you come in bitcoin land and you can have radical ideas you can bounce them off other people and that's where the real innovation goes so stay you know traveling around the u.s states rights is something i'm like most envious of the us living in the uk i can't move anywhere else in the uk and materially change my life because the rules are different i can go to scotland and there's slight differences and i can go to wales and there's like slight differences but there's no fundamental difference there's no different approach to taxations or there's no different approach to marijuana laws we are the same wherever you go whereas you come here and you know look if i wanted to move to the u.s i'd have a choice if i moved to new york i have to deal with xyz if i move to texas i have abc and it's like i have those options on different taxes different laws different ways of life like quite it's quite different and it goes back to one of those things balaji talks about where that vote with your fee is actually much more powerful than the ballot now you talked about the brain drain into bitcoin but there has been that brain drain out of silicon valley and certainly people moving out of san francisco who who are moving to places let's say let's be honest they're red states they're moving to florida they're moving to texas maybe some future wyoming but you're seeing that what i don't understand is because i'm not american you might know more about this if texas made that decision what could the federal government's response be can they block it how does it do we even know how it works yeah it's a good question i think the opposing forces are what does the constitution say yeah and then what is the executive branch who appears to dismiss the constitution very confidently have to say right like osha the osha law trying to make all americans be vaccinated to go to work that's probably not constitutionally acceptable so what the government did is they tried to find a sneaky backdoor way to use osha to enforce it right and so the tricky part is are we going to enforce the constitutional rights or are we going to let the government squash it and that's i think the scariest point here and it's also tying in like okay the fed and the government are going to merge corporations and government are going to merge that's very scary right if government and corporations are like friendly and friendly competition that's good for the people but if they team up the little guy is in bad shape right then two of the main power sources are consolidated and we look really bad and it brings me back to i think i stole this from naval originally but there's only two ways to coordinate society at scale cooperation or coercion right cooperation would be free markets coercion would be force do you want btc do you want cbdc okay the and i think that is true and the central government wants power it's in their best interest but it's not the best interest for the people and if we don't want state enforced violence forever then we need to push back on this we need to preserve markets we need to preserve this financial institution that is bitcoin that is non-discretionary and can't be politically captured um otherwise great we get through another fourth turning and we put a band-aid on it we build new human institutions with slightly different you know colors and then in another 80 years we're going to be doing the same thing again um or we we take this bitcoin path and and maybe this fourth turning doesn't lead to war um if we want to be optimistic for a second i think definitely want to be i am optimistic yeah i think bitcoin could serve as that institution and prevent the war right before things get too bad you're essentially just as people wake up they're they're just adopting a new system rather than getting so bad that they feel the need to fight right and we're seeing for example el salvador um i love this example so whatever we want to say about bouquet and his authoritarian tendencies he's bringing freedom money into the into the city or sorry into the country so even if he screws up he just empowered his people to not listen to him anymore okay then what about the imf okay the imf says shakes their finger at bouquet and says we're not going to give you a loan if you keep messing around with this bitcoin thing what does bouquet do he eat a bag of dicks yeah he should post back at him and then he goes you know i'm going to crowdfund this important part i'm going to crowdfund a billion dollars by selling a volcano bond just middle finger to the imf the us is like well tensions are rising with el salvador right so the old guard all these old institutions they just hate it they can't stand this new power rising and i think that's the thing that we need to latch on to and you're seeing it with young people the young people who are um post-woke let's say um they're looking for new new sources of truth new avenues why is jordan peterson massive because young people mostly males sort of feel disenfranchised by the current system and they go to a system that feels more true and more real that's what bitcoin is right the facade is gone the ledger is open and you know come come play in in the new future and that makes me very excited and i think the nation state game theory is going to explode and i think one more thing on this rant is i think the most underpriced or underappreciated aspect of the whole let's just call it in quotations crypto space is the fact that bitcoin and energy are forming symbiosis and you know some people are aware of that but the second order and third order effects i don't think have really hit the consciousness or the market yet and what's happening is these two industries are going to merge because they have economic incentives to do so and simple economic incentives lead to positive externality on society so every time a bitcoin miner and an energy uh producer merge what happens okay the bitcoin miners are paying people to work they're generating tax revenue they're stabilizing the grid they're reducing the energy costs for everyone nearby so what happens bitcoin's co-opting local governments and they're saying guess what you're on our team now and it's not i use co-op and kind of a playful term it's really just economic incentives they realize it's in their best interest to protect bitcoin and there's there's unlimited opportunities of this like okay volcano bonds that's the sexy one but you go into like um uganda yeah uganda has a unique example in some hydro there's some geothermal around africa and it makes sense to plug bitcoin there so then what governments all around the world are going to say no you you can't do anything to bitcoin we love it it makes it better for our people well that's just happened in sweden sweden said yeah we're esg don't bring that stuff here you know they said we should ban bitcoin mining and one of the and this came up in my last interview with nick carter one of the arguments uh one of the energy companies uh you can find that one of the energy companies in um sweden came back and said no no we need this it makes it more it makes us more efficient uh i've just brought up a quote from harry sudden because what you've been talking about with bitcoin and energy just reminded me what he said what bitcoin does it demonetizes the political class and empowers the productive class and i think that empowering the productive class is a really important element that's what better money does for people it takes the people who are just renting in our political structure and say to them i'm sorry you don't belong here because you don't produce anything or create any net economic uh any economic positive impact i love that i love harry too he's great he's [ __ ] amazing yeah you know he just comes up with these just like i said to him i was like do you plant these like no i just they just come into my head that's beautiful yeah and to be honest i've been spending all my mental energy in bitcoin on mining interesting um i think it's it i used to think it was just like a thing that was part of bitcoin didn't really matter yeah and so i just totally totally underestimated it and now i'm completely obsessed and leaning you know leaning into an energy revolution and energy is foundational to our species it is the absolute base commodity for everyone if you want food if you want energy to move around to heat your house to cool your house all of that comes from the base and so if bitcoin is it sort of is like a free market catalyst or a free market subsidy it makes your capital investment cheaper it makes your roi faster right literally stabilizes the grid and reduces prices and so if we scale that for a hundred years what is what does our planet look like right but it's one of those positive externalities that satoshi could nowhere plan for true yeah that's true he said one cpu one vote yeah and now we're saying let's uh mine bitcoin with volcanoes all right we're gonna come back to uh bitcoin uh just one other thing i want to talk to you about is uh when we recorded last time it was november 20 so it was about a year ago we were good i don't know what's that seven months into a global crisis of sorts but since then last year it's expanded to be mandates we're seeing mandates with regards to passports we've seen mandates with regards to vaccines and this is splitting society we have those who are fully supportive you said people who would give up uh freedom for security we have people who fully support mandates fully support locking down half a society well i mean in austria you cannot leave the house less once a day for exercise if you've not got a vaccine and i believe and again it would have to be fact checked i believe that by maybe february next year you have to be vaccinated if not you will be fined and if you don't pay the fine you can go to jail now that is a i'm i'm not a like conspiracy theorist i'm not extreme right i think that's [ __ ] scary and that can fracture society and that could that these kind of decisions could lead to revolutions and they could lead to civil wars i agree i think you framed it well it's very very very very scary um and it happened fast right it was incremental but if you look back just a year or two years from now life is very different and let's let's go through this a little bit the mandates and how it ties in um the left again the center of mass paul in politics is left-leaning compared to what it was let's say a decade or two ago and their position is we're all in this together it's the big grand war against covid if you're not with us you're against us right the ends justify the means these are the phrases and we just have to we have to act and the right says well we shouldn't trust government we shouldn't trust pharma our long-term rights are more important than short-term security and so how do we break this down i think charitably the central planners are just reacting to their incentives and we could say that they're overreacting they're trying too hard and doing too much you can't just stand there right you got to do something and so but what does that lead to that leads to unintended consequences their intentions let's let's be charitable let's say their intentions are pure the outcomes are going to be really bad and so i don't care what your intentions are your outcomes matter and so i think that's the most important thing to focus on here is what are the actual outcomes and from my perspective it looks like a money grab a power grab it looks like taking advantage of a situation for your own individual gain never mind the cost it looks like guardian information it looks like free speech is questionable it looks like science is now religion right these are these are very dangerous paths and i think we should be vigilant about this because you know we shouldn't give up our rights for some vague sense of security that doesn't even appear to be working and so again politics is now we got rid of religion right fourth tournament hits an all-time low and we replace it with something we always have that god-shaped hole in our heart we're attaching it to politics so it's no surprise um and it's become so big and to your point the division here is massive families do not see each other for thanksgiving families destroyed don't talk to each other what's going to happen if the tension boils over and the state pushes too hard and then the opposition says okay it's time to fight um it feels like right now everyone's digging in their heels more and more and more it doesn't feel like anyone's budging an inch and so if that boils over we could actually get into war i hope not and the politicians are exaggerating the pain again again for their own benefit so they're adding fuel to the fire and i think one more point here that's just really really important is with regards to fouchy and science so some congressmen i think rand paul and a few other people are essentially saying fauci should step down you're doing things poorly whatever step down and fauci goes on and says you can't criticize me if you criticize me you're criticizing science itself because i speak for science which is the most terrifying dangerous also ironically the opposite of what science is right science is an error correcting method science is a process for uncovering truth there's no such thing as science is settled you can't trust science it's the complete opposite of that you test science you don't trust it um and so yeah he's saying i'm the holy scripture when in reality he's making judgment calls about public policy he's telling you how you can interact with your friends and family who can buy food who can travel none of that is scientific and so to me these are these are very concerning things where do we go from here i don't know it feels like a quote post-truth world where humanity seems to be unable to find truth and the narratives are we're so focused on these narratives and they seem to be just not not zeroing on truth they like our sense-making ability is just going haywire and the people with the least amount of scruples are willing to sacrifice everything to move the herd around this post-truth world is interesting because i'm wondering whether what's the incentive are people disinterested in truth and then they're more interested in their echo chamber and i'll give you a lens for this just uh this last couple of weeks uh with regards to australia australia has been something that a lot of people in europe and america have very strong opinions on with regards to their response to covet i'm not picking aside here they made a decision as pretty much an island country to lock down their entire borders and try and prevent covert getting in and they had a relative amount of success and as a just for the people listening who are losing their [ __ ] right now i'm not saying i support this all i'm saying is that was their strategy and they did quite a good achievement covered out and you know as part of their strategy they had some things that felt very authoritarian you could not leave the danny here based in australia we had to write to the government to try and get him out to come and work you know it was a difficult process luckily because he is british we were able to do that um but other people just cannot leave the country people coming in and put into these camps now people look at them and tim paul calls it a concentration camp whatever but they've had this process of trying to you know prevent covert within the country over the last couple of weeks stories have come out about these uh regional aboriginal communities which have had uh outbreaks of covert now i've tried to find the truth on this there have been claims of force to vaccinations people being taken away from their families and put into these camps howard springs this uh what they call a concentration camp now there is opposing voices that are coming out and saying you know i was speaking to claire lam and from quillette about it somebody who tim paul has gone hard at and she's trying to say no it's not what you're what you're saying is not actually what's happening these communities are of people where there could be 30 people living in a house they have higher co-morbidities uh an outbreak of covert is more dangerous what's happening is the i can't remember the police army but going in offering support saying look if you're not vaccinated here are vaccines if you can't if you're positive covered you should probably come to howard springs to protect your families all i find is trying to find the truth i find extremes trying to honestly say look i think i found some information what's going on here oh you're a communist oh you're supporting the left like there is punishment for trying to find the truth there is reward for supporting your echo chamber and i find that really challenging brandon it is challenging and it it's directly from the fourth learning thesis also which is that we've identified that it's crisis time and we have to get together pick a team and we're going to battle it doesn't matter if there are consequences there are but the ends justify the means right and so people select the team and they go head strong towards that team no one's looking for truth right politics is our religion our identities are tied to what side we're on and so you see all these divisions and they're real and you're right nobody's looking for truth and that makes it really hard to figure out how to go forward and in a way it feels like a simulated war right there's a quote i have here somewhere where it's essentially i think it was a maybe william james quote uh essentially the thesis is you need war because war achieves something in society and it leads to productive outcomes and so in a sense humans like naturally go to these conflict points not intentionally but the outcomes are that we collectivize we make radical change and on the other side theoretically we're better for it it's like we were hardened through this this crucible and the long term's better i don't know how to solve that tension i feel it in my personal life with friends with family tensions growing it really sucks yeah and i've had some like one-on-one long conversations with someone with very different political views than me and the funny part is we're actually a lot closer than people think and i think this is generally true in politics we sort of like attack the straw man of each other rather than like we're like 70 over lined and let's just find the differences where we disagree and it pretty much came down to the fact that i think we're responding a little bit too much to the threat and they're saying no this threat's really big we need to do whatever we can to solve it and i think that's pretty much the divide here um i think people are mostly trying to do the right thing but again the road hell is paid good intentions yeah so it doesn't matter what you think it doesn't matter what your intentions are hayek had an amazing quote it was like we don't we don't have an issue with problems we have an issue with solutions which is so beautiful it's just a central planner instinct and they feel justified in their actions and they feel like they're doing the right thing that's the scary part right they can totally defend their position and my favorite one of my favorite authors aldous huxley um he also warned of the central planners in brave new world and his interestingly he wrote that in like the 40s i think and then he wrote another book a decade later called brave new world revisited this is him just going yes i wrote that dystopia here's how things evolved here's some here's how to prevent essentially my dystopia from happening and one thing stuck with me which is that central planners view society as if we're insects right you can just have the queen bee and all the worker bees just operate in this like hierarchical rigid um super linear fashion um however humans aren't like that we're more like a pack of wolves or we're more like wolves who who operate in a pack because of collective benefit right one wolf can't take down a moose but a pack of wolves can so they work together for a shared interest because incentives are aligned um it's like bitcoin just like bitcoin just like okay let me give you another angle on this it's quite interesting so i had a huge argument with my brother about a year a year 18 months ago um and we were discussing trump and i'm not a huge trump fan but i took the trump side just to challenge my brother my brother historically he's being quite left quite progressive um i obviously cannot stand donald trump and i took the other side and just kept challenging him just kept like just poking a little bit it became this huge row and what's been really interesting and is my brother i've you know we've been orange pilling him me and danny and a couple other people over the last 12 months and it's worked he's become super orange build and now i'm not saying he would defend trump but i the topics we used to row about we can now talk about in a civil way because through the lens of bitcoin i think he's realized that uh he's kind of realized the problems with central planning which he didn't realize i think before he by the way he'll listen to this and maybe tell me i'm wrong but historically he he believed in central planning and i i think he's through the lens of bitcoin has realized central planning is completely and utterly flawed but that came through orange piling him through bitcoin his first thing he read satoshi's white paper he still cannot get his head around it's like this is this was nine pages the entire thesis for a new global system was theorized in nine pages and since then he's just been going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole and his the majority of his outlook on the world government and institutions has changed and it's a fascinating thing but it's what bitcoin did it which takes me to that back to bitcoin with you is that bitcoin you know you've talked about bitcoin can be the the thing that brings us together that crosses the divide that crosses the aisle that hopefully brings solutions that maybe stops us heading into crisis and but why is that and and is it because i think one of i think the biggest thing biggest lesson i've taken from bitcoin is time preference and i wonder how much of the fourth turning cycle also is down to time preference um good question um first i want to address what you said about bitcoin so yeah it is this weird catalyst this weird chaos agent that gives you a new lens on the world and you have to you have to earnestly interact with it right you can't have just a i read an article in the new york times version of bitcoin you have to really get dirty with this thing and after doing that you realize okay the problem bitcoin solves is really big and i didn't even know it existed yes yeah yeah right i was totally it's totally sub-perception and then you go weird okay what else do these bitcoin people say oh they talk about that too oh maybe that's of a similar problem maybe bitcoin okay and you just kind of follow that's the rabbit all right you start uncovering this and then you're surrounded by this fraternity of truth seekers who have a similar interest in getting to the bottom of things and then you play off each other now you're in a community then all of a sudden which you know there's negative parts of communities and identity but there's a lot of positive things here and it leads people to the truth and then it attracts more true seekers right and we don't get everything right but at least the the rules of engagement are um your ideas matter more than your reputation you know what the quality of your thought not the quality of your credentials and that's a much better place to build the world on right we need to lean into that and if you look at bitcoin as an institution it is that right it it's like it automates what central planners do and it prevents the unintended consequences that central planners automatically lead to it's a bit like everyone kisses elon musk's ass and we all told him to go [ __ ] himself yeah that's a perfect way to describe your credentials don't matter what's the quality of your thought you can be an anonymous space cat on the internet and people will take you seriously because of your proof of work right and how opposite of that like in politics today we select for mouthpieces who can look good and regurgitate the talking points and sway public opinion to get elected we're not optimizing for the people who build things who take risks who you know do the work it's totally backwards we're rewarding the productive class as harry said exactly right interesting so how does how does bitcoin save us from crisis the one point we mentioned already was it's a pressure release valve right so before it gets too bad you'll most people naturally will look for a solution once the problem's real and a lot of them are going to find bitcoin a lot of them already have right you see developing countries adopting bitcoin and mass because they actually need it and that really pisses off the credentialed class of the new york times for like i know about economics and so that's one way you have a real problem you identify it bitcoin's here for you when you're ready and so that theoretically saves people from getting to desperation right that's kind of like the emergent micro that builds up over time um then the coming from can i add something in there yeah so one of the interesting points in that is people look to leaders or opinion leaders or thought leaders with regards to you know various issues what we're seeing is like some of these new thought leaders in this new kind of post-mainstream media world are coming towards bitcoin so we've talked about weinstein he's like flirting around the edges of bitcoin i did a thing with him now breed loves done a whole thing with him he's definitely interested in bitcoin and interested in bitcoin as we watched jordan peterson the other day you get orange peel by save for dean i mean the energy moment with him when he realized you could move energy around the world with bitcoin was like like watching him go wow like [ __ ] i need to think about this you know we're starting to orange peel like important opinion leaders which are the people who can like bring more people into realizing hey this might be the solution because people like jordan peterson and eric weinstein they're always looking at the problems in society they're they're commenting on them they're going on to rogan or they're going on to lex freedman or whoever's shows and they're talking about these issues we're now arming them with bitcoin yeah it's a beautiful thing yeah and yeah i mean jordan peterson's probably the most important bitcoiner i think i think i agree and at least for this stage that we're in uh i think michael saylor and bouqueley have a unique spin it's like the corporate model the state model but jordan peterson's model is like the people who already value personal responsibility are so ready for bitcoin they just don't know it yet right it's a lot easier to orange pill his his followers than it is to um you know the progressive left wing of american politics it's gonna be an uphill battle right you're gonna have to fight him along every single step all of their um all their priors fight bitcoin but jordan pearson is the opposite well yeah but i think we've missed a trick with that because we have this esg fight we've all focused on the e but actually bitcoin really supports the s and the g the social and the governance like i think if you there was a dan moorhead a pantera wrote this whole piece about esg and people missing the s and the g part like everything has been focused on the e because it's an easy attack vector but i and you know this has come up in a few interviews recently that i am worried about bitcoin become politicized uh you know we talk about jordan peterson and eric weinstein but also there's this like new class of politician who is becoming orange build we started with nummus we had uh warren davidson we've now got ted cruz which always surprises me but also we're getting reached out by people who are kind of congress hopefuls who are campaigning on the campaign trail a lot of them are starting to adopt bitcoin talking about sound money because they realize they've got to serve their constituents who are being they're having their like uh the savings and uh purchasing power destroyed by inflation they're realizing bitcoin's an answer so like this is whole group now yeah i think you touched on something really important which is that bitcoin has something for all political flavors yeah right the left actually loves bitcoin they just don't know it yet yeah and it's packaged up in this like brutish aggressive in your face tone which is kind of like a holdover of the early times in bitcoin's history and i think bitcoin now is starting to attract more normie-friendly voices right like elin alden can speak to anyone and command respect whereas insert x hardcore bitcoiner from the early days they probably can't get the message across so the message was never actually even being wrestled with and so i think there's there's a whole like progressive bitcoiners thing on twitter that's growing um i think that's a good thing right bitcoin is fair money how could you not be supportive of this like institution that doesn't require politicians or bankers how is elizabeth warren not obsessed with bitcoin her tirade against the banks well there you go i i had the exact same conversation nicardia like her her you know she went after mnuchin and she went after the link between wall street she was basically saying there's an arm of wall street within the white house um but i think what it is is they've been misled by the fud they've seen the top layer of fud or they've seen a bunch of people get rich and they don't like that wealth disparity i just want to bring out this parker lewis quote that's brilliant if i so he said liberals are going to love bitcoin when they figure out what it will do for low-income families but democrats will hate it conservatives will love bitcoin when they figure out what it will do for the budget deficit but republicans will hate it that's funny yeah there's a lot of truth to that there is um but i do worry about this bitcoin becoming another political weapon and we are definitely seeing more of the right more you know people within congress or the senate who are interested in bitcoin certainly this certainly is a sway to the right yeah it's absolutely true and it makes more sense on the nose for the right of course but i think that the problem that the left needs to overcome and i don't think this is even overcomeable but i think it's like kind of a tension point is the left wants strong government generally the right wants less government right and so the left would be more in favor of the idea of keynesian economics where you manage the economy and they're just like yeah we just need the smart people at the top and we're good to go and we just have to protect all the evil billionaires from getting too much power and redustry wealth so everyone's fair um bitcoin is essentially recognizing the fact that we shouldn't have people in charge of the money and that is a radical idea generally and extremely hard for the left to grasp because they're always the you know the intellectuals and don't worry we'll solve it by jamming all the people together but they want redistribution of income they do and that's a hard thing to get over yeah it is i think over the transitionary period with bitcoin it's you know the faster bitcoins adopted the more carnage they'll be right and i think that there's there is a risk there um but like okay we exported all of our manufacturing jobs right we're not going to just turn that ship around and produce labor jobs like reasonable middle class jobs we're not going to just do that in a day right it's going to take a decade two decades three decades and so yeah we can like argue about sound money and if that's moral or whatever but the alternative to sound money is the state steals from people and on paper redistribution okay i can get get down with um sometimes it's unfair and you don't want to have your neighbors starving i i can get down with that in an intellectual sense however what that actually comes what that leads to is a cartel of the rich and powerful making rules for them at the expense they don't care about the little guy they throw the little guy's scrap so he shuts up it's bread and circuses right and so there's there's a difference between like the idea of what you want philosophically and then what humans do with too much power and i think that's the fundamental thing satoshi identified power gets abused humans do that even with good intentions and so i think we have to bite the bullet here and separate money from state and go through the hardships that that comes we're already going through the hardships by the way without bitcoin the world's messed up and so we can't we can't pretend that bitcoin's the iceberg that sinks the titanic it's not like that it's bitcoin's the life raft the titanic's already sinking and so i think we need to lean into the fact that less human oversight is actually better but again that's a radical idea that's that's markets also the left is kind of concerned about markets because what they view as capitalism it's not working wealth inequality well that's not from markets markets and and uh distribution of decision making that's what creates the wealth in the beginning um so yeah it's a big tangled big tangled mess but i think it's time to bite the bullet could could the fourth turning war be a war of money or war for money i think so yeah i think the state will try to centralize power and create a cbdc um i think china will increase okay two things one china could encroach their version of a monetary reset might be different than the west that could create tension um also i could see the west europe and america uh creating cbdc's and then maybe people don't actually want that um because it actually is bad um but communicating that's gonna be hard i agree people are gonna love cbdc's at first they're gonna love it yep um i i've tried to talk to people about this try to frame it for them try to make them understand what this actually means i mean i don't even like the loss of uh physical banknotes i i i despise the thought of going to a world of just digital money i mean this is bitcoin but like i hate that idea um yeah i think that's a really important point cbdc's are going to be popular through the fourth journey lens the mood is let's collectivize let's make radical change let's make it fair again and cbdc's will be pitched that way um secretly or maybe not secretly i hold out the hope that the american political establishment or members of that will identify bitcoin as the right solution for america long term and i actually think that that's true i don't think we want to copy china because we're fundamentally different and the things that make the west good are different than what makes china good and so if we adopt their version of social credit scores centralized control i just think it will be incongruent with the people here and i think that that's that matters and so i'm holding hope out for individuals to bump into bitcoin through their own incentives locally realize that this is good for them and have that emergent process happen in america right we're seeing mayors we're seeing governors senators congressmen energy companies corporations individuals it's happening now is that force strong enough will it build enough momentum in order to actually compete with the central planning class and the more the clown world continues to screw up the more bitcoiners we get right it's just and it's a one-way street you don't come to bitcoin and then go yeah never mind i would like to go back to wage slavery please never happens yeah i think this is why [Music] the argument or the pushback against um all coins is also super important because right now all coins [ __ ] coins they are certainly winning the war and narrative against bitcoin right now because they're fun and they're exciting and they're sponsoring miami heat stadium and [ __ ] like that and uh you can get rock jpegs and you get you know go to parties and there's a lot of money going into this it's all exciting bitcoin is kind of like boring we want a super money institute yada yada that's true but i i think at the same time we have to like really stand our ground with this and you know i think parker lewis and the people in texas are doing a really great job they've identified like we can make texas the bitcoin state and they are arming themselves and they're arming politicians um and governor abbott there are uh uh ted cruz army people with why this is good why this is good for the energy sector why this is good for texas and i feel like that seed and i know there's multiple seeds in the u.s there's one here in florida and one in wyoming etc and all over the place but that seed that's been you know that's that's been planted there by parker lewis and growing it to me it's the kind of like it's the opposite of what's being done with the christian a16z crowd up in silicon valley where they're trying to push all kinds of [ __ ] world coin and what that [ __ ] bollocks web 3 token [ __ ] a couple points one yes the whole greater crypto space it has more mass appeal normies do not have the priors to understand why bitcoin's important right most people get into the space for something other than bitcoin if you're in the west you're looking at technology you're looking at blockchain saves everything and that's that's a really good funnel for bitcoin actually right not everyone but a lot of people end up finding bitcoin go deep enough to appreciate what it is and so i think it's important to recognize that the greater crypto space is going to be a top of the funnel thing for bitcoin and i don't i go back and forth on this like should we try to scold people or should we just try to like steer them in the right direction like how you know where are we on where are we at in that spectrum and i don't think forcefully telling people you know even if we're right the the student is ready when the teacher appears right they're not ready for that message and so it's almost like build content bridges um to show that or um do a better job of speaking to people outside our ecosystem more normie content and i think that that's happening and so that's one way to look at it another thing is bitcoiners are probably going to be looked at as wrong for a while and that that's the hard part here is like we've we've got used to that i i think so i think so um but not not from the greater like cultural thing yes but i think there's going to be a point where like the whole crypto thing is big in the consciousness and it looks like bitcoin doesn't matter but all of that is hype and and fast money and there's some maybe kernels of truth there but it's mostly inflated by hype and fiat money and end of the debt cycle gambling which is common during this period but in the long game bitcoin users are sticky that's the difference here there's no sticky users to these blockchain projects nope that's very true they come and go people adopt bitcoin in the west uh because they recognize what it is but most people outside of the west adopt bitcoin because they need it you can't tell someone in nigeria to go sign up for esg blockchain dow to save the world kiddies like they don't give a [ __ ] about that they care about solving a real problem in their life and bitcoin solves that lightning network solves that and so maybe bitcoin grows a little bit slower during the hype but the users don't leave that's the difference and it gets stronger every time in planting the roots and it's it's actually okay that it's like that right because we don't need coinbase users as much as we need self-sovereign bitcoiners who who care about what this thing is again going back to the previous point we can't lose the principles of bitcoin just for some shiny you know bull market nonsense we we need to stick to our principles because this thing is special it is unique it is sovereignty as a service it's property rights for everyone it's a non-governmental monetary system this is so unique and the greater crypto space does not understand how unique it is they think copy paste proof of stake and you're good that is nonsense and so my call to arms would be like we need to protect this thing i i think uh bitcoin sign guy has my favorite quote we need to provide cover fire for bitcoin until it gets through the door right we need to bring this trojan horse into the future to where it really can't be stopped arguably we're there but i think that is the key preserve the principles get it to the point where it's too big to fail and then it doesn't matter what happens in crypto land well i think crypto land needs a bit more pain as well i mean i don't think 6.2 percent inflation is enough pain for people uh i think people need a lot more pain and i think uh you know we talk about the cycle uh maybe not ending we don't want it to break but in some ways the cycle breaking is good for the bitcoin versus crypto kind of disparity in that uh the crypto people go through far more pain in a winter in a crypto winter than the bitcoin people and usually you know it was a crypto winter of 2018 that made me go bitcoin only like i had that and a lot of other people have been through that so in some reason some some ways i do want a crypto winter because i want to lead more people to bitcoin yeah i think the nft winner is going to be diabolical when they realize that you can't market sell your jpeg no someone has to pick the one you have and sell it and then it's going to be a race to the bottom and it's going to be bloody out there um no doubt but i don't think we should cheer for it i think i think a better approach is like yeah like told you so that feels good but i think it's actually a net positive i think it's more important that we think about this like um and just separate bitcoin intellectually philosophically however you want to do this bitcoin's unique the rest of the stuff is competing against each other and that's fine there's nothing inherently wrong with it there's maybe some reality here and there but i i it's not bitcoin it's not bitcoin and it's better that way so there might be an nft bear market that's horrible while bitcoin's up 200 in the year right i think that i think that's the right approach going forward is like bitcoin is what it is we know what it is now or maybe we don't it feels like we do but that's very arrogant to say because previous points we thought it was something else so i'll humbly submit we're probably wrong about bitcoin but we're closer to right well i think it's it's quite individual bitcoin is true to different people i you know i don't know what it is to you uh to me it's like a whole bunch of things but it's god this is gonna sound hyperbolic and cringe but like it's a bit of a teacher if you know what i mean absolutely i mean people call it a mess messianic object from the future just calling as a teacher is pretty pedestrian yeah well okay fair i know i know it's going to come back across as cringe and my crypto listeners are going to be like you [ __ ] maxis but like it is a bit of a teacher like all i can tell you is my life before bitcoin is very different to my life after bitcoin in terms of thinking about money life health a bit my health could be better but like it is a bit of a teacher in that way i agree and it's very very emergent right you're interacting with this thing that can't be changed and so your only choice is to submit to this thing submit to bitcoin yeah which sounds kind of creepy and weird um but i mean it in like uh it really does happen like bitcoin teaches you things just through interacting with it if you hold the asset you're incentivized to think long term right so just that alone is enough to teach you to lower your time preference isn't it weird though it is it's so extremely weird why is this white paper and software so powerful that people re-architect their lives around it that's madness well it's because money is the lubricant for trade right it's it's the the way we interact with each other like money is the base of society right and when it's corrupted you know you have to spend it quick you know you live a different type of lifestyle when you have the a hard money or sound money where you have to think long term you have to think about everything long term so yeah i mean it's weird but it kind of makes sense it does make sense and a lot of people critique safety in the bitcoin standard for extrapolating what tie preference does to culture yeah um and okay i get why you make that critique like maybe he took a couple of cheap shots at things he doesn't like personally that maybe it's not a strong connection maybe not i have opinions on that yeah of course um however if you look at just the bitcoin community yeah individuals make radical change so that's happening so maybe he took some liberties but you can't argue with the facts on the ground which is that bitcoiners are getting in shape they're thinking long term they're having babies it is a radically different culture and it's not just attracting the people that are naturally into it like i was left-leaning politically my whole life until bitcoin like embarrassingly left compared to how i feel feel about things now um and it radically changed that perspective for me um it gave me an out i was a nihilistic uh intellectual lefty making phone calls for bernie sanders campaign in 2016. like live for the moment trade all your things for experiences like comically looking back and bitcoin gave me a new lens to see the world and it actually integrated different parts of myself like different identities if i go back in my life like in college and after college i was like frat boy business guy sales douche bag make a lot of money exterior world and then i got to the end of that cycle and i was like i don't want to be this so i went the complete opposite way i went like hippie traveler nomad for five years with the wife just backpacking around the world literally complete opposite then i came back to bitcoin pendulum swing comes back swung back and maybe a little bit more in the middle i can integrate the markets capitalism external side of me and i can integrate that like you know it's not all about material have a good life experiences relationship side um integrate those two and that's what bitcoin is it's kind of like and that's why i say there's something for everyone because depending on what you see in it what you need you know it presents itself differently and you know that's my personal story you extrapolated on everyone and so again sound money or lower time preference it has dramatic impacts on people and then you multiply that by this fraternity of people who have similar values in my mind i've always felt like slightly as an outcast yeah i can chameleon into little that's why you found bitcoin correct that's why i found it when i did it you did yeah right in the future people will find bitcoin they don't have to be outsiders but earlier that's that's a strength and also i'm very highly disagreeable also common with bitcoiners but i guess the point i'm driving to is then you have this community that sharpens your thinking that pushes you to go farther people i respect so if i write something i want it to be good right and there's like this social pressure to be the best version of yourself because you have a community and humans are tribal i don't think we should deny that it's in our evolutionary dna and we see it play out people say it's a bad thing i don't think it's necessarily bad i think it's just how we are and it can be bad it can manifest itself poorly but the reality is tribes hold you accountable they build you up they make you feel good they tell you when you're screwing up they lift you up when you need it that's just super super human and so no wonder why you see people on twitter being like i found my family or and i definitely feel that well that's also that's also true it's really interesting in that uh you suddenly like you can go anywhere in the world and you know because i'm on twitter like i'm in i don't know i mean atlanta any bitcoin is here yeah like 10 people have come down and you don't know each other but you know you're gonna get on and you might not agree on everything but you're generally gonna get on you're gonna have a great conversation you're gonna go and have some food have a beer and hang out and it's just gonna work i don't i don't know maybe there are other communities like that i just don't know of any that exists like that it's not like i could i could go to atlanta and say hey liverpool games on any liverpool fans oh [ __ ] down what's the scoring liverpool game um big game right now i've double book tests for liverpool v everton the merseyside derby by the way but like you could turn up and they could be a bunch of knobs and you wouldn't get on with them but i've just found like when you travel around there's a lot of people that you can really get on with with us it's kind of weird yeah speaking of something important which is that this is fundamental values overlap football is superficial you like a team whatever you might love it you might consider it not superficial it's not to me man but compared to i just bought a football team congratulations thank you uh compared to base values how do we relate to government how do we relate to our family how to relate to our food the base based stuff bitcoiners overlap on it doesn't matter if you eat meat or you're vegan or you're left or right or whatever like yeah there's some maybe some tension around there but really to your point you can throw a text up and say any bitcoiners come for a drink and you're going to instantly get on with everyone and what i think a lot of people miss here is that i host meetups by the way in minneapolis we have a really great group shout out bitcoiners in minneapolis but what what's funny is that we don't talk about bitcoin that much you get together and yeah okay we see the world through that lens but really you're you're friends with shared values and like you're talking about bitcoin adjacent things more often than people think um interesting what's the school it's tomorrow i thought it's tonight oh who are we clashing with tomorrow um the mayor for [ __ ] sake man that's just [ __ ] um okay a couple other things i want to talk to you about just before we finish talk to me about the real super cycle yes okay so this is kind of just a cheeky point but um people have said okay the super cycle theory i think danielle popularized it which is essentially that we're not gonna have a bear market we're just gonna keep grinding up because you know it's time and i think there's some credence to that and the way i would frame this theory is essentially um bitcoin hasn't really changed that much in the last 10 years but the context around bitcoin now is way different um it's sort of taken its place as a macro asset we've upgraded the level of buyers it's been de-risk all these things could lead to a future where the world's burning down and bitcoin's rising i think that there's something to that what i'm saying with the real super cycle again cheeky is essentially that all these cycles seem to be overlapping at once and you know okay we have the fourth turning so demographics lead to a crisis we have the long-term debt cycle so we have to redo the financial system we have the sovereign individual we're transitioning from the industrial age to the information age we have the age of aquarius which i don't know much about but it's essentially a 2000 year cycle that apparently we just transitioned to we hit peak globalization about a decade ago um that's now reversing right foreign trade as a percentage of gdp has already peaked um we essentially stretched our economic expansion through fiat money to its limits and now populism's in control what else individualism versus collectivism i think we're approaching the peak of collectivism and we'll start to swing back maybe in a decade or two and so essentially you lay all these up together and they're all cresting at the same time that's pretty gnarly and i couldn't pretend to know what that means or whatever but it leads me to believe that it's going to be a big one it's going to be more volatile than usual and if all the cycles overlap that gives me a little more confidence also um that something's coming ah all right come on bitcoin okay and then like last final thing let's let's let's finish on something cheery okay we go through the fourth turning whatever what have we got to look forward to in the first turning we'll we'll be alive during this right definitely yeah what do we got to look at so for timing um each turning is about 20 to 22 years this one started in 2008 so roughly by 2030 you'd expect us to be wrapping up interesting because when i last spoke to lynn ordon we talked about inflation and she said it's going to be an issue for about a decade she thinks definitely yeah um and that's also bitcoin's 21st birthday on 2030. spooky um so what do we have to look at also that's also the year bedford fc which i the team i bought gets into the premier league wow nobody's ever heard of that it's nine promotions that's [ __ ] spooky isn't it that's pretty spooky oh don't mock me this is [ __ ] this important i know it's a big deal for you dude all right come on um okay what do we have to look forward to so the 50s right this is the period of the last first journey we just got done fighting this is white picket fences a period of rising economic progress of the middle class for about two decades leading up to the about 1970 that was peak uh middle class um and so yeah there's probably going to be a situation where we reset the game board institutions are strong hopefully they don't look like china hopefully look like something bitcoin from the west hopefully hopefully from bitcoin um and if that's true then we should see some light at the end of the tunnel um but i think that the idea of a bitcoin renaissance which i think brady probably popularized essentially sound money world we're going to have a lot of positive things come from that i believe that that's true if bitcoin does what we think it's going to do but i think it's going to take a lot longer than we think right and i think it's really hard for me to even think through this next decade and think about the cheery stuff because like think about okay we're eight years away from the end of the fourth turning that would put us at around like the late 30s so we had a recession in 37 we went to world war ii we came up with the imf the world bank the bretton woods system um empires rise and fall and totally massive changes in that last five ten years and so i i predict similar level of volatility or more now and so i'm scared of that period but if we look forward we're going to figure it out humans are not going to end our reign here and if we do it right and we're right about bitcoin bitcoin will be the base layer of a new bright future and i'm optimistic about that that's why i'm here that's why i don't care about nfts even though they're probably going to be massive because humans like things like that i care about the long-term mission and i view my life successfully if i do whatever i can to help do this thing for for our species and what does it look like i mean i think going back to harry's quote again right you're shifting the power back to the producers and away from the political class and it's going to be an emergent thing i foresee centralized centralized governments being less relevant kind of the sovereign individual thesis we're already seeing that game three play out bitcoiners are highly mobile capital with ideological principles and we're ready to come build wherever you'll have us and enterprising young countries like bouquet like el salvador they're going to observe this and they're going to attract the talent we're going to come there and we're going to make it succeed it's like now that el salvador attaches itself to the bitcoiners we have this incentive even if it's sort of like a basin instinct but we can't let el salvador fail now because it makes us look bad right so it's emergent ascent of incentive alignment energy everywhere is going to be attached to bitcoin those countries are gonna support it other countries are gonna fight it right and that just pushes the miners out of the uh hostile environments and puts them into a more long-term aligned relationship that's the game theory that's the game theory i'm sure we're going to look back on china's banning of not only bitcoin but bitcoin miners as one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes of the last century i totally agree just like when they went all in on silver and just like when they got rid of all their big ships because the merchant class was getting too powerful and they gave the seas to europe right massive blunders and that's that's the china way it's like we're doing it our way we're not doing it your way and that's our opportunity right they push it out we should lean into this hard we should throw away the idea of cbdc's and we should lean into bitcoin it's extremely american it's good for american people it's good for the west western ideology it's good for the long term of our species we need markets we need competition and this is what in my mind is our best chance of saving markets and if we don't have markets it's over right it's not going to end immediately but it's a slow decline to being over going back to china produces no innovation they can't do it it gives me hope for my children man excuse me have my children yeah are we just the soldiers going through the transition and we'll hand it off to our kids once it's nice i think that's what might be happening dude um trying to orange people then my daughter's orange build as [ __ ] that's amazing she's like she's like how do i get more bitcoin dead can i have some bitcoin debt when do i get my bitcoin dead can i own bitcoin dead uh yeah okay wicked listen brandon i knew this was gonna rock man have i missed anything you want to talk about um i don't think so i think we kind of meandered through it all i feel like we can do this every year like an update where are we we're in a worse place we're in a better place but uh definitely dude i love your work uh it's great to see you we should have some dinner now but uh i appreciate you flying in for this uh you definitely work better in person and just tell people where to find your posts all about this because i think we'll put in the show notes but people should follow you and go read it yeah absolutely first thanks for having me really appreciate it you got a quite a team here it's been good getting to know you guys appreciate it again yes agree the in-person stuff is totally different feel a lot more personal which is cool where can you find me twitter is the best be quittum b-q-u-i-t-t-e-m all my writing is on my personal website which is just my name brandonquitum.com we referenced an essay i published a year ago bitcoin and the rhythms of history you can find on my twitter on my website i also wrote a lot about mycelium of money comparing bitcoin to a living organism that one's quite mind-blowing itself um and i work for swan and so if you are looking for an easy safe way to buy bitcoin swannbitcoin.com um corey will be proud of you right now yeah do a little self-shill there that's okay man we'll get away with yeah but i mean it you know i think normal people should be just dollar cost averaging on bitcoin and we make that as easy as possible and we also have a whale business so if you wanna you know one-on-one support talk to stefan lavera about your cold storage get some handholding we do that as well it's a fast part of our business what most people don't know is the boomers are starving for bitcoin they're not all ready but they're trickling in and so we're capturing that market so send your parents to swan we love your parents um that's enough for swan that's enough for me appreciate it peter all right ma'am listen let's go eat let's do it cheers you

Channel: What Bitcoin Did

Views: 35,611

Keywords: Bitcoin

Id: n2qlR3McSfI

Length: 103min 8sec (6188 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021