Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Generation X and the Millennials both tried to do everything right according to what the boomers told them was the path forward.
[00:00:08] Save money, study hard, get a job. At every stage, we got rug pulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.
[00:00:18] Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen X and the Millennials and said quite rationally, F that the best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin. Audible.
[00:00:49] What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin. Audible I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, and I did not intend it to be, but this is a super depressing episode and I actually think I'll caveat it a little bit because I don't think this is hopeless. And I try to emphasize this a little bit in the commentary after, but it is an assessment of kind of generationally where we are and what has happened. And I love this just in the context of the marshmallow experiments. Everybody knows a Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. If you've listened this show for more than two episodes, I probably mention it a lot, but it's such a beautiful demonstration of the time preference problem and the outcome. How much it affects society, how much it affects mentality, how much it affects success and prosperity for everyone and everyone around those people to have a low time preference.
[00:01:52] But it depends on the reality of getting the two marshmallows. If you wait. And I love the framing of this because that's what this piece talks about.
[00:02:04] The kind of clash between the boomers and the zoomers. Like, oh, you people are, you know, lazy and you spend too much money and you get your doordash, you need to save up for the future. Then Zoomers are like, and I'm not going to leave the article too much, but Zoomers are like, that's a joke. Who the hell save for what I'm if I take five years to save, I'm not going to be able to afford anything anyway, it's all going to get 10 times more expensive, etc. Etc.
[00:02:28] And the looking at what's right in both of those perspectives, but then positioning and analogizing it through the idea of the marshmallow experiment. What happens if you put a bunch of rational actors, maybe even a bunch of young children who do have low time preference, who would wait for the second marshmallow and the experimenter lies and they don't get the marshmallow at the end?
[00:02:55] What do you create?
[00:02:57] What then happens to the culture?
[00:03:00] Best way to get your second marshmallow is to get yourself a bitbox. Buy some bitcoin and hold your own keys. Do it safely, do it privately, and do it in a way that's easy and unintimidating. Get yourself a Bitbox 02 and their new one, the Nova. You can plug it right into your phone, your your iPhone, your Android, or your desktop computer. Your laptop. Whatever it is, it just works. It's a sleek, wonderful little device and I got a discount code and an affiliate link. It's also a great way to support the show, so check them out. That is what this article is about.
[00:03:33] And with that I will delay no further and we will jump right into today's read, followed by a guy's take and it's titled when the Experimenter Fails the Marshmallow Test by John Carter How a Generation's Time Preference Was Sabotaged the venture capitalist and anti charismatic preacher Kevin o' Leary recently succeeded in reigniting the perennial vitriol of generational hate discourse with his observation that it really bothers him when he sees zoomers who make only $70,000 a year spending $28 on lunch when they could be brown bagging it and putting the savings into an index fund.
[00:04:19] I'm going to have a little rant here, so I'll start by emphasizing not all boomers. Look, my mother is a boomer and I love her dearly, in large part because she represents the opposite of so many boomer stereotypes. And many of you reading this are boomers. I know this because you're in the comments writing some of the best comments you can ask anyone. The very best comments. Everyone says it. It's true. I know full well that much of what follows doesn't apply to you because you are the good ones, the exceptional ones, the few, the proud. So please do not take any of this personally. With that said, the shouting match broke down along the expected lines. Boomers, including spiritual boomers, loudly agreed with Oleary's remarks. If you only spend $2 a day on lunch, they ins the resulting $26 a day that you save adds up to $94.90 a year. After five years, you've got the down payment for a $250,000 house. Checkmate. You financially illiterate layabouts, zoomers, millennials, and Gen x replied that $250,000 will get you a leaky shack in rural Arkansas with black mold in the unfinished basement that by the time you save up the money for the down payment, the shack will be going for $500,000 that recent immigrants receive government assistance to get onto the property ladder along with preferential employment, and so do not have to spend years of their lives saving up at all disaffected youth. And these days, that is just the youth generally heaped scorn on the idea that it's even possible to save in this economy, or that there's anything worth saving. If you live on instant noodles and margarine sandwiches for 20 years, you too my son can one day afford a van down by the river.
[00:05:55] I can see both sides of this. I tend to live frugally myself, not so much because I consider it virtuous, but out of simple necessity. Throughout my 20s and 30s I was a career student living paycheck to paycheck, as a result of which I became very accustomed to cooking my meals and buying only what's necessary. I never once used Doordash or Uber Eats. I buy my clothing at thrift stores, only purchase a new laptop once every decade or so, and have somehow managed to avoid racking up much in the way of debt. And by somehow I mean that I've never owned a house or a car, partly because I change continents too regularly to make such big ticket purchases, practical or necessary, but mostly because I couldn't afford them. Even finishing my doctorate did not really bring anything you could call prosperity in its wake. My first position was for the princely sum of just over US$30,000 a year. By the time I reached the median national income in my late 30s, I'd gotten so accustomed to frugal living that money started piling up in my account just because I had no idea what to do with it and little inclination to spend it because I was honestly just happy to not have to worry about budgeting to make rent. That turned out to be very helpful when DEI came for my career track. I lived on those savings for a couple of years after a rainy day fund, which has long since been spent down. Of course, these days my sole source of income is derived from the words that I share with you here, which I provide for all free of charge.
[00:07:18] Shakes cup so yes, it is obviously possible to save some money up by living under one's means, assuming that one is actually making money, that is, which zoomers mostly aren't. Zoomers fly into a rage when they are told to tighten their belts so that they can save for the future. Because zoomers do not think that they have a future, they are not wrong to think this way. Planning for the future relies on the ability to defer gratification, to prioritize the greater potential reward over the smaller present reward.
[00:07:49] To a very large degree, this is the basis of civilization which, as the old saying goes, thrives when old men plant trees whose shade they will never enjoy.
[00:08:02] Old men do not plant metaphorical trees anymore. They cut them down for quick cash to pay for casino cruises.
[00:08:12] The baby boom generation took out tens of trillions of dollars in debt in their descendants names to pay for social welfare program programs that only baby boomers will enjoy.
[00:08:25] Boomers will often point out that the younger generations today are lazy spendthrifts, and there is actually a lot of truth to that. Zoomers think nothing of calling in sick to work for the third time in one week so they can bedrot in front of Netflix with their Pad Thai takeout and mango cherry vape juice. This moral failing boomers despair is why their grandchildren are destined for downward mobility and why they don't dare hand over the reins of society to them There was a famous Stanford experiment called the Marshmallow Test, which measured time preference in young children.
[00:08:57] A child would be left in a room with a single marshmallow on the table. They were of course free to eat the marshmallow, the experimenter would tell them, but if they didn't, then later on they would get a second marshmallow. Children with high time preference, meaning that they strongly prefer the immediate reward to the hypothetical future reward, would cram the marshmallow into their candy holes without a second thought. Children with low time preference, meaning that they would value the future at a similar or even higher level to the present, would patiently wait and be rewarded with a second marshmallow. These children were then followed, and it was demonstrated that the children with low time preference demonstrated better life outcomes. They maintained higher grades were less likely to fall into debt. We're less likely to develop drug addictions. We're less likely to get pregnant before marriage, we're less likely to get fat, and so on. All of which makes sense. The capacity to endure present pain by studying, dieting, working out what have you in order to obtain a better future outcome is obviously going to be linked to better outcomes.
[00:10:05] How would a smart kid react if the experimenter failed the marshmallow test?
[00:10:12] For instance, say the experimenter simply lied. There was no second marshmallow. The child waited for nothing. Or even worse, the first marshmallow was snatched away and replaced with two marshmallows, each one half the size of the original or a third of the size.
[00:10:31] Here are your two marshmallows, sucker. Joke's on you.
[00:10:36] What would the Results be if, after this experience, the children were tested a second time. I don't know if such an experiment has ever been conducted, but the outcome is not hard to guess.
[00:10:46] Every single one of the children, whether they'd passed the marshmallow test the first time or not, would scarf down the marshmallow the moment it was in front of them.
[00:10:56] The capacity for low time preference may be largely innate, but whether it expresses or not is entirely a function of social trust.
[00:11:05] In order to defer gratification for a greater future reward, one must believe that there is a reasonably high chance of that reward manifesting. The less likely the future reward becomes, the more steeply a rational actor will discount the future.
[00:11:23] I don't want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard and they didn't enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam war, well, about 3% of them. They spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles. They suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s. They were punished by double digit interest rates in the early 80s. And they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the burring money printer.
[00:11:59] But despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted, things would generally get better. Technology would advance, working conditions would get safer. The special effects in movies would become more convincing. Houses would get larger, cars would get nicer, air conditioning would get quieter. The environment would get cleaner. Society would become more just. The world would become freer and safer for democracy, and so on and so forth. Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known, free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place for the boomer. Deferred gratification always had a payoff.
[00:12:51] For the Zoomer and the Millennial and Generation X, this has simply not been the case.
[00:12:57] After 9 11, a police state, panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real estate got zerped to the moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures and their unborn children to the wolves. Covid stole two years from young people's lives so that old people could feel safe from the kuf.
[00:13:34] Now AI squared artificial intelligence plus actual Indians means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry until robots take that too.
[00:13:45] If you're a young person, the only thing you've ever known is decline.
[00:13:50] You've seen society get digested by the attention economy, human interactions digitized into shares, views and likes. You've seen the war of discourse poison relations between the sexes to a degree never known before in history. You've seen dating apps replace romance with swipes and monogamy with tender gummy. You've seen third spaces disappear. You've seen culture stagnate. You've seen music, movies, television shows, video games and books be converted into ham fisted, poorly written, badly composed, terribly edited agent Slop. You've seen the Internet get inshittified by adware, malware, spyware, engagement bait, and the subscription model sass scam economy. You've seen food get more expensive even as the quality of the ingredients declines and the portion sizes decrease.
[00:14:39] You've seen a third of your income get stolen by inflation in a few years time. You've seen the basic elements of a human life a house, a spouse and children recede before you like a mirage in the desert.
[00:14:54] I'd like to believe that this is all temporary, that things can be turned around. But if you tell me this hope is nothing more than cope, it is very difficult for me to argue otherwise.
[00:15:05] Maybe things will finally improve and maybe they won't. The point is that for the young who have only ever known civilizational rot, it is entirely rational for them to lay down and let it rot.
[00:15:20] Generation X and the Millennials both tried to do everything right according to what the boomers told them was the path forward.
[00:15:28] Save money, study hard, get a job.
[00:15:32] At every stage we got rug pulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that. Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen X and the Millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that.
[00:15:43] This is why Zoomers don't care about jobs or careers or education or savings. They know there's no such thing as institutional loyalty, that they'll be cut loose the moment their job can be automated or outsourced to cheap Indian labor. And so why would they be loyal to their employers? Why would they do any more than the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired, especially under the identitarian spoils system of DEI that makes a point of rewarding someone else for your hard work. Zoomers have no faith that the future will be better and every reason to believe that it will be much worse. And so they have every reason to prize the small present pleasure over some future prize that experience has taught them lives only in their broken dreams.
[00:16:29] What's the point in saving for a house if you'll never even be able to afford a hovel in an abandoned toxic waste dump small town where the major local industries revolve around the fentanyl trade? You might as well just splurge on that $28 lunch, which you can enjoy now and which you won't be able to enjoy in a few years when you're making the same amount of money. But that lunch costs $48.
[00:16:50] It's prepared with worse ingredients, is provided in smaller portions, and is served in grottier surroundings by less attractive waitresses who now expect a 40% tip.
[00:17:01] To be clear, I'm not saying this is a good thing. This generational demoralization is a great tragedy. Zoomers have been spiritually sabotaged and many of them will never recover. Once social trust is broken it is incredibly hard to rebuild.
[00:17:18] This is not entirely the boomers fault. They've been the primary beneficiaries of the vampire economy and they are by far its strongest defenders. But but they weren't the ones who set the system up. That would be the greatest generation who were the ones that built out the welfare state, passed the Civil Rights act, dismantled long standing protections against third world immigration and first started letting the money printer rip. Boomers have profited from a kind of generational cantillon effect. They were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together.
[00:17:57] Blame is beside the point. On its own it isn't going to solve anything. The only way to fix this is for things to start improving for young people again. And not in the sense of getting cheaper smartphones or whatever. We are talking about very basic mammalian necessities. Food, shelter, mating. It doesn't matter if technological trinkets are slightly more affordable than they were last year when the foundational elements of Maslow's hierarchy are either chewing giant holes through shrinking budgets but or simply priced out of any practical reach sneers about $28 lunches come off as practically tone deaf when groceries have exploded in price to such a degree that it's barely cheaper to eat in than it is to eat out. Not to mention that restaurants everywhere are struggling because people don't have the money to eat out. I don't know how to solve this unless there's a world historical economic boom thanks to AI, which there's no sign of yet. And furthermore, it would need to be one whose benefits are not concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs. And there's probably no way to solve it without pain. The only question is how that pain will be distributed. Experience suggests that boomers are unlikely to volunteer to take the hit. If we were sane, we'd dismantle the Social Security system immediately and start putting in place systems to transfer opportunity, wealth and power to native born childbearing demographics immediately. This is improbable. The most likely outcome is that over the next decade or two, the boomers will spend down the last of the West's national wealth on heroic, heroic end of life healthcare and leave behind a broken mess of insolvency, shattered institutions, lost cultural knowledge, and tribal warfare. None of which will be a problem for the boomers. Apres moi, le deluge. It will be up to everyone else to piece together something resembling a functioning society amidst the ashes and ruins.
[00:19:46] By that point, millennials will be in their 50s and 60s. Most of their lives will be behind them. Zoomers will be hitting middle age. Perhaps you can see why everyone under 50 is so dejected and prefers treating themselves with the small pleasures they can still afford, rather than dwelling upon the long decline that awaits.
[00:20:03] Or instead of berating the youth for their moral failings while society crumbles, you might try throwing them that marshmallow and seeing what happens.
[00:20:14] The only way out is sound money, and the only way to keep that safe is to hold your own keys. If you want an easy and elegant way to do that, get yourself a Bitbox O2 hardware wallet. They've also just recently released the Nova, which is their newest model and you can plug it directly into an iPhone or an Android. And I gotta say, the experience of having a hardware wallet that's very easy and quick to use on an iPhone wallet so that you never have to put keys on a mobile device and you can still get that convenience of using it is just chef's kiss. Check it out. I have an affiliate link and a little discount code right down in the show notes.
[00:20:52] Oof. This one hurts.
[00:20:55] But it is so freaking true.
[00:20:59] It's amazing.
[00:21:01] It's amazing what Debt does, like societal debt, is the ultimate destroyer.
[00:21:11] And it is shockingly wild that we've literally been convinced the entire culture, the political system, has propagandized us to believe the opposite, that savings is taking away spending from the economy, that we have to literally induce people to go out and waste money for the benefit of the economy.
[00:21:38] Think of, just add that on top of the Zoomer situation and the Gen X and Millennials is that they've been told that to not spend is bad for everyone. They've been literally demonized for the one act that would get us out of this mess.
[00:21:56] There's something deeply, deeply sinister about how the rotting of society fuels the very mentality that rots society and that the people benefiting from it embrace and push this cancerous ideology so that they can squeeze as much benefit out of it as possible before they die and leave the later generations with a giant pile of rotten garbage.
[00:22:31] It's funny, it takes me back to Alan and Sasha's recent piece number Go down and talking about, which I'll link to in the show notes, because I. If you haven't listened to it and or read it, you absolutely need to. And I think it's such an important framing because there are these constant arguments that because we get AI or because we get this other thing and this idea, this Keynesian idea of we need to issue more debt and put it into good investments so that we can grow our way out of this hole, that we need to increase production and investment in such a way that we actually make more stuff and get more technological advancement than it costs in the debt we had to do in order to actually get that, to actually build out that productivity. Because what's funny is that there's an extremely simple and obvious way to determine whether or not we got our money's worth, whether or not the issuance of that debt actually did increase the living standard or increase and create more productivity than it stole from the future generations, is that prices go down, is that food got cheaper and higher quality, is that housing got cheaper and higher quality, that everything became more affordable.
[00:23:56] Think about it. This is extremely, extremely simple. Is that if you have a tree and it produces a hundred apples and you've got a hundred dollars in the economy, then, you know, you've got a rough $1 per apple price. That's going to be the equilibrium price. All else held equal. Well, the idea is that, well, you know, it's going to cost a lot to get a loan because that money would go to eating apples and somebody's gonna have to literally not eat apples. They're gonna have to, they're kind of starved themselves in order to get the investment to go, you know, get a new plot of land, start growing an apple tree and take the time and the care and the attention it it takes to get another tree to produce another 100 apples.
[00:24:38] So the government and the Keynesians are all like, well, we should invent $100 out of thin air and loan it so that we can grow a new apple tree. So let's say we do that.
[00:24:51] Well, at the end of it, if the apple tree produces another 100, if the new apple tree produces 100 apples, well then we've got $200 in the economy and our production is 200 apples. So we're going to have the exact same price except we now have interest on $100 worth of debt. So we're actually at a net negative. But imagine because somebody was offered $100 at a bad price and, and an investment which may not have actually been a good investment based on the savers who would have actually made the decision and determined what interest rate was viable. We just defrauded the market. We just arbitrarily decided that the interest rate was going to be whatever because we can just print money. And so the person that we hired to do this did a genuinely half assed job, didn't really care about the outcome because they just basically got a bunch of free money or worse, they were a big corporation. All they did was just buy the tree that actually was there and now they sell the apples for a dollar and 25 cent just to make back the interest. And what actually happened is that we just exchanged ownership from the people who grew the original apples and earned the original apples, or grew the original apple tree and earned the original apples into just some corporate coffer who have now just turned the entire economy into a written seeking system. That's probably what would actually happen because that's exactly what happens in our economy. And that's what happens when you, when you make the cost of debt for giant corporations practically nothing, while the cost of debt for everybody else is still normal. It's not, it's. They're not going to go do hard things that make the economy better. They're literally just going to buy shit up at low cost and then sell it or rent it back at high cost super easy. They literally get, they're literally getting free rent on all of our stuff. So what do you do? You take possession of it and then rent it back out at A higher price. So that's probably what would actually happen. But let's just say they did make the investment and they, because they simply weren't getting the price was not real, the interest rate was not real, and because they had no concern to actually create productivity, they have a really kind of piss poor tree that only produces about 50 apples. Well now you've got $200, 150 apples and interest payment. So apples are going to be what, a buck 75? The only condition in which apples get cheaper is if we put 10 times as much care into the apple tree. And our second tree produces 150 apples. And so we have $2 in the economy and 250 actual apples being produced. And now the price has gone lower, which means our proof, in the absence of being able to count all of the apples and all of the trees, it doesn't really matter. We don't need to count any of it because we would know exactly what would occur if it's actually there. Even attempting to count it is just going to be not only a herculean task, but it's going to just confuse the signal when the real legitimate can't be cheated signal is whether the price of apples went up or down, period.
[00:27:44] If it went down, it was worth it. If it goes up, it was a net destruction of resources and wealth and prosperity for everyone involved.
[00:27:55] So are prices of the goods and services of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs going up or going down.
[00:28:04] That is how we know every single thing that they have done is just destroying society is just eating up value and resources that are scarce and gutting this economy of everything of meaning and value.
[00:28:20] And he's right. I don't know how to fix it. How do you fix it?
[00:28:24] Like the only thing is to, is you have to have something that will produce a potentially better future, that will, that will promise a better future for them.
[00:28:35] Sound money is the only way out. It's created by fiat money. The only way. You will never solve it practically. You will never solve it on a technicality of oh, we're going to change this policy or this regulation or this political culture. We're going to convince enough people to believe this. No, you will never do it. You have to have something that restricts the mechanism, that actually enables the behavior systematically.
[00:28:59] That is fiat money. That is the money printer. Gold isn't going to do it because gold got us here. Gold is the thing that failed and proved that it could not do the job. In a digital economy. You have to have something that you can settle halfway around the world instantly with the assurances that gold provides. And that is verifiable cheaply.
[00:29:21] That is bitcoin. That is why this show exists. That is why I spend all of my time on it. Because I still just don't. There is no other way out. I don't know how there could be another way out. You have to fix the money or all of it is just going to keep getting worse. But here's the thing, is that the zoomers coming in to bitcoin are the ones who create crypto because their time preference is so bad that they just YOLO into everything.
[00:29:49] It's like I don't even care. It doesn't even matter.
[00:29:52] There's still no long term hope. They just come in thinking, well, best I can do is either scam a bunch of people or be one. Be one of the people who's early in on a scam, go all in and be the person that actually pulled out and got rich in, you know, 10 days, that I got rich quick off of it. And I don't care, I don't care about the morals, I don't care about what it means for society. I don't give a shit about how somebody else is paying for this. I'm either going to get rich or I'm going to. I'm just dead. I'm just this it. I don't, I don't have any other future. There's no long term position here. The society is literally falling apart around me. The best I can do is try to get. Is, is, is YOLO all in, go all in on one play in order to try to get into the upper echelons of society so I can build a fence around myself and let society die while I hack out some semblance of a life in my little corner of the world.
[00:30:47] That's the mentality. And so all of crypto is flooded with scams. I mean just every bit of it is just scams because it's people who never still never even understood the whole reason for any of this. All they saw was the volatility. All they saw was the skyrocketing price and the plumbing. That's why they've lost interest. A ton of people in crypto have lost interest in bitcoin and it's largely just it's becoming more stable based on the long term holders and the institutional, the slow moving institutions and everybody who starts starting to build a base and new infrastructure around it is because crypto people literally say you can't make money in bitcoin anymore because it's not volatile enough. It's not. It's too slow. If it doesn't go a hundred percent in a week, they don't want anything to do with. It's a perfect representation of, like, marshmallow now. And I don't even care. Don't even. Don't even start your sentence about what I'm gonna get later because you're full of shit. And as John Carter says in this piece, when societal trust breaks down, you don't just get that back.
[00:31:56] You don't just turn it back on.
[00:31:59] Like, societal trust is specifically something that builds up or builds up or is lost over decades.
[00:32:08] And when they've been abandoned, when they've been lied to for not just 20 to 30 years, their whole lives, this is how old they are. They don't know of a different world.
[00:32:24] They probably won't even get it back. They will not be able to build it up in 20 to 30 more years of actually being told the truth and given a chance and allowing their savings to be worth something in the future, they may be broken for good. I hope that's not the case. But his history isn't exactly, you know, all sunshine and rainbows about rebuilding societal trust and rebuilding a society and a civilization that indebts itself into oblivion.
[00:32:58] Quite the contrary. Sometimes it's a thousand years, Sometimes it never comes back. Sometimes that's just it. That's their story.
[00:33:05] I want to believe that we're better off. That not that we're better off, but that we will be better off.
[00:33:14] That bitcoin adoption can save us. But I'm not also not trying to delude myself that it has to happen in the United States to really find a prosperous and growing society again. I might not have to leave the country.
[00:33:28] I don't know where it is, unfortunately. It all looks like shit. Looks like it's all dying at the same time. It's weird. Like, globalization has spread the can. It's like bone cancer or blood cancer, for crying out loud. It's just everywhere.
[00:33:42] And I don't mean this to be, like, super depressing or whatever either. Like, I'm not trying to doom and gloom all of it here. It's just that, you know, like, bitcoin is a way out. Bitcoin is hope for the future.
[00:33:58] But this is a natural ebb and flow of society. And there's no.
[00:34:05] You can't escape a cultural failure.
[00:34:08] You know, it doesn't matter.
[00:34:11] Like, culture comes first. Culture does come first. It, it is a circular thing in the sense that like sound money will affect culture and culture will affect the money and will affect the technology and the direction and all of this St.
[00:34:25] But if you don't have a culture of liberty, it doesn't matter how good your quote unquote republic is or your system of governance is, the society will die if it doesn't socially respect property rights. And I've talked to a number of people who live all over the world and there's so many things about like, oh, there's terrible laws here and there's no respect for property rights and then there's good laws here. And so this is the better society. But what's funny is that that actually doesn't turn out that way in practice is there are some countries that have on paper horrible laws, but they never get enforced because nobody really cares.
[00:35:04] And that's one of the things that's really interesting to me. And then there are countries with what apparently look apparently like great laws, but so many side and edge cases get enforced and there's so much cultural demonization and just that slow pressure cooker of things that move against you. And you know, this suing culture, like there's just so many other little things around it because the culture itself, the morality is so degraded that it doesn't even matter that you have good laws. You're constantly fighting up river the whole time. And that's exactly the thing. You know, if you're in a small town, it doesn't matter. So many times it doesn't matter what your national government says. The, the laws are, especially if trust is lost and there's like a huge disconnect or disrespect to the idea of authority is that small town will just not enforce stuff. That small town will have its own rules and its own ideas of, you know, how things should be run and the police will just not do it. But what happens is as things get more and more corrupt, things will start running through bribes. It will be the corruption itself that becomes the law. So it's not about whether or not having having bad law on paper means that someone who decides to abuse that can basically destroy someone's life that they want, anybody, anything that they want. You know, when everybody is doing committing a felony, right. One, and that's. The average American commits three felonies a day. They have no idea. When the law is that broad and there are that many innocuous things that are functionally illegal, nothing gets enforced unless there's a reason for power or authority to enforce it. Which means that it gets enforced on the people who disagree. It gets enforced on the people who embarrass them. It gets enforced on the people who decide that the way this politician makes money should be revealed and the corruption should be uncovered and then the full hammer of the law comes down and it comes in the most vicious and arbitrary way possible. And they'll have unlimited ammo to do whatever they want to anyone. And this is why culture matters so much. And why I am afraid, I still am afraid of the future of the United States is because the culture is crap.
[00:37:37] There is so the. I'm shocked by how much, you know, there is this sense that like things are pushing back or there is this, there's this undercurrent of sanity starting to bubble up, but it is not the one running the show, not by any means. There is insanely poisonous and rotten cultural ideologies that have pervaded through the entire American system top to bottom, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Like they've, they've lost all restraint about their moral obligation to basically kill, maim, genetically modify or like, I mean literal, like professors literally talking about the moral obligation to spread ticks who make people allergic to meat.
[00:38:29] Like that is bioterrorism through and through. The moral obligation because of the, because of the risk of climate change. Because remember, cows are bad for the environment.
[00:38:41] Like the, the 10 levels of insanity inside insanity and propaganda inside total fucking mind numbing self centered rule like world dominating arrogance, like that's Nazi level psychology. And this is, these are professors, These are professors at esteemed universities. And they're not even. They didn't get fired over this. And understand when someone tells you that this is what they think and that this is what they feel morally obligated to do, you better believe they'd be willing to do it or more likely that they probably are already doing it. The number of people who stick their heads in the sand and will listen to somebody say this is a solution to a problem that I believe is existential. And I believe we are morally obligated to engage in this. To say that because they didn't put it on a billboard or pass out papers detailing exactly what they're doing, that they might not in secret, with the hundreds of billions of dollars that are completely unaccounted for, going to ngo' and private scientific institutes and bio labs, they would never engage in that. Actually, they're just kind of talking about it in a theoretical sense. Wake up. They're not going to tell you about it. They are telling you about it. Actually they're admitting it without admitting it. And importantly, they're trying to read the room. And probably what they're realizing is that a shocking number of people actually agree with them. And everybody who disagrees doesn't believe they'd do it. And that says to me, why wouldn't they do it? They know they can get away with it because they just said it out loud and nobody believes them. And this is happening on so many different issues.
[00:40:37] This is happening across the board. This has pervaded every layer of society and every industry. And like politics is controlling everything.
[00:40:49] It is all downstream from there and it is rotting the culture to the point that the New York mayor, New York City mayor just said that they were going to hand over, they're just going to confiscate a bunch of housing and then hand it over to like a housing authority, a bunch of NGOs, which is even more insane. They're not even taking it as the government, they're just stealing it and then handing it over to institutions that you just, you can't then like the next mayor can't just like fix this.
[00:41:19] Talking about state run grocery stores. And this is, again, this is becoming normalized and this is not being stopped. It's not being pushed back against. This is being applauded. My one big hope with these is that the outcomes are becoming quicker.
[00:41:35] The, the results are being demonstrated far faster.
[00:41:39] But it was funny, is that it doesn't seem to be fixing it. It just causes everybody who could fix it or who does care to leave.
[00:41:50] And if that happens at a national level, it will just kill the country. It won't get everybody to stand up. That's, that's my fear. My hope is that it gets people to stand up and to realize that they need to fight and they actually can undo this and prove that these are horrible, insane ideas. But my fear, and unfortunately the thing that history shows more than happens more often than not, is that everybody who actually could do something about it and actually cares and understands just gets up and leaves. And you know, I think the same thing, like how much, how much would I put into it? I got a wife and kids, I have a family, and I don't even have the time to devote to anything else.
[00:42:36] I, I would probably just leave.
[00:42:38] I don't know where to go, but I would just get out.
[00:42:43] I hope that's not true. I hope if, if that started happening, I would, I would find more time and I would figure out how to get involved or something and I would believe that there was some hope of turning it around but I don't know.
[00:42:59] I don't know I'm. I'm not and it's not there yet for me and I don't know what I would do But John Carter in this, in this article I think what he points out is that the failure of time preference and the rotting of the culture is perfectly rational.
[00:43:19] They've made the right choice because they've been lied to. They have been cheated out of their future so why on earth would they believe they were going to get a second marshmallow anyway? Check out the bitbox link down in the show notes to support me I'm Guy Swan this is Bitcoin Audible until next time that's my two sats.
[00:43:56] The only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale are free markets and physical power.
[00:44:03] Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power. Socialism, communism and fascism all converge to the same end point rule by the biggest thug, Naval Ravikant.
