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Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have back Bitcoin Core Developer and author Jimmy Song. Jimmy recently published a new book titled Fiat Ruins Everything. And as you'll see from this interview, he highlights some really interesting perspectives on how the money is not only changing the way businesses conduct themselves, but he also gets into how it's impacting family values, culture, and relationships. This is a chat you won't want to miss, so with that, here's my interview with Jimmy. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by The Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here back with Jimmy Song again on the show. We are so excited to have you back, Jimmy. Thanks for having me again. I think this is my third time being on the show, right, Preston? Yes, sir. It is. And I had the privilege of hanging out with you last week in Texas. You've got your new book. I'm going to put it up here for people that are watching the video. Yep. Fiat Ruins Everything and it sure does, and we're going to get into that. But before we get into it, there's something I want to start off with. So I see you last week, and you're doing a book signing, and of course, I want to get a copy signed, which this one is, and I'm going to show people this really neat and interesting people that are seeing the video. Here's what Jimmy wrote, and then you can see that little QR code up in the corner of the book. And I said, you know, you handed me the book and I said, Jimmy, what is this QR code up in the corner of the book? And what did you tell me, Jimmy? Well, the QR code is a PGP signature that you can go download. It leads to a URL, my website, basically, and I wanted to sort of show my cryptography cred back when I wrote my first programming Bitcoin. And the way I do it is not just physically signing the book, which I did for you. And I do for anyone that asked me, but I also digitally signed the book. So how do I digitally sign it? Well, I take a picture of that very page. I take the JPEG and I shot 256 it and put the hash into a PGP message and sign that message, and all of that is uploaded to the website, which is at the URL pointed to by that QR code. And it's something that you can download. You don't, you know, you don't need to go find the handwriting experts. And since it's a test it to by me, and that's the entire idea. Well, this is a big idea because it goes way beyond, it is. This is a huge idea because it goes way beyond just your book. It talks to something that I think is missed by so many people in this space, especially when we talk about NFTs and we talk about art. And we talk about an author signing a book and validating that I could go show somebody this signature and be like, well, Jimmy didn't sign that, right? Or call in the person with the big magnifying glass. I mean, when you watch, what is the show? The, the pond stars, they call the guy in with the big magnifying glass, right? And he's there looking at the signature and he's like, I certify this is authentic. And like every time that guy comes in with that magnifying glass, I left my tail off and just like, this is so ridiculous. This is so ridiculous. But this is if a person would take their smartphone out and scan that QR code, it literally takes you to that address and you can see the picture. It was hilarious while while I'm talking to Jimmy. He has his computer there and he literally just wrote some lines of code and like, boom, this picture that he just took with a smartphone of my book that he signed is now on his website to validate and then he cryptographically signed it. So Jimmy, the next thing I said to you was, are you going to put this on the blockchain, right? And I've never heard, I've never heard Jimmy laugh so hard. Like right in my face, just laughs. He's like, no, Preston. I'm not going to put it on the blockchain because that would be idiotic. Explain why Jimmy, because this is such an important point. Yeah, because in a sense, this is a transaction between being you and really anyone in the future that you might sell the book to or something or maybe your ares will be selling it or something like that. And it's nobody else's business. I don't need to put it on the blockchain because it's a test that to buy me. And as long as you're in possession of that signature, you don't need anything else. You don't need it to be public. And in a sense, it's sort of like unnecessarily exposing the fact that you own this property. Why do that if you don't need to? There is no need for public validation because it's a test to buy me. And I'm the author. So that's what matters. You don't need a third party to certify. Now in the pond stars kind of like world that you're talking about, yeah. Or you know, even with like baseball cards or something, when you get something PSA graded, you know, there's a third party that says that maybe at that point, it's important to certify and have things be public or something like that because it's really a third party. But if it's me, if it's direct bilateral transaction, like it is between you and you, no blockchain is necessary. But so let's pull the thread on this. So like, let's say it's 50 years into the future. Let's say it's 100 years into the future. And somebody's like, oh my God, I've got a copy of this book. It was signed by Jimmy himself. And now he's a renowned author from the past, right? Would they be able to scan this QR code and say, well, this is the signature that Jimmy used for countless other books. And therefore, we know it's real. Is that how that would go down despite it, and it was never put on a public ledger? Yeah, as long as you have the file with my signature, you can't be generated without my private key. Now, this is, of course, like 50 years down the line, some cryptography might be broken or something like that. So it is possible that it's broken by that. But assuming that the cryptography on both, you know, the shot to 56 and ECDS and I think I might be using RSA for my PGP key, assuming those things aren't broken. Then yeah, 50 years from now, if somebody has the file with my signature, like they don't need, it doesn't need to be public as long as you can produce it. It's kind of like being able to appear in court and say, see, I have this guy's signature. And it's a testable. And this is honestly a large part of how Bitcoin works, right? It's the ability to sign a signature with a private key and it doesn't matter where you got the transaction from. It could be from a node or satellite, whatever. If the transaction has the right signature, it's valid. And, you know, it's not about who's in possession of it. It's about the actual fact of the signature itself. I guess my question is, why in the world aren't you using multi-dimensional, elliptical curve key generation in order to protect against this in a hundred years? Well, maybe there's going to be stronger cryptography. There's there's a lot of different, you know, fact there's best. So, you know, who knows where he disappointed, very disappointed Jimmy. For the person who's listening to this, I'm just trying to, you know, see it from their argument standpoint. They'd be like, well, Jimmy, you could be giving away other things with a token that's associated with the signatures and whatnot, right? It just really gets into, and if you really want to go down this, because there's, there's a chapter in your book, chapter 29 that's titled altcoin delusions and naivety, explain kind of your viewpoint on why you think a lot of that is immoral or a distraction or, I guess, use your own words as you describe it. I thought a lot about this stuff because I was a color coins developer back in 2013. And we, we thought about this way back in 2013 and all these people that are thinking, oh, NFTs are brand new and stuff, that's thinking about this stuff 10 years ago. And a lot of other people were, and in fact, the portal call like counterparty had rare pit bays in like 2015. So it's not anything new. But the main reason why I see it as highly immoral is because you're, you're selling something that's actually not scarce and it doesn't give you rights to anything. The fact that you have a piece of art, right? Like a lot of artists like to say, okay, here's like a monkey JPEG. And you know, it's a test of two by this blockchain. There's no like the JPEG and the row in the database are not related, except by convention by somebody saying that those two are related and supposedly the artists or the people issuing it say that. And it's really not worth that much, right? Like you don't have any copyrights to the monkey JPEG. You know, somebody uses it. You can't sue them or anything like it. There's no real rights around it. Really, it's a row in the database. And this is the thing. It's going to be a road in a database that doesn't have to be on a blockchain. It could be on your website. It doesn't matter because it goes back to the, it goes back to the issuer, right? And so like you're the author of this book. You're the issuer of this book and the signature that's on this book that would give it value that the author signed it. It doesn't change whether you're talking about a piece of artwork or anything that's non-fungible. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. I just keep frustrating. No, no, no, no, no, that's, it's true. And the thing is like when you're a third party issuer, like and you're doing it on something like Ethereum or, you know, ordinals or whatever, the entire idea is to sort of get people excited about it in a way that's completely illogical. It's, it's a way to get people to buy your stuff that, you know, buy what they think is your stuff, but it isn't, you know what I mean? It's, it's saying, okay, I have this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. And it's not really the bridge in Brooklyn. It's some piece of paper. So that's where I see it as immoral because it's giving people the wrong impression. I, that said, like a lot of the people buying are fully aware of the reality. But a lot of people aren't. And this is where the sucker sort of like lose their money in a sense because they're, they're not informed. But it's immoral because you're trying to issue something that doesn't represent anything. It's entirely by convention. I think if you talk to a lot of the people that are participating in these, they would tell you, I know I'm speculating. I don't care that I'm speculating. I'm just trying to make more money so that I can get by day to day, which really kind of gets to the crux and the thesis of this book, right? Because we're talking about incentives. And those people are, I would, what I would call rent seekers. They're not adding value to anyone. They're, they're not like an investor that's actually like providing liquidity or getting equity or something. So some business can provide more goods and services. It is pure speculation. It is pure gambling. It's, it's a zero or negative sum game where, you know, a lot of money gets wasted. A lot of resources get wasted in, in this stuff. And what you end up, what, what ends up happening when you have enough rent seeking in a society is that it tends to crumble. And this is how Rome fell. This is how a lot of civilizations break down because you don't have enough people producing goods and services. And you have lots of people rent seeking and leaching off of the rest of society. I'm going to jump around a little bit here in your book, but because there's certain themes that I really want to kind of talk about first, that being one of them because that was just such a fun experience for me last week to get through with the book. And I just love your response. Like no, Preston, I control my own website. Everybody can see it's my website. And, and I don't need a blockchain to do it. It was just such a great example. But chapter 13, you say fiat undermines work. Yeah, like really bring this out for us. A lot of work, at least historically, was sort of like a more fastman, you know, like like artisans and people that actually made things. Right now, I would say that a lot of work is more like email jobs and stuff like that. It's, and we can see sort of a little bit of a ship as the fed raises interest rates where, you know, money is going more towards the people that are actually providing value and less to the rent seekers, right? I'm sure you're aware of what happened with the UPS negotiation. I think a UPS driver now makes like $170,000. And in a sense, I think they deserve it because, you know, they're doing like backbreaking work every day. Whereas, you know, the MBA graduate from a mid-tier school that's, you know, making L-style spreadsheets that get read by two people and don't do anything like that. I mean, does that really deserve even like $70,000? I don't think so. They're not really necessarily providing value. So work has been debased in many ways because of the presence of the money printer. And what we've seen is that instead of having lots of customers as a craftsman or an artisan wood or somebody that's actually selling goods and services to the market, a lot of people just have one customer and that's the corporation that employs it. And it has a tendency to change a lot of your behavior. It makes you way more political. A lot of work is very political anyway because of the various incentives of the money. The corporation gets a lot of money from the black rocks of the world who might have certain agendas and they through corporate governance demands certain kinds of policies, which are not related to the business and affecting the business nonetheless. Those are things that don't provide value to anybody but end up becoming a large part of work, right? How many people spend many hours doing like HR compliance training of one kind or another? These don't necessarily add any value. But this is something that a lot of people have to go through. And this is all waste. This is all rent seeking. This is all essentially destroying value from civilization. And in a way, as people get into this stuff for a long time, it undermines the very nature of work itself to the point where it's much more about politics and compliance and less about providing goods and services. And I argue in the book that this is a large part of why people are so depressed at work or feel so stuck and just depressed about where their career is going because it's not satisfying at all. You're not making people happy with your goods and services. You are doing some agenda of some faceless person way down the line that essentially controls you through the money printing. The way that you laid out the book is really awesome. So you really kind of walked the dog for a person of incentives and how Fiat destroys it for the individual, for the company, for the nation state, and then from a global perspective. I want to talk to you about from the individual's perspective. You say in the book that at the individual level, you have to talk about outracing or outpacing a 7% benchmark. What is it that you're talking about with respect to this 7% benchmark? Yeah, so the 7% benchmark is sort of known in the investment community as sort of like a gold, right? If you can beat 7%, you're doing a good job. If you're under 7%, then you're not doing such a good job. You know, I investigated where that came from and it turns out that that's exactly, that's almost exactly the rate of monetary expansion in the M2 money supply since 1959. And that's as far back as the records I could find go. And this is published by the St. Louis Fed. I believe like January of 1959, the M2 money supply was 289 billion. This is all the money, you know, one measure of all the money in the world. Currently, it's somewhere around 23 trillion or something like that. It's some insane number. And if you annualize that from 1959 to 2023, that's not being about 7%. So if you're an investment manager and you get 7%, you are just keeping up with the monetary expansion, which is very interesting, right? Because like that's just to this red water treadmill. Yeah, all you're doing is just keeping up with everybody else. And you have to beat that in order to actually make a profit. Or get more value out of it as a proportion of the entire money supply. So that is the crux of why savings is like savings in a fiat economy is itself its own job. You have to go find investments and investigate. And you're not really even getting paid for it. You're just trying to tread water. Not even to mention if you're paying some professional to do this for you and they're taking 2% right now you're at 9% just to tread water. Yeah, and that's it's not a coincidence that those are the numbers that a lot of pension funds go for as well. It's all right, let's try to meet the 7% benchmark. A lot of them are underfunded because they weren't able to meet 7%. And now they have to assume like 9% or 10%, which is going to be very difficult for a long period of time. Literally this morning, Lynn Alden had a post where she had the M2 money supply growth rate. And I think she did this through the Fred website. She had the M2 money supply growth rate next to like all these different types of consumer goods. And all of them were below the M2 growth rate. And most of that can be attributed to technology basically inserting itself and making itself more efficient, right? But I looked at the numbers and I was like, I want to see what the calculation is. And in the time frame that she had on the chart was from 2000 to today, which is 23, 23 year period of time. And I did a compound annual growth rate. It went from 100 to 450. And sure enough, after I did the the keger on it, it came out at 6.75%. And I just I literally did this this morning before this interview. And I smiled because in your book, you talk about 7%. And I mean, it was on the money, the calculation there for the M2 growth rate. So it's pretty insane. And I think people don't think about how destructive 7% can be because you're losing half your buying power every 10 years with that percent, right? And if you're paying somebody 9%, it's even it's even it's every eight years, right? Every eight years, you lose half the value of your savings. Yeah, I joke that this is sort of like the inverse of the Sabbath year instead of your debt being wiped away every seven years. This is like your savings gets wiped away every seven years, something like that. And this it's even worth like we're talking about the US and the West in general. You go to a developing country, you know, it's way worse. It's like they'd love, you know, 7% or even losing 7% a year on the dollar is considerably better than the 2370, 140% that they're losing on a yearly basis. Let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. There's a new standard in investing in Bitcoin and River is setting it. 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What does this look like if we move to a Bitcoin standard and you don't have? Because I mean, we're not even talking about the frictional, a clawing away of taxes on top of these percentages, right? Which are huge when you compound them. Do we see in a Bitcoinized world, do we see taxes really blow up? Because that's the only way they're going to have to actually pay for things. Do we see a shift in what people are willing to pay for taxes because of this? Yeah. I think tax policy will definitely shift significantly because the implicit taxation that we're talking about with inflation is a huge part of the government budget. Basically, the deficit any given year is funded by inflation. So $6 trillion of spending and $4 trillion of tax revenue, the other two trillion is straight inflation. That's a lot that they're going to have to make up and generally explicit taxes are extremely unpopular. I remember I was living in Boston many years ago and there was like a property tax vote and this is in liberal Massachusetts and there was a little vote for property tax increase of like quarter percent or something like that and that was a really close vote in a very, very liberal state. I mean, the quarter percent increase ended up going through, but even in very liberal places, very few people like raising their taxes. So I suspect that government is forced to shrink because they don't have the money printer. You're not going to be able to hire 87,000 IRS agents at the drop of a hat. That's the increase of the bureaucratic state. I think it at least slows down and probably shrinks as a result because they can't afford it. Where are you going to get loans for $1 trillion? At any price, who has a trillion dollars in a sound money economy to lend you? This is the problem that we get into or the solution we get into. Yes, you're correct. If you lined up 100 people on the street and you asked them a simple question of should a rich person pay higher taxes than somebody who's poor? I think those 100 people would probably say, yeah, I think the rich person, if you got a billionaire, they should pay more in taxes or a higher percent than somebody who only makes 20 or 30,000 a year. What's interesting about this conversation is when you look at taxation through inflation of 7% annualized, that is being applied equally to the person who's making 20, 30,000 a year as it is to the person making 5 billion a year. They're paying the same tax rate when you're talking about a taxation inflation. It's interesting to me that I think it's just such a hidden tax that people just they don't even think about it. Think about how unfair it is because in a sense, the billionaire has a lot of stores of value that the people down at the bottom don't. I point out that a house in the Hamptons gets way better than 7% a year and NFL football team gets way better than 7% a year. Facebook's stock before it went public, which you have to be an accredited investor to get in on, got way better than 7% a year. The rich people have this ability to use the wealth that they have and kind of store it. They can keep up on this monetary treadmill. The poor people can. In fact, it's even worse for them because you take out personal loans. It's way more than 7%, you take out credit card loans. That's way way more than 7%. You get payday loans, which are even higher than that. It all ends up screen over the poor people way more than the rich people. I sympathize a little bit with the people that are saying tax the rich because in a sense, a lot of these rich people have access to these cantalong games that the poor people don't. This is the justice of Bitcoin. None of this crazy games to make the game completely unfair for the rich people. That I think is what we really need to be talking more about is this thing. Because it forces elected individuals that if they want to pay for their government, they have to do it through tax revenues as opposed to this hidden tax that just soaks up tons of buying power out of the system in a way that most of the market participants or the citizens can see. What's interesting going back to this chart that Lynn posted, so we just talked about how the real hurdle rate is 7% based off of decades of data of monetary expansion. But it's hidden because they're showing 2% inflation for this 5% up in smoke kind of hidden tax that's actually taking place. And when you look at what 5% is across the whole spectrum of money itself, this is a massive number. This number is huge and it's not equivalent to somebody saying, oh yeah, I paid 20 or 30% in taxes off of what I made for the year. This 5% is like on par with that amount that they're paying in the percentages don't kind of make sense when you're just kind of looking at the face of them. But when you actually dig into the buying power that's associated with those percentages, they're like on par with each other, I just find it really exciting that we can disclose reality through the populace, through money that is actually sound because it forces us to say, no, I don't want to pay for this war in Ukraine or this war wherever. If my taxes are going to go up 20 or 30% to fund this, and that's what that's obviously what Bitcoin does. Sorry to talk so much. I'm just really passionate about it. That's an excellent way. And I want to build on that a little bit because last time I was or two times ago when I was on the show with you, you pointed out that the inflation this time was very different because it was hitting the consumer goods because of the semi checks and direct to consumer almost level of money just going to them. All of these consumer goods went up in price significantly. And I think there's something very important about that that's different this time around and this part of the inflation curve or this deep into this inflation than than previous because in a sense, all of that money printing went to a lot of rich people earlier on. But they were putting it into House in the Hamptons and boats and things like that where there was asset inflation in those things and especially equities, but not in the consumer prices, which is why you see this disparity between the 7% in monetary expansion and the 2% that they've been claiming for consumer goods. And that is no longer the case because we're seeing it where the consumer prices have gone up enough that people are really feeling it and there is sort of like this dissatisfaction with the economic games that are being played and they're trying really, really hard to bring down the consumer inflation, the grocery store inflation to quell some of this stuff. But it's not really working, which and Lyn Alden I think said something about this in an article a little while back about how well, what if you raise rates and inflation still goes up? What happens then? And this seems like a real possibility to me. I'd love to get your take on this. That's my base case. Yeah, that's my base case for sure and for a person who'd be saying, well, why? So when we look at over the last 40 years and you see how all this fiat's getting added into the system, right? And you're seeing cooperation amongst companies it's going up. It's getting more efficient. They're making all these investments on and how to be just in time manufacturing, right? You have globalization taking place. And what what that really means is if it took me 10 times the hammer widget X, now it's taking me five times the hammer widget X to make it. And I can sell it at a cheaper price because it only took five units of energy versus 10 units of energy. This all works as long as you can continue to accelerate and build this global cooperation and efficiency system so that everything is humming along without any defects or mistakes. You get to a point where it becomes too saturated. And so when I would say when when Russia and the Ukraine really kind of kicked off and COVID, you got to this point where the global harmonization and optimization of supply chains and everybody globally working together to produce the most efficient product possible, kind of hit its fever pitch. And now you're starting to see some of that unravel. And I think it's actually going to start to accelerate because as they add more of these fiat units into the system, what they're doing is they're actually incentivizing more polarization into the hands of just a couple people. You ever watch the I love Lucy where they're on the they're on the the conveyor belt, right? This is a perfect example of like society for like the last 40 years where they started getting clever. They're like figuring out ways to like still do their job and get to get the chocolates off the conveyor belt. But then after it had accelerated too much and there weren't more people to do the job, like everything just falls apart and it just turns into pure debauchery. And I think that's where we're at where they've added so much money. They've incentivized so much optimization and now the conveyor belt skill and so fast that it's just like throw your hands in the air because I don't think we can get this back under control again. Yeah. And that's something that I talked about in the in the book with the entire company level incentives. And the one thing that you get out of enormous companies is, you know, scalability, right? Yeah. Exactly what you were talking about. You can make things very efficient, but that leads to a winner take all dynamic in which case everything becomes very, very fragile because you have like one supplier of computer chips in the world for a lot of different processes. And you know, this is why Taiwan is now strategically. Yeah, strategically important. Amazing. But by the way, and then there's so many things like that all over the entire global supply chain where there's like a specialty resin that auto manufacturers need and it's only produced in one factory in Germany or something like that. Like hard drives and memory are produced in like one place and Singapore or something. And this hyper efficiency is necessary to keep that number down to 2%. But really like it just makes everything fragile. And once you have war or any kind of destruction, it's, it's just it goes, it goes down. It's like space balls where he's like, we're going to go ludicrous speed, right? And like this book, I would highly encourage people, I'm for the audio listeners, I'm holding up this book called Chip Wars. If you want to read about how supply chains in this just one particular area are literally going ludicrous speed, read this book because it talks about exactly what you're saying is this lithography process of etching these chips and how like one machine is $100 million. The next one that they're getting ready to make is a $300 million machine. All the parts and pieces just to make this one machine. And then the only place in the world that's like, well, not the only there's there's very few places in the world that can actually afford these and have the infrastructure and the facilities, the what are the facilities called where you can't get any of the dust in there. Oh, it has a like that. You know, you know, I'm talking about the actual chip manufacturing. Yeah, facility. Yeah, the facilities in the process to make this is so specialized and so custom that if one of them goes offline, well, truly, one of them goes on like in Taiwan. If it goes offline, you're going to literally lose 30 to 40% of all the capacity in the world for these chips. And the man for the chips are just going through the roof. So it's this analogy that we're trying to create where we're trying to push so much energy through this pinhole that if there's even the slightest mistake, it's going to allow all this printing in this debauchery that fiat has has done through the decades to truly manifest itself and express itself. And everyone's like, I don't understand why prices are blowing out 200%. Well, you know, the food that you're checking out with has the truck that ships it has micro processors and it has this dependency and that dependency and it's all intertwined and it's just it's breaking down. Well, not only that, but we had significant amount of money printing and labor and all of this stuff was all of the markets just sort of re jittered. And if you think about how sensitive the entire supply chain is to price and the contracts that you might have for chips or something like that, they're very sensitive. So any sort of disruption there and like you lose your entire profit margin. Well, what are you going to do if you have to your under contract to produce something and you can't produce it at the cost that you promised and you're going to lose money? Well, you're going to slow walk that delivery as much as you can. So you make something more efficient so you can make a profit again. Well, this is what the entire supply chain had and this is why we got a lot of delays and we're in a sense still getting delays and we're going to see only more of this as we do more money printing going forward. In your book, you say banking is the pinnacle of rent seeking. What are you getting at here? Banking really doesn't add anything, right? Because at least the modern conception of banking, which is all printing money out of thin air like the loans that you get from the bank are not somebody's savings. They create the money to lend to you. This is one of the dirty secrets of fiat money is that it doesn't work the way you've been taught at an elementary school. Oh, somebody deposit $300 and gets 2% and they lend it out at 5%, the same 300 and they make 3% at a profit. Just do the numbers. That doesn't work. There's no way you can have a significant percentage of the U.S. economy make enough money doing some sort of interest rate arbitrage at those levels. What's actually happening is when you get a $500,000 mortgage, that comes into existence for your benefit and this is what's happening all over the economy and not just at the retail level but at the commercial level, a lot of commercial bonds, certainly at the government level, treasuries and things like that. These are all loans that are, this is money created out of nothing and this is the most rent seeking because in a sense, the people that have the power to print money for their purposes can push whatever kind of agenda that they want. One of the reasons why BlackRock has so much power in the economy right now and why they can essentially tell Bud Light or target to hold the line is because they have this power of money printing right. They control so much money and they can create so much more into existence that they can bankrupt any company that they want just through the games that they want. So it's the they're not providing value. If they went away tomorrow, the system would be much better off and this is why I say it's a rent seeking. It's a pinnacle of rent seeking. One of the, you know, you say Fiat reduces the need for reputation and I think for some people that are looking at social media, they'll be like that's all people are trying to do is create like the social reputation type personas. What do you mean when you say Fiat reduces the need for reputation? This is when you are working right. For people that have to like compete in the market and, you know, even stuff like social media, that's actually a real market. If you can't get people to follow you if they can't they don't subscribe to your channel and stuff like that you lose and I mean, you know this person because you've had to deal with this in the market where you're trying to grow your audience and things like that. That's real work and that's real value you're providing to your listeners. But, you know, you work in at BlackRock or something like that. That's not what you're judged on at all. In fact, it's based on how much money that you have under management and that's given to you basically by the people in charge and it's not about your reputation like in the market. It's way more about reputation with the very few people that actually control everything. So, I mean, this is also obvious in a lot of bureaucracies where you're clearly not providing much value but you have the right political connections and they're not going to fire you because you are in good with these right people. That's what I mean by it's not about reputation at all. Like, there are lots of people that, you know, like think about Hunter Biden, worst reputation possible. Like, there are very few people that would trust him with their dog even. Like, there's no way he gets put in charge of anything. Yet, he's worth many millions of dollars, gets paid lots of money doing various things because he's the son of the president. So, he has this ability to like not care about his reputation. He doesn't care that, you know, people think he's a hobo basically. It doesn't matter. He can still make money. Let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. You want to speak a new language but haven't quite got the hang of it. Meet your language learning match, Babel. 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And what ends up happening is that they need to put it somewhere and if they just hit one, if you have a Facebook in your portfolio, it makes everything else fine. But what's ended up happening is that there's now an ecosystem of startups that really are not doing that. Like, they don't make money for a very long time. They don't care because they don't make revenues. They don't make revenues. Their entire purpose is to attract new money. And if you have the right story, that's more important than profit or cash flow or any of the other stuff that traditionally, you would want for a good investment. And it's become like that over the years because of the continuous money printing. I still remember in the mid-90s when a lot of these internet startups were going public and they were like, they don't have any revenue. What's their business model? They're not making any money. But they skyrocketed because the growth was what mattered and the stability to grow quickly and get to this place where you have these advantages. That's all of them are aiming for those advantages as a large company because then you have access to new loans. You can get access to the commercial bond market and so on. You get lots and lots of money. So that's become sort of the playbook for a lot of startups. So you get weird stuff like Theranos and WeWork and even FTX where it's way more about selling to these investors and like not at all about the business model. So and it becomes way more focused on retail because having sort of like some buzz in the retail market is way more important than actually having a sound business. So you pay lots of celebrities like FTX did or go sponsor, you know, or something like these eight pictures. I mean, the whole thing was about like let's put it in. Let's give these things away to the celebrities and then have them go on Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy will have one too and just yeah. This is this is the this is what it's become. It's it's now become let's dump on retail like Uber. I don't think has ever made a quarterly profit if I'm not mistaken or they might have one once or twice or something like that. But that tells you like they went the entire way without having to actually provide value to the market. They're actually subtracting value. That's how much money is being printed. And this is the entire startup world now where it's not about your good or service. It's about your ability to attract further money down the line. And the VCs that invest you in early it they're not evaluating you on your business model. They're evaluating you on your ability to sell to retail like sell your business to retail. It's okay. Let's get all of these suckers that think they're going to get 7% off of your company rather than you know the good or service that yeah. Yeah, it's pretty insane. I they've become professional storytellers of like the highest magnitude like instead of like storytelling by writing a book. These people are storytelling by coming up with this really complex narrative raising a bunch of money with it. Taking this enormous amount of money sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars and then investing it into marketing to grow the top line. There's no bottom line. It's negative, right? And grow the top line so that then they can tell yet another story or compound on this story to then suck more fiat into this thing. And then it's interesting that you say it's a negative value. So like let's just take Uber for example. I like Uber a hundred times better than a cab service. I think everybody's going to agree with that, right? They haven't made any money and they've been around for what feels like a decade but I don't know that it's been that long. Let's just say that if they actually had to be profitable and be self-sufficient the prices that you're paying might not be anywhere near what you've become accustomed to, right? And if they destroy every other competitor in this process of storytelling, they then become a monopoly and can drive down the throat of all the consumers any price that they want. And so like some of the antics and the behaviors because the fiat is so prevalent really sets us up into this monopolistic style system where you don't actually get competition taking place. Now people will say, oh, there's lift and there's these other ones and there is lift, right? But I guess I'm pulling the thread on if this continues to perpetuate itself. And you go further and further down the timeline. You're just kind of creating these market dynamics that aren't in harmony with what I would describe as nature where you have a competitive landscape. They have to actually generate a profit and then they have to compete in that space by creating profit and they can be slim profits. But if they're slim profits, then they can't grow as fast and investing and marketing. So it just warps reality and it's pulling technology forward and it's monopolizing certain sectors and it's creating again going back to what we were talking about earlier, Jimmy, with supply chains breaking down because you have such consolidation of enterprise. You see this everywhere you look and once it starts to unravel and it'll aggressively start to unravel when they add more fiat into it because they're just amplifying and fanning the flames of this consolidation. Sorry, I just I normally don't talk this much. That's exactly what is happening is that when you grow to a certain size, you have access to so much more money either through additional equity that you bring in through another round or through the commercial bond market or even the public market and you take all of that money and what do you do with it? Well, you're going to finish your competitors by underpricing them and this is why Lyft is almost out of business. And you know, like people talk about it as if it's like a major competitor. Talk to a lot of Uber drivers and they're like, yeah, used to be a Lyft, but you know, they're letting a lot of us go because they can't afford it anymore. It does become this winter take-all market because you have this ability to underpriced everybody. And this is honestly how Amazon behave for a very long time. It's not an unknown strategy to use fiat money, the newly printed money as an enormous advantage over your competitors. This is why we have these monopolistic sort of companies that dominate the market. I'm sure you heard about the S&P 7, right? Like, like, seven companies have accounted for most of the growth of the S&P 500 in like the last five years or something like that. It's getting actually worse. The dynamics that we see at the individual level, like we were talking about, where you have a few billionaires that control a lot of stuff and the rest of us that don't. Those dynamics happen at the company level, and I would argue at the nation level as well, where you have a few, you know, like when you have this dynamic of the ability to print your money, you only have a few entities that end up controlling everything. And that's the dynamic we have at the individual, the company, nation, and global levels. Well, just if you're a lift executive and you're listening to this and we're talking about how you got to be a better storyteller, I'd recommend a book on Amazon. It's called Fiction Writing 101. Just go in there and then maybe you'll be more competitive with your competitor at Uber. Okay. You say that freedom is an illusion from this corporate organizational standpoint. What are you getting at with that? Well, freedom is well, so which part of the book are this is in the organization that is breaking down? Yes. Yeah. So you don't have that much freedom, right? Like if you're if you're part of a company, there are all sorts of restrictions on what you're able to do, you know, what you're able to say. You sort of represent the company. I talked to a bunch of people over the weekend after my presentation at Bitplac Boom about how they were like, yeah, it is really kind of way more stifling than you think because if you're not representing the company, then you're at risk of not being promoted or maybe even fired. Like they're watching your social media way closer than ever before. But the freedom that I'm talking about is your freedom to go and do what you want, right? Like for me, it's being able to say what I want and do what I want. And you know, a lot of times the company will prevent you from doing something that would objectively be good for civilization, your ability to provide goods and services as like a side gig or something like that. But they want to prevent you from doing it because for them, your contribution to the company matters more than anything else. In many other ways, the corporations themselves are restricted because again, they have the black rocks of the world that demand certain things. They have governments that demand certain things. And the way companies survive now is by being compliant to the demands of those few companies, few authorities that sort of demand everything. And that's unfortunately sort of like handed down to the employees themselves and we get that dynamic all over the place where even at the nation level, the US tells certain countries what to do and they kind of have to comply because the money rules everything. There's a part in your book kind of near the beginning and you bring up this Frankfurt school conundrum. What is this and just kind of explain why you bring this up in the book? I wanted to talk about sort of the societal degeneration, the moral morality of Fiat money and all of that. And of course, it comes largely from Marx as the fifth Plank of the Communist Manifesto was a central controller of the money, something like the central bank and he sort of envisioned it. The problem in the 30s or the 20s and 30s for Marxism was that there were a lot of economic crises all over the world. We had the Great Depression here in the US. You had the Y-Mart and Republic hyperinflation, the hungry had inflation, Austria had inflation. All of these were predicted by Marx as sort of ushering in socialism. The entire thesis of Marxism is that you go from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism and here's when the transitions would happen. It doesn't really give justifications, but it was always just sort of like it's going to happen and here's how it's going to happen. A lot of Marxists were excited because there's an economic crisis. He said you transition from capitalism to socialism when capitalism fails, when there's crises and people will rise up and you'll have a violent revolution that brings in socialism and then that will in turn bring in, have a few things happen and then communism will come and then we'll have workers paradise. Everybody that was a Marxist in the 20s and 30s was waiting for this revolution to happen all over the world. They thought that the Russian Revolution was the first of many and that it would happen everywhere, just top up like that. Except it didn't it didn't happen at all. In fact, it went backwards in a lot of places where people are like this this isn't happening and the reason for this is not capitalism. It's like back of the policy and you know, there was almost no interest in a violent revolution. So there were a few Frankfurt scholars at that time that were thinking about this dilemma, the Marxist dilemma and saying okay, what is the why is it that people aren't rising up to revolution and they came up with a solution and they sort of married Freud and Marx in that way because Marx had said that the family unit is not the ultimate form and that it's like sort of evil for not progressing through this this thing that we were talking about and Freud gave like a very good explanation of sort of being bound to your family and you know, he was all into explaining a lot of your behavior through your childhood and you know, the relationships that you had in your family. They came up with this theory, the Frankfurt School, that in order for Marxism to truly, or the next stage for socialism to come, then we need to break family bonds and this became a part of Marxism from that point on and their argument was that people needed to be awakened to the reality of oppression and if you don't know that you're oppressed because you've been deceived by your family ties, then people would never wake up and that language is still with us today. The entire idea of woke is being awakened to your oppression, the rulers of capital, the controllers of things sort of like oppressing you and that was their argument and it's evolved a lot since then but that's the source of a lot of the leftist stuff like, you know, critical, by the way, the Frankfurt School called all of these theories like critical theory from which we get critical race theory, queer theory, intersectionality and all the modern, I guess the postmodern take on colonialism and stuff like that, all of these have roots in the Frankfurt School. So this has become sort of like married with a lot of Keynesian economic dogma and the social institutions around government, particularly funded by Fiat money like academia, a lot of media now government bureaucracy, they've shifted towards this over time as Marxism or as Fiat money has been printed more and more because it's so in line with what they want to happen. Jimmy, you talk about how Fiat destroys family values. This is something that's here and dear to me, I noticed to you as well. So for kind of our last point, I want you to kind of talk about the really important points for you personally when you think about how Fiat destroys family values. Fiat basically makes it so that you don't, you're not dependent on family anymore. And you know, people think of it as an act of compassion to provide somebody with stuff when they're down, but really if you're stealing from everybody else to do it and not doing it voluntarily, I think it's just doesn't just. And in a sense, the current system is very much not dependent on family. It's dependent on everything else, whether the company you work for or the government handouts or something like that. Very few people are that dependent on family. That said, there are pockets of the West where you have closer families. I know a lot of Indian families, for example, are very close knit and they have sort of like culturally this idea of supporting each other and things like that. They even do like a range of marriages. But the main thing is that we're not dependent on each other. We're dependent on central controllers. It's much more centralized. And that has led to sort of this very weird, has gone off in kind of a very weird direction, where we're getting more towards this sort of Frankfurt school philosophy of breaking down families and making them assets of the state, where you serve the state instead of being self-souderant or wanting to do something for yourself. And this is something that I think has historically been one of the pillars of Marxism or any form of Marxism is that you need to break down family bonds in order to make things that they're hoping for to come to pass. And I don't think that works. I really think it's horribly immoral to separate the children from the parents or to take them, give them up for state control. We're kind of halfway there already with the entire public schooling system and education and the influence that a lot of these institutions have. And they are all funded by Fiat money. And in a sound money economy, we're way more dependent on our families, we're way more incentivized to create more people, like have more children. Sadly, like the fiat way of framing this is that we need to have less children because it's destroying the planet. Really, they see everything as sort of like a zero sum game where if you have more children, then there's less for everybody else. Instead of each person is somebody that can produce a goods and services for everybody else. So it's a very different set of mentalities and it's ended up destroying families. We're seeing depopulation all over the world. Jimmy, just like my personal thoughts on this particular matter, when you have people that are constantly being stolen from through the debasement of the currency and through the taxation, I mean, you have to pay some type of tax. Who's going to build the roads, Jimmy? That'll mean. But on a serious note, when that is accelerating, the amount that is continuing to be clawed away from individuals. And you combine that with the idea that most don't understand that it's being clawed away at an accelerative pace through debasement of the currency. What you find is the parents don't have any excess energy that they've saved. In fact, they have a depletion of energy. They don't even have enough for themselves, let alone for kids or for others or to, they're just trying to make it by. They're just trying to make it to the next day with the knowledge that tomorrow is probably going to be worse than today because I'm going to be stolen from through the night into tomorrow. And so at a very core and fundamental level, there's this idea that how can families grow and how can anything grow when it doesn't have any excess energy that it can store? It's impossible, whether it's a plant or a person, it's impossible, right? And I think that that's the incentive that's driving this actions that we see so prevalent throughout society is nobody has any excess energy of any sort that they can't grow. They can't prosper. They can't participate. They can't coordinate with each other. They just want to get theirs because if they don't get it right now, it's going to be even less tomorrow. It's interesting that you frame it as like excess energy because really we're talking about savings. And because we're being stolen from everywhere, in most families, both parents work, right? Like it used to be a useful job. Yeah. And you know, 30, 40 years ago, you had maybe one pair of work. Well, that means you have more energy, more savings and things like that to a four more children. A lot of the money has gone into real estate. So if you wanted to have four or five kids, you need a larger place. But because of the store of value premium on housing, well, you can't afford it anymore, right? You're being stolen from and that money has gone into housing. So you can't afford the things that you need. The long term things that you need to plan for if you're going to have a family have all just sort of gone up and priced tremendously, making it less affordable. And it's a form of being able to steal from you because your dollar doesn't go as far as it used to. And that ultimately means that you focus on short-term stuff like food and housing or like having a roof over your head or you're making sure you have gasoline in your car and things like that, which ultimately means that you neglect the more long-term things that bring satisfaction like having a family, having children and grandchildren and things like that. Thankfully, Bitcoin is bringing that back and we can kind of see it. I know you and I have a lot of friends in the Bitcoin community that are having way more children and more families, more people getting married, more people dating. It's a beautiful thing to be watching. It really is. So for folks listening, here's the book, Fiat ruins everything by Jimmy Song. He also has other books, one that I particularly like as an engineer, programming Bitcoin as another one. He has Bitcoin in the American Dream, the little Bitcoin book. You're quite the writer, Jimmy. I love this bit. We'll have links in the show notes for people that want to check out the book. Jimmy, anything else you want to highlight. I am doing a crowd fund for Fiat ruins everything up until September 6th if you're listening to it before then. It's Fiat ruins everything.com and you can go and support my work on the stuff and hopefully I get to write more books, maybe one with you Sunday, Preston. You know, I hate writing, Jimmy. I hate it. Shout GPT, it can help us out. All right. Thank you so much for making time. Jimmy, this was a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Preston. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found a valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that and it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithms. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors podcast network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or report casting.

BTC147: Fiat Ruins Everything w/ Bitcoin Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast)