[00:02:59] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:03:24] Preston Pysh: Right. Or we’ll call in the person with the big magnifying glass. I mean. When you watch, what is the show? The Pawn 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 laugh my tail off.

[00:03:43] Preston Pysh: And I’m 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 I’m, 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 his smartphone of my book that he signed is now on his website to validate and he cryptographically signed it.

[00:04:12] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:04:33] Jimmy Song: Yeah, because in a sense, this is a transaction between me and you and really anyone in the future that you might sell the book to or something, or maybe your heirs 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 attested to by me.

[00:04:50] Jimmy Song: 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, if you don’t need to, there is no need for public validation because it’s attested to by me and I’m the author.

[00:05:10] Jimmy Song: So that’s what matters. You don’t need a third party to certify. In the Pawn Stars kind of like world that you were, you were talking about 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.

[00:05:33] Jimmy Song: But if it’s me, if it’s direct bilateral transaction, like it is between me and you, no blockchain is necessary.

[00:05:40] Preston Pysh: But let’s, 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 a hundred years into the future. And somebody’s like, Oh my God, I’ve got a copy of this book.

[00:05:49] Preston Pysh: It was signed by, 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 not being, and it was never put on a public ledger?

[00:06:13] Jimmy Song: Yeah, as long as you have the file with my signature, it 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 then.

[00:06:29] Jimmy Song: But assuming that the cryptography on both, you know, SHA 256 and ECDSA, and I think I might, 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 attestable.

[00:06:56] Jimmy Song: 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, 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.

[00:07:14] Jimmy Song: It’s about the actual fact of the signature itself.

[00:07:18] Preston Pysh: I guess my question is why in the world, aren’t you using multidimensional elliptical curve key generation in order to protect against this in a hundred years?

[00:07:26] Jimmy Song: Well, I, maybe there’s going to be stronger cryptography. There’s, there’s a lot of different you know, factors, so, you know, who knows where we’ll be going.

[00:07:35] Preston Pysh: Very 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.

[00:07:55] Preston Pysh: And if you really want to go down this, cause 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.

[00:08:16] Jimmy Song: I thought a lot about this stuff because I was a ColorCoins developer back in 2013 and we, we, we thought about this way back in 2013 and all these people that are thinking, oh, NFTs are brand new and stuff.

[00:08:28] Jimmy Song: I was thinking about this stuff 10 years ago and a lot of other people were. And in fact, the protocol like Counterparty had rare pip 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.

[00:08:48] Jimmy Song: 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 attested to 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 artist or the people issuing it say that.

[00:09:10] Jimmy Song: And it’s really not worth that much, right? Like you, 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 road in the database. And this is the thing. It’s going to be a road in a database. It doesn’t have to be on a blockchain.

[00:09:28] Jimmy Song: It could be on your website. It doesn’t matter.

[00:09:31] Preston Pysh: Because it goes back to the, it goes back to the issuer. 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.

[00:09:50] Preston Pysh: I’m sorry I interrupted you. I just get frustrated.

[00:09:53] Jimmy Song: No, no, that’s it. It’s true. And, and the thing is like when you’re a third party issuer and like, and you’re, 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.

[00:10:13] Jimmy Song: 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.

[00:10:34] Jimmy Song: 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 suckers 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.

[00:10:52] Jimmy Song: It’s entirely by convention.

[00:10:55] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:11:13] Preston Pysh: Right? Because we’re talking about incentives.

[00:11:16] Jimmy Song: 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.

[00:11:31] Jimmy Song: 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 this stuff. And what you end up, 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 leeching off of the rest of society.

[00:12:04] Preston Pysh: I’m going to jump around a little bit here in your book, because there’s certain themes that I really want to kind of talk about first that, that being one of them, because that was just such a fun experience for me last week to get through with the book. And, and I just love your response. Like, no, Preston, I control my own website.

[00:12:21] Preston Pysh: Everybody can see it’s my website and, and I don’t need a blockchain to do that. It was just such a great example. But chapter 13, you say fiat undermines work. Yeah. Like really bring this out for us.

[00:12:35] Jimmy Song: A lot of work, at least historically, was sort of like more craftsmen, you know, like like artisans and people that actually made things.

[00:12:45] Jimmy Song: 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 shift 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.

[00:13:06] Jimmy Song: 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 Excel spreadsheets that get read by two people and don’t do anything like that.

[00:13:26] Jimmy Song: 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 would, or somebody that’s actually selling goods and services to the market would, A lot of people just have one customer and that’s the corporation that employs them.

[00:13:54] Jimmy Song: 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 fiat 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.

[00:14:15] Jimmy Song: Demand certain kinds of policies, which are not related to the business, but end up affecting the business nonetheless. And those are things that don’t provide value to anybody, but end up becoming a large part of work, right? Like how many people spend many hours doing like HR compliance training of one kind or another.

[00:14:36] Jimmy Song: 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, like as, as people get into this stuff for a long time, it, 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.

[00:15:02] Jimmy Song: 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, you know, doing some agenda of some faceless person way down the line that essentially controls you through the money printing.

[00:15:24] Preston Pysh: The way that you laid out the book is really awesome. So the, you really kind of walk 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 percent benchmark.

[00:15:51] Preston Pysh: What is it that you’re talking about with respect to this 7 percent benchmark?

[00:15:56] Jimmy Song: Yeah. So the 7 percent benchmark is sort of known in the investment community as sort of like the goal, right? Like 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.

[00:16:18] Jimmy Song: 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. Well, you know, one measure of all the money in the world. Currently it’s somewhere around 23 trillion or something like that.

[00:16:38] Jimmy Song: It’s, it’s some insane number. And if you annualize that from 1959 to 2023, it ends up 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? Cause like, that’s just to tread water treadmills. Yeah. You’re all you’re doing is just keeping up with everybody else.

[00:17:03] Jimmy Song: 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, investigate, and you know, it’s, you’re not really even getting paid for it.

[00:17:29] Jimmy Song: You’re just trying to tread water.

[00:17:31] Preston Pysh: 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 percent just to tread water.

[00:17:41] Jimmy Song: Yeah. And, 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.

[00:17:48] Jimmy Song: Let’s try to meet the 7 percent benchmark. A lot of them are underfunded because they weren’t able to meet 7 percent and now they have to assume like 9 or 10%, which is going to be very difficult for a long period of time.

[00:18:02] Preston Pysh: Literally this morning Lyn Alden had M2 money supply growth rate. And I think she did this through the Fred website.

[00:18:11] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:18:33] Preston Pysh: And in the timeframe 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 a hundred to 450. And sure enough, after I did the Kager on it, it came out at 6. 75%. And I just, I literally did this this morning before this interview.

[00:18:53] Preston Pysh: And I smiled because in your book, you talk about 7 percent 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 percent can be because you’re losing half your buying power every 10 years with that percent, right?

[00:19:13] Preston Pysh: And if you’re paying somebody 9%, it’s even, it’s even, it’s every eight years. Right. And 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.

[00:19:35] Jimmy Song: Something like that. And, and this… It’s even worse, like we’re talking about the U. S. and the West in general, you go to a developing country, you know, it’s way worse. It’s like they love, you know, 7 percent or even losing 7 percent a year on the dollar is considerably better than the 23, 70, 140 percent that they’re losing on a yearly basis.

[00:20:02] Preston Pysh: What does this, so for a person who’s a Bitcoin or listening to this conversation, 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 clawing away of taxes on top of these percentages, right? Which are huge when you compound them.

[00:20:21] Preston Pysh: So do we see in a Bitcoinized world, do we see taxes really blow out because that’s the only way they’re going to have to actually pay for things? And do we see a shift in, in what people are willing to pay for taxes because of this?

[00:20:35] Jimmy Song: Yeah, I think tax policy will definitely shift significantly because like the implicit taxation that we’re talking about with inflation is a huge part of the government budget, like basically the deficit any given year is funded by inflation.

[00:20:52] Jimmy Song: So, you know, 6 trillion of spending and 4 trillion of tax revenue. The other 2 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.

[00:21:15] Jimmy Song: And there was a little vote for a 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 like, even in very liberal places, very few people like raising their taxes.

[00:21:36] Jimmy Song: So, I suspect that government sort of 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 you know, at the drop of a hat. Like, that’s like 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.

[00:21:58] Jimmy Song: Like you, where are you going to get loans for a trillion dollars? Like 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.

[00:22:15] Preston Pysh: If you, if you lined up a hundred people on the street and you ask them a simple question of should a rich person pay higher taxes than somebody who’s poor?

[00:22:25] Preston Pysh: I think those hundred people would probably say, yeah, I think the rich person, if you’ve got a billionaire, they should pay more in taxes or a higher percent than somebody who only makes 20 a year. And what’s interesting about this conversation is when you look at taxation through inflation of 7 percent annualized, that is being applied equally to the person who’s making 20, a year, as it is to the person making 5 billion a year.

[00:22:51] Preston Pysh: They’re paying the same tax rate when you’re talking about a taxation through inflation. So it’s kind of interesting to me that I think it’s just such a hidden tax that people just, they don’t even think about it, or they just.

[00:23:04] Jimmy Song: Well, and think about how unfair it is because in a sense, the, the billionaire has a lot of stores of value that the people down at the bottom don’t you know, I, I point out that, you know, a house in the Hamptons gets way better than 7 percent a year and NFL football team gets way better than 7 percent a year.

[00:23:25] Jimmy Song: Facebook stock before, you know, it went public, which you have to be an accredited investor to get in on, got way better than 7 percent a year. Like, the rich people have this ability to use the wealth that they have and kind of store it, so they can keep up on this monetary treadmill. The poor people can’t.

[00:23:45] Jimmy Song: 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 percent and you get payday loans, which are even higher than that. So it all ends up screwing over the poor people way more than the rich people. And I kind of 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 cantaloupe games that the poor people don’t.

[00:24:13] Jimmy Song: And this is the justice of Bitcoin is that. Like, none of this, like, crazy games to sort of make the game completely unfair for the rich people. And that, that I think is what we really need to be talking more about is this thing.

[00:24:30] Preston Pysh: Because it forces elected individuals that if they want to pay for their government, they have to do it through tax.

[00:24:37] Preston Pysh: 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, can see what’s interesting going back to this chart that Lyn posted. So we just talked about how like the real hurdle rate, 7 percent based off of, you know, decades of, of data of monetary expansion.

[00:24:59] Preston Pysh: But it’s hidden because they’re showing 2 percent inflation, right? For this 5 percent up in smoke kind of hidden tax that’s actually taking place. And when you look at what 5 percent 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 percent in taxes off of what I made for the year.

[00:25:27] Preston Pysh: This 5 percent 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, right?

[00:26:00] Preston Pysh: If my taxes are going to go up 20 or 30 percent to fund this. And that’s what, that’s obviously what Bitcoin does. Sorry to talk so much. I’m, I’m just really passionate about that.

[00:26:09] Jimmy Song: No, no. That, that, that, that’s an excellent point. I, and I, I want to build on that a little bit because you know, last time I was, or two times ago when we, 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, right?

[00:26:25] Jimmy Song: Because of the STEMI checks and, you know, 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.

[00:26:55] Jimmy Song: But they were putting it into House in the Hamptons and boats and things like that, where there was asset inflation in those things, especially equities, but not in the consumer prices, which is why you see this disparity between the 7 percent in monetary expansion and the 2 percent that they’ve been claiming for, you know, consumer goods.

[00:27:19] Jimmy Song: And that, that, that is no longer the case because we’re, we’re seeing it where the consumer prices have gone up enough that people are really feeling it. And there, there is sort of like this dissatisfaction with the economic games that are being played and they’re, 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, and, you know, 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 I, This seems like a real possibility to me. I’d love to get your take on this.

[00:28:03] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:28:22] Preston Pysh: They’re making all these investments on and how to be just in time manufacturing, right? You have a 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.

[00:28:46] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:29:09] Preston Pysh: 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 of people.

[00:29:39] Preston Pysh: You ever watched the I love Lucy where they’re on the they’re on the conveyor belt, right? This was 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 the, get the chocolates off the conveyor belt.

[00:29:58] Preston Pysh: 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’s going 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.

[00:30:19] Jimmy Song: 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? Like, 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.

[00:30:53] Jimmy Song: Amazing book, 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 in Singapore or something.

[00:31:15] Jimmy Song: 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 disruption, it’s, it’s just, it goes, it goes down.

[00:31:28] Preston Pysh: 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 for the audio listeners.

[00:31:37] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:31:58] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:32:14] Preston Pysh: And the facilities, the what are the facilities called where you can’t get any of the dust in there? Oh, it has a certain name like the, you know. Yeah. You know I’m talking

[00:32:23] Jimmy Song: Yeah, yeah. The actual chip manufacturing facility.

[00:32:26] Preston Pysh: 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 off.

[00:32:35] Preston Pysh: 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 demand 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 and this debauchery that fiat has, has done through the decades to truly manifest itself and express itself.

[00:33:03] Preston Pysh: 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 a, the truck that ships, it has microprocessors and it has this dependency and that dependency, and it’s all intertwined. And it’s just, it’s breaking down.

[00:33:18] Jimmy Song: Well, and not only that, but we had.

[00:33:20] Jimmy Song: Significant amount of money printing and labor and all of this stuff was all of the markets just sort of rejittered. 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.

[00:33:46] Jimmy Song: Well, what, what are you going to do if you have to, you’re 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, that delivery as much as you can. So you make something more efficient so you can make a profit again.

[00:34:03] Jimmy Song: 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, you know, going forward.

[00:34:16] Preston Pysh: In your book, you say banking is the pinnacle of rent seeking. What are you getting at here?

[00:34:23] Jimmy Song: Banking really doesn’t add anything, right? Like, because at least It’s 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, this is one of the dirty secrets of of fiat money is that it doesn’t work the way you’ve been taught at an elementary school.

[00:34:47] Jimmy Song: Oh, you know, somebody deposit 300 and gets 2%. And they lend it out at 5% the same 300 and, you know, they make 3 percent at a profit. Just do the numbers. That, that, that doesn’t work. There, there’s no way you can have a, you know, significant percentage of the U S economy make enough money doing some sort of like interest rate arbitrage at those levels.

[00:35:13] Jimmy Song: No, 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, not just at the retail level, but at the commercial level, a lot of you know, commercial bonds certainly at the government level treasuries and things like that.

[00:35:33] Jimmy Song: 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…

[00:35:56] Jimmy Song: Essentially tell Bud Light or Target to hold the line is because they have this power of money printing, right? Like 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.

[00:36:17] Jimmy Song: If they went away tomorrow, they’re, you know, like the system would be much better off. And this is, this is why I say. It’s a rent seeking it’s a pinnacle of rent seeking.

[00:36:28] Preston Pysh: 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 these social reputation type personas.

[00:36:43] Preston Pysh: What do you mean when you say fiat reduces the need for reputation?

[00:36:47] Jimmy Song: This is when you are working, right? I 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.

[00:37:04] Jimmy Song: And I mean, you know, this Preston, because you, you’ve you’ve had to deal with this in the market where you’re trying to grow your audience and things like that, 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, like that, that’s not what you’re judged on at all.

[00:37:23] Jimmy Song: In fact, it’s, 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… 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.

[00:37:52] Jimmy Song: 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, there are lots of people that, you know, like think about Hunter Biden, right? Like. worst reputation possible. Like there, there are very few people that would trust him with their dog even like there, there’s, there’s no way he gets put in charge of anything yet.

[00:38:19] Jimmy Song: 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, he has this ability to like, not care about his reputation. He doesn’t care that, you know, You know, people think he’s a hobo, basically. It doesn’t matter. You can still make money.

[00:38:39] Preston Pysh: When you talk about the incentives breaking down for organizations, one of the chapters that really made me smile was the the one titled the moral quandary of insane startup valuations. Go through this one. This, this is something people need to hear.

[00:38:59] Jimmy Song: A lot of startups, like this is Cantillon effect, like money trying to find a home, right?

[00:39:04] Jimmy Song: This is a lot of rich people trying to beat that 7 percent either through their family office or you know, direct investments into hedge funds or VC funds or whatever. And what ends up happening is that they need to put it somewhere. And if they just hit one, right, if you, if you have a Facebook in your portfolio.

[00:39:25] Jimmy Song: It makes everything else fine. But what, what’s ended up happening is that there’s now an ecosystem of startups that, that really are not doing that. Like they, they don’t make money for a very long time. They don’t care because. Their entire purpose is to attract new money and if you have the right story, that’s more important than profit or cashflow 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, right, when a lot of these internet startups were going public and they were like, they don’t have any revenue.

[00:40:16] Jimmy Song: What’s their business model? They’re, they’re not making any money. But they skyrocketed because the growth was what that what mattered and this ability to grow quickly and get to this place where you have these advantages that that’s all of 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.

[00:40:43] Jimmy Song: So that’s become sort of the playbook for a lot of startups. So you get, 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.

[00:41:11] Jimmy Song: So, you pay lots of celebrities like FTX did or go sponsor, you know, or something like that.

[00:41:18] Preston Pysh: Look at these eight pictures. I mean, the whole thing was about like, let’s put it in, let’s give these things away to these celebrities and then have them go on Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy will have one too.

[00:41:32] Jimmy Song: 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 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.

[00:41:53] Jimmy Song: 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, they’re not evaluating you on your business model.

[00:42:12] Jimmy Song: They’re evaluating you on your ability to sell to retail, like sell your business to retail. Okay, let’s get all of these suckers that think they’re going to get 7 percent off of your company rather than, you know, the good or service that you might have.

[00:42:27] Preston Pysh: Yeah, it’s pretty insane. They’ve become professional storytellers of like the highest magnitude.

[00:42:34] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:42:54] Preston Pysh: There’s no bottom line. It’s negative, right? And grow, 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.

[00:43:16] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:43:37] Preston Pysh: Right? And if they destroy every other competitor in this process of, of storytelling, they then become a monopoly and can drive down the throat of, 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.

[00:44:05] Preston Pysh: Now, people will say, oh, there’s Lyft. And there’s these other ones and there is lift, right? But I guess I’m, 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 in marketing. So it just warps reality and it’s pulling technology forward and it’s monopolizing certain sectors.

[00:44:45] Preston Pysh: 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, 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.

[00:45:05] Preston Pysh: Sorry. I just, I normally don’t talk this much.

[00:45:09] Jimmy Song: That’s exactly what is happening is, is that when you, 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.

[00:45:25] Jimmy Song: And you take all of that money and what do you do with it? Well, you’re going to crush 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. They’re like, yeah, I used to be a Lyft, but you know, they’re letting a lot of us go because they can’t afford it anymore.

[00:45:44] Jimmy Song: They, it does become this winner take all market because you have this ability to underprice everybody. And this is honestly how Amazon behaved for a very long time. It’s, it’s not an unknown strategy to use fiat money, the newly printed money as As a, an enormous advantage over your competitors, this is, this is why we have these monopolistic sort of companies that dominate the market.

[00:46:11] Jimmy Song: I’m sure you heard about the S&P 7, right? Like, like there, like seven companies have accounted for most of the growth of the S&P 500 and like the last five years or something like that. It’s getting actually worse. The, 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, that don’t, those dynamics happen at the company level.

[00:46:38] Jimmy Song: And it’s, 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 own money. You only have a few entities that end up controlling everything. And that, that’s the dynamic we have at the individual, the company, nation, and global levels.

[00:46:59] Preston Pysh: Well, just if you’re a Lyft 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 maybe you’ll be more competitive with your competitor at Uber. Okay, you say that freedom is an illusion from this corporate organizational standpoint.

[00:47:19] Preston Pysh: What are you getting at with that?

[00:47:21] Jimmy Song: Well, freedom is, well, so which part of the book are you referring to?

[00:47:26] Preston Pysh: This is in the organization organizational incentives breaking down. Yes.

[00:47:30] Jimmy Song: Yeah, 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.

[00:47:43] Jimmy Song: I talked to a bunch of people over the weekend after my presentation at BitBlockBoom 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 know, you’re, you’re at risk of not being promoted or maybe even fired, like there’s, they’re watching your social media way closer than ever before.

[00:48:06] Jimmy Song: 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.

[00:48:28] Jimmy Song: 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.

[00:48:45] Jimmy Song: 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. You know, even at the nation level, the U. S. tells certain countries what to do and they kind of have to comply because the money rules everything.

[00:49:14] Preston Pysh: There’s a part in your book kind of near the beginning and you, you bring up this Frankfurt school conundrum. What is this? And just kind of explain why you bring this up in the book.

[00:49:27] Jimmy Song: I wanted to talk about sort of the societal degeneration, the, the moral.

[00:49:33] Jimmy Song: Morality of fiat money and all of that. And of course it comes largely from Marxism. The fifth plank of the communist manifesto was a central controller of the money, something like a central bank. And he, 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.

[00:49:57] Jimmy Song: You know, we had the Great Depression here in the U. S., you had the Weimar Republic hyperinflation. The, you know, Hungary had inflation, Austria had inflation, all of these were predicted by Marx as sort of ushering in socialism. His the, 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, and it’s Like, he doesn’t really give justifications for any of that, but it was, it was always just sort of like, it’s going to happen and here’s how it’s going to happen.

[00:50:30] Jimmy Song: And so, a lot of Marxists were excited because it was okay, 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.

[00:50:57] Jimmy Song: 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 pop up like that. Except it didn’t. It didn’t happen at all. In fact, it, it went backwards in a lot of places, where people were like, this isn’t happening.

[00:51:17] Jimmy Song: And the reason for this is not capitalism, it’s like bad government 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, what is the, why is it that people aren’t rising up to revolution?

[00:51:38] Jimmy Song: 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, 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, he was all into explaining a lot of your behavior through your childhood and, you know, the relationships that you had in your family.

[00:52:11] Jimmy Song: 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, of oppression.

[00:52:35] Jimmy Song: 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.

[00:52:54] Jimmy Song: 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.

[00:53:18] Jimmy Song: 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, it’s so in line with what they want to happen.

[00:53:52] Preston Pysh: Jimmy, you talk about how fiat destroys family values. This is something that’s near and dear to me. I know it is to you as well. So for kind of our last point, I want you to, to kind of talk about the really important points for you personally, when you think about how fiat destroys family values.

[00:54:10] Jimmy Song: Fiat basically makes it so that you don’t you’re not dependent on family anymore.

[00:54:16] Jimmy Song: 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 as unjust. 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, the government handouts, or something like that.

[00:54:46] Jimmy Song: Very few people are that dependent on family. That said, there are pockets of you know, the West where, you know, you, you have closer families. I know a lot of Indian families, for example, are very close knit, and they. They have sort of like culturally this idea of supporting each other and things like that.

[00:55:05] Jimmy Song: They even do like arranged marriages. But the main thing is that we’re not dependent on each other. We’re dependent on central controllers. It’s, it’s much more centralized. And that, 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.

[00:55:33] Jimmy Song: where you serve the state instead of being self sovereign 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, you know, things that they’re hoping for to come to pass.

[00:55:54] Jimmy Song: And I don’t think that works. I, I really think it’s it’s horribly immoral to separate the children from the parents or to take them or 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.

[00:56:18] Jimmy Song: And in a sound money economy, we’re way more dependent on our families. We’re, we’re made way more incentivized to create more people, right? 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 it’s you know, they, they see everything as sort of like a zero sum game where if you have more children, then there’s less for everybody else.

[00:56:47] Jimmy Song: Instead of each person is somebody that can produce 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.

[00:57:01] Preston Pysh: Jimmy, just my, 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.

[00:57:16] Preston Pysh: Who’s going to build the roads, Jimmy? Right? That whole meme. But on a serious note, when that is accelerating, the amount that’s continuing to be clawed away from individuals, and you combine that with the idea that most don’t understand that they’re, that it’s being clawed away at an accelerative pace through debasement of, of the currency.

[00:57:39] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:58:03] Preston Pysh: Because I’m going to be stolen from through the night into tomorrow. And so at a very core and fundamental level is 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.

[00:58:25] Preston Pysh: 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.

[00:58:47] Jimmy Song: It’s interesting that you frame it as like excess energy. Cause 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 multiple jobs. Yeah, and you know, 30, 40 years ago, you had maybe one parent at work. Well, that means you have more energy, more savings and things like that to afford more children.

[00:59:13] Jimmy Song: A lot of the money has gone into real estate. So if you wanted to have, you know, 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 has gotten gotten into housing. So you can’t afford the things that you need.

[00:59:35] Jimmy Song: 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 in price tremendously, making it less affordable. And you know, there it’s, 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 know, 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.

[01:00:16] Jimmy Song: 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.

[01:00:32] Preston Pysh: So, for folks listening, here’s the book, Fiat Ruins Everything by Jimmy Song.

[01:00:37] Preston Pysh: He also has other books one that I particularly like as an engineer, Programming Bitcoin is another one. He has Bitcoin and the American Dream, The Little Bitcoin Book. You’re quite the writer, Jimmy, I love this, but we’ll have links in the show notes for people that want to check out the book.

[01:00:55] Preston Pysh: Jimmy, anything else you want to highlight?

[01:00:58] Jimmy Song: I am doing a crowdfund for Fiat Ruins everything up until September 6th. If you’re listening to it before then, it’s you know, fiat ruins everything.com and you can go and support my work on, on, on this stuff. And, Yeah, hopefully I get to write more books. Maybe, maybe one with you someday, Preston.

[01:01:17] Preston Pysh: You know, I hate writing, Jimmy. I hate it.

[01:01:24] Preston Pysh: All right. Thank you so much for making time, Jimmy. This was a real pleasure chatting with you.

[01:01:29] Jimmy Song: Thank you, Preston.

[01:01:31] Preston Pysh: 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 it 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 algorithm.

[01:01:55] Preston Pysh: 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.

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