and we are live episode 23 of to the unknown pod it is we are glad to have you here my name is
jordan bush i'm the executive director of tgfb media which exists to help christians understand
and use bitcoin for the glory of god and the good of people everywhere today we are joined
by a couple fine mountainous presby's who i will allow to introduce themselves now
I'm Tim Fox
Executive Director
of the Magnolia Foundation
working on Orange Pilling the Church
and I'm Jim McAndrew
at Magnolia with Tim
I'm also an entrepreneur
and run a
little software company
called DroneLink
and we are here
for episode 23
can you believe it
guys
23 episodes
we're missing Oshawa
our Portland bound friend
who knows what he's doing
something along the lines
of celebrating
his daughter's birthday
he's getting ice cream
or something
again
And these guys who we're working with have way too good priorities.
So we are here, though, to discuss boomers ruin everything.
This is not a statement.
This is a question.
There's been a lot of activity, a lot of energy, a lot of hostility on the Twitter webs.
I almost said en cuanto de, because my mind went to Spanish.
as it relates to the boomers
and their role in the economy being in the state that it's in
and their role in politics being in the situation that it's in.
So what we want to do is we kind of want to examine this claim.
Is it really just so neat and clean
that we can just blame everything wrong with the world on boomers?
That certainly is a take.
So we're going to start basically to kind of prime the pump on this discussion.
We want to look at Charlie Kirk, not a friend of the program, would be open to being friends
with Charlie should he be interested.
Would love to have him on and chat about these things more.
But he went on this other tiny little podcast called Tucker Carlson's Podcast.
And he just talks about this little rant about the boomers.
And he's calling them repulsive.
So let's just watch the first 40 seconds or so of this and see what he has to say here.
let me share this
and here we go
of course this takes way longer
it's like this inherent contradiction
we're super wealthy on one side
like a powerhouse juggernaut
and we are like an economic
nightmare on the other side
how did that happen?
answer
the wealth went to older people
at the expense
of the next generation
that's for sure
Every single economic growth decision of the last 30 years has been made.
I am going to benefit.
My baby boomer generation is going to benefit.
And I don't care if it hurts young people.
And I'm not anti-boomer.
I get negative hate mail all the time because the boomers are super protective to their generation.
As if I'm like attacking Presbyterians or something.
They're repulsive.
They've always been repulsive.
And I grew up in a world.
I was born in 1969.
The baby boom ended in 1965.
That's basically it.
Okay.
Well, let me just finish this.
I want to hear it.
I'm over 64.
or whatever.
It was just a post-war generation
and in the mid-60s.
I'm not a boomer.
Thank heaven.
My father was not a boomer.
He was born in 1941.
Totally different attitudes, right?
He was born before the Second World War.
All right.
We'll just stop there.
Wow.
That got elevated,
or that,
what's the phrase?
That elevated quickly?
Yeah, escalated quickly.
Escalated, that's the word.
Yeah, that escalated quickly.
What do we think about this, guys?
We'll let Tim,
noted a giver of the measured takes.
We'll let Tim give his opinion first here.
Yeah, I mean,
it's a simplistic diagnosis
of a very serious problem.
You know, it's the boomers.
It's just because boomers got rich.
And it's like, well, that's true,
I think, of a lot of people,
but there's a lot of boomers
who did not benefit
from the economic system
that we've had,
you know, the military political system
we've had the last 50 years.
There's a lot of boomers
who suffered and are suffering
under it who have overdosed on opioids or whatever, committed suicide. And it's like,
I don't know, I'm a millennial and I like to bemoan my own generation. I mean, there's almost
nothing more human than bemoaning how bad things are and how much better it used to be. And there's
nothing really new about that. But yeah, I don't know. Sometimes it's like, well, as much as there's
a lot of things I don't like about millennials, it's like, well, who raised them? All the boomers.
Um, but also it's like the boomers didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, this isn't like, oh, you know, we, we went on the, the, uh, fiat standard in 1971. And before that, everything was wonderful and everything was great. Well, no, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on philosophically and culturally and politically and theologically way before that, you know, decades and decades, arguably centuries before that.
And so, I don't know, it's easy to blame them. I get a little worried sometimes about kind of resentment and envy and kind of looking for other people to blame. But yeah, that's not to say there are a lot of issues and a lot of problems.
um uh Aaron Wren recently has been talking in some of his newsletters about kind of boomer
mentality and basically saying stop blinding so much about the boomers and how much cultural power
they've had learn to be more like the boomers and one of the characteristics of the boomers is they
didn't care uh what people before them thought they were willing to buck the trends and he's
saying this about evangelical boomers and he had one the other day where he's talking about kind of
evangelical complementarian theology about men and women and gender roles.
You know, they explicitly said, John Piper and Wayne Grudem explicitly said in their
book about complementarianism that we're rejecting traditional Christian patriarchy.
We're doing something new and something different.
And one of Aaron Wren's points, and this may go with what Charlie Kirk is saying, is he
said, now when you come around and you criticize the boomers like they did to the generations
before them, they get really uptight and really defensive and say, well, you can't
criticize us.
You know, this is just the way things are.
And so Aaron Ryan is saying we need to be the same way towards the boomers that they were towards generations that came before them.
But also, too, I think part of his point is don't be so stressed out and so resentful and try to blame everybody else.
You can just do things.
You can try new things.
Go for it, Jim.
I mean, my take is I don't think millennials or Gen Z or any other generation having been born at that same time frame would have been any different.
So that doesn't make any sense just at face value.
But then also as Bitcoiners, and again, I'm not saying fiat is the problem behind everything.
Obviously, the real problem behind everything is our sin nature.
But fiat just makes it that much easier for us to give ourselves over to our sin nature.
and yeah, if the boomers are in charge of the big red button
that lets them print and they're the asset owners,
then of course they're going to be the biggest beneficiaries.
And we would have been had we been born at the same time.
And so to me, this is just classic
blaming kind of the symptom as opposed to the disease.
The disease is fiat.
The symptom is like the class and generational warfare
that fiat causes, right?
And so they want us to blame each other.
They want the generations to be mad at each other because it keeps us mad at each other instead of mad at the people that are pressing the red button.
Who's they, Jim?
Who is this they?
It's the shadowy people behind the curtain that are causing the money printing to occur.
The man, yeah.
But having said all of that, this is just setting up the very next thing, okay?
So what's interesting about millennials, and maybe it's a little bit more true of millennials than even Gen X because Gen X had enough of a foot kind of in the old world that they can't quite wrap their head around Bitcoin.
But millennial is kind of in this Goldilocks zone where we are digital natives enough to be able to understand Bitcoin, but we're old enough to actually have a few assets to our names.
And I'm not saying all millennials do. Yes, there's a lot of millennials that can't afford to buy a house and things like that. But there are certain millennials that understand Bitcoin and have enough money to put into it. And if Bitcoin ends up becoming the new monetary standard, that set of millennials is going to become fabulously wealthy. And the Gen Zers and below after them are going to look up to the millennials with the same level, if not more resentment than we currently look up to the boomers with.
And so if you dish it, get ready to take it.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so many scriptures we could quote, you know, again, this is one of the
things that I wanted to bring up was just with the measure that you use to judge others,
what God will use to judge you.
Like this is, this is something that, you know, a principle that's, that's talked about.
And again, yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing, Jim.
Like there, there is absolutely no part of me that in any way thinks that if the, if the
millennials were in the situation where they're presented with the choice to push the button and
get bailed out, to push the button and get all the benefits of this, that they would do anything
different. Because like real, really, if we're going to get down to the disease, the disease
is a disease of me. It's a disease for short-term, you know, convenience to, you know, immediate
convenience to you, everyone else be damned, everyone else's consequences be damned. And this
is really an infantile way of looking at the world. Like this is, there are ways in which,
you know, we're commended and commended to be like children. You know, Jesus says, unless you
become like a child, you can't inherit the kingdom. So like there are ways in which we ought to aspire
to child likeness, but this type of child likeness is not that. This type of, you know, again,
like blaming everyone else for your problems, refusing to take responsibility, refusing to,
I mean, even just be able to consider
if there's actually truth in some of the criticisms
that are being levied against them.
So I think that's one thing.
The other thing that I would want to say,
and again, maybe we can just kind of,
maybe I'll just wait.
I'll wait to bring that up.
Well, I was going to say,
if you play the clip a little bit further,
not that we have to,
but Tucker kind of makes this assertion
that the Boomers are uniquely selfish as a generation.
And again, I think that it's a little bit relative
here, right? Because it's a question of like what type of selfishness. I think the boomers grew up
in this world where it was like 1960s mad men and everybody was targeting selling to the boomers
because they were the biggest generation. So they had to, all the products and services had to be
tailored towards that because that's where the whole population was. And so boomers kind of got
this big ego about themselves and thought that everybody should be servicing them. And there is
a type of selfishness to that. But I mean, look at our generation and below. We're sitting here
posting TikToks and everybody wants to be TikTok famous and they're posting selfies of themselves.
I mean, our generations are just as self-absorbed. It's just, we don't have the stuff to be self-absorbed
with ourselves with. We do and we don't, right? Because again, you just referenced the fact that
people are able to make livings literally just hanging out on the phone all day and like
recording themselves doing banal tasks like that.
You know, it really is.
I mean, there is a truthfulness.
There is a truthfulness to like the generational trust fund kid thing
that, you know, is true of the boomers to a degree.
Like that is true.
I do want to raise, I think Mark Moss shared this tweet.
Let me see if I can find it.
Yeah, it was in response to the...
Yeah.
I think this is again helpful to keep our, you know, pump the brakes here.
Yeah, boomers had it easy.
Can you make that a little bigger?
Yeah, there you go.
Boomers had it easy
except for being drafted
to the Vietnam Wars,
fears of Cold War
and nuclear fallout,
civil unrest
of the civil rights movements,
gas and food shortages
in the 70s,
and globalization came online
and took jobs.
But they had it easy
because, sure,
money printing inflation
pushed asset prices so high.
And what do you think
people continue...
And what do people think
will continue to happen
for the next 10 to 20 years
when presumably the boomers
are out of the way?
Yeah, I think this is
a fair criticism
and again, there are grievance merchants.
There are people who,
for the sake of building up their YouTube channels
or selling books
or pumping their own personal brands,
are going and are just shilling grievances,
trying to convince people
to rally around them as thought leaders or whatever.
And so you ought to be suspicious.
You ought to be suspicious
when you hear somebody saying things that sounds good,
that makes you feel good.
you ought to be asking yourself, why, why are they,
why are they doing this?
You know, what do they have to gain from saying these things?
It doesn't even mean that necessarily they're not true,
but like, what do they have to gain by,
by peddling what they're peddling?
And so yeah this this type of thing again these guys are I would imagine two of the I mean based on what I know two of the better actors all things considered But still this is like catnip for a lot of people
And, you know, calling them, whatever Tucker said, they're despicable.
Like, I don't know, man.
Yeah.
So for when my dad watches this, this takes for you, dad.
I think, you know, having boomer parents, my parents were some of the most generous, selfless, Christ-fearing, God-honoring people that I know.
So this one's for you, Dad.
Well, amen.
Like, I think that's a really, yeah, again, it's drawing, painting with a broad brush in this particular case, I feel like is specifically not helpful.
The other issue, let's see how far are we in.
Yeah, we're 15 minutes in, good.
But the other, okay, so the other thing I think that this, the other topic that we could talk about in this context, and Tim, that I'd love to kind of get your perspective on specifically, because like one of the things that I'm thinking about here is just the relationship of like federal headship.
Okay, this is a big, it's a big topic in like reform circles, you know, like people talk about this and it, but I really do think in this particular case, it's, it really is, it's germane.
It's something that we ought to talk about because, yes, there is a sense in which the baby boomers have benefited.
But at the end of the day, the levers that were pulled that made these policies happen.
I mean, you're talking about a couple key levers that were enacted or a couple of policies that were passed that literally did the lion's share of the work.
for producing the end result that we see here. So I'm thinking of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913,
which is before the baby boomers. We can't quite pin that one on them. But when that thing goes
down, you have a handful of people who are behind it saying, we want to do this. Then you have,
obviously, the people who are in Congress or Senate, whatever, who actually vote on this
thing and pass it. But so much of what we see is just baked into the cake that the ingredients were
mixed back in 1913. And so at the end of the day, it's just like, what were they actually going to
do? Like what were baby boomers actually going to do that was going to meaningfully change much of
what's going on? I don't think there's really a ton, to be honest. Yeah. And it's, we were talking
before we hit record about, you know, these couple of verses in Ezekiel 18, Jeremiah 31, where God is
kind of chastising the Israelites as they have gone off into exile after many centuries of
accumulated rebellion and disobedience against God. And God finally says, that's it. You're going
into exile like I promised. And so at the time, you know, the Israelites are suffering for all
kinds of things that their ancestors have done in many ways. And so they start saying this proverb,
they say, well, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge.
They're all resentful towards what their fathers did wrong. And we have to suffer the consequences.
and in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, God says, hey, stop saying that. No one's allowed to say this
anymore. He says, everyone's going to die for their own sins. This is how it works.
And part of the point is that you children today suffering the exile who want to blame your
ancestors for what's happening to you, you have plenty of sin to go around and you have no excuse
to say, well, I'm innocent. I don't deserve any of this. On the other hand, there is a
complimentary point that scripture makes about how humans are all in the same boat. We are in
Adam's boat. And when Adam sinned, everybody sinned. And because Adam rebelled against God,
we are all born sinful and we all suffer because of it. And a lot of people don't like that about
Christianity. They don't like that about scripture. That's offensive to a lot of people.
But it's like Chesterton said, this is one of the most obvious things of Christian theology
out there, you read this in the newspaper every day, why are people so messed up from such a young
age? Why do we all have this bent towards really terrible things? And so, yeah, there is this
element of you suffer because of what your ancestors did, especially Adam. And God, there's
elements of that too, and kind of, you know, say closer to our own day, God says in Deuteronomy,
he punishes sin to the third and fourth generation. You know, does that mean that I'm
being innocently punished because of what my great-grandparents did? No. It means that sin
has lots of consequences that last for many generations, and we all know that, and we all
see that in our own families and in our own family stories. You see these things percolate
down through the generations and get repeated. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's...
Bavik has this great part, he's a theologian I like a lot, where he's talking about this doctrine
of original sin, that we inherit Adam's guilt, and he's talking about how, this is 100 years
ago. He's saying, yeah, people don't like this. They get offended by this. And so he says,
you know, we have no problem with inheriting good things from our ancestors and from our parents.
He says, we don't care if they want to give us money. We don't care if we pick up their talents.
We don't care if we have a house to live in. We have a great family. But when it comes to
things like guilt and sin and suffering, we say, oh, you know, it's so unjust, so unrighteous. How
dare they pass this on to me and bobbing says it's just as unrighteous and unjust for them to
give you good things as to give you bad things and you have no right to complain about that stuff but
happily take the good stuff and you know i'm sure a lot of millennials will be very happy to take
lots of things from their boomer parents and inherit lots of money no um but you know have you
have you earned that any more than you haven't earned the other stuff so i don't know i think
you gotta be careful.
It's a double-edged sword.
It cuts both ways.
Yeah.
Brings to mind Job 2.10,
or Job's wife's,
you know, Job endures
the loss of all these things,
loss of kids,
loss of wealth,
loss of animals,
all this kind of stuff.
And his wife basically tells him
to curse God and die.
And he says to her,
you speak as one of the foolish women.
Shall we accept good from God
and not trouble?
I think that's kind of
what you're getting at.
The other one that came to mind,
the other verse is Ecclesiastes 7.10,
where he basically says,
do not say why were the old days better than these for it's not wise to ask such questions.
And basically it's an oversimplification to act like, oh, you know, the past was so much better
than the situation we find ourselves in now. And that was written thousands of years ago.
The same temptation was faced by other people. And I think that's a big part of, I mean,
there's a hundred senses in which that's true where, you know, there's another verse in the
Old Testament where it talks about, God says, my people perish for lack of knowledge. I think,
I mean, in the ones, on the one hand, modern people, whether they're boomers, millennial,
whatever, like we have access to more information than anybody has ever had in the history of the
world. And yet that proximity has not, you know, resulted in us actually being smarter or wiser
people necessarily. We actually are very ignorant of the way that things have worked throughout time.
you know just you know there's a hundred ways in which we don't see the world accurately we we we
think that so many of these problems that we're facing like uh the the differences between
generations like as if this is something novel as if this is something new uniquely where we're
uniquely to be pitied uh in in uniquely in a position to lament our situation uh in a way that
that other people weren't like it's just laughable it's it's genuinely ridiculous uh by any kind of
historical measure to act like we're,
we have a worst situation and we have the worst situation ever.
It's bonkers.
Just absolutely insane.
Tim's coming back.
He's just doing that dad thing.
Yeah.
I don't know if you guys saw the little hit a little ham.
We can go to the next one though.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's keep going here.
Let's see.
This is Martin's scold.
We'll see how scolding Martin is towards.
Here we go.
All right.
So Eigenrobot has this to say,
do boomers realize they're still mostly going to be alive
when we soft default in like five to 15 years?
Thinking about this a lot lately.
What's their strategy here?
Oh, shoot.
Let's go back.
Oh, no.
Do not get whatever this card is.
This is not an endorsement.
Not a paid ad.
most don't have a plan, but the ones who realize it are dimly aware that A, their benefits mostly
track inflation via cost of living, negotiated Medicare fees, et cetera. Inflation drives stock
and real estate up. Jim. Yeah, exactly. That is the plan. The plan has been the same as it was
for the last 50 years. They're just going to keep printing money and their asset prices are going to
keep pumping so like we've been soft defaulting ever since at least 1971 but like you said all
the way back to 1913 yeah so that that is the plan inflation is the plan yeah and continuing
to hold scarce assets is the plan and even if those assets don't perform as well as something
like bitcoin they're still going to perform better than the you know more and more uh debasing dollar
So they're going to be the most.
Yeah, I guess maybe the question here is when he says five to 15 years, is he saying this is the suddenly part of gradually then suddenly?
Because other takes like Pierre Oshar will say that this is probably, I mean, he's famously kind of said when he first kind of learned about Bitcoin and got into it in 2013, he was like, oh, we're like, we're six months out.
like hyper-Bitcoinization is like six months out.
And now he's kind of like,
no, it's probably more like six decades out, you know?
Yeah, that is how it goes.
Immunitizing the economic eschaton
and destruction of the United States.
Like that, if there's maybe people
who don't understand that phrase.
So immunitizing the eschaton is basically,
you're saying, hey, the end of the world
is happening in my time.
Basically every generation.
thinks that the end of the world is happening in their time at some point or another.
You know, you have like World War II, they go through the Holocaust, like all these different
things. They go through watching more people die in the span of five years than have ever died in
history of humanity. And so they think that the end is the year. There was tons of fervor about
that. And, you know, the same, a similar point could be made about Bitcoin in terms of just the
more limited scope of the decline of the, you know, the global fiat monopolies all over the
world. It seems like, man, you see their doom is sure. And so you're just, you're like, well,
I mean, I get this right now. So surely everyone is going to wake up to this reality within the
next six months or the next four years or 15 years, whatever it is. And in reality,
it generally speaking takes a lot longer than that for these things to roll over just because
of the sheer scale and a whole lot of the factors. I remember reading Rich Dad Poor Dad's
prophecy book that was all about the boomers starting to retire in 2012. And so therefore,
the massive amount of drawdown that was going to happen from them taking their retirement funds and
living off of them was going to cause a massive crash. And it just hasn't happened. Right?
Like they just, the Fed's not going to let it happen, essentially. They're just going to print
money until the cows come home to prop everything up. Yeah. Yeah. And again, you don't have to sell
all your stuff at once. You can just continue to take out, you know, like every month, just take
out some and you know leave the vast majority of your you know your your dragon treasure hoard uh
you know there in assets and you know stocks i just i think it's pretty clear that at this point
given what happened in 2008 and what happened in covid and even just like minor things like
trump's tariffs the tariff tantrum and then the flash crash in april and then it just comes right
back in it's like we're we're in a new basically since 2008 we're in a new monetary order where
it's like the fed just says we're just gonna go money printer burr on anything because you cannot
let the prices deflate i mean this is jeff booth's whole deal which if you haven't watched his latest
uh episode on what bitcoin did it's i mean it's not anything new if you've read his book and stuff
like that, but it's basically just like we live in an inflationary economy. And if, if any deflation
at all happens, the whole thing falls apart. And so they, and they know that and they, they won't
let it happen. They'll just, you know, I, so I guess in defense of this original tweet, this is
the soft default. Yeah. Yeah. There you, you can't taper a Ponzi to quote one of our own profits.
This is one of these things you can't.
They can't slow this thing down.
To quote Lynn Alden, nothing stops this train.
Another one of our profits.
Yeah, this is just something that you can't.
They can't.
This is why, I mean, this affects interest policy.
All these things that Trump wants to do,
he looking at it from one standpoint Oh we gonna drop interest rates to 1 or 2 whatever it is It just like no that not going to fix everything There is no easy fix
at this stage of the game.
It's not going to happen.
Well, yeah.
And so it's like,
somehow we're strange bedfellas
with Jerome Powell now.
It's like,
I don't know what I'm rooting for anymore.
It's like,
I hate inflation.
And so, yeah,
it's like,
I want the rates to stay high,
but then I'm also a Bitcoiner,
so I want the money printer to go burn.
and I'm just like...
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the big short meme
where it's like pumped
that they locked in these shorts
on these things on the housing market.
They shorted like the A tranches
and they're going to make
even more money than anybody else.
And like Brad Pitt,
who's Ben Rickert,
just basically said,
they're like jumping around
and he's like,
stop, what is this?
Like stop clapping
or stop being happy
or something like that.
He's like, basically,
if you're right,
everyone suffers.
Everybody else is going to be in an awful situation
if you're right, which we think you're right.
Stop celebrating,
I think is what he says.
And I just think, yeah, we're just in a situation
where
none of this stuff is going to be as
due to the rate
of inflation, all this kind of stuff. I'm just
looking at this like, are people due to the speed,
due to a hundred other things?
There's part of me that really just thinks
people, even like the strongest Bitcoiners are going to have to sell some of their Bitcoin sooner
than they're thinking because of how bad things can get, uh, you know, pretty quickly with,
with inflation, especially in like the last, the last few stages of it. Um, so, uh, let's see what
else we have here. We've got the Kobe, the Kobe, Kobe EC letter. Let's see what they have to say.
Let me share this here. Our next tweet. Boom. I'll let you read this one, Jim.
make it a little bigger yeah jim got them old man eyes here we go all right this is uh
more kind of m2 money supply porn uh u.s m2 money supply surged 4.5 percent year over year in june
to a record 22 trillion this marks the 20th consecutive monthly increase so if you scroll
down it just kind of shows uh what happened at the pandemic where you know we've got the money
supply increasing kind of it looks like a linear rate and then there's an inflection point and it
just almost goes straight up during covid tapers off a little bit kind of in 2022 and then it
actually contracts during 24 25 interestingly bitcoin is still going up during that time frame
and now the money supply is kind of going back up at a similar rate to what looks like was before
the pandemic which was still also bad yeah so yeah uh and then there's a there's another tweet
that i just that this is classic tweet the next one that i posted in the chat which is just the
overlay of the bitcoin chart and m2 money supply yeah so it predicts we're supposed to be at 150
right now yeah it is not a mystery i'm looking for the chat here tim's back i'll let him tell
tell us why if he chooses to
what he just had to go deal with.
Speaking of
apocalyptic happenings,
I'm back.
Are your hands clean?
The children were eating sour grapes and the father's
teeth were set on edge.
My hands are not clean.
And your Proverbs 31 wife
is out busy.
Yeah.
She's great.
Doing Proverbs 31 activities.
Let's go.
Based.
Where is this?
tweet you said Jim?
It was next in the signal chat
I think.
It's a SimplyBitcoin.
SimplyBitcoin.
Let me see this one here.
There's Vivek first and then
SimplyBitcoin after that one.
Here we go. We'll do Vivek first.
Share this Devastate. Boom.
People have probably been seeing this going around.
Apparently Grok4
Heavy, the best model out there,
blah, blah, blah, says that
we're supposed to hit $400,000 Bitcoin by November 2nd, 2025.
And then if you pull up the Simply Bitcoin M2 BTC overlay chart.
Do I have that one?
Where's that one?
It's right after this one.
Did I miss it?
Let's see here.
This is horoscopes for Bitcoiners.
Exactly.
Yep.
Here it is.
It says, yep.
Coming at you.
give us a give us a uh preview jim here we go yep so classic just they they offset the chart by
10 weeks or whatever it is um and it makes it look like 100 correlation and i guess this of
course this thing is saying yes we zoom in there should be more like 160 165 by november grok is
disagreeing. Grok is more bullish.
Which,
yeah, and this is one of these things where people are like,
oh, this is why Bitcoin,
it has nothing to do, Bitcoin's not actually
growing, it's literally just monetary supply.
And it's like, yeah, there's a sense in which
a lot of it is monetary supply.
But again, there still is real adoption
going on as well
that also will affect
this, I think, more as time goes on,
as more people get into it.
My take on all this would be to
just zoom out,
stop staring at your screen.
Any sort of short-term price prediction,
even months or a year out or something,
is just, nobody knows.
But we do know that the broad context,
based on what we were talking about
on the previous topic,
is that they're going to print.
They have to print.
They can't let it collapse.
And so when you start talking about
five and 10-year timeframes,
we know it's going up.
If you want to predict six months out,
anybody's guess.
Yeah.
You could tell me anything. You could literally tell me Coinbase collapsed, Coinbase holding a disgusting percentage of the Bitcoin held by a lot of these treasury companies, including MicroStrategy and other guys. You could tell me that something happened to them and we went into a six-month absolute devastating bear market. Sure, I could believe it.
you could tell me we had two Saudi birthdays.
They all aped into a trillion dollars
of the Bitcoin each.
And now we're at a million dollar Bitcoin in a month.
Like I'd believe any of it,
just given the state that we're in
and the incentives in play.
Yeah, Jordan's the guy on the roller coaster
that's looking back with a deadpan look
as the roller coaster is just...
That's right.
I literally, so I mean, I tell people this
and they don't believe me,
but like, I'm trying to think,
can you, I'm trying to think what you can see here.
Stop sharing.
Can you guys see,
I don't know if you guys can see my, so I've got my, my Tron or my Block Tron over here,
uh, courtesy of our friend of the program, uh, Chester, Chester Ney, uh, the, um, what's his
name? Ginger Sherpa on Twitter. He basically has this thing. It's similar to like a block clock.
It's great. But literally the only reason that I checked the Bitcoin price is when I walk into my
office and see that there. Like I, I just, I literally don't look at the, don't look at the
price. Uh, you know, we, we got other stuff here we're doing. And so, yeah, I just really encourage
you like i mean if it's something where you just find yourself checking the price on take it off
your phone like just you know it really is one of these things where i have never been served
by by looking at the price it's only served to you know during there's been periods where i have
looked at it more and it really just it just doesn't help doesn't help me focus on the things
that i need to be focusing on so um oh are you still there tim i'm here yes he's there oh no
did we lose Jim?
I'm back.
Okay.
All right.
Jeff was actually making this point
and what Bitcoin did
that he dropped was like,
there's kind of three phases of,
or people,
there's like the no coiners,
there's Bitcoiners,
but they still check the price all the time.
So they're like,
they have this cognitive dissonance
because they're living in both systems.
And then there's the Bitcoiners
that have sort of reached the escape velocity
and they're using Bitcoin as a unit of account.
and it's like once you kind of get to that level,
you realize that the price doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, obviously, while the current system is still in place,
if you want to buy a house
or if you want to go do something with it,
but generally the people that are checking the price all the time
are people that are going to take some profits off the table,
which obviously when you get to phase three doesn't really make sense
because it's like, what are you going to take profits in?
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's, I mean, the other thing that affects that
and a friend of the program, American Huddle,
has also talked a lot about this,
is you get to the point where,
I mean, if you're like two cycles in,
if you're more than one cycle in,
the reality that you have bought,
you have very likely bought more Bitcoin
than you'll ever be able to buy in the future.
Like you just get to the point where that's the reality.
Like your initial buys,
you'll never get anything close to them
unless you found some crazy company
that is growing exponentially.
If you found the next NVIDIA or something like that,
then sure, you might be able to do that
or some other successful business.
Like that's possible.
But for the vast majority of people,
after a cycle or definitely after two cycles,
you're not gonna be getting a meaningful amount more Bitcoin.
It's just not gonna happen.
And so like that also plays into this effect as well.
You know, there's like a moral danger there
that I've noticed
because when you do your initial buys,
you're usually not as maxi as you will be.
And so you're buying like smaller amounts
And then by the time you become more maxi, it's like you want to buy more of the thing, but you can actually only afford to buy less.
And so it's just like, yeah, it's not good for the soul.
It is.
I mean, it's this happens in a lot of ways, too.
Right.
You see older people.
You can do this with time.
Like if time is think about time as a currency.
The people like when you're young, you just you just do whatever you want.
You waste time.
You do all kinds of stuff.
And then when you get old, you get older.
You just realize, oh, my gosh, where did the time go?
I could have done these things.
I could have done all this kind of stuff.
And you just realize that, you know,
you realize how, I mean, just how incredible
and what an opportunity you had
at different points of your life.
And so, yeah, I think it is a sobering thing
that ought to, you know, spur us on.
You can think about with your kids,
time with your kids.
Yeah.
I do want to shill Chester's product though.
He's making more of them.
And it is a really cool product.
So you should go and support him.
I think it's blocktron.io.
That's what it is.
Let's check it out.
we'll pull it up here on the,
uh,
let's see.
It's a kind of got an eighties vibe to it.
It's pretty cool looking.
Yeah.
Let's try this.
Boom.
Yeah.
So,
uh,
Jim,
so Chester made like a founder's edition and Jim grabbed one of those.
Jim,
what number did you get of the,
uh,
the founder's edition?
Uh,
it's hard to remember.
Um,
I may have gotten number one.
He was literally at the,
thank God for Bitcoin barbecue over there,
vibe coding it and i walked up and i was like what's what's going on he's explained the project
to me and stuff and i was like oh can i buy one so i just got lucky he walked up and jess was like
sure you can buy one and he's like what number do you want and he goes can i have number one
and jess was like sure i think there was actually a zero so i wish i had gotten zero because i'm a
computer science guy all computer science is zero based indexing but anyways uh that's actually
ties in since we're talking about vibe coding if you want to bring up the my vibe code tweet
oh yeah let me see that uh so yeah go check these out i don't think there's any available right now
but there there will be he's he's making more yeah so so good to do that um i believe like the
regular he's got i see this is the one that i wanted he's there's one in each of the pub key
bars there's one in new york city that's that was the original one it's a bigger one and then
they're gonna have one i think he made another one already for for the swamp key which is the
the pub key bar in,
in DC that's going to be opening soon.
Uh,
but go check those out.
Keep your eyes peeled.
Do you know when that's opening?
It's,
it's not super long.
I don't,
I maybe ended a year or something.
I wonder if it's going to be before the conference.
We should tell Ben.
Also the videographer in me is dying.
Jordan's head is cut off and Tim,
you're off to the right.
All right.
Is that better?
It's,
it's helping my autism,
but you guys were not,
we need to be lined up.
And this happened to me the other day to you.
It's, we're just still, right?
I'm going to go crazy.
Your vibe coding tweet.
Yeah, Jim, Jim, notorious hater of vibe coding.
Jim, you gave it a whirl the other week.
Yeah.
And you tried to, what was it you actually tried to do?
So I was trying to vibe code up.
There's been a couple of big feature requests on our backlog for like years that I've never gone for.
One of them was doing like terrain follow.
So the drone actually measures its altitude above the ground with a barometric sensor.
And so it only knows how high it is, but where it took off from.
It not like it got a laser that points down and figures out its altitude So what you do is you get like a digital elevation model that has the relative altitudes of the ground above sea level And so what people want
to do is they want to provide their own elevation models because the ones that we have by default
aren't the most accurate in every single area. So I subscribed to Supergrok4 whatever blah blah blah
and OpenAI codecs.
And my goal was to just say,
hey, I want to add
digital elevation model file import
for these formats.
And I want you to just go update
all the code that you need to update
to make that happen
and allow the user to like
add and remove the file.
And it was just like
a super high level request.
Don't tell us any information yet.
Don't tell us how it went
because we want to share the tweet.
Jim, so here we are reporting back.
How are things going
with this thing here,
with Jim's experiment.
He shared a tweet about it.
Let's get this.
And here it is.
Happy to report that both AIs were an epic failure.
Humans are safe for now.
Yeah, and then Cole says that.
And then Cole, part of the program,
Cole, shout out to Cole.
One of the great upcoming tweeters
of modern times,
a poor workman blames his tools.
Absolutely.
fantastic what a tweet so i guess what he's saying is i'm not a great prompt engineer
uh so touche i i i guess if i really wanted to lean into it was work though
yeah well okay so here's here's like the measured take between those two so uh if i was willing to
sit down and break the problem down further and use the ai as hey i want you to code this part of
this feature or I coded this up can you check it for errors or hey can you just read this file
format it probably would have gotten me 90% of the way there on some of those things and so yes
I think that if you're a software engineer and you're not using AI you are selling yourself short
and unfortunately there's sort of a prisoner's dilemma here right and so if you don't do it it's
like the other person is going to do it. And so I think you do have to use AI in software
engineering right now. But it's not to the point where it can do high level features that span
multiple repositories on GitHub, and it can just figure out all the details. You kind of have to
sit there and massage it. And so I think I probably would have had to spend like a week
going back and forth and doing prompt engineering
and copying the code and verifying it
and all that kind of stuff.
Whereas the feature on my own without AI
probably would take a month.
And so, yes, a week is better than a month,
but a week is still a large amount of time
that I don't have.
So until it gets there, I'm not doing it.
Yeah.
So again, that has been,
Jim complains about AI Corner.
It's one of our favorite recurring segments
of the podcast.
Anybody else?
I'm trying to think,
do we have any other ones?
Well, I was talking with Tim about this.
Tim, I don't know if you want to chime in,
but just this idea that my generation
might be the last generation
of actual software developers.
Because again, we're like in this Goldilocks zone
where I've got 20 years
of software development experience.
So I am best positioned to be able
to take advantage of the tools as they are now.
But then in the future,
with kids that are like graduating,
right now, they are AI natives.
And so they never, like,
they're never going to have the ability
because you have to use AI to keep up, right?
And so they're never going to have the ability
to spend two decades learning a craft.
And so, and 20 years from now,
there's not going to be anybody like me
that knows how to code.
All they're going to know how to do is prompt engineer.
Now, you can make the argument,
it doesn't matter because by then the AI is going to be so good
that like nobody's going to be prompt engineering anyways.
They're just going to be having whims
and saying, oh, I just,
I want to have this app that does this thing.
And like, that's enough.
Like it could somehow figure it out.
But I don't know.
I think the jury's out on that one.
And I think we're losing something.
And it's not just in software development.
I think it's across the board.
And I think people are just,
this whole idea of outsourcing your intelligence
and all of your thoughts to the AI
and just having it spoon feed you everything.
Essentially, just think about like
your YouTube suggested videos
feed, but for everything in your life.
Correct.
There's a lot of people who are not going to have the, they're not going to want to deal
with the friction of fighting it.
So they're just going to go along with it and end up being, again, just there's so many,
so many ways this can go bad.
Let's check out our friend, Aubrey Strobel, who has a similar tweet that kind of brings
us full circle.
Aubrey Strobel, being a millennial is like taking the last copter out of man.
so yeah this brings up jim's jim's point about uh you know there's going to be the potential for
uh for a lot of you know generation alpha and these people coming behind to be just
super frustrated with the world that uh you know that that was that's given to them and
this could get exponentially worse if if that is the case uh so yeah be careful what you wish for
uh millennials because you just might get it what do you think tim do you think
AI people are just going to keep
outsourcing more and more of their cognition to it
or it's going to be a reverse trend like
millennials don't let their kids have access to
phones now
it will probably
be like
however many years you know I'm just old
enough to where smartphones were not really a thing
when I was in high school or even in college
they started coming out right after college
and it's like I'm really thankful
for that looking back you know I had a little stupid
flip phone that was really hard to text on
but you know i don't know it looks like what we've gone through 20 years of parents just handing
their kids ipads and smartphones and you know all kinds of carnage everywhere because of it
and maybe hopefully who knows i'm not sure you still see a lot of kids glued to ipads at restaurants
maybe people are being smart now and they're like okay maybe this wasn't such a good idea and we
should hold off and handing kids to smartphones social media so i don't know maybe we'll go
through something like that where you get through a couple decades of people like yeah what's the
big deal, no problem, and lots of damage done because of it, and people starting to say,
wait a minute, maybe we should be careful about how much we hand this stuff over.
I just read this tweet, Derek Thompson, I think he's a writer for The Atlantic.
He was talking to some, replying to somebody who was talking about, you know, this huge
problem now in college education, all of a sudden everybody's cheating like crazy.
You can't assign term papers anymore because kids just go home and cheat and use chat,
GPT to write their essays for him. But how do you learn anything if you don't go through all the
trouble of doing research and studying and writing? And his reply was, writing is not a second thing
that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing is thinking. Anyone
who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied
of thought. That's a good little phrase there and terrifying to think about. I don't know,
Maybe people have to learn the hard way why the liberal arts are called the liberal arts.
You know, not liberal in the sense of, you know, I'm going to go learn about Adam Smith or Hillary Clinton or something like that.
But liberal in the old, old, old sense of being a free person, not a slave.
The liberal arts are what you study when you have the luxury and the time and the wealth to think and to slow down.
And maybe we're going to be just turning ourselves more and more into slaves, if not actually mentally.
we won't know how to think anymore we don't won't know how to understand anything we won't know how
to tell stories we won't have stories to make sense of our lives and we will be no better than slaves
i can definitely uh corroborate that when it comes to programming there's different levels
of abstraction and you can like i can just be on an airplane for eight hours and dream up a feature
or something and think about the high level architecture but until i got a keyboard in
front of me can actually sling the code there's a different level of granularity and kind of detail
that you can start fleshing out when you're actually typing at the keyboard and seeing the
code come out in front of you um that just you can't there's no replacement you have to actually
go through the pain of writing it i think you're muted jordan yes thank you for that it is one of
these things where there is no shortcut. You, you have to die in order to like, you know,
like death or life comes from death. Like this is, this is what happened. Like this so much of,
I mean, there's a fantastic documentary about, uh, he's a farmer. It's like the lunatic farmer,
Joel Salatin, where he just basically talks about the way that God has designed the world to work
is things die. And then they basically turn into new, you know, they basically turn into compost
that basically helps other things grow out of their death.
And so this also applies with things like Jim is talking about.
God has designed it to where we labor,
we deny ourselves, we die to ourselves,
and we set our minds or our bodies on a task
and out of that death springs life.
And so I think that, yeah, this is to act like
and to think it would be desirable to escape thinking,
to be freed from thinking
is really just making yourself a slave to, you know, either wittingly and, you know,
you know who your enslavers are or just unwittingly, you're just becoming a mindless,
you know, a mindless drone. And this is, it brings up who's this, I believe it's GK Beal.
Is it Tim who wrote, you are what you worship? And so you have, yeah. And so you've got this,
I mean, I, I've had this, this, this realization of, you know, I'm on my phone and, you know,
I'm working on something and one of the kids is calling me and I'm, and I'm just like calling
or I'm like focused here. And then, uh, you know, basically they'll come over and like,
they'll just basically, Hey dad, can you come, you know, do this thing? And I'm like, Oh yeah,
sure. And so it's, it's literally like, it's so easy for us to become like these devices. Like
it's easy for me to become like a phone or become like a computer where you're like, I it's, you
can't hear. It's like when somebody comes up and touches your keys or pushes a button on you,
then you activate and then you're able. And so it's just like how much more as we kind of,
as these choices that we're making compound, it's just like, man, this can get to a really,
really dystopian and even more unsustainable situation than the one that we're in.
Again, the Lord is very kind though. We do have lots of examples of things getting to the point
where they're, you know, unsustainable
and the Lord just kind of pulls the plug.
So we've got Tower of Babel-like moments,
a number of them all throughout history.
And so this, you know,
is just comforting to think about
that even in the worst case,
God is still more committed to his own glory
and our good than we'll ever be committed to anything.
And so we can trust him to bring about
the required happenings to get us where
and a more sustainable path.
well i guess that was such a compelling point that no one has anything else to say
i'll give any of you guys any other tweets tim anything uh i know you had you guys you had
family in town this week any other uh things that impacted you on your end i came across this quote
uh again by wh out in uh 20th century poet um he said and this is related what we're just talking
about he said what fascinates and terrifies us about the roman empire is not that it finally
went smash, but that it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.
I mean, kind of a depressing thought, but you can go a long time kind of just surviving as a society
in a very dark kind of way without hope. And, you know, we hope and we pray that God brings light
into our world, most of all through the gospel, but also, you know, through his kindness and his
mercy through more general revelatory things like bitcoin through uh things turning around
socially and politically and culturally so that people suffer less but yeah it's sobering to
remember that these things can go badly for a long time i don't i can't think of a better note to end
on than uh be out and pilling yourself uh this is put put down your orange pills you've probably
taken plenty if you're watching this and go out and pill yourself uh tim jim appreciate you guys
grateful for your continued contributions in the Bitcoin space, having all kinds of fantastic
conversations with all kinds of interesting people all over the place. We look forward to,
again, we're trying to figure out a timing, like a rhythm for you guys that works. Things are
getting tricky. So we'll figure that out. We'll report back and we'll see you on episode 24
this coming Tuesday of To The Unknown Pod.
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