and we're live philip pilkington welcome to the thank god for bitcoin podcast
thanks for having me jordan good to be here i realize i'm sure this i mean did you ever imagine
you'd be on a podcast called thank god for bitcoin i'm sure it was on your butt your bucket list
uh and so we can knock one off today uh so for those for those who aren't familiar with your
with your work, Philip, why don't you just kind of give an overview of who you are and what you do?
Well, I guess by training, I'm an economist. I know you sent me a picture of my old book,
which is kind of creepy. That was a long time ago now. That was 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago,
I wrote that book. And so I was involved in the kind of, how would you put it, like the
critical economics movement after 2008,
rethinking economic theory and stuff like that.
And then after that, I went into finance, investment finance,
and I was there for nearly a decade working as basically a macro strategist
on a portfolio.
I lived in America for a while, in Boston and in London.
And since the past few years, I've been basically working in
interim policy.
I'm currently working in foreign affairs in Hungary.
I'm working for an international institute, so working on kind of geopolitical matters and so on.
But I've always been interested in philosophy and stuff like that.
It's always been a big interest of mine.
It doesn't pay the bills, unfortunately, most of the time.
Wait, wait, you're tilling minutes for the first time?
So, exactly.
So, yeah, I wrote this book, Collapse of Global Liberalism.
And it's, you know, there's economics in there as well, but there's a bit of political philosophy and stuff like that.
Been involved with the post-liberal thing for quite a while.
When American Affairs, the journal started, if you know it, Julius Krine and Gladden Papin started in 2016.
I was a pretty early contributor.
And, you know, I kind of hung around that circle, what developed into the post-liberal circle.
So I kind of like, I'm a bit of a known quantity, I'd say, you know, from the inception, but I only really started publishing under my own name on these issues the past couple of years, really.
Yeah. And so, okay, so this is your background, you know, you study, you're an economist, you kind of start working, you know, in all these different places in those capacities as an economist.
So what was kind of the impetus for the book on the Reformation and economics?
I know, I believe I remember you're, are you Roman Catholic?
yeah yeah yeah so i mean again i don't know if you meant to invoke the the reformation uh but
yeah i mean it was the first thing that having as someone who's thought about a lot about these
topics uh i was interested just from that basis so was that a little tongue-in-cheek or was that
totally accidental i probably wasn't as roman catholic when i wrote the book but i knew enough
about theological politics to think it was clever um i'd say protestants will actually
really appreciate the analysis. I mean, the idea was basically that the economics profession
was what the church was like when the Reformation happened, right? And I think even Roman Catholics
are allowed to admit that the church was in a pretty sorry state around the time of Luther
and Calvin and so on. And, you know, it was kind of, I actually don't agree with this
now, but it was, the Protestants made the claim that it was very intellectually flobby,
that it was just justifying things for no reason.
You know, it was justifying really corrupt practices in the church
and giving these, you know, really abstract theological reasons
for things that were obviously what we call grift nowadays.
And it seemed to me that the economics profession were doing that too,
especially after 2008.
I mean, basically what happened with me was
I was in college studying economics in Dublin,
and on the weekends I was showing houses, property.
My mother worked as a real estate agent,
as you guys say in America.
We call them auctioneers and all that.
And so I was in college studying economics
and they were telling us there was no housing bubble.
Of course, in Ireland,
there was the biggest housing bubble in world history.
And I was showing houses on the weekend
and I was like, this is clearly a,
like, I don't even know I'm a stupid 18 or 19 year old,
but I can tell this is a bubble
or there's something weird going on.
So when it all crashed,
I just thought this is complete nonsense.
How could these economists be teaching me all this rubbish
and then me seeing and being a stupid 18 or 19-year-old
not knowing anything about the world
and just saying like something's fake here.
So yeah, I mean, I was involved in some of the,
I went and did a master's in very heterodox economics
in a very obscure department in the UK,
in Kingston University.
I thought it was great.
I learned kind of all the Austrian and the Marxist
and the post-Cangestian and the mainstream stuff too.
And the combination of it all really was, I suppose, that book,
which is now obviously heretical from a perspective.
No, I'm kidding.
But I think most of it's still pretty valid.
I was pretty young when I wrote it,
so maybe there's a couple of regrets.
But I haven't detoned it and I haven't changed my name.
Yeah.
How old were you when you wrote the book?
25.
Young.
Whoa, okay.
And so you self-published.
I mean, dude, just good on you for that.
I know it's Palgrave.
Okay, no, you're right.
I'm sorry, Palgrave.
You're so right.
I saw it was the, what is it?
It was just the citation in the beginning that you have.
Yeah, it's just you.
It says the author, 2016.
But yeah, no.
So congratulations on getting that done as a 25-year-old.
That's impressive.
Yeah, I would have published when I was 27, I think.
Okay, but you wrote it when you were 25.
Okay, so why don't you just kind of give a brief introduction to the book
and then how I would love to know your evaluation of it here.
What are we like nine years on from it?
I know you said most of it stands.
Like are there things that you disagree with on it
after you give kind of the intro to what was the project of the book?
Yeah, I think, I mean, the rhetorical tone, I think,
might have been a little different if I wrote it now.
But, you know, the analogy is apt.
Unless you're taking a very strong theological position on the Reformation,
the analogy is apt.
I mean, that's what the economics profession became.
Effectively, what struck me about economics was two things, basically.
And they really sounded like the things that some of the reformers were criticizing the church for back in the Reformation period.
The first one was that the actual foundations of the theology that they were putting forward, the economics abstract theory, the actual foundations were very poorly understood by the economists themselves.
And this was basically because back in the 30s and 40s and 50s and maybe even into the 60s, the economists that were writing, putting down the foundations for what would become neoclassical economics, were quite broadly literate, you know.
They had an understanding at least of basic philosophy or basic social science methodology.
Maybe they wouldn't know much about philosophy, but some of them did.
But definitely going back to the earlier economists back at the turn of the 20th century and in the 1930s especially, they'd be very philosophically informed.
I mean, John Maynard Keynes came out of the British idealist tradition of G.E. Moore and so on.
So that literally was his circles.
And his students came out of the kind of Wittgenstein era and everything like that.
So they were very philosophically informed.
even in the 40s, 50s, 60s, I think they all would have had to be at least like reasonably aware of
methodological debates in social science. And what struck me with the neoclassicals,
the baby boomer generation in neoclassicals and younger, is that they had no idea of the
foundation. So they had these highly abstract theories, like general equilibrium theory,
dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling, tons of stuff, even simpler models, ISLM,
I know I sound like a complete nerd here, but all these things, like these are abstract mathematical models.
And I didn't think they even understood the foundations of these models.
I knew for a fact they had not read the literature on which these models were based.
And so you had this profession that spoke in these very abstract terms.
But once you kind of dug in, read like what those models were actually all about, what the authors intended with them,
you realized it was completely different to what these guys were talking about.
And this obviously is exactly what the reformers were saying about the church.
They said, we've gone back to the church fathers,
and we found that you guys are wrong with it.
So the analogy is pretty perfect.
And then the second point is that they were using this ideology
to cover up what was a rotten economy.
A rotten economy that had gone through two bubbles at that stage.
It went through the dot-com bubble.
and then it well it actually went through the savings and loan bubble before that in the 80s
but at least the dot-com bubble and then the 2008 bubble and it was here and now evil see no evil
you know and they didn't want to change any of their models they came up with post-hoc
rationalizations of why these events took place and so i think the analogy the basic analogy
basically stood and the book was basically about like what is with economic theory what is it is it
Is it fit for purpose?
What are the foundations of it?
Are there alternative theories?
And yeah, I think overall it was pretty successful.
I could probably think about it and find some stuff that I kind of regret.
Well, not regret, but I could probably improve on or something.
But I don't really intend on writing an economic theory book like that again.
I've just finished a book with a demographer on the economics of demographic change.
But that's, I mean, there's some economic theory in it for sure,
But it's not a big T theory book in the way that Reformation was.
So I don't know.
I haven't really thought about it that much.
I occasionally write pretty concrete economics theory articles.
I wrote one on consumption for American affairs recently and so on.
So I still kind of do do it.
But I haven't really thought about the book in a couple of years
until people started pulling it off the bookshelf recently,
which is kind of interesting.
oh and just one more thing it inspired a bunch of people who this is really interesting just
i just came from me now it inspired a bunch of people i know this for a fact i won't name who
it is but that are currently working on on trade pulse the trouble ministries so that's really
interesting a bunch of um post kind of post-liberal types cottoned onto that book back about eight
years ago it didn't sell very well i mean it's an academic book it's from an academic publisher
but um i did have people come up to me and were like yeah i read that book like it was a big
thing whatever so i think maybe it had a bit of an underground influence but if you look at it on
face or you i think it got reviewed in the ft like badly or something but if you look at it on
its face um it didn't seem to have it didn't work and the economics um reform movement in general
after today's night was a miserable failure yeah yeah and this is this is one of these things where
I mean, yeah, I mean, there's so much that you just said, but you could go back to, I mean, yeah, central banking, right?
The promise of central banking is we're not going to have any booms and busts anymore.
You know, this is great, great news.
We're not going to have these kind of –
Exactly.
So now, again, so somebody – so our audience, we have a lot of people who are Austrian-influenced.
And so there's a lot of people who will hear you criticize central banking, and they'll go, oh, great.
He's not a fan of Keynesianism, right?
And then you read the intro and it's more complicated than that.
So can you kind of talk about your relationship with Keynes and his line of thinking?
I'm a Keynesian economist.
Like 100% I'm a Keynesian economist.
And I know the Austrian monetary theory very well.
I think I know it better than some Austrians.
I'm not that sorry, but I do.
I know the Austrian monetary theory very well.
And I think it's a reasonably okay theory.
It's a little bit literalistic.
Austrian business cycle theory.
I don't have a...
But it's better than neoclassical theory.
I mean, it certainly is describing
credit boom and bust cycles
that are driven by lax monetary arrangements.
But I mean,
Hyman Minsky is a Keynesian economist
and he has a similar...
There's some Austrian theory
in Hyman Minsky as well.
I mean, I just...
I don't really think of these schools
as necessarily competing.
her medically concealed or medically sealed things yeah no and i think there's ideologies
have been attached to the schools like post-keynesian economics which i think i am a post-keynesian
economist has been associated with marxism of some sort and a lot of post-keynesians are marxist
i'm not yeah professor was a marxist but it i'm not a marxist so it's not and then the austrian
stuff has become tied up with libertarianism. But I don't think you, I actually know people I used to
work with in finance who were Austrians, but in theory, but they were actually like labor voters
in the UK. So like, I don't think, I think that tying these schools to political ideologies
is just not a good idea at all. And I include neoclassical economics in that and everything.
I think the alternative schools, Austrians, post-Keynesianism, and Marxism to a certain extent, the thing that they oppose is actually this technocratic scientism in the neoclassical doctrine.
And that's what's really important to me.
Yeah. Yeah. And this is something that we talk about a lot.
So the very first quote in the introduction is kind of where a lot of our audience and me, myself, where I have some objections to some of these things.
So I'm just going to read it for us. It's from Johan Georg Heyman. For this prolepsis of being equal to God had blazed the trail for all philosophical knowledge and legislative justice. This forceful seizing was the first lie of the first attempt to displace our senses from simplicity and words and to oversalt the peace of God on earth to the debauched taste of reason.
And so this idea of men trying to be God, I think this is one of the big critiques that I would have and I think a lot of our audience would have with the project of central banking.
And so I think like the, one of the, one of the questions, I think that getting to the philosophical roots of a lot of these things, I think it's much something I'm much more interested in, which again, it's not going to pay the bills necessarily, but like just getting at the root of, I think like one of the, the, the conclusions that I came to, or the realizations that I had was like so much of, of all of these systems and your idea of what makes a good system or what makes a bad system is rooted in your understanding of what it means to be human.
and of like how, what level of control you think that humans are supposed to, like it would be good.
Like, first of all, that it is possible for humans to have.
And then also that it would be good for humans to have over, you know,
over these different elements of their life, including economics.
And so I would love to kind of get like, how do you think about,
what are your grounding principles for thinking about economics?
Maybe we'll start there.
Well, I mean, that kind of touches on it, right?
The neoclassicals all assume omniscient knowledge on behalf of something or other.
It's not even clear.
I say it in the book over and over again.
These are theological doctrine.
They're weird.
Secular theology is a lot of these equilibrium principles.
I wrote a paper later on.
You might be able to track it down in an inference review called The Miracle of General Equilibrium.
equilibrium. I actually did a mathematical calculation on how probable it would be to
achieve a general equilibrium. I think it's the first time it's ever been done. I still don't
think I got credit for it. But anyway, whatever. I guess economics theories debate isn't actually
interesting anymore or something, even though everybody uses it. But the point is, I called
it the miracle of general equilibrium quite purposefully. It was miracle-like probabilities,
you know? It was like some completely impossible number that was like a million times the
number of seconds since the big bang or something. It was not stuff. And that's basically the whole
thing. You have this again, similarly in the Hayekian tradition and the Keynesian tradition,
a notion of uncertainty and limited knowledge, that both of those hold to it. And that's why
I think these ideological divisions are largely fake. Keynes writes about limitations on knowledge.
He writes a book on probability before he writes any famous economic works, before he even writes
the economic consequences of the peace, which makes him famous. He writes a book on probability
that was very well received by the Cambridge philosophers like Bertrand Russell and so on.
Not that I have a huge amount of time for Bertrand Russell, but I mean, you know, he's a real guy,
I guess, and he was a good mathematician. And Keynes writes a book on probabilities
that's still widely ignored. And it's a really interesting book on actual capacity to apply
probabilities. We don't have to get into statistical arguments. I'm fascinated by them,
econometrics, all that. But the foundations of statistical science are based on probabilities.
And that is not just economics and econometrics and pretty much all social science. It's also
medicine. It's also epidemiological studies are based on this. I think we came to realize that
over the year 2020, 2021 about some of these statistical issues. But, you know, I'm actually
pretty good at that kind of thing. And I know the foundations of it probably better than most who
are in it, who, again, like these guys in economics, I think often they just haven't
thought about the philosophical basis of what they're doing, epistemological basis of what
they're doing. But it's hard to get knowledge of the world. I mean, that's the kind of key takeaway.
It's very, very hard to get knowledge of the world. I mean, getting knowledge of the world
controlled in a scientific manner requires repeatable controlled experiments as I talk about in Reformation And in that you even still dealing with a probability Sometimes you can run an experiment five times
and you can be like, okay, well, we've proved it. And then the sixth time it doesn't work.
I mean, that's actual science. Statistical inference is different. I'm not saying it's
unscientific, but it's something different. And I think people in financial markets are most
tuned to this and even in Bitcoin markets because you lose when you get it wrong. And so when you've
had your ass kicked a couple of times in a market, you're like, I'm not going to be so certain before.
I remember just an anecdotal story. When I first went into finance, I was in kind of a quantitative
driven firm and I was working with all the quantum stuff and I put together this really good
recession model that I could backfit and it would tell me about market downturns and all sorts of
things. And it was all very sophisticated and everything like that. And I showed it to my boss
who'd been in the game for about 15 years. And he just laughed at me and he said, that's not
going to work. But I said, hang on a minute, look, it's backtested. I ran a T-stat on it.
Like it's very improbable that this isn't fitted properly, blah, blah, blah. And he just kind of
snickered at me and he said, okay, well, keep an eye on it. Of course, it completely failed. Of
course, it completely failed. But by statistical standards, it was a well-fit model, blah, blah,
blah blah blah so the thing is like i had a sense of it even before i went into finance i got much
more of a sense of it when i was in finance um it's really hard to get knowledge of the world
it's really really difficult unless you have a controlled experimental environment which is
almost impossible to achieve outside of like physics and chemistry to a certain extent biology
biology is not even as hard a science as some people think it is um medicine isn't uh you know
it's hard to gain knowledge of the world and so people who think that they have a knowledge of a
system like an economy down to a t i'm not sure i'm not sure about your claims yeah it's insane
to be honest with like and this is it's a similar there's like similar problems or a related issue
would be uh there's been people who've talked about the difficulty of of police work in the
age of csi because like everyone thinks about like forensic evidence and they're like oh this is the
strongest evidence and they act like even this forensic, like this is evidence that's beyond
interpretation. If we have this level of evidence, we know for certain that these things. And so,
and then it tends to, it's tended to like denigrate things like circumstantial evidence.
You know, people, people don't appreciate and value it as much. And so if you don't have the
silver bullet, you know, if you can't see it when it happened or, you know, this level of evidence,
then you can't have the degree of certainty. And so it's really just like, it's, it's,
it's the elevation of things like science or like the, the doc, the discipline of science
over the discipline of something like history, right? Like these have two different evidentiary
standards that are both really important and both really valid, but they're just very different.
Uh, and so there you have to your point, you have people who have come to appreciate one at the
expense of the other. And they don't, they don't realize that you need, these are, these are two
hands on the same body. You need both of them. Uh, you, you can't just say one is more important
than the other, like they, they do different things. And so we really do need, uh, you know,
both of them. And so, yeah, I think that, I think that we've been very ill served throughout the
last, you know, uh, I don't know, you could, whatever time period you want to put on a hundred
years over like the secularization, uh, there's this idea that real religion and some of these
theological questions are things that we can just laugh off and, you know, just throw into the dust
bit of history rather than, you know, there to quote, there's a, um, there's a guy, a pastor
named Douglas Wilson, who basically says it's never whether but which in terms of your theology,
in terms of your theological presuppositions, like we can't evade them. Like we're going to
have theological presuppositions that manifest themselves in how we look at the world and how
we think about it. The question is, who is the identity of our deity at the center of our system?
And so this is kind of what I would be getting at in terms of, I mean, just I would love to get
the grounding for your critique. So my question is this, are governments fit to have the type of
conversations that, you know, to be able to control the economy? Or do you just look at this like,
hey, this is just, it's going to happen. And so we have to make the best of it. Because like,
I look at this and I'm like, you know, if the government tried to, if a government tried to
force a tax on oxygen, like it's theoretically possible that a government could be so hubristic
that they could try to do something like that.
But you'd get to the question very quickly
of the authority.
Like by what authority do you have
to try to control and tax this kind of thing?
I honestly think like a government
could try this today
and actually get away with it to a degree
because the average person is so out of touch,
so out of touch with the basic questions
of governance of like,
what is government for?
Like, what are the limits?
Is it just a matter of getting a law passed
to define limit?
Like what are our laws just the result
of, is it just positivism or is there some sort of natural law? Like, I think the average person
cannot answer those questions whatsoever. So we'd kind of love to hear your thoughts on some of
those things. Well, the first thing about, just to get back to the, I know we're starting at a
very basic level here, but the statistical, the probabilistic thing. So what you just said,
that everybody wants to base things based on science and they ignore things like history,
or you might say law. I think law is a really nice example a lot of the time. That's kind of
what you're talking about with criminal investigations. And they're ultimately presented
before a court of law. Just two quick things on that. First of all, Keynes' book on probability,
I'd really encourage people to read it. It's about treating probability about the probability of
statements, not about the probability of facts, about the probability of statements.
And that's really interesting to me because that is what a judge does. They treat the probability
of statements. That's what a historian does. They treat the probability of statements,
especially the longer you go back in history, the more you have to look into the probability
of statements. I think this is a really compelling question. I think it's one of the most compelling
questions for people, in a sense. You can even go so far as to say every time that you do a
repeatable controlled experiment, you're ultimately dealing in some sense with a statement. Okay,
maybe it's a little bit far. But barring that, I think you're basically dealing with statements.
The second thing is even the more scientific or scientific version of probability theory.
So the most popular today is called Bayesian theory, right?
And I read an essay a year and a half ago for post-liberal order.
And I pointed out that I don't think anyone knows this.
Bayesian theory was come up with by a guy, a British clergyman, an Anglican clergyman called Thomas Bayes, right?
But not just that. This isn't just the like, oh, the priests can do science too. No, no, no. He came up with it to prove Christian miracles against David Hume.
like he thinks they didn't the bayesian formula so if anyone works in any sort of scientific field
they'll have used the bayesian formula before the bayesian formula is created by thomas bayes and
then published by richard price who was his um who was his uh student or his mentor or whatever
um and it was to prove that the humean critique of miracles i.e that miracles can't happen within
the scientific framework. False. I mean, people should go back and look at those Richard Price
papers. It's nuts to me. The whole thing's being turned on its head. It's completely strange. But
that's just the point, that these theories aren't what they're deployed for anymore.
And it's very, very odd to me. I think the original people looking at aspects of probability,
which forms into all of these inferential sciences and economics and theories of government,
they would be aware of the discussion that we're having now.
And it's the people who have taken their ideas in a reified form, you might say, in the equation form,
that have jettisoned all the presuppositions of what these theories were all about.
So, I mean, in terms of the issue then of government and so on,
This is where the post-Keynesians and the Austrians depart,
and it's a very interesting point of departure
because the Austrians tend to say, what you've just said,
that since we have this limited amount of knowledge,
this uncertainty of the future, call it whatever you will say,
some sort of limits on human knowledge,
they say, well, you're best leaving decision-making decentralized.
because if you centralize decision-making, you'll always make mistakes.
It's effectively the TLDR version of it.
The post-Keynesians push the uncertainty argument further,
and they say, no, no, no, no, you don't get it.
The uncertainty aspect, the lack of knowledge and foresight and all,
actually means that disaggregated or decentralized decision-making
will lead to unstable outcomes, chaotic outcomes,
and that actually what this means is you need collective decision making,
you need collective consensus decision making.
Now, there's no hard and fast principles for what that is.
You could be a more limited government post-Keynesian.
You could be a socialist. I mean, some of them are socialist.
So there's no hard and fast rules on that.
Some of them don't think markets work at all, basically.
I think markets mostly work.
They're pretty okay.
They're an okay way of distributing resources.
I don't think they're very good for allocating capital all the time.
So there's two readings on the uncertainty thing.
One reading is a downtrend on me reading,
which is like governments can never have enough information to solve a problem.
The other is a more radical one.
People don't have enough information,
and they actually need to make collective decisions for that reason.
I'd say, I mean, not to be snarky,
but I'd say human history is on the side of the latter interpretation.
Societies do tend to be organized.
They do tend to lay down laws.
And they do tend to create shared consensus about ethical principles and so on.
And this would tend to suggest that the natural state or natural law, whatever you want to call it, is a consensus formation.
I don't think any of this says anything hard and fast to say about, for example, whether Jerome Pell is a good central banker.
I think you can have reasonable opinions on that either way.
But I'm just pointing out that the epistemological aspect common to these two traditions actually can lead in two different directions.
Yeah. Yeah. And this, I mean, I look at, I go back to, I mean, you look at, again, at least if the stories can be believed about like the formation of central banking, the formation of the Federal Reserve, you know, like some of these things.
And there's all kinds of, you know, details of this, the shady, the smoky room on Jekyll Island, you know, all this kind of stuff.
I mean, at the end of the day, you have you have like a partnership between private entities and, you know, government officials that is done to I mean, arguably to to, you know, basically ward off competition from from wildcat banking.
So there's some of this where I'm just like, I look at this and I'm like, I look at this
from the standpoint of somebody who was a philosophy major and then worked in ministry
as a missionary and pastor.
And I'm like, oh, look, the love of money is still a root of all kinds of evil.
I just look at the power, the drive for more power and more money.
This seems like a pretty good way to explain the rise of central banking.
Obviously, it's couched in all kinds of things that end up being false and ridiculous, like
we mentioned.
Like this is going to do away with the boom bus cycle.
And really it causes more.
And so it's like, all right, well, if a system is what it does, then like maybe, maybe the
actual point of this was not to actually serve people.
Maybe it was just to serve these, this limited interest, both in a governmental and, you
know, private, private banking, you know, um, from that standpoint, it's like, that
seems like a much better explanation.
And then, and then just looking at this, uh, yeah, it just, I look at this and I, and I
look at the last hundred years that we've had this system, 112, whatever it is. And I don't think
that we're, I mean, you can say, are we better off? Like, that's a, it's like, by what metric
are we doing this? Are we talking about like, are we evaluating this on a moral level? But even then
there's all kinds of questions. So I don't know. It's just not as clear to me. Like I understand
the project and I understand like the desire for mankind to exercise control. And obviously I would
look at it from a biblical standpoint and we look at, we go to like Genesis three or Genesis one and
two, and God basically tells mankind to exercise dominion. And so like, there's clearly, you know,
the question is, what is, what does that look like? And so I think that there's been people
who would align themselves with a more Keynesian idea of the world. And they would say, Hey, look,
we're just trying to be good dominionists. We're trying to, you know, basically harness the world
and channel it for good, which again, in the abstract, I would agree with. I think this is a
good thing. I think it just comes down to where do we draw these lines? I mean, that would be a
question. And then beyond that, I think the thing that I'd want to go back to, and I think that you'd
agree with me on, is just like, this is at bottom, this is the theological question. Like, we can't
just keep continuing this fiction that these are not deeply theological questions because, I mean,
at the end of the day, this is what they are. Like, we're talking about what does it mean to be human?
We're talking about what is the like, where does authority come from? What are the limits on governmental authority? You know, and so I think like we've been able to kind of in the name of for the last hundred years or like at least 75 years in the name of like economic expediency, we've been able to not talk about philosophy at the highest levels of policy and politics.
and I think in the end,
maybe this would be a good bridge
over to the collapse of global liberalism.
Like I think that that's part of the collapse
is we've reached the end of just being able
to kind of push these conversations to the background.
Like they're coming back with a vengeance.
So I would love to kind of get your thoughts on that as well.
Like what are your thoughts there?
And then maybe we can move into the new book.
I think what we're seeing today especially
is that increased technocracy does not lead to better outcomes in anything at all.
I mean, there was a kind of a golden period of technocracy
between, in America at least, between the 1930s New Deal
and I'd say maybe the 1960s.
And I don't mean into the 1960s.
I think the fascination with technocracy was up until about 1960, 1965,
at which point libertine ideas start to take over
and it becomes a completely different thing.
But between the 50s and the 30s, well, 40s obviously was the war, but the 30s and the 50s were these periods where there was a lot of optimism about managing society through technocracy in the United States.
And I think basically this is the foundation of the contemporary United States government.
I'm definitely adherent to this idea that there hasn't been one republic in the United States, so it's been at least four and perhaps five.
And I think one of them was put in place by FDR in the New Deal.
And that came to an end, Chris Caldwell says, with the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.
I think that's probably true.
I think that's accurate.
Bruce, real quick, can you name the five, what did you say, the five, what was the word you used?
Republics.
So the idea behind this theory of America is that people will know that France is currently on its fourth republic, I think.
So there's actually any time they have a constitutional change, like there's a fundamental change in their way of government, they announce it and they say we have a new republic.
And it's not a criticism, but one reading of American history is that they've actually been through a couple of republics and they haven't named it and they've pretended that they have constitutional continuity.
The British did the same thing with the glorious revolution and the beheading of Charles and so on.
Britain has a bunch of revolutions in its history, and it claims to have none.
And it's a strange thing.
So can I name all the American?
I mean, I feel like I'm being put on the spot now.
American Revolution, Civil War, FDR, the controversial one is Civil Rights, and I'm missing one there.
Maybe it's Jackson.
I think it's Jackson.
So basically that these are fundamentally different systems.
And the one that existed between the New Deal period, the hard New Deal period, 1930s until the 1960s, was one of technocracy.
And it's the one in which what they called the blob or the bureaucracy or the swamp or whatever you want to call it in D.C., the permanent government grew up.
That was when that grew up.
And some of the goals of that were changed in the post-civil rights era.
There's no doubt about that.
but the fundamental structure of it is from the FDR period.
And basically, the idea there was that you could technocratically manage a society.
And I think what we're getting at as global liberalism and liberalism itself starts to collapse
is that, well, first of all, we've known for a while that probably doesn't work.
But beyond the fact it just doesn't work,
it's not even that these are particularly important aspects.
The neglect of what I call natural law principles,
but you could talk about, you know, broad ethical principles, social norms, so on.
Like these are clearly, or at least I think, these are clearly more important for the functional running of a society
than any sort of clever whiz-bang technocratic management.
I mean, I have a very keen sense of this because I grew up in Ireland,
and I grew up in Ireland at an amazingly interesting time.
When I was eight years old, divorce was still illegal in Ireland.
in 1995, it was still illegal to divorce somebody.
Based, based.
I make no comment. I make no comment. It was illegal to do. I remember it. I remember
when people couldn't get divorced. I literally remember because even for a couple of years
after it was made legal it was super controversial And basically Ireland would not have aspired to being anything resembling technocracy or anything like that And now it become a modern technocratic state where if you go into government you talk like you know a civil servant bureaucrat interest rates all this gobbledygook
And has Ireland become more or less stable?
A hundred percent less stable.
I mean, a hundred percent less stable.
The country is not what it was.
it's a very kind of strange, murky, people don't really know what they want. They don't know what
they believe. The birth rates are collapsing. Migration's gone absolutely nuts. People hate it.
There's political instability. The authorities are afraid of, you know, the usual stuff,
the stuff that's all over the West right now. And I just look at that and I go, yeah. And just
comparing that to like this society that didn't really care about any of those issues and just
kind of focused on like how to live your life. Like you should have a family and like you should
behave in this way and blah blah blah and it's shocking and as well another thing like murder
rate went through the roof in ireland after this the suicide rate went through the roof
um i published a paper on this on the danube institute of annual as a statistical overview
of how ireland improved after it adopted basically liberalism it deteriorated on every metric except
gdp gdp was the only thing that improved on apart from gdp everything declined political stability
suicide murder drug addiction alcoholism everything went up so it seems that this focus
on like technocracy and a lack of focus on what people have been focusing on since you know adam
basically um yeah seems to lead to social collapse it's kind of funny it's kind of weird
and and so i look at that and i'm like is this feature or bug like because like i look at you
look at like if the goal i mean you could look at the the breakdown of the household right when
the women's liberation movement where like women are out in the workplace. So our GDP goes up,
but our families collapse. So the outcomes of people is much worse off. And so like it is,
it's like when you, if you're defining success by these economic measurables, then, and not in
these intangible, like if you're, I guess I would say it this way. If your denominator for success
is dollars, then you're going to take a very different course of action than if your denominator
for success is people. And so, and so like, this is where, I mean, I look at, you mentioned like
the, the, the shift to technocracy, you said like thirties to the fifties. And so it's like,
I look at this and I'm like, none of that's even possible. Like the only reason why that change was
even possible to the same degree is once you introduce like state created money, like, right.
Like because state created money, that's effectively just arbitrarily created. Like
you can have unlimited quantity of it. Like that gives governments so much more control
over so much more of society through just, I mean, you don't get what you want, you get what
you subsidize. So we have all kinds of things that have been subsidized. And again, there's a limit
to these, to what you can do. But like it is, I mean, you could look at like the LBGT, like that
movement and its ability, the way that it's spread across the world, like trans ideology,
like a lot of this stuff is not stuff that's being demanded by markets. It's stuff that's
being subsidized by nonprofit organizations who are getting money from the government.
And so there is this partnership there.
I mean, again, at the risk of oversimplicity,
in the Bitcoin world, there's people who say,
if you fix the money, you fix the world.
Obviously, that's an oversimplification,
but it's not as far of an oversimplification
as a lot of people would think
just because of the nature of incentives
and the nature of the way that money works in society.
So I don't know.
I would love to kind of hear your thoughts on that.
I think people get too obsessed with money and making money.
I think economic growth itself, this metric of economic growth has gone gangbusters.
You just gave an example, right?
I wrote an article about this called The Overlooked Contradiction of Capitalism for American Affairs about two years ago or something.
And I pointed out that to maximize GDP growth, you have to maximize production and consumption, right?
So you have to go to work as much as possible and you have to consume as much as possible.
So what type of person is that?
That's not someone with a family.
But here's the problem.
GDP growth rests on two things, labor force growth and productivity growth, right?
Abstract productivity growth, that's difficult.
We don't know really what to do with that.
We don't even really know what it is.
It's just a statistic.
We know what labor force growth is.
It's people.
So the short-term incentives of capitalism to make you, and any system that tries to maximize
GDP growth, which could be communist as well, make you go to work, make you consume as much
as possible.
But then the next generational cycle, GDP will decline because there won't be as many people.
And you have all these problems in your economy.
This will be a very post-Keynesian uncertainty critique, which you say, well, there you go.
There is a decentralized system.
But we all agree to maximize capital output or GDP or transactions.
GDP is just transactions.
It's just passing money from one hand to another.
We agree to maximize that.
And look at this.
you generate all these contradictions in terms of your long-term planning. So I think we just
shouldn't be, I don't know why we're so obsessed. Look, obsessing about GDP is bad for society as
far as I can tell, but it doesn't actually get the GDP to go up either. The GDP is stagnant at
the moment. It's just the wrong measure. We're just chasing the wrong things. And this complete
obsession with production and consumption is crazy to me. I'll give you one example, right? So
in Hungary right now, the government here gets a lot of flack because it subsidizes churches and
pubs in small Hungarian villages, right? And people say this is the most wasteful money you
could have. So some people just say it's a waste. And some people say it creates economic inefficiencies
or whatever. So they're giving money to restore little churches in small little villages in Hungary.
And they're also putting money effectively behind the bar and a pub because these pubs can't stay
open they're not competitive and what you understand what you realize if you go to one
of these villages is that the pub and the church are the center of the entire life of the town
and i'm just like as people you know a lot of americans a lot of american conservatives go
that's you can't do that and that's a way that's a that you're propping up an inefficient business
and i'm like what are you talking about inefficient business and and by the way and then i have to
point out to them that the birth traits in these villages are substantially higher than in the
cities. And I said, well, there's a natalist element to this as well. But it just shows like
we've completely, we've kind of missed the boat on this whole of what we're judging metrics by.
Like, I think if your homicide rate is going up, that's probably one of the worst, this homicide
and suicide rates are two of the worst statistics you can see deteriorate to my mind. Drug addiction
is pretty bad too. And, you know, back in the day, people would have known this. Like,
Durkheim wrote a book on suicide. He said, if suicide's going up, you've got a society that's
kind of falling apart. You could say something similar about homicide rates. And we've just lost
sight of this. Like, you hear every single quarter about what GDP growth is. But like,
it's only kind of, you know, people are interested that know where the suicide rate went or the
homicide rate went. Like, why is that? Yeah. Yeah, you've got that. And then, I mean, you look at,
again, just to further describe the problem,
I mean, you've got people who are excited
with the stock market price going up.
When in reality, like if you just look at,
like you look at like the growth,
like so much of it is just the new money.
Like it's just a way to keep track
of how much money has entered the system.
Like there's the, broadly speaking,
the growth actually isn't there anymore
to the point that we're being,
like the US economy is being propped up
by like insanely valued AI companies.
like if not for these AI companies, the market's in shambles. And so like, so I look at this and,
and, and I'm like, and a lot of us look at this in the Bitcoin world. And we're like,
this is just like, your denominator is broken. And so like, it doesn't matter. Like these are,
I would be in favor. I think the, the policy of favor of giving money to these towns, you know,
like insofar as it's so far as there's a good, according to a good thing to give money to like,
yeah, I'll take that over, you know, these other things any day of the week, but it's still,
is like, if you look for the longer time horizon,
it's like, you're not gonna be able
to outpace a broken denominator.
So the question is like,
how do you fix the monetary denominator?
That's the metric by which people are doing business.
How do you outpace if that is just losing value perpetually?
And like, I don't see a way that you can do it.
The only thing I can see is like,
you need something that's going to get,
you need a currency unit
that's gonna get more valuable over time.
Like that's, and then like that will be,
and so you can look at home prices.
This is another thing. Like you, you look at home prices and the way that I described this,
I have described this is it's like a family where if, if the father, if the father abandons the
family, then somebody else is going to have to fill the vacuum that he is, that he was supposed
to fill. And so if it's the mother, then she's going to suffer because she's trying to do two
people's jobs. If it's a grandparent, they're going to suffer because they can't just be a
grandparent. If it's going to be an uncle, whatever it is. And so similarly, like the function of,
money in the society, like if you stop having a scarce money, then something else is going to have
to take on these monetary, these monetary properties. And the problem was when, and so
one of the things that's happened in the world is that real estate has taken on much more of
these properties. And the problem is that real estate is, makes poor money for a number of,
in a number of metrics. And then it also just increases the price of, of, of real estate over
time to create some of these problems where younger people aren't able to afford real estate.
So I don't see any way the big problems get fixed without a return to money being money
to allow all these other things, including real estate, including some of these other things,
to be what they are and not ask them to be what they are and also be money,
or monetary units, if that makes sense, to carry a monetary premium.
I think the problem goes a lot deeper.
The addiction to what I call the Wall Street model or the rent-y model in America is because of fundamental structural changes to the economy that have taken place.
I mean, they're a long time, but I mean, back to the 80s at least.
And this is offshoring manufacturing and propping the whole thing up with King Dollar.
Like, that's what created this.
And then it formed a massive lobby around Wall Street.
The pinnacle of that was Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, these guys in the Clinton era.
But, you know, there were holdovers as well into the Bush era and so on.
And then it fell apart in 2008 and everyone's been confused about what to do since, basically.
But the Wall Street model, that's what it was.
And as the Wall Street model deteriorates, it used to just be, you know, chasing dot coms, pets dot coms, all this kind of stuff up the ladder or whatever.
And people could say it's kind of harmless.
and now the excess capital,
the excess cash is just flowing into everything.
Housing markets, as he said,
I don't believe the EMB stuff.
It's credit-driven.
I mean, I can show that in multiple different markets.
It's credit-driven.
But it's not even credit-driven at this stage.
It's being driven by quote-unquote shadow banks,
private equity funds and hedge funds.
And these are taking money out of the pension funds.
And by the way, the whole thing's going to blow up
and it's going to be an absolute nightmare
and people are going to worry where their pension went
and then we're going to have to bail out the pensions.
We could talk about that.
That is going to be an enormous scandal.
It's going to make 2008 look like a complete joke
because 2008 was confined to the banks.
This stuff is being lent out of the pension funds
and no one will admit it.
It's absolutely shocking what's going on.
But the point is that everybody,
like what happened to America
and to the West more broadly,
but mainly to America and the United Kingdom
and Ireland's being touched by this as well
because it's kind of in the same bracket
and actually Australia too and Canada.
So it's really the Anglosphere this has happened to. And what's happened is that America became de-industrialized, not as bad as Britain, not as bad as Britain, but it had a substantial amount of de-industrialization.
and what we did was we we some of these kind of more libertarian policies that were pursued from
the reagan era up until whenever today i guess the trump administration's still doing them they're not
actually opening up like making it easier for small shops or something to open up in towns which
i'm in favor of fine i don't want too much regulations or taxes on small businesses like
obviously but that's not really what's happened what what's happened is that they've deregulated
all these sectors where this like parasite capital goes in i mean i saw recently it's one of my
favorite current examples that um the price of um uh um rv parks of uh um camp campgrounds has
gone through the roof now some of this is due to an increase of use uh after the pandemic but not
all of it. The private equity industry is buying up all these campgrounds and it's destroying.
This is not even like standard economics 101 does not say that when a big private equity fund comes
in with the wealth of 5% of the nation's pension funds or something behind it and starts scooping
up all these campgrounds and merging them into some big oligarchy or monopoly or something and
jacking the prices and making the services suck. And like that is, sorry, that is not what is meant
by like market competition or whatever. But we don't even know how to deal with it. The entire
late liberal capitalist system seems to be turning into this giant like rentier grift.
and like everything's a grift and everything's like how do i utilize money capital to like corner
a market or to extract more rent out of somebody or to get somebody addicted to a gambling app or a
dating app or whatever and maybe it's destroying their lives i don't care because i'm just extracting
the rent but the point is and here's where i diverge from you i think that's a much deeper
problem than just the problem of credit creation of money i think that you could do that with
Bitcoin, you could do that on a gold standard system. This is a serious problem with the way
that we're structuring our societies. And I don't really have a hard and fast rule about it. Where
I would start is looking at the worst aspects of this. And I think currently America is about to
have an enormous explosion of gambling problems because of these gambling apps that are incredibly
addictive. And actually realize we had gambling laws in place for a reason. And with these
addictive apps like 10 times we need them um same what like i don't know that's easy enough with like
vice products and i think that's where we should start but when you get i don't have a hard and
fast answer for like how do you prevent private equity buying up all the campgrounds and buying
up all these family homes in texas i don't have a hard and fast rule for that but we need to be
more nuanced and i think this is where i diverge from the the money um uh reform people that i don't
money reform is going to get you there. And I think that a lot of these guys who are making
money out of this are perfectly happy for people to be focused on monetary reform and not talking
about, for example, like the gambling app that's like ruining one in five people's lives.
Correct. And let me clarify, like, I don't think Bitcoin in itself is going to do it because I'm
100% with you. The analogies that I've used, like the examples that I think are relevant are
you've got Luther, right? Like Luther, he's pointing out problems with the church. He's
pointing out hypocrisy, pointing out grift, all this kind of stuff. And obviously there was,
again, there's other interests in there. There were people interested in funding his dissenting
opinions. So that's definitely the case as well. But so that was going on, but he was aided,
okay, his more or less righteous cause, okay, we can debate, you know, he never wanted to leave
Catholic Church, but his righteous critiques were enabled and furthered because of this
technological innovation in the printing press. This enabled him to expand these, spread them
farther wide, other countries, which caught on there and helped produce what it produced.
Another example of this that doesn't have the technological aspect is Wilberforce.
Wilberforce, he's making moral critiques. He's trying to awaken the moral consciences
of this more or less Christian nation
to alert them to basically,
hey, yes, you are personally enriching yourselves.
Your nation is being personally enriched
on the back of injustice of slavery.
And so he actually was able to,
by virtue of making religious arguments,
was able to basically help the British people
end up taking steps that would be arguably
against their economic interest
by ending the slave trade.
So that happens.
And so that's more like those two situations are more akin to where I see, I don't think Bitcoin, I think like there are moral arguments that need to be made and that we need like Christians on whatever level that they find themselves in to begin having these conversations and critiquing, not just on pragmatic basis, but on moral grounds and on, again, just loving your neighbor grounds.
And so, again, it's going to be complicated because of this whole discourse of separation of church and state and all this kind of stuff.
Like for a lot of people, they've just been one-shotted by this whole idea of the separation of church and state.
And they can't even fathom what this would look like and the legitimacy of having things like vice laws, you know, like vice by whose standard.
Like it's going to be a complicated thing.
At the same time, I do agree with you that things have gotten so bad and I think are going to continue to get worse that we are kind of rediscovering why vice laws exist.
We are kind of rediscovering why some of the indecency laws exist when you look at issues like pornography and the pornification of everything and just the way that that has transformed society for the worse and the outcomes of that.
I think we it been easy the story been easy to drink down oh this was just the fuddy These are just these people who just wanted to control everything That why these laws existed And I think we going to discover through a lot of pain that no actually there was something something far more real grounding all these things So yeah want to clarify
I 100% agree with you. Bitcoin is not this panacea that's going to fix everything. But I do think
that, you know, like a return to scarce money is one tool, one part that does have extended
consequences. But it's not a substitute for, again, this is a personal, this is a people problem.
Like this is if our denominator, if our functional denominator that we ought to, that God would call us to use and that is going to produce the best outcomes is doing what is in the best interest of the people of a nation, then yes, it's going to revolve.
It's not just going to be simple.
We just fixed a couple levers and then we can fix this thing.
It's going to require people to be courageous and people to step up and do what people have done to further human flourishing for thousands of years.
Look, you're always going to have regulations, pretty strong ones, on economic relations.
I'll give you one example, right?
Contract killing.
Contract killing is a market transaction.
But we're like, okay, well, you can't contract kill people.
Like, that's illegal.
okay so like start there human trafficking illegal okay what's happened now what's happened
now this is actually what's happening as global liberalism collapses is that these these really
disgusting money-making activities that have gone on since probably since the beginning of time but
were vastly uh expanded when modern economies trade economies and monetary economies grew up
in the 17th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
These really repulsive things were then,
they were outside.
They were projected onto the rest of the world.
I mean, one of the most dramatic is the opium wars.
Just look into the opium wars.
It's crazy.
These guys getting the entire of China addicted to opium,
and then when they refused to buy the opium
because it was the strongest society,
they went to war with them.
With private Navy,
vet like it's not stuff and that we did that over there and people like wilberforce or whatever said
this is not this is not right right now what's happened is those practices have come back to the
mainland like that's what's happening you look at like the opioid crisis and trace it back to the
Sackler family like that's an opium war thing and okay they didn't use gunboats they used lobbying
in dc that's what they did and like we all know what happened there now so this is happening at
like multiple levels if i don't think making money in and of itself is illegal or immoral but i think
there's a lot of immoral ways to make money like a lot and they're very very tempting because
there's only a certain amount of moral ways to make money and there probably isn't there probably
isn't enough to go around if you see what i mean so like only and if everyone's acting morally
less people are going to make fortunes but if everyone's allowed to act immorally more people
are going to make fortunes not everybody but more people yes this this is a hundred percent the case
this is why again i i can't prove this but one of the thoughts that i've had since thinking more
about economics i read this story in the scriptures of uh of the disciples being mystified that a uh
the rich, like it'd be hard for the rich to inherit the kingdom. And like, if you think about,
if you think about it in like a scarce money context, the only way to get rich, well, the only
legitimate way to get rich is to serve the needs and interests of a lot of people. And so like,
if you're thinking about this, like if you're, if you're operating with this mindset, that the way
that you get rich is by loving and serving your neighbor, then somebody who's rich has served and
loved lots of people. And so then it would make sense that you'd be confused about how somebody
who served and loved lots of people would find it difficult to get into the kingdom. And so it
seems that Jesus has a much more real understanding of, of the nature of capital, you know, capital,
uh, creation and capital accumulation. Uh, and so, yeah, I do, I do think this is a huge issue
is it's going to be, it's going to blow people's minds when like a healthier society looks like
GDP going down for at least a period of time. But I think you're absolutely right. They're like,
That's what's needed. It's going to need to happen.
My recent American Affairs article is saying that we should measure the GDP differently and we should actually exclude these activities.
Just really quickly on the biblical view of making money, a lot of it has to do with the time period.
If you're living in the time of the New Testament, who has money?
Well, the king has money. The government has money.
Yes, because they can levy taxes.
But beyond some merchants, some merchants, legitimate merchants
who are doing trade across the Middle East,
or what we call the Middle East now.
How do most people make money if they aren't rich
and they want to get rich?
Debt or tax collection.
Those were basically, for 95% or 98% of people,
if you really wanted to get rich in that time period,
those were your two options.
And of course, as everybody, I hope, tax collection back then was not the IRS, whatever you think of the IRS.
But it was not even the IRS.
It was mafia stuff.
It was Shakespeare in our history.
You'd break people's knuckles and stuff.
And loaning money was not going down to the local bank and taking out a mortgage to buy a house for your white picket fence wife and three kids.
No, it was human slavery.
That's what it was.
for the most part, money lending back then,
ended up in human slavery of some sort.
So that's why that view was taken in the Bible.
Now, during the Reformation period,
and especially if you read the very interesting
counter-reformers, the Salamanca school,
who are the first real, in my opinion, modern economists,
what they realize is that some of the older laws
that were put in place in the medieval period
were not really working
as merchantile trade developed in Europe.
And they said, okay, what worked,
basically they wouldn't have had this language,
but what worked,
what the rules were under feudalism
made sense under feudalism.
And now as merchantile capital's developing,
we have to have a more nuanced view
on, for example, money lending
because we need lines of commercial credit
for merchantile vessels and so on.
And they were fine with that.
That kind of sorted itself out.
But the overcorrection there is there shouldn't be any rules.
No, no, no, no, no.
And now what we're getting out of, I would say, 40 years of free market rhetoric,
which is not going to small businesses competing with you.
We have more monopoly after this.
We have more awful stuff.
But what we're seeing is we're going back to that kind of New Testament era.
The if because so much is already done, because there's so many shops, because there's so many pet clinics, because you have all the services you need at your fingertips.
This is kind of what my essay is about, the last one for American Affairs, on what I call consumption deepening.
because you have all these things at your fingertips the only places to make money anymore
if you're an upstart i'm not saying the only but a lot of the only places are vice stuff
and that's what we're seeing i i saw just to give an example in britain britain's really falling
apart we could spend a whole hour talking about it's an emerge it's so bad what's happening there
but yeah maybe it's so depressing and people in britain i used i lived there for most of my life
and people in Britain complain to me
because I think I'm bashing the country.
I'm not, guys.
Like, you just got to recognize
this keep calm and carry on thing
is not working anymore.
Your country's falling apart.
But the Financial Times,
which is the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal in Europe,
is usually has this very high prestige thing,
which is lunch with the FT.
And lunch with the FT is for business leaders
and blah, blah, blah.
And they're the only fans CEO on.
And I just said that is,
that's what's happening there. And what's happening is that the economy is collapsing
in on itself in a way that's more dramatic than in America, but America's facing down some serious
problems too. Britain's facing them down times three or four. And it's coming up on them a lot
quicker than it's happening in the United States. And what's happening is that the vultures are
moving in and that they're normalizing stuff. They're normalizing like, here's a community
leader the ceo of only fans and you're like are you crazy are you gonna have the ceo of human
trafficking on you know their human trafficking department on next week like you guys don't you
let this stuff out and you will report whirlwind like it will not work out like you're thinking
it's going to completely demolish your society humiliate your people you're going to be turned
into like a joke um really sad stuff's going to happen and it's going to be very very generationally
hard to come back from that kind of decline. But as both we have saturation of consumption,
so we have all our goods met, and then we have what I think is coming, a contraction in living
standards in much of the West, the temptation is to open skid row everywhere. And that, I think,
is the most pressing problem right now. It really is, because we're not going to sort out this
economic situation that we've got ourselves in this is 30 40 years of bad policy now we're not
going to sort it out overnight but we need to contain some of the worst that's coming down the
pipeline and i think that i think as you say we need to look back to this kind of like we need to
put some moral judgments on on what business is allowed and what business isn't and not just in
in vice stuff lending credit cards gambling we need to start really thinking about this now
yeah and like this is i mean the the lending we could bring it up i mean the the thing with lending
of i mean just when i was reading your book and uh and i was i got to one point where i was talking
about i think like uh they have to have like at least 10 percent reserves like at the time of
writing like they had to have at least 10 percent reserves in the banks and then like when covid hit
it was zero percent reserves so now it's just like totally i mean just lending out just willy-nilly
and so it's just like this is totally predictable like this is always i mean it was 100 then it
went down from there, went to 90. And then it just over time just whittles down. And again,
the critique, the pushback from this, this town who's partnering with only fans is, well, listen,
if we don't take their money, then where's the money going to come from? You know? And so again,
it gets back. I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but like it, at some point, like
there are multiple, there's multiple things that need to change. Like that, that's what I'm saying.
And the money is one of them. You can't like, whatever these other changes are, it can't be
done separately from changing whatever the money is because like that drives so many of the
incentives. And so like, I mean, we look at this with our, so TGFB has been operating as a, or is
like a for-profit enterprise. And so we, you know, we're a media company, we do podcasts, we do
conferences and stuff like that. And so as we've had people reach out to us from these dubious
crypto projects who want to give us lots of money in order to sponsor our conferences and this kind
stuff. And I tell them to kick rocks regularly because like, I'm not interested in them farming
out and like prostituting my audience for the sake of their garbage crypto project. But there's
plenty of people who are, who are totally willing to do that and throw up their hands and do the
free market thing. And just basically say, Hey, who am I to just not take their money? This,
this project could be good at some point in the future. And it's just like it, you get these
people who are desperate and these businesses who prioritize their existence over the good of their
customers, over the medium to long-term. And this really is the crisis that we're facing.
And to put this in biblical parlance, it's like Christ calls us to die to ourselves.
And there's a lot of people who are not comfortable with that level of death. They're not content to
do that. And so again, that's understandable to a degree, but also there comes a certain point where
you have to have a North Star moral guiding system that is guiding you by something other than
I need to make money. And so like until we get in, like these lines are already drawn. We already
have these lines drawn. You mentioned contract killing. You mentioned prostitution. You mentioned
some of these other things. We do draw these lines. They were drawn during an age of, you know,
an age where we knew a lot more of the reasons behind what we were doing.
We're currently in like a,
in a point where we've kind of forgotten why the why of all these things and
we're, we're kind of rediscovering them. Um, but yeah,
it really is one of these situations where I think things are going to get a
lot worse before they get better. Uh, and again,
some of the ways to cope with this, you mentioned like one,
one way to cope is, all right, we're going to take money from only fans.
Another way to cope with the decisions that they made is just open immigration
where we're going to treat people like they're like people are a dime a dozen
One person is as good as another. It doesn't matter what their beliefs are. It doesn't matter what their religious convictions are. And there's just severe underestimation of the consequences of doing that. So the example that I always go back to is in some place like Dearborn, Michigan, where you've got humongous Muslim population. Are you familiar with Dearborn?
Okay. So yeah, me either, but humongous Muslim population. And so one of the interesting things
is the consequences of having a large Muslim population, they start to, like their religion
starts to affect the laws. And so this has been exposed in divorce policy. So in Islamic countries,
largely, overwhelmingly speaking, when there is a divorce, the children go with the man.
And so this is coming into conflict with the United, you know, with the, in the United States,
at least at this point where again, largely speaking, the children go with the mother.
And so you have this crisis of the crisis of law is based in a, in a crisis of religion
and of like, who, who is right?
How do we make these decisions?
And so when you're getting this importation of immigrants from whether it's Muslim countries
or Southeast Asian countries, or it's not as, it's not as, um, excuse me, it's not as
bad when you're importing people from South American countries where they do have this
largely Christian conception of the world. There's much more similarities than there is in some of
the Eastern Asian context. But these are real changes. These are real differences that produce
humongously different outcomes and powerfully different outcomes that are creating much more
conflict, that are going to create much more conflict as time goes on. And so it's not going
to be as simple as, oh, we just import new people and then we can pay them less. And then, you know,
they're content paying less, uh, being paid less. And then this is just going to work. It's literally
a bandaid on, on the gaping hole of the Titanic. This is, these things are not going to work.
Uh, but they, they make sense from, if you're looking at a problem from a political standpoint,
who's just trying to, somebody who's just trying to stay in office or get elected maybe for another
four-year term like if we had a monarchy for example and this person was governing for life
these are not the decisions that these kind of people would would be making um so the it's yeah
this whole political question is super interesting and unfortunately i think it's going to get worse
before it gets better because people are still thinking over five minute time horizons it is
going to get worse and this is why i keep saying like a big hit to living standards and other things
is probably coming by 2030 in most Western countries
and worse than some, less bad than others,
but it's probably coming.
And I'm only warning that making kind of more long-term plans
about how to dig your way out of that,
it's another question.
I think about it.
I think it's possible,
but it's going to take a while to get done.
But there's going to be a pretty nasty period here.
And the only thing that I can say is that to totally destroy a society, you have to kind of destroy its dignity and its culture.
And you may not be able to solve 30 or 40 years of bad economic policy or, you know, longer than that of kind of family policy or whatever you want to call what happened over the past, I don't know, 100 years or 50 years or whatever you want to call it.
Those things are going to take a long time to solve.
But what can be focused on right now from this kind of quasi-economic perspective is what we're going to let in.
Because, you see, if you think about this for a minute, like, right, go back to like the 1950s or something, especially in Europe.
Like the 1950s in Europe, a lot of countries are pretty poor.
I mean, Ireland would definitely have been considered a developing country in the 1950s in Europe.
Italy probably would have been as well, parts of France and so on.
Maybe not Germany.
It might have been a little bit wealthier.
England a little bit wealthier.
But loads of these countries would have been considered
what we consider developing countries.
Now, most of them weren't tempted to, like,
go down the kind of, like, complete crap hole, right?
And turn into complete disaster, mass societies.
Like, I'm thinking my model's always kind of Russian in the 1990s,
like, really falling apart.
Like, it's horrendous what happened there
for a period of about 10 or 15 years.
and you know these countries didn't naturally go there and their living standards are going to be
substantially lower than anything that happens in the west in the next five years or something
like that now there's it's difficult to compare apples to apples in that regard because if you're
priced out of the home market for example which many people are you know back then you might not
have been pressed out of the home market even if it was a hot or something like that but so it's
It's difficult to do apples to apples, but ultimately we'll be wealthier than the Irish person in 1955 living in a patched hut, right?
And working really hard on the farm all day in the rain.
But the problem is that it's the decline.
decline it's the it's the beta or the delta as they say it's the it's the decline in living
standards that tempts people to try and prop up their living standards doing stuff that they
shouldn't do and that will really destroy not only their lives but they'll destroy the the the um
economy the society around them and it will do so in such a way that it will take generations for
that society to recover and i think that it really should be the the most immediate focus right now
we're seeing a lot of these kind of creepy crawlies coming out from under the fridge and we're going
like oh that's kind of gross what's that and then we're kind of like ah you know we're always doing
weird stuff no no no i think it's getting to the point now where like we have to be like okay i
think there's a bug infestation problem and maybe we should just like really focus on making sure
that, okay, we may not be able to solve all our problems
in the economy and everything in the short term.
Let's just ensure that we don't go down
the social collapse route.
That's my fear at the moment.
The decline in living standards is going to drive people
to do things that lead to broader kind of social degradation
and potential collapse, actually.
Yeah. Yeah, and this is, I mean, this is what you see,
these like niche beliefs.
Like you have people who are acting like the fact that they're,
the fact that we don't have universal daycare or something like this is like the, the cry,
this is the outrage of the hour. We had no universal daycare. This is a human right. You
know, daycare is a human right. And you just get all these kinds of, these kinds of beliefs. You're
just like, you have like, this makes no sense. This is like the fact that you have this standard
when there's so many people around the world that, you know, who are in a hundred times worse. And
when you look at what is the trajectory that we're on, like, these are just laughable. Like
These concerns, I just think the average person has no idea just what's coming and are totally delusional, totally in denial because they're believing what politicians are telling them.
And I just think it's going to be bad.
I would love to know, so you mentioned you live in Hungary, you live in Budapest.
What kind of drove your decision to move to Budapest?
Did some of these dynamics, was that a player or did you find employment there?
What was a combination of the two?
yeah i i really do believe the west is about to collapse i'm not i'm not kidding yeah it's not a
it's not a joke for me i'm not selling anything well my book you're putting your money where your
mouth is yeah your body where my mouth is yeah i mean maybe i'm trying to sell my book but i
wouldn't move to a substantially different part of the world with a very obscure language just to
get talking points to sell my book no i i think i think something something pretty bad's uh coming
to Western Europe. And I think probably, well, definitely the UK is halfway through it. And
I think America is going to be affected in different ways, but I have some concerns there.
And I mean, this is the most stable country in Europe. It didn't have any migration waves.
Didn't happen here. It's the same as it did pre-2015. The economy, I mean, it's not doing
great, but it's relatively stable.
Society is very normal.
It's a very normal place to live. It reminds me of
Ireland when I was a kid. It's just a
totally normal place. Most people don't
think about all the strange stuff that
people don't think about, to be honest.
And they're good leadership. I mean, I
don't care what people say about
Orbán. I think Viktor Orbán's the politician
of the generation in Europe.
So, yeah, I mean, I just think it's
a better place to live. I mean, I'm a
European. I don't mind living in America
either, but it's kind of a
European place anyway. And in some sense, I know America, don't take it the wrong way. I understand.
No, I take it. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, it's Europe, Europeanized culture. Okay.
So like, but you know, I'm a European, I don't really want to live in Vietnam or whatever. I'm
sure it's a nice place, but I don't have any desire to do that. And so basically my, my talking point
is Hungary is the furthest I can go to the East while staying in the West in a sense. It really is
Europe, by the way, people don't get this. And actually, probably I suffer from this too. My
conception of Hungary maybe 10 years ago was probably that it was one of these Eastern European
countries, which there's nothing wrong with the Eastern European countries, don't get me wrong.
But they tend to be quite sterile because either they're kind of, I don't want to say fake countries,
but either they were created quite recently, let's just say, or they were bombed to bits in World War
II. And so they tend to be like the communism hit them really hard. They have the tower blocks
everywhere. Hungary's part of the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy,
and Budapest, I'm pretty sure, is like
the most beautiful city in Europe, outside of
maybe Rome.
So, it's a pretty good
deal. It's a pretty good deal here.
Living standards are
pretty good. I think the stocks
are fake, actually. I think the PPP-adjusted
GDP per capita stats are basically
fake. I think the living standards are...
We have loads of Americans over here.
I wouldn't say loads, but there's a
American conservative types.
are living here loads of friends of mine circulating in and out of dc actually two of them have gone
recently back to dv uh so there's a big circulation and stuff like that but i i think i think countries
like hungary are are probably best placed in the broader west let call it uh to whether to whether what is coming frankly i know that sounds really doomish but No I Listen I with you So in terms of just a couple of questions about Hungary are they mostly self
Are they producing a lot of their own stuff or is there vast import-export stuff?
What does that look like?
Because I know that the EU has exercised control over some of the things that other countries
are able to do in some of the economies,
the economic policies.
So what does that look like,
at least in your experience in Hungary?
Hungary are the only country in Europe
I'm aware of that has consciously done
self-sustaining in the basics, right?
So the kind of potential crisis management.
Now, I don't think things are going to get that bad.
I'm a mid-level doom guy.
I just think living standards are going to go down.
Paul Paltice is going to become really unstable.
stuff like that. I don't think we're going to be like eating out of bins or anything like that,
but you know, it's, it's good to have your own stuff for sure. And Hungary, I think is the only
country in Europe that's done that. Um, so it's, it aims for, for, for self-sufficiency in food and
energy and so on. And it's been, I think it's been very successful given the hand that it's
been given in terms of the broader economy. It's quite dependent because it's, um, I mean the main,
uh, it's a big manufacturing economy, which is nice. It's not a kind of fake economy,
But a lot of it is automotives tied to the German automotive industry, which is a major decline because the Nord Stream pipeline, which was done by sailors, drunk sailors.
I can't remember.
There was something that I thought.
Drunk sailors or something blew up our energy supply in Europe.
I don't know.
I can't remember.
But anyway, the drunk sailors.
No, I'm telling you.
We need Vaisos.
So ridiculous.
Otherwise, the sailors get drunk and they blow up energy pipelines.
But anyway, so the...
It's grim.
Does it stop lying politicians?
No, I don't think so.
Okay, yeah.
No, no, no.
I was a drunk sailor.
Poles or something, I think.
I can't remember.
Anyway, so maybe it was the Finnish.
I don't know.
So anyway, all jokes aside.
So the economy is not completely insulated.
The manufacturing jobs and so on are definitely impacted by Europe.
But most European countries are just kind of like on autopilot.
And they're just trusting the plan.
And there is no plan.
So they're just trusting a non-existing plan.
And Hungary is thinking very hard, like, how do we make the best of this situation?
And the leadership here is, I mean, I know a lot of them.
They're very impressive people.
It's a bit of a philosopher, King State.
The average person, they portray these guys like, I read the European press films, and
you think like Fidesz are full of these like football hooligans.
I know that there's a different term in America, but like, you know, football hooligans here,
which is like soccer hooligans that like go and stuff.
That's how they kind of portray them.
but like actually the average party in Fidesz, Orban's party,
the average like party member at a senior level is like someone who's really into like philosophy.
The philosophy of law.
Yeah, the impression that I am given, or at least from afar, is like they're like Bond villains.
It's like they're these diabolical figures over there in Budapest, you know.
maybe maybe i mean i definitely think the bond film is better than the soccer hooligan like in
europe we're kind of it's made out that they're like guys are gonna like with skinheads that are
gonna jump you in the in the parking lot you know um but they're kind of no it's kind of a bit of a
philosopher king place and uh it's kind of nice in that regard but they're they're very thoughtful
on the long-term strategy of the country in a way that i don't think any other western country is
And they'll go through some hard stuff.
I have no doubt that you can't insulate yourself from, for example,
the deindustrialization due to lack of energy in Europe.
But I think that they'll be pretty sensible.
There's a lot of nuclear power here as well.
That's very noticeable.
And they're very pro-nuclear power.
And they're building two new reactors.
Wow, let's go.
So I think by 2030, maybe we can become electricity exporters.
Actually, we supply a lot of the electricity to Ukraine at the moment,
despite them not being very nice to us.
But, you know, we're such a Christian.
We provide them electricity.
So all in all, I think it's a pretty good setup.
But the one thing I'd say is it's just like
there's no safer city in the West.
Budapest is just no crime.
There's no crime.
There's no, like, mass migration.
It's just a really normal place.
And it's, I mean, if you haven't been here,
look up the pictures online.
It's one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with the,
you know, we're in like the age of the, where, where philosopher kings are, the philosopher king,
you know, the country, those are, those are scarce. And so part of value is scarcity. So,
right. So you've got, you've got Bukele in El Salvador, like he's been able to, you know,
just like turn things around to staggering degrees. And again, there's, there's concerns
there from certain people, oh, is he a dictator or whatever? But like, I mean, he's, he violated
the constitution technically by taking a second term, but like all the people were like overwhelmed
like you saved our lives, we're eternally grateful.
Please, please stay.
So you've got him, you've got Orban,
you got some of these other places And I just think again it gonna going to be these places that have you know that have like that are able to sensibly and quickly and decisively make decisions
These are going to be the places that are still going to be around and where you have a bunch of,
you know, you have peril, you know, decision paralysis because you've got all these institutions
in place. Like they're going to get there. It's just the bureaucracy is going to kill them.
Yeah. And the internal corruption, when you, when you don't have strong leadership,
people just grift and loot.
Yes, exactly.
Yep.
100%.
So I guess I'll just finish with this.
So, I mean, you've kind of talked around Bitcoin a little bit.
I've seen a number of your tweets about Bitcoin.
What is your overall thesis about Bitcoin?
How do you think about it?
Where do you think the future is going?
We don't talk about price on this podcast,
but broadly speaking, what do you see?
What are your thoughts about it?
Well, I'll just be honest.
that my concern is the Bitcoin seems to be
correlated to the S&P.
I own gold. I know
you don't want to hear that, but like,
I own gold because it's uncorrelated.
I have to
interrupt you. Like, I am
a gold appreciator, and
there's a lot more overlap and
appreciation between the gold people
and the Bitcoin people than Peter Schiff
would have you believe. So, I
will say that. And I'm not a long-term
gold book. I hold up my
hands. When I was in financial markets, we all used to laugh at Peter Schiff and Rumpel on the
gold thing, but things have changed. The dollar is not going to be the reserve currency for much
longer. And the whole point and laugh of the gold guy was premised on there's no alternative to the
dollar. Sorry, it's not that there's no alternatives. Complex dynamic, we could do an hour and a half
on what's happening with the dollar, but the dollar is on its last legs as a reserve currency.
Not saying it's going to collapse into hyperinflation, not saying any of that, but things are coming.
and the Wall Street model is not long for this world.
And I agree with all the Bitcoin people on that.
But my concern is that it's become correlated to the S&P
and I know why it's become correlated to the S&P
because it's in portfolios as a risk asset.
I used to work on this.
That doesn't mean that Bitcoin,
that doesn't seal Bitcoin's fate as a technology.
But what's happened with Bitcoin is
it was initially set up as a monetary instrument
and maybe a store of value.
and it became a risk on asset, speculative asset for portfolio managers.
And I think this is a big problem for the Bitcoin people.
It's not their fault because they wanted to resemble what gold actually currently is,
which is an uncorrelated hedge against society,
against the dollar system, whatever you want to call it.
But Bitcoin has become linked to the dollar system through this portfolio speculation.
And I mean, what else can I say?
I don't want to be long NASDAQ.
And right now it's correlated.
No, here's the question.
Will it always be correlated to NASDAQ?
No, it's correlated to NASDAQ for as long as people want to put it in the same risk basket as NASDAQ.
But the guys on Wall Street do have it as a risk on asset.
And I don't know the Bitcoin response to that, but I am telling you that is the reality because I know loads of these people who buy it on Wall Street and they see it as a risk on asset. They see it as, you know, it rallies with the AI basket and stuff. And that's the concern that I'd have.
Yeah. And I think that's fair. Like right now, I mean, that makes sense. But like, it's just one of these things where is that the long term? Is that where it's going to be long term?
And I think it makes sense.
I had probably not.
It's become caught up in the current tech bubble.
That is my concern.
And I would 100% agree.
I still think like, again, if you look, I mean, the things that we do and the conversations that I have with gold bugs are basically just acknowledging some of the limitations of gold.
So one of the examples, I was a church planter and missionary in Uruguay in South America for almost seven years.
And so half of our church members were Venezuelan immigrants.
and so gold served them no purpose
because a lot of these people had to flee the country
walking across the border.
There were thieves and governmentally sanctioned thieves,
soldiers waiting who knew that these people
were leaving with valuables
and so if they have like a bag of gold or silver,
like it's not gonna work for them.
And so there's lots of places where they don't have a way
to meaningfully secure gold or silver,
but they do have like a cell phone
where they can, you know, they can,
and nobody knows that they have the Bitcoin,
they can, you know, there's wallets and different things.
So I think that's obviously, you know,
that's millions of people. It's still not as big of pools of capital as these Wall Street firms and
as sovereign wealth funds from nations, all these kinds of things. I think it's just a matter of
maturity. People are doing what makes sense to them. Bitcoin takes time to understand. Gold is
much more straightforward. Again, gold, there's plenty of fraud that goes on with gold where it's
tungsten wrapped in gold. And so you have to do more work to try to guarantee that what you have
as actual gold. And so again, none of this is like panacea versus totally broke instruments.
There's trade-offs with all of these things. And so it's going to take time for the broader market
to understand custodying Bitcoin understand a lot of these things But I do think that one of the drivers for this for Bitcoin adoption is going to be and it actually is this is happening is with Bitcoin mining
Because you have, like, basically, Bitcoin mining allows you to turn stranded energy into money wherever it is.
So, like, where you have all these, in inland China, you have a lot of these hydroelectric dams that are too far from the large population centers to efficiently transport the energy.
And so what they're doing is, even despite the fact that China banned Bitcoin seven times,
and they've banned Bitcoin seven times and banned Bitcoin mining a number of times,
China still has always been inside the top five of countries in terms of where mining activity is going on
because they can mine Bitcoin in these far-flung regions
and then just transfer that Bitcoin to a regular population center.
And so as that continues, as people understand that more and more,
And people realize like, wait a second, this can actually make me more green. This can allow us to take energy that's currently being either burnt off with gas flaring or whatever. We can turn this into money to help us overcome some of our budget shortfalls.
And then just the potential to do this to apply Bitcoin mining to something like nuclear power.
Those two things people are having at some of the highest levels.
They're having these conversations and they're looking at Bitcoin differently than just a financial instrument as a risk-on asset.
And so I think it's going to take time.
I think that we're still super early.
You're talking about less than one quarter, I think, of 1% of global wealth is in Bitcoin.
So it still is just, it's basically a baby.
And so, but I still think it's going to take time.
But again, to your point, yeah, at this moment,
like there is correlation just between, you know,
people taking money and dumping it into Bitcoin.
They're looking for something to give them,
you know, performance in a market
where everything else is getting killed.
I'll tell you exactly what they're doing.
They see it as a leveraged play on the stock market.
So the beta on Bitcoin to the NASDAQ,
I don't know what it is,
but it's probably two or something like that.
So for every two points, the NASDAQ moves, Bitcoin moves four points.
Now, if you want to do the two times leverage on NASDAQ, you've got to pay the piper, right?
Because you're borrowing at the margin.
You can get free leveraged exposure to NASDAQ by buying coins.
At the moment, that's pretty much what it's being used for in trader space.
I know it because, I mean, I used to work in it and I know what people think.
so it's by the way just if you want super details on this the correlations aren't perfect so you're
getting the trade-off that you're trusting the beta rather than paying the piper on the margins
um but you know it makes it makes kind of sense i it's a pity it's been turned into that but um
and it won't be that forever i agree and anecdotally i hear of more and more people using it for
transactions and i'm beginning to understand why they would start using it for transactions yeah so
I'm Bitcoin curious, I guess you'd say, but I'm here clinging to my bags of gold coins and doubloons and stuff.
See, that language of Bitcoin curious, I will put that under vice laws going forward in my philosopher kingdom.
Well, Philip, I really appreciate your time, man.
And just, again, the conversation, I would love to have you back at some point in the future.
We can kind of reevaluate and maybe just get more into the newer book.
again we barely
scratched the surface
but grateful for you
tell people where
they can find your work
and just where they can
find you and follow you
online
I think most of it's
on my twitter
at philipilk
p-h-i-l-i-p-p-i-l-k
and I just
I think I post
pretty much everything
everything I do up there
there's a lot of finance
stuff not a lot of
bitcoin stuff
but if you're interested
in the end of dollar
reserve hegemony
and all that kind of stuff
like I don't want to say
that I have one of the
best accounts
but I think I do
I called the end of the
dollar in March 2022. So a week after the invasion of Ukraine in American affairs. So it's time
stamped article. And so I've been very early on the dollar reserve thing. So if people are
interested in developments on that, I think I follow it pretty closely. Among other stuff,
geopolitical stuff as well. But the dollar stuff, I'm very interested in.
Has anyone ever told you you look like Brent Johnson?
I don't know who that is.
Brent Johnson is the dollar milkshake guy.
You should look him up. He's pretty well known
and he's been doing the
he's kind of like the opposite where he's been saying, listen
yes, the dollar will someday
crash because of these stupid policies
but in the meantime, the dollar is going to go way
higher just by virtue of all the dollar
dominated debt that's around the world and stuff like that.
Oh, he's the like
finance commentator.
Yeah.
Brent Johnson. Yeah, you should look him up.
Maybe we're like
twins, twins,
Seth Rode of the Bird.
Twins, he's the
American version of you.
Maybe, maybe there
could be a history,
you know, uh, you're,
you can check out
your, your family
demographics and, you
know, where, maybe
you guys are related
to your fighting.
If we really look
alike, that would be
good if he's like pro,
if he's pro dollar
and I'm like anti or
whatever, that would
be a good, uh, that's
a grift, that's a
grift, man, there's a
grift for you.
Well, but hey, really
appreciate you.
And again, we'd love
to have you back at
some time in the
future.
All right.
Thanks, Jordan.
We Are F publishers.