Bitcoin is amazing because it has demonstrated to people that you don't need the state to issue money.
Fiat is in its death throes. The great Keynesian experiment is coming to an end.
I cannot believe we are here today. It blows my mind.
We have nation state involvement. We have almost every large financial institution participating.
Yeah, I knew we would get here. I just didn't think we would get here this quick.
AI things came out and they really started getting good.
Major companies stopped hiring entry level positions.
robots like that. I mean, they're going to be rivaling nation states. I know a lot of people
who lost a lot of money because they believe in that progression theorem and it held them back
from buying Bitcoin. It was real tragic. All right. Welcome, everybody, to Episode 2 of the
Bitcoin Boomers. Today's special guest is Dr. Robert Murphy. I've had the pleasure of knowing
Bob for, I think, Bob, maybe like five years. We've known each other. We've kind of had a
a weird intersection of life insurance, Bitcoin and economics and kind of that Venn diagram
drew us together. For those not familiar with Bob, he has a resume that is way longer than I could
ever do justice for. But Bob always leads with that. He's a Christian. I respect that and admire
that. And I think that you'll see as you learn about Bob that it kind of weaves its way through
everything that he does. Bob has a PhD in economics from NYU. He's a senior fellow at both the
Fraser Institute and the Mises Institute, which if you're not familiar with the world of economics,
that's about as good as you can do. He's the chief economist at an organization called
uh infinio uh he's an author podcaster i've had the pleasure of being on his show um the bob murphy
show but he also has the human action podcast um has an old show uh contra krugman which was
absolutely phenomenal maybe we'll touch on uh some of that at some point so welcome bob thank you for
coming well thanks for having me guys and i should clarify i'm not officially a boomer but sometimes
when I'm in the park with my youngest son, people assume I'm his grandfather.
So I do have that.
I should have clarified that.
You're an honorary boomer.
Yes, I should have clarified that.
Bob is not a boomer, and not all our guests will be boomers, but I think he certainly
knows a lot of boomers and understands a lot of things about the world that we can all
learn from.
You know, Bob, I thought maybe a place to start for folks is I think the world of economics
itself is somewhat of a mystery. And so I'll let you expand on this, but it's maybe one of the few
disciplines where you have radically different schools of thought, and you're an Austrian,
and I guess I didn't mention this, also a libertarian, which is another, I think,
important perspective for people to understand about you. But maybe kind of given over you,
But why do these different schools of thought exist?
The MMTers, the Keynesians, the Austrians, which and why are the Austrians right?
OK, so for the first one in terms of like, why are there schools of thought and economics, period?
And that's not the only discipline.
So if you look around like for psychiatry, like there are Freudians or like post Freudians, things like that.
And you can see even like in something like literature or history, there's different schools of thought in the I think that the dividing line is like in the.
social sciences right whereas in among like chemists and physicists and stuff it's not like
there's broad schools but even to the extent that there is like in physics some people believe in
string theory and some don't and so when you say well how can this schism persist it's because and
they'll say well because we don't have the equipment yet to test the you know the theories
right it's just all math right now so i think that's ultimately the thing is that in the hard
sciences there's experimental verification and so like it's pretty they have a pretty clear metric
in terms of who's right and who's wrong, at least in principle.
Whereas in economics, you know, I can be arguing with Paul Krugman
about what caused the Great Depression, and no one can ever be proven right
because we would have to go back in time to 1929 and do different government policies
and then run the tape and then compare that to what happened.
Yeah, against irreparable conditions, right?
Right, you're always arguing the counterfactual or like the Obama stimulus package or whatever, right?
So that's, I think, you know, to answer quite, and then of course too,
it's so ideological and there's so much at stake.
Like in the grand scheme, a lot of people don't care one way or the other whether string theory is true or not.
So that's not like this cutting social issue that's keeping people up at night.
But people do care a lot about, you know, should there be UBI or whatever?
Or, you know, should the government give more support to higher education or things like that or SNAP benefits?
Right. That people really care about that.
And so then I guess what I'm saying is economics is rigorous in the sense that the models or the methods you use to explain your position have to be coherent and internally consistent and stuff like that.
but you can, there's like a lot of free variables, if you will. You can, you know,
you can point to the data and tell some story that justifies your ideology if you're clever.
And then, and I think that's kind of explains what happens. I don't want to say people are
consciously lying, but I'm just saying when you go in with your, but I'm saying you need not be
lying. In other words, you can just say, no, I know what I, and you can just come up with a story
to fit the, and that's what they would say that, you know, that my friends and I do, right? So
That's the accusations that would go back and forth.
You know what?
I appreciate about your answer, Bob.
But I think if we ask the same question to some other economists, they would answer it differently.
And part of it is, I think we see it when we see economists frequently that are quoted, and we'll use, like, say, a Krugman.
they they often present it with this confidence whatever their position is this confidence that
and and uh the mmt-ers which maybe you could even explain that world for a little bit like they
they believe they've mathematically proven a whole bunch of things at least that's my
perspective of it you may you may view it differently yeah yeah sure so uh and also to
to circle because you had asked me a two-part question the one was like why are there schools
why is yours right um and so yeah i i don't want to give the impression and you know lawrence of
course i agree with you that a lot of these guys are not honest players that was one of the you
know underpinnings of our that uh podcast contra crewman bob that you alluded to in the intro there
is that we every week we would just take his pot his article in the new york times and just go
through and show why he was mislead or whatever even though yeah he had this you know this patent
of scientific irrefutability.
No, I'm just doing math here when, no, there's a lot of assumptions.
So just to give a quick example of, so I, for example,
did not favor the Obama stimulus package.
And just to give an example of what I mean to illustrate this ability
that it's like non-falsifiable, but yet I think my camp is right,
is, so remember, there was the financial crisis in 2008.
Obama gets elected in that election, so he gets sworn in in January 2009,
and they had the so-called Obama stimulus package that was going up
hey, we're going to the economy's in free fall.
And the chair of the economic advisors for him, Christina Romer,
and then the vice chair was Jared Bernstein.
They had this analysis to try to explain to legislators
why you should vote for this package, the Economic Recovery Act,
or whatever they called it.
But what we think of as the Obama stimulus package.
And they said, and I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head,
but the structure of their argument was,
they said right now unemployment is 7% and change.
Again, this was January of 2009.
And they said, if we go ahead and do this stimulus package, unemployment is still going to go up.
Don't misunderstand.
But we'll contain it.
Like unemployment will only go up to eight point something if we do this package.
However, if we just sit back and let the free market rip, unemployment might go up to nine something.
So that's why we should do this.
Right, everybody.
So they went ahead and did the Obama package.
And unemployment went up above 10 percent.
Right.
And so you would think what more could happen to show that they were wrong and the critics were right.
Well, no, the Keynesians just all ran victory laps saying, wow, it's a good thing we passed that stimulus package because the economy was in worse shape than we realized.
Right. So that's how they handled it. So, you know, to us, of course, as Austrian libertarian guys, that sounded like, you know, special pleading and crazy.
But I mean, you know, you could come up with an analogy in medicine or something where some patient's sick and they, you know, the doctor says, well, we recommend this treatment and because otherwise this could happen.
and they go ahead and do the treatment and the patient dies,
that one anecdote doesn't prove that the treatment is bad.
There could be 19 million things going on, right?
So that's kind of what happens here within economics.
There's already 15 million things going on,
so you can't do like a controlled experiment.
As far as the MMTers, they're a little bit different than the Keynesians.
And the way the MMTers work is, and that stands for Modern Monetary Theory, MMT,
they rest a lot of their rhetorical weight on accounting tautologies and so they'll say just
give you one example that's my favorite so stephanie kelton who's like the leader of their
movement now um she was an advisor of bernie sanders campaign and so on she posted a chart
on twitter a while ago that showed a graph of the u.s federal budget deficit and then overlaid that
with what they called like the net private surplus or financial surplus to the private sector. And it
was like, they were almost mirror images that whenever the government was, you know, had red
bars, the private sector had a financial surplus, almost offsetting mirror image. And so she, you
know, she said, uh, all this fretting about the government debt, but the only way the financial
sector can accumulate net financial assets is if the public sector has a deficit, their red ink
makes our black ink possible. Right. And so, you know, it's just so clearly rhetorically,
what she's trying to say is all you fiscal hawks wanting to cut spending and, you know,
get the deficit under control and we're, you know, impoverishing our grandchildren.
You guys are all idiots. What you don't understand when it comes to public finances,
as opposed to like a household deficits are actually responsible because that, you know,
provides the means by which the private sector can accumulate assets. So not to go down a rabbit
hole here. There is a sense in which what she's saying, she could point to some accounting by which
that's true. But the trick is that the way they do these numbers, like the net, the private sector
as a whole, the financial assets net to zero necessarily, right? Like if you have a corporate
bond, that's an asset to you, but it's a liability to the corporation, right? So that's a sense.
And so all they're saying with that, you know, insight is the only way that the private sector
as a whole can be owed dollars by something that's not just a wash is if some outside entity owes
them dollars well who could that be well it could be foreigners or it could be the government and so
yeah that's not a false statement but it doesn't you know the private sector the fact that the
government owes us 37 trillion dollars because that's their debt or 38 38 if they snap their
fingers tomorrow and that debt just disappear all those treasuries disappeared it's not that the
private sector as a collective would be that much worse off because how was the government going to
pay the interest in the principal they were going to tax us borrow it you know just roll it over or
print money and so you can see that that's a different thing that a household old but you know
if if foreigners owed us that 37 trillion that would mean something that would make americans
genuinely wealthier because the only way foreigners are going to come up with that is to make cars and
stuff and send them to us but to say the government owns the private sector 37 trillion so that's
net assets to us is kind of goofy when you think through how does the government pay us it's like
if some if some guy owes you a thousand dollars and he sticks a gun in your belly
you give him a thousand dollars because he mugs you and then he pays you right back and says there
you go we're square was his iou you know was that really an asset the same you know i mean so it's
kind of like that so again that's the thing with mmt years is they'll make some statements that
are technically not false but they're extremely misleading i agree with that i was covered in my
book, you know, the fantasy that they live under is that they can continue to print money to cover
deficits and that there won't be any impact of that printing. And they concede that inflation
is a potential risk, but they also believe that they can control that inflation through taxation
and government policies. And anybody who believes the government can control anything effectively or
knows how and when to do the right thing is delusional in my view. And the first experiment
with MMT was 1921 through 23, and it was called chartalism back then. And there was a guy named
Knapp who came up with the notion that the government could never run out of money,
and that all money was a creation of the government, not a creation of the marketplace,
which was just totally false. And it ended up with the hyperinflation in Weimar Germany. So
it's funny, because when I asked her, Stephanie, about that on Twitter, I got blocked.
yeah i don't know how that shit happens right yeah we know warren moser blocked me which is
weird because i've had him on my show it was curdy i don't even know like he sometimes there's like
lists that go around and people just automatically like defer to someone else's judgment block these
accounts yeah when i yeah when i went after suddenly i had all of mmt world coming after
me and i just had a total blockathon i i x'd out hundreds of people within days yeah well that so
Lawrence, you make a good point there, too. I've seen that, too, where it's again, Stephanie
Collins, she's not dumb. Right. So in her book, like if people just say like, oh, you know,
money printer, go burr, you MMTers, you just think print money. And the MMTers can, you know,
get righteously indignant and say, no, Stephanie says several times in her book, you know, that
there's real resource constraints. And if the government runs the printing press too much,
then that will make prices right. And yes, she does say that. But again, like there's never a
time when they say the government should stop printing it like there's clips of her on cnbc
there's no mechanism for it yeah she said multiple times she's like cash cards she said we can never
run out of money you know we've got an unlimited amount of money just like there's an unlimited
amount of cash in the federal reserve i mean she is just an outright complete and utter fraud i mean
she's a liar and she's full of shit and she knows she's full of shit but she's kissing up to the
state you know and she went to that great college stony brook and got you know got a phd there and
I mean, she's just dumb as fuck.
I mean, it's just...
She is.
I mean, it's just...
Well, tell us like it is, Bob.
Larry, tell us like it is.
No, it's just...
It's true.
I mean, I read her book.
I mean, it was such trash.
I just couldn't believe anybody reads and believes that crap.
I mean, it's like, what the fuck, lady?
This makes no sense whatsoever.
I mean, it was just horrible.
I mean, I had to read it because I was writing mine, and I had to cover MMT.
so i had to sit down actually read the whole goddamn book which i never would have done
otherwise and i was just appalled at what i read i mean it's just a piece of shit
you know why anyone buys it i just don't understand i don't know if i'm old enough
for this podcast you may not bob you may not be cranky enough i mean we should become the cranky
old man bob yeah we should have should have warned you about when larry gets rolling
our last guest might have surpassed me we had a guy on um who's a good friend of ours george
bodine and he's probably right there with me but yeah bob and gary are much more polite than i am
i think that's set to scale for us yeah i'm kind of i'm kind of at that point where i'm just so
pissed off and and i got nothing to lose i just don't give a fuck and so you know i'm just gonna
kind of call it as i see and i think but i think that's what i think it it i think that's a really
sage point because i think at some point you just had enough right and you know like yeah we're well
in our you know well over 60 years old and i know you're not you're not there yet uh even close bob
but like there's a point at which you just say i'm i'm just so tired of this crap and this bullshit
you also realize like you have a clock yourself like you want to see stuff righted before you pass
on right and and so it it gets frustrating and i i think kind of back to that whole thing of how the
different schools of thought the way i look at it and you know correct me if you feel differently
bob but i think we're really talking about a whole bunch of schools of thought that think
an economy can be managed that a central authority can can somehow pull the levers and make it all
right versus the Austrian school saying, no, it, it, it,
you don't want to screw with it. Like let it,
let it run its course and it will be much better off than if you tried to play
with it.
Yeah, I think that for sure that's true. And then I,
I got more of a glimpse in the psychology and understand how it works when I
went to NYU to get my degree. And there, you know,
there were some of the professors there. So at the time I went,
It was probably like a top 15 economics program in the world.
So it was a pretty rigorous program.
They had an Austrian fellowship.
That's why I went there because it was like I got the mainstream education, but my dissertation could be Austrian and they supported me.
And, you know, so those guys were sharp.
You know, they were very good at math and everything, but they just they didn't.
In my view, they didn't really understand how the economy worked.
And then also it wasn't just like a side point because they were so intelligent or because Paul Krugman is so smart.
that's why he thinks oh i have the ability i could run things better than what these clowns
are doing you know what i mean so this arrogance kind of fuels it and that's there was a guy in my
program i was somehow the socialist calculation debate came up so this is a famous debate that
raged in the 20s and 30s between like mises and hayek and socialists and mises was saying that
yeah you need market prices central planners don't have the ability even after the fact to
say whether resources have been allocated efficiently that's why you need you know
decentralized ownership money prices just so entrepreneurs can do profit and loss calculation
that's how it works in a market economy you don't have the analog in a socialist one so they they
have no idea he said they'd be groping in the dark they have no idea what they're doing
it's and my buddy in this program you know going through the program with me and he was a sharp
guy a nice guy and he was just like no i mean clearly the socialist won because whatever the
market economy does the socialist could just mimic that allocation but if they didn't like it they
could just tweak it so like and why was he thinking because in his mind it's just a little
model that we just learned in our first year class at nyu like that's what the economy is it's just a
bunch of equations not realizing like to say oh just tell the central planners just start out you
know basically mimic what the market would have done this year and then if you see some things
you don't like like inequality it's ironic because we've got thousands of years of history that shows
that you know the freer markets are the better the outcomes that they provide and yet you know
all these Keynesians and socialists just ignore that. And that's because they want to be in power.
And what you're saying, Bob, kind of reminds me of a conversation that
Ryan Lundin had with Alan Greenspan, where he after he left the Fed, and, you know, he was a
gold bug. Originally, he was, you know, an Ayn Rand accolade. And he said, Well, you know, when we
were running the Fed, we were really just trying to mimic the gold standard. And I just wanted to
throw, you know, spit up my coffee. I mean, it's just like, no, you weren't, you know, you very
clearly you know blew an enormous bubble and and you were managing to an outcome which was higher
stock prices because you knew that if asset prices went up you know there wouldn't be a revolution
and so we engineered a system where asset prices have to go up continually the only way to have
asset prices go up continually is to feed them with newly printed money and that's what we've
been doing now for 50 plus years and the whole experiment's about to blow the fuck up and it
deserves to blow the fuck up you know and um it's it's just disgusting you know how stupid these
people are and the stuff that they've they've tried to shove down people's throats and that's
why i wrote the book i mean i wanted to just try and educate people that you know you've been lied
to about all this stuff yeah just to elaborate on that um green i don't remember off the top of my
head what it was but i saw like after he stepped down and was no longer on the fed and then you
know he's you know this revered man or whatever at conferences and people are asking him he wrote
some things and once again like the stuff he wrote was pretty reasonable and like pretty you know
sound money perspective right when he wasn when he was so it was like before he had the power he was real good such that you know ayn Rand puts him in a chapter in a book on you know the virtues of gold And then after he out of power again like his economics intuition is good
It's just funny when that guy, though, is well charged.
And I can I can offer a clue on that again.
He was asked by Brian Lundin at the New Orleans conference where I just spoke to to come down and present after he left.
And Brian gets to have dinner and supper with all the speakers, you know, when they're down there.
and he told me in private,
but I think he would be okay with me sharing.
And he said, I was asking Alan,
I said, Alan, how did it feel to be a central banker
for all these years, to be the maestro, to be this?
And he said, Alan kind of turned to me
and with a sly look said,
it was intoxicating.
It was just absolutely intoxicating.
I thought to myself, there you go, right?
I mean, it's just-
It's a very honest answer.
Yeah, right?
I mean, it's all ego and bullshit.
it you know yeah there was some memory when i did my book on the great depression i came across some
stuff about like the in the visit office the diary or whatever memoirs of some of the guys that were
like in roosevelt's inner circle yeah and the one guy i forget his name now he was telling us
like when they went off gold or you know 33 they go you know gold was locked in and then they they
went off gold temporarily and then you know revalued it but there was a period where it was
like every day roosevelt was just making up what the price of gold was going to be that day and like
And he was doing stuff like saying, you know, like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a nice number.
You know, it wasn't any kind of scientific.
And the guy, so the guy writing, again, it was a memoir or diary or something, said something like,
if the public knew the method by which we were determining the gold prices, they would have been horrified or something like that.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
Well, you know, maybe this is maybe a slight change in subject,
but I think related, you know, we're kind of in a difficult state.
I think we can see the Mamdami election in New York,
I think is, you know, great evidence of there's a lot of people struggling,
especially the younger generations are really struggling.
and one of the things that the three of us face bob is a lot of angst um about our generation
people will say you know it's the boomers fault that we are here and and uh without prejudicing
your your answer further and it's okay to say they're they're right um but i'm curious how you
view that what what how would you respond to something like that so i've seen that too i mean
it's tough. Cause like, I, I get along with my parents who are boomers and the,
and they retired to Florida and they did very boomer.
And my dad calls probably five days a week and stuff.
So they're definitely like in that box. And I like my parents,
I have no animosity towards them.
They were very nice to me and they have been. So it's, you know,
I think maybe in some of these things,
like somebody might have a personal thing that then they project.
So, I mean,
the critique where it's coming from that I've seen in terms of like to
operationalize it's like, well, what do you have in mind?
And I know there's a thing where like rising home prices is a good example.
So like, geez, like you're some young guy coming.
How are you if you're 25 right now?
How are you supposed to get married and go buy a house or something with home prices,
what they are?
And then now that AI is making it like right now, entry level jobs are tough.
Right.
And so that kind of critique.
And so then against the mindset of like a lot of people saying like, oh, we can't deregulate
and have more, you know, like to take away zoning regulations to allow more homes to be
constructed well no because that's going to hurt my property value you know and that's my number
one asset for retirement is my house so that's the kind of type of thing when people can be
specific about what is it that they have in mind when they say the older boomers don't understand
they're like you know pulling the ladder up after them and now we're screwed yeah that's the kind of
thing they mean i can sure i understand i understand the situation like for instance i i bought my
first home in 1986 or 87 for $62,000 with a 3% down FHA loan, right? So I put, what is that like
$1,950 down or something like that was my down payment. And, and, but I, I guess I would love
for it because I have kids, I don't even have grandkids and I would love for them to have that
same opportunity but i don't blame my generation for it i think it i think it's rooted in some of
the things we're talking about earlier the the the way inflation has has happened the way assets have
have um appreciated um um i'm a sound money guy too you know what nixon did in 71 and certainly
the precursors to all i i believe those are more the issues and by the way the people that made
most of those decisions weren't boomers they were generations before that right yeah so what you just
did i think is the nail like there's a sense in which if something's screwed up with the world
and young people coming up into it it's the old people's fault like there's like it's tautology
in a sense but when you really want to break it down and say what are the institutional
factors that change and why is it that you know inflation so much worse now than it was in
you know the 1920s or something yes those you can point the specific policies and it's not
technically boomers that were in charge of those fateful decisions.
So I agree with, with all that.
And then yeah, given that you're now in the environment where you are,
of course your house is going to be your primary asset.
If you're just like a middle-class person, like what, what else would it be?
And so I get that if you banked on that and then they come in and tweak things
so that now all of a sudden your, your home price collapses, well,
that's going to impact you as well.
So it is, you know, it is what it is.
I think this has been going on a while though.
I mean, my parents bought our house, our first house.
in 63 for $20,000. Then in 83, I bought my first house for $100,000. And it wasn't a great house.
I'm glad we don't live there now. But my parents were having a heart attack going,
how are you going to afford this? Oh my gosh. And I said, well, we're going to make it work.
You know, so it's not like it's something new. That's a, what, a five fold in 20 years.
you know so i don't know what the average house is now and it wasn't that great of a house
well right yeah so i mean even there they're like nixon going off gold in 71 you know the big
inflation so that's what i'm saying i think it was the 70s that really destroyed the and bob you
know this like from the life insurance world that it used to be the case that and mises and some of
the older austrian works you know as a matter of fact we say that people save through like you know
bank savings accounts and maybe some you know safe uh bonds and then life insurance whereas
nowadays that the idea of people like saving in their life insurance is still kind of this quaint
thing that's making a comeback because in the 70s that just seemed to be stupid that you know with
what inflation was doing so i anyway i and also too like there was like the rise of no load mutual
funds and things like it it is i think the 70s is really what pushed a lot of people such that the
average american household thought okay yeah i need to be in the stock market and you know i i
I need my house to go up over time.
Otherwise, how am I going to, you know,
have something at the end to give to my kids?
Yeah, I think that the human tendency
to want to be able to blame somebody
is maybe, you know, at root cause here.
And also just we don't educate people, right?
So, I mean, to the degree I have knowledge in the spaces that we're talking about, it's all been self-education.
You know, even though I actually studied economics in college, like everything I've learned is I've had to seek myself.
And, you know, I think we live in a world where I think it's harder and harder.
You've obviously published a lot of books, Bob, trying to help and educate people.
Larry's book, which is, I think, Alvarez is right, called The Big Print.
What was that release? Maybe six, seven months ago.
February. Yeah.
You know, I mean, there's attempts and we're doing these kind of podcasts, but it's really hard for people, I think, to get information.
And when I look at like the Mamdami election.
I mean, I just I cringe because I think the people that voted for him, I understand why they voted for him.
But I but I I feel sorry for them because I don't think they understand how unlikely it is that this will be successful.
Oh, yeah, I agree with all that. And also, too, like on the right, the big populist upsurge with Trump and so on like it.
It used to be standard among right wing conservative to like fans of Rush Limbaugh, let's say that like, oh, yeah, free trade is the default position.
low taxes and then you know tucker carlson and guys like that pap you can and challenging that
and saying no this is why all the jobs are going overseas so i'm saying that yes for sure when
every everybody is acknowledging something is screwed up with the american economy since you
know the 90s at least like it just keeps getting more and more screwed up and that tends to hurt
you know the economically vulnerable more so young people who have no assets or anything they're the
ones that are going to be the most ones bearing the brunt of that and then yeah the the right has
it's prescriptions and the left has theirs. And to the extent that I would say they're not,
you know, correctly diagnosing exactly what went wrong, then yeah, those, those things are going
to blow up in their face. But unfortunately, again, going back to what we said right at the top,
it's hard, even after the fact, looking backwards to say, why did that not work?
You can always come up with a story that's consistent with the observations. And so they'll
say, oh, we didn't do socialism hard enough. That's what happened. Or it's those greedy,
rich people that they all, they all moved out of New York city. So now we can't tax them.
Otherwise, it would have worked.
You know, they're going to say stuff like that.
They're not going to say, wait, maybe capitalism is great.
Anyone who voted for Mondain is not going to say that.
No matter what happens.
Right.
Hey, Bob, I got a question which is changing, maybe not changing that much the subject.
With the AI going like it is and the amount of jobs that are predicted to be lost over the next 10, 20 years or whatever,
do you think that they will come out with UBI?
and if so, how would that affect the market?
I could just see them going for that
with all these people out of work.
We discussed this last week.
I think people would be rioting in the street
if there's no jobs at all.
Right, so if you're asking me,
what's my prediction about what's actually going to happen?
Yes.
Yeah, I think there's going to be some kind of UBI.
Maybe they'll call it something else
to make it go down smoother.
But yeah, I think that that's what's going to happen.
And so as a, you know, market fundamentals kind of guy, I don't think that would need to be the case.
In other words, we just had a society that, you know, voluntary contracts and things like that.
And there was no big welfare state. I don't think AI would spell doom for 50 percent of humanity.
It's like to me, no, that that's kind of like how you get to live in the George Jetson kind of world.
Like, that's what that looks like. But it is true that right now, I mean, there's lots of statistics.
you can go and look and see that it's hard to disentangle because the Fed started raising rates
too when ChatGPT came out with, I forget which model it was, in 2022. So some of this stuff,
it's hard. But if somebody wants to make the case that right when these AI things came out and they
really started getting good, major companies stopped hiring entry-level positions, you can
show a lot of graphs that seem to back that up. And that's also the advice. I know people who
specialize in consulting with companies about how can you use these large language models
to integrate in your workflow to get efficiencies.
And that's what they're doing.
They're saying, how can you do what you're doing now without having to hire new people?
And they're not going to be laying off the 20-year-old manager, meaning 20 years experience
manager.
It's going to be the entry-level things.
That's the easiest thing to get rid of first, just to have the established person using AI
to do the jobs that normally they would have hired four new people to do.
So that's all happening.
And again, in the long run, I think normally the market would have adjusted
and those people can find new things.
The cliche, we don't need as many people growing food as we did in 1800.
So they just went and did something else.
But in the short term, that is painful.
And I think it's going to be easy.
And plus too, with all these big companies getting trillion dollar plus market caps
because of AI, then it's going to be so obvious to say, oh, we'll tax them in order to fund,
you know, these support payments to the people that are displaced. And so I don't, I don't see
politically how you could possibly stop that given that both the left and the right now
are kind of populist and like looking out for the little guy and these, against these fat cats.
And so what, isn't that going to really kind of just add tons of money to the deficit?
oh yeah sure so it's again it's tricky though because um i think peter teal made this point
recently on an interview that somebody was asking you know they're asking all kinds of stuff
it was the one he got really weird and was talking about the antichrist if you saw that
but anyway i did one of the points that yeah that was not you know too out there that i thought was
good is they're asking about elon musk and he said well it's weird because on the one hand elon
is warning about you know the deficit cliff and how the big beautiful bill is going to destroy the
country and everything but on the other hand he says by and i forget what he was like by 2035
we're gonna have 50 million robots working and you know doing mid-level jobs and so he's saying
so which one is it so in other words he was saying there's a sense in which you know if this predicted
thing that some people and i'm i think this is very plausible that yeah there's a sense in which
it'd be like a bunch of aliens showed up millions who can do all these jobs and everything and
they're willing to do it for a dollar an hour like in that kind of framework if the
government can just figure out a way to tax them just even a little bit they're gonna have tons of
money flowing in and that again that's what would make it so hard to deny people who say well then
why don't you give some of it to these you know humans now who can't find work it's gonna be a
hard problem I I um I made a tweet about a week week and a half ago and one of the things I said
was um it's my advice to basically any developed nation in the world to radically shut the door on
immigration. I'm not saying 100%, but and plan for a labor shortage in the short term,
like just deal with it. Because we have no idea what the effect of the AI, the robotics, the drones,
the self-driving vehicles, like all these sorts of things I think are going to have a radical impact.
And the last thing you want is a massive amount of new people coming into the nation, especially unskilled ones.
I think what Trump's doing to flush out a lot of the illegal immigration is a very positive thing because I don't really know.
And I think all of us understand AI as a technologist.
I look at it and I see improvements that are exponential.
Like even compared to a year ago in my own life, I can see radical change in my efficiency because of it.
And so, you know, that really worries me.
Like how do we do all this?
And I guess I'll – I love your comments on that, Bob.
But the second thing I'll say and let you expand on it is Gary asked about UBI, but then you mentioned things like, oh, we'll tax the organizations that are winning, essentially, right?
The NVIDIAs of the world or the Teslas or whoever is winning.
um do you how do you see that happening and and and like do you see
things like uh tax on uh unrealized gains being a something that that maybe gets chased in the
not too distant future especially in western worlds uh yes everything you just said i agree
with all that that it's um and the immigration stuff i i'm agnostic in the sense that i i want
to decentralize everything like i i think that in the long run like like in the u.s context i've
written in favor of texas seceding and things like that because i just don't see how at the
national level this stuff can work right so anyway i'm just saying that's you know what my yeah crazy
views on that stuff in terms of the like making the decision making instead of people in washington
deciding the immigration policy for the whole thing instead like you know breaking it down
and letting more local people like decisions about that area but in any event um yeah i i just in my
own work it's the stuff it's incredible we happen to use claude at infinio and you know if i need to
do so especially something that involves like some quantitative modeling and things like that
whereas before i would have needed to like try to get some grad students somewhere to do it and it
would have taken a week to make the arrangements,
to send him the thing, to get the feedback.
And then we would have had to pay him a bunch of money
because he's got opportunity costs with his time.
And I can do it in a one-hour setting with Claude
and get results.
And yeah, and it's not perfect.
And sometimes they'll give me nonsense,
but I'll just say,
hey, what you just said that doesn't make sense
because of this, right?
And they'll say, oh, yes, my apologies.
Here, and they'll go ahead and do it.
Phenomenal.
And it's crazy.
So fortunately, I'm not worried about Claude
taking away my job.
In other words, they need me at the helm.
Again, also assessing whether or not that output's nonsense.
That's not what I asked for.
But in terms of, you know, would that make us less likely to hire a bunch of interns or something?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, entry-level.
Analysts and things.
Yeah, at least for right now.
And that's kind of what I'm saying to other businesses, too, is just if you don't see the potential of this thing, just look at your workflow and what your employees currently do and just see.
So a lot of this stuff, it's more like you can do things that you otherwise wouldn't have done.
So I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there where it's more just that companies are going to be able to do so much more than they otherwise would have because the AI is doing a bunch of stuff that it wouldn't have made sense to hire somebody to do.
So there is that element.
But yeah, I think for plenty of places, and again, you're seeing this with Amazon and so on, a lot of places are just saying, yep, we're either laying off or a lot are just have a hiring freeze.
And the thing that's – I hate to use the term game changer.
I can't stand that term, but I think the thing that's really going to be
the inflection point, I'll use another buzz term, is when they
because the robotic technology keeps getting better.
I don't you guys like watch these things from these conferences and stuff
where the robots are.
I mean, it's gotten to the point where I have to look and see, is this a parody?
Is that really a human inside of suit or is that really a robot?
Because it it was just yesterday I mean we recording this on November 7th for November 7th for those listening later on But Tesla just had a conference yesterday and the optimist which is their robot was doing exactly what you said was dancing and doing it in a really elegant way
And the dexterity of this thing is amazing.
they're producing them for $20,000
or the retail price on these is $20,000
they're going to have a production capacity
I believe of 10 million per year
and the robots are building the robots
it's mind blowing
my vision
because I've also said things
that I think the US is not going to be the superpower
in the year 2050
not that China will be
but just I think it'll be more multipolar world and stuff just because the relative shifting.
And I think we're going to see just like multinational companies rising.
Like, you know, if you have 50,000 robots like that, I mean, they're going to be rivaling nation states in terms of like just people not messing with them and doing what they, you know what I mean?
So I think that you're going to see all this kind of stuff.
And especially given if the U.S. government, its finances just keep getting worse.
and yeah it's going to be more powerful than any one particular company but if you do have these
other companies that have you know 50 trillion dollar valuations and wherever and then the u.s
government is 60 trillion dollars in debt and we've hit the point where unlike the mmt-ers would say
that no if we just start running the printing press the dollar is going to crash because you
know bond investors around the world now have gotten their appetite full that's going to be a
different thing that it's these companies people run these companies and maybe it'll be like the
CEOs and board plus the AI engines that are, you know, GPT 9.0, helping them make decisions and
things. So I think you're going to see a lot of that where it's not just one thing, but all these
different trends all kind of coming together in the world 30, 40 years from now, I think it's
going to look a lot different from today. Like just like it's hard for us to even imagine.
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commissions i i agree and you touched on something i've spoken some on myself which is
i i predict the exact same thing which is in a lot of cases these very powerful multinational
corporations, Tesla is probably a great candidate to be one or SpaceX, actually, or maybe the blend
of those two gets difficult to distinguish from the nation state and maybe even one of themselves
and the ability of traditional nation states to control them could get very difficult.
um and so it so it like like you said kind of a kind of a mind-boggling
thing and it and it could go could go really bad it could go
well to it you know we could we could go toward utopia or dystopia but
you know it's hard to uh you know the middle the middle ground is probably less likely than
than the two ends right yeah i mean my prediction on that stuff is it'll be kind of like when you're
watching the movie the matrix and how like it's sort of scary and dystopian on one hand but on
the other hand like oh wow like they're flying around in a spaceship like in the real world part
like so that's some cool technology like i think you know the the tech just like if somebody from
the year 1950 saw the u.s today i think they would be both amazed by the technology in certain
aspects but they would be horrified like you you let boys and girls use their bathrooms what are
you nuts you know just some stuff that would be inconceivable to them and so i i think it'd be
saying you know from our vantage point looking ahead that yeah there's going to be certain
innovations and certain respects in which wow that's amazing i can't believe humanity's achieved
that but on the other hand i think like certain social patterns and then and the most notable
part about that as you guys both know is that if all that comes to fruition it just totally
destroys the Keynesian credit-based financial system. Do you know what I mean? You can't,
I mean, all these technologies are enormously deflationary. They do more with less and they're,
they create efficiencies. And we have a monetary system where money is debt and the money supply
and debt have to continually grow or else it collapses. And so, you know, the two just can't
coexist. This is Jeff Booth's point with his seminal book. And, and I'm pretty sure I know
which one's going to win. The, you know, the, the fiat world is, I mean, I think fiat is in its
death throes right now. I mean, the, the great Keynesian experiment is coming to an end and AI
and technology are, are helping, helping with that. I mean, it's helped already because it created the
internet, which disintermediated the lies of the media. Yeah. I totally agree with that, that,
you know, part of my vision there that I sketched a minute ago, that all these big, you know,
multi-trillion dollar from our perspective corporations or whatever is what's a big thing
that oh they'd be like mining bitcoins you know i mean like that would be a big you and that yeah
their transactions vis-a-vis each other because in a world where the u.s dollar is no longer the
global reserve currency which is splintered i think you will see a return to you know bitcoin
things like that but also even like oh gold that's custodied and that you know you're it's on the
blockchain you know on a blockchain and that's how they all keep tabs so that it's sort of you
know in a world where there's no global authority and it's just all kind of decentralized obviously
the type of money and financial transactions they're going to use they're going to have to
be on things like blockchains because otherwise how are they going to trust each other yeah you
know this may be a good transition bob you um you wrote a i don't know if it's a book booklet maybe
we call it understanding bitcoin yeah a booklet and um it was an early book you know uh i i looked
it up before um before we started and uh it was published in uh 2015 um and i read it several
years ago but i i pulled it back out and um i want to just read a little something um and and
it's on this very topic it's from very early in the book there's a a section called why do we need
privately created money. And I'll just read a few sentences from it. But it says, we the authors of
this guide are extremely skeptical of the modern state, consider it a threat to both civil and
financial liberties. The most obvious pitfall of state issued money is the danger of hyperinflation.
Moderate inflation entails the transfer of wealth from people holding the currency to the institutions
given the power to create it. Proponents of this system sometimes argue that wages and prices
adjust to make it all wash, but consider if someone offered you a printing press that could
make legal tender notes, wouldn't you see how that would slant things in your favor?
Central banks are able to spend more on both the welfare and warfare than their subjects would ever
support through open taxation and private lending because the central banks are waiting in the wings
to issue new money and absorb the government debt. I skipped a few parts, but I thought that,
So this is kind of in the setup of your book, kind of to get to Bitcoin.
And so you comment on anything in that section that I read.
But how do you view Bitcoin?
And you mentioned it a little bit in kind of this future state.
And, you know, how big of a help can it be in that world?
Well, sure.
So in terms of like, how does it affect what I've been doing in terms of my career that, you know, I was an academic economist and then I'm now more like writing and speaking to the public, things like that.
And I'm in the financial sector, too, of course.
So in that respect, just from that narrow dimension, Bitcoin is amazing because it has demonstrated to people that you don't need the state to issue money.
So to go back to what Lawrence was saying, like a big trick that the MMTers try to employ to make it look like their position is inevitable is to say like, oh, we wouldn't even have money if it weren't for the government.
So what are you guys talking about? And this is historically, this is not true.
right but so that's what i like and um and i think jeff dyson might have been the one that
made this analogy but saying that uber and lyft did more to show the public like the virtues of
decentralized private ride sharing than any you know dc think tank white paper on hey let's get
rid of the medallion system for new york cabs or something you know what i mean he cares about the
what but to see it and to know the difference like no i've taken rides in uber versus you know a
yellow cab in new york and the uber's way safer and cleaner and right so that's what i think with
with bitcoin that yeah we obviously in this austrian tradition and other economists too
can explain the dangers of inflation why commodity money was so much better than government fiat money
and everything but it still just seemed inevitable well yeah but there's the government's in control
the money and what are you going to do and so now bitcoin you know gives this alternative to show
that yeah this this could happen you don't need a state to issue money so that's i think huge just
you know, just to show people that possibility.
And then in terms of in practice,
I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with, you know,
the debate over the block size and things like that.
And that, yeah, right now, Bitcoin can't,
you can't buy cups of coffee with Bitcoin.
That's not going to work.
And so people are like, well, it could be like,
you know, sort of like gold bars stored in a vault somewhere.
So there's debates over that type of thing,
but certainly the idea of being able to lock up value
and transfer it to people just with an internet connection
And I mean, that's huge.
That's going to be the underpinning of, I think, what's going to happen with the global financial system going forward.
Bitcoin was just the first example showing blockchain per se.
And that's what, like at Infineo, we're putting life insurance on the blockchain, right?
So this is not just about Bitcoin per se, but this technology really opened up a whole new arena in commerce.
Well, and that coffee cup thing, that's coming.
I mean, that's the lightning network and layer two.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's very good.
I use it all the time.
And I realize I'm not everybody.
It's very good.
Gary runs a conference.
You can see it in the BitBot Boom.
And all through that conference, people are transacting and utilizing it.
And I know, Bob, you have some expertise in what is money, how does money develop, all those sorts of things.
things and it, you know, it's not, maybe the way I would phrase it is, you know,
money is not created by the government and it has to, to be a good money, it probably has to
be created organically, which means it has to go through a process to get to a certain point.
Would that be consistent with the way you would think? Well, sure. So in this, if we take a moment
as a detour here perhaps that i hope your viewers will be interested in originally there were some
diehard austrian fans who didn't like bitcoin and the thing that was tripping them up was that
ludwig van mises you know who's a giant the austrian tradition when he was
pioneered a lot in terms of monetary theory and he had this thing called the regression theorem
and so what what that i don't need to get the full blown details of it but the idea was
to explain the purchasing power of money it involves it's kind of weird like why are you
accepting money today to give up your car to work or something it's because oh you think it's going
to have purchasing power tomorrow like that's ultimately why would you accept something today
you know it's because you think it's going to purchase where they say well where'd that come
from how do you where your expectations coming from and they'd say oh because you observed its
recent history and so you saw a sense of oh yeah this money has a certain purchasing power so i'm
I'm willing to give up my valuable stuff today for it.
But then the critics said, oh, doesn't that lead to an infinite regress, right?
That you're explaining today's purchasing power ultimately by yesterday's.
And doesn't that just go back forever?
You haven't really explained.
And Mises said, no, because you can go back.
There's a logical stopping point when these commodities, because Mises was writing at a time when it was still gold and silver, that there was a state of barter and people just liked gold and silver because they were pretty or they used them for some industrial purpose or whatever.
and so that's why you know so in his framework he needed that just to solve this logical objection
that he was using an infinite regress um and so and mises even went further and he said for
something to be a medium of exchange it must have first been used as a mere commodity because
otherwise how would anybody know what you know what what relative valuation to ascribe to it
so he was pretty and so when bitcoin first came on the scene there were a lot of people steeped in
that tradition who thought well you know you can't use bitcoins to make a sandwich or to you
know build a building or so like how do we know how much it's supposed to be worth so this is crazy
this is all but the the point i mean is kind of a technical one is once it got off the ground and
it was worried like that objection if anything that would have stopped anyone from accepting
the first bitcoins period but since you know given what the 10 000 for the two pizzas it's
like well there you go now people saw that and then they have a basis for figuring it out i know
I know a lot of people who lost a lot of money because they believed in that regression theorem
and it held them back from buying Bitcoin.
It was really tragic because what they should have done is gone back a couple of Austrians
before him and consulted Menger, who basically said money is the most liquid good and all
value is subjective.
And in my view, it's always been money is a ledger.
It's valued based on its qualities.
And as long as it's scarce and immutable or scarce and defensible, I mean, gold,
you know, doesn't tarnish and last forever. Bitcoin, you know, the network is immutable or
basically immutable. And so, you know, it's got great monetary qualities and obviously it's
emerging as money. My kids and grandkids are going to be transacting in Satoshi's. My guess is,
Bob, that you would agree. But yeah, the regression theorem hurt a lot of people. I mean,
I had several very good Austrian friends who just couldn't get to Bitcoin because of it.
And it was too bad. Yeah. And I want to clarify. So I agree with what you said. Yeah, I think
So in the year 2100, there's going to be lots of people holding, you know, carrying the fact that they're the ones that the blockchains point to and say that they're the ones who control those Satoshis, that that's still going to be a big deal in 2100.
That my point was, I wasn't even saying Mises was wrong.
What I was saying, though, is to the extent that you think that there is some issue there, it would have stopped Bitcoin from becoming a medium of exchange.
Right. Going from medium of exchange to money is just a matter of degree.
Right. But so that was my point.
we know that some guy gave up two pieces for what it was 10,000 bitcoins or
something. So there you go. Somebody, you know, in other words,
it would have stopped him there because he would have said, well, how,
how many, you know, should I ask for, for these pizzas? Well, he did. Okay.
And that's what happened. So, so market got created and, you know,
and it became a liquid good and, and the value of the pizzas was subjective.
Now, as it turns out, you know, the guy who gave up the Bitcoin made a bad trade.
Right. I think he did that though, several times, Bob.
So he wasn't too upset about it, obviously.
Well, he probably, if you can give up 10,000 Bitcoin, you probably have some others behind it would be my guess.
I doubt it.
And the pizza could have been good.
We don't know how good the pizza was.
Excellent.
Well, and remember, too, the cost of production at that point was trivial.
So, which at that time, it was the only acquisition method, which was to mine it, to create it.
And it was, you know, pennies, essentially, to do so.
If I could just be geeky for a second.
It's just funny because I was having this thought the other day driving around of a silly short story where somebody goes back in time to the early days and then knows to just hoard Bitcoin.
But because he did that, it never takes off because he's just hoarding it and then it's not getting out.
It's interesting you say that because one of the things I talk a lot about, Bob, is Metcalfe's Law, which is a network.
The value of a network is equal to the square or the number of users of the network.
And one of the things that I harp on within the Bitcoin community is I tell people, if you just hold Bitcoin and you don't participate in using Bitcoin, you're defeating yourself because you're stealing the network effect.
We need users of the network for the thing to propel.
And there's secondary issues like the way the security budget is and funding the miners and all this sort of stuff.
But fundamentally, it has to be used.
Otherwise, we don't get the benefit of the Metcalf effect.
My view of spend and replace, Jeff Booth feels this too.
I've talked about it.
Spend and replace is a very important part of it.
It's not just digital capital.
It's not just a store of value.
It has to become a widely used source of money.
And it is, but it's just we're so early days on the medium of exchange side.
So is cashing in Bitcoin the same as spending Satoshi's as far as the effect it has?
Say that again, Gary.
Is cashing in Bitcoin for fiat the same as spending at Satoshi's as far as the good it does for the network?
It is.
I mean, and I think that's one of the things, too, is the hodl culture.
And I'm not against hodling.
I want people to acquire Bitcoin and grow their stack.
However, I don't think there's anything wrong with using it.
I don't think you use it frivolously, but if I decide Lola and I want to get a new house
and a bigger place or a nice place and we use some to do that, it's okay. I understand what I'm
giving up, the likely future value of that money, but hey, I'm 61 years old and I want to have some
nice things and I want to live in this. And I think it's okay to do that on occasion.
I think spend and replace is an important part in my view of creating wider adoption. I mean,
I often, with waiters and waitresses at restaurants, I often ask if they know about Bitcoin and
most don't. And then I say, okay, I'm going to give you your regular tip. And then I say,
I'll give you a little additional tip. If you'll download this strike wallet and, um, you know,
I'll basically flip you some Satoshis. Um, you know, I just think the more people know about it,
the faster it gets adopted, the better it is, you know, and I, I don't, I don't miss those Satoshis.
and I refill my bucket every couple of weeks when I need to.
So to me-
So I should start asking my waiters if they take Bitcoin.
There you go.
Well, you go stake it, stake it, and they take it.
We know that.
That's a big step forward.
I mean, look, it's amazing everything that's going on in terms of adoption.
I mean, you've got, it's just, it's stunning.
I mean, I think if you'd ask Bob or myself or Gary, probably you too, Bob,
A couple years ago, did you think Bitcoin would be where it is today in terms of knowledge
and understanding and widespread acceptance?
I mean, it's stunning.
And what interesting though to me is that the price doesn always move linearly with that happening And everyone recrying the fact that right now the price hasn moved as much as they like even though it up like 40 year over year um and you know a lot of some of the whales are selling and they say that the reason why it
not moving maybe that's so but you know great let's get more fully distributed you know some
of the people invested early and have the foresight if they want to take profits on it and
spend that somewhere else great i mean we need to have a broader base of holders and that's
this is a natural process by which that happens. So, you know, I view this all as very, very positive stuff.
Yeah. And just to circle back on some of those points that I guess go back to Gary's distinction there,
I suppose that, you know, narrowly speaking that, right, if what you're trying to do, like, hey,
I go around and, you know, I share the gospel with people and I do this and I teach them free market.
And then also I want to do my part to kind of bolster familiarity with Bitcoin.
What's the best way that I guess if you're going to,
if you find merchants that would accept it,
and then you have a preference for like buying things by sending Satoshis to somebody.
And then you say, well, yeah, but I'm trying to stack.
But you could, again, if you get your paycheck and fiat,
just in other words, instead of having it and you're going to your checking account
and something you find online, you use by your conventional bank.
if you find someone who accepts Bitcoin, then you just pay them the Bitcoin and then transfer
from your conventional bank to replenish your stockpile. And that's a wash from your point of
view, unless there's a price change in the interim. But I think that does more. It tells that business
you are right to accept Bitcoin, right? Because that's a decision merchants have to make. And if
they don't get many sales, then they might say, this is not worth it. But I think on the margin,
If you're thinking like, hey, I want to evangelize, that helps.
As opposed to just you selling for cash, that might just mean that, oh, somebody out there now who's looking to add more to their stack buys from you because, you know, you're selling Bitcoin for money, for dollars.
And that, you know, that person who's already stacking on the margin, they're already a fan of Bitcoin, whereas like the merchant or something.
Yeah, so it's funny you should mention that, Bob, because I've got a perfect example of that.
I'm in Naples, Florida.
I just went over to my CrossFit gym.
And he's the guy who owns is an avid Bitcoiner.
And he's offering a 20% discount on gym memberships and drop-ins for anybody who pays him in Bitcoin.
And 20%.
Wow, that's a lot.
Right?
Yeah, it's a good deal.
I mean, I just signed up for a month and saved, I don't know, $30 or something, whatever it was.
It was a big number.
And same with drop-ins.
And I'm going to tweet that out.
And my guess is that Bitcoiners traveling to Naples, they're going to find this guy.
right and uh and he and i asked him why he's doing it he said i'm just doing it because i want to see
the thing spread and you know this is incentive for people to you know to to become smart about
it and he's got a lot of regular people who are probably just paying him by a direct deposit but
he's telling them they can get a 20 discount for doing this wow how many of those people do you
think are going to figure out how to get a strike wallet and do it right yeah so i mean it's like
bravo to the businesses that are helping out you know on this on this stuff well i need to get more
aggressive in asking people if they take bitcoin it sounds like which i'm not well i mean a question
for you gary i mean when you sell you know um tickets for your show or your conference i mean
is there a bitcoin is there a bitcoin discount paying bitcoin discount versus regular payment
no it's just regular payment yeah but worth worth something worth considering right yeah yeah it is
worth considering as far as helping the uh economy of bitcoin now i get maybe 10 of the people paying
in Bitcoin, but 100% of them are Bitcoiners. I get it. I get it. But again, just for those who
aren't, it's incentive. Like I said, at this gym, there are a bunch of members who are definitely
not Bitcoiners. If I remember a gym and I was paying a monthly fee, I don't know what it is,
like 150 or something a month. Somebody said, you can get 20% off. I went, oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that angle, Lauren, in terms of before I was thinking of it like
businesses do it because they like Bitcoin and want to get it.
But in a sense,
this guy likes Bitcoin and wants to get it too.
But I mean,
and obviously like,
like Bob said,
20% is a big,
I mean,
that's a big economic number,
but,
but again,
I think,
but you're saying to get people to get over the hurdle.
Cause that's the thing.
He was like,
yeah,
I don't know how that works.
I think he just,
I think he just wants to help the network.
And by the way,
he probably will.
There,
he gets a lot of drop-ins.
There are a lot of people who have a parent that lives in Naples and they come down to visit their parent and they're,
they're,
you know,
a CrossFitter from any, I mean, I see him there all the time.
They're from some other part of the country.
They come down here and they come and they drop into his gym.
Well, and there are four CrossFit gyms in Naples,
so people have a lot of choices.
But guess what?
I'm going to go to the one with the Bitcoin guy running it, right?
Bob, a little bit off of the payment side,
you wrote this booklet 10 years ago.
what what has surprised you the most so you you had some expectation and optimism for it obviously
at that point what what surprised you or maybe and maybe what's disappointed you if if anything
in that 10 years okay good yeah good question um it's hard to remember exactly what my mindset was
back then but i think that this is true that um i think i thought back then that you were going to
see more widespread adoption and that bitcoin was going to spread more in terms of just like
smaller businesses accepting it and just you know more and more people especially if they already
had like a libertarian you know bent to them just using bitcoin more and more in their daily
transactions but i didn't think it was going to percolate up to you know major investment banks
and stuff or certainly i couldn't imagine the president talking about it and like people wanting
to have a bitcoin strategic reserve like that so that that's kind of what surprised me is that the
and the one kind of explains it because the large institutional adoption i think that pushed up the
price and then you know that made it harder you know to just justify you know in terms of uh
day-to-day commerce but in any event that's i guess that would be my answer that it's the adopted
how commonplace it is now.
I can remember, I'd be on a plane
reading a book on Bitcoin and the guy next
to me would be like, what the heck is that? And that wasn't
that long ago where they didn't even know what it was.
And then now it's like
on CNBC's website,
they just got the crypto tab, just like you look at bonds
and FX and S&P.
It's just normal. Not like, oh, that's an asset class.
What are you talking about? So that kind of surprised
me how fast that happened. And now all of a sudden
it's not this crazy thing. It's like, oh yeah, that's just
normal. It's like gold and silver and
you know, commodities and crypto.
And do you see,
when you look at like the valuation right now,
do you have in your own head some way where you say,
hey, that like two and a half trillion dollar market cap,
that makes sense to me?
Or like, I'm shocked it's there now,
or it should be 20 trillion.
or like how do you have any feelings like that?
I mean, I've done back of the envelope calculations
at Infineo in terms of like what long-term
if you just got global adoption
and then I guess really was sort of like the backup thing
that everyone's still using their day-to-day currencies
that their government issues,
but like everyone now holds this as a backup kind of thing.
And I've done things like that just to see,
you know, what could be plausibly in terms of the,
And I still think you can get like 15% growth for decades.
And that's totally consistent with normal assumptions about if people just kind of got out of their own thing and got into Bitcoin.
So it's hard for me to say like right now is a correct.
So I'm extremely bullish.
So in that sense, I think most of the world has not yet caught on to what to me is obvious, if that's one way of answering your question.
But on the other hand, I think a lot of stuff and I'm looking around saying you guys are all idiots.
Well, that's the common theme of this show.
Everybody else is an idiot.
That happens to me every day, Bob.
So, I mean, again, I feel like you're saying back when I wrote that booklet, would I have guessed what the market price would be now?
I honestly don't remember what I was thinking back then.
I thought that this was – that's partly why my co-author, Silas Barton, I wrote that.
And he was a guy – he understood the mechanics of it.
Like he had built an early mining rig in his, in his coffee, you know,
in his family room, you know, he just had the thing like back when it was,
you know, he had like fans going on and stuff. So it wouldn't overheat,
but that's how early he got into it. When it still made sense,
you could do it in your house. And then, you know, so,
so I knew the economics, the monetary theory, and he knew like,
this is really how, you know,
the cryptography and the private public keys and all that work.
So that was the point of us writing that.
But the reason we did that was because we realized, you know,
this is going to change the world.
You're right.
it was visionary and when you look bob at um you know you you mentioned your parents are boomers
and um you know one of the problems with boomer by the way is it's it's too big of a generation
right it's a yeah you know and i think there's this term now uh coming about where they're taking
the second half of the boomers and they're calling them joneses um i don't know if you guys have
heard that but it's kind of so my year i was born in 64 i'm the very youngest boomer but they're
kind of going back, I think, to 55 or 56 and saying, you know, that era is the Joneses.
And then the ones before that were the actual boomers.
But regardless, when you look at your parents or somebody, you know, in that generation,
how would you talk to them about Bitcoin?
Do you say like, hey, you should have a little bit just in case?
or just, you know, ride it out.
You made it this far.
You don't need it.
Ride it out.
How do you think they, what's your advice to them?
I know you're not giving financial advice,
but maybe to your parents who are.
So what would you say?
You know, it's funny.
So I think, you know, I definitely have them,
you know, they over the years asked me
what I think about what they have going on and stuff.
And, you know, they paid their house off
and everything's just, you know,
and I explained that in terms of,
that's like the mortgage payment, you know,
it's just coming to you every month in a sense. It's like, okay. Um, and they, there's, as you
know, Bob, with the life insurance stuff. So they have some, you know, well-funded paid up life
insurance is just sitting there that they can do if they need and a big exposure to gold.
And so I don't remember. So the, to my knowledge, they're not sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin. And I
think, I can't remember if years ago I brought that up or just decided that's going to, you know,
that they're going to say that that's, they don't get how it works and we'll know what if we lose
the thing or you know that it just seems too weird so um i i don't know that i push too hard on that
i'm gonna see him in thanksgiving maybe i'll maybe i'll bring it up and see but but the gold they're
gonna say i mean the gold has done so awesome like they're thanking me yeah thanks for getting us in
the gold yeah so things like bitcoin so yeah what about you know for for them and this is very
controversial in the bitcoin world but you know do things like the like an etf like a little etf
exposure or something like that make is that more it was certainly yeah it was yeah so a hundred
percent that would definitely you know if in terms of the standard thing they have right now just to
say hey you know you've got like a mining stocks or why don't you just take a little allocation and
put it over here into this ctf in that framework sure to get some exposure and in fact yeah i
definitely can uh have that conversation and that's partly you know to go back to what you
said before about the institutional adoption like it was a fairly quick turnover from when bitcoin
was still this weird, crazy thing that only ideologues or like computer nerds talked about.
And then all of a sudden it just became like, yeah, this is normal and all, you know, BlackRock
and all these guys, they're all getting into this stuff and this is normal. And there's ETFs and
yeah, you can put it in your, you know, your IRA or whatever. If you want exposure that way,
it's no big deal. Yeah. I mean, to me, by the way, answering my own question from earlier, that's
That's even, I think Larry alluded to this too,
even three or four years ago, as a guy heavily involved,
I cannot believe we are here today.
It blows my mind that we have nation state involvement.
We have essentially almost every large financial institution participating.
I just, I'm blown away by that.
that we were facing such headwinds, such resistance,
both from the financial community and the political community.
And this flip was just amazing.
And it could be that that ETF was maybe the,
certainly an inflection point, if not the inflection point.
And I know it was still resistance, right?
Gensler was trying all he could to delay those things.
But if just a comment, I mean, I think, again, with all this, those counterfactuals, we don't know.
But I mean, that was I know there's lots of things that I don't like about the current Trump administration.
But I mean, that was just huge in terms of the shift in the mindset.
I mean, as you guys, I'm preaching the choir here.
But I mean, it was just like, you know, at our company, like we were thinking we were going to build stuff, you know, for foreign markets.
because, you know, the regulatory climate and then Trump coming.
It's like, oh, they want us to build here.
Oh, that's that's refreshing.
OK, maybe we will.
So, yeah, I knew we would get here.
I just didn't think we would get here this quick.
I mean, eventually we would.
But this is like overnight, really, to me, compared to what I was thinking.
Yeah.
But, you know, a certain thing we talked a little earlier about, like, exponential adoption.
And I think you guys all know I live through the personal computer world and we've seen the Internet and we've seen cell phones and the pace with which when things are on an exponential adoption curve.
That really is the phenomenon, right?
That old gradually then suddenly phenomenon like I saw this thing recently.
It said, you know, if you had a bottle and you had a bacteria in the bottle and, you know, every second the bacteria replicated, right?
It doubled.
You know, I mean, you know, let's say it takes an hour to get to the whole bottle being filled.
Well, one second before the hour, it's only half filled.
And two seconds before, it's a quarter filled.
And, you know, so when you're there, even two minutes before the hour, it doesn't look like anything's happening. And yet, you know, boom, you're, you know, you're there. And it's hard for us as humans to grasp, to grasp those sorts of things.
when I was at Gateway that was part of my job I was the chief technical officer and as a
technologist and I would try to find places in the world where that was happening with technology
and I remembered two incidents that left a mark on me one was I started hearing about this massive
change in the gaming market in Korea and I flew over to Korea just to observe it and what had
happened was Korea, this would have been like 2000, 2001. Korea gaming had gotten so popular
that there were now TV stations dedicated in 2000, 25 years ago, just to games. So, and they would
broadcast live first person shooter games. And the best players in the world and the games that
were popular were like the Michael Jordan. They're making millions of dollars a year.
every week there were weekly broadcasts they had as the games were were going on they had analysts
um giving just like a football game right you had a color comp a play-by-play guy and an
and an analyst and it was just it was fascinating and um said well you know why why is this happening
um and what does it mean for the rest of the world right and and what he basically found out
was what had happened was in Korea, because you have these really dense populations,
you have all these skyscrapers, and South Korea had invested in fiber. Gary just talked about
getting fiber here in 2025. Well, in the late 90s, they had fiber everywhere. And so what we saw was
the effect of high-speed internet everywhere, right? And so remember, at this time period,
like the xbox is basically like just being invented but they were already they were already
there and then um second thing occurred in the same time frame i went over to the philippines
because i found out that at that time the uh average filipino in the year 2000 was sending
over 22 text messages per day but the average america was sending one and and i i'm not
I thought that was weird, right?
But what we were foreseeing was the change of the cell phone from a calling instrument
to a radically different communication instrument.
And the reason I tell you those stories was sometimes to see the early part of the growth,
you've got to really go deep and navigate.
And if you want to get ahead of one of these curves, you want to be early in developing around them, you've got to be able to spot them at the right point.
And so, you know, obviously, Bitcoin's not at that point anymore.
We're further along the adoption curve.
But what could happen from here?
Hard to tell because the next hundred million or billion people could come in in a matter of months.
well um i think actually we're running up probably toward the end of our our time here um hey bob is
there um tell us like what you know what what are some of the things you're working on right now
and uh yeah so i have different hats um i would point people so the my like sort of day job is
chief economist for infinio as you said so our website is infinio.ai and for them right now a
big thing that I'm looking at is uh we're ideas of making a stable coin that's backed by the cash
surrender value of life insurance policies so that's uh you know a thing I'm sort of like doing
the theory of that and then you know we're looking at practical applications and how to implement
that the genius act put you know makes it a little trickier because they have to have the Treasury
backing but so that's one main thing I'm doing there um and then I'm the host of what's called
the human action podcast at the Mises Institute so for people who like just more pure Austrian
economics and analysis and controversies and things like that in that realm I would point
him to that and then at Twitter I'm at Bob Murphy econ which is kind of like the clearinghouse of
all the things I got going on we'll close it with that and and hope uh please please hit the like
button and subscribe button and all that good stuff and support us we're uh we're uh we're very
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