Latest / Turley Talks / Ep. 3439 You Won't BELIEVE What Bill Maher Just ADMITTED!!! w/ Lyn Alden

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Ep. 3439 You Won't BELIEVE What Bill Maher Just ADMITTED!!! w/ Lyn Alden · Turley Talks

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: The liberal globalist order is on its brink and awakening a new conservative age.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Dr. Steve Turley joined me every day as we discover answers to today's toughest challenges and explore the re-bondalization of conservative civilization.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is Turley Talks.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I remember I, along with forever, most people, were saying at the beginning, oh, you know, by the Fourth of July, somebody had a thing, I have a country with the economy, was going to be tanked by then.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stock market is at record highs.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know not everybody lives by the stock market, but I also drive around.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't see a country in a depression at all.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I see people out there just living their lives, and I would have thought, and I got to own it, that these tariffs were going to f***
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: sink this economy by this time and they didn't.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hey gang, it's me, Dr. Steve and did you see Bill Marr actually just made quite the admission.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: The admitted he was wrong.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Dead wrong about the economy under Donald Trump.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: In his most recent podcast, Marr openly admitted that he was wrong, particularly about Trump's tariffs, expected Trump's policies to in his words, quote, sink the economy by the summer of
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And of course, when that didn't happen to his credit, he said, you know, I got to own it, Trump was right.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was wrong.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, rather beat up on Mar, like a lot of influencers, I've noticed have been doing over the last couple of days.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do think he's indicative.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's evidence in just how complicated things are right now with our economy, not just ours, but the global economy as a whole.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Many respects were seeing something akin to what you might call clash of economies to play off a Sam Huntington there.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: There were those who claimed that Trump's policies like tax cuts, deregulation, America first trade policies are inevitably going to tank the economy.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then there were those like Treasury Secretary Scott Basin, who see tariffs, lower taxes, and deregulation as sort of the three-legged stool for economic flourishing and prosperity.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: But our both sides missing something here.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was certainly Elon Musk's concern about the big beautiful bill.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: For example, interest on the debt now actually tops defense spending eating thirteen percent of every federal dollar.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even after was announced that June saw the first budget surplus in two decades, the deficit still sits at one point three trillion.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as much as they might count themselves to be fiscal hawks, let's admit it, Republicans as well as Democrats inevitably win votes by spending not saving.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But what's so interesting here is that in the midst of all of this economic complexity, there's a revolution happening in money, a cyber revolution led by the rise of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency in many respects is bypassed in the old Bretton Woods global financial system.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: and providing a very real and vibrant alternative.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And even Washington's getting on board, Trump's strategic Bitcoin reserves of bold move to embrace financial innovation.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's helped stabilize crypto markets and position America as a leader in digital finance.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So as one financial system appears to be at its brink, a new one appears to be dawning with America at the apex
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: of both.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what sense should we make of all this?
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, you're today to discuss this increasingly complex economic cosmos is Lynn Alden, a macro economist and highly respected expert in the field of investment and cryptocurrency and the author, the groundbreaking book, Broken Money.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Lynn, welcome, great to see you again.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Happy to be here.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's honor to have you.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So let's start with this
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I guess I'm calling it sort of I'm playing off of the clash of civilizations here.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: This clash of economies, or economic theories, as I understand it, Trump's policies basically constitute a three-legged stool.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: So tariff revenue to all set the annual deficit, lower taxes, and deregulation to spur economic growth.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, you're again, you're thinking big level here in your estimation.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: How is that working thus far?
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are the critics of Trump's policies getting right and what are they getting wrong?
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, good set of questions.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The answer for most of these things most of the time is that the policies that are kind of put top down on the economy, while they do matter on the margins,
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: They tend not to radically change the direction of things.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so for example, if you were to look at most economic metrics over the past year, three years, you wouldn't be able to identify the clean break between administrations, for example.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So unemployment bottom debt, three point four percent back in twenty twenty three.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's up to four point one.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been roughly four point one for something like a year now.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, a lot of economic metrics are like that.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Same thing for the deficit spending in recent years.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when we look at the tier of revenue specifically, we're talking in the ballpark of tens of billions of revenue so far, a new revenue added.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's on top of what is estimated to be something like a thirty trillion dollar annualized economy.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so while these policies are material, they are not necessarily the game change, especially because they're one variable among many.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, whenever I'm kind of analyzing these policies, I try to take them as one at a time and then put them back into a sum of holes.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for example, certain thing is like the
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're focusing more on energy abundance.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's kind of pretty good across the board.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: The issue with the tariffs.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that one of the biggest challenges so far is not necessarily the levels per se, but the lack of clarity about what they might look like three months from now, six months from now.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're a business, a lot of times you're kind of frozen in decision until you have more information.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we roughly hit peak uncertainty in April.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: The markets, you know, they threw a little fit both bond market, the currency market, the stock market,
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: that, you know, we kind of de-escalated or pushed things away gradually and kind of started taking these one more step at a time.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think by a lot of metrics, we're kind of in sort of a stall speed, which is that there are some things about the economy that are propelling it.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for example, we're still running historically pretty high deficit.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: That tends to be stimulatory, but also somewhat inflationary.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in other hand, we're kind of putting the brakes on things.
• 6:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we obviously have the central bank that's
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: got, uh, interest rates so pretty high.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's putting the break on a lot of things, especially the housing market and tears right now are kind of the wild card in the middle, uh, which is that they're kind of a break on the economy, uh, but they're not as severe as the ones that were initially proposed back in April, and we're still in kind of a great area for what we're going to look like over the rest of this administration.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: What about the whole issue of spending?
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: We met up at the Bitcoin Conference in Vegas, and I think people were even making t-shirts out of this now.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's no stopping this train.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: You've made it into pop culture with this.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: It does seem like you're arguing at least at a fundamental level.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love how you put it.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can look at a chart over the course, say, twenty years, not even see a slight bit of break between administrations.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: The fundamental is something is basically flawed in our system, not just our system, sort of the global monetary.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: system.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: You write about this in your book, Broken Money.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you give our explain to our listeners a bit what what the issues are with the particular is what we call the Fiat system?
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the biggest takeaway is that it was mostly a technological outcome, which is to say that if you look at most hit you books of money, they'll focus on decisions that politicians made at given times.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those are of course highly relevant, especially in a given country.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But some of the biggest things that I think go under the radar are the technological changes that happen.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so one of the things I argues that one of the biggest changes that happened to money was the invention of the telegraph.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ever since we invented it, and then specifically when we deployed it over long distances decades later, we entered a world where transactions could move at the speed of light, because the transaction is simple as an agreement.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But final settlement still moved at the speed of matter, basically transporting and auditing something like physical gold.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so roughly for a century and a half, we've been in this kind of weird intermediate stage where we spread of transactions but not final settlements.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we became very reliant on these big centralized ledgers to basically bridge the gap.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: That gave a lot of power to banking systems and of course central banks and their government's nation states.
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's who runs the big ledgers.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it really wasn't until the invention of Bitcoin that we finally had an alternative of decentralized final settlement.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: But even then, I mean, that starts at zero and it's growing, you know, now it's a two trillion dollar plus network growing into a much larger existing network.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I would say one of the challenges of the Fiat currency era is we have this speed mismatch and therefore we're kind of more reliant than we've ever been historically on these big centralized managers of ledgers.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we somewhat feel it less in the United States than globally.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But for example, in Africa, there's over forty currencies and Latin America, there's over thirty currencies.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Every cross-border transaction or lending is a point of friction.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we also create these kind of global imbalances, which is to say, I mean, we were just talking about tariffs and trade in general.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Part of the reason we have in the US structural trade deficits is because the entire world uses our currency as a global reserve currency.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they kind of, they kind of structurally have the excess demand for it.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, they structurally overvalue it.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And therefore, some of our low margin stuff becomes pretty uncompetitive to make here, even compared to other developed countries.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so basically, the way we supply the world with the dollars that they use is through trade deficits.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And running a couple years of trade deficits is not the end of the world.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when you run trade deficits for forty plus years, because it's structurally embedded, that starts to become a national security issue, that becomes a rising issue of populism, because there are some people that are benefiting from that arrangement.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are other people that are on the wrong side of that arrangement and they start to get critical mass in terms of politics.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think what we're seeing is kind of the later stage period of that when you had these imbalances in place for many decades and people are increasingly pushing back on those imbalances.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, do you see the Bretwood system salvable at this point or is this something that's just going to have to it's just going to have to buy because it sounds familiar like you're saying there's there isn't inherent tension technological tension between the speed by which a transaction could be made but but the
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: that the lag inevitably in terms of fulfilling it, given our second industrial revolution, temporal spatial limitations.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And even with the dollar being the default currency, then then plants all this excess international dollar in our tea bills keeping us in debt.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is there any saving this?
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or is this just going to have to
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is it harder to go with it?
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually, it's Jurassic period.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it'll eventually go through a pretty big reset period.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I tend to argue that the current period can often last longer than people think.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It kind of my nothing stops his train term that I kind of repopilize after, of course, the show Breaking Bad is to point out that the US physical deficit, for example, are in my opinion not going down anytime soon.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they're also not necessarily going to blow up the system anytime soon.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: If we were having this conversation five or ten years from now, many things will look different.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I do think that the system will still be in this kind of current trajectory.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to speak, and that these big changes take usually a generation or two to really kind of work through.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so my expectation is we're going to see ongoing major currency debasement for many years.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't really view that the current system or the the prior bread and wood system is salvageable in their current states.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that they are by products of this era where fast transactions existed but not fast settlements.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were all basically attempts at bandating you know that mismatch.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think it's really going to come down to what fast settlements look like over the next couple decades.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, I'm on the bull side of that, which I think there'll be increasing relevant in this, you know, more multi-polar world, this less trusting world, where instead of relying on a handful of really big central managers of ledgers, we do have these centralized alternatives now.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's incredible.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think our listeners, if they haven't availed themselves of your work prior to this, they can obviously tell you, you know, quite a bit about the history of money, particularly from a commodity based systems, fiat currencies and the like, are there any
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: broad lessons from monetary history that you think are our most relevant for understanding the particular challenges we're facing in twenty twenty five and how they can actually even guide future reforms.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously it seems to me just this whole now Bitcoin or crypto reserve they're creating seems like DC is trying to position itself into the future of money and like
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think, I mean, the history kind of is shows that we go through these big pendulum shifts.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the most interesting ones is the long-term debt cycle, which is basically that private sector debt gradually builds up over the course of a couple generations.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then it gets so extreme that it blows up.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We saw this back in the late nineteen twenty, so we saw it again in two thousand eight.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: By many metrics, they were quite similar in terms of just how much private sector debt had built up and then started to pop and we hit zero interest rates in both cases.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And historically rather than letting that deliver to nominally, they tend to start rotating some of that debt onto the public ledger.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's where you see bigger fiscal responses.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see more monetary debasement.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you kind of smooth over that implosion by putting more on the sovereign level.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you usually get like a second hit in the subsequent decades, which is tensed more inflationary and more currency debasement.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So back in history, that was the nineteen forties era.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's obviously a lot of else going on as well.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: and now we're in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: command to control type of economic approach, at least in real-time margins, it tends to show up in any types of environments.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's so interesting, because that's also when you start to see the whole beginning of the right-in-wood system and the IMF coming in, the WTO, the World Bank, and the like sort of the beginning of that liberal international order post-World War II order.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm curious, you know, so we're talking about like, like, kind of going outside and alternative to this Brentwood system and the two commodities I think of immediately are gold and Bitcoin, yeah, which to me is kind of like this archio future sort of structure, which I love both, I love gold, I love Bitcoin.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious on how you see
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: gold and Bitcoin, literally this arkyo future money co-existing, say in a portfolio and and and and and and under what conditions might one outperform the other I know mark Mike sailors kind of like at gold is just going to go the way of the total bird itself and it's all going to go Bitcoin, but what do you see?
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the shortage is I've been bullish on both, and I've been recommending both from an investing perspective.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can talk about their importance geographically or investing wise.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Investing wise, I've been emphasizing basically, if you start with something like a sixty-fourty portfolio, which is like a sixty percent stock, forty percent bonds, if you want to fix that toward the current era, my argument is replace some of the bonds with gold, and consider replaces of the equities with Bitcoin, just because we're talking about two very different levels of volatility.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another way of kind of putting it is that gold is is, you know, a twenty trillion dollar asset and Bitcoin is a two trillion dollar asset.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bitcoin is of course, you know, a sixteen year old asset is growing into whatever it might become.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so generally speaking, Bitcoin has given you much better returns and I would estimate that the next five to ten years is probably going to continue.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that comes with greater volatility and uncertainty along the way.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that the Bitcoin's growing into what it's going to become,
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: gold is historically already there.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But we look at it at geopolitical level.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's mostly a question of kind of central banks versus others.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for example, ever since two thousand nine, gold has been gradually re-asserting itself into the global kind of central bank reserve system.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So prior to them, the tonnage of gold held as reserves around the world was gradually diminishing.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And around two thousand nine, they started gradually going back up.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then in twenty- twenty-two, we saw, again, another spike up to some extent in enthusiasm by central banks for gold.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, you know, the two benefits of gold are as much harder to debase than the sovereign bonds of other countries, and they can't be frozen or confiscated with a stroke of a pen if they're held in your own jurisdiction.
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there's been more of an interest among countries that having a percentage of their reserves to have those qualities.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, one of the challenges that one of the things we're Bitcoin can matter, I think on the geopolitical scale, is that a lot of these countries are trying to build like alternative payment or settlement systems.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the bricks have been talking about this for quite a long time.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's things around the margins.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Something outside of Swift.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And these things are, they, they, they, the network effects are very challenging to deal with.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that's interesting about Bitcoin is that it has some of the same qualities of gold, which you can hold it.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, central bank or any other entity can hold it, they can hold their own keys.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It can't be just easily debased.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's also a settlement system that is more efficient than gold.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: With the caveat that it's very volatile in the sixteen years old.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So until fairly recently, it's been too small to be on the on the on the scale that central banks might find useful.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But as now we're talking about a two trillion plus network.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the years ahead, if it doubles and doubles again, right?
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is actually a pretty big relevant network for them now that as a trying to build their kind of closed source alternatives, there's also this open source one that they can latch on to or build on or leverage in various ways.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I do think that at least as an alternative, it is starting to catch the eye of policymakers around the world.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I heard about the brick bricks countries considering using something akin to or actually using Bitcoin as as their as their currency to be interested.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they haven't they haven't come to a conclusion yet on that.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's for sure.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, you when did you get into Bitcoin was it like, twenty nineteen I'm forgetting what am I reading of of your resume or not your your bio.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: When did you get into Bitcoin?
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: My first article on it was twenty seventeen twenty seven.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but I really started to pound the table on it in April, twenty twenty.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It went through another cycle was in the Bay of Market of the Time.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: We were having the big liquidity effects of that whole, you know, that whole era.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's when I started to say, you know, it went for being interesting to being actually like high probability outcome for a while.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think what was your article I why I'm bullish on on Bitcoin was at the twenty seventeen.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the one in twenty seventeen was out of value Bitcoin encrypted currencies.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: The twenty twenty one was three reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin three reasons it was yeah, that was that was that was a really good read.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, so I'd say probably half of our audience are all in.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: on Bitcoin crypto a defile that the other half or still kind of like I don't know I don't know if it's real money or you've heard all the arguments from from your perspective you know what what what are the most compelling reasons
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: for Bitcoin's long-term value.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, what would you say to people who might still be skeptical of its potential?
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe, I don't, I wouldn't say a Peter Schiff or anything who actually just lives and breeze that skepticism and, well, he can's good arguments.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, to somebody who's, who's still not quite convinced.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the best thing I could do is share what got me over the line because I was skeptical even though I was interested.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: For me, my biggest hang-up was the idea that Bitcoin is interesting and Bitcoin is scarce, but anyone can copy it.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what makes it just not copyable into oblivion?
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of my kind of key observations that got me over that hang-up was really analyzing the details of its network effect in how communication protocols spread.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so for example, we're having this conversation over the internet, the internet runs on ethernet, it runs on internet protocol,
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: e-mail runs on simple mail transfer protocol, universal Syria bus is very popular for physical connections.
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: One suddenly becomes established, even though there's many ways to make alternatives, those standards tend to persist for quite a while.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it becomes self reinforcing because part of the reason why Ethernet is so popular is because building to devices already have Ethernet.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you were to come up with something marginally better, it wouldn't matter because you're up against such an entrenched
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: communication standard.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I basically have observed the Bitcoin kind of reached that status with as the way to communicate value on the internet, which is to say it's a true trillion dollar network.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been the biggest cryptocurrency for sixteen years in a row.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, the most liquidity.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's got the most security.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's got the kind of the simplest design to be robust.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's proof of work.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I've, you know, what I generally argue
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: is that in a world of decentralized ledger, so there's the US system, there's bricks working on their own system, China's got their own system, there's all these different centralized ledgers around the world, Bitcoin is the preaminent decentralized ledger, which I argue has value.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you look at most estimates of how much assets there are in the world, Bitcoin is worth something like .tupersent of global assets, with gold being about two percent of global assets, ten times bigger.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think Bitcoin is
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: will continue to grow in market share of that.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's, I think it's never gonna fix, keep it well positioned to remain decentralized and secure.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another way of putting it is that basically Bitcoin is the most immutable database that people have built yet.
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you were to stick something in, you know, an Apple database or a Microsoft database, you know, it can be deleted and it was Bitcoin.
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's basically this big distributed system.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the killer app for that is money.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So basically, all it really is at the end of the day is that you centralize Excel spreadsheet more or less.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's got this ongoing security network effect around it that puts it as a leader similar to Ethernet, similar to simple mail transfer protocol, similar to even a spoken language, as a reason where languages in the persist for a very long time, they have self reinforcing network effects.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that your argument for Bitcoin is that
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the permanent way to transport a valuable value and the permanent way to do decentralized money in the world.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it is the next phase of the technology of money, as it were, moving into the cyber space and the like, well, I mean, I'm just curious, have you, have you followed some of Peter Schiff's arguments against it?
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if so, do you, could you, could you identify just maybe perhaps the most, what you believe in your opinion, just sort of his,
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: the the biggest oversight in his argument because he's he's actually he seems to be a good faith fellow in terms of trying to keep keep the crypto world honest.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he also seems to he just he just seems to miss something is it have you identified it.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well yeah so Peter and I have met a couple times a you know behind the scenes at these conferences you know he's always friendly.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that there's a hang up around the physicality of it.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would say I don't make his argument for him.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But basically, sometimes it can be hard to understand why something that's intangible has has value.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gold, you can touch it.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can wear it.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can do things with it.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bitcoin, people often say that it has no intrinsic value.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So how could it have monetary value?
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually think that what people are somewhat missing are one, there is a physical aspect to it.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are physical minors and energy that goes into keeping it decentralized and working.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So even though we're mostly moving on numbers and we're managing a ledger, it is tied to the physical world.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Two, those network effects and those attributes that it provides are very important.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: that the non-monitor use case is basically a decentralized ledger or decentralized database.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: The monetary use case is that by extension, it's the best way you could self-costate portable value.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if I were to travel around the world.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And actually, I live part of each year in Egypt.
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I go back and forth to the United States.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: United States in Egypt.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can't bring my gold with me every time.
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can't really bring so many physical dollars.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we get weird looks at the airport and you know, risk all that.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you can memorize twelve numbers and bring things around the world.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think in a world where that is true.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, I mentioned there's, you know, you have to think globally.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's forty plus currencies in Africa.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's thirty plus currencies in Latin America.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's capital controls everywhere.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is a demand for that people have for a decentralized portable very hard to debase, very hard to censor money.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because of the nature of network effects and liquidity,
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: and security, it's something that resist the fact that it can just become distributed and there can be a million cryptocurrencies.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because at the end of the day, there still tends to be centralization around whatever the leading one is, which is Bitcoin.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, well said for sure.
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: All right.
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Last one.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just want to nerd out with you a little bit.
• 28:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I have seen you did a little writing on the fourth turning, which I think is pretty cool.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: The cyclical theory on how generational shifts inevitably result and often dramatic political economic cultural transformations.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I know you've drawn from that theory a bit.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you give us a sense of how we are in the midst right now of a fourth turning?
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I like to look at some of the quantifiable aspects of it.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, people often criticize it and say that it's a core scope, it's qualitative.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I found what kind of drew me to it is that when you look at the history of that and then you map that onto the long-term debt cycle, which I talked about earlier,
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: so that the buildup of private debt and then that bubble kind of blowing up and then the reflecting of it on the on the sovereign level.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those events tend to mark what a fourth turning is.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's that's what things start changing dramatically.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when I when I kind of put out the long term chart of say the monetary base is percentage of GDP or private debt and public debt as percentage of GDP and if you if you map that out over like a hundred twenty year period for example and then you kind of outline on it what are the fourth
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: It'll it'll very clearly match that situation.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what I find interesting about the fourth hurting is that that's kind of discussing at least that authors or the co-authors view of what's going on socially at that time, which which agree with it or disagree with it, at least it's a lens to look through it in addition to others.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so as I as I look at the numbers and as I kind of look at the quantifiable aspects, it still is useful to have that social element in mind.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some of the things that stand out to me is one
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: institutions that were built for generations ago.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've gone through periods of entropy, periods of really no longer reflecting the environment that they're in now.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so new institutions are built.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've generally argued that Bitcoin is one of those institutions.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not necessarily the institution in the centralized sense, but it's a new thing that kind of has sprung up in the modern era and it kind of challenges some of those older institutions.
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: For example, that's one of many.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think they're refreshing of institutions.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: is highly relevant.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then also the cycles of populism that tend to happen.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we talked before about if you run structural trade deficits for many decades, don't be shocked when you start to get populism as pushback.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so people often ask how long can this go?
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's to some extent it's a mathematical answer.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then there's also a social answer as well, which is that when you do start to have these things build up, you start to get increasing pushback against it.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's useful to have a
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: a mind for history, to at least see how that kind of went through in the past.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think it's useful to kind of combine the qualitative and quantitative aspects.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I love it.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely love it.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Lynn, where can our audience keep up with your amazing work?
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now you have a website, you have the ex handle, where can they check out?
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So people can find me at linaldin.com.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: If they're on ex, it's linaldin contact.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they can also check out broken money on Amazon or wherever else they purchase books.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it's wonderful.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're gang.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you do want this dive deeper here, grab a copy.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It flins broken money.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is a must read, check out all of her platforms, which are all linked down below.
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: You will not be disappointed.
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I do.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love the is it a monthly newsletter that you do on your on the linaldin.com is up to.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: every six weeks.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, every six weeks.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's excellent.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, it's just so chock full of information.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, blow your mind.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Lynn, thank you so much.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's have you back soon.
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is wonderful.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for listening this episode of the Turley Talks podcast.
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a five star review, and share this episode with your friends.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Help us defeat the fake news media and rank us the number one news and commentary podcast all over the world.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Come back again tomorrow for another episode celebrating the rise of a new conservative age.