Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 434: The Moon!

Transcript

Episode 434: The Moon! · Words & Numbers

0:00
Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony and this.
0:02
Is words and numbers brought to you by the good people at
0:09
polyhymia. That's POLYHYMNIA.
0:17
He's. Reading it off a piece of paper.
0:19
No, I'm not, you idiot. I got some crap recently for
0:22
saying that Polyhemnia is now the thing and then not
0:26
explaining what Polyhemnia even was or is.
0:30
Polyhemnia is, for all intents and purposes, Khaki, the Center
0:34
for American Culture and Ideas. We're doing ADBA doing business
0:38
as Polyhemnia, and we chose Polyhemnia for a couple of
0:42
pretty good reasons. First, it was a single word that
0:47
was available as a URL. And if you think that's no small
0:51
shakes, go try and find a single word that is available as a URL
0:57
for the regular price, not for the 10s of thousands of dollars
1:00
the squatters think they're going to get.
1:01
So there's that. But Polyhymnia herself was one
1:05
of the Greek muses, aunt. She was the Greek muse of sacred
1:09
music and rhetoric. And what could be more in line
1:15
with what we do? Not you and me, but me and the
1:18
group formerly known as Khaki. What could capture?
1:21
What we do more than sacred music and rhetoric, that's
1:27
exactly what we're looking at, Culture and all of its many
1:30
forms. So there you go.
1:34
And on that happy note, Ed, what's new and exciting in your
1:36
world this week? I was walking through the Denver
1:39
airport the other day and somebody stopped me.
1:43
One of our listeners, Jake Tibbets, It was wonderful for
1:47
someone who listens to stop and talk.
1:49
It's the second time it's happened to me.
1:51
The first time was due to my videos, which I mean, that's
1:54
understandable. You see the person on the video.
1:57
I was very surprised that Jake recognized me, I guess from the
2:00
pictures that accompany the splash screen on the podcast.
2:04
But he did and stopped. We had a nice little chat, ran
2:07
to each other by accident. Both of our flights were
2:09
delayed. If either one of us hadn't been
2:11
delayed, we would have missed each other, but that was a nice
2:13
little respite in my otherwise hectic travels were.
2:18
One of you on American and the other on United.
2:21
Oh my God, James. He was on United.
2:24
I was on American. I'm convinced American doesn't
2:28
actually want to fly. Yes, every time.
2:32
Every time I take those people, the flight is either seriously
2:37
delayed or just completely cancelled.
2:39
They love cancelling flights. Well, I'll tell you.
2:42
I had a flight to go out to Kansas and it was fly to, I
2:47
guess I was going to Dallas, Fort Worth connection and then
2:50
to place in Kansas. And my flight is supposed to
2:56
leave at like 6:30 in the morning from Dulles. 1:30 in the
3:01
morning, I get a text from American saying, oh, your
3:04
flight's cancelled. I'm sure it doesn't matter to
3:07
them. What they're concerned about is
3:09
they had to cancel the flight. But for me as a passenger, it
3:13
would be nice to know, you know, I mean, did you just decide not
3:16
to get up today or what's going on?
3:19
But nonetheless, the flight's cancelled.
3:21
And by the time I woke up at, I guess I was getting up around
3:25
4:00 or so, a second text had come in saying, we've got you on
3:31
a different flight. I thought, OK, that's all right.
3:34
The different flight was not out of Dulles.
3:36
It was out of Reagan, which is a pain in the butt to get to.
3:39
But they had me on a flight and the flight had two connections.
3:45
So between that and my other connection, I now have three
3:48
connections to get to where I'm going.
3:51
But I figured, OK, it's going to get me where I'm going.
3:52
It's going to be a hassle ball. Do it.
3:54
What could possibly go? Oh, oh, let me tell you what
3:57
could possibly go wrong. What possibly goes wrong is 20
4:00
minutes before I'm ready to leave the house to go to Reagan,
4:04
I get another text. Oh, your flights been delayed
4:07
six hours? Oh, there you go.
4:11
Now you understand why I want and still want and Adventures
4:17
with American Airlines segment on this very podcast.
4:20
It's astound. I cancelled the whole thing.
4:21
I said heck with American. I got a last minute booking on
4:24
United. United got me to where I need to
4:27
go. And let me tell you the
4:27
difference between United and American coming back.
4:30
There was all those storms that were passing through the
4:32
Midwest. I was supposed to connect
4:34
through Denver. That's where I met Jake.
4:37
They were having ground shutdowns at Denver.
4:40
All this kind of thing in our pilot.
4:42
I'm in Kansas on the plane. Our United pilot says, OK,
4:47
everybody strap in, Denver's closed, but I'm going to taxi
4:52
out to the end of the runway because if they open up, it'll
4:57
be for a short window and I want to get off the ground so that
5:01
we're now in line to land at Denver.
5:03
So this guy's proactively and he got us there.
5:05
I was delayed, but you know, if it was American, I'd still be in
5:09
Kansas. That's exactly right.
5:11
So what I'm going to do, Aunt, is I'm going to send a link to
5:14
this podcast to the president of American Airlines warning him
5:19
that his company is about to become a regular segment on this
5:23
podcast. And you might ask why I dealt
5:26
with American at all, it turns out, because I fly to, how
5:32
should I say, very rural places. An American seems to be the only
5:37
airline that services, as near as I could tell, all of the
5:40
state capitals, even though the capitals out in the Midwest are
5:43
out in the middle of nowhere. But American serves them.
5:47
Well, I don't know how I can possibly hope to compete with
5:52
anything you just said, but I came across an interesting thing
5:56
on the hill this morning. Here's the headline for you.
6:00
Home sellers now outnumber buyers by half a million.
6:04
Sellers outnumber buyers, Yeah. Now, is that regional?
6:08
I bet you it's driven largely by Washington area.
6:13
No, it's driven largely it seems, by Florida.
6:16
Really. Huh.
6:18
Six of the top ten buyers markets are in Florida.
6:21
Wow. Now this is interesting, right?
6:24
Because we've been hearing for quite a while now that people
6:28
can't afford houses. They're just too expensive.
6:30
The run up in the prices has been ridiculous and then you add
6:35
to that the interest rate and you've got a recipe for
6:38
disaster. Well, if there are that many
6:41
more sellers than buyers right now, prices are going to start
6:45
coming down pretty significantly.
6:46
As a matter of fact, the estimate here in this article is
6:49
1% by the end of the year. I suspect it might be more than
6:53
that because I don't think the interest rates are going to come
6:57
down anytime soon. No, no, I don't think so either.
7:00
And as long as interest rates are high, it doesn't matter why
7:04
the cost of housing is high, it just matters that the cost of
7:08
housing is high. And you know, 7% rates are going
7:12
to, people aren't going to buy houses they can't afford them.
7:15
Yep, Yep. That also means people can't
7:18
sell houses, and that's going to turn into a real problem.
7:22
What about when retirees want to sell their houses to live off
7:25
the fat of the land? Yep.
7:27
And they can't. So this is something that bears
7:31
watching for the next year or two.
7:34
I think it's going to be more than next year or two.
7:37
With our population slowing down.
7:40
There's going to be a whole bunch of houses.
7:41
I mean, part of what drove up housing prices for generations
7:45
was the fact that there were more and more Americans.
7:47
I think there are twice as many Americans now as there were when
7:50
I was a teenager. And of course, they need houses.
7:54
That's right. And there's an interesting thing
7:56
going on here, right? Because if you buy an incredibly
8:00
inexpensive house or a very, very expensive house, you're
8:03
probably safe. Right.
8:06
You'll always be able to sell on either end of the distribution.
8:10
It's those median homes. Oh man, everybody's going to
8:15
hurt with those median homes. Unless, as I see around here in
8:20
the Washington area, the in my mind I called a 1950s house.
8:25
You know the one level brick thing?
8:28
People here have no trouble selling those because developers
8:32
first thing do is tear them down.
8:34
They don't want the house, they want the piece of property it's
8:36
sitting on. And a lot of times when I lived
8:39
in DC, when I was looking for houses, and this was 15 years
8:45
ago, those little brick footprint houses were going for
8:49
$475,000 then, yeah. Right.
8:53
Good luck with that. Good luck with that.
8:55
A house that nobody wants at a price nobody can afford.
8:58
Perfect. This, of course, Aunt, brings us
9:01
to the foolishness of the week, and we've got a call back.
9:04
Do you remember a couple of weeks a month ago when I said
9:09
that Donald Trump had only gone to two of his daily
9:14
intelligence? Briefings.
9:15
Yeah, right, Right. Tulsi Gabbard is working on a
9:19
solution to that problem, given of course that that's her job.
9:24
And let me ask, how would you fix that problem?
9:30
I don't know. I mean, he's the president,
9:32
right? He could do what he wants.
9:34
And he's going to do what he wants.
9:35
He's proven that repeatedly. So you got to find a way to make
9:39
him want to do it, which seems impossible.
9:43
Except I think Tulsi Gabbard might be a genius, because what
9:47
she's decided is to present the daily briefing to President
9:53
Trump in the form of a Fox TV show.
9:59
How about that? How smart is that?
10:02
OK, OK. But my God, if we've come to
10:05
this, this is the foolishness of the decade.
10:08
I guess I say that once every three years, so I have to
10:11
reassess, but my God, have we gotten here that a president of
10:15
the United States requires some sort of dog and pony show to go
10:20
to his daily intelligence briefing?
10:23
You might recall, Aunt, that we have war now in the Middle East,
10:28
in Africa and in Ukraine that is so bad that more people are
10:35
dying of violence now than having years.
10:39
That level has just kicked up and up and up and up.
10:43
And now we can't say the world is the safest it's ever been
10:48
anymore. The world is almost as safe as
10:51
it's ever been, even with these hotspots, But it's not as safe
10:55
as it's ever been. Right.
10:57
And that's incredibly sad and very telling.
11:02
So here we are. For One Stop shopping for all
11:06
things James and Aunt, visit our website wordsandnumbers.org.
11:12
We give a special shout out to our Patreon sponsors who help us
11:16
keep the lights on. If you'd like to contribute, go
11:19
to patreon.com/words and Numbers.
11:23
I have it on good authority that you're going to lighten
11:26
everybody's mood. Well, everyone except yours.
11:30
Could this possibly be true? What could you possibly want to
11:34
talk about that will make everybody happy?
11:38
Because it made them all happy once before over my objections.
11:42
They're going to feel your blood pressure rising over the audio.
11:47
I already have a headache in my eye.
11:49
A couple of years ago I said to James we should do an episode on
11:54
property rights on the moon and James would have nothing to do
11:58
with it. And finally, I badgered him
12:00
enough that we did the episode and actually ended up being
12:03
rather popular and I want to revisit the topic.
12:09
Because of course you do. Of.
12:12
Course you do. How could you want anything
12:14
else? Well, OK, aunt, given that there
12:17
is still a moon, there is still an Earth, We don't go to the
12:20
moon often, nobody lives there, and there is absolutely no
12:24
reason for property rights in a place where nobody lives.
12:28
What the hell are you talking about?
12:31
All right, let me tee up the conversation.
12:34
For those who didn't hear the previous episode, here's my
12:38
claim. We've got a tremendous resource
12:44
orbiting up there. The moon.
12:46
What is there? I haven't the foggiest idea you
12:50
could imagine all kinds of things from minerals to the
12:53
vacuum to, you know, lower gravity, whatever.
12:57
I don't know. I'm not a scientist.
12:59
Let them and entrepreneurs figure it out.
13:01
But I can tell you it's a resource.
13:05
Now what's required to figure out how to leverage that
13:09
resource, how to do something with it?
13:10
I claim what's required is property rights because until
13:15
you have property rights, no entrepreneur, no investor is
13:19
going to take the risk, put the money on the line to go and
13:22
figure out what to do with this thing.
13:26
And so I claim, and we went over this in the previous episode,
13:30
that one of the best ways we can leverage this resource is to
13:34
assign the property rights. Now, that creates a problem
13:37
because typically people turn to government and say, well, you
13:42
know, the government should own it or sell it off or whatever
13:46
handed out. I don't think we need to do any
13:48
of that. I think we can completely bypass
13:51
governments. In fact, not only can we do it,
13:54
but governments run so slowly, given that we'd be using
13:59
technology to do it, it would be done and accepted long before
14:03
governments could ever formulate any kind of response.
14:07
And here's what we said in the last episode, that we could take
14:12
the moon, which I believe is roughly, and it's coincidentally
14:16
8 billion acres, and randomly assign one acre to each person
14:22
on the planet. That's your acre.
14:26
Now, what do you do with it, right?
14:28
Beats me, but it's yours. So somebody's going to turn
14:32
around and say, hey, I'll buy it from you.
14:35
I could go down to many neighborhoods that I know well
14:41
and buy lots and lots and lots of acres for about 10 to 20
14:45
bucks apiece. Oh, yeah, Look, people think
14:48
back to the early days of Bitcoin and they say, boy, I
14:52
wish that I had the presence of mind way back in the 1990s to
14:57
buy Bitcoin when you could buy a hundred of them for a penny,
15:01
right? I wish I'd heard about it back
15:03
then. Yeah, there was a story about
15:05
the early guys with Bitcoin buying a pizza for like 1000
15:09
Bitcoin or I don't know, some ridiculous thing, right?
15:12
Most expensive pizza on the planet?
15:14
Billion dollar pizza. Yeah, here's your opportunity.
15:19
Come on man, come on, let's take a deep breath.
15:22
This is your opportunity if and only if people want it.
15:27
No, it's even better if people don't want it.
15:30
If people don't want it, I can buy up all sorts of acres for
15:34
pennies on the dollar. And that's worth it if and only
15:38
if there's any actual value. Right.
15:42
Yes, that is. Correct in owning a plot on the
15:45
moon, but. Notice what happens all of a
15:48
sudden, because it's possible to buy it.
15:52
You get entrepreneurs and investors thinking to
15:55
themselves, what would I do if I had 1,000,000 acres on the moon?
16:00
Yeah, All right, a fair question.
16:03
So why are we talking about this nonsense again?
16:07
We're talking about it because when we discussed it last time,
16:12
we pointed out that the Achilles heel in the whole plan was how
16:17
do you assign an acre to a person?
16:21
I mean, we've got the ability to identify each acre using GPS and
16:26
all that nonsense, right? So we could identify the acres,
16:28
that's no problem. But how do you attach this acre
16:31
to that person? And believe it or not, I think
16:35
Sam Altman, the founder of Open AI, the ChatGPT people, has
16:41
solved that problem. Do tell.
16:45
Sam has launched a program by which he's looking to be able to
16:50
identify individuals on the blockchain, and he's doing this
16:55
by taking a photograph of your eye and I guess has something to
16:59
do with the retina and encoding this.
17:02
Hold on, hold on. Now I've got questions all of a
17:04
sudden are do we all have? Unique eyes.
17:10
That's my understanding. Like fingerprints?
17:14
So we have unique eyes, unique fingerprints.
17:17
You know what else is completely unique from person to person?
17:21
You're never going to believe this.
17:23
What? The anus.
17:26
James why? Why do you have to do this?
17:29
I'm not doing anything. That's a scientific fact.
17:31
It could have blown me over with a feather when I learned this.
17:35
OK, I could have gone all day without hearing that, but let me
17:38
go back to. True what you know there.
17:40
Are lots of things that are true that I don't need to hear?
17:43
It's not like our intestines are somehow unique.
17:46
I mean DNA is the gold standard I would think in uniqueness.
17:49
Why aren't we using that? Well, because that requires
17:53
getting a sample of blood or saliva or something, and then
17:55
there's a whole bunch of scientific stuff.
17:57
This requires only a photograph. You take a photograph of your
18:01
eye. And I think actually what he's
18:02
done is he's offered people money.
18:04
I forget what it is, $20 sticks in my head, but I may be wrong
18:07
about that. He's offering people money.
18:09
If you take a photograph of your eye, that can then be put onto
18:12
the blockchain. And the idea is, my
18:16
understanding is that we would then be able, for example, to
18:20
enter a contract, which you can do already.
18:22
You can enter a contract, it could be recorded on the
18:24
blockchain, but we would be able to identify specifically it was
18:28
you, it was me, by taking a photograph of the retina because
18:32
that's already recorded somewhere.
18:35
So it's like having your fingerprint on file on the
18:37
blockchain is stated goal get everybody on the planet
18:41
identified on the blockchain. All right, so two things.
18:44
First, given that I never believe anything you say, I went
18:49
and looked it up and yes, in fact, eyes are unique.
18:53
So much so that even your eyes and my eyes, our left and our
18:58
right are different. Really.
19:01
How about that? The only open question I would
19:03
have is what about identical twins and things like that?
19:06
But that's such a minority that who cares?
19:11
Yeah, I don't know, but what fascinated me when I heard this
19:15
is that Sam has a problem, and unbeknownst to Sam, he is the
19:20
solution to our problem. Well, hang on, 'cause the second
19:24
thing I wanted to talk about is that if we can't get human
19:29
beings here on Earth to shut up about obvious things like
19:35
genetically modified foods, oh, I don't know, vaccines, what do
19:43
you think they're all going to say about collecting pictures of
19:47
their eyes for this database? Oh, I think it's easy.
19:52
You say look like he's doing now.
19:54
It's completely voluntary. He's offering 20 bucks.
19:56
I'm saying offer an acre on the moon.
19:59
It's not going to cost him a thing as opposed to the 20
20:02
bucks. And you then solve our problem,
20:06
which is there's now a way to assign an acre of the moon to
20:09
each person. Now your question, what do you
20:12
do about the people that say, well, forget it, This is, you
20:14
know, conspiracy. The government's trying to get
20:17
my retina. Whatever, Fine, don't do it
20:20
then. Don't.
20:21
Give people a period of time. Give them two years.
20:24
You got two years to decide this.
20:25
If you decide not to, hey, your acre gets randomly sent to
20:29
somebody else. Yeah, maybe we could have some
20:31
sort of lottery where you could get a second acre.
20:34
Sure. Because of all the people who
20:36
didn't bother. It is interesting, isn't it?
20:39
Because no matter. What?
20:41
Problem. I see the solution is baked into
20:46
the proposition. It's already there, right?
20:49
I think this means that the only criticism that I could possibly
20:53
have. At the end of the day, who gets
20:56
the right to assign? Yeah, that's interesting,
21:00
because that leads to my next thing, which is how do we know
21:03
the governments are going to honor this?
21:05
I think we can solve both of those problems with the same
21:08
thing. If the assignment is completely
21:13
transparent, you're being assigned perfectly randomly.
21:17
And I don't know how you do the transparency, but you know,
21:20
people who deal in blockchain have figured this out already.
21:24
Make it transparent so everybody is comfortable that this game is
21:29
not rigged. Then you're going to have more
21:32
people looking to sign on to it. This solves the second question
21:35
of how do you get the governments to honor this?
21:38
All you got to do is get enough people behind it.
21:40
Imagine in this country what would happen if you had pick a
21:44
#50 million Americans who were told they own an acre on the
21:49
moon. In fact, they could tell you
21:50
which acre it is. And all of a sudden the
21:52
government comes along and says, no, we don't think so.
21:55
Yeah, that's not going to fly. That's not going to fly at all.
21:59
Not at the numbers that you're suggesting.
22:02
Right. Right at the numbers you're
22:04
suggesting, people are going to be irked if the government does
22:07
something untoward, and the government will, because that's
22:11
what governments do. But you didn't answer the first
22:14
question. Who gets to decide who gets to
22:18
set up the randomizer? There's always a first mover
22:21
here. How do we determine who gets to
22:24
be that first mover? Yeah, I don't know the answer to
22:27
that, but there are ways to set up randomization that is
22:31
transparent that everybody could point to and say, yeah, indeed,
22:33
this is truly random. And here I am about to just jump
22:37
on this foolishness full square because I've already figured out
22:43
how to make millions of dollars on this the minute it comes into
22:48
being. And it has nothing to do with
22:50
the real estate on the moon. It has everything to do with
22:54
taking pictures of the moon for people.
22:57
Here's your acre. Oh, right.
22:59
Yeah, right. Right.
23:01
I want to be the Levi Strauss of the moon movement, right?
23:06
And for those of you out there who don't know why Levi Strauss
23:09
is such a big deal, he made more, I think over time, given
23:15
the company that still exists with his name on it.
23:17
But even at the time, he made more than all the Gold Rush
23:21
participants combined. Yeah.
23:23
Most people ran to California to find gold and found nothing, but
23:28
they bought all their gear from Levi Strauss.
23:31
He wasn't looking for gold, he was just providing them with
23:33
pants. That's right, pants and pants,
23:36
right? All the things that you need,
23:39
essentially, he was running tax stores and you could buy
23:41
anything you needed from Levi Strauss and he was the big Gold
23:45
Rush winner. Not the people who came home
23:47
with all the gold. And that's something it
23:50
fundamentally changed the way that I try to make a living.
23:55
Yeah. It always has.
23:58
All right, This is getting interesting.
23:59
Even I am finding ways to manipulate this.
24:03
I know I was very surprised that you find it interesting, but let
24:07
me underline a couple of other things.
24:08
One, there will be a huge sense of equality here, right?
24:13
Not only be doing an N run around the government's here,
24:17
heck with them, we're going to figure this out ourselves.
24:19
We're also making N run around the rich people, right?
24:23
We're taking the entire planet. Whoever's alive as of today,
24:27
each of them gets one acre. It's perfectly equitable.
24:31
Yeah, it's not, though. There's a gigantic problem that
24:34
you have not stopped to think about, and that's that there is
24:37
a dark side of the moon. Yeah, but it's not dark in the
24:42
sense of being dark. We call it that.
24:43
You just don't see it from Earth.
24:45
It's on the other. Side Yeah.
24:48
Is that going to cause a problem?
24:49
No. I think those spots might be
24:52
less valuable. They might be simply if for no
24:54
other reason, then you could point to this spot.
24:57
I could get a big telescope and look at my acre, right?
25:00
You can't do that from the other side.
25:02
I can't take a picture of anything on the dark side of the
25:04
moon and hand it out to people who pay me money to do it.
25:09
But you can because there are pictures.
25:11
There are high resolution pictures of the backside.
25:13
So we we might be able to do some work on that.
25:17
I don't see an obvious problem. Besides the fact that the moon
25:21
is far away. We can't get there.
25:23
There seems to be no reason we would ever get there anytime
25:26
soon. And this doesn't exactly answer
25:31
my question of who gets the rights to chop it up, because
25:37
there could always be alien races that don't agree with us.
25:41
Yeah, I can't help you there. That's completely beyond me.
25:45
But here's the thing, it avoids all of the problems because
25:49
look, you know this is coming. There's going to come a point
25:53
probably in the next generation where we're seriously sending
25:58
people to the moon and they're going to be there for semi
26:00
permanently there, stations there, the whole thing, the
26:04
question of ownership is going to come up.
26:07
Let's deal with it now while it's very clean before anybody's
26:11
there. You absolutely do not want the
26:13
Chinese and the Indians and the Americans to all have bases up
26:18
there. And then we start to talk about
26:20
who owns the moon. Right.
26:22
But now you see one of the problems because you want to
26:25
give property rights on the moon to individuals and governments
26:29
are still going to build bases. Well, are they?
26:34
Yes. Are they?
26:35
Because picture a world in which, and let's be conservative
26:39
here, let's suppose 20% of the people on the earth sign up for
26:44
this thing and they're scattered throughout all the countries.
26:47
You got 20% of humanity with a vested interest in telling the
26:52
government's to get off their property.
26:55
Yeah, and no means by which to do that.
26:58
Well, maybe. No obvious means of.
27:02
Doing that, I think it depends on where you are.
27:04
If you're in China, you may have no obvious means.
27:06
If you're in the United States, all of a sudden there's a race
27:09
amongst the politicians. Elect me and I'll ensure that
27:12
the government respects your property.
27:14
Rights. Yeah, careful there.
27:16
I think what you're much more likely to find is a politician.
27:19
Oh, I don't know, one with an orange hue per SE.
27:23
Who says the Chinese have the upper hand?
27:29
We're going to have to take all your moon space away 'cause you
27:34
know, the Chinese. Oh, a politician may say that,
27:39
but then you've got 300 million Americans saying, ha, ha, my
27:43
larger problem is not that. My larger problem is the IRS
27:47
saying, oh, look, you just got an acre of land on the moon.
27:51
You owe taxes. Yeah.
27:54
And it's interesting, right, because there would be no
27:57
obvious way to tax that until it becomes a capital gain, right,
28:02
on the federal level. And I don't think that my
28:04
locality or my state is going to get into taxing me on my moon
28:08
holdings. No, what they'll do is, at least
28:11
initially, is they'll tax it like they tax Bitcoin.
28:13
If you sell it at a profit, you're going to owe capital
28:17
gains tax. I think ultimately that's
28:19
correct. Let me refer listeners to
28:23
something in economics we call dead capital.
28:27
And this is a phenomenon that you see a lot of in Africa where
28:32
people own something. So you're in a village and you
28:35
own a plot of land, maybe you own a house that's on it, what
28:39
have you. And we refer to it as dead
28:42
capital because although you own it, you cannot use it as
28:47
leverage. You cannot go to a bank and say
28:49
give me a loan using this land in this building as collateral
28:54
so that I can do whatever, pay for education, start a business.
28:58
I might point out that if that's true, you don't own it well.
29:04
See, that's the weird thing. You ask anybody in the village
29:08
who owns that house, who owns the property, they all say,
29:10
well, this is James. James owns it.
29:12
The problem is there's no record that you can take to a bank as
29:18
an objective piece of evidence and say I own this thing.
29:23
And if you can't do that, the bank can't regard it as
29:25
collateral. Hence it's dead capital.
29:30
We've got an entire planetary body that right now is dead
29:34
capital. This would solve that problem.
29:37
It would enable people to leverage, to invest.
29:40
They would have the possibility of some return.
29:42
All of a sudden, that capital becomes alive.
29:46
Interesting, very interesting. So I'm going to say a thing, but
29:52
I can't believe I'm going to say we should get back to this.
29:57
This is interesting. There are things here that are
30:02
very fascinating, and even as a thought experiment, it's
30:07
interesting. But it might be interesting in
30:11
the real world, even if the real world includes the moon now.
30:15
Yeah. And you know what's interesting,
30:17
James? We had this conversation that
30:19
was probably 2, maybe three years.
30:21
Ago. Two years, Maybe three years
30:22
ago. That's about right.
30:23
And it was at the time we said this is an interesting thing,
30:26
but it's fatal flaws. How do you how do you match the
30:29
people with the thing? And but here it's just been two
30:32
years and that problems been solved.
30:36
Yeah, we should get in touch with this guy.
30:39
Sam Altman. Yeah.
30:40
Anybody who's listening, if you know anybody who works for or
30:44
with Sam Altman, send them a copy of this episode.
30:47
Yeah, 'cause we may not be able to reach him ourselves.
30:50
Just say it. Just say it.
30:53
I don't know. Look, I'm becoming more sold
30:56
with each passing moment on this, right?
30:59
And with moments, I go back to the time before that first
31:02
episode until today. You're kind of selling me on
31:06
this. I'm kind of buying this, so
31:09
we'll see if I ever own a portion of the moon.
31:12
And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
31:15
numbers. Until next time.
31:16
Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
31:20
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
31:24
week. Can't take it easy, see?
31:24
You next week, James.