Latest / What Bitcoin Did / The Fourth Turning is Here: Bitcoin vs Crisis | Brandon Quittem

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The Fourth Turning is Here: Bitcoin vs Crisis | Brandon Quittem · What Bitcoin Did

• 0:00
  If you look at today, I think the risk of a second American civil war is increasing by the day.
• 0:08
  We're riding this thing off the rails right now. And so something has to change.
• 0:12
  I think Bitcoin at the individual level makes you more optimistic. It reduces your uncertainty in the world, which allows you to act better.
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  I think the question remains, though, are we going to go hole up in the mountains and build our citadel and f*** off?
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  Or are we going to stick around and grind through this transition period and rebuild the world in a way that we think is better?
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  Incentives wise, it's really easy to just give up the fight and live out your days comfortably.
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  Luckily, I think Bitcoiners are a different breed.
• 0:47
  but I think we have what it takes to rebuild the world in a better way. If we just get through this
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  one, we all get rich and disappear. Is that really the win? Is that really the mark we want to leave?
• 0:59
  I don't think so. I think we have a golden opportunity here or an orange opportunity here
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  to dramatically change the trajectory of our species.
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  Brandon, man, good to see you. It's been a little while since you've been on the show. You've not
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  been on the new show yet um you're kind of our our fourth turning pundit i think this is the
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  fourth this is the fourth turning of fourth turning shows so welcome back man hey thanks
• 1:23
  for having me danny i'm excited to be here yeah i think we did maybe like four shows with peter and
• 1:28
  very much excited to to chat with you today when was the last time we saw each other new year's
• 1:32
  eve maybe uh i saw you in vegas that'd have been the last time i think that's true forgot about
• 1:37
  vegas yeah how have you been i've been good man uh enjoying life here with a little three-year-old
• 1:43
  um starting to become fall here in the midwest which is my favorite time of year so lots of
• 1:48
  camping lots of outdoor stuff and yeah life is good last chance to do something before it completely
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  freezes that's right honestly i turn into a psycho this time of year and i i just freak out because
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  i'm like oh no snow is coming i'm not i didn't spend enough time outside and so i try to cram
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  it all in here before the snow flies that's the way man i've still not been out there i need to
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  come up to where you guys are. But maybe we should start. I've been told off in the comments,
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  but not introducing my guests because I just assume everyone knows everyone. But why are you
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  into the fourth turning? Who are you? What do you do, Brandon? Yeah, absolutely. So let's see.
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  I'll start with Bitcoin. Found Bitcoin in 2017. Friends making money on internet coins. I felt
• 2:34
  left out. I started trading shit coins, made a bunch of money in 2017, thought I was a genius,
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  thought I was a traitor. And then in 2018, I quickly realized how lucky I was. And I watched
• 2:45
  the number go back down. And then I had a decision to make, which was run away, pretend it never
• 2:52
  happened, which most people do, or double down, study this thing and figure out what's going on.
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  I chose the second path, partially because I'm extremely stubborn and I like to be right.
• 3:04
  So in this case, that served me well. And then I spent the first half of 2018 reading all the
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  books, doing all the podcasts, teaching myself economics from the ground up through an Austrian
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  lens. And then it all sort of crystallized there. I was living in Bali at the time with my girlfriend,
• 3:21
  now wife, going to meetups all the time, really just sprinting down the rabbit hole. And one of
• 3:27
  the meetups, a guy gave a presentation showing the lightning network, like the topographical map of
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  the nodes in 2018, which there were very few. And I have a history in mycology, which is studying
• 3:39
  fungi, totally as an amateur, no formal training. But for like 15 years, I've been foraging,
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  learning about mushroom ecology, growing them, all that kind of stuff, cooking with them.
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  And what I saw with that topographical map of the lightning network was something resembling
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  a mycelial network, which is the primary form that a mushroom takes. It's like an underground
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  root system. It forms a network. And I took my little scooter home that night, got back to the
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  villa just scribbling on paper. And I essentially wrote the first Bitcoin essay I ever published,
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  Mycelium of Money, the first part in 2018, published that later in the year. And that
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  sort of gave me some sort of a reputation in Bitcoin land. And to my surprise, the Bitcoiners
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  were very open minded to such a topic. You know, most people talking about finance, software,
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  game theory, whatever. And I'm like, are we sure Bitcoin's not a living organism?
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  and so somehow that worked and fast forward a little bit i met cory clipston the ceo of swan
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  at the bitcoin 2019 conference in san francisco which was a great event and later that year in
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  2019 i joined swan been there ever since almost six years now and yeah very proud of what we built
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  if you want to get buying some bitcoin in the u.s check out swan.com and now let's fast forward a
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  little bit more. It's 2020 COVID, you know, fully ingrained in the Bitcoin community,
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  radically changed my life personally after interacting with this thing, as many people do.
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  And it's maybe May or June 2020. George Floyd died like three miles from where I live in
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  Minneapolis here. I'm on a camping trip, come out of the woods, hear that news. My city's burning.
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  Now we have lockdowns. I'm cooped up. And I was living in the city at the time.
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  and I was trying to make sense of the world.
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  What is going on?
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  People are not acting in a way that I would have predicted.
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  I assumed that Americans would be more conscious
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  of their civil liberties and giving up everything
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  in exchange for this like vague sense of security
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  that never really came.
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  And instead I watched my neighbors call the cops
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  on my other neighbors for too many cars in their driveway
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  for like had their parents over for dinner or something.
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  And so I'm locked in my room,
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  all the monitors up, reading books, trying to figure it all out. And during that borderline
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  manic phase, I found the fourth turning book, read that in like two days. And I'm like, okay,
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  this is a framework that at least starts to make sense of what I'm seeing around me.
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  It's not as intimidating or chaotic if you have a framework to map it against.
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  And so at that point, I started devouring all the content from that author, eventually wrote an
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  essay called Bitcoin and the Rhythms of History later that year, sort of viewing that thesis
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  through a Bitcoin lens, of course, as all good think boys do, and sort of modernizing those
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  ideas and bringing those ideas to current form. Because the book was written in 97,
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  and so predicted a lot of what we're experiencing right now. It was the same year as a sovereign
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  individual, equally as prophetic. And so, yeah, I think those two books together kind of give you
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  a good macro picture of what we should experience socially during this period of time. And yeah,
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  that's where I found it. SA became very popular, extremely popular on Twitter. And now I turned
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  into, I went from the mushroom guy to the fourth turning guy and here we are. I love it, man. It's
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  funny. I've been talking to people about this recently. One of the things that I think Bitcoin
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  has lost is the more kind of fun abstract pieces on Bitcoin. Like back when you wrote Mycelium
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  and money i think that was the title um and there was people like gg writing bitcoin is time there
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  was like chur did an amazing piece on the bitcoin reformation there were these kind of like
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  slightly weird and more abstract takes on bitcoin whereas now it's just so financialized do you
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  think we're missing something that's a really good point really good point um my initial reaction is
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  yes i think the glory days of philosophical bitcoin musings was probably 2018 to 2020 2021
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  and then as Bitcoin became more mainstream, more financialized, the content that was rewarded
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  online was more treasury companies, corporate adoption, BlackRock this, ETF that, right?
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  Do I think we're missing something? For me, I'm definitely missing something. That era of content,
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  I would devour. Now, honestly, I don't listen to that many Bitcoin podcasts. I don't read the books.
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  I don't read the blog posts anymore.
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  And to me, that's really sad.
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  But if I step back for a second and rude myself, I think this is just a natural progression
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  of Bitcoin, right?
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  I don't think that many people around the world on a percentage basis are going to go
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  down the rabbit hole and get obsessed with this thing.
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  I think the majority of people that are going to get obsessed with Bitcoin already are.
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  And if that's true, what we should expect going forward is more of a sanitized content
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  sphere that reward that gets rewarded because there's more normal people interacting with
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  content. Normal people don't want to read about mycelial networks. They just want to know if the
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  number is going up. Right. And so I think it's natural. I think it should be expected.
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  But personally, I do feel a loss. And I joke, I think if we go forward maybe 10, 20 years,
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  Bitcoin will be boring. You probably won't be doing this show anymore. And what will we do if
• 9:15
  we want to rekindle that like early revolutionary energy we're gonna have to call up josh and have
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  a beefsteak in the woods somewhere and call the old crew together and you know we'll be grandpa's
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  by then and relive the glory days tell tell some war stories yeah i i like personally i really miss
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  that stuff as well if anyone's out there who's writing strange bitcoin pieces let me know because
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  i want to cover that stuff it was the most it's almost like that meme of like you don't know the
• 9:42
  good times until you're out of them or whatever it is like they were the good times um we need we
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  need to bring it back brandon but let's let's get on to the fourth turning stuff um so what is the
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  fourth turning if for anyone that's not listened to you before like can you just give us a bit of
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  a synopsis yeah absolutely so we touched on it's a book the authors uh two authors a historian and
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  a demographer and they wrote a series of books prior to the fourth turning the primary one was
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  generations. And they were just looking at American history over, let's say, 500 years,
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  and they were studying those different generational cohorts. These authors also
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  coined the phrase millennial generation, by the way. And so what they found looking over the last
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  500 years is that these patterns kept coming up over and over and over again. I'll cut right to
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  the juicy part. They noticed that every 80 to 90 years, we have some sort of a crisis moment.
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  And if we go back in time, the previous one was World War II.
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  Before that, we had the Civil War.
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  Before that, we had the Revolutionary War.
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  And what you might notice is they're all wars.
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  And so essentially what happens is society outgrows its institutions, its structure that
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  sort of keeps people in line and keeps society humming along.
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  We outgrow that for whatever reason, either it decays or society changes, whatever it
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  is.
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  And we look around and there's just no order.
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  And the people start to demand that order.
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  And so we tear down our institutions.
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  We rebuild new ones.
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  And that's sort of the juicy part.
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  But how do we get there?
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  What's it based on?
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  Let me give you a little bit more here.
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  And so, okay, I think that the best way to understand it is that there's a symbiotic
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  relationship between history and generations.
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  Generations being like a cohort of people born during a certain time window, usually
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  like 20-ish years.
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  and all those people born in that 20-year window,
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  let's take millennials because we're millennials,
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  you're born in our period,
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  the context in which you were born
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  and in which you were raised is relatively the same.
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  And so what that means is history imprints itself
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  onto a generation
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  because we're all exposed to the same type of thing.
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  And then we grow up and we leave our parents' nest
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  and what do young people do?
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  They push back on their parents
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  and they go do their own thing.
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  And we leave the nest, we go out with our peers
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  and that age, let's say 20 to 25, roughly, people are immersed with their peers. And that's when you
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  essentially forge that identity. We become cemented as millennials and we carry those same
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  hopes, wishes, dreams, how we respond to things. We carry that for the rest of our life.
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  And we also exit the childhood stage. We go to early adult stage. That's very different.
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  Then we go to middle age and we start running things and then we become elders and we pass
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  the wisdom on.
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  Right.
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  So what the authors notice is that there's four archetypes and those four archetypes go
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  in a repeating pattern.
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  So hero, artist, prophet, nomad on repeat.
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  And depending on which age each archetype is.
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  So if the hero is young adult and the prophets and elder, et cetera, et cetera, the constellation
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  of those archetypes creates a mood. And that mood will be used in this theory to predict how society
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  will respond to events. So it doesn't tell the future, it predicts the mood, and the mood you
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  can more or less predict how we respond to things. And so again, based on the constellation of
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  archetypes, let's say we're in the third turning, right? In that 80 to 90 year window, there's four
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  turnings, four quadrants, whatever you want to call it. In the third turning in the early 1900s,
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  the Germans sank one of our American ships. And what do we do? We said, oh, that's bad. And
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  whatever. Next day, turn on the game, move on. Okay. Fast forward to the fourth turning, Pearl
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  Harbor, Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. How do we respond to a similar catalyst? The next day,
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  total war, right? So different turnings, different moods, different responses to a similar catalyst.
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  And so that's just one way you can kind of look at this kind of stuff.
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  And again, going back to the symbiosis, history creates the generation.
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  That generation grows up and creates history.
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  And that's just on repeat.
• 14:09
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• 14:14
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  visit iron.com to learn more which is i-r-e-n.com so of those four categories what are the attributes
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  of each of those um those four turnings those four generations the first before we go into each
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  one the way you can the way those different archetypes come in a repeating pattern is because
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  of the history so when are you born let's take the young people now they're born during a crisis
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  period. These are the artists. What happens in a crisis period? They watch their parents lose their
• 16:48
  house. They went through COVID lockdown, lost two years of school. They're seeing all the social
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  unrest, the political violence. There's no stability in the world and they feel that.
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  And so that type of context creates the artist generation. Artist archetypes are inward.
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  They're not very social. They're very creative. They don't work in teams. They're very individual.
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  and so that's how they're raised.
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  And that's more or less how they are
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  for the rest of their life.
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  If we go back one to the millennials,
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  which are the hero archetype, that's us,
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  we were born in a period of, in a third turning
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  and a third turning is defined as essentially deregulation,
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  increasing violence, but economics are still pretty strong.
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  And so essentially day-to-day life is good,
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  but we're gutting all the things that keep society going.
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  And so in that type of environment, we're essentially under-parented.
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  Or sorry, we're over-parented.
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  And that's also just a response from the period before the second turning when all the kids are under-parented.
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  And so what you see is these pendulums swing back and forth.
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  But back to millennials.
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  Millennials, we're all special snowflakes.
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  We're all unique.
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  We got seventh place ribbons at the track and field day.
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  Baby on board stickers.
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  mothers against drunk driving rights all this thing we got to foster the kids we got to over
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  invest in them so we grow up and we're team players we expect all our work to be valuable
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  and meaningful and we're you know we're we're relatively good in the workplace but we're
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  nothing like the generation before us which is the gen x's which are the nomads when i think of
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  like my childhood so i was born in like the early 90s and i know there's always sort of
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  rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia when you look back but that like early period everything seemed
• 18:39
  pretty great um but then you have sort of the attacks in 9-11 then there's like the patriarch
• 18:47
  that comes off the back of that the start of mass surveillance and then 2008 which i know is sort of
• 18:51
  the start or what you think of the start of the fourth turning so in that third turning is it
• 18:56
  the world moving from something that works really well to the beginnings of seeing the sort of
• 19:00
  crisis. Yeah, exactly. So again, the third turning, we deregulate and we start removing
• 19:06
  scaffolding in society like Glass-Steagall, letting Wall Street go crazy, bailouts, etc.
• 19:15
  And so, yeah, that world goes like it's starting to break down. And then the transition period is
• 19:21
  when humans look around and we say, uh-oh, society is going off the rails and there's
• 19:27
  no institutions to keep us in order. And it's sort of defined by lack of trust in institutions.
• 19:33
  You can go look at polling from all the main polling companies, and they're showing historic
• 19:38
  lows of trust in institutions. They're showing a separation in the left and the right, larger than
• 19:44
  we've ever polled. They're showing political violence being justified, especially on the left.
• 19:51
  And so these are all the climate you would expect in a fourth turning Yeah I mean you don even need to go to the polls You can just feel it You see it every day You can feel that that sort of divide in society is obviously there
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  Okay, before we get into that,
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  because I do want to get into what's happening in this fourth cycle,
• 20:09
  let's go back.
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  So we had nomads and artists to go through.
• 20:13
  That's right.
• 20:14
  And I'm actually going to skip to the prophet, the baby boomers,
• 20:17
  and do it more historically.
• 20:19
  It'll make more sense here.
• 20:19
  So the baby boomers, they were born in a time when life is great.
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  Okay, baby boom.
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  That's right on the post-World War II era.
• 20:29
  So World War II, we're all fighting.
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  Things are crazy.
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  Then we're done with World War II and everyone has a collective sigh of relief and we go back to normalcy.
• 20:39
  We're fatigued.
• 20:40
  What does that mean?
• 20:41
  We raise kids in the most boring environment imaginable.
• 20:45
  This is white picket fences, leave it to beaver.
• 20:47
  this is like Pax Americana you know that kind of thing and predictably what do the boomers do when
• 20:54
  they grow up they push back on their parents and they create the second turning energy which is the
• 20:58
  civil rights movement the psychedelic 60s all that kind of stuff sex drugs and rock and roll
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  right polar opposite of the first turning because those young people came of age and they push back
• 21:09
  and the baby boomers they're principled yet they're narcissistic their tagline would be like
• 21:16
  do as I say, not as I do. Right. So you can kind of think of that. They grew up in the indulgent
• 21:22
  post-crisis children. And then you get into the Gen Xers, right? They're the kids of these hippies.
• 21:29
  What do they do? They don't want to really be parents. They had kids, but they underparent
• 21:33
  the next generation, the Gen Xers. So those kids grew up on their own. This would be movies like
• 21:39
  Terminator, The Goonies, stuff like that, right? Where the young kid is on his own. He has to
• 21:45
  figure it out and acts larger than his age. They're like coming of age tales for young kids.
• 21:49
  That's like the most Gen X vibe. And they grow up and they become practical and yet entirely
• 21:55
  unfeeling. And so this would be Elon Musk. This would be Peter Thiel, things like that. Individual
• 22:02
  practical kind of folks, right? They don't care about political correctness. They don't care if
• 22:08
  everyone gets rich as long as they get rich themselves, right? Where the millennials are
• 22:13
  more like, I'm fine sacrificing. And as long as the greater good, dramatically different.
• 22:19
  Right. And then back to the millennials, which are born in the third journey. So I think that's
• 22:24
  all four there. But it's really about the context that shapes the kids. That's what forges that
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  archetype. And that's why it repeats. So is this a sort of America specific phenomenon? Because I
• 22:36
  don't imagine just to pick another country like India, we're going through the exact same cycles
• 22:41
  at the same time.
• 22:43
  Yeah, it's a good question. So the authors focus only on the US. However, recent talks with Neil
• 22:50
  Howe, we've done a couple of podcasts together and I consume everything he does. His perspective
• 22:54
  is that this is the first global fourth turning. And I think that makes sense. So post-World War
• 23:00
  II, what do we do? Okay, let me back up for a second. The previous fourth turning, 1929 to 1945,
• 23:07
  global stock or stock market collapse great depression fdr takes power fdr does all this
• 23:15
  crazy stuff that's never really happened before deficit spending social security unemployment
• 23:21
  insurance nato world bank imf breton woods obviously world war ii right so we essentially
• 23:27
  recreated all the institutions that we've been living under since the end of world war ii
• 23:32
  is it global or not? So after World War II, those institutions are pretty global, right?
• 23:38
  Reparations against Germany, rebuild Europe, financial system based on the US, Bretton Woods,
• 23:44
  but that's global. World Trade, WTO, NATO, those are all global organizations. And what we're seeing
• 23:50
  now in present times is that populism on the left and populism on the right is exploding all over
• 23:56
  the world. We're having similar crises, overthrow of the thing, crazy new election, can't believe it.
• 24:02
  That's happening everywhere. And so in a global trade world, and obviously China entering the WTO,
• 24:08
  those type of things really, really pull us into a global world. We saw this during COVID when
• 24:14
  supply chain disruption in one area causes all these issues all around the world. And so I think
• 24:19
  we're firmly in a global foreturning. I don't know what that means in terms of what's going to happen
• 24:25
  because of that, all I know is that everyone is in a more volatile state. And so if our peer or
• 24:32
  competitor nations are more volatile, their backs against the wall, they're going to be willing to
• 24:37
  do more crazy things. And so I would say that adds more chaos to the pot here.
• 24:44
  I guess volatility is a good way of looking at this in terms of like
• 24:46
  foreturning being the obviously the highest volatility first being the lowest.
• 24:51
  So it's the interesting thing you said there, though, is like all those institutions and ideals
• 24:55
  that came out of the previous first turning, things like the IMF, deficit spending, social
• 25:00
  security, are all the things that are unraveling today. Is that the way that it always goes?
• 25:06
  Pretty much. Yeah. Is it inertia? Is it, you know, organizations just get corrupted over time? Like,
• 25:16
  I think most of those organizations and other people that spoke on this had good intentions,
• 25:21
  especially Gladstein. They had good intentions at first, but then they sort of lost their mission.
• 25:27
  Their mission is no longer relevant. So people capture the org and use it for their own benefit.
• 25:32
  And then all of a sudden it's a shell of what it once was. I think that's part of it. I think
• 25:37
  with social security, that was a really good story to tell for about 80 years, right? It said,
• 25:44
  hey, listen, you can go back to work. You can trust the social contract of the United States
• 25:49
  because worst case scenario, when you're old, we'll get you covered. Oh, you're worried about
• 25:53
  bank runs? Don't worry. We have FDIC insurance. Don't worry about this. We got you covered, right?
• 25:59
  So you make a lot of promises when your back's against the wall. It doesn't matter if those
• 26:03
  promises will eventually break because you got us through the last cycle. And so I think a little
• 26:09
  bit of decay naturally, a little bit of over-promising to get yourself out of trouble,
• 26:13
  and then eventually the bills do.
• 26:16
  And I think one more layer here that makes this important
• 26:19
  is that every fourth turning,
• 26:21
  we notice easy money coming back on the table.
• 26:24
  And so, yeah, fourth turnings are when we print money,
• 26:27
  when the long-term debt problem comes due, et cetera, et cetera.
• 26:31
  So both of those two frameworks,
• 26:33
  I think together is the best way to see this world.
• 26:36
  It's like an emergent social phenomenon
• 26:39
  with the fourth turning generational theory
• 26:41
  and then the macro picture with the long-term debt cycle coming due again adds more volatility
• 26:46
  less room for error and that's obviously what we're experiencing now and and in terms of the uh
• 26:52
  the money printer turning on at the end of the fourth turning like the very easy answer to that
• 26:56
  is there's a war so we need to print money um and we're going to get into that because because
• 27:01
  all the previous fourth turnings have ended in war um i'm curious to think if you to know if you
• 27:06
  think this one will but like let's start with why we're in the first turn the fourth turning and when
• 27:10
  it started. So was 2008 the catalyst that started the fourth turning? That's right. Yeah, it's a
• 27:16
  perfect parallel with 1929. So 2008 very firmly marks the transition. That's also Obama, right?
• 27:24
  So if you look at political slogans between third and fourth turning, that sort of shows the mood.
• 27:28
  In the third turning, let's take the 90s. Problems were starting to appear. And what did politicians
• 27:34
  do, they got elected by minimizing the problems and saying, no, everything's fine. I got this.
• 27:42
  Problems are no big deal. Then you transition in 08, obviously global financial crisis,
• 27:47
  but all the political slogans switched immediately. They switched to hope and change,
• 27:53
  make America great again, right? These are capturing the political energy saying everything's
• 27:58
  messed up and I'm your guy to fix it. And so it started in 08. We've been firmly in it since.
• 28:04
  I expect we'll wrap up in three to seven years, something like that.
• 28:10
  And unfortunately, I don't think we've hit the crisis yet.
• 28:13
  I think we're ramping up.
• 28:15
  I would love to believe we hit the crisis, but I really don't think we have.
• 28:19
  The crisis would be defined as something large enough to mobilize people to go in a certain direction.
• 28:27
  War is a great mobilizer.
• 28:29
  The barbarians are at the gate.
• 28:30
  Print the money.
• 28:31
  Grab the spears.
• 28:31
  We're all defending our freedom or our lives or whatever.
• 28:34
  And so we need a catalyst sufficiently large enough to mobilize the people. We've had a total hot war. We've had proper civil war in the U.S. And the Revolutionary War was actually kind of a hybrid. And so most of the fighting was actually U.S. versus U.S., loyalists versus patriots, less than like the British coming over. And so it was kind of a hybrid one.
• 28:59
  If you look at today, and I don't know if you want to go into climaxes now, but if you look at today, I think the risk of a second American Civil War is increasing by the day.
• 29:10
  I think if I had to choose, this would be the least attractive option as someone who lives in the U.S.
• 29:16
  And before people say, hey, we're not going to have another Civil War.
• 29:20
  First of all, it won't be anything like the first Civil War.
• 29:23
  it will feel more like splinter cells political terrorists uh i'm just going to pick some groups
• 29:31
  antifa versus the proud boys they carry out these missions and both sides believe they're justified
• 29:37
  well if trump is actually hitler then i should probably do something about it uh if the other
• 29:43
  side is actually communist i should probably do something about it right so you create this
• 29:48
  condition where both sides feel justified in some sort of a political violent situation.
• 29:54
  You combine that with the fact that socially, we don't see eye to eye. There's really two parties.
• 30:02
  There's not one country anymore. The left and the right have different language, different facts,
• 30:07
  different sources, different everything. And so in that world, it's very easy to demonize the other
• 30:14
  because they're nothing like you.
• 30:16
  And I feel this in my personal life.
• 30:18
  Social groups have changed.
• 30:20
  And if you're in, let's say, mixed company,
• 30:23
  you kind of have to feel out the room a little bit
• 30:26
  and you drop these little lines to see
• 30:27
  are we aligned on this issue or not.
• 30:30
  You can just pick a current event,
• 30:31
  say the current event,
• 30:32
  and based on the reactions in the room,
• 30:34
  you know exactly how people stand on most political issues.
• 30:38
  And I think cancel culture is also a symptom here
• 30:41
  because in a fourth turning,
• 30:42
  collectively we realize that we got to work together to solve the problem and that means
• 30:47
  making sacrifices to essentially survive and so if you're not with us you're against us
• 30:54
  so we cancel each other the left eats the left because they're not left enough right that's crazy
• 31:00
  if you were trying to win an election you wouldn't want to eat your own you'd want to allow them to
• 31:05
  be part of the group and have a big tent and win but instead we cancel people in our own
• 31:10
  for that same existential feeling deep inside.
• 31:13
  I don't think people are conscious of this.
• 31:15
  I think this is a society-wide mood situation
• 31:17
  we're experiencing.
• 31:19
  It's funny that you say you have to like
• 31:21
  get a temperature check
• 31:22
  whenever you're talking to someone
• 31:23
  about any of this stuff
• 31:23
  because I do the exact same thing.
• 31:25
  And that's one of the reasons
• 31:26
  I love hanging out with Bitcoin
• 31:27
  is because you can kind of skip that
• 31:28
  because you know that there's like
• 31:29
  a shared set of values
• 31:31
  before you even talk to someone.
• 31:33
  But one of the things that I'm unsure about
• 31:35
  is like if to move from the fourth turning
• 31:37
  to the first turning,
• 31:38
  you kind of need to coalesce people
• 31:39
  and get people working together again in some sense to rebuild.
• 31:43
  How do you do that now?
• 31:45
  Because one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about
• 31:48
  is kind of the loss of monoculture.
• 31:51
  I don't think monoculture exists anymore.
• 31:54
  When we grew up, everyone would watch Friends or The Simpsons
• 31:57
  and consume the same media and you'd watch the news at 6pm
• 32:00
  and whether it was right or wrong
• 32:01
  and they were trying to sell you a narrative or not,
• 32:03
  everyone was fed the same information.
• 32:05
  But now everyone lives in entirely different worlds.
• 32:09
  You live in the algorithm that is provided to you.
• 32:11
  And so you can go home and my neighbor will consume entirely different content to me.
• 32:16
  They'll get entirely different information.
• 32:18
  And so where's the cohesiveness going to come from?
• 32:21
  Great question.
• 32:23
  I think it depends what the ultimate catalyst is.
• 32:27
  I think the easy one is if we have an external conflict, let's say with China, that's pretty
• 32:32
  easy to rally the people and let's go solve a bigger problem.
• 32:35
  put our differences away for a little bit. But I fear that if we have ramping up political
• 32:44
  violence in the US, both sides are just going to dig their heels in and accelerate this thing.
• 32:49
  And in that type of environment, I don't see a world where we put our differences behind us.
• 32:55
  I see a world where we exhaust ourselves through conflict and we just are so sick of it,
• 33:00
  We just give up the fight.
• 33:02
  Whereas both sides don't budge.
• 33:04
  It's only getting worse.
• 33:06
  And somehow, some way, we just give up because we're exhausted and we want to go back to normalcy.
• 33:12
  That's the Civil War path.
• 33:14
  I think another path, let's say optimistically, is let's say the conflicts abroad and we essentially redo global trade.
• 33:26
  We sort of bring back manufacturing here.
• 33:28
  We de-globalize.
• 33:29
  we reinvest in the middle class, we make housing affordable, we make student loans for people who
• 33:34
  can't pay them, go away, whatever basket of things to help out the little guy today, the young people
• 33:40
  today, I think that could essentially lower the tension, right? If half the population in the U.S.
• 33:47
  wasn't on the poverty line, essentially, they wouldn't be so desperate. They wouldn't have to
• 33:52
  care about national politics as much because their day-to-day life is a lot better. But right now,
• 33:57
  young people have no hope. They feel like the social contract's broken. And so it's natural
• 34:03
  to lash out there and to feel a little bit hopeless. And if young people are hopeless,
• 34:08
  that causes a lot of problems. Their neofrontal cortex isn't developed. They do crazy things.
• 34:15
  Obviously, we have a pharmaceutical issue, a mental health issue, all kinds of social issues
• 34:20
  that contribute here. And so the short answer is depending on the catalyst, I could see that
• 34:25
  cohesion going different ways and there is a world where there's no cohesion and instead we rally in
• 34:32
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• 34:42
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  That's ledn.io forward slash WBD. Do you think that sort of growing nihilism, the sort of
• 36:53
  medicated youth is all part of basically broken money? And is that where Bitcoin can fit into the
• 37:00
  next first turning? That's a good question. I think it's a big part of it. I think if young
• 37:06
  people had a Bitcoin stash, they watched it go up a little bit. That radically shifts your
• 37:11
  perspective on the future because you found something that gets you out of the troubles
• 37:16
  you're in.
• 37:17
  And so, yeah, if you look around at Bitcoiners versus Genpop, okay, Bitcoiners are way more
• 37:24
  optimistic about the future.
• 37:25
  They don't have to get caught up in the political drama of the day, even though we play there
• 37:30
  too.
• 37:30
  But we don't have the need.
• 37:32
  It doesn't feel existential because your future feels secure.
• 37:36
  And if your future feels secure, you raise a family.
• 37:39
  You're generally more peaceful.
• 37:41
  you're more hopeful and that's when people are at their best and so yeah if we could somehow
• 37:46
  seed all 18 year olds with ten thousand dollars for the bitcoin that they couldn't touch for 10
• 37:52
  years or something like that um that might change the world pretty quickly it's like the way that we
• 37:58
  interact with the sort of daily news is much more voyeuristic like we don't even live in that system
• 38:02
  but it's still interesting to see what's going on um but the thing that has like come up in my mind
• 38:08
  a couple of times while you've been talking is I wonder if UBI is one of the things that's going
• 38:12
  to come from this, especially when you like factor in AI and what that's going to do in terms of job
• 38:16
  replacement. Like, do you think that that is one of the things that we see before the end of this
• 38:21
  fourth turning? Yeah, I do. Actually, I've been thinking I've been calling for UBI for a long
• 38:26
  time, maybe close to 10 years. I don't think it's a long term solution to anything. But I think if
• 38:34
  we go through a rocky transition here where AI and robotics, automation generally starts to eat
• 38:40
  a bunch of jobs, I think people will start to freak out. And what we're going to experience
• 38:45
  next with AI is white collar jobs going away, right? If it was just the blue collar jobs,
• 38:51
  sadly, those folks don't have much representation in the highest levels in our country. So we just
• 38:56
  pretend it doesn't happen. And we let the rust belt occur. And it's tragic. We lost families
• 39:03
  and generations in those regions. And we didn't really do anything about it. We didn't really care.
• 39:07
  Trump seems to care, or at least he panders about caring about bringing jobs back.
• 39:12
  But in an AI robotics world, when white collar jobs are gone and it becomes really desperate,
• 39:19
  and then you see the AI companies just printing money, economic divide growing. Well, in that type
• 39:26
  of environment, I think UBI would be very, very, very popular in the political sphere.
• 39:31
  I just hope we have a timeline on it
• 39:34
  or a means tested version of this or something
• 39:37
  because obviously that type of spending
• 39:40
  contributes to the deficit,
• 39:41
  it erodes the value of the dollar further.
• 39:44
  It would be pretty good for Bitcoin,
• 39:46
  but yeah I think UBI is a good idea I think in general what we have to think about here is give hope to young people And our AI overlords who run these companies they going to be ruling over a pile of ashes if they
• 40:00
  continue to dominate, and that's going to make their lives a lot worse. And so the elite should
• 40:05
  essentially give a bunch up right now to preserve order, which also benefits them, in the form of
• 40:12
  student loan forgiveness, housing, UBI, whatever it is, some combination of that kind of stuff.
• 40:18
  I think it needs to happen. I don't support those views in a vacuum. Politically, my ideology would
• 40:25
  say those are bad ideas. But in this time, I think that those are the right ideas, all things
• 40:29
  considered. Do you think there's any chance that actually happens, though? I wouldn't trust my
• 40:35
  opinion or instincts on that. I think 10 years ago, the chance of that happening was approaching
• 40:41
  zero. I think within the next five or 10 years, that happening, I think, is pretty good chances.
• 40:46
  right we got to go back to the the previous fourth turning because everything that happens
• 40:51
  feels new it feels like it came out of left field entirely not predictable and so push comes to
• 40:58
  shove we do crazy stuff and people are willing to accept it because the alternative is worse
• 41:03
  do you think there's a chance that this is either the last fourth turning or an infinite fourth
• 41:09
  turning in and and this gets back to the idea of the death of monoculture because if we do all live
• 41:16
  completely separate lives with completely different media like subcultures are huge and monoculture is
• 41:20
  dead um like how do people coalesce that's that's the thing that i really struggle with because
• 41:26
  like everyone will go home and either doom stroll twitter or youtube or instagram or tiktok or
• 41:32
  whatever it is and you just fed an entire set of different information to everyone else so like
• 41:37
  and it's called doom scrolling because it makes you feel like shit there's no end to it like
• 41:42
  whenever any content previously there's always been a start and an end and then you have to wait
• 41:46
  till next week to get the next episode or whatever it is and and so i just worry that people are going
• 41:51
  to fragment more and more as these algorithms get better and more powerful and i think add ai into
• 41:55
  that and it could be even worse that's a good question a few questions there let me try and
• 42:00
  break it down so i think monoculture versus polyculture is one angle here if we go back to
• 42:06
  the glory days of broadcasting or radio or something like that, there's only five channels.
• 42:12
  Everyone watches the same three people give the news, right? So it's one news stream. And that
• 42:18
  medium does create social cohesion. Even if everything they said was a lie, at least we all
• 42:23
  believe the same lie, right? In an internet world, many sources create information and you can sort
• 42:31
  to choose where you want to go. The algorithms steer us towards outrage. And so, yeah, then we
• 42:36
  end up doom scrolling. And that does create a polyculture, a poly information sphere, whatever
• 42:41
  we want to call that. Do I think that this fourth turning will change that? Or can we ever get back
• 42:48
  to a monoculture? Or would we even want another monoculture? I would zoom out a little bit and
• 42:53
  look at the technology that's causing this. Always online algorithm fed content, etc. Whatever we
• 43:00
  call that that's new right our hardware our homo sapien hardware is hundreds of thousands of years
• 43:08
  old and in one or two generations we went from like uh pay phones to supercomputers in our pocket
• 43:17
  and which is just dopamine hits constantly yes yes it's hard for our bodies to handle this and
• 43:25
  what i'm trying to say is that we haven't integrated these new technologies into our
• 43:29
  lives in a way where we really understand them. We don't use them responsibly. We went in guns
• 43:33
  blazing and now we're starting to notice the problems. And so over time, I do expect a backlash
• 43:40
  towards that. And I expect humans to eventually properly integrate the technology we have now.
• 43:46
  But where this gets tricky is, okay, great. In 20 years, we figured out how to deal with social
• 43:52
  media, but what's coming out in 20 years and how are we going to deal with that? And so it's kind
• 43:57
  of like we're always late to integrating things and there's never any problem because technology
• 44:04
  is exponential. We keep on going. And so I think, do we ever become monoculture? I think the answer
• 44:10
  is no. I also think that that's okay, but that also comes with some consequences, right? So if
• 44:18
  we never go monoculture again, it's going to be really hard to maintain cohesion in a country like
• 44:23
  the U.S. Extremely diverse regional differences, different migration patterns, different religions,
• 44:31
  political views. I don't see us going back to one culture unless we have like a hot war abroad and
• 44:38
  we sort of re-buddy up again. But again, the technology forces will fracture us again because
• 44:43
  our information sphere is different. So if I had to bet, this might take a while, but I forecast
• 44:49
  a world where we go from, let's say, 300 countries to a world of, let's say, 3,000 countries.
• 44:55
  And in that world, a lot of things would be different. You could choose your geography based
• 45:00
  on whatever things you care about. And smaller groups in an information world is actually
• 45:07
  competitive, right? Going back to sovereign individual, the previous trend was the Industrial
• 45:13
  Revolution. And in the Industrial Revolution, the way to win as a country is to have the most
• 45:18
  magnitude, the most ships, the most soldiers, the most energy, the most, most, most. But in
• 45:25
  information technology world, information is the primary valuable or knowledge is the primary
• 45:30
  resource. And in that world, you don't gain anything by having more people. You gain things
• 45:37
  by having the best people, the most productive people, right? You also pair that with asymmetric
• 45:42
  warfare, right? We could have a small little island country with high-tech automated defense
• 45:49
  systems where you could be small, you pay your military tax, and the automated drones keep you
• 45:53
  safe or whatever it is. And so I also think it ties into Bitcoin mining sort of colonizing
• 46:01
  energy assets in the middle of nowhere. And if you can go build a nuclear plant in the middle of
• 46:06
  nowhere. Okay, great. Now you have energy, you funded the energy by Bitcoin mining. If there's
• 46:13
  cheap energy, you'll bring industry. If industry's there, you bring people. So similar to how Balaji
• 46:18
  sees this like startup society, these little pop-up geographies, pop-up little country sort
• 46:25
  of things popping up all over. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think going back to money
• 46:31
  In an industrial age world, gold is money.
• 46:34
  And so the first thing the military does is they go to the vault and they take all the gold.
• 46:38
  In a Bitcoin world, there's no Bitcoin to seize in the vault, right?
• 46:43
  So you can defend yourself against that.
• 46:45
  So the economic incentive for violence goes down a little bit.
• 46:49
  It doesn't mean war goes away.
• 46:51
  There's a lot of complex reasons for war.
• 46:52
  But at least the incentive for squashing these small territories reduces.
• 46:57
  and I think that could be a better world to be honest.
• 47:02
  I think the U.S. attempted such a thing with 50 states
• 47:05
  and so there's also a world where we go back
• 47:08
  to a more of a federalist model in the U.S.
• 47:11
  which would probably be my preference,
• 47:13
  give way more power to the state and totally gut the Fed,
• 47:17
  then you can move around and choose the values
• 47:19
  that you care about.
• 47:21
  Yeah, that's my smattering of thoughts on the topic.
• 47:25
  Yeah, no, I agree though.
• 47:26
  I think that's the most likely outcome from this.
• 47:28
  Because one of the things that you're seeing super clearly in the UK at the moment is there's massive social unrest.
• 47:34
  It's all kind of being blamed on immigration.
• 47:38
  And don't get me wrong, like just tons of illegal immigration is not going to be good for a country.
• 47:41
  But I do feel like one of the there's obviously the money side of it, where if people feel impoverished, feel like they're not being looked after, then they're going to get angry.
• 47:49
  And then I do think part of it, again, comes back to like the nostalgia for shared culture.
• 47:53
  Like, what does it mean to be British or what does it mean to be American?
• 47:57
  I think that's been totally lost because there is no shared culture anymore.
• 48:02
  Like, everyone lives in their own world.
• 48:03
  And then, like, if you're feeling poor and you don't feel, like, aligned with the people that you live amongst, blaming immigrants is, like, the easy scapegoat.
• 48:12
  And, again, it's not that there should just be total illegal immigration, but I don't think – I think people are using that as a scapegoat.
• 48:19
  It's not actually the root cause of the issues.
• 48:21
  Yeah, that's interesting.
• 48:23
  I feel very strongly about immigration.
• 48:26
  Like Europe's entirely cooked and I don't think they recover.
• 48:29
  I think the U.S. has a chance to clean up by removing as many illegal immigrants as we possibly can, starting with the dangerous ones.
• 48:40
  But I think there's something to shared culture that actually really matters.
• 48:44
  if we don't have some sort of shared culture you don't feel like a country in which case you don't
• 48:52
  care about your country your national pride goes down and that's not a good way to run a country
• 48:59
  right the glory days of any state is when the whole country shares the identity and they march
• 49:06
  together right you can't go to space you can't go to the moon if you don't have everybody working
• 49:11
  together. You can't have an industrial revolution where people aren't aligned, right? Like that is
• 49:17
  how countries are effective is when you mobilize people to a common goal. And so I think it is also
• 49:24
  an easy scapegoat to your point. I think there's good, I don't think it's just an easy scapegoat
• 49:30
  though. I think when you bring in crime and you bring in competitive nature around housing, right?
• 49:39
  If you had 20 million people bidding up housing in the U.S. and 10 people all chipping on one house and some like single family can't afford the houses.
• 49:50
  Right. It's more complex than that. But point being is easy scapegoat.
• 49:54
  And there's truth to the social consequences of immigration.
• 49:59
  No, I totally agree with that. And I guess to expand on that, it's not that in Britain, people are just angry at the illegal immigrants come across now.
• 50:07
  like that's boiling over to the point where they're angry at immigrants who have been in the
• 50:10
  country for 40 years and might identify as british like it that's where the line gets really blurry
• 50:15
  and this becomes a really hard problem but it's what everything that you're saying there
• 50:20
  kind of leads to war in the sense that when like in the previous first turning um after world war
• 50:26
  ii britain was obviously rocked by world war ii there was the blitz like the so and it was a really
• 50:33
  shit time for a long time like those rations everyone was having to like band together and
• 50:36
  and try and like step up and rebuild britain and so there was that like shared culture of like get
• 50:42
  through this i think it's where like the keep calm and carry on phrase comes from um and then in
• 50:46
  america that was like the birth of the american dream and again everyone was together on this one
• 50:50
  big idea and so is the only real outcome from this four turning war probably um i think all
• 50:59
  fourth turnings ended in total war and all total wars have and have occurred in a fourth turning
• 51:07
  And it doesn't mean for sure, but if I'm betting, yeah, that's where I'm betting.
• 51:12
  I think that the social climate feeds into it.
• 51:15
  I think the debt feeds into it.
• 51:17
  I think declining America, rising China, it's not that simple, but that story plays into it.
• 51:26
  I think in general, we just have a lot of things ramping up to say social institutions are decrepit.
• 51:34
  Pain is felt all over the world from multiple variables.
• 51:37
  If people feel hopeless and their day-to-day sucks, it pushes people to violence.
• 51:43
  And I also think if the U.S. continues its path, let's say accelerating political violence,
• 51:50
  why wouldn't a competitive country like China say, hey, the U.S. is pretty preoccupied internally.
• 51:58
  Why don't we go take Taiwan?
• 51:59
  Why don't we get in the Middle East and secure our energy interests?
• 52:04
  And so I could see a world where the U.S. starts getting worse, and then it turns into a hot war abroad.
• 52:10
  I think that's, if I had to pick one, I think that's probably the most likely outcome.
• 52:15
  But I also don't expect a World War II-type battle with soldiers, tanks, ships, etc.
• 52:23
  I expect something more like a Cold War 2.0, which you could say we're even in now.
• 52:28
  this would be defined by things like plausible deniability. I hacked your energy grid and took
• 52:36
  down the grid. I cyber attacked your whatever and released the thing. I stole your government's
• 52:42
  Bitcoin, economic war, trade war, all these sort of like hit and run cyber guerrilla type tactics
• 52:52
  where both sides can pretend that they're innocent, but in reality, they're fighting
• 52:57
  just more covertly.
• 53:00
  Maybe we just need the aliens to turn up, Brandon.
• 53:01
  I don't know if you've seen the clip from,
• 53:03
  I think it was Reagan and Gorbachev
• 53:05
  during the first Cold War.
• 53:07
  And Reagan says to him,
• 53:08
  if like, I can't remember exactly how he phrases it,
• 53:11
  but he's like, if the aliens come,
• 53:12
  are you on our side?
• 53:13
  And he's like, of course.
• 53:14
  So we just need them to turn up
• 53:15
  and that'll coalesce everyone.
• 53:18
  That's an incredible quote.
• 53:20
  Yeah.
• 53:21
  I mean, I definitely didn't say the quote word for word,
• 53:23
  but it's something like that.
• 53:25
  President Reagan suddenly said,
• 53:27
  to me what would you do if the united states were attacked by someone from outer space
• 53:37
  would you help us i said no doubt about it he said we do um so we've done all the depressing
• 53:49
  ship. We've got three to five years of maybe crisis, war, complete volatility. What comes
• 53:56
  next? And maybe on top of what comes next, what makes it through the fourth turning?
• 54:03
  Yeah. So I would say we're ramping into a climax period. We'll experience the climax.
• 54:08
  It will suck, but it will be over. It will not last forever. And before we get into resolution,
• 54:15
  Forth turnings are necessary.
• 54:17
  These aren't all bad, right?
• 54:18
  Like society does need to change.
• 54:21
  We're riding this thing off the rails right now.
• 54:23
  And so something has to change.
• 54:25
  I wish it wouldn't be war.
• 54:26
  And I wish we wouldn't make the next hundred years of institutional decisions in a period
• 54:32
  of a crisis.
• 54:34
  I wish we would make those decisions methodically, but humans are humans and we act last minute
• 54:39
  and we don't change until there's pain.
• 54:41
  And so we're going through it.
• 54:42
  and if you're going through hell, keep on going. There's nothing else to do. Protect yours,
• 54:47
  protect your family. We'll get through this, right? When we know that it's over,
• 54:52
  the mood will shift to something like exhaustion. You will be less political energy. There will be
• 54:59
  more, okay, I gave up the fight. I'm going to become a farmer. I'm going to raise a family,
• 55:05
  just like general temperature going way down. And in order to do that, what we need is order.
• 55:11
  We need strong institutions.
• 55:13
  You could call that order.
• 55:15
  And so we have a debt problem.
• 55:17
  We have a social problem.
• 55:18
  We have geopolitical issues rising.
• 55:20
  We have immigration, a whole bunch of issues.
• 55:22
  And on the other side of that, most of those things will be behind us, but it's not going
• 55:28
  to be like a hard line in the sand, right?
• 55:31
  08 is pretty easy to find the transition, but it's usually only easy to define the transition
• 55:36
  in hindsight.
• 55:37
  and so I don't think it will be like,
• 55:39
  okay, first turn starts today, we're good to go.
• 55:42
  But on the other hand, if we have a hot war
• 55:44
  and there's a ceasefire
• 55:45
  and then we do reparations at the end of that,
• 55:47
  then that would probably be the end of the thing.
• 55:50
  But in order to get through it,
• 55:51
  strong institutions, number one.
• 55:53
  Number two, what are we going to do with the debt?
• 55:56
  Those two are both crucial to solve
• 55:57
  and to pull Bitcoin in at roughly the one hour mark.
• 56:02
  I think Bitcoin plays a role here
• 56:04
  And I think Bitcoin, properly understood, is a new type of institution. It is a global, digital, fair, central bank-type system that anyone can use. And in a world with lots of debt and no trust in the banking institution or any other institution, we can outsource our trust to this Bitcoin protocol.
• 56:27
  It handles the money side, it handles the debt side. And if economically, there's a little more tailwinds for the masses, all the political energy dies down. Right. So like, honestly, if economics were better, I think we would be totally fine right now. And I think we would move past most of the differences we have.
• 56:45
  And so that's the thing I'm looking for.
• 56:49
  I think Bitcoin at the individual level makes you more optimistic.
• 56:52
  It reduces your uncertainty in the world, which allows you to act better.
• 56:57
  And that's true at the company level.
• 56:59
  That's true at the nation state level.
• 57:01
  That's true at any level you look.
• 57:03
  Owning some Bitcoin gives you more security about your future, less volatility.
• 57:08
  And so what we want to see is global Bitcoin adoption growing faster than political uncertainty
• 57:13
  or political violence growing.
• 57:16
  I think that'd be one thing to watch.
• 57:18
  And I think on the backside of this,
• 57:20
  we'll probably reinvent what America means,
• 57:24
  what America is.
• 57:25
  The author of the book, Neil Howe,
• 57:27
  says every fourth turning,
• 57:29
  we test all the American values
• 57:31
  and we create a new republic.
• 57:34
  And so we'll be entering the fourth American republic
• 57:36
  in the next decade or so.
• 57:39
  And it's my sincere hope
• 57:40
  we end up in something more like OG American values, separation of power, federalism,
• 57:47
  checks and balances, all the things that made America great. Sorry for the slogan. I think it's
• 57:55
  true. I think on the other side, we could devolve into something like a techno authoritarian state
• 58:01
  defined by mass surveillance uh cbdc type money um you know ubi for everyone everyone gets free
• 58:11
  internet porn and weed and they live in a shipping container and they we go on to the vr worlds and
• 58:17
  it's some sort of like manage the masses with technology which is what china appears to be
• 58:24
  doing um as the ready player one version that's right i really hope we go 180 degrees away from
• 58:30
  China's approach. Some of our politicians and tech people are kind of admiring how swift China can
• 58:39
  work in a centralized country, which is true. They can make rapid changes. Look at what they're doing
• 58:45
  on energy production. We haven't produced a nuclear reactor in 50 years. China's got like
• 58:49
  20 of them coming up right now. And so, yeah, there are advantages to being an authoritarian state,
• 58:55
  But there's obviously severe disadvantages. And I think America's decentralized model provides a more anti-fragile state. Maybe we move slower, but maybe that's a good thing sometimes. And maybe that is what helps us preserve our values.
• 59:12
  But that being said, America today is nothing like America that it once was. And so it will take something large for us to retest all these values. And then one more point is we're seeing communism, socialism become really popular for young people. We see Mamdani in New York. There's probably going to be many more of these. And you might say, well, what are we doing? That's not American. Well, go back to the 30s.
• 59:37
  the educated upper-class elites, they were all communists.
• 59:42
  They're all saying, hey, you know what?
• 59:44
  It not working Maybe capitalism the problem Maybe we should make a change And we were on a knife edge during that decade on where we going to go And I expect us to do the same now And so obviously socialism or communism is bad It not a good model But we should empathize
• 1:00:01
  with young people for why they came to that conclusion. Yeah, I totally agree. I like this
• 1:00:07
  is something like you see the like I see posters all the time for like Marxist walks where you can
• 1:00:11
  go and learn about it. And it is clearly on the rise. And I totally understand why. Like,
• 1:00:16
  they feel totally disenfranchised and they don't know what's going on. And they're diagnosing a
• 1:00:20
  problem. They're just misdiagnosing a solution. Exactly right. Yeah. And so we should take it
• 1:00:26
  seriously. We should not dismiss it. And we should do whatever we can to help young people.
• 1:00:32
  I guess I am optimistic that young males in general are shifting, right? They're sort of
• 1:00:38
  sick of what's going on. They've been told their whole life they're bad. So they're having a
• 1:00:43
  reactionary movement. That's a good sign. And that's another way to look at the fourth turning.
• 1:00:50
  These are just a whole bunch of different pendulums swinging on different axes.
• 1:00:54
  And every so often the pendulum synchronized and you have a very big shift together.
• 1:00:59
  And so over-parenting, under-parenting, socialism versus capitalism,
• 1:01:05
  you know big state small state hard money soft money social conservatism social progressivism
• 1:01:14
  that's really what this is all about and we we feel it in ourselves right we're all to some
• 1:01:21
  degree reactionary we all rebelled against our parents right this is some innate thing
• 1:01:25
  which leads me to believe the fourth turning is like a social organism phenomenon that emerges
• 1:01:32
  out of civilization. And so going back to your previous question, is this the last for turning?
• 1:01:38
  Hell no, it's not. All the orange tinted glasses, Bitcoin people who always trip at me on Twitter,
• 1:01:43
  this is the last one Bitcoin breaks for turning. That's bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Do you think
• 1:01:50
  human nature is going to change? You think our hardware is going to change? I don't think so.
• 1:01:54
  And so Bitcoin might reduce the magnitude of the volatility. I think that's fair to say.
• 1:02:02
  If the money is fixed, let's say for a thousand years or a hundred or 200 years, whatever,
• 1:02:08
  if that's true, that definitely helps reduce volatility.
• 1:02:13
  But it doesn't change that humans have conflicts and we rebel against our parents and that
• 1:02:19
  there's still other variables here besides the money.
• 1:02:22
  And so, no, we're going to keep doing this thing.
• 1:02:24
  It's interesting that you say like the young people, especially young men probably are
• 1:02:28
  turning to the right.
• 1:02:29
  because when Charlie Kirk got killed,
• 1:02:33
  I was aware of him.
• 1:02:34
  I'd watched some of his stuff.
• 1:02:35
  I thought a lot of the stuff he said
• 1:02:37
  was really interesting,
• 1:02:38
  but I didn't understand how much of a pop culture figure
• 1:02:41
  he was for young people.
• 1:02:43
  And that death was like,
• 1:02:46
  it impacted me in a way that I didn't really expect
• 1:02:48
  because obviously you see it right in front of you
• 1:02:50
  on multiple camera angles and that's pretty visceral.
• 1:02:53
  But what I didn't,
• 1:02:55
  I couldn't really quite put my finger on
• 1:02:57
  why it bothered me so much.
• 1:02:58
  And I think part of the reason is because of how instrumental this feels and how much like this is just a perfect example of being in the full turning, I think.
• 1:03:09
  I totally agree. I think, first of all, I'm with you. I did not know Charlie's impact ahead of time.
• 1:03:14
  I just saw like either the left being like, oh, this is your flag bearer. He's racist.
• 1:03:21
  And the right saying like, look at this epic takedown of the libs. Right.
• 1:03:25
  So that's the version of Charlie I got.
• 1:03:28
  Then I watched some of his more long-form stuff.
• 1:03:31
  He's like a middle-of-the-road conservative.
• 1:03:34
  Like, other people say this, but that's who I grew up surrounded by.
• 1:03:38
  That's the average Catholic dad in my hometown's point of view.
• 1:03:43
  Like, these aren't crazy ideas, but it does demonstrate the fact that our social climate in the U.S. has shifted dramatically since when we were growing up.
• 1:03:53
  And so now he's considered a Nazi fascist when really he's like 10%, 20% to the right of center. And so that's insane. And I think it is forth turning aligned because strong political voices come in and they mobilize the masses.
• 1:04:13
  and it's what else is interesting is it's mobilizing young men to be more conservative
• 1:04:19
  and more family oriented you know god family etc it's wild to me that that's popular for young
• 1:04:30
  people i've never experienced when i grew up that none of that stuff was popular for young people
• 1:04:34
  at best it would be neutral young people wanted to do more crazy stuff and now young people are
• 1:04:39
  like, give me the straight and narrow. I think that's pretty wild. So when we move into the
• 1:04:45
  first turning, do you think the dollar will survive? Or do you think we'll have another
• 1:04:49
  Bretton Woods type agreement where gold or Bitcoin becomes the global money?
• 1:04:55
  Yeah, I think that there's almost no chance the dollar survives as it's currently set up.
• 1:05:02
  But I don't think of it as much as dollar. I think about it as we have to reset the debt somehow.
• 1:05:08
  and I think that US treasuries won't be the reserve asset of the world anymore.
• 1:05:15
  And so I think the dollar can survive as long as we de-globalize
• 1:05:20
  and treasuries aren't the standard and we fix the debt.
• 1:05:24
  And so I think Bitcoin plays that role nicely.
• 1:05:27
  Bitcoin's the new treasury reserve asset for the world.
• 1:05:30
  It's neutral.
• 1:05:30
  You can settle trade with China using a neutral currency.
• 1:05:34
  I think that makes sense.
• 1:05:35
  And in that world, somehow we figure out the debt,
• 1:05:37
  But I don't think that means the dollar goes away. And I don't think fiat currencies go away
• 1:05:42
  anytime soon in a Bitcoin, a fully Bitcoin adopted world. I don't think that's going to happen
• 1:05:47
  because there's a lot of power in having a local currency and governments aren't going to give that
• 1:05:51
  up. But they could give up the treasury reserve part of the puzzle, which essentially means
• 1:05:58
  America cannot be the world police anymore because we can't sanction our enemies.
• 1:06:02
  And so maybe that's bad for imperial America, but that's a good thing for middle class America.
• 1:06:08
  And that's for sure a good thing for our adversary countries abroad.
• 1:06:12
  And so I'm envisioning Bitcoin everywhere on the balance sheet.
• 1:06:17
  That is the new gold for central banks.
• 1:06:20
  And I envision individuals in various countries doing their best to save in Bitcoin.
• 1:06:25
  but I'm not going to be surprised
• 1:06:28
  if we're still spending dollars, pesos, shekels
• 1:06:31
  Aussie, kangaroo bucks
• 1:06:33
  whatever you guys call them over there
• 1:06:35
  I think those will stick around
• 1:06:37
  and I think that's totally fine by the way
• 1:06:40
  that's your checking account
• 1:06:42
  and Bitcoin's your savings account
• 1:06:44
  and if you need to make transactions
• 1:06:46
  that you don't want your overlords to spy on
• 1:06:48
  then use Bitcoin privately
• 1:06:50
  or use some new technology to e-cash
• 1:06:54
  whatever
• 1:06:55
  I think that's an okay outcome here.
• 1:06:57
  The real issue is getting money out of the central bank,
• 1:07:00
  getting the printer away from the consolidated groups of power.
• 1:07:04
  That's the win.
• 1:07:05
  I don't need to buy self-sovereign coffee.
• 1:07:08
  I don't need to only pay in Bitcoin.
• 1:07:10
  I don't need Bitcoin to be the only currency.
• 1:07:13
  I think that's like we're already 90% there
• 1:07:16
  and we could fight for 1,000 years to get the last 10%.
• 1:07:19
  I don't even know if it would be worth it.
• 1:07:20
  um and but i do think the interesting thing will be like what bitcoiners do um because the the shift
• 1:07:27
  in bitcoiners are going to be the new financial elite at some point in the future and like it
• 1:07:33
  will be people that we're friends with that are reshaping the way the world works and it'll be
• 1:07:38
  really interesting to see how the values that we think bitcoiners hold actually play out in the
• 1:07:42
  real world and how that that does impact kind of everyone's life society yeah i think that's a good
• 1:07:49
  Good point. Strong agree Bitcoiners are the new capital allocators. I think the question remains,
• 1:07:55
  though, are we going to go hole up in the mountains and build our citadel and fuck off? Or are we
• 1:08:02
  going to stick around and grind through this transition period and rebuild the world in a way
• 1:08:07
  that we think is better? I think that's yet to be seen. I think it's clear that, I should say,
• 1:08:14
  incentives-wise, it's really easy to just give up the fight and live out your days comfortably.
• 1:08:19
  luckily i think bitcoiners are a different breed and not all bitcoiners but i think we have what it
• 1:08:27
  takes at least some percentage of the bitcoiners around now to rebuild the world in a better way
• 1:08:32
  and i think american hodl has a few good takes on this he's very strong on this one and i agree like
• 1:08:39
  if we just get through this one we all get rich and disappear is that really the win is that really
• 1:08:45
  the mark we want to leave? I don't think so. I think we have a golden opportunity here or an
• 1:08:49
  orange opportunity here to dramatically change the trajectory of our species. And I think missing
• 1:08:56
  this opportunity would be a really big shame. And I feel the same way about taking money out
• 1:09:01
  of central banks. If we don't do it right now, well, right now meaning like the next 20, 30 years,
• 1:09:06
  if we don't do it right now, we'll probably never do it. And so that has to be goal number one.
• 1:09:12
  and I think when we've sufficiently won,
• 1:09:16
  it's not just the money.
• 1:09:17
  There's problems everywhere.
• 1:09:19
  And so if we go back to the American industrialists
• 1:09:22
  who, quote, built America,
• 1:09:23
  yeah, they put libraries everywhere.
• 1:09:26
  They built research.
• 1:09:27
  They built universities, et cetera.
• 1:09:29
  And it's our turn to do that kind of stuff too.
• 1:09:32
  And so I think education is going to need an entire overhaul.
• 1:09:36
  I see Bitcoiners playing a role there.
• 1:09:38
  I see like self-sovereignty, grow your own food, whatever we call that basket of stuff.
• 1:09:46
  I think that's going to be popular in any fourth turning. But I think if we transition to like
• 1:09:52
  peacetime and you trust your neighbors again, I think those skills all of a sudden become worth
• 1:09:57
  less. And so I think I view it as like practically, you want to be a prepper,
• 1:10:03
  but you want to stay practical. You don't want to move your family in the middle of nowhere and
• 1:10:07
  ride out the worst thing ever. You want to have one foot in the matrix and one foot out of the
• 1:10:12
  matrix because we don't know how bad it's going to get. And you don't want to sacrifice a decade
• 1:10:16
  because of the worst case scenario fear. And so I'm on team like have a backup plan, but also,
• 1:10:24
  you know, stay connected to the world. I think it's easy to get in like a doomer point of view
• 1:10:30
  here, especially coming from a Bitcoin lens. You realize that they lied about the money. They lied
• 1:10:35
  about the schools and the healthcare and everything's a lie. So let's just throw it all
• 1:10:39
  out. But that's also wrong, right? Most of the things in society are there for a reason. And
• 1:10:46
  it's usually a larger reason than we think, right? It's easy to throw the baby out the bathwater,
• 1:10:53
  essentially. And that's not a good idea. And so, yeah, and that's also the tension between
• 1:10:58
  conservatism and progressivism. They each play an important role in society. This is true in a
• 1:11:05
  a friend group. This is true in an organization. This is true in a country. If you're in a company,
• 1:11:10
  the progressive people's role, usually younger people, is to say, hey, this all sucks. Let's
• 1:11:16
  try a new way. And the conservative people are saying, yeah, well, you don't know what you're
• 1:11:20
  trying to remove. And you should probably understand what you're trying to change before
• 1:11:24
  you just change because every change comes with unintended consequences. And that tension is
• 1:11:29
  healthy. That tension is good. And so I think from the Bitcoiners' standpoint, we should be
• 1:11:34
  open-minded and we should be optimistic and we should share that with our peers, our family,
• 1:11:39
  and let that ripple out. And if we don't have hope for the future, we don't have a chance.
• 1:11:45
  And so I think hope for the future is probably the lead domino, right? If you all of a sudden
• 1:11:51
  cancel most of the student debt and make housing affordable, you tell me that's not going to lower
• 1:11:56
  the tensions? Even if that comes with an unintended consequence later, I expect it will.
• 1:12:01
  but again desperate times desperate measures the reason that i think the incentives will align and
• 1:12:08
  bitcoiners will make a meaningful impact is if the massive generalization but if you try and put
• 1:12:13
  things that bitcoiners care about more than bitcoin it's having a family and time and i think
• 1:12:20
  those two things will lead to the incentive of build a better world for my kids to grow up in
• 1:12:25
  that's what i hope like bitcoiners do need to do stuff and and you don't want to do stuff too early
• 1:12:29
  Accumulate as much capital as you can, have family, but at some point there comes a time
• 1:12:35
  where you have to then rebuild.
• 1:12:37
  Absolutely.
• 1:12:38
  And let's also be vain for a second here.
• 1:12:41
  Humans care about legacy, right?
• 1:12:44
  If you have your basic stuff figured out, the next thing is legacy, right?
• 1:12:48
  Elon Musk goes to Mars, Jeff Bezos goes to space and gets a new girlfriend or wife or
• 1:12:54
  whatever.
• 1:12:56
  Bitcoiners are going to do the same thing, right?
• 1:12:58
  We care about the fraternity of Bitcoin people in our era.
• 1:13:02
  And I fully expect a time when Bitcoin has won and the American hoddles and whatever personalities
• 1:13:08
  are flaunting their impact.
• 1:13:10
  And that's going to inspire other people to give back and build real things.
• 1:13:16
  And that's a positive force.
• 1:13:19
  Even if the motivations individually are somewhat selfish, the positive externality there is
• 1:13:24
  we do build a better world.
• 1:13:26
  In the same way that the billionaires pressure each other to give up 99% of their wealth or whatever, Bitcoiners are going to do the same thing.
• 1:13:33
  And I'm here for it.
• 1:13:35
  Brandon, this has been amazing.
• 1:13:37
  Is there anything that we've not covered that you think we should?
• 1:13:39
  I think the only thing that comes to mind is another framework to help it make sense is supply and demand of order.
• 1:13:46
  And I have a really nice graphic on the essay originally.
• 1:13:50
  I don't know if you want to pop it up or not.
• 1:13:52
  I can pull it up, yeah.
• 1:13:53
  I think if you could remember one thing, I think this is probably the most valuable thing to take away.
• 1:14:01
  I'm going to pull it up on the article on my end, too.
• 1:14:05
  Yeah, there it is.
• 1:14:06
  Shout out to the people on Twitter who critiqued the curves.
• 1:14:10
  You were right.
• 1:14:11
  But this was just a crude version, and then I had Nick Ward build it for me.
• 1:14:15
  Shout out, Nick.
• 1:14:16
  Okay, let's look at this now.
• 1:14:17
  First turning, what do we have?
• 1:14:20
  Supply and demand for order are high.
• 1:14:23
  Okay, what is order?
• 1:14:25
  Order is strong institutions that kind of keep society going.
• 1:14:29
  Demand of order is like people want stronger institutions.
• 1:14:32
  Supply of order is we have strong institutions, right?
• 1:14:36
  So the first turning at the end of a war,
• 1:14:38
  we have a high supply of order because we just rebuilt the world
• 1:14:41
  and high demand because we're exhausted from the chaos, right?
• 1:14:45
  Then as we transition to the second turning,
• 1:14:48
  the demand for order goes down
• 1:14:50
  because young people who were raised in a high order society push back. And then they're like,
• 1:14:57
  we don't want this. We want sex, drugs, and rock and roll. So then you have the delta between
• 1:15:01
  supply of order still being high, but the demand is low. That's the condition for creating an
• 1:15:07
  awakening. An awakening is a religious thing or civil rights or the hippies. All previous religious
• 1:15:14
  movements happen in the second turning. So essentially the midway point of that 80, 90 year
• 1:15:18
  cycle is a religious movement. You can go back to the Quakers and the whatever's going back in time.
• 1:15:24
  It always happens then. Then in the third turning, we're essentially deregulating.
• 1:15:30
  And what does that do? The supply of order goes down. We're removing the order, removing the
• 1:15:35
  institutions. So now we hit rock bottom for supply and demand of order. That's when crime goes up.
• 1:15:42
  That's when we start to sow the seeds of the crisis in the third turning.
• 1:15:48
  Then in the fourth turning, what happens?
• 1:15:50
  Our institutions start failing.
• 1:15:52
  So supply stays low.
• 1:15:54
  But we look around and we say, we actually need these institutions.
• 1:15:58
  And so the demand skyrockets.
• 1:16:00
  And again, the delta between the supply and demand is where you have change.
• 1:16:04
  And that defines the crisis period.
• 1:16:06
  We're done fighting.
• 1:16:08
  Supply order goes up because we rebuild.
• 1:16:10
  And we're back to the beginning.
• 1:16:12
  so on this chart at the end of the fourth turning the gap between supply and demand of orders the
• 1:16:18
  the highest it it gets um and then by the start of the first turning they are basically equal with
• 1:16:25
  high demand and high supply so that gap i issue i assume this is why you think fourth turnings end
• 1:16:31
  in war because that gap has to close very quickly yeah exactly the gap has to close quickly and so
• 1:16:36
  if I redid this chart, which I should do, the supply of order should start ticking up at the
• 1:16:42
  end of the fourth turning and the peak should actually be like midway in the first turning or
• 1:16:48
  something like that. Because this should be a graph that goes continuously and I didn't
• 1:16:54
  effectively do that. So that's my bad. So we've got a few more years of chaos before
• 1:17:00
  life gets good again. Is that right? That's the TLDR. Yeah, but I mean, honestly, life is good
• 1:17:05
  right now. I think what we should do to wrap up here is do not let the macro affect the micro.
• 1:17:13
  Okay. Go raise a family, build real relationships, spend time with your loved ones,
• 1:17:18
  get physically fit, get smart, get healthy, and live your life right now. There's always going to
• 1:17:24
  be some chaos in the world and we should not just hide in our bunkers for this period. We should be
• 1:17:29
  bright eyed and bushy tailed. And it doesn't mean you just ignorance is bliss, go by your ways.
• 1:17:34
  like you should take this part seriously this is a serious time this is the most serious time in
• 1:17:39
  anyone who's alive's life and so take it seriously um become anti-fragile get a second source of
• 1:17:46
  income have a backup plan maybe get another passport um save more than you earn what happens
• 1:17:53
  if you lose your job right like play all those scenarios out and make sure that you survive this
• 1:17:57
  with your wealth intact with your health intact with your family intact and yeah eventually the
• 1:18:03
  chaos will subside, but we should be working on ourselves now, right? Most people aren't.
• 1:18:10
  Same with COVID. What happened during COVID? People hung out inside and they whined and they
• 1:18:16
  just like yelled on the internet. Well, guess what? When everyone else is stagnant, you could
• 1:18:21
  have built a company. You could have learned a language. You could have gotten jacked and healthy.
• 1:18:25
  You could have started a family. And so don't waste the time and use this opportunity if you
• 1:18:31
  want to to get ahead of your peers because people are stagnant right now so seize the cart what a
• 1:18:38
  way to end the show brandon i strongly co-sign that message um before we close out is there
• 1:18:42
  anywhere you want to send anyone to check out everything you do yeah all the writing is at
• 1:18:47
  brandonquittum.com uh the essays we mentioned here and some other ones find me on twitter at
• 1:18:53
  bquittum b and then my last name if you want to get started buying bitcoin at swan swan.com to
• 1:19:00
  get started. You can buy in your personal account. You can buy in a retirement account.
• 1:19:04
  You can custody your Bitcoin in our two of three collaborative multi-sig product. Many more
• 1:19:09
  products down the line. I'm very proud of what we built. Shoot me a DM. My DMs are open. I love
• 1:19:15
  hearing from you guys. And as always, Danny, great catching up with you. Yeah, good to see you too,
• 1:19:21
  man. Thank you for this. Hopefully I'll see you again soon. But if not before Vegas, Vegas again.
• 1:19:26
  Definitely we'll see you there. Worst case scenario.
• 1:19:30
  Thank you.