This episode of TFTC with Ben Braddock explores diverse topics including MS-13’s societal impact, President Nayib Bukele's leadership in El Salvador, and significant shifts in American society post-COVID-19
This episode of TFTC explores a wide range of topics, starting with a glimpse into the MS-13 gang's impact on communities. The discussion navigated through the implications of criminal organizations on local crime rates and federal responses. A notable focus was on the Trump administration's crackdown on gangs, contrasting with a lack of action from the Biden administration.
The conversation shifted to a fascinating analysis of El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele's leadership. Bukele's embracing of Bitcoin and implementing libertarian-leaning policies, have drawn international attention. Ben's personal connection to El Salvadoran culture provided depth to the discussion, underscoring the significance of Bukele's achievements in defeating MS-13 and liberating Salvadorans from the gang's oppressive control.
Touching on the condition of the United States, the episode delved into the cultural and economic shifts post-COVID-19. It examined the decline of traditional media and the rise of independent voices, as well as the political and economic ramifications of central planning and the incompetency crisis. From the collapse of local newspapers to the depletion of military ammunition, the conversation painted a picture of a nation grappling with the fallout from policy decisions and societal changes.
The discussion highlighted the complexities of gang influence, the potential of forward-thinking leadership, and the repercussions of policy missteps, painting a picture of a world in transition. The overarching message was one of cautious optimism, emphasizing the power of individual action and belief in shaping a better future.
0:00 - Intro
1:27 - MS-13
4:36 - El Salvador and rule of law
19:10 - Media control and narrative shifts
27:14 - Covid lockdown’s financial motives
32:57 - Places to escape to
37:33 - Inflation is exhausting
48:59 - MAID and spiritual starvation
51:48 - They’re not sending their best
58:39 - Gradually, Then Suddenly
59:18 - Manosphere and nationalism
1:11:17 - Connecting over distance
1:18:58 - Cities and aesthetics
1:30:33 - Environmentalism
1:38:35 - IM—1776 and journalism
1:45:08 - Politicians
1:54:26 - Austin
2:03:03 - California water cycle
2:09:02 - Energy/mining
1:14:54 - Competency crisis and price system interference
2:33:09 - Eclipse and final thoughts
00:00:00:03 - 00:00:01:17
Ben
I could do a live.
00:00:01:24 - 00:00:03:18
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
00:00:03:20 - 00:00:07:23
Marty
So, are you on in Mr. Taylor's?
00:00:07:25 - 00:00:35:25
Ben
I was told to behave as if I am. But there was this funny little synchronicity that happened after I had spent a couple of days just like nailing down the final draft of the article I wrote on, like, the history of Ms. 13 and what luckily did to, you know, finally defeat them once and for all. And after this and was like kind of late at night, I was tired.
00:00:35:25 - 00:01:03:19
Ben
I've been like writing for hours and all I go head up support like for like a 10 p.m. charitable and I'm here in line and this group of, you know, comes and gets behind me and line and, and they're talking Spanish. And I turn around and the guy has a clear tap on the side of his face. That's like, That's it.
00:01:03:25 - 00:01:10:12
Ben
Yeah. It was an m 13 And, you know, I just started to get like, kind of schizo paranoid.
00:01:10:15 - 00:01:14:02
Ben or Marty
Just from that. But, you know, it's.
00:01:14:04 - 00:01:39:23
Ben
There's these guys are still out there in in in America, in states like Virginia. It's been a problem since like the early 2000s even in, you know, affluent suburbs of Washington D.C., like Fairfax County School systems of having have been having to deal with this kind of thing for for a long time and like students getting involved in it.
00:01:39:23 - 00:02:11:10
Ben
And and also it's it's been an ongoing issue. You know, they've tried different tactics. There was a attorney general in Virginia. He had some interesting ideas like putting in these tattoo removal parlors, you know, to try to get the they're trying to create these programs for rehabilitation and stuff. Varying degrees of success. I think the the Fed cracked down like the FBI during the Trump administration.
00:02:11:10 - 00:02:39:03
Ben
They they went pretty hard on some of the gang prosecutions and that seemed to have tamped down quite a bit. But in the in the past couple of years, like the ambient crime levels have been rising in the D.C., Virginia, Maryland area. And whether that's, you know, linked to the members, to the gangs officially or not, it's a lot of a lot of it's been caused by the same people.
00:02:39:05 - 00:02:56:15
Ben
And that's just something that, you know, I haven't seen a strong federal response from the Biden administration on this. So at least not in terms of prosecutions and things. But I guess they have bigger fish to fry like Donald Trump.
00:02:56:18 - 00:03:22:14
Marty
Yeah, they're not prosecuting anything these days. It's really perplexing. So to set the stage for this conversation, we briefly met at an event last year. I've been following you on Twitter since even before that event, and I think I have this the picture of you in my mind and your worldview just from following you on Twitter and meeting you briefly.
00:03:22:16 - 00:03:49:06
Marty
That is extremely fast. Not my picture. I think you're an extremely fascinating person. From what I've observed, from arm's length on Twitter. I think the start this conversation, I was like, What drove you to focus on all the subjects you do, whether it's about 13 in El Salvador, the state of the United States more broadly. Your work at I am 1776.
00:03:49:06 - 00:03:54:03
Marty
Like what drove you to cover and speak out against all this stuff?
00:03:54:06 - 00:04:20:13
Ben
Well, it's like starting with El Salvador, you know, I'm from a part of Virginia that has a significant El Salvador population, so I've felt for a while that a lot of our histories and, you know, culture, like we, you know, distinct cultures and distinct histories and all of this. But, you know, they've been like in this like mixing pot with us for, for a while.
00:04:20:13 - 00:04:44:11
Ben
So it's like I, you know, that was like the, the big other like group, right? Like, you know, for, for people in Texas or California, it might be like Mexicans or the other big ethnic group people across the South. It might be, well if they're white blacks but if they're blacks and white. But you know for for me, it was like in El Salvador and sort of like, you know, that's the that's the big other group.
00:04:44:11 - 00:05:08:10
Ben
And, you know, it's an always found them kind of interesting. And they were they did keep to themselves a lot. I remember growing up and you know, I could tell there was a lot of really they'd been through a lot of heavy stuff. I think because of that, like closing off. And I don't know, they just seemed like as a people really beaten down.
00:05:08:12 - 00:05:45:10
Ben
And a couple of years ago I started seeing like Boo Kelly's face, right? Like it papoose, Arias and all this stuff. And it's kind of like he's displayed in the Salvadoran businesses the way that the pope is displayed in Italian restaurants, or at least in like the old school Italian restaurants in America. And, you know, seeing some of what he was tweeting about, like one was in I think it was in 2001 when El Salvador made a dramatic about face on COVID and 2121.
00:05:45:12 - 00:06:32:12
Ben
Initially, they had pursued a strategy just kind of in line with World Health Organization guidance and all this. But then it's like at that by the following spring, I think they had just realized, you know, this is going to put us into like permanent debt, like this is blowing things up. It's nuke the economy. And the about face was it was like what I would have designed if you would just put me in charge of coming up with, you know, the public health plan which basically like encourage people to get outside, get sunlight for vitamin D, because we know vitamin D was vitamin D status was the biggest risk factor for COVID mortality and lifting,
00:06:32:12 - 00:07:12:22
Ben
you know, any restrictions. There were no vaccine mandates. There were no entry mandates into the country. So you could travel there as an unvaccinated American, which the way things were going at the time made it one of the few countries where that was possible. And yeah, so just, you know, seeing for a while the the success they were having in governance and embracing like Bitcoin and freedom and at the same time, you know, being realistic, not being like dogmatically libertarian as in if we make the police go away, then that's going to cure everything like they were the right kind of Austria and.
00:07:12:25 - 00:07:13:05
Ben or Marty
They.
00:07:13:05 - 00:07:40:13
Ben
Took the right lessons are like hike in those guys, right? It's the right mix of like pragmatism and libertarianism to me. And yeah, so I decided about a year ago I was like, I should finally go check this place out. And yeah, I went down last March and I've been back five times since. So I love it. It's convenient.
00:07:40:13 - 00:08:03:24
Ben
It's like a three hour flight and usually like a couple hundred bucks on Avianca. Really easy to get it out of there. Great airport And it's a you know, it's a country about the size of New Jersey so it's not that daunting to travel around. You know, you can be from the the beach to the summit of a volcano in like couple of hours.
00:08:03:24 - 00:08:13:03
Ben
And so that's that's really cool. It's like for for such a small country there is like a pretty diverse array of like topography and landscape and all.
00:08:13:06 - 00:08:37:09
Marty
Yeah. So having made my pilgrimage to El Salvador yet it's on the list and it is fascinating. It's obviously El Salvador. BUCHELE What he's done in the world of Bitcoin is something that everybody's been paying attention to for many years now. I mean, he sort of planted the flag was like, yes, we're going to embrace Bitcoin as Bitcoiners were very much in favor of that.
00:08:37:09 - 00:09:09:28
Marty
Or a lot of us I won't speak for all of us because there is a contingent of the Bitcoin people are in the Bitcoin. I hate to say bitcoin community flack better term Bitcoin community review typically is done as a fascist in in some way or another. And I, I tend to fall on the side of like, oh, what you just described is like I think his implementation of bringing rule of law to the country was not only very successful but very necessary considering.
00:09:10:00 - 00:09:14:10
Ben
Yeah. And that's a, that's a view that frankly is ignorant.
00:09:14:17 - 00:09:15:03
Ben or Marty
And, and.
00:09:15:04 - 00:09:36:14
Ben
Kind of insulting to and to Salvadorans because if you and I think I have like a strong reaction to this because I've talked to so many Salvadorans who've told me what things were like before and the entire country was a prison, you know, you're talking about that people are complaining about, oh, you locked up 60,000 people, you're depriving them of their freedom.
00:09:36:21 - 00:10:02:21
Ben
Everyone was deprived of their freedom. You couldn't leave your neighborhood unless you paid an extortion fee. You know, mothers kept there were some kids who, like they'd never really got out in about because their mothers, like, kept them inside all the time, like home schooled them, you know? So you had this and that. That's a prison. It's not a formal prison governed by a state.
00:10:02:21 - 00:10:25:10
Ben
But you are you're not free to come and go as you please. And so, in effect, every poor neighborhood in the country was like a prison. And those people have been liberated. And there's now this like outpouring of freedom in the streets. Like like they're like sports are being adopted that they hadn't seen much of before, like biking.
00:10:25:10 - 00:10:51:25
Ben
A lot of Salvadorans have got into road biking. A lot of the kids have gotten into skateboarding like skate culture has taken off there. And, you know, just like this flowering and even without like specific sports or whatever, it's just like there's a lot of families. They can go to the parks, they're going to the plaza. So people are just going out into public feels very different than America, where people now, I think, like they treat their suburban houses like castles.
00:10:51:25 - 00:11:14:05
Ben
There's not much of like a public space that that many people go to. It's like, you know, the space is kind of we've Brazil ified a lot. I've actually noticed this since 2020, just in like people's space, they're out. It's like what spaces they go out into. It's it's kind of wild to watch that happen.
00:11:14:05 - 00:11:16:14
Marty
Look, spend that like, what do you mean by Brazil?
00:11:16:16 - 00:11:44:06
Ben
Well, in Brazil, you have this situation where, you know, the streets and public squares and that sort of thing. People like, avoid them or at least avoid them during certain times. I mean, I've I had a gun put to my head on a residential street one quiet morning in Rio, and it was in a nice neighborhood. I was getting in an Uber, but I was like transiting like between two secure points.
00:11:44:06 - 00:12:01:27
Ben
One was like the gated condo I was staying that had an armed guard. And then, like, the moving car. And it's like that slight in-between time when you're a target. And this dude rolled up on a motorcycle and robbed my phone after put in a 1911 to my head. That was.
00:12:01:29 - 00:12:02:25
Marty
What was this.
00:12:02:28 - 00:12:26:08
Ben
Was that was in like I think what year it was right before Bolsonaro was sworn at. I remember because I was there. It was like the week after that, his was his inauguration. So I guess I would've been like 20, 2018, like January 2018 or so. So I think he got in like, I think his the election for him was like a year after Trump.
00:12:26:11 - 00:12:50:01
Ben
Anyway, whatever it was. But I remember the next time I went back, Rio felt much, much safer. Like there was a very appreciable difference in the security situation. Once Bolsonaro took over, not that much had to be changed. It's just like he let the police off the leash and was like, Actually, yeah, go, go take care of these guys.
00:12:50:03 - 00:13:12:29
Ben
There been a hostage situation on a bridge between Niteroi, which just sits across the bay from Rio and Rio. And they brought in a sniper and shot the guy who was holding these people hostage. They just, just the government started, like, publicly, you know, being more hardcore. And it sent a message that took effect very quickly.
00:13:13:01 - 00:13:13:28
Marty
Yeah.
00:13:14:01 - 00:13:15:26
Ben or Marty
But back to.
00:13:15:28 - 00:13:42:05
Ben
The Brazil vacation that before that, things had gotten so bad from a security perspective that like if you were going to go somewhere and just like walk around like in public, it would be like one of these really nice luxury shopping malls that you can see favelas from. Like the the contrast between poverty and ultra wealth in Brazil, Like it sits next to each other, at least in at least in places like Rio de Janeiro, because they're all packed.
00:13:42:05 - 00:14:11:24
Ben
And, you know, it's very dense. And, you know, a lot of people would just avoid these like public areas that theoretically should be secured by police. But or by culture. But in reality were places where you could be mugged. And, you know, so Brazil had this like decline of the third space happened like at least a decade before the United States.
00:14:11:26 - 00:14:39:22
Ben
And, you know, I don't think it's gotten quite that dire here. But in a number of cities, I have noticed like, okay, people don't want to take subways. They don't want to take public transportation. They don't want to walk places. They're like avoiding these, you know, public areas that should be controlled by the police or secured by the police and instead, you know, opting for like safer measures to get from point A to point B.
00:14:39:25 - 00:14:51:18
Ben
And I think part of it is it's not even like the serious crimes. It's just like the low level harassment by the homeless and mentally ill.
00:14:51:20 - 00:14:53:03
Marty
Happens here in the city.
00:14:53:05 - 00:14:54:28
Ben or Marty
Yeah, well.
00:14:55:00 - 00:15:13:19
Ben
I was in I was in New York about a month ago, and I was I was shocked at how much I still love New York City. It's probably an unpopular thing to say these days, but I think there's a lot of great qualities to it as a city. But, you know, riding on the subway used to be just like a very normal experience.
00:15:13:19 - 00:15:31:04
Ben
And like now you will see something. I feel like like whether it's someone like openly defecating on the train platform or having a schizophrenic episode in the train car, you're and it's just like there's this, there's this, like, background ambient level of stress that goes up.
00:15:31:07 - 00:16:05:24
Marty
Yeah, it's been growing for the last decade. So I moved to New York from Chicago in 2014. I put six years in there too, in 2014 COVID, and it was a noticeable difference from when I first moved there, even before COVID. Like I remember my wife and I lived in Williamsburg because before we had children and towards the end, like 2019, 2019, predominantly, like I remember two instances where we were coming from the West Village back to Brooklyn on the L train two separate times, probably around like 1030 11 at night time.
00:16:05:24 - 00:16:26:09
Marty
So like somebody just whipped out a stick and started like massaging himself like on the L train in front of me. And my wife was just like, What the fuck? Yeah, this is before COVID. Like we were smart enough to get out of the city. Like March six, 2020. Our first son was just born. We're like, We're not staying here for these lockdowns.
00:16:26:10 - 00:16:47:29
Marty
We escaped to the beaches of New Jersey and we went back. We we thought we were there for two weeks when it became apparent the lockdowns were going to be for two weeks. We're going right, We're canceling our lease. We had to go back and wind down in our apartment and get all of our shit and move it to a storage unit.
00:16:48:01 - 00:17:12:28
Marty
And we went back. We lived on North Fifth and Wythe when we were in Williamsburg, so right down the street from Joe's Pizza and we couldn't even go get a slice without my wife getting cold. It was just pure anarchy during that time. And I'm originally from Philadelphia, having lived in the city for 15 years, but my family and all my friends from growing up are still there.
00:17:12:28 - 00:17:18:00
Marty
And you can't even be in Rittenhouse Square. Past art without getting harassed these days.
00:17:18:05 - 00:17:22:28
Ben
Is that named after Kyle Rittenhouse or maybe should?
00:17:23:01 - 00:17:24:26
Ben or Marty
Shouldn't have.
00:17:24:28 - 00:17:39:09
Marty
I've met him once. It's a funny interaction. I did something for what was on Glenn Beck's show and he showed up right after I interviewed record back and was like, Oh, you're Kyle Rittenhouse. Good shot, sir.
00:17:39:11 - 00:17:40:04
Ben or Marty
You know.
00:17:40:06 - 00:17:46:11
Marty
I forget who should know this. As a native Philadelphian who Rittenhouse Square is named after.
00:17:46:14 - 00:18:29:03
Ben
I know one of the other things that set Philadelphia hard has been the the fentanyl epidemic. Oh, yes, it was, I think the first one of the first places where Trank started showing up trends additive. I was in. You can get it for like $10 a kilo from Shanghai. You can order directly and the like. This had been a problem on the street for months and months and like, I looked into it and found like it's not even on the schedule and it won't even like raise like, like Customs and Border Patrol doesn't even track it because it's like so unlisted like.
00:18:29:05 - 00:19:02:27
Ben
So they don't even the DEA doesn't even know how many tons of it are coming in the United States annually. And I started researching into this that tweeted about it some. And what was cool is there was a congressional staffer who followed me or saw the post on Twitter and got his balls to like draft a letter. And what's funny is, like right after that letter was drafted, that was when the White House was finally like, we're going to do a task force like 24 hours later.
00:19:03:00 - 00:19:47:12
Ben
So sometimes cool things can happen from the Internet. But it reminds me of something Amanda Melius described. She said, If you wanted to get anything done, you have to go on cable news or something and say it like it's, you know, governing by Fox is kind of the euphemism. They use. But it is is interesting. Like that's what people respond to now is just what what becomes discourse in the news cycle and you know in the political system right like it just people want to issue was like they want to focus on what's being talked about inches can be cool sometimes it's kind of horrifying because if you have the platforms controlling algorithms that tell
00:19:47:12 - 00:19:51:04
Ben
you what gets talked about like that, that's a powerful form of control.
00:19:51:04 - 00:20:16:13
Marty
But I mean, we witnessed that. I got put on YouTube time out twice during COVID for talking shit on the vaccines and ivermectin versus ivermectin. It was before the vaccines ever even came out. And you're saying hydroxy chloroquine and ivermectin had a few doctors on it, like we think this is good preventative medicine to take. If you're worried about getting COVID and if you do get it, maybe you should take it as well.
00:20:16:13 - 00:20:19:15
Marty
And boom, Susan was lucky the recent time out.
00:20:19:15 - 00:20:46:03
Ben
I, I got a I got banned a couple of times on Twitter and until I finally figured out how to talk about it euphemistically without like tripping the censors. But I remember during the time like YouTube was just nuts. And then also like Instagram, like Metalhead went kind of went really hard on stuff, even like I lost my personal Facebook account because I was posting about vitamin D.
00:20:46:06 - 00:20:46:14
Ben or Marty
Was.
00:20:46:17 - 00:21:15:03
Ben
You know, Yeah, it was. And it was an old post. It was like from the first month of the pandemic where I said, like, we don't know much about this, but everyone should be getting as much sunlight as possible because we know vitamin D is really important for all respiratory diseases. Simple as that. It was saying, look, this is like this worked against works against the flu, colds, all these other things we can probably infer, even though there's nothing published.
00:21:15:06 - 00:21:49:05
Ben
So we had all the caveats in there and still, yeah, it wasn't even like a takedown thing. It was like your personal account that you've had since college. You know, it's gone now. You can't like download an archive of photos or anything. It's just it's a it's a really demeaning experience to go through something like that. I just, you know, I just now it's like having social media for personal reasons.
00:21:49:05 - 00:21:53:04
Ben
It just feels like you're setting yourself up for for failure somehow.
00:21:53:09 - 00:22:23:04
Marty
Yeah. And the fact that he did that is early on in the pandemic is even more crazy to me because I vividly remember again, my son was born right before it became apparent that COVID was a thing. But I think Bitcoiners were on a COVID early, like December, January particularly, we had a doctor's appointment where my wife, before she gave birth to my son, it was like one of the last check up appointments before she gave birth, and I was freaking out.
00:22:23:04 - 00:22:38:10
Marty
My wife was yelling at me in the Uber over to the doctor's offices. I was like, I'm going to ask about COVID. Should we be worried? She was like, Don't, you're crazy. Like, there's nothing going on here. And I was like, Fuck it, I don't care. I asked, and the doctor looked me straight in the face. She's like, You have nothing to worry about.
00:22:38:12 - 00:22:56:29
Marty
She'd be more worried about the flu. And then the fact that it went from something that you should not be worried about to something that you had to censor. Anybody was questioning any anything the regime was putting out about it. It happened literally within a six week period.
00:22:57:01 - 00:23:17:10
Ben
Yeah. And they were they were mocking people like they were saying like the all the tech brokers down in Austin are like paranoid because they're, you know, not shaking hands at South by Southwest at all. And then, yeah, The Washington Post, Vox, all these vultures. The early thing was like, if you have any concerns about COVID, if you even mention it was.
00:23:17:10 - 00:23:17:29
Marty
A racist.
00:23:17:29 - 00:23:43:04
Ben
It's racist, it's coded, it's dog whistles, you know about Chinese people. It's like, okay, you're calling it a dog whistle. But that's kind of in that context. It's kind of a dog whistle in and of itself. I'm not saying that they're eating dogs or that's where COVID came from. I'm saying there's a lab in town and that's which is like the funny thing, too, is when they tried to say the lab leak thing was racism.
00:23:43:06 - 00:24:04:14
Ben
If people talked about the lab leak like they were doing coded racism, it's a lot more racist to say it came from a wet market. You know, like the official line was like, these disgusting Chinese people are eating bats. You know, this is how it happened. Instead of just like, yeah, there was a lab accident and everyone covered it up, as tends to be the case.
00:24:04:14 - 00:24:31:19
Ben
And bureaucracies like Chernobyl, the the HBO series, it came out like just the fall before, you know, it was it was actually like that was a nice reminder watching that before that was a nice reminder of just how these systems operate. But then it became really horrifying to see the American government do the exact same thing that the Soviets had done in the eighties.
00:24:31:22 - 00:24:46:00
Ben
As that unfolded. It was yeah, was totally nuts. But yeah, I mean, I had the experience of like being called an alarmist and then being called like a denier and just really without modifying my position much at all.
00:24:46:02 - 00:25:07:27
Marty
Yeah. So I was, my position was modified pretty aggressively over the first six months of 2020, where in the beginning, before COVID was even talked about on the news, I was hyper worried about it. One of those like we were stocking up on food at the Whole Foods in Williamsburg, wearing masks like two weeks before, like getting looked at like we were crazy people.
00:25:07:27 - 00:25:21:18
Marty
And then quickly by April, I was like, Oh shit, I got got this is something else is going on here. Like, this doesn't make any sense with the lockdowns and the way they're treating this and and so I had this pendulum.
00:25:21:18 - 00:25:46:27
Ben
Swing, especially with the lockdowns, because nothing in the plans leading up to that, like nothing in pandemic planning had indicated that that should ever be an option because it was understood even by like people I thought they were saying that yeah, you don't lockdown doing a respiratory pandemic. This is the wrong thing to do. And early on they were really pushing against locking down it.
00:25:47:01 - 00:26:23:12
Ben
It wasn't, I think until March came along and they started to understand, I think, what could be gained from it, which was the liquidation of the American working and middle class and a massive transfer of wealth via fiat currency printing, just insane amounts of dollars. And of course, as you know, inflation is not evenly distributed. It's takes from the people who are farthest away from the central banking cartel that sets around the the falsehood of the Fed.
00:26:23:14 - 00:26:31:24
Ben
And yeah, I mean, we just watched the greatest robbery in history play out and no one's even talking about prosecuting the people responsible.
00:26:32:01 - 00:26:34:18
Ben or Marty
No. And well.
00:26:34:20 - 00:27:09:14
Ben
Bobby Kennedy. And that's probably why he's polling better than any independent candidate has in 40 years. So we'll see how the ballot access thing goes. I know that like MoveOn.org, it's like a death star of progressive electioneering. They've now moved on to fully focusing on Kennedy, which is pretty remarkable to have such a large Democratically Line organization like totally tune Trump out.
00:27:09:18 - 00:27:18:08
Ben
Like they're not focused on him at all. They're terrified, terrified that they're going to lose Democratic constituencies to Kennedy.
00:27:18:10 - 00:27:39:18
Marty
I mean, can you file people for voting for if it's a Democrat choosing between Biden and Kennedy? Can you fault people? I don't think so. I mean, that gets like the bigger question that's been nagging me. And I think I become pretty convinced that I don't think we're going to solve this via the bureaucracy or the political system.
00:27:39:22 - 00:28:01:23
Marty
I don't think we can vote our way out of this. Is that am I correct? And where would you what would you say to that? Like, I'm that's why I focus on Bitcoin going back to the Fed. Like I'm convinced that the lockdowns happen because they need an excuse to print trillions of dollars because there's something structurally broken on the back end of the financial system.
00:28:01:23 - 00:28:44:18
Marty
We had the repo spasm in September of 2019. It highlighted that there was pretty significant liquidity issues and they needed to fix that. And so the COVID leak was the sort I'm looking for. It was convenient way to lock down the economy, print trillions of dollars and re get liquidity back into the system. And I think until you take the power over those monetary levers away, like voting and trying to work through the bureaucratic system is not going to be productive.
00:28:44:21 - 00:29:20:22
Ben
I well, I agree in a sense it the biggest thing I see facing us is a fiscal cliff in 2025. I kind of suspect they might let Trump win just so he's holding the bag when that blows up. However, it's kind of it's like this irrational thing. I know, but I kind of still it's like, all right, this is like a last ditch chance to keep from going off script, because when things go off script, really bad things can happen.
00:29:20:24 - 00:29:56:02
Ben
And, you know, I think the coming up with alternatives working outside of the system, like, you know, all of this stuff is really good. But the and essentially I think long term it it is the solution. But I think in the short term it makes sense to engage at some level, even if for for no other reason than our political campaigns are often a means by which you're able to get certain messages out to the public about the nature of the system, the nature of things.
00:29:56:02 - 00:30:28:09
Ben
And so I you know, I really like a lot of what Bobby Kennedy has been doing, talking about the Fed, talking about inflation. I mean, I haven't heard anyone talking this term since Ron Paul right. And, you know, there's a lot that can be done administratively in terms of the health issues, the chronic health problems, the corruption within the the medical industrial complex.
00:30:28:11 - 00:30:51:18
Ben
You know, having a Department of Justice, it's like there's not that many laws that actually need to be changed. It's just which ones are going to be enforced. And, you know, I think with Biden, we would just be heading, you know, there's a danger there. We've been flirting like on the edge of World War Three for a while.
00:30:51:20 - 00:31:22:09
Ben
And my concern is if we got like tied up into that, it could manufacture can set for like a massively destructive war. But also I could see them trying to do something like that as a way to slingshot it out of the economic problems, the fiscal problems, kind of the same way that FDR used World War Two to slingshot out of the recession or the Great Depression.
00:31:22:12 - 00:31:41:24
Ben
And, you know, I think in any kind of major confrontation like that, like anything we could do, we should do to avoid. So, you know, I believe, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, all about all of the above. Guy. Yeah, right. Like, let's try it via the political system, but let's not put our faith in the political system.
00:31:41:24 - 00:32:22:21
Ben
That's like that might be a Hail Mary to where we could get some kind of Millay type situation. You know, and I, I think M.I.A. And BUCHELE are good examples for what can be achieved by going through the usual routes, but with unusual people. Malawi in particular. I mean, he's facing a Congress that's dead set against them, but they have taken a, I think, $12 billion cash reserve shortfall at the Argentine central bank, and it's now an $800 million surplus in a span of just a few months.
00:32:22:21 - 00:32:44:12
Ben
I mean, that's you know, it's remarkable since yet he has a great team with a policy people. He's enabled like you have like actual, you know, people who know Austrian economics now running the program and you see the results they get in such a short period of time. You know, it does inspire you a little.
00:32:44:19 - 00:32:49:15
Marty
Thank God I've seen what you've done for other CEOs, and I want that.
00:32:49:17 - 00:33:05:03
Ben
And I get some people are like, oh, okay, well, why should I care about El Salvador, Argentina, in any of these places? I'm like, So you have somewhere to go to if it really gets you know, it gets really weird here. You know, I know a lot of people have done the whole thing. I was born here. I'm going to die here.
00:33:05:03 - 00:33:30:20
Ben
I admire that attitude and I have it myself at the same time, you know, if you have if you have a family and young children, I think you do need to be thinking, you know, at least in theoretical terms, about like what how how bad is are you willing to let it get here?
00:33:30:22 - 00:33:41:11
Marty
Or what's the worst case scenario in your mind? Like how what two paths could you see this going down? Maybe it's not just to.
00:33:41:13 - 00:34:09:11
Ben
You know, in one case it could be the reinstitute the draft. They start sending, you know, your kids off to die for Taiwan or Ukraine or whatever proxy they've decided as the, you know, the be all and all or, you know, we get I mean, at the same time, let's say they start World War three. I don't know we get nuked.
00:34:09:13 - 00:34:59:02
Ben
That's a pretty bad thing to go through. You know, I think it's it's a lot nicer to be in Argentina eating steak than, you know, outside of DC, like with your skin peeling off from radiation or just probably the more likely thing is things just like continue to deteriorate economically and socially and culturally and you basically would have kids growing up in a country where there's no opportunity and just a lot of bad stuff, a lot of risk, a lot of good people who suffer in these and situations where you have this like a narco tyranny systems, you know, like you see it now already the deaths of despair because of so much of the
00:34:59:02 - 00:35:30:09
Ben
heartland has been hollowed out. You know, I mean, there there are great innovations and exciting things happening, going and opportunities in America and all that. But but geographically, they're pretty confined to like a few key areas, like here in Allston, you know, here in Allston, it's like it it feels so different from the rest of the country. But you could drive, you know, a thousand miles from here and not run into any other place where there's any level of opportunity for young people the way there is here.
00:35:30:09 - 00:35:59:00
Ben
So, you know, if for, let's say, Argentina became an engine of dynamism and and that sort of thing, I think that, you know, I mean, same for El Salvador. KELLY Just announced they'll be giving away 5000 free passports for, you know, doctors and artists. And, you know, just want to bring great minds to the El Salvador to vitalize the country.
00:35:59:03 - 00:36:08:10
Ben
You know, I mean, that's that's real vision right there. And I think his ambition is to to turn the place into like the Singapore Central America.
00:36:08:12 - 00:36:37:04
Marty
Yeah. It's so frustrating as an American. Somebody grew up in Philadelphia, really had that sense of how the country was founded in the spirit of the founding Fathers imbued my personality to a certain degree. Maybe it was just because I was more attuned to and more interested in it growing up than others. But, uh, there's again, that idea that I want to stay and hopefully not go down with the ship.
00:36:37:07 - 00:37:09:18
Marty
Right? The ship, something I certainly align with philosophically and it's just like, what the fuck do we need to do to get this back on the right track? It's via the political system which we're touching on here. Or like I think one thing that you're doing in particular with I am 1776, I think we need to really instill and ingrain these ideas of freedom and abundance into people like the American populace.
00:37:09:18 - 00:37:10:12
Ben
Is.
00:37:10:15 - 00:37:30:11
Marty
Literally fat, complacent and stupid right now. And that's like the big thing. Another big thing in my mind is like, how do you like that fire people's minds to to take agency over their lives and take control back of the country?
00:37:30:13 - 00:37:31:22
Ben
It's no easy answer to that.
00:37:31:23 - 00:37:33:11
Marty
Yeah, no, there isn't.
00:37:33:17 - 00:38:04:04
Ben
It's there's such a variety of things that I think have had that have people kind of trapped. But kind of there's there's a lot of programing. There's a lot of beating down particular generations. It's like a lot of millennials graduated in the worst job market and since the Great Depression, they were getting their feet under them. And then, like COVID came along and ripped the rug out again.
00:38:04:06 - 00:38:41:26
Ben
And yeah, it's just like after after a while, people get burned out and kind of hopeless. And I, I think COVID is, well, what we call COVID. But it was a number of things. It's everything that happened in 2020 and shortly after I put it that way, the events, because you also throw in the election January six, all these things that had there that created these these current things, right?
00:38:41:26 - 00:39:14:27
Ben
The things to get everyone scared and hyped up over. You know, I go to other countries, places like Italy or Salvador, obviously, but just all around and they've bounced back pretty well from the pandemic. Like you still have this, you know, there's like youth, vitality. Vibrancy is like return to towns and, you know, places are people are having fun and there's just like a, I don't know, a carefree spirit.
00:39:15:00 - 00:39:46:18
Ben
And in America, though, it seems like people have just been so beaten down, like there's this heaviness that you find almost everywhere in the country. And it's just like any exhaustion. And I think it's because, like, we followed up, covered with or we piled on top of it, right? The January 6th thing, which was like blown all out of proportion into like I mean, they mention it in the same breath, in the same sentence as 911.
00:39:46:18 - 00:40:31:00
Ben
And Pearl Harbor, you know, discussed Kamala Harris getting up 911 and now January 6th, you know, like pretending to be solemn and all this stuff. And then after January six, you had the vaccine mandates. That happened after it became very obvious that young people were dropping like flies from myocarditis and other issues, blood clots. And then you had the fall of Afghanistan, which I think we should have got out of Afghanistan, but it was done in like the most sloppy embarrassing, humiliating way possible.
00:40:31:03 - 00:40:34:25
Ben
And, you know, it's just been like one hit after another and.
00:40:34:27 - 00:40:37:24
Marty
Slow building inflation or quick building inflation.
00:40:37:24 - 00:40:56:28
Ben
I think that's been one of the biggest psychological for me. Now, you know, I remember when you can like walk around a grocery store and it was a nice experience and you just oh, I get this is now it's like, all right, going in with list consulting the sale thing, it's like, why does this cost three times as much as it did, you know, a couple of years ago?
00:40:57:00 - 00:41:01:27
Ben
But the thing actually the thing about inflation that I think drives me most crazy is shrinkflation.
00:41:02:00 - 00:41:03:14
Marty
Oh, yes.
00:41:03:17 - 00:41:27:13
Ben
Because it's that's like that's surreal. You know, it's like, is it just me or are the candy bars getting smaller, the bread loaf, you know, losing slices? Like what's going on here? And like, like my local grocery store, they now sell a half a loaf of bread for what, a fallen for bread used to cost.
00:41:27:20 - 00:41:29:14
Marty
I think it's market is a half a loaf.
00:41:29:17 - 00:41:31:22
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
00:41:31:25 - 00:41:47:01
Ben
A half round of sour dough. But it's done. It's packaged in such a way that it's supposed to look like kind of similar. It's just like shorter and, you know, like Toblerone bars. I think they're one of the ones where they, like.
00:41:47:03 - 00:41:48:02
Marty
Take the notches off.
00:41:48:02 - 00:42:18:19
Ben
Or take the notches off. Yeah, it's just. And then there's also what happens where lower quality ingredients are added in and this sort of thing. It's like all of these ways people try to hide inflation rationally expected, but yeah, it's just the little things of you know, swap the sugar for corn sirup and, you know, all the stuff that's.
00:42:18:21 - 00:42:19:10
Marty
And then.
00:42:19:13 - 00:42:20:01
Ben
Once.
00:42:20:03 - 00:42:46:26
Marty
You're confronted with that reality at the grocery store and then you go home, you check Twitter, put on MSNBC, God forbid, and the government's telling, you know, inflation is down. It's a it's solved. It's at its lowest rate since before Trump even got in the office. And that's like the Orwellian double speak propaganda that's initiated.
00:42:47:03 - 00:43:16:07
Ben
And they constantly tell you, well, you know, yeah, okay, your groceries cost more. And you tell them that, but wages are up. And I'm like, not if you haven't switched jobs. Yeah, like no one's getting raises out there. Layoffs are happening. Companies are advertising job positions that they're they have no intention of filling because they want to appear to like investors and such that they're in a growth mode and they're hiring and all this.
00:43:16:07 - 00:43:37:12
Ben
But so much about the economy is just illusory. You know, I've got like friends in tech who they left their jobs thinking they could just, you know, easily jump into another one. And they've been looking like six, eight months. Then Nothing ever gets I mean, I know, you know, tech as a sector, it's like doesn't hit particularly hard.
00:43:37:12 - 00:44:05:24
Ben
But then people will be like, well, you know, they can be plumbers. It's like, well, it takes some time to learn how to become a plumber. And when everyone goes and becomes plumbers, the wages for plumbing is going to drop a lot. So, you know, that's why one of my bugbears is like when people are constantly pushing the the trades thing, saying that ever tell all the young people to go work in trades was like, y'all are a bunch of boomers who just want it to be a lot cheaper for you to remodel your house.
00:44:05:26 - 00:44:06:29
Ben or Marty
Because that's exactly.
00:44:06:29 - 00:44:11:21
Ben
What's going to happen if everyone rushes into these industries, you know, it's the nature of labor.
00:44:11:21 - 00:44:51:07
Marty
Markets. Yeah, well, and then you have sticking to labor markets, like all the jobs reports over the last two years have been revised downward two months later. And very quietly, the job growth is predominantly been either part time job growth or full time employment that's been taken up by illegal immigrants. And then, I mean, speaking of like wage growth, we have an incredible example of an attempt to manufacture wage growth in California this week really instituted the $20 minimum wage for fast food workers and it literally had overnight companies shut their doors and fire thousands of people.
00:44:51:09 - 00:45:16:10
Marty
And this the central planning, whether it be via overt policy or the data manipulation, again, going back to the exhaustion you were mentioning earlier, I think that's another big factor. It is like people are seeing these things in their real life and then the government's telling you don't believe you're lying, guys, everything's okay. It's the best market we've ever been.
00:45:16:10 - 00:45:23:19
Ben
And well, you know, it all goes back to 1971, doesn't it?
00:45:23:19 - 00:45:24:03
Marty
It does.
00:45:24:03 - 00:46:00:03
Ben
That's when we had the great divorce between productivity and wages used to be gains in productivity people were compensated for. And you're not going to have I don't think we're ever going to have like a good wage growth model until we go back to it, until either like Bitcoin becomes dominant enough for people to be paid in Bitcoin, which be awesome, or just like some kind of strict either like Taylor rule at the Fed or, you know, go back to some kind of standard.
00:46:00:05 - 00:46:04:15
Ben
I like the LED standard led standard.
00:46:04:17 - 00:46:06:00
Marty
That economy backed by bullets.
00:46:06:01 - 00:46:21:05
Ben
Yes. And butter. I want I want giant vaults at Fort Knox, you know, like Stockholm with 5.5, six rounds and then really fine butter.
00:46:21:08 - 00:46:42:03
Marty
That has been one of the positive externalities of all this economic pressure. Uh, at least in my life. I obviously can't speak for everybody, but my wife has noticed that at the grocery store she's like, fuck, like the good butter, the good bread, it's way more expensive or you're getting less. So she's decided, I'm going to make my own butter, make my own bread.
00:46:42:07 - 00:46:50:15
Marty
That's been something that's been happening in our house over the course of the last year. It's been incredible. Makes her own pasta as well.
00:46:50:18 - 00:47:15:09
Ben
Yeah, that was that's what it took for me to double down and just start like buying whole cows, whole hogs, all that. And that's been great, actually. So it is there is this trend of like millennials suddenly connecting with the silent generation in terms of lifestyle. That is it's interesting to watch. And that's like the best case outcome.
00:47:15:09 - 00:47:40:17
Ben
You know, like that's the healthy way to adapt to these kind of pressures. The problem is when, you know, people take these pressures and like just give up a, you know, and start on drugs or drinking heavy or whatever, you know, all number of vices that are coping mechanisms for all us. And are just suicide. And like the suicide rates are nuts.
00:47:40:19 - 00:47:43:03
Marty
The assisted suicide rates are not the story.
00:47:43:06 - 00:47:49:04
Ben
The other killing the autistics in Canada now. Yeah.
00:47:49:06 - 00:47:57:12
Marty
And I think I also was a 28 year old in Sweden is getting assisted suicide in the last week which is crazy.
00:47:57:16 - 00:48:00:16
Ben
Some of the more publicized cases. I feel like they're doing it for attention.
00:48:00:21 - 00:48:12:27
Marty
Yeah, it's like, you know, it's very perplexing to somebody. The father of two young children, I look at the world, I'm like, Holy fuck, what are you two going to grow up in?
00:48:12:27 - 00:48:22:29
Ben
And and the Canadian government is saying that we can't afford to not do the aid program like they're now talking about it in fiscal terms.
00:48:23:02 - 00:48:27:15
Marty
And it's getting to material levels. I think it was like 5% of deaths in Canada last year were made.
00:48:27:18 - 00:48:31:24
Ben
Well, do you know how they're doing it?
00:48:31:26 - 00:48:36:20
Marty
I think an injection injection, multiple injections, one to numb and one to kill.
00:48:36:27 - 00:49:14:11
Ben
That's that's wild because like the pharmaceutical companies now won't sell it to states for execution purposes. But I assume the same manufacturers are like selling it to the these governments for assisted suicide. Yeah. So yeah, it's like they're they, they take the great moral stand against like executing someone who, you know, killed a young couple and burn their bodies and but it's fine to do this for like kids who are molested and have mental health issues because of it.
00:49:14:13 - 00:49:34:15
Marty
It's how much, uh, how much do you think a lot of this is driven? I mean, we've been focused on the economic and the political of it, but how much of of the despair and the exhaustion and overall stress that we see is driven by a lack of spirituality or connection to God?
00:49:34:17 - 00:50:05:06
Ben
You know, I think that's a big part of it. I think there there has been a turning and all of this like I like the new atheist. I love, you know, the past 20 years or so, like that's gone. You know, people are people are searching, but it and, you know, I think because that foundation didn't exist, there's a lot of people who, you know, got especially buffeted hard by those times.
00:50:05:06 - 00:50:34:27
Ben
But also like the church has been shut down during the pandemic. I think that made things worse than it needed to be. Um, people's connections to to God and to each other. And, but, you know, I think the other part of the malaise is just like it's, it's such an open clown show, you know, it's like everyone you just see the fakeness, right?
00:50:34:27 - 00:50:56:08
Ben
Like the, the fake president, right. Who was supposedly declaring Easter like a trans day of visibility. He has no idea what's going on. It's like that is not that man. That's some like staffer. You know who didn't even know. My theory is like they just didn't know when Easter was like, they're just, you know, out to lunch or that.
00:50:56:08 - 00:51:15:19
Ben
And then they just doubled down after they were called on it. And then the the order went out for the rest. Okay. Light up the Empire State Building, the trans flag colors tonight. You know, we've got another thing. I mean, these it's like I don't give them much credit for having, like a big overarching plan. I've met too many of them.
00:51:15:20 - 00:51:42:00
Ben
I had a weird run in slash conversation with Anthony Blinken not that long after Ukraine invasion started. And, you know, before it all, I'm like television that that that was an act the way he would talk you know I was like he can't really be that much of an idiot and be secretary of state right And no, I talk to him.
00:51:42:01 - 00:51:44:24
Ben
It's like, wow, this guy really is this stupid.
00:51:44:26 - 00:51:45:26
Marty
Attitude and.
00:51:45:26 - 00:51:46:01
Ben
That's.
00:51:46:01 - 00:52:11:03
Marty
Scarier. What was your chance? And I don't know if it's scary. It actually gives me hope because like the idea of this, like big art, this big plan that is being executed, uh, makes people feel hopeless. But it's because that's the thing. I don't know if you remember the I think it was, uh, Academy of Ideas video that became very popular, and COVID is like mass about mass psychosis, mass hysteria, whatever you want to call it.
00:52:11:03 - 00:52:42:07
Marty
And they had a follow up to that, which I thought is actually very influential on how I approach what we're doing here on the show and in my writing, which is you literally have to ridicule these people, highlight to others out there that they're literally fucking stupid. And once you have this knowledge that there's not some grand plan, there's a bunch of idiots in control, like you can begin to highlight the fact that they're abject idiots and in some way some form get back control yourself.
00:52:42:09 - 00:52:43:12
Ben or Marty
Well.
00:52:43:15 - 00:52:58:29
Ben
I think it's I think the issue is like when that's the cut of the people that are running the show. But they keep running the show. Right. It's it's kind of like I deserve better enemies. It's like, God, give me better.
00:52:58:29 - 00:53:00:08
Marty
And they're not sending their best.
00:53:00:10 - 00:53:24:27
Ben
It's like, is it better to be targeted by like a Jack the Ripper type serial killer and killed that way? Or just like some, like, random crackhead, just, like, stabs you with the bottle and you bleed out on the subway platform like, I don't know. I think it's like if you're up against something that's like a conscious plan or something, at least it's sexier.
00:53:25:04 - 00:53:26:09
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
00:53:26:12 - 00:53:27:06
Marty
More of a hero.
00:53:27:09 - 00:53:47:06
Ben
Yeah, More of a hero's journey. It's just. It's not like meaningless random violence. That's a good point. Random stupidity. Just like people lashing out. It's like, what if there is no one behind by? Like, what if he actually is giving the orders? But just in an advanced, demented state, it's like that's that's pretty.
00:53:47:08 - 00:53:51:12
Marty
C America's Caligula reserved. Yeah.
00:53:51:15 - 00:53:56:02
Ben
You know, I thought that was going to be Senator Fetterman.
00:53:56:04 - 00:53:59:00
Marty
It that stroke was the best thing that ever happened to us. Yeah.
00:53:59:04 - 00:54:04:01
Ben
Yeah. It's like, how do we how do we replicate this?
00:54:04:04 - 00:54:04:18
Ben or Marty
You know, it's.
00:54:04:19 - 00:54:08:06
Ben
Like he took the Trump vaccine.
00:54:08:08 - 00:54:20:24
Marty
That's the idea. Everybody thinks Trump's going to be the savior. And all this many people forget that Operation Warp Speed. Um, yeah.
00:54:20:27 - 00:54:36:11
Ben
I think the biggest risk is that, you know, term two would just be like Jamie Dimon is Treasury secretary and, you know, just like a stuffing of like a collection of, you know, some of the most entrenched elites in power.
00:54:36:15 - 00:54:50:03
Marty
I mean, term one for if that yeah, that's what would happen. Maybe it's Steven Mnuchin, but on the war side of things like he surround himself with pretty terrible people.
00:54:50:05 - 00:55:08:14
Ben
Yeah I could and I can kind of see it early on because it was like, well, you know, there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of fear that is like day one is going to like, start pressing the, the nuclear launch button. But as there was turnover, it's like they were just getting replaced with other bad people.
00:55:08:18 - 00:55:29:26
Ben
And it wasn't until the very end, like the very end of it, that almost made everything because it was like, This is who you could have put it, the Department of Defense all along. But you waited till like November 2020. It's like put in Miller, you know, or these other. It was like the last couple months. He just started like throwing in like the wireless people.
00:55:29:26 - 00:55:40:03
Ben
And that's because they were the last ones who would work for him. But if they had been his staffers all along, I don't think it would have ever gotten to that point. So.
00:55:40:05 - 00:56:08:26
Marty
Yeah, yeah. Got her so many angles. Now I want to talk about like the media's seat on this. And we talked about social media earlier, but now you have this environment. We have Tucker breaking off. There's a lot of independent publications like I am 1776, coming to the fore, obviously, of the this fracturing of the mainstream media. And these more you have more established people defecting from mainstream going independent.
00:56:09:00 - 00:56:19:01
Marty
There's Tucker making Kelly Don Lemon on the other side. CUOMO Um, and how much they've fed into this malaise that we've.
00:56:19:07 - 00:57:08:04
Ben
It's interesting to see. CUOMO Like off the leash or all these personalities like off the leash. But then you just, like, realize that pretty much everyone who works professionally in media is a chameleon. Oh, yeah. And it's it's like it's not the on air personalities you hate or you love. Like, you know, they're reading scripts and I don't know, I think I think with the impact of Tucker's cancellation, you now have this phenomenon where, like Tucker was kind of the guy who kept people on script, but he did a good job of identifying like which topics, which things to run after, like how to herd the cats and without that monologue every night, I think
00:57:08:04 - 00:57:23:15
Ben
there's just now a lot more weird like infighting and weird directions that things are taking a lot of bleeding of like, I don't know, I think a lot of people are trying to be entertained.
00:57:23:17 - 00:57:24:07
Marty
Yeah.
00:57:24:09 - 00:57:37:14
Ben
And that's, that's becoming a problem because you have like a Charlie Kirk who's running the biggest right wing youth organization, suddenly just getting up and being like, oh, 30 year women are not in their prime.
00:57:37:16 - 00:57:40:19
Marty
I hate the whole Nanosphere It's it's.
00:57:40:22 - 00:57:41:19
Ben
They all need to be taken.
00:57:41:19 - 00:57:54:00
Marty
Aback. And a lot of them, I mean, a lot of it is it's very it's all a bunch of hypocrites who'd no one don't practice what they preach. I don't think they believe all of it. Again, there's.
00:57:54:02 - 00:57:59:02
Ben
A lot of people who aren't in their own prime either. They they've hit the wall and now they're.
00:57:59:04 - 00:58:02:06
Ben or Marty
It's I mean, you know. Well.
00:58:02:08 - 00:58:18:06
Ben
It's it's very online and a historical, too, because like people are thinking when people are talking like the phenomenon of a spinster is without precedent or, you know, the guy who just like, doesn't get married.
00:58:18:06 - 00:58:18:22
Marty
Or the wine.
00:58:18:22 - 00:58:48:14
Ben
And yeah, this it's like these archetypes of, you know, they go back thousands of years. There's always a percentage of them in any society. And it used to be that people just had the good taste to like not try to be unnecessarily cruel. A lot of it, you know, talking about like, oh, these these women who aren't married, it's like, oh, a lot of these women, they're not married because no guy has asked them, you know, it's not they're like any fault of their own.
00:58:48:17 - 00:59:02:08
Ben
And I don't know, somehow they just making that a thing is just for people to talk about in public. To me, it's just kind of a it's very low class behavior.
00:59:02:11 - 00:59:37:10
Marty
It it is. And it's creating this weird I mean, I don't know if it's indicative of a broader trend, but I've seen like, you know, I've seen like Reddit posts from women who've been happily married for years and they're like, my husband started watching Andrew Tate or her name, your other manosphere influencer. And now he thinks that he has the right to just have sex with whoever he wants and is his his place on earth go forth and spread his seed and he doesn't need to be monogamous.
00:59:37:11 - 00:59:40:12
Marty
Think that's just one example of the corruption that you have This.
00:59:40:12 - 00:59:57:24
Ben
All his brother put out this video talking. It was basically like a coaching guide, like this is how to convince girls to give you their virginity. But then on the flip side of it, it's like, well, I want my wife to be a virgin. That's the other thing. It's like they're like promoting like this one life style, on the other hand.
00:59:57:24 - 01:00:18:18
Ben
But then they're just saying, but for me. And yet I'm over my wife then, like, she needs to be, like, untouched. And it's this. Yeah, complete like hypocrisy and schizophrenia. And it's like, why is this even, like, up for discussion? Yeah, like, why are people actually interested in this?
01:00:18:20 - 01:00:23:20
Marty
So the, the impressions and the views and the attention it gets would suggest that.
01:00:23:22 - 01:00:55:00
Ben
They used to say that that the, the war of the sexes would be impossible to fight, fight because it would be too much fraternization with the enemy. But now I kind of worry that that's not the case anymore. Like people really do buy into these, too. Some of these like group, like paintings of a group, right? Like these ultra stereotypes and caricatures, like all women are this way or like all men are this way or many do this.
01:00:55:02 - 01:01:14:10
Ben
And so like 99% of the time they're like talking about one specific person in their personal life. You know, like, you know, one woman who did this thing to them or maybe two and then like, amplify. It is like, this is a critique. Billions of people.
01:01:14:15 - 01:01:16:10
Marty
Yeah.
01:01:16:13 - 01:01:40:25
Ben
You know, I still see people as individuals that, you know, very resist categorization and pigeonholing. And, you know, it's a lot more I think it's a lot more fun to get to know people, individual levels and judge people on individual levels. All of that can. At the end of the day, I come back to being a liberal.
01:01:40:27 - 01:01:41:16
Ben or Marty
Like.
01:01:41:18 - 01:01:42:09
Ben
Classic.
01:01:42:09 - 01:01:43:24
Ben or Marty
MLK, you know.
01:01:43:25 - 01:02:04:26
Ben
Content of character, all that stuff. It's, you know, it's because that's you lose you lose things when you take something as complicated as a human being and you, you know, narrow it down to like m or for Yeah, you know, or D or any of these things like people.
01:02:04:28 - 01:02:19:09
Marty
Bitcoin like that's what I was like earlier. I was trying to be particularly for lack of a better term, you know, want to paint everybody in the Bitcoin as, um, a regimented subgroup that believes all the same things. Certainly like.
01:02:19:09 - 01:02:21:11
Ben
If true, you could say a person of bitcoin.
01:02:21:11 - 01:02:26:08
Marty
You know, a person of Bitcoin, the people of Bitcoin.
01:02:26:11 - 01:02:42:15
Ben
It's like the whole rise of identity politics on the left. That was what drove me to like, you know, what would be defined as the right. And so like a right wing version of that, that's not what I'm after. You know, if that makes me just like a dinosaur, then that's why.
01:02:42:18 - 01:03:08:04
Marty
Well, and you think again, I even hate like people would call me. I am conservative. I, I got married at 25, have children. We get to church trying to conserve traditions that we grow up with. Um, and yeah, I'm conservative. I hate that label. Like a, like I said, very much in line with viewing everybody as an individual, getting to know them.
01:03:08:11 - 01:03:33:12
Ben
I think something that drives a lot of that, those a lot of the people who are like promoting the discourse cause they are themselves very deracinated and they don't have, I think, strong identities. And I think that's why they're they're kind of like grasping towards that, right? Like a lot of the people who are the most like online kind of annoying proselytizing Christians or like themselves recent converts.
01:03:33:14 - 01:03:42:02
Ben
Right. And they're like the ones saying that, well, you know, all Protestants are going to hell. And like, they just became a Catholic last year.
01:03:42:07 - 01:03:42:15
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
01:03:42:22 - 01:03:46:11
Ben
And you know, like cradle Catholics, like, they don't talk that way.
01:03:46:14 - 01:03:47:03
Ben or Marty
No.
01:03:47:05 - 01:04:11:18
Marty
So that's me, like. So I grew up Catholic, still a Catholic, but it's it's maybe blasphemous to any of the new age Catholics that they were even going to an Episcopalian church just because it's convenient for us. It's down the street. They say the Nicene Creed, they don't believe in transubstantiation, which is sort of their problem with. But it's the community that we've grown up with in our neighborhood who our boys hang out with.
01:04:11:18 - 01:04:19:01
Marty
That's where they give the church and it's convenient for us. There's not that many Catholic churches here in Austin, Texas.
01:04:19:04 - 01:04:47:29
Ben
My dad once described to me like the Episcopal, sort of like Catholics without as many of the bells and whistles. And it is like across the spectrum. But it it you know, that that is an example. But then you have, like other people, like they they'll be like Catholic converts to like an evangelical or something. And then it's like it's it's opposite phenomenon.
01:04:47:29 - 01:05:22:25
Ben
They'll then suddenly be like freaking out on the other Catholics or what like their family members. That didn't do the conversion process with them. I guess some of and some of that's like a natural thing. But with this other stuff too, like, I don't know, like American nationalist identities and some of these things like not having a strong regional identity but see like a certain brand of person, like they're really into the idea of America, but they're there's not like a particular place or region within it.
01:05:22:25 - 01:05:32:10
Ben
And then you, you find out that they're tweeting from from Malaysia. It's like, oh okay, maybe that's why.
01:05:32:13 - 01:06:02:09
Marty
Yeah, the and that's the other thing. And somebody was born in Philadelphia. We moved to South Carolina, Charleston for four years when I was growing up, went to college in Chicago, live in New York, and I live in Texas. Like there are these distinct cultures is there is no there maybe quote unquote, American culture that anchors back to like the idea of what the founding fathers fought for.
01:06:02:09 - 01:06:16:28
Marty
But beyond that, like, there are these subcultures that are beautiful, necessary, and probably necessary to have a strong society overall, you know?
01:06:17:01 - 01:06:17:28
Ben or Marty
Yeah, I see.
01:06:18:01 - 01:06:33:18
Ben
I see identity as being kind of like this nesting doll thing, right? Just in like the context of national and regional, all that. It's like, you know, America and Virginia and like, start boiling it down to, you know, Yeah, I'm from this town, Philadelphia.
01:06:33:18 - 01:06:34:23
Marty
I'm from this parish. Yeah, I.
01:06:34:24 - 01:07:24:06
Ben
Think. Yeah, well, places like Philadelphia, Boston and all these cities, like, have very strong city identities. And that's a very classic thing. You know, Athenians versus Spartans and all this, like that's in a lot of ways that's like a lot more natural and, better fitting than to try to have like a national identity. You know, I think something that's kind of myths when people talk about like nationalist movements, early 20th century, whether it be Germany or France or wherever, was that a lot of these were left wing in a sense of like having this homogenizing culture war type flavor, right of creating like a German people, which was actually a new invention in many ways,
01:07:24:06 - 01:08:09:02
Ben
because before that, well, you had Swabian, you had Bavarians, Saxons, right? All of these like very distinct peoples and cultures. And you try to mash them up into one, you know, homogenized blend example of that too, as in France, during the last election like this, right before the election, Marine Le Pen said that she was against the teaching of the Breton language in the schools in Brittany, you know, because it was regional language, it wasn't French, but it's older than France, you know, And that's that's the example I use is like nationalists are not always your friends, you know, because they'll ask you a lot of times to give up all of these like real
01:08:09:02 - 01:08:36:28
Ben
particular things that I think at these lower levels of, you know, attachment like to particular places or regions or whatever like that, that's what, you know, the big national stuff, like that's the broad outline. But what really gives color to it all is like these really particular attachments people have. And yeah, I think there's a generation out there that's like looking.
01:08:37:01 - 01:08:51:10
Ben
They've been stripped of those, right, because of this ongoing cultural revolution. They've been stripped of those. And so now they're like, they're out trying to, you know, grasp all of these things. But unfortunately enough of them are being annoying in the process.
01:08:51:10 - 01:08:53:09
Ben or Marty
That it's.
01:08:53:12 - 01:08:55:02
Ben
It's creating a of noise.
01:08:55:05 - 01:08:57:04
Marty
What do you mean by that?
01:08:57:07 - 01:09:09:07
Ben
Well, just like what we were talking about with like a manosphere type of stuff and this and that, It's just like, you know, people are just like groping around in the dark for answers and bumping into people. And although things are kind of messy.
01:09:09:13 - 01:09:38:03
Marty
Yeah, I mean, and that's a product of the weird inflection point we find ourselves in humanity finds itself in with this transition to the digital age. Like we have these digital spaces where people are geographically distribute it across the world, can meet and think they um, not, but in some cases definitely. Like, that's how I felt that really comes on this podcast.
01:09:38:03 - 01:09:53:20
Marty
I mean, on the Internet, most people I on this podcast met on the Internet, but we're in this weird inflection point where people are over indexing on the digital, forgetting the physical sort of connection you need in your everyday life and meet space.
01:09:53:22 - 01:10:20:00
Ben
Yeah, for me, like within this sphere, you know, for a long time I, I just didn't hardly meet anyone offline from it. I just kind of kept all that segmented. But then, you know, going to come to places like Austin, you know, come in here, all this, it's it's great because when you're actually able to be in a room with someone but I'm like it's it's so much richer than just that.
01:10:20:00 - 01:10:21:08
Marty
It really is the.
01:10:21:10 - 01:10:41:07
Ben
Content that that's out there. And I think one of the most valuable things you can take away from all of this is just like the the connections like that. You know, like what if the real MAGA was the friends we made along the way?
01:10:41:09 - 01:10:43:28
Ben or Marty
Well, it's, uh.
01:10:44:00 - 01:11:13:25
Marty
It's funny, I had so I had this internal struggle where I would not be sitting in this chair. I would not have the life and the career that I have today without the connections I made online in the Bitcoin space and now broadly branching out to other tangential areas, if you will. Um, with my family in Austin, Texas, that's my family.
01:11:13:25 - 01:11:46:15
Marty
My wife's family, big Irish-Catholic families are in Philadelphia and this is weird struggle I got to where I feel very compelled to work on when I'm working on and be around physically the people that I'm working with. But then family is the most important thing. This is like this. I don't know if I'm articulating this appropriately, but the distance being physically disconnected from my family while working on something passionately here is something that I struggle with.
01:11:46:17 - 01:11:49:20
Ben
Yeah, it's. It's a very American struggle.
01:11:49:27 - 01:11:50:27
Marty
Yeah.
01:11:51:00 - 01:12:28:00
Ben
I'm reading the, uh, especially from, like, Californians because, like, you know, for, for those of us from the East Coast, like, our, our families stopped when they got to a certain point, Californians, it was just generations. They continue to cross. And so you have like the most restless breed of Americans and, you know, without modern air travel or any of this stuff, so many people like that's that's a kind of a core part of the American identity, though, is this like just being willing to uproot and go, you know, and and putting the roots down.
01:12:28:02 - 01:12:57:25
Ben
But yeah, totally. Yeah. And it became I think it became a much bigger thing, though, after World War Two, right? Because most people, even up even with the settlers and all that, once they put down roots and created families, they stayed somewhat in the you know, in the same areas. After war two, we had like this new paradigm of labor, nobility, mobility, people moving across the country for aerospace jobs, Cold War industries, all this stuff.
01:12:57:28 - 01:13:34:11
Ben
And, uh, there's a really interesting essay written by Joan Didion called Slouching towards Bethlehem, where she had penned a lot of the late sixties cultural ferment on just how like novel and artificial it was to move away from your extended family and like, raise your kids in a subdivision. And it was such a new thing that like the like, you know, the parents had just like, kind of done the same thing their parents had done, but without like the extended family being around.
01:13:34:14 - 01:13:59:04
Ben
That ended up being a very different experience for the kids. Right? Like, you know, having grandma and grandpa next door like that was kind of like the that made one model of parenting work. And as those parents went and, you know, tried to do the same thing, but without that extended family presence, it has led to in a generation that had a lot of runaways.
01:13:59:04 - 01:14:22:23
Ben
You know, kids were just run off to San Francisco and be preyed upon by pimps and drug dealers and all this sort of thing. So, yeah, I mean, it's something that I think each successive generation since as, like gotten a little better at dealing with. I think the rise of affordable air travel is probably just made it much, much better.
01:14:22:25 - 01:14:48:17
Ben
But now, you know, I hear of this thing not in my own family, thank God. But yeah, among others where people talk about like their parents just not being that interested in seeing the grandkids. And this is like totally unimaginable. Of course, you know, my roots are kind of similar. It's like Scots-Irish and then Irish Catholic and then some English.
01:14:48:21 - 01:15:16:16
Ben
So, you know, we have a come from like a big rambunctious family where family is everything, like, you know, from Scots, Irish and Irish. It's like it's the, it's the extended clan. Like that's, that's who your loyalty. You're not loyal to a country. You're not loyal to any of these things. You're you're loyal to the family. And you know, hearing now about how you know, there's some like older Americans are just less connected that that really scares me.
01:15:16:20 - 01:15:40:24
Marty
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the I mean, that's exactly why I said like 25 cousins. We're all like brothers and sisters. Like, we leave Austin since we moved here, we've left Austin in the summer and gone to the shore where we all, my whole extended family congregates on a small barrier island. And we throw the kids in the middle of the circle.
01:15:40:24 - 01:16:12:21
Marty
There's probably an 80 person circle around the kids, and you have grandparents. My generation, our kids, like all intermingling together. It's very important, particularly for the kids to see us interacting with our parents and how it really does take a village. I mean, I think what we have is very special, something I desperately want to protect. I think other people should strive for it, but it takes the whole concept of it takes a village and really makes it very apparent in the physical world.
01:16:12:23 - 01:16:14:01
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
01:16:14:04 - 01:16:44:04
Ben
Yeah. I think that that's another thing too, of like the, the more recent like decline in the conditions of the cities that's so bad. It's like the, the large families within the cities. I mean that's such a and that's a such a cultural pillar you know that making a lot of these cities like Philadelphia, you know, making it harder for people to to thrive there, it's like they're kind of replacing the population to a large extent.
01:16:44:06 - 01:16:51:28
Marty
I don't even say mass in English where I grew up anywhere. Well, it's a Portuguese and Korean.
01:16:52:00 - 01:16:53:29
Ben
For Brazilian or they're Portuguese moving.
01:16:53:29 - 01:16:54:25
Marty
They're Brazilian.
01:16:54:27 - 01:16:58:29
Ben
Brazilian, which is Korean. Well.
01:16:59:02 - 01:17:21:27
Marty
Uh, that's why, like you mentioned, the Philadelphia's very interesting. Um, so I grew up in Northeast Philly, so not too far from where you see all the people doing track under the Frank for now. Interesting is like Frank, Fidel's always been that way. It's always been like when I grew up, my parents like, don't ride your bike past Kensington off towards towards Frankford.
01:17:22:03 - 01:17:41:28
Marty
Uh, the Frankford No, um, but now it has devolved to a certain set, particularly on the outskirts. But I don't know, Philly is considered, the shire does have these strong pillars that I don't think we'll ever, ever crumble South Philly.
01:17:42:01 - 01:17:47:28
Ben
Philly was, it's always been like fascinating to me because you can have something like boathouse row on this.
01:17:47:29 - 01:17:49:03
Ben or Marty
Google.
01:17:49:06 - 01:18:26:04
Ben
And then where I used to go to race in college at the the Danville Regatta still held on a Saturday to respect his beliefs that you shouldn't exercise on Sundays. Really cool that largest collegiate rowing competition in the country. But at the same time, like just a few miles away, staying in a hotel that had a bulletproof concierge, that's like a bunch of prostitutes standing outside that are the person who did logistics for our rowing team.
01:18:26:06 - 01:18:33:07
Ben
They fell for the fake reviews that the Indian cousins had left.
01:18:33:10 - 01:18:35:20
Ben or Marty
It's just like, Oh, this is such.
01:18:35:20 - 01:18:38:23
Ben
A cheap motel. It has a five star rating.
01:18:38:25 - 01:19:05:20
Marty
Well, it's because that's I went to high school not too far from Boathouse Row in North Philly on, um, in that that is like because you a fair amount you get your art off and you get towards North Philly towards Temple and that was a, I went to an all guys prep school and we were like in the middle of North Philly where like he had locked down for, like stray bullets that were being flung around around the neighborhood where we went to high school.
01:19:05:20 - 01:19:18:29
Marty
But you could easily walk like to boathouse row from high school. So you have this like juxtaposition of the chaos and the beauty of what was built in the previous centuries.
01:19:19:01 - 01:19:49:23
Ben
Yeah, it's it's really something. I mean, you get these glimpses of what it was like kind of before I see this in Brazil a lot like in Rio. There's a beautiful colonial architecture that's crumbling. And then like modernist, brutalist architecture, like it's more recent, but it just hasn't been well-maintained. And then like, you know, by the 2000 and tens, it's just like squalor all around that.
01:19:49:25 - 01:20:14:15
Ben
And it felt a lot like being like the barbarians living in the ruins of Rome, you know, like there's aqueducts, but no one knows how to keep them up. I don't think I don't think Philly is that far gone as Rio. But it is is interesting to be in these places where, you know it's like a lot of old nice architecture that and things get rundown.
01:20:14:17 - 01:20:44:05
Ben
You know, there hasn't been a major civic beautification movement in America since like 1920, like with the city beautiful movement. And it's it's incredible to me how many parks and museums and just great public works are from that period like that ten years of or however long it was. I think it was yeah, it was like 1922 when the Depression kind of put us put a damper on that sort of thing.
01:20:44:07 - 01:21:26:17
Ben
But so much of like what we identify as like this is what makes this city in a nice place to live or to visit or wherever was just like built during this one decade. Decade. Yeah, like this outpouring of like, you know, civic reform and beautification and yeah, when like the Mackenzie Bezos of that era, like, was not giving the money just to these communist nonprofits when they were actually, like, spinning it to build like a park in a city or museums or sculptures or whatever else you're speaking of.
01:21:26:17 - 01:21:41:03
Ben
And that kind of relates back around to Bitcoin Nashville. They have the the what they call it the big Greek temple that's right there. It's like the one in Greece. The Parthenon.
01:21:41:03 - 01:21:42:00
Marty
Parthenon.
01:21:42:02 - 01:22:04:27
Ben
Yeah, it's like a replica. The Parthenon that they decided to build, like in the early 1900s. And it's a huge statue. And I think it's Athena. But yeah, you go there and it's just it's amazing. It's like in the middle of the city, massive, grassy area and then this huge Greek temple that's in better shape than than the one in Greece.
01:22:04:29 - 01:22:33:28
Ben
Obviously, it's not as old, but you think about it like this is what people in a much poorer time like Tennessee in the early 1900s was not a particularly wealthy place. And it's like, how is it that, you know, we're on paper so much more prosperous now, but nothing like this is happening project wise? There's so few people with vision to just do anything or the mean, you know, vision and the means.
01:22:34:00 - 01:23:01:17
Ben
I think that's why, like Elon has such a big fan, you know, because it's like there's at least one guy who's still trying to do like these these wild projects and doing things like, you know, manufacturing instead of just software, you know. But, you know, I see some of our guys up and coming, like the daylight computer.
01:23:01:19 - 01:23:04:22
Marty
Yeah, the origin.
01:23:04:25 - 01:23:12:28
Ben
Not fully the Parthenon, but you can take that thing to the Parthenon and just like, you know, work from the grasses, you know, people walk around the.
01:23:12:28 - 01:23:39:28
Marty
Part then like on the on the engineering and the architecture, like shut up. Chuck Morone at Strong towns and awesome tunnel building culture and thousand year homes like there is bright spots like strong towns, I think it's probably one of the most profound books I've read in the last decade, just because it was like, Holy shit, I've never thought of like the economics of a city this way.
01:23:40:00 - 01:24:12:18
Marty
The focus that he has on revenue per square foot. And I should try to design a city physically to produce an economic outcome is like one of the biggest unlocks I've had in in recent memory. And that's the thing. It's like it's Chuck Malone. He's not Mackenzie Bezos doesn't have the the will. He can give towns like the playbook of like if you really care about the economic well-being and the esthetic nature of your city, here's here's what you can do.
01:24:12:18 - 01:24:24:20
Marty
But you got to invest. And for a lot of these smaller towns that want to become strong towns, it's a massive time investment. They simply have the capital through it. It takes time and vision and patience.
01:24:24:22 - 01:24:46:21
Ben
Yeah, you know, there are these like I see them almost as monasteries. Like there's this school down in Charleston where they still teach the classic building trades, like the artisanal, artisanal. And I, I love that it's there because I think Charleston has the best urban architecture anywhere in the country by far. No one comes close. So it's like one of the only cities that I recommend for foreigners to bother traveling to.
01:24:46:21 - 01:24:50:20
Marty
I feel lucky to have lived there for as long as I did. Yeah.
01:24:50:22 - 01:24:51:19
Ben
Amazing place.
01:24:51:19 - 01:24:59:04
Marty
You know, Scott's Irish. That's where it was. Like my family started in Mississippi and then half broke off the Charleston. Half broke up to Philly.
01:24:59:06 - 01:25:30:19
Ben
Very interesting. Yeah, I think a lot of Charleston was built by the like the Huguenots. So it's one good thing that came from persecuting the Protestants as they sent them into South Carolina. And they were really good builders. But yeah, you have like places like that. They're just, they're keeping this technology alive and like, hopefully, you know, some of the elites will start to grab onto it and you can have like another big version of like the city Beautiful movement.
01:25:30:19 - 01:26:04:12
Marty
But, but that's like, I don't know, the elites these days have terrible esthetics like Elon agree what he's doing with space X Tesla um, and all these other companies X Now I think it's ambitious, something we should be striving for. Big ideas, esthetics are terrible business. Amazon's a great company. It touches as a long term way for some cosmetically manufactured side piece that still gets like all these people, they don't have good esthetics, which is disconcerting.
01:26:04:15 - 01:26:17:29
Ben
Louis That's that's one you can mark in favor of. Trump is he has he still has every man's taste. He does He's one of the only billionaires is like the courage to have a beautiful wife.
01:26:18:01 - 01:26:20:15
Ben or Marty
It's it does.
01:26:20:15 - 01:26:36:17
Ben
Take courage to have a beautiful wife as a billionaire. They're all seeking to be like allergic to it. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's why we have to have new elites. That's why the the people in this Bitcoin office need to, you know, make a ton of money.
01:26:36:19 - 01:27:00:10
Marty
Yeah, that's what we actually just had a last month and invent bitcoin urbanism around Austin Snell from building culture come in turn to Mr. Well and that was to give a great presentation saying like if Bitcoin keeps tracking on it throughout the full monetization as it has up to this point like rent I think said right now Bitcoiners make up 1% of high net worth individuals.
01:27:00:16 - 01:27:09:15
Marty
If does another ten X will make up 10%. So on and so forth. And at some point we'll find that Bitcoin is our the majority of the high net worth individuals.
01:27:09:15 - 01:27:13:25
Ben
And what is the proper esthetic for bitcoin, though.
01:27:13:27 - 01:27:15:15
Marty
I don't mean.
01:27:15:18 - 01:27:19:10
Ben
To be mid-century modern or kind of like art deco.
01:27:19:13 - 01:27:55:19
Marty
No, not art deco. I mean I'm I'm a I'm partial towards like, like the big and terrible like the the labeling of these different architectural periods. But, um, like, I love the old stone houses in Philadelphia, like in Chestnut Hill, like by boathouse row. That esthetic for that environment is what aligns. I mean, they get a South Carolina like the colonial big tall porches that wrap around.
01:27:55:22 - 01:28:06:03
Ben
And I do want a South Carolina plantation one day with like the long row of of oaks with the Spanish moss did create the There been a Daniel Boone.
01:28:06:04 - 01:28:11:22
Marty
Plantation. Yeah that's right. On a train on Mount Pleasant outside of Charleston. Beautiful.
01:28:11:24 - 01:28:24:22
Ben
Mount Pleasant. It's very Sullivan's Island. Yeah. Love those beach houses out there at Sullivan's Island. Yeah. I like that 1930 style building on the coast is is unparalleled.
01:28:24:25 - 01:28:34:28
Marty
So we lived in Mount Pleasant and we would actually we went to church on Sullivan's Island. So beautiful. Like we would take the 30 minute drive to get a church.
01:28:35:00 - 01:28:43:25
Ben
Speaking of esthetics and South Carolina Kiawah is interesting because so much of that has been developed since the 1980s.
01:28:43:25 - 01:28:44:25
Marty
Yeah, it's a modern.
01:28:44:28 - 01:28:55:18
Ben
Yeah, but you go there and it's not like this ham handed attempt to do like the classical architecture. To me it feels like it feels pretty authentic and natural there.
01:28:55:24 - 01:29:02:19
Marty
Yeah. Because you do have those. There's the it's like the road to Cuba has like literally the oaks.
01:29:02:19 - 01:29:03:05
Ben
Yeah.
01:29:03:08 - 01:29:06:22
Marty
Going over the whole road. Know the Spanish moss falling. It's beautiful.
01:29:06:24 - 01:29:27:26
Ben
Yeah. Well one of the, one of the principles they had was like remove as few trees as possible. So even like building brand new houses, they would build decks around existing trees and so much of new development, like they just go in and clear off an entire site and then like plant, you know, trees. It'll take 70 years to mature.
01:29:27:28 - 01:29:44:17
Ben
So I think I mean, I think that's a big part of it is just the, you know, taking down as little of the mature vegetation as possible and know building around the environment rather than trying to terraform the environment to just be like a flat pad for house and yard.
01:29:44:20 - 01:30:07:14
Marty
Yeah. And there's I mean that's a lot of what we covered at the Bitcoin urbanism meet up. And then I recorded a podcast with Austin Turner, Kelly Land and after was like economic consequences this urban suburban sprawl excuse me where like you create up a shit ton of maintenance debt that will not be able to get paid back in the long run.
01:30:07:15 - 01:30:20:05
Marty
So you're literally going to have these suburban enclaves outside of city centers that are just they become the slums that the the poor people are pushed into eventually because they cannot be maintained economically.
01:30:20:13 - 01:30:42:27
Ben
I have some brothers in construction, remodeling and stuff in the suburban homes that were built like the 2000s in 2010. So like that's what keeps them in business. These things are falling apart after ten, 15 years, you know, like you have a fake stone application for chimneys that starts peeling back and you see that it's really just like, what?
01:30:42:27 - 01:31:18:17
Ben
It's like a chicken coop construction under their walls that are sprouting mushrooms because they were improperly sealed or improperly sited or. The eaves are too short and they don't shed the water far enough away to keep the walls from running. You know, substandard plywood and materials used for roofing, all this stuff. It's like it's a huge problem. We we like we adopted the Japanese model of building houses that are meant to be torn down 30 years later, but without telling the consumer that that's what we did.
01:31:18:19 - 01:31:40:03
Ben
And so by the time the average homeowner today, I feel like by the time they get done paying down their mortgage, unless they own an older home, they own a new home. And by the time they're done paying it down like the thing is pretty much ready to be replaced, just like the grade of materials. It's all this it's it's insane.
01:31:40:03 - 01:32:05:01
Ben
And then you contrast that with, like the big old houses you'll find and, you know, just about any village in western Germany that, you know, they date back to the 1100s, the year 1000 and all this. And you think like, okay, they it's expensive to build a house like that in the first place. But is it really expensive because this is going to be housing families for centuries.
01:32:05:04 - 01:32:23:11
Ben
I think I would argue our mode of development right now is the most expensive. It's not just the maintenance debt, but it's that, you know, it's like it's not going to be able to last with maintenance, even with really good maintenance anywhere nearly as long as it could if it was just like properly built from the start.
01:32:23:13 - 01:32:33:19
Marty
Which is hilarious considering the Cultural Revolution that we were probably on there. That really pushes environmentalism and.
01:32:33:21 - 01:33:16:13
Ben
Oh yeah, no, it's, it's. But you know, like they're pushing the, the new, you know, go get a new electric car. But really the most environmentally friendly thing you could do is, have an old car and repair it and, you know, have a catalytic converter on it obviously. But because of the cost of extracting all of these metals to build a truck with, it's better to, you know, if we got rid of planned obsolescence, like if that was our that should be our response to, you know, to the demands of of the environmental groups is there are really serious economic environmental issues that we're facing as a country.
01:33:16:16 - 01:33:43:18
Ben
And with a lot of the environmental movement like the hysteria and just bad policies and things that they're promoting, a lot of it's just corruption, you know, it's like a way to get federal funding for like various, you know, solar startups and whatever else. It's it's all very much grift, you know, the response to that should be like, no, this is the right way to do things.
01:33:43:18 - 01:34:08:06
Ben
But I think a lot of people, they do this like kind of knee jerk like no, you know, nothing is happening or I want to like, install the thing that causes black smoke to roll out of my, what do they call it, a coal burners, I think, or rolling coal. That's one of those things you'll see sometimes when retrofitting their pickup trucks to intentionally make them dirtier.
01:34:08:08 - 01:34:08:28
Ben or Marty
Just because.
01:34:08:28 - 01:34:09:28
Ben
It's like a middle finger.
01:34:09:28 - 01:34:10:26
Ben or Marty
To environmental.
01:34:10:26 - 01:34:36:26
Ben
It's like this is a well, this is it's a instead of just saying, you know, all right, we're not going to do Cash for Clunkers any of this stuff. We're going to, you know, give you a tax write off to restore and keep you like your old car running because it takes a lot more to build a new car than it does in terms of like the environmental cost takes a lot more to do that or for anything like refrigerators, freezers.
01:34:36:28 - 01:34:53:05
Ben
My my dad has a chest freezer. That was a wedding gift from 1967. Yeah. And the thing has been running continuously since then. Still uses it. So it's great.
01:34:53:07 - 01:35:04:23
Marty
57 years go to the bathroom and that's when you can't even buy a blender without it having to buy a new 118 months later.
01:35:04:25 - 01:35:31:03
Ben
Or a washer and dryer. I just had to replace a dryer because of not because of like any real mechanical issues, but because the motherboard on the control panel glitched out and was just like like wouldn't turn the heat on it would like. So when you turned it on like the it would start spinning but there would be no the heater wasn't turning on to heat of the other.
01:35:31:06 - 01:35:32:04
Marty
And that's just a computer.
01:35:32:04 - 01:35:42:01
Ben
Problem. That's just a computer problem. But Samsung doesn't know how to fix it. It was out of warranty, so they weren't really able to tell me anything other than.
01:35:42:01 - 01:35:43:11
Marty
I'll go get it. No, I'll.
01:35:43:11 - 01:35:57:16
Ben
Go get a new one. And so I hunted around on Craigslist, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, and I got a really old GE top loader dryer and was like, you know, I'm not touching anything digital. This thing is.
01:35:57:16 - 01:35:58:28
Marty
Like.
01:35:59:00 - 01:36:09:22
Ben
Totally, totally, you know, old school analog, working great so far. And if it breaks down, you know, I can get in and, like.
01:36:09:25 - 01:36:43:01
Marty
Fix them. Fix it. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. It's we've had to replace our washer and dryer down here already, um, which hasn't been fun. Then we almost had to replace our washer again and it was just a waterline problem. I figured out how to fix the waterline, insulate it properly. I can't. We're not buying another one of these. Yeah, So we've covered the macro and the micro of the problems that exist in our world.
01:36:43:01 - 01:36:53:19
Marty
What are you, what are you in terms of, like, actionable things that you're worried about it right now? What's your focus?
01:36:53:22 - 01:37:02:04
Ben
My focus right now is on this futurism issue. Next print edition of I am 1776.
01:37:02:06 - 01:37:09:06
Marty
Before this particular talk about this particular issue, what is I am 1776.
01:37:09:09 - 01:37:46:29
Ben
It is a online magazine slash print journal that we cover everything from, you know, commentary on economic, social, cultural, political issues to, yeah, some fun pop culture stuff and movie reviews. It's You know, it's going to be the the favored magazine of dictators and mercenaries. This some journalist once once said which I take as a great.
01:37:46:29 - 01:37:49:17
Ben or Marty
Compliment to said that I don't remember.
01:37:49:23 - 01:38:15:22
Ben
I was just one of the things I saw there was a Guardian piece done on us recently that was just really landed on thick, like we have ran an obituary when Ted Kaczynski died. That was one of the things they included for it, which I don't know. There was no like explicit call action, like, you know, send out pipe bombs in his name.
01:38:15:22 - 01:38:44:07
Ben
So I don't see what their problem was. But, you know, because it wasn't just like a blanket. Everything this man ever said was bad. And then there were critical parts of that. But they just use whatever they can cause they're because they're jealous that we get lot more views in circulation than they do. And it is hard to be I think it's hard to be in the legacy media now and see like of upcoming people like eat their lunch.
01:38:44:10 - 01:38:54:19
Marty
Or some of the upcoming people. It's the fact that it's people haven't historically or didn't go to train as a journalist. It's just people that are yeah.
01:38:54:21 - 01:39:13:03
Ben
People who have not gone through the like the authorized credentialing process and institutions and all. Well, I've seen it before when I've gotten press passes to cover other things, like they just like, look at you, like really, you know, they let you into the press.
01:39:13:06 - 01:39:43:26
Marty
And they're a dying breed. And it's let's see, I tried to touch on this earlier, but that's the other thing, like people overindexed impact that these legacy media companies have they've at some point it was it was hard to develop this prestige over time over the course of a century for a lot of them. And they're just hanging onto that prestige that was built by generations before them.
01:39:43:28 - 01:39:47:16
Ben
Yeah, I mean, they're wearing it now like a skin suit.
01:39:47:19 - 01:39:49:12
Ben or Marty
You know.
01:39:49:15 - 01:40:29:05
Ben
There's there's great history of and, you know, journalism in the 20th century. I mean, just people who found interesting things out and dug into it and all that. I think like from the forties, like up through the eighties there still that was kind of a golden age of reporting there for a while. And one of the biggest things I think we've lost and in a very negative sense when it has come to the decline and fall of the news media has been local papers because a lot of these local papers were good at that.
01:40:29:07 - 01:40:54:28
Ben
They had investigative reporters on staff. They were very good at holding local governments to account and now you see like almost none of that. You know, still it still exists for cities, but like in the places that they're not like big enough, you know, to have a dedicated newspaper anymore because people get their news from Facebook and they'll just be like Facebook groups.
01:40:54:28 - 01:41:21:04
Ben
And that kind of like serves the purpose of what things were previously. But of course, you know, it's not independent and it's not vetted like a paper. It's like any anyone can post in their, you know, which there are some benefits. But then there's other like there's reasons that you have you know, they like formal local newspapers. They could actually fact check things before they throw out the accusations and all this.
01:41:21:05 - 01:41:47:20
Ben
It's I don't know, it's like in some ways, this is new. In some ways we're just going back to like the really old model of where new newspapers in America were explicitly partizan and just like said, the most crazy like you go back to coverage of some of the early presidential races. Right. And I would be talking about how, you know, like Andrew Jackson, you know, has syphilis.
01:41:47:20 - 01:42:08:08
Ben
So like all of the snippets, like National Enquirer type headlines, you know, that was the that was the coverage or was the 1800s in American media. So I guess I guess it was just kind of like a blip that we had this kind of objective local newspaper model that existed here for a while.
01:42:08:08 - 01:42:19:05
Marty
But yeah, fast forward to six years ago. It was Trump's getting peed on by Russians, Russian strippers, completely fake.
01:42:19:07 - 01:42:30:22
Ben
Yeah, man's too much of a germaphobe for that ever happened. I mean, that's how you know it was fake. Like, if it was the other way around, you'd be like, Oh, maybe.
01:42:30:25 - 01:42:32:16
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
01:42:32:18 - 01:42:35:11
Ben
But he would not be the one getting peed on.
01:42:35:11 - 01:42:40:00
Ben or Marty
So that's like.
01:42:40:02 - 01:42:46:05
Marty
They let and they leaned into it for way too long. We're still leaning into it today. I mean, like, what's going on?
01:42:46:05 - 01:42:47:14
Ben
They wanted it to be true.
01:42:47:17 - 01:42:49:13
Marty
Yeah, because they're sick.
01:42:49:13 - 01:43:35:29
Ben
Fucks, you know, because they can't. It's easier to create, like, a caricature of your enemy that you can dismiss than it is to address, like, uncomfortable truths that you recognize as being true. So that's why you have to, like, demonize, because otherwise you just you would have to actually deal with whatever they're bringing up, which would have been like the mature thing when when Trump came up would have been for the ruling class to be like, Yeah, actually, you know, we have hollowed out vast parts of the country with these, like allowing China to, you know, do these predatory trade operations like target our furniture, our furniture industry in particular with dumping like they subsidize
01:43:35:29 - 01:44:05:28
Ben
their own factories to produce copies of white furniture makers in Virginia in North Carolina were doing. And you know, there's there were already laws on the books to prevent this sort of thing. But the Bush administration wouldn't move the litigation to the manufacturers out of kind of like 15 million for legal fees. And, you know, they won, but they didn't win like enough for it to even make it worth their while in direct victory.
01:44:06:00 - 01:44:25:19
Ben
It didn't save the furniture industry really just at that. So, like, that was the last of the industries money just went to trying to fight this feudal thing instead of like acknowledging things like that and then trying to work on them and, you know, be like, okay, you know, it's like we're we've transitioned to like this information economy.
01:44:25:19 - 01:44:37:07
Ben
How do we bring the rest of the country along with us? Right? Instead of taking that seriously, they just decided to be like, yeah, so this guy is saying these things. He was peed on by Russian hookers in the hotel.
01:44:37:13 - 01:44:51:24
Marty
And all of you people that, uh, think he's coming to help you. You're racist idiots. Um, yeah. Again, it goes back to the quality of the enemies. They're not sending their best.
01:44:51:27 - 01:44:52:15
Ben
In their best.
01:44:52:17 - 01:44:54:17
Ben or Marty
Really.
01:44:54:19 - 01:45:02:18
Marty
The only tactics they have are literally, like, grade school. Like he got peed on top. Don't deal with him.
01:45:02:21 - 01:45:20:00
Ben
Yeah, but I guess that. I guess that's like, that works on the their people that they need to propagandize maybe that's why they do the grade school stuff. Like maybe just so much of society is still adolescent. Still adolescent. Yeah.
01:45:20:00 - 01:45:22:26
Ben or Marty
Yeah. But I think it is.
01:45:22:26 - 01:45:49:14
Marty
But I think they push too far with COVID. I've seen this. My aunts. Are they coming from Philadelphia? You can imagine a lot of the people I grew up with and are related to, uh, are extremely liberal, which is the case. And I've seen just in my own circles people that I never thought would come to me and be like, Yeah, I think what you've been saying is correct.
01:45:49:16 - 01:46:12:06
Ben
You know, for me, when that happened, it wasn't just from COVID. They stayed stubborn during COVID, it was the mugshot. The mugshot when Trump brought in to I think was Fulton County really doing that was like that. That was the big change that I saw. That was like the first moment when people were like, Actually, we do have crime in the city.
01:46:12:06 - 01:46:34:01
Ben
It was weird because it was like they were they were telling me like they were sounding a lot more like me. But on these other kind of issues without even like addressing the mugshot. But I think that on some level the mugshot was this like indicator of like, no, you know, this isn't like the big, scary fascist man.
01:46:34:01 - 01:47:12:28
Ben
Like, this is like a, you know, a politician that we have just like perp walked, you know, like it became evident who really controls the power because they've always tried to, like, pretend that there's you know, someone on the right is really pulling all the strings. And it's like trying to you saw this during Trump's first term when they were wearing the robes from the that that show Handmaid's Tale is, you know, and it's also too like when you're liberals pretend to be oppressed by Christian fundamentalism, you know, like, oh, Christian fundamentals run our government.
01:47:13:00 - 01:47:20:07
Ben
Like that was, you know, during the Bush years, it was like that, you know, And so far from the truth.
01:47:20:07 - 01:47:27:13
Marty
I mean, he had that Netflix propaganda documentary on the family or whatever it was. Remember that?
01:47:27:15 - 01:47:28:00
Ben
Vaguely.
01:47:28:00 - 01:47:29:10
Ben or Marty
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:47:29:11 - 01:47:49:21
Ben
I mean, they've had so many of these I mean, these different shadowy groups like there'll be like a Catholic fraternity like Opus Day and. It sounds so you look at some of the writing in the media about it and I mean, it sounds like they're Alex Jones talking about Freemasons, you know it's like, oh, Antonin Scalia was like the member of this.
01:47:49:21 - 01:48:19:28
Ben
Like there's a secret Catholic organization and they're trying to, like, turn all women in America into baby making machines. And, you know, it's like a men's group that like, gets together of like DC professionals. You know, they're they're having coffee every Tuesday. Yeah. Yeah So, yeah, I think everyone likes on both sides. It's just this universal tendency to just invent a lot cooler enemies than they really have.
01:48:20:00 - 01:48:27:06
Marty
Maybe it's a lesson everybody needs to internalize from this conversation. The the enemies are not as.
01:48:27:06 - 01:48:29:17
Ben or Marty
Smart or.
01:48:29:20 - 01:48:32:12
Marty
Or strategic as we may think to be.
01:48:32:14 - 01:48:59:28
Ben
They're just they're people that's you know, that's one of these things that tell people, I lived in L.A. for a little while and I would run into celebrities here and there. And what had struck me at first until it just became so much of a thing that I just took it for granted then is like how much of a normal people they were?
01:49:00:00 - 01:49:00:10
Marty
Yeah.
01:49:00:16 - 01:49:10:14
Ben
You know, it's like, yeah, yeah. Ryan Gosling at the next table having brunch and he's just like talking on cell phone with somebody and he sounds like just like you're, you know, just like an average.
01:49:10:14 - 01:49:12:04
Marty
Joe Yeah.
01:49:12:07 - 01:49:13:10
Ben
Could be anybody.
01:49:13:13 - 01:49:41:20
Marty
And that's what I worked at Barstool Sports in New York for a quick minute. And that was a similar experience, like seeing all these pro athletes and celebrities come through the office and they would come to the come to the business floor and talk to people just like a normal conversation. Mm hmm. Um, you know, people are just people, but as people, there are some sociopaths out there.
01:49:41:22 - 01:50:03:11
Ben
And there are some that are exceptional, too. I mean, I met Trump once in person and the guy is like such a charmer. It's it's crazy. I was asking, like, where I'm from, you know, and then like, a link. Oh, I own a business. There. You know, it's the best in the state.
01:50:03:13 - 01:50:05:09
Ben or Marty
But but just.
01:50:05:12 - 01:50:40:19
Ben
Just such a, such a people person at a higher level. Some others I've met like some, uh, one guy. He ended up becoming the governor of Virginia. Bob McDonnell was actually prosecuted by the same prosecutor, Jack Smith, that's going after Trump now was prosecuted, was convicted, and then Supreme Court overturned it unanimously. It was a political head job because I was going to run against Obama in the second term.
01:50:40:21 - 01:51:07:12
Ben
But he could remember people's names at the state level. So I was I was pretty much a kid when I first met him and didn't see him again until like five years later when he's running for governor. And he had he remembered my name, my mom's name, knew where we were from. We were we're like 3 hours away from, you know, the place where he met us.
01:51:07:18 - 01:51:29:15
Ben
Just it was crazy to see some operate like that. And then I and if working on his campaign when he did run and he was like that all over the place, someone who just had this same like gift, but at the end of the day, it was a normal guy aside from that. So yeah, even extraordinary people are still pretty normal.
01:51:29:20 - 01:51:35:00
Marty
Yeah, that's a talent I do have. I'm terrible with names, right? With faces. Terrible.
01:51:35:00 - 01:51:40:21
Ben
Yeah. Same here. Yeah. Can't. Can't forget a face. Can't remember.
01:51:40:21 - 01:51:43:16
Ben or Marty
And that's.
01:51:43:18 - 01:51:52:27
Marty
That's something that's plagued me. And it's genetic too, cause my dad's, it was his worst treat as he cannot remember anybody's name.
01:51:52:29 - 01:51:54:29
Ben
Oh, you got it? Honest. Yeah.
01:51:55:01 - 01:52:04:22
Marty
Yeah, That's something I'm working on. That's why you need to have a good wife. You need if you can't remember names, you need to find a wife that can remember names so she can whispering in your ear right before you walk.
01:52:04:22 - 01:52:08:24
Ben
Up to somebody. It's like in the Veep. Have you seen her show?
01:52:08:24 - 01:52:10:10
Ben or Marty
Yeah, It's.
01:52:10:12 - 01:52:13:06
Ben
She's always got that assassin in there. You're like.
01:52:13:08 - 01:52:19:23
Marty
Uh, I only remember him. Um, the hell was his name in Arrested Development?
01:52:19:26 - 01:52:20:15
Ben
Oh, Buster.
01:52:20:15 - 01:52:24:18
Marty
Buster, even in Veep is Buster to be just like, Yeah.
01:52:24:20 - 01:52:28:02
Ben
He plays the same character and everything. It works.
01:52:28:04 - 01:52:32:24
Marty
Yeah. Very smooth. Fucking awesome. It's for the what? Yesterday.
01:52:32:26 - 01:52:34:24
Ben or Marty
But. Yeah. Oh, it's.
01:52:34:26 - 01:52:36:21
Marty
Sunday, right?
01:52:36:23 - 01:53:05:24
Ben
Uh, yeah, I think Sunday. Yeah. So? So also sounds great. Unless it's called. I came down here, like for the eclipse. Then everyone's in town, and then, you know, we made this happen. This wasn't on the calendar anywhere near. You know, I had already been here almost a week for then, so it's it's cool that there's such a concentration of high quality people in one city.
01:53:05:26 - 01:53:07:20
Ben
You don't see that much. Yeah.
01:53:07:22 - 01:53:25:05
Marty
Now it is something special happening here whether we have going on or bitcoin here in Pueblo, here around the corner, a huge health focused community. Many different people focus on different areas of it.
01:53:25:05 - 01:53:27:16
Ben
I feel like there's a wellness center on every corner.
01:53:27:21 - 01:53:28:12
Marty
Yeah.
01:53:28:14 - 01:53:48:08
Ben
I went to the daylight computer. They had their launches like two different ones, two totally different ones, but they were each cool in their own way. I was like, You get this like coworking space slash gym slash cold plunge slash sauna, different kind of tech launch. You know, I'm not used to like raw milk. Being in coolers.
01:53:48:11 - 01:53:49:18
Ben or Marty
Like that is like.
01:53:49:18 - 01:53:59:25
Ben
This is this is good. This is a good alignment of. Yeah. And there's like, there's other places, so many cool places like there's the comedians.
01:53:59:27 - 01:54:05:23
Marty
Rogan's motherships, two blocks away from here. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how.
01:54:06:01 - 01:54:20:28
Ben
I went to this Palladium Book Club discussion thing on Sunday. And as we were leaving the the organizer, Andrew, he was like, Yeah, this is where Elon decided to buy Twitter like the restaurant we were.
01:54:21:00 - 01:54:23:08
Ben or Marty
Of like, Whoa, wow.
01:54:23:11 - 01:54:48:20
Marty
Yeah, food scene's good here. The, uh, the health scene, it's it's great. Like, having lived outside of South Carolina, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, especially, um, you're not getting outside that much outside of spring and summer in Chicago. You're not getting outside unless it's the summer. It's, um, being able, particularly with young kids, to get outside, like in February and have it be 75 degrees.
01:54:48:27 - 01:54:51:03
Marty
It's fucking incredible, you know?
01:54:51:05 - 01:54:59:16
Ben
And you've got country music to country music. It's very important. It is? Yeah. My old neighbor moved down here to play steel guitar. Really?
01:54:59:19 - 01:55:02:14
Marty
Doing really well with it. Yeah. At the, uh.
01:55:02:16 - 01:55:10:02
Ben
What is it? Jenny's little Longhorn Saloon chicken shit. Bingo. Thing is, you know, you got to keep this city where this is.
01:55:10:05 - 01:55:14:12
Marty
We've got to Makes it special. We don't live too far from the broken, and so we'll go there.
01:55:14:14 - 01:55:15:02
Ben
On it's.
01:55:15:09 - 01:55:18:14
Marty
Terribly line dance. But the.
01:55:18:18 - 01:55:20:22
Ben
First honky tonk you ever darken the door.
01:55:20:24 - 01:55:21:20
Marty
You had the.
01:55:21:20 - 01:55:23:07
Ben
The George Strait play there back in the day.
01:55:23:11 - 01:55:40:19
Marty
Yeah. There'll be like some big exact. Brian came and played there last year at some point. That's one thing that I don't really get out. That was the great thing about Chicago. The weather and the political policies were the best, but the music was incredible.
01:55:40:19 - 01:55:46:00
Ben
Austin in some ways set me on my sort of like weird political journey.
01:55:46:02 - 01:55:46:22
Marty
Or it said that.
01:55:46:23 - 01:55:51:05
Ben
I was like a I was something of a normie believe it or not.
01:55:51:08 - 01:55:52:12
Marty
It's very hard to believe.
01:55:52:15 - 01:56:31:15
Ben
Back in the day, you know, like kind of libertarian kind of liberal, kind of conservative, just like a standard. But I was listening to Tim Ferriss, and he had Liz Lambert as a guest on, and she started a hospitality group here in Austin, started with the the, the old motel. I think that was like the Continental Summit, but it was done off self Congress like back in the nineties when it was really rough over there like renovated this motel did a documentary of like the last days of it being an operation as it was, which was like a drug den place of.
01:56:31:19 - 01:56:32:00
Marty
Barely.
01:56:32:06 - 01:57:00:21
Ben
Prostitutes and all these other people would congregate and live. But she started talking about like her design philosophy, and that turned me on to the work of Christopher Alexander with a pattern language and the timeless way of building. And so that clicked with me. So I got into like the, like good urbanism design that kind of like wrath of non.
01:57:00:23 - 01:57:06:14
Ben
And then that led me down like the rabbit hole.
01:57:06:17 - 01:57:09:22
Ben or Marty
So it's like this.
01:57:09:24 - 01:57:15:23
Ben
I'm pretty sure she's a Democrat. Yeah, it's just like spunky lesbian from Texas.
01:57:15:26 - 01:57:16:23
Ben or Marty
Certain media.
01:57:16:24 - 01:57:17:17
Ben
On this dark.
01:57:17:17 - 01:57:19:01
Ben or Marty
Path to.
01:57:19:03 - 01:57:22:12
Ben
Right wing extremism.
01:57:22:15 - 01:57:23:13
Marty
It's funny how the world works.
01:57:23:13 - 01:57:24:16
Ben
The butterfly effect.
01:57:24:19 - 01:57:28:16
Ben or Marty
It is that it's sort of.
01:57:28:18 - 01:57:45:17
Marty
The Capitol and parts of the world can recognize something like urban design, not recognize it. It takes like a certain will in a certain economic system to to make that possible. Yeah, I was like.
01:57:45:20 - 01:58:12:20
Ben
It was also a matter of timing too, I think, because I think the boutique hotel offerings like at that and that period like they weren't really thinking in the in deep terms that she was about like she would, you know be like, okay I want this, this hotel needs to have like the smell of Palo Santo in the gardens and, and creating like a multi sensorial experience for guests like that.
01:58:12:26 - 01:58:45:24
Ben
That was like light years ahead of where hoteliers were at the time at least, you know, in the states generally. And she's her doing that like it's been broadly influential I think across a lot of a lot of the industry since then like because now you'll you'll see people I'm trying to think there's this hotel in Santa monica like they have a pattern language like prominently displayed in the lobby and they're like they're doing the same thing.
01:58:45:24 - 01:59:12:11
Ben
Like, there's a lot of people, I think, who copied what Lambert and Bunkhouse Group did, ran with in some ways maybe even cooler than than what she had done. But yeah, just like the the force of will, I mean, it takes a it takes a force of will to go in and try to make a nice hotel out of a, a place that was like, you know, a monthly motel for drug addicts.
01:59:12:13 - 01:59:40:19
Ben
You know, like that's a certain like Texas counter cultural attitude there. But, you know, you run into all types down in Texas. There's there's this boutique out in Dripping Springs. I stopped by when I was out near there on a ranch, all cutting. And I was trying to locate a good belt buckle to to fit in successful. Got a really nice one with a longhorn on it.
01:59:40:21 - 02:00:07:06
Ben
But, you know, I started talking to the owner and at first, you know, and she mentioned moving from originally being from Connecticut and like, I was like, okay, these are one of these northern liberals that are moving down and turning Texas in such. I talked to her a little more and she starts going off on the FBI. It turns out she's a constitutional lawyer, you know, like hardcore gun nut.
02:00:07:08 - 02:00:08:06
Ben or Marty
And it's just you would.
02:00:08:06 - 02:00:24:23
Ben
Have never seen I think she even had like like the purple highlights and stuff. It was like she was such like a at first like to me, like look like a caricature of just like a northern liberal. And yet I talked to her a little bit. She's like completely based.
02:00:24:25 - 02:00:43:08
Marty
They never taking our guns. That was wasn't I mean, I lived down here three years ago now at this point, that was like when everybody's thinking flooding the Texas from New York and California, that's like the big worry. Like I tell people came from New York like, oh, hell no, don't fuck up the city, too.
02:00:43:10 - 02:00:55:29
Ben
And better work would be senator now if it wasn't for the blue staters. He won the native Texan vote by a few points. Native Texans hate Cruz, probably for good reasons.
02:00:56:01 - 02:00:58:25
Marty
But I don't see how even if you hate Cruz, I don't see how anybody you.
02:00:58:29 - 02:01:23:11
Ben
Know, I don't think I've ever. But I was like, the day was saved by the Californians because for all the for all the complaints about the the Californians moving in and changing things, but like, Californians understand what the stakes are because they've just lived through it. And, you know, most of the people who when people are complaining about Californians, what they really mean is like Midwesterners who lived in California for a few years.
02:01:23:14 - 02:01:24:12
Marty
Really?
02:01:24:14 - 02:01:51:29
Ben
Yeah. Yeah. The the native Californians themselves, they, by and large, don't leave the state very high numbers. And when they do, they're it's because they're like hardcore conservatives and like, they don't want their kids to get any vaccines or go to any school. So I go to Texas or something and they're like grandkids of the dustbowl migrants. So it's kind of just like returning to Texas.
02:01:52:01 - 02:02:23:01
Ben
Yeah, or Oklahoma or Arkansas. But yeah, I mean, culturally, a lot of California is really similar to Texas because there are so many Texans and Oklahomans that came there during the Depression to pick cotton, including some of my family, that, yeah, it's like very strong Texas feel there. You know, it's like Mariposa County and the foothills of the Sierras and Central Valley and all that.
02:02:23:04 - 02:02:27:11
Marty
Yeah, Yeah. It's a shame what's happening to that great state.
02:02:27:13 - 02:02:30:06
Ben
Yeah, it's. We're going to take it back.
02:02:30:09 - 02:02:32:01
Marty
We are. What's the point and tell you about.
02:02:32:04 - 02:03:10:18
Ben
All the plan starts with the water cycle. Like California's out of drought. Now. So I have this theory that California's fortunes rise and fall with the rain. And so California's on a 35 year water cycle, doesn't deviate that much from it. John Steinbeck described it really beautifully. I think it was in the opening to East of Eden. But, you know, you get like ten really good years, ten kind of middle years, and then like ten really rough years and said the one thing that's true is that no one remembers the good years during the bad years.
02:03:10:19 - 02:03:50:11
Ben
No one remembers the bad years in the good years. But my theory is, is because this water cycle, like you can graze a lot more cattle, grow a lot more crops, that sort of thing. Once you're in the good part of the cycle and that changes the balance power in the state, relative rural and urban. And so like the years when the ranchers and all are doing well, that tends to be and I've looked at this kind of through the political history, that tends to be when you have like this kind of reactionary renaissance and then, you know, in the hard years when things dry up, it's like the the people out in the rural
02:03:50:11 - 02:03:54:07
Ben
areas, they don't have as much power because they don't have as much money.
02:03:54:11 - 02:03:54:19
Marty
Yeah.
02:03:54:25 - 02:04:02:27
Ben
And, you know, a balance of power just kind of swings back and forth a little bit. It's there's a little esoteric mysticism to this, but.
02:04:03:00 - 02:04:04:01
Ben or Marty
I didn't realize.
02:04:04:05 - 02:04:04:25
Ben
A manifesting.
02:04:04:25 - 02:04:07:03
Marty
It. I didn't realize they had a water cycle that was.
02:04:07:06 - 02:04:32:10
Ben
Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, now like there's well before last spring people were talking as if like this the drought was just going to end everything. And, you know, the whole, the whole state was in drought. Everything was like state of emergency. There's no water that you can turn on. Like farmers were just not able to plant near as much.
02:04:32:10 - 02:04:52:01
Ben
It was it was causing really serious headaches and it was getting to the point where there's concern that there might not be enough water for the cities and like to Colorado for Colorado River, for instance, that it's incredibly dry. So it's not like you could even bring it in from neighboring states. It's all across the west, huge drought problem.
02:04:52:03 - 02:05:21:04
Ben
And since then. The like starting the last spring, it's just been like torrential rains. It rains later into the year. There's a lot more snowpack. So like here a month or so ago, Lake Tahoe got like 12 feet. You know, like the thing that they used to measure the snow got buried. So just unprecedented levels. And that snowpack is what keeps the lakes wet all summer.
02:05:21:04 - 02:05:51:04
Ben
And also that was last spring. And they were saying, okay, well, this was like a one off. This might save California for ten years. And then this one or the same thing starts happening all over again. And they had these atmospheric rivers, they call them the Pineapple Express from like in the vicinity of Hawaii. And it was like, if you look at it on a film, what was happening on a weather map was literally like there was a river running in the atmosphere from way out in the Pacific directly into California.
02:05:51:04 - 02:06:11:20
Ben
So large parts of the national park Death Valley are inaccessible because the roads got washed out. A lot of it is there's like a big lake out there. Like the like what was, you know, the driest the low spot in North America, actually, like maybe in the world I'm on. It is Death Valley the worst in the world.
02:06:11:23 - 02:06:13:00
Marty
Baby.
02:06:13:02 - 02:06:27:12
Ben
It's either there, the Dead Sea, but it's pretty close. Totally like filled up with water. I mean, remember last year, Burning Man? Yeah, right. Burning Man got rained out in August. Yeah. And like.
02:06:27:14 - 02:06:32:10
Marty
It was spreading. Ebola was spreading to us.
02:06:32:11 - 02:06:33:29
Ben or Marty
The best rumor.
02:06:34:01 - 02:06:34:26
Ben
Diplo.
02:06:34:28 - 02:06:42:06
Marty
Diplo is bringing Ebola back to the masses. Number eight. Number eight. Death Valley is the eighth lowest.
02:06:42:08 - 02:06:48:23
Ben
So lowest in America then. But, you know, America is the country that counts.
02:06:48:25 - 02:06:49:26
Ben or Marty
It's our world.
02:06:49:27 - 02:06:50:14
Ben
You know.
02:06:50:14 - 02:06:53:16
Ben or Marty
Like it can be.
02:06:53:18 - 02:07:04:11
Marty
I'm worried bad about that. I'm look it out. I'm worried that this anarchy or narco tyranny is going to take over. But maybe I worry too much.
02:07:04:13 - 02:07:34:20
Ben
I, I mean, things can always get worse on the bright side, but, you know, things get worse until they stop getting worse. And I think we're we're at a point where I think we're kind of heading critical mass, but it's just like there's a number of things that I think have to go, you know, either I'd say in either direction, but it's not even so as like things have to come in our direction is just like we need to not make unforced errors.
02:07:34:23 - 02:07:35:17
Ben
Yeah.
02:07:35:20 - 02:07:58:14
Marty
And I was be a bit facetious. I'm actually very optimistic, particularly because I think actually it's funny, The guy I was talking to when I went to grab you at the front door, it's what we were talking about for the last couple of hours before you showed up was this intersection of the Bitcoin mining world, the energy sector.
02:07:58:17 - 02:08:35:08
Marty
I don't think people understand how profound that is because it's probably one of the weakest layers of our economy right now is the energy infrastructure, how fragile it is, how uneconomical it was made via the renewable energy credits like Bitcoin mining is breathing very strong life back into the energy sector, and the energy companies are beginning to realize, and I think in terms of this is something I've been telling people in the industry who are going to start their own, uh, policy initiatives.
02:08:35:10 - 02:08:36:10
Ben
Um.
02:08:36:12 - 02:09:02:11
Marty
PACs, whatever it may be, to influence policy pertaining to Bitcoin in DC is stop wasting your time, money and effort doing that. Just make sure that Bitcoin mining is as integrated into the energy sector as much as possible, because once becomes a critical part of their operational and business stack. There's no turning back, right? Like energy is the base of everything we do in an economy.
02:09:02:11 - 02:09:19:11
Marty
And if you get the energy sector and the energy sector saying, no, you can't take Bitcoin away from us, it is allowing us enabling us to remain profitable, not only remain profitable, but expand the infrastructure make it more reliable and robust. There's no turning back.
02:09:19:14 - 02:09:24:12
Ben
How do you use your Bitcoin miners to hear infrared solar?
02:09:24:14 - 02:09:26:09
Marty
Not yet. Not yet.
02:09:26:10 - 02:09:28:08
Ben
Is a free startup idea out there.
02:09:28:09 - 02:09:35:05
Marty
Oh, those people were I mean, you know that that spawned Brooklyn to do with the pools at least. Oh yeah.
02:09:35:07 - 02:09:36:28
Ben
It's yeah I did hear.
02:09:36:28 - 02:09:45:12
Marty
About that my bitcoin miners are off grid in Appalachia in the woods Nice of Tennessee I'm stranded natural gas. Well.
02:09:45:14 - 02:09:55:14
Ben
I've always liked the idea of putting them down into like a coal mine, just like buying a coal mine and converting it into Bitcoin. It's like a place to do it for somebody.
02:09:55:14 - 02:09:59:07
Marty
You can talk about this right outside the store.
02:09:59:09 - 02:09:59:15
Ben
Yes.
02:09:59:21 - 02:10:05:04
Marty
We're going to restore all the coal mines in all the coal power facilities in Wyoming.
02:10:05:06 - 02:10:06:06
Ben
Very nice.
02:10:06:09 - 02:10:10:10
Marty
Very Turner spin up all all the power generation that weekend.
02:10:10:12 - 02:10:39:05
Ben
Speaking of power, you know, there's some moves towards building some new geothermal power down in El Salvador. Really exciting stuff like the harnessing harnessing the power of the volcanoes and mining is would be like a big part of that. But I didn't realize just how and how critical it was for aluminum production, like aluminum smelting that the prices be consistent.
02:10:39:08 - 02:11:04:10
Ben
It's not so much about high or low. It's just like the instability of of them and how consistent geothermal is. It's it's really exciting like how the output of the power stations that were built before in El Salvador from geothermal they're still putting out as much as they did in the seventies. And like the cost are just so fixed.
02:11:04:10 - 02:11:36:18
Ben
It's it's really incredible, you know, because like normally the there's so much fluctuation and you know, I think there's a big opportunity there. And then in geothermal and also, you know, like up up around like the Yellowstone Basin and other areas in the U.S. that have geothermal potential to do like men, you know, power for manufacturing in particular, where it's so predictable, you can do like long term planning with confidence.
02:11:36:20 - 02:11:48:28
Ben
It's just a really neat thing that appeals to me, especially considering how much instability there has been and other energy markets price wise. You know, we've just gone through this Whiplash is like with with oil and gas.
02:11:49:00 - 02:12:18:28
Marty
Oil, gas, the new renewable energy credits are really fucking up energy markets even here in Texas. Thank God for all the Bitcoin mining in West Texas. It's really helping to alleviate the negative pricing problem that all this renewable infrastructure buildout has brought to the market. But going back to geothermal in Yellowstone, one can make a very strong case that it is in the best interests of humanity overall to depressurize that caldera to make sure it doesn't explode into the super volcano.
02:12:18:28 - 02:12:23:08
Marty
So you need to channel that energy produce electricity. My bitcoin was a.
02:12:23:11 - 02:12:42:26
Ben
Have you ever seen the Haqqani tweet? I was saying pray towards continue to pray towards Yellowstone, focus on the Caldera. We can end it here. We can end it for all time. One of my favorite niche internet subgroups is the the called the Oracle. Like this.
02:12:42:26 - 02:12:44:29
Marty
I have not stumbled across like.
02:12:45:02 - 02:12:58:02
Ben
A apocalyptic end times anarcho primitivist you know, Ted Kaczynski posters and they've probably all grown up by now. I don't see as much of it as before, but It's one of those things like 2016. There was just a lot more.
02:12:58:02 - 02:12:59:05
Marty
Of focus on the.
02:12:59:09 - 02:13:08:06
Ben
Really, really weird niche ideologies that are incredibly appealing, even like there would be no particular reason to.
02:13:08:09 - 02:13:09:14
Ben or Marty
It's like.
02:13:09:17 - 02:13:13:25
Ben
Building a political movement around, like praying to the Yellowstone.
02:13:13:25 - 02:13:17:18
Ben or Marty
Volcano to get to blow up and destroy.
02:13:17:18 - 02:13:18:18
Marty
The set of our misery.
02:13:18:20 - 02:13:20:14
Ben
This is how we in the Fed.
02:13:20:16 - 02:13:21:02
Ben or Marty
It's the cult.
02:13:21:03 - 02:13:22:27
Ben
This is the caldera they call.
02:13:22:27 - 02:13:32:23
Marty
They're this, uh, it's just focused on the cult. There's the, uh. Do you think we'll in the Fed, in our lives.
02:13:32:25 - 02:13:35:23
Ben
That your hopes will.
02:13:35:25 - 02:13:36:12
Marty
I so.
02:13:36:14 - 02:13:37:21
Ben
I think so.
02:13:37:24 - 02:13:39:05
Marty
I think so too.
02:13:39:08 - 02:13:52:09
Ben
Yeah. I don't know. I think, I think next year with the fiscal situation like this, this might finally be the, the point where something happens.
02:13:52:11 - 02:13:53:03
Marty
I mean, or.
02:13:53:03 - 02:13:55:25
Ben
Just nothing happens and we go another.
02:13:55:27 - 02:13:58:12
Ben or Marty
50 years. I have.
02:13:58:15 - 02:14:07:10
Marty
But and I've been wrong before. But it seems if you just look at the chart of the interest expense on the debt alone, it's literally hockey stick. It's like.
02:14:07:12 - 02:14:09:09
Ben
Well, the thing for me that.
02:14:09:11 - 02:14:12:25
Marty
The left side of the bell curve to me is just like, that's not going to work.
02:14:12:28 - 02:14:20:13
Ben
The the biggest thing for me is is not even like the I mean I mean, that's a big part of it, but.
02:14:20:15 - 02:14:21:14
Marty
The unfunded side.
02:14:21:15 - 02:14:47:19
Ben
It's the military problem. It's what the Houthies did like showing that they could defy the US military and that our kinetic options sucked like we were not able to wipe them off the map. That as an indicator of like the U.S. may not Taliban up. Yeah. You know if we can't back up like control of global shipping like that's that's a big problem.
02:14:47:19 - 02:15:38:22
Ben
I when it comes to the cause that's that's what props up the dollars we have the military power to back it up. Yeah you know it's not totally fiat but it's it's based off of having a military that isn't insane. Force action. And the military the defense industry has become so bloated. Um, I talked to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, about this back in December, did an interview for the site and, you know, just like the cost of these cruise missiles that were launching, like the Houthis like that a lot, the interceptor missiles in Israel, you know, that was a big problem going into this, was that before even before October 7th, it was
02:15:38:22 - 02:16:08:17
Ben
like the periodic rocket barrages that Hamas and other groups would send into Israel. They were like sheep rockets. But you have you had to use this like $2 million piece of ammunition to bring it down, you know, And the strategy wasn't to like actually overwhelm Israel with the rockets. The strategy was just to hurt their budget, you know, and ours by extension, because we underwrote a lot of that.
02:16:08:19 - 02:16:44:24
Marty
And then you I had this ex intelligence advisor on last year, Lisa Slusher, and he was explaining to me like what's going like the arming of Ukraine is completely depleting our mission base. And the thought I mean, there was it's not as pronounced as it was this time last year, but the saber rattling around Taiwan and the idea that we could fight Russia and China and Ukraine and Taiwan, um, same time it's like it's objectively idiotic there's no not enough ammunition.
02:16:44:24 - 02:16:53:20
Marty
We don't have the training to fight on those terrains and we don't have the recruitment necessary to actually get feet on the ground.
02:16:53:23 - 02:17:15:10
Ben
Germany had better tanks or too they had better armor on them. They move faster. All these, you know, inspects. They just they blew us of the water. But we could produce 20 times as many of them for much cheaper than than the German tyrant. And that's that's how we won World War Two. But we don't have that kind of manufacturing capacity anymore.
02:17:15:17 - 02:17:19:09
Marty
It wasn't Napoleon. So quantity has a quality of its own. Yeah.
02:17:19:11 - 02:17:57:23
Ben
It has a quality of its own. Yeah. So that's I mean, there the argument for arming Ukraine has kind of been, well, this is how we get that manufacturing restarted, but that would require us like abandoning a lot of ideologies and going back to more meritocratic earlier attitude in America towards business and stuff. But then at the same time, like you can't just put everything back together again after deindustrialization because like so many of the workers have lost the skills, like just the human capital element.
02:17:57:25 - 02:18:21:24
Marty
You know, the competency crisis is pretty massive, though, that you're seeing with Boeing. Is that just everything we're seeing from Boeing is that confirmation bias that's been going on for a while, or are these anomalies not anomalies? But is there a true trend of the commercial airline force completely degrading in front of our eyes?
02:18:21:25 - 02:18:37:02
Ben
Well, another example of this was I started noticing a pattern of big fires and accidents at food processing plants I put together.
02:18:37:02 - 02:18:38:23
Marty
I think that's why I started following Red.
02:18:38:23 - 02:19:01:00
Ben
Yeah. Now people took it and ran with it and said that like this was a proof that the World Economic Forum was planning starve us out or something. And, you know, I mean, I was taking hits for that kind of stuff. I'm like, Oh, you're promoting conspiracy. I was like, I have not said why it is. I'm just pointing out, okay, this other, you know, yet another thing has happened, you know, not making any claims.
02:19:01:00 - 02:19:24:25
Ben
But then the more I looked into it, you know, the more Kim became convinced. Okay, this is obviously not some deliberate plot, but something's happening here. What's going on? And because that had blown up and got become so prominent, some of the people who had like firsthand knowledge of what was going on actually DM'd me telling me, hey, this is what was going on.
02:19:24:28 - 02:19:53:02
Ben
And overwhelmingly what it was was that it was COVID that wasn't the virus making the factories catching fire, but it was the way we responded to the virus. So much of the workforce like went home during that. And basically the people who stayed and kept the lights on were doing these super heroic jobs to keep the food being processed.
02:19:53:02 - 02:20:21:24
Ben
Right? Yeah, keeping the lights on. But then the companies were like, Oh, cool, we can actually like get this productivity output with a lower with lower labor costs. Let's go tell the investors this is awesome. You know, profits stocks a without taking into account that these people could not like do the heroics forever. Yeah and a lot of them were baby boomers.
02:20:21:27 - 02:20:46:23
Ben
They're already older workers. They knew they had the knowledge of this is how we maintain things. This is how we would do it analog If the digital goes down. You know, we had this accident back in 1985. This is how we keep it from happening again. All this, you know, core build up knowledge. And they were sort of burning out left and right around a year, year and a half into this.
02:20:46:26 - 02:21:16:14
Ben
And so they started dropping out and the positions would be backfilled with people who had like no knowledge of the factory or how it ran and all this. So then suddenly accidents started happening. It's very much like the last like the last half of Atlas Shrugged. Right? You just started getting this breakdown. Yeah. I mean, that's I think that novel, like, more, more people should read it.
02:21:16:14 - 02:21:29:23
Ben
It was a big thing. People were reading a lot of around like thousand ten or so to the last recession. But I think it is actually more applicable today. It's like the competency crisis and what's going on. Oh, you've got it right there. Amazing.
02:21:29:25 - 02:22:06:20
Marty
Yeah. Yeah. What's that? So if it's just abject loss of knowledge in a particular spot, so like, so like the Francis Scott Key Bridge, similar stories. Nobody did read directly, but a friend of mine who I trust spoke to somebody with knowledge of the shipping use, shipping fleets and how they operate, particularly in the U.S. within a certain vicinity of the coast.
02:22:06:20 - 02:22:41:20
Marty
And apparently there was a policy put in place that if you're within a certain amount of miles from the coast in the U.S. or a port in the U.S., you have to switch your engines like a sulfur based fuel. And that makes the reliability of the combustion and reduces reliability of the combustion. And so the source basically told my buddy, like, yeah, what happened most likely was that they switched to the sulfur fuel and they just like it reduced the reliability of the engine and it crapped out like the absolute worst time.
02:22:41:20 - 02:22:43:01
Ben
Is that for, like, emissions?
02:22:43:01 - 02:22:51:13
Marty
Yeah. Okay. Wow. Around like they don't want emissions in urban environments. Yeah. Cleaner air. Something like that.
02:22:51:15 - 02:23:18:11
Ben
No. Yeah. You look into, you look into big accidents and like these end up being the things and it's no, it's, you know, more insidious a way than if it was part of the big WEF plot. Right. Because it's just these like poorly thought out, you know, it's like you, you said, I always know some some bad news is coming when I hear there was a policy put in place teams immediately proceed Disaster.
02:23:18:13 - 02:23:24:15
Marty
Yeah, yeah. Renewable energy, credit policy.
02:23:24:18 - 02:23:28:01
Ben
Uh, it's led to central planning.
02:23:28:06 - 02:23:28:29
Marty
Central planning.
02:23:28:29 - 02:23:37:02
Ben
It's. And is it, is it that we are actually losing the knowledge or is it the knowledge is being destroyed by central planning. I mean I think.
02:23:37:05 - 02:23:38:06
Marty
Whether it's conscious or.
02:23:38:08 - 02:24:12:23
Ben
A refer people a lot of times to the create fear Hayek article pretty short, but if you tell people to read it until you realize it's one of the most brilliant things ever written. But he talks about how it's like the particular knowledge, time and place and how that's like accessible to individuals, and it's like they can't even really fully express why they know something or it's like he's saying, like, this is stuff that, you know, will never be accessible to the central planners, but it's coordinated via the price mechanism, right?
02:24:12:23 - 02:24:40:00
Ben
I don't need to know why there is a shortage of aluminum. I don't even need to know that there's a shortage of aluminum. But I will respond to prices and take my scrap aluminum, you know, to a junk dealer if the price gets like high enough to motivate me to do that. He talks about how it's this thing it's like it's it's clean because it's like it allows information information to be transmitted efficiently.
02:24:40:02 - 02:25:09:01
Ben
It would be inefficient for me to have to know why aluminum shorted you know, why the aluminum price was high, right? The only thing that matters, the only piece of information that matters is the price and how in a price activity in that way. And the reason why like this is why you do not mess with prices, price systems and what is what is it by messing with price systems, when you inject how much liquidity in.
02:25:09:01 - 02:25:10:04
Ben or Marty
2020.
02:25:10:07 - 02:25:11:10
Marty
Six through six.
02:25:11:10 - 02:25:22:17
Ben
Trillion dollars? Yeah, the I think M2 money supply grew by what's the figure? It's like 48% of all dollars have been.
02:25:22:17 - 02:25:24:00
Marty
Minted in the last three years.
02:25:24:00 - 02:25:24:14
Ben
Three years.
02:25:24:19 - 02:25:48:08
Marty
Or so years. Now you go back into what I economics at college and that's why I fell down, not because I studied economics, I studied economics was brain were attempted. They attempted to brainwash me the Keynesian view, but Luckily, I had a good professor in high school. It was like, gentlemen, like the Austrian views, right? Like, you should go study that where you can.
02:25:48:14 - 02:26:23:20
Marty
So read about it independently. And basically, like early on in my Bitcoin journey, it was like running the numbers of monetary base from literally from 1776 to 2008. The monetary base expanded from $0 850 billion to 120 odd years to go from 0 to 850 billion Posto eight went from 850 billion to 6 trillion like in the matter of two years.
02:26:23:20 - 02:26:32:06
Marty
Now fast forward to where we are. It's above 20 trillion. Yeah, complete insanity, very short amount of time.
02:26:32:08 - 02:26:44:12
Ben
And it doesn't just affect us we're because that's the reserve currency of the world we are pushing this all on everyone else. And I mean I think that's a big cause of the international instability we see.
02:26:44:14 - 02:26:45:01
Ben or Marty
Yeah.
02:26:45:03 - 02:26:55:03
Ben
It's like, you know how in crazy inflation drives people and then like you put that on the rest of the world and it's things are dire, you know.
02:26:55:07 - 02:27:20:16
Marty
So that's why think Bitcoin is an paradise. You get the sound money back. And then again, the still people have really not grasped beauty of the intersection of Bitcoin mining and the energy sector. The fact that you can there's no such thing as stranded energy anymore if you have the wherewithal, it's a pricing signal. You literally have this free energy that's stranded.
02:27:20:16 - 02:27:41:14
Marty
For my personal miners, it's they're sitting on a stranded natural gas. Well, they had no pipeline connectivity, get to bed stream to get to the rest of the market. We bought a generator, a data center, mining equipment, went to the landowner, said, hey, your wells are being maintained. Well, pay your land lease for the year. Let us plug our generator into your gas line and buy bitcoin you like.
02:27:41:14 - 02:27:46:10
Marty
Sure, mining is very cheap there. It's amazing this exists everywhere.
02:27:46:17 - 02:27:47:05
Ben
Yeah.
02:27:47:07 - 02:28:17:06
Marty
But only in Appalachia, across the world. And again, going back to energy is the basis of everything we do in our economy. The fact that you have this free market monetization of energy that is location agnostic is increased. You don't only bring sound money to the, but you bring a bootstrapping mechanism for energy systems around the world where you have a purchaser of that energy, a first resort and last resort that can bootstrap up a local energy economy.
02:28:17:08 - 02:28:20:10
Ben
That's great and it puts places like Appalachian back in the game.
02:28:20:15 - 02:28:21:10
Marty
Yeah.
02:28:21:12 - 02:28:34:03
Ben
You know, instead of like our financialized economy, it just becomes what's what are the financial pillars of the country, right, in New York, San Francisco and sort of thing. It brings it back to brings it back to the core.
02:28:34:06 - 02:28:56:26
Marty
It's reversing trillions dilemma in real time. I mean, that off grid examples is just one example, like a part of a mining company that's doing all grid operations in Appalachia in the same area as well. And basically what we do is we go to substations that were previously the delivering electricity to large manufacturing facilities that have moved out long ago, decades ago.
02:28:57:00 - 02:29:19:05
Marty
So they're sitting with these substations with excess capacity that has been utilized in over a decade. We say, hey we'll buy you can get TVA to deliver you more electricity, fully utilize the substation. We'll buy the rest of that electricity. And since TVA operates in a utility co op with a mandate to keep prices low, they buy energy in bulk at lower prices.
02:29:19:05 - 02:29:41:11
Marty
Then they pass that down to residential consumers. Utilities more profitable. They can their transmission lines or substations, whatever it may be. And so the only the narrative problem the big winners have to worry about is like, oh, this is job creation. It doesn't that many jobs yet, but it can bring revenue and to utilities that will allow them to reinvest in tax revenue eventually.
02:29:41:11 - 02:29:44:21
Marty
Then you can figure out how to bring jobs that on the back end.
02:29:44:23 - 02:30:04:16
Ben
I, I am very much against job creation. I am fully med pilled. I don't I don't like having a job particularly. I don't like working. I am pro wealth creation. I want the bitcoin miners to, you know, pay for my robots that I.
02:30:04:20 - 02:30:06:29
Ben or Marty
Could do.
02:30:07:01 - 02:30:18:00
Ben
That would be I, I don't yeah, I mean, I understand where people are coming from. So all the jobs we that's how they provide and all that, I get the importance of that. But so many of these jobs.
02:30:18:06 - 02:30:18:21
Marty
Are mine.
02:30:18:21 - 02:30:35:11
Ben
Are mindless and it's like they're actively I think they're actively like destroying a lot of people. All right. So especially with the, you know, the whole thing, like working inside under under fluorescents.
02:30:35:14 - 02:31:03:21
Marty
As we sit right now, That's what radicalized me towards Bitcoin, too. I was working at a at a fund. It was great. I love the people I worked with. It was very interesting job. I got to learn a lot at a very young age. But the literal physical aspect of sitting a cube punching Excel functions and just staring at a computer, pulling data from Bloomberg, crunching it, passing it every day, writing commentary every once in a while, just like God.
02:31:03:21 - 02:31:07:29
Marty
This is so sucky. Yeah, humans were not meant to do that.
02:31:08:01 - 02:31:14:21
Ben
I meant to do that at all. We were meant for cool stuff like the eclipse.
02:31:14:23 - 02:31:15:08
Ben or Marty
I love.
02:31:15:08 - 02:31:37:18
Ben
I love the people's reactions to it. You know, some people started cheering, some people were. Yeah, I felt moved by it. It was like a very spiritual experience to me. It was like, you know, witnessing this show put on by God and just, just still an absolute all. And we're very blessed to like the clouds move just in time, right?
02:31:37:20 - 02:31:59:05
Ben
And we still had just like a little bit of cloud cover certain moments during it that you could look at it with all the glasses and see some of the colors. That was really cool. I was like green and fuchsia. These different colors coming from the side when I'm reaching for totality like a real American patriot. I did stare at a bear.
02:31:59:06 - 02:32:21:18
Marty
I did as well. And we I was at my house, my front yard, my older son, my youngest son napped. This is nap time as totality hit. So he was napping. My wife, my oldest and our neighbors were out in the front yard. It was it was cool to see the four year old react to it because we got him all jacked up about like the moon is going to cover the sky.
02:32:21:18 - 02:32:41:05
Ben
And he the crickets started chirping. The buzzards were like coming out from the trees and flying. There was a car like streaking up. We're kind of like on this prominent point so you could like look down in the hill country and see one lone road sinking. I'm in this car just like fly it up almost like what they what the lights on and all.
02:32:41:05 - 02:32:50:22
Ben
It was just like all of a sudden it just felt like the world was like, gripped this. You know, the while this was set up, it was quite an.
02:32:50:22 - 02:33:06:24
Marty
Experience, was crazy seeing it. And we it was probably, I imagine, was cloudy or we were. But likewise, we had this moment of where it wasn't completely cloudless, but it was thin enough. The clouds rested enough that you could see like without like using the glasses.
02:33:06:24 - 02:33:07:09
Ben
See.
02:33:07:09 - 02:33:12:15
Marty
Totality. It was like this ominous black hole looked like a portal.
02:33:12:19 - 02:33:26:27
Ben
I had also got the ideal idea right before, as we were approaching full totality that the that I should utilize the Bluetooth speaker from the campfire the night before. So I put on the 2001 space theme.
02:33:27:00 - 02:33:28:04
Marty
We were listening to.
02:33:28:04 - 02:33:29:26
Ben or Marty
A ritual or else.
02:33:29:28 - 02:33:39:14
Marty
We realize, Oh no, we were listening to a What the fuck is Dave? David Bowie's Space Odyssey.
02:33:39:16 - 02:33:45:10
Ben
Another great one. Yeah. During part of it also played out Total Eclipse of the Heart.
02:33:45:16 - 02:34:01:01
Marty
So it was a great day. It was. It was hilarious to watch. That's how you know, you have to get off social media like the two week lead up of the theories around the eclipse and.
02:34:01:03 - 02:34:01:17
Ben
Oh yeah.
02:34:01:24 - 02:34:04:15
Marty
Certain running at the same time the portals opening.
02:34:04:18 - 02:34:26:03
Ben
While they turn it turned out they turned. Cernan I think Friday afternoon I was, Wow, something has happened. I feel like I'm losing my mind. And then I realize I hadn't drink coffee all day and I had just drank a four shot latte. Oh, it's the caffeine returned to my brain. Now, some of that is, you know, some of the stuff is fun.
02:34:26:03 - 02:34:49:05
Ben
I like I like it for the posting aspect, but didn't like people start taking it really seriously. It there has been some effect like some people lot of people just like started acting kind of crazy in the days leading up to it. But yeah, I don't know if that was just like the mimetic aspect of, of that itself or, you know, it just making them kind of emotional on the one hand.
02:34:49:05 - 02:35:13:17
Ben
But like people I knew it was just like behaving a little out of sorts. You saying things that wouldn't say otherwise or this or that. But it's weird. And I was I was like, no, this is the this is really the time. Because, like, the last eclipse was the one that ushered in like the crazy years. So maybe this is like the undoing of it or something.
02:35:13:20 - 02:35:15:25
Marty
We're in the Age of Aquarius now.
02:35:15:27 - 02:35:44:13
Ben
So right away it's whatever you believe is like, whatever will happen. So you think it's better to take these celestial events and like the best possible spin on it as a you know, it's a time of rebirth and, you know, you can now change anything or let things go that, you know, longer serve you. You're instead of psyching yourself out, which if you do it, I am a great believer in in manifestation.
02:35:44:17 - 02:35:49:26
Ben
If you intensely believe that something bad is going to happen, something bad will happen.
02:35:49:28 - 02:35:57:19
Marty
You know, Alternatively, if you intend to believe that you're going to make the world a better place, maybe you can maybe fix the money, you can fix the world. If you believe in art above all.
02:35:57:21 - 02:36:02:04
Ben
Else, to save you, fix the lighting of the world. That's true. So what on John's trying to do with that?
02:36:02:06 - 02:36:03:21
Ben or Marty
Yeah. Like you.
02:36:03:28 - 02:36:06:23
Ben
I'm going to send you guys some incandescent bulbs.
02:36:06:23 - 02:36:16:29
Marty
So thank you. I mean, we have these here. They're not bright enough. I could turn these down. Yeah.
02:36:17:01 - 02:36:22:07
Ben
That was the real reason I didn't want to do video, but a chance this actually worked.
02:36:22:08 - 02:36:37:02
Marty
Wasn't that I turned it down. Yeah, you can. You can believe the world is going to be a better place and that you can affect change in that world. Or you can believe the Patriots are in control and in front on that rabbit hole and hope that somebody else will fix it for you. The Patriots will.
02:36:37:02 - 02:36:37:16
Ben
Fix it for.
02:36:37:16 - 02:36:38:23
Ben or Marty
You.
02:36:38:25 - 02:36:51:10
Ben
Well, if you believe if you do believe the Patriots in control, you should be the Patriots. Who's in control? Yes. Of. Yeah, that's a good note to lead. Leave it off. Actually know be a patriot in control.
02:36:51:11 - 02:36:54:20
Marty
Be a patriot and control until next time, fix peace, love. Thank.
