BTC117: Bitcoin and the Start of the Information Era w/ Luke Broyles

BTC117: Bitcoin and the Start of the Information Era w/ Luke Broyles

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[00:00:52] Preston Pysh: Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I’m here with Luke. Luke, welcome to The Investor’s Podcast and the Bitcoin Fundamentals Show. [00:00:59] Luke Broyles: Thank you very much. It’s quite an honor to be here. [00:01:02] Preston Pysh: Great to have you. So you’re making a splash online, and my goodness, I found a couple of your threads on Twitter and was just kind of blown away at the content and the thought that you’re putting together and, and putting out there.

[00:01:17] Preston Pysh: So I figured it would be, it’d be great to bring you on the show and just learn more about you and who you are. So start off there and, and tell us a little bit about yourself. [00:01:26] Luke Broyles: Well, thanks. As, as we were just talking before we started recording, you’re one of the people that I really wanted to talk to, just cuz your background and everything.

[00:01:32] Luke Broyles: I’ve, I’ve loved your podcast for a long time, so it’s like, it’s, I’m so excited to be here. Yeah, who am I? Where did I come from? I’m completely shocked with how much attention my threads have gotten online. Thus far. I’ve only posted two and the first one I posted not expecting much and it went pretty much viral, more or less instantly. [00:01:51] Luke Broyles: Like same day. Like I wasn’t planning it at all. I, in, in retrospect, you know, I had typos in it. I was like, oh, no, . I, I couldn the perfectionist to me wished that I’d spent a little more time putting it together, but, but the second one did even better. And it’s, it’s been really nice to have all this positive feedback from

Twitter and have people such as yourself reach out to me and express interest in us. [00:02:13] Luke Broyles: So it’s been really great and I, I am being told by others that I’m presenting other people’s ideas and new ideas and a new lens. So hopefully today in this show, I can bring the presentation of Bitcoin with perhaps a new light and perhaps new ideas. Whether the right or wrong, hopefully they’re more right than wrong.

[00:02:31] Luke Broyles: But anyway, I’m looking forward to sharing what I have today, so [00:02:34] Preston Pysh: I love it. I love it. So what was the impetus for writing the first thread that really kind of caught everyone’s attention? [00:02:41] Luke Broyles: Yeah, so I explained this a little bit on Blocker Solutions podcast with Joe last week. The long story short is that I first heard Bitcoin in 2017, and I was just new to finance, new to everything like that. [00:02:54] Luke Broyles: And so like a risk off person that I am, which I know for those listing that might sound a little silly, that I’m super deep into Bitcoin, I’m risk off, but we’ll get to that later. Trust me, I assumed it’s a scam or speculation and I didn’t really understand it. I, it was too unknown to me. It was too confusing.

[00:03:10] Luke Broyles: And you know, you just go online or you watch any news clip and there’s just so much jargon. It’s so, it’s just so complicated and most people think it’s out of [00:03:17] Luke Broyles: reach. And I was like that too. So 2017, I heard of it and I completely ignored it. I did not look into it at all. And then 20 18, 20 19, I had some contacts, friends, acquaintance.

[00:03:29] Luke Broyles: That I knew were very smart and I knew were into Bitcoin. And so I realized, okay, if I’m going to be intellectually consistent, here I am wrong. And either I’m wrong about my friends and my acquaintances and I’ve been duped in, they’re actually not nearly as smart as I think they are cuz they’re gambling all this money in this internet magic money.

[00:03:48] Luke Broyles: Or there’s possibly something that I’m not understanding about the spit Bitcoin thing. So anyway, I go down the rabbit. and eventually I come to the conclusions that we’ll get to in this video of Bitcoin’s inevitability and its significance for the era. And of course, like most Bitcoiners, eventually I wanted to start telling other people, because I believe this is really important, I need to tell other people, warn other people. [00:04:11] Luke Broyles: And, and just a long process of trying to explain Bitcoin, which is again a very abstract, difficult topic for most people to understand. I was just honing in my presentation more and more and more, and eventually I have all these slides.

And now with the bear market and Bitcoin and price being down, you know, less and less people are interested in it. [00:04:29] Luke Broyles: At least in my circle, less people are interested in it. So, I decided to, Hey, you know, I’m getting less calls or less messages. Why don’t I just post it on Twitter and see what happens? And I figured, shoot, maybe I’ll get a thousand views and it’ll be great and you know, I’ll get a couple comments or thumbs up or emojis or whatever.

[00:04:45] Luke Broyles: But it instantly blew up. And I was like, wow, okay. I actually have the ability to present something here. And people gave wonderful feedback. And so now it’s really, it. It’s the cliche of overnight success, more or less that has a

long backstory. And I’m not trying to overstate what I’ve done so far. I’ve only done two threads and you know, I’m not huge or anything, but it’s definitely felt like that the fifth, two and a half, three years I’ve been pretty much talking to people 1 0 1 or small presentations of a dozen people or so. [00:05:14] Luke Broyles: And all of a sudden now, you know, thanks to the magic of the internet and this new communications network that we’ve created, it can get very wide viewership very quickly. So anyway, all that to say that’s, that’s my basic story of why I made the threads is basically my consolidation of trying to explain Bitcoin as concisely as I can. [00:05:32] Preston Pysh: So you have this five eras of monetary history. Walk us through

some. [00:05:39] Luke Broyles: Yeah, so this is a topic I’ve not actually yet discussed in my threads, and I probably will in the future in greater detail, but basically what the average person needs to understand, what I believe in, to understand is that, like my first thread discusses, human society is defined by the technology of our era. [00:05:55] Luke Broyles: So one, one of the main points to make my first thread is that we are in an ancient world of tomorrow, today, in the year 2023, and that we actually have less in common with the person a hundred years from now than the person 2000 years ago, because a hundred years from now, technology’s going to be so much more advanced that we can even conceive today if we’re optimist and we assume that everything’s going to continue as it is currently continuing, then basically the technology between today and then it’s going to be incompatible in the same way that, you know, we’re incompatible with the pre-flight horse era of, you know, the, the 1920s and you know, the early 20th century. [00:06:30] Luke Broyles: 19th century in the same way that’s an ancient world technologically to today. That’s us in the future. And so defining that and, and expanding on that first thread and that idea, it’s not just eras are defined by the technology, they’re also defined by the monetary technology of that era and the different and different eras. [00:06:47] Luke Broyles: And the quality of money of any given era is more or less limited to the advancement of technology of that era. So specifically what I might talking about

here, well, the first kind of money that humans had was more or less basically social credit. You know, you had small villages and towns or whatever you want to call them, in very, very ancient world before were empires and ancient civilizations. [00:07:09] Luke Broyles: You know, basically you are in debt to your neighbors, your family, and your, you know, your community. You provide work for other people and they returned the work for you. And that’s what I mean by social credit and not our modern understanding

of social credit, but basically that it was a small community so that everyone could keep track in their heads. [00:07:26] Luke Broyles: Who owns who, what. That was pretty much the first monetary system where basically it’s pure human trust. That’s the currency. It’s relationships, that’s the currency of very early society. And then going from there, eventually you get to a

more or less a world where you have small ancient societies, you know, Mesopotamia and Egypt and, and everything of that sort. [00:07:49] Luke Broyles: And everyone begins to store their monetary energy in commodities that are more universally accepted. So things like salt or green, these, these things were once money and they were kept track of on tablets. You know, the samians kept track

of these things on tablets, you know, these are the ledgers, the first ledgers. [00:08:05] Luke Broyles: And so really these things were the first forms of money. And obviously there are many, many examples here are radically oversimplifying, but basically salt and green is an advancement in technology that ma, that makes the old world seem ancient, you know, to upgrade from hunting and gathering to actually having farms where you can go greens and you know, have cows and livestock and everything of that sort.

[00:08:26] Luke Broyles: You know, those are the first kinds. Of money AF after the social credit era. And then of course technology continues to advance and eventually we go to gold. And gold, you know, especially towards the beginning of ad, you know, Rome and, and everything of that sort. You have gold kind of taking the stage because while salt and grain is better than social credit, cuz you can actually touch it and you can actually quantify it, you know, in bushels or barrels or whatever on a tablet and actually have a ledger. [00:08:53] Luke Broyles: You know, technology’s progressing. You have writing and everything

now. Now gold’s even better than that because the problem with grain, of course is that, you know, it expires and gold. It doesn’t really expire. So gold is an improvement of technology from the old monetary standards. So that, that’s kind of the more ancient world that we think of today. [00:09:09] Luke Broyles: You know, we’re, we’re talking, you know, much later Egyptian period, Rome, China and, and other dynasties and empires. That’s the gold era. And then you come to the Dutch and you know, middle Ages and that era and you basically have a debt monetary system where basically we more or less, and I know a lot of people will criticize me for saying upgrade, you know, because in many ways it’s not an upgrade.

[00:09:29] Luke Broyles: But going from gold to a debt-based promissory energy system where, you know, again, all these things come back to trust, you know, social credit was trust, salt and green is trust that the next person in the future is going to value those things cuz you can eat. Same thing with gold, same thing with national currencies and everything like that. [00:09:47] Luke Broyles: So the Dutch, you know, the, the reason I point them out here is that they were the first central bank. They had the first central bank stock market. You know, basically a lot of what we would call the modern finance world really originated there. So that would be the fourth era. They were fourth macro era, era.

[00:10:02] Luke Broyles: And of course, each region in the world advanced at different times. And so again, it’s a radical oversimplification, but where we are now and the big scope of where we are now, you know, basically I want to make the point in this show today that bitcoin’s a monetary singularity. And I would argue the monetary singularity, that meaning we’re entering the fifth era here. [00:10:20] Luke Broyles: And so fundamentally, What has to be understood, I believe by the average person, is that this is a very rare event and it makes perfect sense as we leave the industrial era of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th centuries, you know, all that era, more or less in the industrial revolution putting that in a pin, including that now we’re entering the information era and we’re only beginning the information agent. [00:10:41] Luke Broyles: This is something I think that people don’t realize, you know, just because their lives have changed so much, we think we’re in the middle of the information agent. It’s like, no, we’re at the very beginning of it, and we’ll touch on that

later, but, but that, that’s the basic idea here, that humanity is a continual, exponential curve of technological progress. [00:10:56] Luke Broyles: That’s, that’s the basis of history and the world’s empire’s, the world’s political movements and regimes and the world’s monetary standards, you know, frankly, are a function of the technological advancement of that time. Everything comes back to the technology. So if that’s the basic idea with those standards and those five standards are loose again, but that’s the basic idea.

[00:11:17] Preston Pysh: I’m curious to hear a little bit more on your thoughts on the comment about this being the beginning of the information era. What do you, what do you mean by that? [00:11:26] Luke Broyles: Yeah. Well, what I mean by that is strictly an adoption curve here in the West. We’re very privileged and spoiled. You know, I’m, I’m in the United States, a as you are, and probably a lot of people listening to this, you know, we’re all able to listen to this, you know, with their own headphones in real time. [00:11:39] Luke Broyles: We have extremely low friction costs and it’s basically free and instantaneous as soon as we want it. And it’s a wonderful thing. But the reality is for about 40% of the world, depending on which sources you cite, you know, there’s a significant portion of the world that’s yet to use the internet. And so if we were

to say that given technology only a 60% adoption, you know, frankly, I wouldn’t say we’re in the height of the internet. [00:12:00] Luke Broyles: I would say we’re only in the beginning, more or less, a third to half the world is yet to use the internet. And then once they do, you know, they, they’re, you know, these developing nations and regions are going to industrialize. And so we’re

at the beginning of that. So all these things coming in the future, artificial intelligence, humanoid robots self-driving cars, all these other things I think can easily be classified in information age. [00:12:21] Luke Broyles: And really, you know, the information age, in my view at least started with the computer and, you know, the forties. I think that’s, you can debate that though, but one, one way or another, I, I believe we’re at the very beginning of the information age, just because there’s so many people yet to use the internet. [00:12:35] Luke Broyles: And then once they begin using the internet, then that’s where all the growth begins. You know, it, to me it’s akin to saying in, you know, the early 20th century that the industrial era is over when it’s like, okay, no, we just discovered flight and the locomotive is only a, you know, 60, 70% adoption, whatever it is.

[00:12:51] Luke Broyles: So that’s the basic I idea there. [00:12:54] Preston Pysh: When we talk about boom busts of empires, what are some of your thoughts on where that is today with the United States, Europe nato how do you see that and what are some of the key driving factors that create that? [00:13:08] Luke Broyles: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have a few slides here just to, if I can share my screen. [00:13:12] Luke Broyles: Really quick. Gimme one second. Alright, here we go. So, to explain that I, I think first we have to go back to technology because technology fundamentally improves the living standards of everyone. This first chart here that we’re looking at is a GDP per capita for citizens from 1800 all the way up to the modern era here.

[00:13:30] Luke Broyles: And if you look at the chart, it’s color coded and has very clear lines here that as GDP goes up and technology becomes better, everyone becomes richer, the rich become richer, and the poor become richer. And I know this might be controversial to people, but you know, statistically speaking, the poor become richer at a faster rate than than the wealthy people do. [00:13:49] Luke Broyles: And I mean, this is a wonderful thing. This is why I care so much about Bitcoin. It’s about helping other people. And we’ll get. Of that later. But basically as these changes happen, and looking at the next slide here, as poverty declines as a function of time, you have social orders that change. So when it comes to the boom

bus cycle that you asked about with, with empires, I believe a major driving factor. [00:14:10] Luke Broyles: And that is technological change as a society develops. You know, if we look at the Portuguese or the Spanish or the Dutch or, you know, Europe is one of the best examples of this because it’s so clearly defined and it happens so quickly you know, in a matter. And so consistently over a long period of time, you can see clearly how one empire innovates and creates new technology and people become more prosperous.

[00:14:33] Luke Broyles: You know, looking at this chart here, you can see how your technological cost of light, Hey, Luke is done dramatically. [00:14:39] Preston Pysh: Luke, the right side of your chart’s getting cut off. Oh. I’m. Here we go. There we go. See it now. Okay, now we’re good. Go ahead. Keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so this, this being one of my favorite examples, you know, of that, of candlelight, you know, and the cost of candlelight going down dramatically. [00:14:53] Luke Broyles: I mean, obviously you, you can extrapolate this out to various eras of technological progress. But basically as the demographics of society change, both within a nation or empire and without its bo outside its borders as well you know, people migrate based on this where prosperity is, and prosperity of course is a result of technological progress.

[00:15:14] Luke Broyles: And so as technology pro progresses and prosperity becomes cheaper for the average person, this causes empires to gain an upper hand one over the other. So one nation lurches forward in a positive way in having more prosperity for its people. Its armies. Armies are better equipped and more technologically advanced to competing armies and everything, and all this innovation, which is extremely expensive.

[00:15:35] Luke Broyles: Eventually, competing nations do cheaper, faster, better than the prosperity nation, you know, I mean, to give a. Modern day example, you know, take the United States and China, you know, the United States in the mid 20th century, for example, was having all this technological progress. We were the hub of, of tech progress in many ways. [00:15:52] Luke Broyles: We still are. However, the, you know, the rest of the world, you

know, outside the United States, doesn’t have to expend those resources to the same degree the United States does. And so they can produce everything we do, you know, cheaper, faster, better. And again, this isn’t anti-China, you know, only pro-American stance here. [00:16:10] Luke Broyles: This is this is about it. It’s ultimately good for the world.

You know, a lot of Americans really dislike the fact that China and other nations take away a lot of jobs. But the reality is this happens every time. You know, you have one empire that rises up. Prosperity becomes cheaper, people become more prosperous. [00:16:27] Luke Broyles: Life living standards become more expensive. And a competing nation

is able to, you know, it’s a global free market and they basically compete ’em out. And so eventually the nation that has been prosperous for so long, decades, or even centuries, Eventually what happens is that they don’t like that growth is not going as fast as it used to. [00:16:46] Luke Broyles: Now we have all these competitors and so what do they do? They begin to borrow and borrow and borrow to make it look like the growth is continuing. And you

know, when you borrow, you’re borrowing from your future self. You’re delaying gratification. And when you do that on a societal level, eventually you begin to curtail innovation and you actually weaken it and you just cause this vicious feedback loop. [00:17:06] Luke Broyles: So anyway, long story short is that when we come here to look at skipping ahead a little bit right here, what we have is a timeline, historical timeline of reserve currencies of the world. And this is, you know, just one aspect to look at dominant empires. But the important point I want to make here is, number one, reserve currencies change very frequently on an historical timescale.

[00:17:28] Luke Broyles: And there are many more ways to define reserve currencies. This is just one way to define it globally, you know, especially the further back in time you go, the more local powers you have and everything. But for the sake of simplicity, this is one of my favorite charts to explain it. And one of the clear trends is that it becomes faster and faster, that the duration at which a reserve currency lasts becomes shorter and shorter over time. [00:17:48] Luke Broyles: And I would argue that fundamentally, like I said earlier, it all comes back to technology. And the reason at which these reserve currencies, and likewise

these empires are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter is a function of time, is because as technology moves faster, these cycles of, you know, demographics and migration patterns and everything just happen faster and faster and faster. [00:18:07] Luke Broyles: So that’s the basic idea of the boom bus cycle here. It just all comes back to technology because technology drives prosperity. Prosperity drives politics and armies and conflicts and everything of that. And when you think of war, what is war besides just a redistribution of resources and prosperity? [00:18:24] Luke Broyles: Granted, it’s extremely expensive and disastrous and horrible, but that’s basically the game theory of what it is. And so you ask specifically about the US. And I, I believe frankly, that we’re in a difficult spot here for the US and for

the Western General. If we look here at the consumer price index of the United States, what we have here is , a clear trend that began in the middle of the 20th century and has only gotten worse since then. [00:18:53] Luke Broyles: So, I don’t know if you have any comments on this chart. You’ve probably seen it before, but I don’t know, do you have any reactions to just the striking visual of this? Well, [00:19:03] Preston Pysh: I’m, I guess I’m curious on your why access there. So this is percent of c p i, cuz it seems like it’s in stark contrast to what’s being published. [00:19:15] Luke Broyles: Yes, this is, this is cumulative. Yep.

[00:19:17] Preston Pysh: This is, oh, okay. It’s cumulative. Okay. Gotcha. [00:19:19] Luke Broyles: Yep, yep, yep. This, this is between 1775 and all the way up to 2012. So it’s not quite up to date today, so it’s even higher than here. But you know what, what we can see for those that are perhaps listening audibly is that we more or less have, you know, a, a flat line that goes up and down a little bit from 1775 all the way up till 1913. [00:19:40] Luke Broyles: You know, world War I, we have a dramatic increase in inflation spending, you know, of course fighting a war here in Europe and after World War I that goes down and World War ii, it increases again. And in the 1970s and specifically the 1971,

the CPI just kind of completely falls off the rails. And the reason for this, for those that may not know, is that the United States has had multiple monetary standards in the course of its history. [00:20:04] Luke Broyles: Before the Federal Reserve, we had two central banks means of them existing more. Of course, we’ve actually had two hyperinflationary events on US soil. And what we have here now is we have a new monetary standard. 1913, we had the creation

of the Federal Reserve, the current central Bank of the United States, and in 1944 we had the Brenton Woods Agreement, which basically pegged the US dollar to gold. [00:20:27] Luke Broyles: And we’ll get to that in more in a moment. But 1971 here is really the year that is applicable to most people’s lives, watching the everyday person that that should be a date that most people know, but it’s not times schools for reasons I won’t get into here , but basically the reason it’s important is because it detached the US dollar from. [00:20:46] Luke Broyles: And as we were discussing monetary errors before gold was an improvement on former monies. And one of the reasons that gold has been such a good form of money for so long is because it’s an extremely high brute force physical cost to create more gold.

It’s extremely expensive to create more gold. Now granted, as the value of gold goes up, the economic incentive to my more gold increases. [00:21:07] Luke Broyles: So of course there’s always going to be more gold dumped onto the market. This is just a, you know, factor of the free market. You know, if price adjusts

up, more gold will be produced. If price goes down, less gold will be produced, and then that increases value. So meaning price goes out. This is just how gold works. [00:21:21] Luke Broyles: But the problem with detaching a fiat currency from something with a brute force, physical costs like gold or oil or some other tangible thing, is you divorce, you know, this abstract concept of money, which is just a ledger of trust f from reality. And now we’re no longer trusting that the US dollars pegged to something real.

[00:21:41] Luke Broyles: We’re just trusting that. The US dollars that, you know, it’s refundable. We’re trusting people to issue it, that they’re not going to issue it in an unlimited fashion. And of course, the problem with humans is that we’re all sinful, we’re all broken, and we’re all corrupt . And so as soon as you detach gold from a fiat currency, all of a sudden, guess what? [00:22:02] Luke Broyles: Promises start being broken. And you see this runaway inflation

statistic here. So what we see is that as technology’s progressing and demographics began shifting 50 years ago due to technology and prosperity post World War ii, we saw that the United States basically said, Hey, you know, we can’t make our obligations with these, this gold peg, and we have to detach. [00:22:24] Luke Broyles: And so that’s what they did, and that’s why we see this massive inflation spike. [00:22:28] Preston Pysh: I, I would love to see from 2010 outward what this would look like, cuz it looks like this only goes out to about 2010 on the chart. I can only imagine if you added the next 13 years in there, what what angle would be looking like right now. [00:22:43] Preston Pysh: And that’s assuming we trust the, the reported CPI numbers that are, that are being told to us.

[00:22:50] Luke Broyles: Yes, yes. Definitely. That, that’s trusting those numbers. And, and the whole idea, you know, for those, especially the younger folks like myself, something I think I should say is that the whole idea of accounting for inflation is, is a new idea. [00:23:03] Luke Broyles: You know, if, if we find the occurrence of adjusting for inflation in books all the way back to 1800 here in this chart, you can see a clear spike in the early 1970s where the term quote unquote adjusted for inflation becomes apparent. Mm-hmm. . And the whole reason Preston, that we have this is, is because it, we have a ledger that is not consistent. [00:23:24] Luke Broyles: It makes no sense. You know, even in the charts we were looking at earlier, you know, when we adjust for poverty or adjust for GDP per capita, we have to adjust for inflation. Mm-hmm. and, and the reason we have to adjust for inflation is because

what is money? Money is the unit at which we determine and communicate value to one another. [00:23:42] Luke Broyles: And if you change the inherent supply of money, you corrupt that metric. You, you. Inconsistent. You make it unreliable. You know, a good metaphor I like to give is that like a meter stick. You know, if, if I had an inflation rate for the meter stick where I inflated or de de based the length of a meter stick, you know, every architect and everyone that measures anything in the world would have to continually adjust their blueprints and their plans based on the changing of the length of the meter stick. [00:24:14] Luke Broyles: And that’s might be our crude analogy, but that’s the basic idea here. When you have a system, a ledger, a monetary system that’s supposed to represent

all the wealth in the world, and then you create more money or destroy money, and you, and you artificially change it, well what, what do you do? All you do is you corrupt everything. [00:24:32] Luke Broyles: You make prices, which is the communication mechanism at which we determine. You make it inherently corrected and you basically cause this inherent communication breakdown in every layer of society. [00:24:44] Preston Pysh: So I think I’m looking at, I really like some of Michael Saylor’s thoughts on inflation, where he is talking about it being a vector and for each person it’s different. [00:24:53] Preston Pysh: So like your inflation rate is different than my inflation rate just because we have totally different spending habits. We have different things that we value.

And so for every person in the US or around the world, this is something that I think plays into the hand of, of the manipulators, of the , the currency manipulators that are adding extra units onto the ledger is they can, they can publish these numbers and it’s really hard for one person to say, oh, that’s not accurate, because it all comes down to the waiting of every single individual person and what they preface as being important or not important. [00:25:30] Preston Pysh: Yeah. I love this, this, this is a great point. [00:25:32] Luke Broyles: Yeah. And that’s really true. You know, one of the reasons there’s so much noise in the financial space, you know? Mm-hmm. , especially those in the

financial space will know what I’m about to say, but there’s so much talk about interest rates constantly. Mm-hmm. [00:25:43] Luke Broyles: You know, pretty much everyone’s heard about interest rates and this and that at yields and blah, blah, blah, blah, and it doesn’t really make sense to them. Mm-hmm. , and basically to cut through the noise and get to the signal and root of it all. What’s happening here is that the price of money is changing.

[00:25:55] Luke Broyles: And so every time that Jerome Powell or some other central figure of this board that changes the supply of money whenever they come out and say, this is the price of money, or this is how we’re going to change this, and you know, what they’re basically doing is they’re repricing everything. And that’s why the market is so volatile and increasingly more volatile. [00:26:13] Luke Broyles: As the economy becomes more and more dependent as, as debt increases become more dependent on that price of money changing and markets react in a greater and greater degree to that. So as we have these people that announce the change of the measure of value in the system, that’s why, that’s why so many news lots, lot less. [00:26:31] Luke Broyles: That’s why people get paid so much money to try to predict what these folks are going to do. Because to be able to predict that you, I mean if you can predict what the Federal Reserve or any issuer of currency is going to do, you can pretty much predict anything. The problem is of course, nobody can predict what they’re going to

do cuz they’re humans and you can’t trust humans. [00:26:46] Preston Pysh: So, go to go to your next slide here, Luke. I like this next slide. Yeah. This is really simple, but I think that it hammers home the point. When you have corrupt money, it basically corrupts the incentives. Then it corrupt, corrupt society and all of

the decision making that’s taking place in there. [00:27:02] Preston Pysh: I really like this. It’s, it’s simple, but it works. [00:27:05] Luke Broyles: Thank you. It works great. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. For, for those

that are listening audibly, basically what you have is you have this premise of corrupting money, so basically corrupting the ledger, and then when you do that, you corrupt the incentives because if you incentivize people to predict the change of monetary policy, well what are you doing? [00:27:22] Luke Broyles: You’re incentivizing less attention towards productivity and improving technology, and thus making the world a better place for more and more people. and you’re increasing the incentive to predict that. And this is why you’re seeing so much more speculation today. Mm-hmm. , and this is why you see so many more gamblers today and you

know, people obsessed with the lottery, you know, continuing over 50 years, people are becoming, even though technology’s getting better and better and we’re more prosperous than ever before, people are becoming more and more dependent on gambling and speculation and all that because we’ve corrupted the incentives in every layer of the world, even in the investing world, you know, things that are just so crazy compared to what they were in the past. And so when you corrupt those incentives, you corrupt the society because the society inherently has to think shorter and shorter term, less and less long-term thinking, a lower and lower savings rate. And eventually, you know, when you corrupt the society enough and you have brains retrained to think in work, zero sum game thinking and short-term thinking . You then again, correct the incentive and you

again, crep the, it’s just horrible feedback. And we see this again and again. Of course there are infamous examples of Germany and Rome and all sorts of other. Times in history, which I won’t get into because it’s quite a bleak picture, although it’s extremely predictable in unfortunately. So my, my next few slides, we’ll go through pretty quickly here, but it’s basically emphasizing this larger point that when you corrupt the money, you corrupt the incentives. When you corrupt the incentives, you corrupt the society. And then it’s a feedback loop that continues from there. So, going through these really quickly for those watching visually

what we see here in this fir in for the, in this first chart again, are the years 1913, 1944, 1971. And remember, those are the three really big, important years of monetary history in the 20th century for the United States. And this is a figure of income and equality in the United States. And you can see that pretty much instantly once we re pegged the dollar to gold and the Brenton Woods agreement in 44 income and equality dramatically decreased. And likewise, in the early 1970s, after we, again, de pegged, of course the incentives shifted. There’s a greater incentive to predict the market. And of course, who’s

obsessed in doing that. That’s, you know, the higher income earners. And so of course, a greater flow of capital and value, again, left productivity and went back to managing money. And so again, this is another chart emphasizing the same point, not just the top 1%, but also the top half of percent that you can see. In 1971, the down trend of in, of decreasing income in inequality shifted and actually started going back up for the last 50 years, and especially in the last 10 years this has only only gotten worse. And so one, one way to think about, and we’ll come back to this later with, with Bitcoin instead of gold. Is that what we see is that currencies have depreciated against gold continually forever. One of my favorite examples is the British Pound, cuz you can, you know, the

British Pound is one of the oldest modern fiat currencies in the world. You can go back 800, 850 years or so, and you can see clearly that continually the pound is going down and down and down against gold forever. For almost millennia. Now it’s done nothing but go down against gold. Now this chart here that we’re looking at is just the last century, but we have multiple fiat currencies here. Of course, we can see German marks collapsing in their early 1920s. This is one of the major factors that led to World War II. Of course, when you corrupt the money and you destroy

the society, you destroy the incentives. You know, everyone becomes much more open to the idea of a strong leader to come in and change everything and make everything quote unquote better. Obviously I’m referring to Hitler. So you know, anyway, we’ll get to more of that later. But basically what we see is every fiat currency continues to decrease in value

against gold as a function of time. and what that means as fiat currencies decrease in value is at prices of everything goes up. This is, this is one of the things I think Jeff Booth is just brilliant about, is that he really defines this conflict between technology and central banks. And I’ve kind of alluded the tattoo, the technology’s making everything cheaper and cheaper and we have this massive force trying to force prices down. But because, you know, humans and people in charge of credit systems want to keep expanding the monetary supply so that we can have more yields and we can make prices go up and make all of our voters and constituents and lobbyists happy, you know, we force prices up even though technology’s making things cheaper in real terms. So this is, this is kind of a, a comical also depressing metric. Here is a price of a Campbell’s

can of soup, tomato soup. And what we see is it was very consistent for a long period of time. That year, 1971 that we’re talking about. And clearly something changed there and all of a sudden the price is becoming more volatile and it’s only going up even though it’s the same can of soup. And you know, technology’s much better than it was, you know, 50, 55 years ago. That’s what we have. And it’s not just cans of soup, but it’s also more essential things. You know, you look at electricity, all food you can clearly see 1971 where we detached a fiat currency, a k a r ledger from a brute force, physical cost.

All of a sudden everything with the brute force physical cost goes up and its denominated price because we’re corrupting that measure of value at which we measure things. And so this goes to hourly consumption as well. We see clear distinction here in 1971 and productivity’s got up well over 200%, but compensation’s only gone up a hundred percent.

And you know, Preston, one of the frustrating things for me, even though I’m a young person, a lot of young people don’t understand Bitcoin yet, and this whole idea. and it, it’s really hard, you know, it’s really depressing because I know so many people that are graduating college and their wages just don’t keep up. Oh yeah. [00:32:40] Luke Broyles: They don’t keep up with the cost of living anymore. It’s just horrible. You know, I, I’m sure you’ve seen that too, as well as everyone listening, but this is one of, if not the main reason why is that, you know, we have basically sucked away the incentive from society becoming more, more productive and better and better technology.

[00:32:58] Luke Broyles: And we have instead directed incentive towards financial management and planning and more or less speculating on what the Federal Reserve or banks are going to do with the supply of money. And so we see this clear divergence here from 1971 onwards between productivity and compensation for wages. We have multiple charts showing that here. [00:33:15] Luke Broyles: And then likewise, you know, we can look at trade policies and again, 1971, average wages and real median wages and everything, everything begins to diverge and go in completely opposite directions. And the seventies. And when I, when I refer to corrupting society, and this is perhaps even more controversial than everything I’ve already said, but you change the incentive of the family structure.

[00:33:36] Luke Broyles: You know, if we look here clearly, the, the birth rate, as many people listening might be aware, birth rate globally is just collapsing. It’s more or less been a free fall, half a century. And you know, some people would say it’s a coincidence, but I don’t believe it is that in the early 1970s we see two things. [00:33:54] Luke Broyles: We see number one single income households begin to transition to dual income households. And likewise, the birth rate begins to decline. There’s less

time to be at home, less time with children because the incentive is for more and more people to work because the real value of wages and comparative productivity are only going down. [00:34:12] Luke Broyles: And so, you know, of course, as this happens, what you have is an increased desire for investors to save their money cuz they can’t trust their ledger anymore. They have to store their economic value. In assets. And one of those assets are houses. So House has not only become a consumer good anymore, but then they become monetized investors. [00:34:30] Luke Broyles: Try to store monetary wealth within houses. You know, I’m an investor

in real estate myself, you are two. And so it’s this horrible realization that, wow, we’re forcing the price of real estate up and it’s because we can’t trust our money. You know, there’s, there’s nothing to attach to money to reality.

[00:34:46] Luke Broyles: So instead we have to store our money in something that’s real, you know, land wood, dirt, and, and that’s real estate. And that’s why we’ve seen clearly since the, again, since the seventies, housing prices have only become more and more monetized and more expensive in wages and, and real terms. And so again, we see Stock Marts doing the same thing. [00:35:05] Luke Broyles: We see the S&P PE ratio and Schiller PE ratio. And for those listening audibly, you, you can’t see it. But again, the seventies is a clear bifurcation

of, you know, previous trends. And we see everything begin to deteriorate. And like I said before, we see only more and more speculation. We see this clearly in the 1970s. [00:35:24] Luke Broyles: We see less and less incentive towards resources and productivity industries and more and more incentive towards banking and everything of that sort. And that’s one of the reasons why we had in the great financial crisis. And in 2008 being that, you know, there was all this speculation from decades that eventually began to unwind. [00:35:40] Luke Broyles: And of course, what we do, we printed ourselves out of it. But

basically what we have here demographics too, it’s also specific to demographic. And incredibly infuriating ways for me and, and probably for many people watching and incarceration waits. We can also look at that, the war on drugs and ev everything of that sort. [00:35:58] Luke Broyles: Since the seventies, again, incarceration rates have only gone up as people become more desperate. And as the government needs a way to spend more money, just the incentives flow in one direction only. And so we can go on and on here. We have the cost of college tuition, you know, being my age, that’s a especially important topic for my peers.

[00:36:14] Luke Broyles: You know, the college, the cost of college tuition is going up dramatically. And people wonder why. And, well, this, this is the main reason why when you have a finite number of degrees and an infinite amount of money, and everyone’s incentivized to, you know, get a college degree because wages are going down, you have this horrible feedback loop where the incentive for college becomes greater and then it’s just this greater and greater dependence on the hand that feeds. [00:36:36] Luke Broyles: So yeah. And then same thing with obesity here. Same thing with

the consumption of meat. We see a clear divergence where chicken takes over everything the world. Chicken thighs, I suppose, in the 1970s. And we see federal debt also explode in 1970s debts surplus begins to decline. And the 1970s and interest rates again, interest rates really

important because that’s the price of money and we see the all time peak. [00:37:00] Luke Broyles: For that we’re in the seventies and eighties, which are very inflationary periods. And since then we’ve had to force interest rates down continually. Right now we’re at historically high periods of inflation rate, especially for the last couple decades. And there’s all this talk of recession, there’s all this talk of crisis. [00:37:15] Luke Broyles: There’s all this talk of over over overdoing our rate hikes and everything. And we’re barely higher than we were, you know, a couple decades ago. And so all that, all us to say that we’re having a greater and greater financial incentive.

We’re becoming more and more top heavy. With debt. And as we do that, we correct the society. [00:37:32] Luke Broyles: So all that to say is that when the money is a lie, cuz we no longer have a consistent ledger we have a greater incentive to lie. And then we eventually have a society built on lies. And that’s why we have all this noise and all this chaos both in the financial sector and the cultural sector and everything and that sort.

[00:37:48] Luke Broyles: And that’s why it, it, in my opinion, that’s why everything feels like it’s getting worse and worse even though technology is getting better. You know, objectively we’re all more prosperous who were 10 years ago. Everything feels a little more disjointed than it was in the past. And the reason for that is because we have an abstract lie at the fundamental basis of our society.

[00:38:06] Luke Broyles: And that is that our money isn’t true. When you crept the money, you inherently crept every price of everything and you bake in inefficiency into every layer of society. So I know I just covered a lot and a lot of charts there, but I really wanted to emphasize this idea that this isn’t just about money, this impacts everything in society. [00:38:25] Preston Pysh: Well, your last chart, I mean everybody that you can see it online, everyone’s calling it clown world, right? They’re referring to everything as clown world is amplifying, it’s getting worse, right? They can’t describe in any type of granularity what you just described, especially with the charts that you’ve thrown up there and explain the why behind it. [00:38:46] Preston Pysh: But they can sure as heck feel it. And any person you talk to,

I don’t care who it is right now, everybody’s like, what the heck is happening? It feels like everything’s just coming off the rails. And and I think it’s because we’re getting closer and closer to kind of the precipice of this, this monetary change changeover that’s, that’s in the works. [00:39:08] Preston Pysh: We obviously have a bias and an opinion on where that , where that’s going, and you know, that’s for the listener to decide whether they agree or not. But I think the more that I see really smart people like yourself laying out quantitative charts that go into detail like you just showed, it’s really hard to dispute and, and deny what, what we’re about to go through, I think here.

[00:39:32] Preston Pysh: Hey, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about game theory. I know this is a topic that you like to cover, it’s something that I haven’t really covered too much on the show. I mean, we’ve covered it here and there, but what are some of your thoughts on game theory? [00:39:44] Luke Broyles: Yeah, game theory. The game theory of money is really interesting to me. [00:39:49] Luke Broyles: First thing to understand is that money converges on one. Why would you trust the second best money when you can just trust the best one? Silver is just an inferior gold, you know, there, you know, take, I mean, take real estate. If we consider

that a form of money, there’s, you know, the best piece of, you don’t want the second best piece of real estate. [00:40:03] Luke Broyles: Mm-hmm. , you want the best one. So it’s the same thing with money. , why would you want the Payso or the Lira when you could just have the US dollar? You know, you’re taking everything is a risk. You might as well take the one that has a greater network effect and a lower risk. And, you know, this is what’s often attributed

to Metcalf’s law and Gresham’s law which I probably don’t have time to get into here. [00:40:22] Luke Broyles: But, you know, all, all these theories are basically saying the same thing. That money is trust. All these monetary errors are basically various ways of saying trust. And of course, you’re only going to trust the network that has more trust. , why would you trust the second best when you could just stick with the best? [00:40:37] Luke Broyles: And so what we have here when it comes to game theory is we are currently on, on the edge, like I said earlier, of the ancient being, becoming the ancient world tomorrow. Even though we’re tomorrow world, yesterday, we’re the ancient world of tomorrow. And when we look at everything, even before we get to Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin aside, what we see here is that we have an infinite supply of everything.

[00:40:59] Luke Broyles: You know, real estate is one of the most obvious examples. You know, a couple thousand years ago, a stone, one story house is a really big deal. And today, you know, the average person can afford a apartment or duplex or you know, a house that’s far more prosperous than a billionaire could have a hundred years ago.

[00:41:18] Luke Broyles: You know, I know perhaps we may not feel like we’re as high in the social rankings as them, but you know, truth is they didn’t have air conditioning, they didn’t have wifi routers in their houses. They didn’t have computers. You know, I mean, your, your phone in your pocket has a library bigger than Rockefeller’s library. [00:41:34] Preston Pysh: They, you know, they didn’t have an open ai. They could just write them anything they want on a whim. .

[00:41:40] Luke Broyles: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we have an infinite amount of prosperity here, basically we have, yeah. We’re able to create more and more houses. We’re able to have more and more intelligence like, you know, artificial intelligence like you just referred to. [00:41:52] Luke Broyles: More and more books, more and more information, more and more knowledge like, like take the internet here, we have more and more connections. There, there’s

more of everything. And so basically I, one of my favorite visuals that I’ve designed to really emphasize this is this one here, is that we have an infinite amount of pretty much everything. [00:42:09] Luke Broyles: Infinite knowledge, metals, and en energy, everything, like I mentioned thus far. Mm-hmm. there, there’s an endless amount of stocks. There’s an

endless amount of bonds, endless amount of cash that we, you know, denominate everything in endless amount of houses. All these things are open systems, and what I mean by open systems, I perha, I’d love to hear your, your thoughts on this from your engineering background. [00:42:29] Luke Broyles: But, you know, open systems, the way I like to put it to people is that for the entirety of humanity thus far, what we have is we have, you know, basically a, a little ocean where we have a bunch of different ships, we have a bunch of different ships with holes in their holes, and they all are taking on water. [00:42:45] Luke Broyles: They’re open systems, there’s literally a hole in their hole, and they’re taking on water. And so they’re sinking at different rates. You know, a again, to go back to the British pound, you know, 800 years ago or so, you could trade one pound for almost a dozen cows. And obviously today, and cows are much more expensive and relative

terms to the pound, but cows are also cheaper because, you know, we have more humans, there are more cows, and the value of one cow in real terms is much cheaper than it used to be. [00:43:11] Luke Broyles: However the, the British pound conversion rate to cows is significantly higher. And the reason for that, Is a cattle, if we can think of cattle as a system, is basically becoming more and more affordable people. As that system leaks value, it leaks energy and it becomes more affordable. And the, the, the brute force, physical cost of acquiring cows goes down, but the value of the pound goes down faster. [00:43:35] Luke Broyles: So if we’re thinking of two ships, the pound is sinking at a faster rate than the cow. And so what people have done in the ancient world is that they would

save in things that quote unquote sunk the slowest. You save in gold, you save in cattle, and you know, lambs. And you know, b, back in the day, your, your farm was your livelihood. [00:43:54] Luke Broyles: And then of course, you know, today better example would be that of real estate or bonds or stocks. There’s an endless amount of real estate. We can always make more houses. We can always build higher, you know, and perhaps maybe in the future

build more land, you know, who knows or at least more efficiently use our land. [00:44:09] Luke Broyles: You know, take stocks. There’s an endless amount of companies and endless amount of brands, and those companies can issue more stocks. Granted, there are regulations that they have, but at the end of the day, there’s an endless amount of stocks could be issued to the market and bonds. Similarly, there are regulations and expectations for, you know, these fixed income assets, but at the end of the day, we can create more debt.

[00:44:31] Luke Broyles: You know, we can always make more debt. And, and so what we have here are a series of open systems that we save in versus cash because we can’t trust our cash. You know, who’s going to trust our cash? So the is the most open system of all in, in our modern world. And so we’re leaving this world where we have these 99 ships that are sinking in different rates, and we’re entering this world where for the first time we have a closed monetary system. [00:44:55] Luke Broyles: And this is something that was predicted. I, I spoke about this

on my previous podcast and in my threads as well. This is something that was predicted by many folks. Four of the most famous ones were Tesla in 1900, and then Ford in 21 H Hayek and 84 and Friedman in 1999. These were some of those famous people. [00:45:14] Luke Broyles: That predicted the eventual arrival, this closed ledger. Granted, they predicted different aspects of it, but they all pretty much predicted the same thing.

That eventually as the world becomes more and more prosperous, that we can’t save in these assets anymore. And we eventually need something, you know, some ledger we can create that’s actually a consistent monetary stock of the human race, basically. [00:45:38] Luke Broyles: And, and that’s what we have here, that we have infinite everything but we have one closed monetary system. And really quick, and then I’d love to hear

your thoughts from an engineer’s perspective. One, one of the metaphors I, I love. Is out of oxygen, you know, of all, of all the assets in the world. [00:45:54] Luke Broyles: You know, the most essential one for human survival is oxygen.

Water is important. Mm-hmm. , you know, heating is important. It’s very cold outside. I need that to live. Food obviously is important, but oxygen from a physiological standpoint is the most essential commodity of the human race. You know, your brain on a scientific level has the greatest and fastest fear response of a lack of oxygen.

[00:46:17] Luke Broyles: So, you know, I mean, technically speaking, oxygen is the most valuable thing in our lives that we could own, and yet we never pay for it. And the reason we never pay for it is because it supplies infinite. And so yes, demand is important, but supply, I would argue, is just as important and more important because if there’s an infinite supply of a very valuable thing, it’s price and relative terms to everything else trends down forever. [00:46:42] Luke Broyles: And so the Mona Lisa is the other example I like to use. You know, there’s only one Mona Lisa, you don’t need it to survive. You’re not going to

die in five minutes. Or if the Mo Lisa were to be destroyed somehow in some horrific accident. But yet the price, the, the exchange rate say between the mo Lisa and oxygen is trending up forever. [00:47:01] Luke Broyles: You know, if you were to, to dominate the Mo Lisa in terms of oxygen, it’s value, relative value just continues to appreciate. And that’s more or less what we have here, that we have all these infinite systems. And eventually it became evident to these geniuses of the past and to the Bitcoiners of today.

[00:47:18] Luke Broyles: Eventually, if we’re going to continue into the information age, we need some sort of decentralized, distributed monetary system that has a fixed supply cap that’s an amenable ledger in all these other qualities of, of good money, which we don’t have time to get into here. But basically what it is, is a system that is closed and that’s why, you know, sailor as an example you brought up earlier, you know, he’s an engineer and in my discussion, you know, you’re an engineer and other people I talk to in my personal experience, engineers understand Bitcoin much faster. [00:47:49] Luke Broyles: Mm-hmm. than financial experts. And I believe that’s because engineers

are trained to understand the strength and survivability of but given system. Mm-hmm. . And once one realizes that Bitcoin is designed to be an economic energy storage system that doesn’t have an energy leak as a function of time, you realize that it’s inevitable. [00:48:10] Luke Broyles: So I love that. How many your thoughts as an engineer?

[00:48:13] Preston Pysh: As an engineer, you got me all excited there with that last statement because I mean, it’s, it’s really coming down to the, the law of conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. And when you’re looking at the existing system, the fiat system, I mean, just take, let’s just say the whole Fiat global system is a hundred units, right? [00:48:34] Preston Pysh: And then tomorrow it’s 105 units, and then the day after that it’s 110 units. You are create, you are quote unquote creating energy in that system, right? It’s not, it’s not a hundred for everybody to use. And if people abuse the unit that they’ve got while they’re going to lose it, and if they’ve done smart and intelligent things with that, maybe they’re going to inherit more of those units. [00:48:56] Preston Pysh: You don’t have. And it goes back to the chart that you had

there where when you corrupt the, the ledger and you corrupt the money, you’re corrupting the incentive structure of how people are going to act. And so they’re clawing for these energy units that are being produced and inserted into a system that is not paying attention to the laws of, of the conservation of energy, and they’re trying to manipulate it into their favor, and they’re looking for the gatekeepers, right? [00:49:23] Preston Pysh: It all comes down at that point to who’s the gatekeeper that’s adding these monetary units into the system, and how can I gain political favor with them as, as fast and as close to them as I possibly can? So it’s exciting. I

2023-02-16 23:18

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