← Hidden Forces
Hidden Forces
Navigating the Fourth Turning: Power, Technology, & Moral Decline | Demetri Kofinas
01:38:42
In of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas shares his recent appearance on the Grant Williams podcast in which he and Grant discuss how the interplay of political power, technology, and moral decline in society are driving the unraveling of the social...
Loading summary
Transcript83 lines
- [00:01]
A
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. What you're about to hear is my recent appearance on the Grant Williams Podcast, hosted by my good friend Grant Williams. Grant was kind enough to have me on his show to discuss some of the more aberrant developments in American politics, society and culture and how they feed directly into our concerns about national security, the public interest, and the future of humanity on this planet. I was pleasantly surprised at how much this conversation seems to have resonated with his audience, and I am very excited to share it with all of you today. In it, we discuss my concept of financial nihilism and how it continues to explain much of the aberrant behavior that we see in financial markets. The corruption of our politics and the transformation of the American political economy from an imperfect capitalist meritocracy to a banana republic. The inter elite competition between the old ruling class and a new cadre of Silicon Valley elites and tech bros, the fragmentation of our information ecosystems and the breakdown of consensus reality, the dangerous disintegration of the global security order and its implications for further international conflict, the broken social contract and the general moral decline that has been taking place in America. I encourage all of you who aren't already subscribed to Grant's podcast to take this opportunity to do so. He's been a wonderful friend to me over the years, as he has to many people, and he has done more than anyone to help elevate and amplify my thoughts and ideas on financial nihilism and the challenges that our societies face in this new century. You can learn more about his podcast@grant-williams.com where you can also sign up to one of his three content tiers that include his podcast, newsletter, long form video interviews, and online community. And with that, please enjoy this wonderful and important conversation about American society, our financial markets, and how to navigate and make sense of the challenges of this moment with my friend, Grant Williams.
- [02:18]
B
Dimitri Kofinas, my friend, welcome back to the show. It's been way too long.
- [02:22]
A
It's great to be back, Grant. Thanks for having me on.
- [02:24]
B
Yeah, it's funny times we find ourselves in. I mean. Well, I'll get to the reason why we're having this conversation now in a second, but first, since we last spoke, you've become a father. So congratulations on that and welcome to a very different World, my friend.
- [02:38]
A
Thank you. Yes. We were just talking about before we started the show, and it's wonderful. I'm very happy. It's a wonderful experience to live through. Tiring, exhausting, but very, very, very fulfilling.
- [02:48]
B
Yeah, I think that's the perfect way to encapsulate it. But I think for both of us, the fatherhood aspect of this is certainly one of the things that kind of kicks up some of the things we're going to talk about today. And just to frame this conversation for the listeners, this conversation is going to be very free form in nature because it's really about feelings and just a sense that I'm getting. I know you've had for a while now. And the switch that flipped me was the Trump coin. Something happened to me when I woke up on that Saturday morning and read about what was going on. That the. That just. It took me to a dark place. It took me to a place that I haven't been, despite having kind of written about the way the world is heading and chronicled it for many years now and done presentations on it and all kinds of things. And I wanted to talk with you about that because it was your framing of this concept of financial nihilism a few years ago, which really gave me some scaffolding to put around this. And since you framed that beautiful phrase those years ago, being able to look at it as financial nihilism has helped me make sense of it and helped me to understand what's unfolding. But still, I feel like we've reached a point now where it's kind of taking over. So I just wanted to talk with you again today about this concept and about what's happened since we last spoke and where the world is going, because more and more of the people that I've spoken to and kind of shared my thoughts and concerns about this have echoed them right back to me. And these are thoughtful people who I've had these conversations conceptually with for years now. And all of a sudden, those conversations have become very real and people are feeling it rather than kind of thinking about it. So let's go back to the idea of financial nihilism, because there will be people perhaps who aren't familiar with that concept. So talk a little bit about that, how you framed it, and what you kind of mean by that phrase.
- [04:42]
A
Yes. So I've always defined financial nihilism as an investment philosophy that views the objects of speculation as though they were intrinsically worthless. It's a departure, as I've described before, from Karl Popper's view of reflexivity, later made famous by George Soros, whereby there is some, albeit at times tenuous, relationship between price and value, it rejects that entirely and views value entirely as being subjective. And in a world of subjective value, the things that really matter are narrative and flow. And the fervent adherence and faith of the community of Hodlers and the convexity of the potential returns, the yolo, those are the core ingredients for understanding financial nihilism. And I think that in order to understand how this, again, investment philosophy, for lack of a better term, has evolved and spread over the years, you have to understand the transformation that's taken place in crypto. Because crypto began as an ideological movement based in a view of bettering the world. It was the solution to the corruption in the aftermath of the great financial crisis. And what has happened is that that is no longer what drives prices in crypto. What drives prices in crypto is the potential for financial returns. And that, I think, is something that we increasingly see in other parts of the economy and in society. So much so that the President of the United States launched his own cryptocurrency as a sort of concession basket that anyone can put money into, post the transaction on the blockchain, or in this case, on Solana's blockchain, and prove that they've given the President money. The President's wife has done the same thing. This is part of a slow evolution towards a more corrupt society. This isn't some anomaly. We have various forms of corruption that contribute to this kind of nihilism. The Biden administration used lawfare to go after its political enemies, most notably Donald Trump. And I have begun this process. I've talked about the twin crises, the two seminal events of the 21st century, which was the illegal by international law, invasion of Iraq. And it was important that it was illegal because it was hypocritical. And it undermined the very argument for unipolarity, for the rules based liberal order, for American foreign policy and the benefit of American empire. And the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which once again showed that the elites in society were willing to change the rules. Everything they said about why they were doing what they were doing turned out to be just a story. And that goes back to the nihilism. It's just a story. It doesn't matter, doesn't mean anything in that sense. It's also very postmodern, which is why you also see as a core framework in financial nihilism, this concept of narrative investing, which is that it's all just a narrative. It's not actually true. We just have to believe it hard enough and get enough people to believe it along with us and the price will go up. And price is the signifier. Price is the thing that matters to us. That's what we're all coalescing around. And it's money. It's ultimately the worshiping of money. And our society has become so corrupt and so wealth obsessed that the target has become money. And not progress, not growth, not moral excellence, not something else that could result in the betterment of society and a sustainable path towards the future. And that's what I find so alarming. That's why I also went into a very dark place on that day. It's interesting to hear and wonderful to hear also the experience that you had, because I also got calls from friends and the best people I know in my life. There are also people that I didn't speak to that day that are also good people. But the only the best people I know had this reaction. People that really, really, really actually cared about the world, about the country, about the future. And I think that says something. And I'm not sure. It's hard for me to suss out what percentage of this country really is in this sense embracing of the nihilism, but it's a sufficient amount that I find it rather alarming.
- [09:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's so beautifully put. I mean, that's a podcast all in itself there. We could just clip that and be done with it, but there's so many places I want to dig into with you. And that's, I guess, to start with, there's this sense of cyclicality about this, this sense of we've been here before. Everyone talks about the Roaring Twenties and this kind of hedonistic approach before the Great Depression and this kind of blow off top. And you and I, both believers in cycles, we're were willing to believe that mankind is cyclical and therefore history is cyclical. And there's been this feeling as I've gone through the last number of years. And really, I can't give you enough credit for this and I'm going to keep hammering on this. It was that framing of financial nihilism that kind of almost accelerated my understanding of what was going on. And I think once you can find a way to put things that you feel into something quantifiable, it helps. And as it turns out now, in the dark days that I've had since hinders. But I gave a presentation, I guess it must have been two years ago now, which was all about trust. Trust in society, trust in money, and the decaying of that trust. And at the time, it was important topic to me. I'm not saying the presentation was important, but to talk about this with people was important. And I put this thing together and not really knowing what the response to it was going to be because it was a personal thing. I wasn't. Normally, if I go to give a presentation, I try and work out what the people want me to talk about and I create a presentation that's appropriate for the people in that room. But I felt so strongly about this that I went against that and I put together a presentation that I felt people ought to be exposed to. And I really didn't know what the response was going to be to that. And I gave that presentation four or five times and each time the response was actually very powerful and people could feel what I was talking about and had felt just the same way. Your financial nihilism kind of framed stuff for them. This presentation had been something of a jumpstart to help people perhaps think about the role of trust in society. And trust. Money is trust. Credere credit is from the Latin to believe. And so when I think about whether this is all just inevitable and it was always going to happen and we've just now reached the point where it's going to happen, I keep coming back to this idea of trust and all the things you laid out there. Particularly after 2008 and the invasion of Iraq, the trust just evaporated. The trust evaporated in leaders after Iraq. The trust evaporated in financial regulators after the crisis. And for many people, trust evaporated in Obama because nobody was punished for 08. So how do you see trust? Where do you see its role in the causes of financial nihilism? And where do you see trust being now and what happens to it next? How do we get it back if it's completely gone? Or what is there left to erode in it before we reach that capitulation phase?
- [12:25]
A
Yeah, I mean, obviously trust is very important, as is faith in the institutions, in the leaders, the people that have governed. It's interesting, as you ask, if it's completely gone, my answer to questions that are framed that way is almost always, well, it's not completely gone. But actually I do think trust is completely gone. I don't think anyone really trusts the previous power structure anymore. There might be people that have benefited from it, that are closer to the source of power and so they just like it and it works for them, but I don't think trust is there. I think that fundamentally what's happened, and this is something again, that I've talked about quite a bit on the show, is that the social contract is broken again, in the context of the two examples I gave earlier, the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq broke the international contract, so to speak. The contract that allowed the United States to be the leader of an alliance of global free states. And it transformed us into an empire that used to aggression and force to get its way. Again. The rules didn't work for us. We couldn't get a United nations resolution to invade Iraq, so went ahead and did it anyway. And the 2008 financial crisis was a breaking, I think, of the social contract. And it accelerated the inequities in society and moved us further away from a meritocracy to the kind of patronage system that we are now living it again. This issuance of a cryptocurrency meme coin is significant not because it signifies necessarily a meaningful increase in the amount of corruption in society, but in the form that that corruption takes. Moving from a clandestine form of corruption where we've always kind of assumed that corruption has existed, but there's always been an attempt to kind of hide it, to now where it's a kind of open larceny. And that is indicative of a banana republic. And in banana republics, there is no trust. And I think now that you say that, I'm reminded of that tweet that I wrote, because I did say that. I think part of the challenge that people have who look at this and may genuinely not think of it as such a big deal, kind of like, whatever, Trump is kind of doing this thing. But so what? Look at Biden. Look at Hunter Biden. He was on the board of Burisma. What did he know? Biden put him there. I think that what people who haven't lived in low trust societies don't necessarily realize is that when you lose trust, when you lose faith in institutions and you hand over power to populist demagogues and increasingly rely on figures to lead you, whoever those figures may be, you can't get that back once the institutions are broken, you can't just fix it again. And a great example of that is Argentina. Look at the example of Argentina. I've thought about this recently because I recorded an episode on Argentina. I have another one that I'm doing with the head of their Doge department, Federico. And one of the critical periods for Argentina was the 1930s. Now the great Depression obviously hit Argentina exceptionally hard because it was an export driven economy and it was a commodity driven economy. So the Depression hit them harder and earlier. But unlike the United States, Argentina one experienced a coup in 1930. And now maybe that was because their democracy was more fragile than the United States, because democracy wasn't necessarily sort of inherent to the Argentine experiment as it is in the United States. But the United States also almost experienced a coup in 1933, 34, which Smedley Butler blew the whistle on. And it was the sort of Wall street putsch, a fascist coup. So countries are very fragile. It may have happened to the United States, but it happened to Argentina. And you see that Argentina remains a basket case. And even now, in order for Argentina to try and undo all the bureaucratic red tape and all the problems that have arisen from these state edicts and all the price controls and everything else, you need a very charismatic and sort of cinematic, larger than life mythical figure like Milei to come in with his chainsaw and all these things to get people to move in his direction, because no one believes in the state. And this is also, again, there are other examples. There's a wonderful example of some Russian anthropologist who tells a story about how in the Soviet Union they used to, whenever a Soviet leader would die, I'm going to butcher the story, but they used to place their remains on the Kremlin wall. And for years they didn't actually put their remains on the wall, they put it inside the wall. But the newscasters continued to just say one thing, and reality was something totally different. And I think that's also a big part of the story, which is that the organs of propaganda no longer work. The official narrative storytellers have lost all credibility. And they didn't realize that they lost that credibility in the course of doing so, to the point where we are now, I think, in a stage in America of rapid decline. And I want to caution myself here because I don't want to sort of be spreading undue pessimism, though I must say that I've generally been optimistic, though I've recently gone to a dark place, as you have. I think that the ruling class, so to speak, has not really. I don't even know if they still understand it, quite frankly. They ran Hillary Clinton in 2016, which was obviously a giant red flag. They wanted to run Biden again. They wanted to keep Biden in for as long as they did, which was just like they were totally. It's almost as if they felt that they could control the narrative, even though they clearly weren't. And most Americans could see that plainly. And so I think that we're past the point now. I think they've lost control. But what we do see, and what people like you and I see, is that we see a power grab here. There's a new set of elites who want to come in and use the government for their purposes. You saw them all lining up. Mark Zuckerberg did his whole new PR tour with Joe Rogan and everybody else. What we're seeing is the rapid formation of a new power structure in America. And what's absent in all of that is a conversation about the public interest. What is in the best interest of the majority of Americans? Is it the creation of a patronage state that allows for certain large tech companies to centralize power or to use the government to pad their balance sheets? Or is it to strengthen free market capitalism, strengthen democracy, set guidelines or rules around some of these really powerful technologies that increasingly sit in the middle between reality and our perception of it, which obviously has a very consequential impact on our democracy and how well it works. These conversations aren't happening. And there's no one stepping up with credibility and a platform to speak on behalf of the public, in my opinion. I think for the most part, what I see is people who are aligning themselves with the power structure, with this new power structure or with the old power structure. And that's what we saw in the previous administration, people that were aligning with the old power structure. Lawfare against President Trump, former President Trump, and now we see a new form, and it's very concerning that there isn't what seems to have happened, and I'll just leave it there is. It seems like we've really lost our way and there's been moral decline in America.
- [19:52]
B
So when I spend as much time thinking about as I am, and I'm down in Australia at the moment to see my daughter, and so it's the summertime here. It's the perfect time to go for long walks and just think. And I've been doing a lot of that as I'm trying to get over my jet lag at strange times of the day. But the cyclicality of all this and almost the inevitability of it. And I keep thinking about our mutual friend Neil Howe and Bill Strauss's the Fourth Turning. And I keep thinking about the impact that book had on me when I read it, that getting to know Neil and being able to talk to him about it and ask questions about it had on Me and this feeling I had that because I read the book and because I'd been fortunate to spend so much time with Neil talking about it, I understood it. And because I understood it, I was prepared for it. And I felt bad for the people that hadn't read it. And I bought so many copies to give to people, and I've recommended a book to everyone I can, and I felt that by reading that and understanding how these turnings work would prepare you for it. And here I am, I'm in the middle of the fourth turning, and we have been for years. And I've recognized that and I've spoken about it and I've said the phrase, we're in the fourth turning, suddenly it seems to mean so much more to me now. And when I think about what Neil and Bill wrote about the fourth turning and how the first turning comes after that, and that's where the hope comes from. When we tear down these institutions, conceptually you kind of go, it makes sense. But living through the part where those institutions are torn down, and more importantly, I guess feeling the reasons why those institutions are being torn down, I find to be incredibly turbulent, incredibly unsettling, even though I'm prepared for it. So I try to imagine what this feels like for someone who has no framework, who hasn't read the full Turning, or doesn't have a way of understanding what's going on, even if it's difficult. And I keep coming back to consequence. I keep coming back to the lack of consequence for anything, any action that doesn't seem to be a consequence for it. And that once you take away consequence for bad actors, it just accelerates everything. Because without consequence, there's no meaning. There's no meaning. And also the phase that we're in where it's like, okay, we may as well grab as much money as we can from this. You talked about technological progress in the 60s. It was to get man to the moon. People weren't making themselves rich from getting to the moon. It was a collective desire to do something meaningful. Now, AI is a perfect example. It's all about getting rich from AI, you know, and the deep seat thing comes along, and we can talk about that later if you feel it as a partners. But consequence. Let's talk about how important consequence is and where we got off track. Because I've been trying to figure out where we got off track. And it may well be the Iraq stuff. It may well be the WMD and the lack of consequence for anything that went on. There was Iraq, okay, so let's talk about consequence, how that happened and why it's so important.
- [23:01]
A
Yeah, because Iraq. Look, my experience of Iraq at the time, for whatever reason, was one where I understood that this was a diversion. I've talked about this on the show. I was very lucky because I was also a student of foreign policy. And my professor before the Iraq war explained exactly. He understood the sectarian divides in Iraq. He explained why this was such a bad idea. He had worked in the administration, he'd worked in the Defense Department. So I was fortunate in that regard. But the Iraq war was a blatant abuse of power on a scale that I at that age had never experienced in my life. I don't know enough about American history to be able to point to another example, I don't know of another one where the President of the United States centralized power. Again, we should also remember that the passage of the Patriot act, the tightening of financial regulations around money laundering, et cetera, post 2001 was a dramatic departure from the world that we lived in before that. Even the experience of going through the airport security. So that was just one thing. That was a the backdrop. And you could argue for those changes for the same reason that you could argue for some of the changes during the COVID 19 pandemic. In other words, you could make an argument that you're doing this to protect people. There was absolutely no argument for the invasion of Iraq that can possibly be made that I think is charitable. At the end of the day, the Bush administration lied to the American people. The press was complicit in doing so, and the entire nation was driven to a war of aggression against a sovereign nation that undermined the entire rules based liberal order, undermined the United nations, which was the key international institution for global cooperation and global international law. And not only did it undermine the trust of Americans, which led also to many veterans returning home with ptsd, many of whom became disillusioned with American policy and with politics. But it also deeply unnerved our adversaries. Adversaries. It unnerved the Russians and it unnerved the Chinese. And so I think you have to begin with the war in Iraq. And it also set us back. Remember, it isn't just that we lost trust. The Bush administration was much more focused on China when it entered in 2000 than it was when it exited in 2008. Because the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consumed American foreign policymakers. Not just in the administration, but in the think tank community, in academia, in the press, everything became about the Middle East. And during that entire time, America's adversaries were growing stronger. Fast forward again. The 2008 financial crisis is also very important. But fast forward from the invasion of Iraq to today and the world looks dramatically different. The security picture for the United States looks dramatically different. So much so that that the smallest detail, like the story around Deep Seq and the competency relative to GPT's Zero1 preview model has literally unnerved people invested in Nvidia. The whole market sold off, but it didn't even sell off that much, by the way. It just shows you how fragile, how fragile the bull market is and people's optimism also. Again, it brings us back to what is it that people worship here? Like, what are we doing? Is there no sense of sort of national mission? Is there no national project? And so anyway, the answer to your question is I think it does. You have to look at the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That was peak American empire. And we're in a dramatically different place now. We're in a multipolar world, quasi bipolar. And it's not clear what the final sort of order will look like when we get through this turning. If you want to use Neilhouse framework.
- [26:52]
B
As I think that through, and I think you're absolutely right about this, but sticking with this idea of consequences and the lack of them for that, it seems to me that what that's done is the worst, most dangerous thing. It's emboldened the leaders in America to believe that they can push and push and push and they can use America's hegemony declining as it may have been at the time and it may be now evermore. And I think nowhere is that perhaps less understood but more important than with the freezing of the Russian central bank assets. That was a blatant power grab, a blatant flexing that really had no basis in law, certainly in the international understanding between countries that reserves should have some kind of sanctity about them, that military might and lack of consequence has moved on to financial might and lack of consequence. So what happens, do you think, Dmitry? Because somewhere there is a consequence, there is a consequence of this and it will manifest at some point in the future. It feels to me like it's brewing now in perhaps the treasury market. That might be somewhere where the consequence might be shown. But when you think that through the procession of lack of consequence, where does that procession go for you?
- [28:15]
A
When you say lack of consequence, do you mean lack of consequence for the freezing of the reserves?
- [28:20]
B
Well, I mean the fact that lack.
- [28:22]
A
Of Consequence for the value of the dollar.
- [28:24]
B
Well, no, I think what I mean, to be clear, and you're right, I probably framed that as clear as I could have done. The lack of ability for other countries to push back, the fact that nobody could go on strike when America took that move and froze those assets, no one could do anything about it. There was a powerlessness the rest of the world could palpably feel. You could see it. And the only response they could possibly have, it seems, is to buy gold and not even sell Treasuries because that would put them in the spotlight. But gently buy fewer Treasuries and try and quietly slip out the back door while America was on the stage, on the bully pulpit, telling everybody what they could and couldn't do.
- [29:08]
A
Yes. So I think what I'm getting from what you're saying is also, is the United States now relying on financial tools in the absence of the coercive power of hard power because we're no longer the unipolar power. I don't know how long the United States will be able to continue to sanction countries without consequence to the value of the dollar. I think the reason why I feel like this answer is complicated is because I feel like so much of this also is tied up in the global order. And absent an international war, I don't necessarily see consequences for them. Okay, that. In other words, how do I say this? I also want to suss things out because I think the issue for me is less about whether the United States was morally correct in sanctioning Russia because we already established the real moral failure was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Russia, in my opinion. I don't know where you stand on this, but I've been very clear about it. I think it was not just morally incorrect, but unjustifiable based on the enlargement of NATO. I also think that a lot of people don't hold the Russians to the same standard that they hold themselves. So we talked about how the invasion of Iraq was illegal. It was an illegal war. It was also horrific for the Americans. The blowback was enormous. There doesn't seem to be the same sort of accountability to the Russians for their actions or. I think also a lot of folks see the Russian invasion as having been Some sort of 3D chess move by Putin. But I think this is a very long game and it's going to be a long term. It's going to be awful for the Russians, not to mention that for Russia, they are now closer into the arms of The Chinese, it's been bad for the United States. And I also do think that long term it is possible for the US relationship to Russia to strengthen for Russia to re enter the western fold. I think long term that's perfectly possible because their long term interests aren't with China. So I'm kind of diverting from your question.
- [31:13]
B
No, but that's the beauty of this conversation. It goes where it goes. It's just fascinating to talk about these things.
- [31:17]
A
Yeah. But partly because I don't, I guess I still don't quite understand the through line of consequence.
- [31:24]
B
Okay, so let me try and do a better job. I'm obviously doing a lousy job of.
- [31:28]
A
No, no, it's okay. It's not an easy subject.
- [31:30]
B
But for me I've just got so many thoughts in my head and I'm trying to get them in order. And that's why talking to friends like you will help me do that. And so the questioning of my questions is a really useful thing to help me frame my thoughts correctly. I think what I'm trying to say is, is this idea of lack of consequence from 2003, there was no consequence because everybody was involved, Blair was involved, Bush was involved. All the people that fell in behind were all involved. And so when the lack of wmd, when the unnecessariness of this whole invasion truly came to light, enough high powered, well placed people were likely culpable that it just got brushed under the carpet and nothing was ever done about it and nobody was punished. There was no, I mean yes, we had inquiries but they were a whitewash. And so people were angry because they felt like, think what you will about humankind, particularly in the West. There is this deep seated sense of fairness and justice and accountability that we feel, you know, we're taught it our whole lives and we're taught that we live in these, you know, countries where the rule of law is paramount and that's the basis of, of everything that is built upon this rule of law. And so people felt that viscerally and it changed the way they felt towards power, towards their leaders. And then we had the 2008 financial crisis and again too many well placed people, nobody was punished for it. This is lack of punishment. And I think in Western Judeo Christian society there is this sense that punishment is appropriate when, when people transgress. And so as we've gone through, whether it be kinetic warfare, whether it be the ignoring of international norms and orders, or whether it be the enrichment of oneself at the expense of others and then the Little people feel powerless because all those elites that you talked about earlier on have their inquiry, they all wag their fingers at each other. A few people pay a few fines, but no body really gets punished. This idea of consequence, I feel has fed directly through into the cryptogrift. This idea that, well, what's going to happen, right? I mean, look at the hawk tour girl recently, right? You know, a classic rug pull. And it's now become a rug pull. It's not become fraud, it's not become anything. Nobody has been punished for anything major, any headline making enterprise. There's no punishment. And so this idea, there's no consequence just accelerates the decline. Because people who would ordinarily never dream of committing anything that was remotely close to breaking the law will now be tempted because it's like, well, what's the worst that could happen? So again, it's a meandering stream of conscience, unfortunately. But I just feel like there's a line of lack of consequence that runs right through all this to the point where people don't feel like doing something bad will lead to a bad outcome anymore.
- [34:38]
A
I agree with that. So just to tie off the conversation about Russia, I think that because the way I view it, the sanctions put on Russia were an attempt to create consequences for the Russians for their invasion of Ukraine. So for me, the more interesting line of inquiry there is what was different about America's response or the way it was interpreted than it would have been, let's say, 20 years ago. And I think that speaks to again, 2003 and the hypocrisy. It was just much more difficult for the United States to make a moral argument against Russia's invasion of Ukraine because they did it in Iraq. So I think that's sort of like where I view it. And I think also because the United States is no longer a unipolar power, it just has less teeth. And so that may also explain why it decided to use sanctions as a tool to try and do something to punish the Russians to show this was not allowed. This could have also been an opportunity, again, not to stray too far from the initial question of consequence, which I think I understand now where you're going and we can discuss it. I think it was also an opportunity to rewrite the ship of state and to create a new consensus with American allies about what the future will look like. Because the United States is not a unipolar power. We need to offload some of the security burden to the Europeans in NATO. I am someone who believes in NATO. I do not want to see NATO disbanded. I think it's an important security architecture for Europe, but it has to be a security architecture that's going to work. And by work I mean it's something that the American people have to support and it has to be constructed in a way that's sustainable. And I think the big failure to me since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is the perplexing inability to scale basic military production to support the Ukrainians and to support them in a manner that would allow a US backed peace that was on the best terms possible. We're not even talking about what led to the war, what could have been done in the months before the invasion to have possibly arrested the war. So anyway, that's sort of my view on that because I do think that the security picture is terrifying. The invasion of Ukraine accelerated this deterioration and the possibility of things going south with China also are very scary now in terms of this idea of consequence and these scams all over the place. There's so many scams. I mean coffee Zillow does such a great job highlighting this stuff. I also see a lot of the thing that's also for me just shocking is the scale of the debauchery that I see in many of the new media platforms which are now the mainstream media. There are people and news, whatever you want to call them, news organizations centered around influencers that have so much influence today and their views and takes are so disgusting and so amoral on so many issues that I think this also speaks to the moral vacuum, the collapse in the institutions of old, because the hypocrisy, right? We say we believe in one thing, but then we don't actually do it. Whether it's the Bush administration invading Iraq, whether it's the media saying one thing and the reality is something totally different. The horse dewormer of Ivermectin is an example. One of the reasons I think that Joe Rogan has been so radicalized is because he experienced the mismatch between reality and perception in his own particular saga during COVID So this moral collapse of the traditional organs of propaganda and consensus making in society has opened the door to, to something else. But rather than something positive, fill the vacuum. What's filled the vacuum is greater depravity. And I think that's the darkness that I encountered with the launch of the Trump meme coin followed by Melania's meme coin. And I think if that's what you're describing, I see that and we saw that back, remember? I mean Elon was way ahead of the curve with taking Tesla private at what was it, 420 and the lack of consequences. But again, I think that on the financial side that financial nihilism was born out of the 2008 financial crisis and the lack of consequences coming out of it and the drop to zero of interest rates and the expansion of the Fed balance sheet. And so many of the things that we thought were not supposed to happen actually happened and there were no consequences as a result of it. And that's what breeds the nihilism, that's what breeds the cynicism. And we haven't made any progress in that direction. We just keep going down the road of the banana republic and towards a patronage system. And a patronage system is not compatible with meritocracy and those systems breed a lot of resentment and I'm very concerned about that. And I think that's probably what you're also describing.
- [39:24]
B
Yeah, I think being, it's funny this idea of being bearish about markets as they've climbed coming back to 2008 and what happened after that and this lack of consequence. I think this idea of being bearish is coming more into focus for me now personally. And it's not about markets, it is a bearishness for society. It's a bearishness for what happens when we reach that moral vacuum that you talk about. This idea that if number go up becomes the only thing that matters. That's what leads to onlyfans and all these God awful women putting themselves on the Internet proudly boasting of how many men they can sleep with in a day and all this stuff for attention. And you talk about influences. It is a complete and utter moral vacuum. And I think I'm only now starting to understand what my own bearishness was really all about. Because it's not that I haven't invested in all these years, it's not that I haven't. I've just sat there on a pile of gold and can.
- [40:30]
A
That's what most people think about you, right? Yes.
- [40:32]
B
With a shotgun in my hand, wait to repel the zombies. It's not about that at all. For me it's been an attempt to try and talk about something other than what's going to go up tomorrow. And that to me has felt important. It's felt that there are plenty of places where you can talk about the number going up. There aren't so many places where you can listen to people like you have meaningful conversations with people about meaningful subjects that don't end with A. So just to distill that here's three letter acronym that you need to buy to make money out of this conversation, and that you use the words moral vacuum there. And that's what it feels like to me. It feels like we've entered this moral vacuum. And a lot of that I feel is because money has become, to your point in your opening monologue, which was quite brilliant, by the way, the one thing that matters to anybody, and I don't know if it's chicken or egg, I don't know if the morals go. And so all that's left is money, or money becomes so important that all the morals go. But the two are inextricably linked. There is no question about that in my mind. So I wonder if you can help me figure all those little bits of that to you. So again, I'm floundering here and anyone listening to this, I apologize if I'm talking complete nonsen, but this is so real to me and these thoughts are flying around my head and I don't have that many people that I can talk to to try and make sense of it, and you happen to be one of them. So apologies for anything random. Go wherever you want with it, and I'll try and hang on for dear life.
- [42:09]
A
Yeah, so I guess a few thoughts. One is that I just think part of this isn't all that complicated. When money becomes free, the economy and the financial markets come to resemble more of a casino. And that's, I think, partly what we've seen. I told you before we got on here, I got a notification from Coinbase about. I don't have it now up there, but it was something about there's still a chance to enter, make a trade for a chance to win. This is a brokerage app. Robinhood was doing the same thing. It's the gamification of investing. So part of it's just that, again, that's the debauchery again. What is the term of affection? Crypto. Degen. But I think there's also something else that's important here, which is there's this. We all are familiar with the concept of exit liquidity. And what we've seen is that this idea of exit liquidity has elevated itself to this idea of exiting the system overall, that whether it's bitcoin, whether it's some other cryptocurrency, whether it's a meme, coin, whatever it is, if you can just make enough, you can exit, you can exit the rat race, you can exit the feudal manor in which you've been assigned and you can achieve escape velocity. And there's a kind of sort of religious resonance there too. And what that really also suggests is that, or it assumes is that you can live and you can exist and you can be happy outside of the systems that support life on this planet. And there's nowhere you can go, by the way, there's nuclear war or if we have more high tech warfare, if we have EMP attacks or cyber attacks in this country. Because by the way, World War III is going to look very different than World War II. World War III is a world where no one's safe. The entire world is a battlefield because everything is connected. And so I think that's particularly scary. That also, I think aligns with a trend that has occurred over years now, increasingly every year more and more, which is that people just kind of check out and they just assume that someone else will handle it. Mike Green and I have talked about this. In fact, I've said before that Mike Green deserves some credit for my term, financial nihilism, because it was a conversation that he and I had in 2019 on a long walk from Union Square to a diner in the early hours of the night. And we talked about a lot of things. And it was out of that in 2019 that I developed this concept of financial nihilism. But one of the things that I remember distinctly him talking about in that conversation that we had was about how. Whether it was passive, because of course, that's the area where Mike has made, I think, one of his most important contributions. Whether it's passive where you just assign the discretionary allocation intelligence to another investor to the market, you're just riding off of their pricing decisions, or whether it's just kind of following the GPS on your phone even as you're driving off a cliff, people have increasingly checked out of making the decisions themselves or participating in a manner that is critical for the functioning of society. And democracy is another one of those areas. Yes, people vote, but there's a lack of seriousness with which people take their role as voters in this country. So I think that generally speaking, and again, I'm actually hesitant to say this because I think that doesn't fully explain things, because of course there are many MAGA voters who feel that they're taking a lot of responsibility in their vote. But maybe there, what I'm also sensing in the case of MAGA ism and Trump populism, is maybe too much of an embrace of the entertainment factor. And maybe that's sort of what I'm also touching on, which is that we're kind of in it for the lulz. A lot of people are in it for the lulls, and that also is part of it. That implies a level of sort of checking out. Right. I'm not particularly concerned about how things are going to work out. I'm actually here for the show. Well, that's also scary because we're not Argentina. If Argentina collapses tomorrow, it actually has no impact on the rest of the world. Like, it'll have some impact on commodity prices and natural resource prices, but there's no security architecture built on Argentina, and there's no embedded national security state that could go buck wild and launch a preemptive world war in Argentina. We are still the most powerful state in the world. And if we withdraw from the rest of the world rapidly, that's going to have massive consequences. And if we decide to go full Hitler. Not suggesting in any way that there's anyone, just to be clear, because I don't want people to think that I'm somehow saying that that's the case here. I've never, by the way, bought into that argument, and it's sad that you.
- [46:58]
B
Have to point that out. But you.
- [46:59]
A
I think it's important, though, because I never actually bought into it. I think that our democracy is at risk, but not because of who's in the White House now. I think for systemic factors. And I never bought into the argument that Trump was a danger to democracy when he was first elected. In fact, what we saw was that the party that was more willing to use lawfare was the Democrats and not Trump. But I do think that if we lost control of our country, if we had a coup d' etat or we elected someone to office who centralized power, who was very interested in doing that, and maybe Trump is interested in doing that today, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Regardless, that person would control the most powerful military on earth. And so these are not games. I remember also that during the invasion of Ukraine, there was a video circulating. I'm sure there was lots of this kind of stuff, but I saw it and I had tweeted it and I said, this is absolute nihilism. This is an example of it. The whole conversation's about escalation. It might have actually not been in the initial invasion. It might have been during the peak escalation fears about nuclear. When Putin was making some of those threats. Right around the time, maybe also of Nord Stream, The Nord Stream pipe breaking or being bombed, attacked, there was a video circulating of a Sort of, you know, fake video of this Putin character dancing to house music with a cake in front of him and a giant red button and, like, crushing the red button. And that's just so incredibly disturbing. Like, this is our life. Human beings have been on this Earth for at the very least 100,000 years or more. Civilization has been around for a very long period of time. Not in the grand scheme of things, but a long time, that we could just kind of flirt with it and play with it and kind of make jokes about it like that, and that people generally have this kind of, I don't know, YOLO view of a lot of these things. It's disturbing, but we keep getting used to it. I'm already used to the fact that Trump launched the meme coin. I'm over it now. I've forgotten about it. I'm on to the next thing. And that also, that sort of chaotic sense of progression in our society just leaves, I think, a lot of people feeling uneasy that something's going to go wrong. And the consequences of something going wrong in this particular version of human civilization is bigger than at any other time in our history that we know of. Unless there's some lost civilization that we're not aware of.
- [49:16]
B
Well, it's interesting. So just coming back on a few little bits and pieces of that, which is really interesting, I come back to this idea that the feelings like those you and I are having are very much generational. Exes, boomers and above, I think, feel this way. I think we're a lot more prone to feeling like this because we. We've been around longer, we've seen more. We have seen inflations. We have seen huge recessions. We've seen, you know, political violence and, you know, the IRA or the Red Brigade. We've seen all this.
- [49:52]
A
We also lived through consensus reality where there was a popular culture and we all had a general idea of what was and what wasn't exactly right.
- [49:59]
B
And we are used to there being consequence. We are used to bad actors being prosecuted. And I'm curious, you know, the generations. I remember that meme very well. I think you shared it, and I remember seeing it on your Twitter feed. But there's a generation who have grown up where everything is a video game and you can destroy worlds with no consequence and Grand Theft Auto, you can rape and murder and steal and loot and all this stuff with no consequence. And this feeling like, is this whole thing just a game? Is it all just a video game? And again, this is just. I'm just talking with the things that you're saying that are resonating with me, this idea of exit. My generation, I remember my first day, literally my first day at work, thinking to myself, I missed the excitement of having a job and traveling up to London and being in the city and all that stuff. But I remember that my goal was to be able to buy a house and pay for my house and exit and be able to retire and not have to worry about that kind of stuff. And so when we talk about exit liquidity, the amount of exit liquidity that has been generated in meme coins and crypto and all these get rich quick schemes that has been left on the table. And a mutual friend of ours told me a story about someone that worked for him who made a ton of money in one of the crypto booms. And he said to this kid, look, just pay off your mortgage, buy your house, spend some of that bitcoin and buy your house. At least then if something crazy happens, you don't have to worry about it. And the guy's response was like, are you insane? Why on earth would I give up some of my bitcoin to pay off my house? I mean, that's just ludicrous. Subsequent bitcoin went down to 13,000 again and back up. Who knows what he's done? But this idea of an exit, it feels to me as though you're in the game and you don't want to exit the game because if you're not in the game, the game's going on without you and it might cost you everything.
- [52:05]
A
Absolutely brilliant observation. Such a brilliant observation. It's also that your identity is wrapped up in owning these call options, right? It's part of a dream, and that dream is tied up in meaning for you and your life. So I think that's also absolutely true in crypto.
- [52:27]
B
But the thing about dreams, right, is.
- [52:30]
A
You have to realize them at some point.
- [52:32]
B
Yeah, we've all dreamt about winning that lottery ticket. What would you do if you won the lottery? And no one's answer is, ever, I would buy 100 billion more tickets to the next lottery. No one ever says that.
- [52:42]
A
So let me turn the mic on you and ask you, what is that about? So what does it mean that you have the money to exit and you don't exit? What does that say about what you're chasing and what people are chasing?
- [52:56]
B
I think for me, personally, when I think about that, because there's a degree of hypocrisy in what I'm saying, because I'm still doing this, but I love doing this. I love doing it. I do this because I love it. Not because I'm trying to, you know, take over the world or build some big mega organization. I love having these conversations. I love writing, I love thinking and doing all those things. I do it because I love it. You know, I'm fortunate, Having worked for 40 years in finance, that I can pay off my mortgage. And it's not a case of, oh, you're not the kid who dreamed of paying off his mortgage all these years ago. You're still in the game. I do it because I love it. And one day when I don't love it anymore, that will be the determinant for me to stop doing it. So I'm very fortunate from that regard. But I've worked incredibly hard for four decades to get to that point. But when I think about the people who've made life changing paper gains and it doesn't seem to have changed their lives, and you could argue that and say, wasn't that great? They've got all this money and they still want to carry on doing what they're doing. But I don't know if that's the reality. I don't know if coming back to money, the fact that money has been so debased that it doesn't necessarily mean that much anymore and it's just a means of keeping score. It's not a means to provide for your kids and provide for your future and to take savings and use them productively for enterprise. It's a means of keeping score. And that comes back to this. And I talked about the corruption of money many, many years ago, and I had to explain what I meant. You know, it's not corruption in the sense of some bad guy doing something with a brown paper bag under a table. You have absolutely corrupted what money means. And because money is trust, you are corrupting the trust in everything. This is the thing that people outside the world of finance don't perhaps understand is that every single thing is ultimately built on money, which is trust. And you have chipped away and chipped away and chipped away one of the very foundational, bedrock pieces of society. And you've rendered it to a lot of people, as we're seeing now, completely meaningless. And if the bedrock of society is completely meaningless, where do you go from there? What do you build anything upon if you don't have a foundation that has meaning?
- [55:24]
A
I'm going to hopefully answer your question, but a few things came up.
- [55:27]
B
I don't care if you don't. At this point, I'm just enjoying the conversation.
- [55:29]
A
No, it's not relevant to your question. Yeah, it's relevant to your question. Just to address this thing about meaning, I think this is in my experience and I'll bring it back to myself because I've actually had a personal experience of life changing returns which I'll share, which I've never shared before, and what my experience of that was, realized gains and so how that ties back in. But I think that what I have seen in this cycle and increasingly is that the types of returns that were once available only to financiers, the kinds of returns that would lead someone. And I met people like this years ago. Over the years, people that made so much money, win financial gains, contributing nothing to society, that they basically exited and tried to do art and spent crazy amounts of money sort of painting on walls and having people tell them that they're great painters but their art sucks and they're unhappy because money didn't fill the hole. Money wasn't the thing that they thought it was. And when they got it, that's when the depression began to set in. I think that more and more people experience that today because that call option has been available to more people as we've sucked capital out of a bigger part of the pyramid at the base and allocated it up to the keystone. So I think that's where my head goes at when you say that I've talked about. Not in any detail, like maybe I'm prepared to talk about here, not in too much detail, but I have talked about how I've actually applied this framework in my own investing. And in this cycle, I actually did realize returns. I mean, I realized some gains in the previous cycle, but not to this extent. And my experience, and I think this is relevant again to this idea of nihilism because these gains were in crypto. My experience of realizing these gains left me feeling empty. And empty is not quite the word actually. Yeah, a little bit empty, but it didn't feel the way I expected it to feel. And it also felt bad because I felt that I was dumping on other people. I didn't feel that I was making money and being rewarded for my contribution to the allocation of capital. I felt that I was making money in a pyramid scheme and I was taking other people's money. And I called my wife after. Actually I called a few people after the experience, by the way. It didn't stop me from doing it, I kept doing it. And that experience, and I think it's also INSTRUMENTAL Because I think also the thing that's, again, I don't mean to harp on crypto here, but it's just such a unique experience to be in an industry where everyone who's smart, that I know, who's in it, who's made money, knows that almost all of it is a scam, that almost all of it is a pyramid scheme, rather that's a better way to put it, that it's almost all pyramid driven. If you've been in crypto long enough, you remember what it was like when people actually believed that most of this stuff was going to do something. Now maybe it eventually will. You throw enough money at something, you get enough government regulation to support it. There are ways to use Blockchain and other DLTs to certainly do certain things in finance, but the amount of capital, the amount of wealth that's been generated, in my opinion, just doesn't justify. And I worry about, and I have worried and I've been open about this. I worry for, in the long term, what does that mean for the success of our economy? If we're expending all this effort and capital in an area of the economy that's only going to produce so many gains in return of real wealth in the economy, what are we doing? And is that what the Chinese aren't doing?
- [59:09]
B
That.
- [59:11]
A
So I guess that's where my mind goes and has gone quite often, which is that we are in a phase where we are just focused on financial gains at the expense of everything else. Our capital model is broken. The capital isn't going to the places where it needs to go in order to address some of these deeper social inequities, some of the bigger strategic needs that we have. And the launch of Trump's meme coin, I think was especially disturbing because Trump was elected on a certain platform that had to do with national rejuvenation. So when he came into office and one of the first, and the first thing he did on Inauguration Day was to launch a meme coin, it was like a gut punch, man. And I've never been someone that believes in the. I don't mythologize people. I didn't mythologize Trump. I didn't mythologize Biden. I was young enough to mythologize Obama. I was a Ron Paul and Obama supporter who voted for Obama in 2008, but I was young. Okay, all right, I'm not that stupid now. But it was a gut punch because I still know that lots of people, millions of people, believe that he is their savior and that he's gonna change things. And I'm also someone that. When he was elected in 2016, I supported the guy. I wanted him to do well, and I was less optimistic this time around, but I would still welcome it and was hopeful that maybe something. Maybe they're right. Maybe he really did change after he was shot. But he didn't, clearly. He launched a meme coin. Who are we kidding here? The guy launched the meme coin. I tried to think about what. Sometimes when I see things like this, I say to myself, I put myself in the other person's state of mind. I'm like, what would it take mentally in your framework and in your worldview, in your heart, to do something like that? And I just cannot square that with someone that's mission driven and focused on what's in the best interest of the country. It feels like it's time to loot and pillage. That's the stage we're at in America. It's time to loot and pillage. Everyone get on board the grift train. All the tech bros come to the White House. Let's see what we can do. This is now a patronage system. We've moved to a patronage system. It feels like.
- [61:25]
B
Yeah, I think that's incredibly to the point here. And I think the Trump meme coin. I don't think Trump sat up all night on the Solana blockchain. I think one of his guys said, hey, you know what we should do? We should launch a coin. Oh, yeah, fine, Go for it. Because. And you'll make X Great. I'm all for making money. The scorpion and the frog. And as you always bites with Trump.
- [61:46]
A
But that's crazy, right? But just think about. I'm sorry, that's totally insane. You're President of the United States. This used to be the most glorious office in the world. An incredible privilege to sit in the Oval Office. An opportunity to make change. You're in your 70s. To have an impact, to have a legacy, to change people's lives for the better. And you're launching a meme coin. It doesn't make any sense. It shows you how depraved the morality in our society is.
- [62:14]
B
But, Dimitri, this comes back to something else that I'm glad you've brought me back to. And that's the. The distinction between the president and the office of the presidency. Because it used to be about the office of the presidency. Nixon resigned because he brought shame upon the office of the presidency. I can't continue this job because the presidency is bigger than the president. I'd be curious in your thought on this, because I've brought this up with a couple of people and I've got different responses. I'd be curious in yours because I know what a thoughtful guy you are. I go back to Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky affair. To me, that was a turning point because that was the first time that someone had brought shame upon the office of the presidency and said, you know what? I'm going to brazen this out. I'm not going to quit. I'm just going to stand there and I'm going to go through this. And I think I'll still be the president at the end of this. And since then, we've had, what, four or five impeachment attempts thrown at Trump or Biden or whoever. I mean, impeachments are thrown around like confetti these days. But once you conflate the President with the office of the presidency, you end up with exactly this kind of problem in that the two become intertwined and it becomes about the president, because you can't see the office of the presidency. I remember our mutual friend Pippa Malgram telling me that when she was in the White House, she would sit outside the Oval Office with the CEOs of big, big American companies, and they'd be, I'm going to go and tell the President he's making a big mistake here, and he needs to do this and he needs to do that. And she would say, you go in there and you tell him, he wants to hear this stuff. You go in there and tell him. And the way she framed it was beautiful. She said that she came to believe that Gollum lived above the transom of the Oval Office. She would see these guys cross under that transom into the seat of power and become complete pussycats. Oh, Mr. President, what an honor to meet you. And here I am in the seat of power, and nowadays you kind of know it's about, oh, I got to meet Trump. I didn't get to go in the White House. I got to go and meet Trump. And I think once you humanize an.
- [64:28]
A
Officer, what a really great observation, Grant.
- [64:30]
B
Oh, I mean, she's brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But once you humanize the office, once the office becomes about the person, the office is gone. It's a popularity contest. There's no gravitas anymore. It's just, hey, our guy is in this time, and let's make sure their guy doesn't get in. I spent some time in Montana last year with a Guy who's a very senior in the Democrat Party, very senior in the dnc, and a superb guy. We had a great conversation. We were talking about the upcoming election. And I said, the way I see it, I think Trump's going to win pretty handily. I just don't think this is going to work out for the Democrats. And we had a very good and open conversation until we got to the point where I said, the thing that's really surprised me is I knew it was going to happen. But I've been amazed at the degree to which the media is in the tank for Harris, how hard they've come out and desperately tried the second Biden stepped down to reinvent her, the Time magazine cover, this presidential illustration, and they've done everything. And he just, he said, I don't see where you're getting that from. I think that's, that's ludicrous. I'm not seeing that at all. And, you know, I said, look, I don't have a dog in the hunt. I can't vote in this election. So I'm just observing it without any dog whatsoever. But you genuinely telling me that you don't think that the media are pulling hard for Harris, he said, no, I think the media have been pretty even handed in their coverage. And that was a real aha moment for me because this was a. He was a great guy. We had a great conversation, and he was very pragmatic about the shortcomings of certain parts of his party, blah, blah, blah, until he got to that. There's a blind spot. And so it seems everybody now it's an our team against their team competition. It's not about the President anymore. It's not about the presidency. It's about, we got to win. We're going to get our guy to win over their guy. And if their guy wins, we've got to do everything we can to make sure their guy doesn't win next time. And to hell with who's the president going to be? Who's the winner?
- [66:35]
A
Yeah, first of all, I just want to reiterate that I think that that observation that you made about how the office of the President used to be, oh, Mr. President, once you became President, you were no longer George W. Bush. You were Mr. President to now where the personality supersedes the cachet of the office. Part of that may also do with the directness and power of social media and the ability to speak directly to your audience. I think that what's more notable is that he actually believed it. But in Any case, I guess that just speaks to just how aloof those folks are that they could see the media's biased support for Harris and not really notice it at all. But look, I mean, this brings us back to I think a really big important part of this story, which is the transformation of media. You and I are part of this in our own particular way, though we're not political. I mean, I guess I'm political more certainly more than you, but I'm not political in the way that the sort of talking heads are political. But what we've seen is we've really now seen the alternative media is no longer alternative. The old media is dead. This is the new media. This is the media. The media is these big influencers with their own private platforms and they're forming part of a new power structure. What I think we have seen here is a battle of elites. The old elites versus the new elites. The old elites had a different power structure aligned with different industries. And this new elite is I think also very tech driven. And something I think talked a little bit about Gen X. I'm actually technically a millennial, but I'm on the cusp.
- [68:17]
B
Dude, you're the most Gen X millennial I know.
- [68:19]
A
I think so. I think so. And I think that this move towards a more disembodied experience of the world through digital media. And because we're such rapacious capitalists as a society today, we've become such corrupt capitalists and we worship money so fervently. We don't have the proper framework to talk about the public interest. So much so that we can allow these rapacious tech companies with their extractive ad driven ecosystems and some of their demonic applications to exploit the minds of our children and we don't stop it. And there are other areas where this is important, but I always go back to the impact on kids, on the health of children. You mentioned this OnlyFans thing, the prostitution of young people, as though this was like post Soviet Russia and we don't do anything about it. That's the sign of a moral failure. Why don't we do anything about it? Why is the excuse that the kind of Mitt Romney Republican and I use Mitt Romney, even though perhaps it's not the best example because of Mormon, maybe he would sort of have a moral problem with it, but maybe not, is kind of like, well, this is free market capitalism work. We can't put our thumbs on the scale. What are you talking about? What's the point of money if you can't Protect your kids. You see a strong correlation between the usage of a particular application and the rise in gender dysphoria among girls. So does that concern you? So your point is that it's more important to protect the private profits of these corporations than it is to try and address the problem, Try to get your arms around the problem. And that's the other thing. We're at a point in society where there's a kind of inertia, an embedded inertia in our policy making such that we can't seem to address these deeper social ills and also build a new social contract because the old one's broken. So is the new social contract. The argument that some of these folks make, and I call them free speech bros. I'm very much in favor of free speech. Of course I am. I support the First Amendment. But I don't, of course, buy into the lie that what happens on Twitter is free speech. I don't buy that lie. And so I think that again, the clear, ominous dangers, besides the impact on children, is the capturing of speech and the ability for one man who owns one platform that's dominant in political discourse to surreptitiously undermine the nature of that discourse and to define the parameters around which it exists. Because there is no free speech on Twitter. You type something in, it goes to the Twitter database, and then it comes out as whatever the algorithm spits it out to be. And this is the more important thing. It isn't necessarily that Elon Musk is sitting on top of Twitter and calling balls and strikes. It's that we're building increasingly automated systems by AI that are determining the scope and nature of our reality. And people are just kind of plobbing along and moving forward. And part of the other, I think, major fault lines in society today. And it's not along party lines. I mean, I think sort of people that are just kind of party driven minds will default to whatever position the party supports. But it's people that have a sort of conservative sense of our values and who we are as human beings and what matters and what do we want to hold onto. And people that are just like full speed ahead, let's just go, you know, disembodied future, transhumanism, whatever. Let's just go. And I think for me, that has been a huge thing that I talk about on the show for years now. It's deeply concerning, what kind of world are we building? What are we speeding forwards towards? Do we even want this? But because we can't have a conversation between ourselves because we've lost a sense of common identity. There's no place or way for us to have that conversation. And so what ends up filling that vacuum are populists and. And demagogues and oligarchs. And that's what we're seeing in America today. It's a free for all among people with power who are looking to use the system to advantage themselves. And nowhere is there a conversation about the public interest. And I hope, I hope, I pray I'm still waiting for some kind of critical threshold to be reached where we see people stand up and take a stand. I mean, Navalny took a stand in Putin's Russia, and he ended up dead in a Gulag. Why are people not taking a stand here? Why are people with power and money taking a stand? I don't know.
- [72:48]
B
Well, I think because the people with power and money realize that there's more power and money to be had by Zuckerberg's a perfect example, right? I mean, perfect example. Watching his flip flop once Trump won tells you everything you need to know. It tells me everything I need to know anyway, that there's more money and power being aligned with the winner.
- [73:05]
A
Let's take the example of Joe Rogan, who I don't know and I've always liked and I've always felt and continue to think that the man has a strong moral compass. At the same time, I don't understand the way he talks about the election of Trump as sort of like, thank God again. And I just really want to make this clear for your audience. I did not support Kamala Harris. I was not someone who thought, oh, my God, let's hope Kamala Harris wins the election. I really am in a place of sort of pox on both your houses kind of place. But what I did understand about Joe was he said that he supported rfk. RFK was the only one that made sense for him is what he said. And right after that, he was attacked by Donald Trump. And shortly thereafter, he had Trump on his show, and he became a full Trump supporter. And now he just talks about how much he likes Trump, and he gets chummy with all the sort of pro Trump people. And it feels like he just joined a club. It feels like there wasn't some other sense of kind of what he wanted or his own sort of sense of what's right for the country. It's just kind of like, well, this is the club. It's better to be in this club. It's a good club. It's better than the other club, there's no sort of independent sense of what's right and wrong here somehow. And that was also, I think. I wouldn't call it disturbing, but it was also confusing for me to see Joe not, I guess, take a more independent stand there. I don't know, man. I mean, I'm a small voice. I'm nobody. So maybe if I'm consistent one.
- [74:30]
B
Dimitri, you're a consistent one, so maybe I'd be scared.
- [74:32]
A
I mean, I don't know. Maybe these guys are scared.
- [74:34]
B
No, I'm not sure it's that. I think you may be a smallish voice, but you're a consistent one. And I think when you get to that level where Rogan is, you have something that you're incredibly keen to protect, right? You want your standing, you want everything that comes with it, and you kind of feel a need to be on the inside, because if I'm on the outside, what do I have in the world? This media. If you get disavowed by Donald Trump in the world of media today, you know, so I guess these guys, it's about the prestige. And look, we live in an age where narcissism is rampant, right? I mean, because of all the things we've talked about. Of course, it generates millions upon millions upon millions of people who are driven by ego and the need for reaffirmation of how amazing they are. And if you're in that situation, it is more important than money, right? Especially when you get. Once you've got the money, the money doesn't matter anymore. It's just I need to be worshipping.
- [75:36]
A
The good graces of the power structure, right?
- [75:38]
B
And so there's one other component to this that I'd love to get your thoughts on, if you can, and that is religion. And this is a difficult one for me because I'm not a religious man. I grew up in the UK in the 70s and religion wasn't a thing. Went to school with all creeds and races and religions, and I had no idea. I have very good friends who were Jewish, for example. I didn't know they were Jewish until we were in our 40s. Religions has not been in my life at all. It's not an important thing to me, never has been. And I don't care if people are religious, but it's just not been important to me. I have a very, very good friend of mine who is a religious man. In fact, I have two very good friends of mine who are religious men, and they're incredible human beings, incredibly thoughtful And I've had plenty of conversations with him about religion because I'm curious as to their grounding in that and where it comes from. And as I've thought this through, there was an article recently which I saw and sent to one of these friends of mine, Neil Ferguson came out as having renounced atheism and embraced Christianity. And I find that interesting. And I found this thread to be very interesting. Because if I tie this to my view that money has become the God and it's become the thing that everybody worships above all else, then it stands to reason for me that once money reaches the end of that place where I can't worship money anymore, we're going to see people turning back to their God. And there definitely seems to have been arise in certainly Christianity in the west, certain people turning back to the church. And I've talked to my friend about this and you know, his view is based in the Gospels, it's based in religion, but it is that ultimately there is only one God and people will come back to that. So I'm curious as to your thought a. Whether you've seen this happening the way I have and if you've thought about it or any thoughts you might have about this.
- [77:38]
A
Yeah. So I want to segment my answer. First of all, there's clearly recently been a rise in opportunistic Christianity.
- [77:45]
B
Yeah, okay. Yep. Okay.
- [77:46]
A
That's people coming out to say how Christian they are, including Elon Musk, making allusions, if not outright statements to that regard, because that's the new heuristic for signaling that you're on board with this, whatever this new movement is. So I actually find it really disgusting to the extent to which it's happening and those people are truly lost spiritually. I also think it's just insulting how many people will at once both suggest that they're Christian, but then you can't find Christ anywhere in their heart. Nowhere do I see them talk about love or express compassion. Where is that in their religion and in their framework? As far as whether there has been a rise in interest in religion or Christianity, I definitely think there has been. I definitely think that reflects a lost sense of community and a search for meaning. I think this is something that's been ongoing for a while, and I think that the teachings of Christ are valuable and that, personally speaking, I have never. Not true. When I was very young, high school, and maybe my very early 20s, I had a sort of radically atheistic, materialist framework of the world that it's all just atoms and bits and Consciousness is some emergent phenomenon. That's not a view that I've held for a long time. I don't know what the nature of reality is. I don't know what the nature of my own identity is, where my own sense of ego ends and something larger begins. Is this just a temporary expression of a larger source, energy? I don't have the words to describe those things. And that's part of what religion is. It uses allegories and myths and stories to try and grasp at something that many of us intuitively feel but don't know how to find the words to describe, which is that there's something more, that this world doesn't make sense, that I open my eyes, I'm here. What is the nature of this world? These are basic philosophical questions. So part of it is the search for community, which, by the way, you may remember this or may not remember this in our conversation. You, me, and Ben Hunt in 2020, in that episode that I titled, this was before the pandemic, right before February, titled Financial Nihilism, Price Discovery in a World that Nothing Matters. In the second hour of that conversation, if I remember correctly, we talked about the cult of the Church of Tesla and the meme stock crazes and crypto. And I made the point, I remember Ben Hunt saying that people are really saying something along the lines of what's motivating folks here is the sort of the desire for money and the prior acquisition. And my point was, actually, I think that a bigger component that people are missing is the search and need for community. And again, that's something I learned from crypto, because I was navigating those circles long enough that I remember that so much of it was about community. So I think part of it is community that explains part of what has been happening. And I think another part of it is that because the nature. I don't know if you've ever smoked weed or done any kind of recreational drugs, but I haven't.
- [81:00]
B
I'm not cold enough, I'm afraid. Sorry, mate.
- [81:02]
A
Okay. No, no, no, no, no. Actually, I think one of the actually positive things that's happened in recent years is that the sort of like, you're cool if you do drugs thing has kind of taken a bit of a hit, which is fantastic, because actually, I don't think that drugs are good. But I used to use. And it was only marijuana. I used to use marijuana. I started it late when I was trying to think 22 or something. And I did it for some years when I launched the Business. And I used it as part of my creative process. And it was remarkable, I must say. It was such a benefit for me. So many of my best ideas came out from smoking marijuana. And I can't do any of that now because I'll go brain dead, I can't. But the way that your perception changes when you're on drugs, whether you drink alcohol or you smoke marijuana or whatever it is, it alters your reality. And I think part of what's happening to people is that their time spent on digital platforms, norms, is altering people's perception of reality. And that they're beginning to realize just how tenuous their preexisting sense of what is real actually is, that they realize that what they thought was real was substantive. Actually isn't. It was just a matter of perception. So I think part of what's happening is that people are, in a sense, kind of losing their minds, in a sense. And if you believe that the nature of the world and the nature of who you are is more in your heart than it is in your head, that could explain partly what people are searching for. They're searching for a sense of what's real that isn't subject to the manipulations of their mind. So that's my best way of describing it. But I do think that that's part of the explanation, the changing perception of the world and also people's loss of community in a sense of, you know, sense of community and the search for it.
- [82:55]
B
So, look, it's time to wrap this up. But just. I mean, this is a huge question and it's one I'm pondering and there's no answer to it. I realize that after all the thinking I've been doing, but a broad question like, where do we go from here? What I'm trying to get a sense of is, does this necessarily get worse? Do we have to burn this whole thing down before we can actually rise up from the ashes? Or is there a way that we can arrest, pull back on the joystick before we hit the mountain and pull out of this dive? Because it feels to me, from reading Neil's work and reading history, that you almost have to slam the plane into the ground before there's no way to pull out of this because so many people are making so much money and getting so paper rich forever to change on its own. All that has to go up in smoke before people. And I'm using air quotes this time. Find religion, man.
- [83:53]
A
It's a great question, right? And I think that's something I've thought about as well. I think we have to probably begin by asking ourselves what a crash looks like. What is sufficient to qualify as hitting the mountain? I bet if you told me 10 years ago we would be here, I'd be like, we hit the mountain.
- [84:08]
B
Yeah, right.
- [84:09]
A
So the question is like, at what point does that qualify? Of course, everyone's always thinking in the back of their head about World War II or World War I, right? Conscription, people going off to die, cities being burned to the ground. That is my fear. My fear is a new World War, a World War iii. I said earlier that a World War III would not look like the previous World wars, because everything is a battlefield today, because everything is connected and everything is vulnerable. All our devices and our cities and the way we live, we're so vulnerable to these types of disruptions. And the worry, of course, is that once you enter a war, the logic of war takes over and then the bottom is unclear when you hit bottom. So I guess to answer your question, I am afraid that in order for this to change. Yes. So unfortunately, reflecting honestly on your question, I think we have to get to a place where circumstances demand collective sacrifice.
- [85:16]
B
Right. Great way to put it.
- [85:17]
A
In order to forge a consensus that will allow us to rebuild. And then the question becomes, what qualifies as such an event that requires collective sacrifice? Otherwise, do we just turn into Argentina and we just kind of roll from one crisis to the next and never kind of escape until we eventually maybe do, but what we don't. So is it a V shaped recession or is it an L shaped recession? And I don't know the answer to that question, but I think that it will depend. Ultimately, what that will depend on is the US relationship to China.
- [86:00]
B
Well, I go back to the. To the 20s and 30s and I think about the Wall street crash, which we in finance is a day that we mark in our diaries. But after that came the Great Depression, of course. And it feels to me as though, I think you're right, that period of collective sacrifice, but with money being the most important thing now to so many people, it feels to me that something as simple as a proper stock market crash, a proper one, not one that's arrested by all kinds of throw everything at it to make sure that number doesn't go down. But a proper stock market crash might even be all that could be the plane going into the ground there. Because the stock market has become so important, not just to the people who have money invested in it, but to the psyche of the population. This idea that even people who aren't invested in markets. They may have a 401k, they may not, but they don't actively look at markets. When they see on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, never mind the Wall Street Journal or the Seattle Tribunal or whatever it is, stock market crash, they panic. Because if the stock market's crashing, we are programmed to panic. And so the fact that we've avoided stock market crash, we have markets in turmoil and all the joke segments on cnbc, but it feels to me as though the plane going to the ground at this point would be the evaporation of paper wealth that would come with the stock market crash. It feels like that's the thing that everybody, the one place people are aligned in terms of business community, investors, policymakers, central bankers, governments, presidents, is we don't want to get poor overnight. We don't want to get poor. And so we do everything we can to not get poor. Never mind building, repairing the, the interstate system, never mind high speed trains between New York and San Francisco, never mind all that. Just let's not get poor overnight. So that for me might be the only catalyst that would actually send the planes to the ground. I don't know.
- [88:05]
A
Do you think that that would be driven by an exogenous shock or an endogenous shock?
- [88:11]
B
Well, I think the deep seat thing that we've seen happen over the weekend tells you that, you know, these shocks come when you least expect them. You know, I think it would have to be a shock. I don't think we'll get a creeping people suddenly deciding, you know what, I've had enough making money now I'm going to take my money out and I'm going to be. So I think it will have to be a shock and I think it'll come from outside markets and then you'll just see this capitulation of people who do quickly say, look, I've lost half of it, but I've still got a whole load left. I need to get that out. But it feels to me that everything is wrapped up in money now. There's nothing else that really seems to matter with people, money and influence. If you're poor, you lose all your money, you lose your influence.
- [88:54]
A
I would take the under on that. I think my sense is that it's likely to be endogenously driven. I'm not convinced that this latest particular thing is going to knock markets over. I mean, look at how resilient they have been in the face of exogenous shocks. The invasion of Ukraine the proxy war between Israel and Iran just blip, just onwards, higher. My sense, again, I have no idea. Right, but we're just spitballing here. My sense is that at some point the endogenous flywheel of capital appreciation will go into reverse. Whether it is some analogous, maybe something analogous to what Mike Green has talked about, it doesn't necessarily have to be passive. It can be something else. Maybe it's just psyche and at some point people stop believing. And again, I have no basis to stand on this, but I feel like this rally could go on a bit longer until the end of this year. But my sense is that at some point in this administration, something is going to break. I feel like I'm in that meme where it's like, tell us what will break and there's a goose chasing the person. I'm that guy that said something will break. The most unscientific thing in the world. But at some point, I think the bull phase of this long expansion in prices will exhaust itself. But my sense is that it will exhaust itself and it will not be some exogenous shock. There may be something that happens that'll grab ahold of it and say that this is it. And so maybe this is it. Maybe the mania is over. But my sense is there's still a bit more sort of euphoria to go with the Tech Bros. In the White House.
- [90:34]
B
Yeah, I think that could be the case. Do you subscribe to my theory that a stock market crash could be the tipping point for all of this? Or will it happen in isolation, do you think?
- [90:45]
A
No, absolutely. I think that if a stock market crashes big enough, it depends on how bad it is, Right? If it's big enough to impact the economy, given how many people are invested in it, certainly it would be catastrophic for people of a certain demographic. Whether or not that wouldn't, though, lead to the kind of, in my opinion, need for social cohesion that I think would be necessary to mark a bottom. Something has to happen that's big enough that it impacts either the whole of society or near the whole of society. You look at the pandemic that impacted people above a certain age, didn't do anything to bring us together. But I don't know what that is, man. And the thing is also, Grant, what worries me, man. Jesus Christ. I'm trying to remember what it was that gave me this realization. But when I was young, I read A World Only by Fire by William Manchester. And of course, I've read histories of World War II and wondered how societies Go crazy how people lose their minds and believe things, that you're like, man, those people were nuts. And you kind of just like, well, we're sophisticated now. We wouldn't do something like that. What worries me is that because the sort of the central square and also both the central square, the fact that there isn't as much of a unified media ecosystem today as there was certainly in the lead up to World War II, though obviously that wasn't the case in the Middle Ages. But because there's not as much of a unified ecosystem, and because, again, the nature of reality is changing so rapidly, our ability to verify things is dissipating, and people are questioning the most basic things. I mean, you see all sorts of rumors catch fire. It might have been the drone story. The drone story is a great example. What are these drones flying over New Jersey? Why can't we get an answer? There's just drones in the sky. No one knows. Governors are coming out and saying. No one's telling us mayors. The media can't tell us. And I worry that the nature of our reality and how we perceive the world and how we communicate with each other and we form consensus, truth is breaking down to such a degree that maybe what the future holds for us is anarchy and the ability to come together disappears because our society is so large that the only way you can manage 300 or 400 or 500 or a billion people in a unified sort of nation state is through very strong common narrative structures held together by media institutions that form some sort of shared reality. And if our reality is each person's own reality on social media, on YouTube, whatever your particular channel is getting. And people are increasingly checked out, as we talked about earlier in the process of governing themselves and in being responsible for the world that they live in. I mean, again, this is. People interact less with their neighbors, talk with fewer people out in the world or on their phones with their headphones on, I do worry that we're seeding a potential anarchy. And that is very scary. That's very scary, man. That's what it feels like also when the president launches a meme coin. Or maybe what that just means is either it's anarchy or dictatorship. And I do think dictatorship is totally in the cards for America's future. And I feel more like that today than I did four years ago.
- [94:27]
B
I hear you, man. I hear you. Well, it's very difficult to imagine a way that a conversation like this can finish on a bright note, to be honest with you.
- [94:35]
A
But I used to finish. I used to this is the first time I've ever had a conversation like this where I've actually ended on such a dark note. So I apologize to.
- [94:45]
B
No, no, actually, to be honest, for me, I think it's important. Part of this is everybody's saying, well, let's try and find a bright note to end on. Let's just be real about this, you know, and the reason why I wanted to talk to you particularly is because I know the depth of your thinking on this stuff, I know your ability to communicate it and I know you don't shy away from the reality and the hard topics. And so, you know, I was really keen of all people to have a chance to talk to you about this and I'm incredibly grateful for giving up a couple of hours of your time to sit and do this. And you know, I have no idea where this goes and I, I'm okay with that at the moment because I know I'm not going to stop thinking about it and just curl up in a ball. I'm going to keep thinking about it and keep trying to figure it out. And conversations like these are the only way that I can not get through it, but move through it without having the access to people like you. And to be able to talk these things through and go away with a few new threads to pull on, all you can do is curl up on a ball. So, my friend, thanks to you so much for doing this. And look, I mean, I would imagine the Venn diagram of overlap, our audience is as close to two circles on top of each other as possible. But just let people know if they aren't listening to hidden forces already, how to do that and how to become a Patreon subscriber. Because it's just your conversations are the best in the business and everybody should be listening to all of them.
- [96:02]
A
Yeah. Also one more thought that came up while you were talking there is. Number one, I totally agree with you that these conversations are very important. I think one of the other corrupting influences that money has had is in the sphere of thought leadership where people have converted their ideas into intellectual wares to be sold. And their thought leadership is a brand that needs protected and people are always trying to IP everything. Again, it seeps into all the cracks. So hidden forces is. Yes, we used to be years ago on Patreon. It's not ad supported. We have a subscription based business, always have. And you can learn about our subscriptions at hiddenforces IO Subscribe. I also have a community, a private community that I run that's now been around for more than two years where I put dinners on all over the world, among other things, and we have a dinner in Argentina and Buenos aires next Friday 7th February, where we bring together people in intimate settings of 14 folks, a mix of our members and special guests, and we work on these problems. Sometimes we work on these specific problems, but other times we work in the case of Buenos Aires, we work on the specific opportunities that present themselves in Argentina and how to navigate them for investors. I try to use the show in a sense as a kind of pipeline between the show to the Genius community online Q&As where people will join and I also share in some cases paywalled subscriber material to people to help them educate them on specific subjects and sort of guide them slowly towards an understanding on various particular themes. So anyway, I don't know if that was a useful description of what I do or what the podcast is or how to subscribe. But again, HiddenForces IO subscribe and thank you so much Grant for having me on the show.
- [97:46]
B
It was more than good enough, trust me. Dimitri, my friend, thank you. I have been to one of those dinners in London. It was fantastic. I'm very jealous. I won't be in our that one.
- [97:54]
A
Got a little rowdy if my recollection got a little rowdy. That one.
- [97:59]
B
Yeah, it's a great conversation too, but I would love to come to Argentina, but I'm down here with my daughter so I won't be going anywhere for a while. But again, thank you so much for doing this and I will see you down the road somewhere soon, I hope.
- [98:09]
A
My pleasure, Grant. I hope to see you soon. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces IO, you can follow me on Twitter ophinas and you can email me at infoiddenforcesio. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.