Peter St. Onge on AI, the Fed, Bitcoin & America's Next Boom

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Mark Moss Show

Episode: Peter St. Onge on AI, the Fed, Bitcoin & America's Next Boom

Date: July 14, 2026
Host(s): Mark Moss, Jake Roque
Guest: Prof. Peter St. Onge

---

Overview

In this dynamic and far-reaching episode, Mark Moss welcomes economist and commentator Prof. Peter St. Onge to examine the state of the U.S. economy amid the forces of AI, Fed policy, Bitcoin, generational divides, and America’s potential for a new economic boom. The conversation dissects the paradox of economic hardship and opportunity, how technology is reshaping labor markets, the evolving role of the Federal Reserve, impacts on inequality, and the hotly debated convergence of politics, policy, and wealth-building strategies for the digital age.

---

Key Topics & Insights

1. The Gen Z Paradox: Opportunity vs. Disenchantment

(Timestamps: 02:22–07:44)

• Gen Z’s Economic Discontent: Despite a booming economy, with strong GDP and productivity, 81% of Gen Z feels the “economy’s trash.”
  • “They feel like they got sold a bill of goods... pay $150,000 for a sheepskin, and that sheepskin is the golden ticket. I think that's off the table.” — Prof. St. Onge [05:01]
• AI & Job Disruption Not as Catastrophic as Predicted: Major 2013 predictions of massive job losses due to AI haven’t materialized. AI’s real impact is narrow, hitting entry-level “credentialed but unskilled” jobs hardest.
• New Pathways & Hustle Culture: Gen Z’s struggle is tied to changing expectations—they must “sing for their supper” with side gigs and hustle, unlike prior generations.
  • “They weren’t prepared for that because they were in 12 years of government day prison... And that's not the real world.” — Prof. St. Onge [05:31]

2. The Wealth Paradox & Technological Progress

(Timestamps: 07:44–16:44)

• Easier Than Ever to Make Money—But Not for Everyone:
  Modern technology (YouTube, AI, etc.) allows almost anyone to self-educate and start businesses more easily than ever before, but cultural and motivational barriers persist.
  • “It’s never been easier to make money than it is today. And both of those are true at the same time.” — Mark Moss [07:44]
• Historical Perspective on Tech Disruption: Every technological leap (plow, water wheel, Industrial Revolution) sparks fear but ends up expanding overall prosperity—even for the “losers.”
  • “Even the losers of the Industrial Revolution, the guys who move rocks, go to Brazil. The quality in life...” — Prof. St. Onge [13:48]

3. Services, Human Touch, and AI’s Real Impact

(Timestamps: 16:44–19:16)

• Explosion in Service Economies: As technology automates more, demand for human-provided services and handmade goods will boom—mirroring how “rich people services” are now more broadly accessible.
  • “There is unlimited human demand for things done by a human...” — Prof. St. Onge [18:55]
• Handmade Over Machine-Made: The preference for human-made items (even flawed ones) and face-to-face services reveals irreplaceable human value in a tech-driven world.

4. Political Upheaval & Generational Resentment

(Timestamps: 21:18–26:16)

• Rise of Democratic Socialists & Historical Context: Echoes of the Bolshevik revolution—a dispossessed elite, not true working-class, drive radical movements.
  • “The Democratic socialists are the exact Karl Marx types...they are the ones who don't have to work.” — Prof. St. Onge [22:00]
• Great Times Create Weak Men: Modern prosperity has disconnected some from economic realities, fostering resentment when expectations aren’t met.

5. The Middle Class, Tech-Enhanced Inequality, and AI’s “Intelligence Age”

(Timestamps: 26:59–34:39)

• Middle Class Hollowing: Technology and globalization are accentuating natural inequalities—smart, motivated individuals pull away even faster in the “intelligence age.”
  • “Now with AI...if I'm smart and hardworking, the AI can do it all for me.” — Mark Moss [27:00]
• Entrepreneurship as the Final Bastion: As labor and mental tasks are automated, creativity and entrepreneurship become the new high ground.

6. The Federal Reserve, Inflation, & Wealth Inequality

(Timestamps: 34:39–43:41)

• Fed’s Paradoxical Role: The Fed claims to fight inflation, but its policies (QE, interest rate control) actually drive inflation and inequality, benefiting those with assets.
  • “You'll read about the Fed fighting inflation, which is weird because the Fed creates inflation in that process.” — Prof. St. Onge [35:48]
• AI as the New Deflationary Force: Like China’s manufacturing boom, AI should drive prices down, but gains are soaked up by the Fed’s constant money creation.
• Potential Policy Shift at the Fed: Discussion of new leadership (Warsh, Bessent) possibly moving away from Wall Street bailouts and empowering Main Street—but constrained by systemic risks.
  • “The question is, what's their goal? My goal is getting the Fed out of the business of bailing out financial markets...” — Prof. St. Onge [47:35]

7. Practical Strategies—Leverage and Building Wealth

(Timestamps: 50:13–54:53)

• How to Play the Game: Direct advice: Take advantage of low interest rates and asset price appreciation—akin to playing Cantillon’s game to your own advantage.
  • “You too can take advantage of Cantillon effects and get as close as possible...Borrow everything you can at low rates.” — Prof. St. Onge [52:55]
• Debt: Not Always Bad: Distinguished from Great Depression advice, low-rate debt is wealth-building in an inflationary era.

8. America’s Next Boom—Can the U.S. Grow Out of Debt?

(Timestamps: 54:53–57:54)

• GDP Growth Prospects: Trump-era policies, AI/data center construction, and reindustrialization could boost growth moderately—but 6–7% GDP is likely unattainable without radical, systemic reform (akin to abolishing the income tax or the Fed).
  • “To really get durably to 6, 7%, you basically need to repeal everything that happened in 1913.” — Prof. St. Onge [56:54]

9. AI Investment, Capex, and Bitcoin Liquidity

(Timestamps: 57:54–67:27)

• CapEx Supercycle: The current AI buildout dwarfs even the dot-com era; capital is massively flowing into infrastructure (“picks and shovels”) rather than consumer-facing applications.
• Bitcoin and Rotations: Bitcoin may underperform in the short run as liquidity is sucked into the AI investment boom. Once this matures or deflates, a rotation back into alternative assets like Bitcoin is possible.
  • “My base case is that the value in AI is going to go into the guys who make the rails. The value is not going into the consumers.” — Prof. St. Onge [63:48]

10. Government Industrial Policy, AI, and Strategic Ownership

(Timestamps: 67:27–72:57)

• Government Taking Stakes in Private Companies: Both Mark and Prof. St. Onge are highly skeptical of proposals (notably from the Trump admin.) to acquire stakes in AI companies like Nvidia.
  • “To have the government involved in that, I think is absolutely catastrophic...It's textbook crony capitalism.” — Prof. St. Onge [68:16, 70:17]
• Free Markets vs. State Intervention: Prof. St. Onge, as an Austrian/Heritage/Mises economist, frames such moves as contrary to capitalism and harmful to innovation, echoing historical opposition to “industrial policy” and public-private collusion.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the crisis and opportunity of Gen Z:
  “Gen Z is feeling depressed because they thought they could coast the way that Boomers certainly coasted...and they're starting to fear that they can't.” — Prof. St. Onge [05:01]

• On historical tech panic:
  “Every single time it's the same fear...but if you look at the losers of that process...the absolute bottom...still takes his family to Brazil. So, like, the white collars went up 50x…blue collars went up 20x.” — Prof. St. Onge [13:48]

• On AI’s deflationary impact:
  “Kevin Warsh has talked about that...he thinks that AI is going to be the biggest deflationary technology in history...you could conceivably have an economy where the top 10% is 80% of the economy.” — Prof. St. Onge [34:39]

• On Fed policy & Wall Street:
  “The Fed has regarded fast growth and fast wage growth as problems, because...they're soaking up the money creation for their own purposes. Not Wall street.” — Prof. St. Onge [39:20]

• On surviving and thriving in the new economy:
  “Absolutely. Borrow everything you can at low rates…The Fed learned its lesson. Never again. You will never again have deflation as long as the Fed exists.” — Prof. St. Onge [52:53]

• On government industrial policy:
  “That’s, you know, textbook crony capitalism…public-private, frankly, fascist style partnership is something that I would like him to move away from.” — Prof. St. Onge [70:17, 72:16]

---

Episode Structure & Key Timestamps

| Topic/Section | Timestamp | |----------------------------------------------------|-------------------| | Gen Z, AI, and the Economic Paradox | 02:22–07:44 | | Wealth Paradox, Tech, and Opportunity | 07:44–16:44 | | Services, Human Value, and Tech | 16:44–19:16 | | Political Discontent & Generational Change | 21:18–26:16 | | Middle Class, Tech-Driven Inequality, AI | 26:59–34:39 | | The Fed, Inflation, and Injustice | 34:39–43:41 | | Wealth Building in a Monetary Game | 50:13–54:53 | | US Growth Prospects & Policy Limits | 54:53–57:54 | | AI Investment & Bitcoin Liquidity Flows | 57:54–67:27 | | Industrial Policy, State Ownership, Free Markets | 67:27–72:57 |

---

Engaging Takeaways

• Opportunities abound for those with entrepreneurial drive and adaptability; those stuck in the old model may struggle.
• AI and technology are reshaping roles and incomes, but the perennial need for human touch remains central.
• The Federal Reserve’s “fight” against inflation is more myth than practice, with policies often exacerbating inequality.
• Wealth-building now means understanding and leveraging these new realities rather than yearning for a vanished era.
• The U.S. may see strong growth, but systemic barriers persist—radical reforms would be needed for true transformation.
• Government ownership in private innovative sectors is fraught with risks of cronyism and diminished market dynamism.

---

For more from Prof. Peter St. Onge, follow him on X (@profstonge) for daily updates, his weekly newsletter, and investment insights.

---

Summary prepared for listeners who want the substance without the ads, fluff, or time commitment.

Transcript

[Mark Moss]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Guaranteed Human Amazon Health AI presents painful

[Mark Moss]

thoughts why did I search the Internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful. It's called soccer.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

It's called football.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Soccer.

[Mark Moss]

Football.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Domino's Best deal ever.

[Mark Moss]

Lets you get any pizza, including stuffed

[Prof. St. Ange]

crust with any toppings for 9.99. We can agree on that. Yeah, fully. So pineapple.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

Don't ruin it.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Get any pizza, including stuffed crust with any toppings for $9.99. Finally, something everyone can get behind. And if the rest disagree, that's between them and Domino's. Which means the only thing left to

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

fight over is who's ordering. Dom

[Prof. St. Ange]

Price is higher for some locations. Excludes XL and specialty pizzas. Select this offer from $6.15 to $7.26 online only. Size availability varies by crust tank max 7 toppings 6 for pan and New York style crust. Minimum purchase required for delivery. Price is participation. Delivery area and charges may vary.

[Mark Moss]

He's dribbling the ball with everything on the line. He's driving down the pitch.

[Prof. St. Ange]

He's facing price hikes and cuts past him. Carrier contracts tries to block him. Oh, he leaves him in the dust. He's at the edge of the box. He cuts past the nonstop group chat trash talk. He clears on goal. He shoots no unlimited data for $25 a month. Forever.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

Visit your local Boost Mobile store today to get unlimited data with a price that never changes. Boost mobile after 30% customers may experience lower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the

[Prof. St. Ange]

Boost $25 Unlimited plan.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

Wasabi is purpose built to free your business from skyrocketing storage costs and fees from the big guys. Wasabi is the go to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams around the world. Check out Wasabi's AI enabled intelligent media storage. Wasabi Air and the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cyber criminals. Wasabi driving innovation in data storage for up to 80% less than market competition. Try for [e-mail] Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage

[Mark Moss]

proud partner of iHeart podcast network 81% of Gen Z says the economy's trash the rise of artificial intelligence.

[Prof. St. Ange]

They weren't prepared for that because they were in 12 years of government day prison. And that's not the real world.

[Mark Moss]

How is that move to communism that we're seeing everywhere?

[Prof. St. Ange]

They're extremely useful to the revolutionaries before the revolution, but after the revolution, they're not very useful. In fact, they're a problem.

[Mark Moss]

The Trump administration wanted to take ownership in some of these companies, taking percentage of Nvidia strategy. That seems pretty scary to me.

[Prof. St. Ange]

You'll read about the Fed fighting inflation, which is weird because the Fed creates inflation in that process. There's one guy who gets shoved off the highway every time.

[Mark Moss]

We might have two of potentially the best guys in the world in those chairs.

[Prof. St. Ange]

They're smart. The question is, what's their goal?

[Mark Moss]

Man, it's been a while since we've seen each other. So good to see you.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, we kept planning to do this and yeah, we never got around to it. Yeah, yeah, it's good to see you, man.

[Mark Moss]

There's so much going on right now, you know, from monetary policy and, and the collision, let's maybe call it, from the regime change and politics at the same time. So you're the perfect person to talk to. So I'm excited for all the different threads I want to pull on here, but let's just start off with maybe sort of like this, like contradictory, contra contradicting, I, I seen that you put on X. 81% of Gen Z says the economy's trash. But on the other hand, we have like this boom you've been calling a genuine boom, like 5% GDP, productivity running high, etc. What's the breakdown there? What's the gap?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, it's an interesting economy. So some of it may be AI. To the extent that you see AI. So broadly speaking, AI is not really showing up in the jobs. It was supposed to be a lot bigger than it is now. So there was a seminal paper that came out in 2013. People don't realize that they've been talking about AI job losses for a long time. It's not something that just came out like two years ago. So it was a big 2013 paper by a pair of Oxford economists, and they predicted that something like a third of jobs were going to disappear. They used academic language to say impacted, but the media ran would disappear. And so that was 13 years ago, and that was supposed to happen by 2030. So here we are 13 out of 17 years into that prediction. And in fact, you can't even see it in the numbers. We have not lost a third of jobs. In fact, jobs are up. Certainly since that prediction, they're up over the last year. So you're not really seeing it in jobs in general. The very specific, there's a couple of specific areas where you are seeing it and one of those is entry level jobs. And specifically entry level jobs for people with general university degrees. That is ground zero because those are people who have a lot of credentials and they don't know how to do anything right. So they just finished college, they got their four years of progressive madrasa. They know their gender. They nailed the gender down flat.

[Mark Moss]

Good, good.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Other than that, there's not much they can do. And so those are the very specific people who are in trouble with AI right now. So companies are still figuring out how to replace them, but those are the people who are in trouble. So there was a speaker at University of Central Florida, which massive school. It's one of the biggest schools in the country, in the world, like 70,000 students. And there was a speaker who was talking about how she was at graduation. She said, you guys have so much opportunity ahead of you. Like in this age where one person can use AI to build a company and you don't need a team anymore, you don't need financing, you need a gatekeeper. She got booed out of the room. Right. Because all these, all these grads understand that, you know, they don't care about the opportunity that's staring them in the face. What they come out of is the fact that they were sold a bill of goods which was pay 150 grand for a sheepskin. And that sheepskin is then the golden ticket to give you a middle class lifestyle. I think that's off the table. So I think for a lot of Gen Z now, they feel like they got sold a bill of goods. You've got ancillary issues like housing is expensive and prices have gone up a lot. People tend to anchor expectations not from what CPI is doing this year, but from what things used to cost a couple years ago. Yes, there are assists on that, but I think that Gen Z in general is feeling depressed because they thought they could coast the way that Boomer certainly coasted. And you know, Gen X and millennials to a certain degree. And they're starting to fear that they can't, that now they have to sing for their supper. So they got to go out and hustle. They gotta do side gigs, they gotta, you know, drive for Uber until they can get some, you know, whatever, some vibe coded new app together. They gotta hustle. And I think a lot of them, they weren't prepared for that because they were in 12 years of government day prison where, you know, you are told if you follow the rules, then everything's gonna turn out fine for you. If the teacher gives you an A, then you know the heaven shall smile upon you. And that's not the real world. They're not on this treadmill to success now, despite getting the degree in psychology or communications or whatever other useless degree they got.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah. I was recently on Patrick by David's podcast and I called it the paradox, the wealth paradox and that it's both are equally true at the same time, which is for those college grads, it's never been harder to get by than it is today. But at the same time it's never been easier to make money than it is today. And both of those are true at the same time.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the trick is that we have an enormous amount of opportunity. If you look at immigrants, for example, even low quality migrants like that is 8th grade education, can't speak English, they'll show up and after two, three years of working hard, they'll buy a house.

[Mark Moss]

Right?

[Prof. St. Ange]

And you know, Gen Z is on and on about how, you know, we have pipe dreams of houses. But no, no, no. Like this illiterate dude from Guatemal it.

[Mark Moss]

Why?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Because he hustled.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah.

[Prof. St. Ange]

So yes, we're in a very funny economy right now where as you say, there's massive opportunity if you've got some modicum of drive, if you don't have that, have that, then yes, it's very disappointing for a lot of these people.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah, I, I tell people. So last year was it, I think it was last year I did a keynote at Bitcoin Asia and it was called the Deflation Dividend. And I was talking about AI and I was saying how it's going to create more jobs than it takes. And every single technological revolution that we've had, they come out and say that it's going to take all these jobs. And it's been the case, always creates more jobs. And through the, through inflation, they've been stealing the productivity gains. But now with Bitcoin, we have a chance to keep those productivity gains. Anyway, nobody wants to hear the bullish case. Even though I had all the data, all the facts all around it. They all want to, they all want to maybe have that excuse that, you know, that excuse for why they can't perform. But at the same time, I was just trying to explain to people how I told you my first job, but the first business, first real business I had, where I actually had an Office and everything. And I think it was like 1997, which was like pre Internet and you know, I'm just in my early 20s and I got this office and I'm trying to build this business. But like, how do I learn about building a business? There was no YouTube videos to watch on marketing or understanding my ideal customer profile or there was no ideas on marketing. There was no one online to market to. Like what do I even do? I had to start sending. I was literally folding envelopes and licking envelopes and sending out pieces of direct mail. You know, and I'm like, today I can just go grab 300 YouTube videos, put it into NotebookLM, throw it in my AI and have it coach me on it.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Like what?

[Mark Moss]

That has like never been easier. At the same time, it's an amazing time. So you're seeing, I guess you're one of the few people that seem to kind of have the same viewpoint as I have. It hasn't been destructive to the jobs and if anything it's potentially adding to the jobs. Here's a question I get asked almost more than any other question mark. How much bitcoin should I actually own? Not should I own it, but how much? Now almost nobody can answer that with a real number. The retirement system was built for an era. It's gone. Meanwhile, they're printing away your purchasing power while your 6040 portfolio, it limps along trying to keep up. Now that's exactly where Unchained comes in. Now if you want, you can book a free 30 minute session which is a one on one call with one of their specialists and they'll walk you through the retirement calculator, all live. They'll model, you know, the bitcoin strategy side by side with a traditional 6040 portfolio. Over the next 20 years, you'll also see what your balance sheet could look like at retirement, how much bitcoin you could be holding, and what different tax structures do to the outcome. At the end of the call, you're going to walk away knowing exactly what your number is and they'll send you a complete personalized link where you can keep it, you can revisit it, you can share it with your friends, your family, whoever else needs to see it. So book your free session@ Unchained.com MarkMoss

[Prof. St. Ange]

yeah, the metaphor that I like on technology in general is an escalator, right? Where the technology is moving you up in terms of income, you know, job quality, quality of life at the job. However, every so often you got to step down, you got to Step down one because of the tech itself, because the tech is disrupting the old jobs since they're replacing it with new jobs that pay more. But if you zoom out, so technology, people think of it sort of by definition as something new. No, technology is thousands of years old. You've got Robinson Caruso, who, you know, he's out catching fish with his hands and then he switches to a fishing hook or a net. That is technology. Technology is extraordinarily. It's what separates us from the beasts. Cooking is technology. Stones are technology. And you can look back through history. So I think it was Plato, either Plato or Socrates, they were concerned about oxen. So the plow was spreading in Greece at the time. And the concern was that the plow was so productive that that they were laying off agricultural workers. So they were concerned that there would be no jobs anymore. And so they would have to start wars to get rid of all the surplus mails so they wouldn't have civil wars. In medieval Europe, you had water wheels, right? So again, you know, if you go through Holland, they have all these old fashioned windmills. You have water wheels. Those were grinding the wheat. Again, massive. You know, this is going to lay off millions of people. How are people going to get by? They're going to be impoverished. All right? So technology is very, very old. And every single time it's the same fear. But if you look at probably the biggest, setting aside fire and whatnot, opposable thumbs. If you look at the biggest technological revolution in sort of written history, that's going to be the Industrial Revolution. The industrial revolution replaced 90% of jobs. It absolutely reshuffled society's resources. So people who were big and strong, young men who could work, they got devalued because they were specifically what was replaced, the nerds. It was revenge of the nerds, right? The nerds took over the world. So people who were smart, people who enjoyed reading books, learning how to write, okay, so there was an absolute redistribution of power. But if you look at the losers of that process. So I was in New York a couple years ago and there were two guys unloading cinder blocks from a truck. And it's New York, so they're very loud, so I can hear them down the street. And the one guy is telling the other guy about his trip to Brazil with his family. All right? These are guys who move rocks.

[Mark Moss]

All right?

[Prof. St. Ange]

This is the lowest skill job possible. This is below babysitting, all right? And this guy's taking his family to Brazil on vacation. So if you zoom out on the Industrial Revolution, yes, power was redistributed away from what we would now call blue collars towards white collars. Without a doubt, it redistributed. However, even the losers of the Industrial Revolution, the absolute bottom of the barrel, guys who moved rocks off trucks, go to Brazil. Right. The quality in life. So, like the white collars, you know, went up 50x, whatever the number is, by various means. It's something on the order of 50x. The blue collars went up 20x.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah.

[Prof. St. Ange]

So if, if AI is, you know, what people expect, I mean, it's possible that AI is complete BS and it just makes stuff up. And then, okay, fine, then we're in the Paul Krugman world member with the Internet. And Paul Krugman said, no, no, the Internet's going to go away.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Because we're going to run out of things to say. Which is cute.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Like, you know, let's say economists don't understand human nature. So, you know, okay, fine, it's possible that AI is a joke and it's all going to disappear, in which case, fine, false alarm. But if AI does what they say it will, and then if the robo next, because the robots have the big brains, so you hire the robot to fold your laundry and do brain surgery. Good. Okay, fine. Even if you have that combination, so you're wiping out, you know, whatever half or more of the jobs, well then you just get the Industrial Revolution. So the losers go up 20x. The winners go up 50x. Now you're making 100 bucks an hour at Starbucks or walking dogs. So it is, it is an unmitigated. It is the most amazing thing. Like, imagine if you're sitting, you know, the year before the Industrial Revolution. He said, no, no, this is going to be horrible. Look, people are going to sit around all day. They're going to work, you know, like the average American. Now, like actual hours at work, like you're at work, but I know for my video views, you're not actually working. You're. You're doing other stuff. Yeah, right. So actual work hours is on the order of like 20 hours. And then, you know, you get the vacations and you get, you know, the, the federal holidays. You're only working half your life anyway. Like, a lot of people retire at 65, which given modern healthcare, people at 65 are like going around the world. Like that's the stereotypical thing.

[Mark Moss]

Right?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, right. Like you can work at 65, so you're working half of your productive life. Even then you're working, you know, whatever. Call it 12 hours on average a week. When you take in all that downtime, I mean, and what you're like filling out TPS reports in an air conditioned office with a nice cushy chair. So if you're sitting in 1829, you're saying, no, no, this is, here, let me show you the crystal ball. This is the ghost of Christmas past. This is what your children will be doing. They'll be sitting in offices 12 hours a week for half their life.

[Mark Moss]

Like what?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Right. So that's where we are with the AI and robots, where, you know, if the worst case thing happens, my God, we should be so lucky. And you know, fundamentally, okay, where do the new jobs come from? The same place they came from when the Industrial revolution. Services. If you look at how rich people live today and you look at how non rich people live, it's services. You have personal chefs, you have personal trainers. They don't mow their own lawn. Something like two thirds of Americans mow their own lawn. If you look at the 1950s, the idea of taking your dog to a dog groomer was craziness. The idea of getting your nails done where you had, you know, little sparkly diamonds, that was crazy. Regular people didn't do that. They didn't have the money to do that. So you get this massive expansion of services. You get a lot more stuff, like a lot more people who can buy second third homes. You make 100 bucks an hour walking a dog, you're going to have a second third home. You know, you need people to maintain that, to come clean your pool. I mean, you know, in addition to that, the other big pool is just handmade stuff. Right? So consider even today, a handmade chair is worth more than a chair out of a Chinese factory. Now the chair of the Chinese factory is better. Why? Because they created the machine tools to not make flaws. The handmade chair is going to have all kinds of mistakes on it because humans yet people will pay 2, 3, 10 times more for the handmade chair. Why? Because it's made by a human. That preference for human production is going to go, it's going to go off the charts. Yeah. So you know, when the smoke clears, if the AI, if the robots, if they do the most extreme thing possible and you know, you lose half the jobs you've got. You've got health care, you've got taking care of kids, you've got somebody to keep your dog company, you got services up the yin yang. Everybody consumes services the way the rich people Consume it. Today there is unlimited human demand for things done by a human. Right. Bartenders, for example. All right, 120 years ago you could run a bar with a vending machine. The vending machine came out about 1910. All right, you could, in theory you could have a bar where people put coins in and you know, assuming you had some age verification, you could run a bar that way. Nobody runs a bar that way because nobody wants it.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

Right?

[Prof. St. Ange]

People want bartenders, people want baristas, people want to deal with humans. As long as that's the case, there will be unlimited number of jobs. And going by the industrial revolution, the losers will make in modern terms what, call it half a million. The winners in modern terms will make to 3 million.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah. the bitcoin conference just a few months ago was in Vegas and at the hotel upstairs, they have a bar. They have like, it's like a little bit of a shopping center or like shopping mall, whatever. And there is an automated bar that you can go and get your drinks served up. Of course nobody's there, nobody's at that bar. But I want to talk about when, when, when, when near 200,000 or 500,000 when you said the barista at Starbucks is making 100 bucks an hour. I want to get into what does that do to inflation? How does the Fed interact in that new economy that has this massive inflation? How do we accommodate the build out of this? What does that do the economy? I want to get into all that. And then unfortunately, where the, the Gen Z feels are being left out, then how is that move to communism that we're seeing everywhere? But before we get into that, I do want to just kind of go back, just back to the industrial revolution for a second. Because what technology does is it removes low level tasks so we can focus on higher level tasks. And so in the Industrial revolution, you had mechanized machines that could do the work of 5,000 men. What did those 5,000 men do? Oh, turned out they went to science and medicine that we didn't have before. Right. And so they went to higher level things. The other thing I would say is Karl Marx, you know, he talked about in the Communist Manifesto of how, you know, it was the capitalist, the people with the money could run the factories and the poor people, all they had was their labor. That's what he said. And if you look into Karl Marx's writing and background, I wrote the book the Uncommunist Manifesto. So I did a lot of research in this. And he was so disgruntled because you Know, he came from a very wealthy family and he didn't want to go work, he just wanted to write philosophy. He was writing plays and he wanted to write philosophies, but he couldn't make any money doing that. So he was, he lived a life of being poor and broke and his kids died of malnourishment and all these things. And he was angry at the world because he couldn't get the money he needed to survive when he just wanted to write philosophy. But the interesting thing is capitalism has made it where today you can make a lot of money just writing philosophy. Right? Just creating content.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, well, that's exactly the irony of it. Even Marx himself, in a previous age, Karl Marx wouldn't have had the time to read because he'd be working in a field and he'd be whipped if he didn't by either his father or whoever owned him. So I mean, the only reason why Marx could attack capitalism is because capitalism afforded such a massive surplus that he was able to spend his entire life writing. And you know, if he had aimed his art a tiny little bit more towards the market, then he could have actually kept his children alive instead of starving them to death while living off charity from his parents. But yeah, and you know, that's exactly what's happening with the Democratic socialists today, the communists, which is that the people who, like, if you look at the elections in New York, the Democratic socialists swept four primaries for Democrat seats and they pushed out, you know, centrist or kind of old school Democrats. And what's interesting about the vote totals is that they did not get votes from blacks and Hispanics. Right. New York is 70% minority. Those are not the ones who voted for Democrat socialists. They like. I mean, they're overwhelmingly Democrat, but they voted for traditional Democrats because they like jobs and they like public safety. The Democratic socialists are the exact Karl Marx types. They are the ones who don't have to work. They've never worked an honest day in their life. They're trust fund babies. Their parents floated them through school and they are off that they know in their hearts that they're superior to everybody else. And they're pissed off that house painters are out buying houses while they can't afford anything. Right. They are the exact Karl Marx, you know, sort of version of youth where they know that they deserve much more. They're not getting it because they don't have any useful skills. They went to school to, you know, whether it was art history or whatever, they treated school as something fun and they counted on that treadmill that we were talking about earlier about, you know, with Gen Z, they just figured, you know, I'll get the sheepskin and whatever fun, you know, history, whatever and then I'll go out and get this wonderful job because everything has always been handed to me. So everything will continue being handed to me as long as I do what I'm told. They are pissed off about it. There was a study, it was by some Finnish professors and they looked at

[Mark Moss]

the,

[Prof. St. Ange]

during the Russian Revolution. So you had the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were the extremists. The Mensheviks would be Nancy Pelosi, they would be the sort of centrists. And when they looked at the social background of the leaders of each movement, the working class communists were the Mensheviks, okay? They wanted incremental, you know, they wanted to get rid of serfdom, you know, sharing of more of the economy. The Bolsheviks who wanted to hang everybody, those were universally the children of the dispossessed elite. So they had grown up rich and then they grew up into an economy where they didn't have the opportunities that their parents did. And so they were pissed off about it. Now what's interesting in modern democratic socialists is that you know, as the speaker at ucf, as you just mentioned, these, you know, over educated idiots, they have just an incredible amount of opportunity, right? The Internet gives you free distribution. So you come up with some shtick, you try it. If it doesn't work, you try another shtick. You just keep at it. You, that's how you know that, that's how we got here. We were normal at some point. That's how everybody gets there, right? So instead of doing that, which you know, immigrants do do that because they, they, they come from a cultural background where you've got to hustle to survive. But these democrat socialist spoiled kids, they don't. And instead they just want to burn it on down. Partly because their teachers have, and their professors have not taught them that. You know, the only reason why they have that luxury is because the system works the way it does and so it can support parasites like them. Unfortunately they're going, if they succeed then they're going to break it. They themselves are going to be the first victim. Because you know the cute part, when you look at every single communist revolution, the guys who launched the revolutions, they're the first ones against the wall, right? The famous line during the French Revolution is the revolution eats its children. The reason of course is that blue haired antifa who burn police stations. They're extremely useful to the revolutionaries before the revolution, but after the revolution they're not very useful. In fact, they're a problem. So what do you do? You get rid of them. So it's like I'm trying to save these idiots for themselves. Just cut it out. Learn how to do something. Get a nursing degree which pays 70, 80 a year. Being a nurse is a good lifestyle. Get a trade, learn H Vac, do something useful and discover that the economy is a fake. Fantastic place, just the way it is.

[Mark Moss]

Well, that's why you see the, the, the conservative base is typically the, the middle class, the workers. Because when you're actually working and productive, you just look at the world differently as opposed to that. So it's, yeah, it's interesting, but unfortunately, you know, it's, it's the generational theory, right? So it's the great times create weak men and the weak men create the bad times. Because the, the great times have disconnected those people from the reality of that. You actually have to drill oil out of the ground if you want electricity. Turns out, huh. Who would have ever thought that, you know, like the people throwing paint on the art, not really. The paint came from petroleum, right. Or whatever. So they're like disconnected from reality. But it seems like with technology,

[Prof. St. Ange]

I

[Mark Moss]

want to get into the economy side of things. But it seems like with the economy or with technology and the economy, you know, we hear a lot about the hollowing out of the middle class in the, you know, in the financial space, in the bitcoin gold space. You hear a lot about, it's, you know, from inflation and monetary debasement and Triffin's Dilemma and having to offshore dollars and hollow at the middle class, all those things. But I also think it's maybe even more because of technology, right? Because in the industrial era, the factory made smart people and dumb people on an even playing field. So you sort of made the masses equal. And you didn't have to be that smart. You could just like literally, you know, put the cog on the wheel. And then we moved into the information age. And in the, in the information age, moving into the Internet age, now smarter people that want to work harder start pulling ahead. And now with AI, you know, calling it the intelligence age, and you mentioned, you know, Sam Altman said, you know, we could have a one person billion dollar company because if I'm smart and I'm hardworking, then the AI can do it all for me. And so it seems like that's only going to Continue to get exaggerated. And if that's the case, then how much worse does that get? Okay, so I got to tell you what I've been doing with my money lately. I moved my cash over to river. And before you ask, yes, I still pay all my bills in dollars. Everything works the same. But here's the real difference. You see, river pays me 3.3% on my cash and they pay it in bitcoin. So my money that was just sitting there doing nothing at all in the bank, it's now stacking bitcoin while I sleep. And I started thinking like, my bank takes my deposits, they loan those deposits out, they make 12, 17, 24% and they pay me 0.04%. I mean, honestly, that's kind of a shakedown when you think about it. Now, Rivers, FDIC insured, they use full reserve. They charge no fees. So I don't know why I didn't do this sooner. So click the link down below and get $100 in Bitcoin just for getting started.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, so it's an interesting dynamic because the, you know, if you automate the physical labor and you automate the sort of mental labor, the last piece standing is the entrepreneurial function. So deciding, like, what is the product going to be, how's it going to be produced, on what schedule, what inputs are going to go in, how are they going to be paid?

[Mark Moss]

Out of the creativity and the risk. Right?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Bingo. And that goes back to the opportunity that we're talking about earlier. This is the golden age for entrepreneurs. Before this.com was the golden age. This is, you know, you know, we've already digested the dot com subsidy on distribution and now, you know, in other words, you can reach the whole world for free and now you can produce for the whole world for free. So yeah, it's an absolute golden age for entrepreneurship. However, that is necessarily, as you say, it's going to increase inequality. And you know, this is standard. Right. If you've got, you know, let's say Ethiopia in the 80s where everybody's starving to death, everybody is equal if they started out in equal, once they sold the car and the house and the children for food, they're all equal again. So impoverished societies are going to be equal because you don't have any opportunity to excel. So people who have drive or talent or intelligence, they're not going to stand out as your economy develops. Even if you're like Sweden somewhere that's intentionally trying to keep it equal, it ain't going to be equal. I think Sweden is actually very, very close to the inequality of the US there's almost no difference. You know, places like Singapore, Japan, which has a very egalitarian policies, you know, it's got a very egalitarian business culture. And yet, you know, you have just exploding inequality in all these places because you have economic opportunity. Some people, no matter how many opportunities you give them, they are always going to be on the floor, all right? They're always going to be on the edge of starvation because, you know, they don't have drive, they weren't raised the right way by parents. A lot of it is cultural. And so as you have more opportunity, those people are always gonna be on the floor. They're always gonna be the edge of starvation. The other 20%, 70%, whatever the number is, those are then gonna pull away. That's then going to create an opening where democratic socialists can come in and say, hey, guess what, guys? On the bottom, we're gonna take it from the top. We're gonna give it to you, vote for us, and promise we won't throw you under the bus this time. Now, in assist from all that which you alluded to at the top was the Federal Reserve and specifically the fact that they've taken a lot of the technological advancements of the past 50 years. They've effectively monetized that. Right? So, you know, generally, technologies, lower prices, they're deflationary. Probably the single biggest deflationary technology of our adult lifetimes anyway has been China, or China. You know, when I was a kid, a microwave oven, like a crappy microwave oven was in modern terms, like 400, $600. I mean, it's just astounding, you know, just across the board, you can, yeah, you can go right now to Alibaba. You can buy a pool table for 75 bucks delivered. It's insane, right? That's China, right? It is. It is just. And, and it's incredible, right? What should have happened since call it 1990, is that everything should have gotten a lot cheaper. And so even if your wage didn't budge, you have a much better quality of life. And, and that is true in certain ways. Like poor people in America have plenty of cell phones. They have giant TVs, you know, they have the kind of TVs that people in the 1970s could only dream of even though they're on welfare. Yes, in certain things. However, in the aggregate, the Fed effectively soaked up all of that deflation, Right? Because the Fed knows that people are not going to grab pitchforks if inflation stays 2, 3%. So what they do therefore is keep their foot on the gas, no matter what's happening, and try to fill out that 2 or 3% to create more money. And you know, they do that through interest rates, which is nice because then you get, you know, you get kind of a tissue fire in the economy, which is good for the politicians. So there's less pressure on the, on, on the Fed. They do it through QE directly, which is wonderful because that's just pouring money into Wall Street. But the end result is that the Fed soaks it all up now in the process of doing that because of how they create that money in the Cantillon effects, that is then transferring resources from the normies to the people who have the assets, right? So they're, they're pumping the bags of everybody who has the assets. When the smoke clears, you get boomers owning, you know, having 6, $7 million and Gen Z living in the basements, right? And that process, right, when you combine that kind of inequality, but the Fed is essentially creating brand new. It's, it's, it's not necessarily taking for the poor, but it's giving to the rich. And so it's, it's creating more inequality when you combine that with a relatively free market, you know, where people can succeed. You put those two together and then you get to the New York Times where you have these exploding, you know, K shaped economy where, you know, the top 10% is now half of consumption. They used to be a third of consumption and so on across the board. Now that I think absolutely is going to continue. In fact, it could accelerate. You know, Kevin Warsh has talked about that, for example, the, he thinks that AI is going to be the biggest deflationary technology in history. As his words, you throw robots in there, that's going to double it. So, you know, the kind of inequality that we saw, not from China, but from how the Fed digested the China productivity gains, I think we're going to see it on steroids at the end of that process. You know, we could conceivably have an economy where the top 10% is 80% of the economy, not a third like it used to be in the 1980s.

[Mark Moss]

So if we have, I think it's a good comparison calling China this technology wave because it did drive prices down and, and the poor person can now have a $75 pool table in their house where they couldn't before. And then to your point, you know, worse or worse point of AI being this deflationary force and for us normies Deflation should be a good thing because then my money buys me more things in the future, unless my money also gets inflated at the same time. But so if, if we have AI becoming even a more deflationary force. And then you also talked about the productivity boom because of the deflation. So then the barista is making the hundred dollars an hour. And what, how does the Fed, what is the new Fed's regime to try to handle that? Because under Jerome Powell and the probably three previous Fed chairs before that, they would look at wages going up as a bad thing. Like, oh, we need to slow the economy down, people are making too much money. Or they would look at productivity if productivity grew too fast. Maybe that's inflationary. So how does the new Fed regime look at trying to accommodate. How is Warsh and Bassen sort of looking at how to accommodate this, this transition?

[Prof. St. Ange]

A central bank like the Federal Reserve is created to inflate. That's. Well, it's to inflate and also to bail out banks. So it has two purposes. This is why bankers buy them. And the trick with the Fed, like, usually when you read about the Fed in the newspaper, you'll read about the Fed fighting inflation, which is weird because the Fed creates inflation. And you know, in fact, I think if you sample most Americans, they'll think that that's what the Fed does for a living, is fight inflation. It's weird. And the metaphor that I like there is that, so the Fed, you have this highway which is what's the value of your money? So let's just call it inflation. And what the Fed wants to do is soak up all of the capacity of that highway with its money printing and hand it to Wall Street. Now, there's one character that it will move Wall street out of the way for, and that's the federal government. So if the federal government needs to borrow money, if it needs to finance deficits, the Fed is always ready. It says to, you know, Wall Street, I'm sorry, guys, I know you want me to print money. You know, in other words, I know you want me to lower interest rates so that you can, you know, lend money that you don't have. However, I have to fund these government deficits. I'm going to do that through quantitative easing, qe. I'm going to go out and literally buy up government debt. So that's the one character that it will prioritize over Wall Street. And the reason is because fundamentally, Congress controls the Fed. So, you know, if the Fed gets on the wrong side of Congress the drunk spenders in Congress, then bad things could happen to the amount of power the Fed has. But in that process, there's one guy who gets shoved off the highway every time, and that's normies, right? So the wider economy, job growth, that is always going to get sacrificed for those other purposes. And so you know what we would like in an ideal world, the Fed would let the economy rip. It would not manipulate interest rates too low, and it would not use QE to try to subsidize Wall street and the federal government. And it would just kind of let the economy grow at its own speed. But what happens in practice, traditionally is that the Fed has regarded fast growth and fast wage growth as problems, because what those essentially say is that the normies are occupying the highway. They are soaking up the money creation for their own purposes. So Wall street, yes, gets a cut of that, but that's not as good as what the Fed would prefer to do, which is siphoning that off to the federal government and directly to Wall street, bailing out qeing the assets that Wall street already has. So in an ideal world, the Fed lets the economy just rip. If it's concerned about inflation, then it makes Wall street pay the price or it makes federal government pay the price by letting interest rates rise on treasury bills. And Kevin Morris actually talked about that. He called it Robinhood monetary policy before he became Fed chair. And he was saying that he would actually like to see that. Like he would like to lower interest rates in general so that Main street can get access to cheap loans. But in return, he would like to sell off all of the assets that the Fed has bought using money printing in the past, which is their balance sheet. So he would like to sell off that 6.5 trillion to soak up the inflation. So that's the exact opposite of what the Fed has traditionally done, which is strangle the real economy for the benefit of Wall Street. Now, you know, there's an open debate. So that implies that you would lower rates. He can't do that right now because inflation is taking off. That's probably temporary because of the war. But at the moment, he's put away talk about Fed cuts. My best guess, I was just talking about this with Larry Lepard earlier. My best guess is that he's looking for an excuse to cut because he, unlike the past four or five Fed chairs, he doesn't think that economic growth causes inflation. He seems to understand that it's the Fed that causes inflation. So he's not interested in strangling the regular economy. Rather, he's ready to sacrifice the Fed and Wall street for that?

[Mark Moss]

Yeah, it looks like what he wants to do is one, be a more accommodative to wage growth and just the boom in the economy and, and basically kind of get the Fed out of the money printing game and return that back to the private sector and let the banks create the money for the people. So lower rates return, return the borrowing to the, to the, the normies as you call them. Then the banks create the credit as opposed to the Fed having to create the credit. Then the Fed can start to sort of roll that off of its books. He seems to be pretty anti qe, if you will. Obviously there's always different ways and different names, but is that what you're seeing? I mean, that's sort of like the regime changes pushed the private credit away from the Fed and back to the private sector, back to the banks.

[Prof. St. Ange]

I think that's what he wants to do. The problem is that, you know, Wall street has gotten so much help from the Fed and so many sort of implicit guarantees that it's like a hothouse orchid that cannot survive without it. And we saw that a couple of times. You know, Bernanke pushed a lot of money out the door and then when he tried to pull it back, when he tried to do quantitative tightening to sell off the Fed's balance sheet, they had so called taper tantrums they were called, where you know, it looked like markets were going to seize up for lack of liquidity. So that's the concern is that I think Kevin Warsh, he himself is pretty based, I think that he would like to reduce the Fed's role in sort of this permanent ongoing bailout of Wall Street. However, he's up against that and we saw that in living color in 2008 where the sort of Fed guarantee, the implicit Fed promise to bail everybody out on Wall street. That ran up against George W. Bush, who when Lehman went down, W. Said no, we're not going to bail it out. And everybody on Wall street had assumed, going back decades, ever since Greenspan started this, Wall street had assumed that if anybody big goes under, the taxpayers are going to take the hit. And so immediately Wall street repriced everything and it turns out at the new risk price, everything was bankrupt. So it collapsed. That was the 2008 crisis. W. I guess somebody sat down and explained this to W. And so he almost immediately backpedaled. He said, no, no, no, no, no, just kidding, we're going to bail everybody out. And they bailed AIG and, you know, Fannie and all the rest of them. I mean, what they should have done is just let them go down. And then people like Warren Buffett would have, you know, they would have gone bankrupt, shareholders wiped out. Citibank would still exist, but Warren Buffett would have bought it for a song or BBT or maybe one of the other prudent bankers of whom there were very few. Instead, sadly, they lost heart, they reverse course, they bailed everybody out again. So the more, you know, the punchline here being that Kevin Warsh himself, he may understand the danger of a permanent sort of guaranteeing the gambler's losses when they get to keep the wins. So he may understand that in the abstract, but he doesn't have that much room for maneuver, because, number one, you know, if he does go too fast, if he does try to, you know, taper sell off the Fed's balance sheet, he could cause another financial crisis. And that's not just a question of being, you know, sort of brave enough to do it. The problem is that if you do that going by experience, then Wall street is going to get even more favors done for it because, you know, it's going to call the senators in panic. The senators are going to look at 8% unemployment. They're going to call, you know, the Fed in a panic, and it's, it's going to get handled. So I appreciate he's sort of backed into a corner by previous Fed chairs. I think he wants to reduce the implicit to Wall street, but he doesn't have that much room for maneuver.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah, I think when you talk about the taper tantrum, I mean, that was sort of like Jerome Powell when he first came in. Was it 2019? And we started to see that taper and then, oh, we got to reverse course and pump it back up again. I think the whole world was shocked, including myself. I mean, how many times do we hear, you can't taper a Ponzi? And in 2021, when November 2021, Jerome Powell came out and announced they're going to start raising rates after he said they weren't even thinking about thinking about raising rates. And they did shave off trillions of dollars of debt. And turns out the economy's booming and we didn't destroy the whole world. And you hear about, you know, well, Japan or China might sell off their US Treasuries. We just rolled off way more Treasuries than China or Japan could sell off. So we did taper. We did taper A Ponzi and the world didn't end. And you know, we don't know, maybe, maybe Warsh just returns the creation to the central bank or I'm sorry, to the commercial banks. But he doesn't taper or he tapers very slowly. I mean, so any of those are true. Quick question. How much control do you have over your money right now? Technology's changed everything and now it's changing how money works. Crypto started as a niche, but now it's going mainstream. It's faster payments, more control, fewer middlemen. This isn't hype, it's just where things are going and getting started today, it's easier than you think. With a Rumble Wallet, you can buy Bitcoin, you can hold dollar back stablecoins, you can even own digital gold backed by real gold. And it's all in one single place. It's a non custodial crypto wallet, which means that not a bank, but you, you hold it. Not a bank, not a platform. You controlled access to your funds. The setup, super simple. It connects with Moonpay so you can use your debit card, your, your credit card, your bank account and you can be up and running in minutes. And for a limited time, you can start your wallet with $10 in US stable coins by downloading the Rumble Wallet and entering my exclusive promo code MOSS10 when you sign up right now, you can even use your Rumble Wallet to support your favorite Rumble creators, maybe like me directly. So do this right now. Scan the QR code on the screen, click the link in the description or go to wallet r rumble.com moss and download your Rumble Wallet now. From there you can set up your wallet. Enter promo code Moss10 to get $10 in US stablecoins. And this is a limited time offer, so you got to do it right now, but take control of your money. Get started with Rumble Wallet today. Of course, terms and conditions apply. See the description below or visit rumble.com promoofficial rules for details. Would you say, well, let me give you my opinion, in my opinion, looking at previous Fed chairs, Jerome Powell being an attorney, Janet Yellen being a, you know, academic, and we already talked about the academics that don't live in the real world. Scott Besant and Warsh both worked for the Goat. Stanley Druckenmiller, right, and ran real money and competed at the highest levels in the most competitive game in the world and won. And I would say even more specifically than that, you know, under the goat and the Goat and, and George Soros is not a Name typically we'd think about in this, in this frame. But I mean, what they specifically did was currencies. Right? Specifically breaking the bank of England, etc. So it seems like Besent grew up in the lions pit and won that game. And if, if there's anybody that knows about managing currencies and competing currencies and currencies wars with real active, you know, war experience, it's probably Besant. Besant, handpicked Warsh, who also came from the same school and has made himself fabulously wealthy in that world. And so it does seem that we might have two of potentially the best guys in the world in those chairs. Whether they can do what they think they can do is a different story. But would you say their experience at least maybe gives them an edge there?

[Prof. St. Ange]

They're smart. The question is, what's their goal? Right. So my goal is getting the Fed out of the business of bailing out financial markets. That's not necessarily their goal.

[Mark Moss]

Right.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Their goal may be to keep economic growth going strong. Bessense talked about growing out of the debt by getting GDP up to 6, 7%. If that's the goals that they have in mind, then they're not necessarily going to restructure. In fact, they could make it worse, which is wonderful. If you're Wall street, you know, you could argue in the grand scheme it doesn't matter that much because economic growth is so important. Like if you put it into perspective, all right, if you increase GDP growth by. And you know, I know there's problems with gdp, okay. But anyway, if you increase the size of the economy, in other words, average incomes by 1%. And if you're using a, let's say a 5% discount rate, that is 20x. All right, so 20% net present value times an economy of what are we at? 30 trillion. Now that's $6 trillion the value. Is it 30 or 20 now? It's about 30, I think. 20.

[Mark Moss]

20.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 20 is M2, 30 is the economy. So that's a net present value of $6 trillion. Okay. If you could increase GDP by 6% in a single year, you would create so much wealth for the country that it would be equivalent to the entire national wealth. Right. Point being that when people like if, if they don't care about the Wall Street Ponzi. Yes. In a sense it's annoying because the Wall street guys are going to get away with it again and they're, you know, we're going to have to buy them another yacht and you know, their Mistress with the, you know, with the cocaine. Okay, fine. But, you know, sort of zooming out. What actually matters. It's, you know, growth in wages, growth in the economy. If the price of doing that is that Wall street gets an outsized share of it, it disgusts me. I don't like Wall street any more than the next guy. But, you know, you want to keep what matters in perspective. So I suspect, I think you're absolutely right. These are some of the most brilliant guys in the world. However, I don't think that they want a, you know, sort of Ron Paul, Ralph Bardian, you know, Ragnarok on Wall street where, you know, finally all the bad guys get what they deserve. I think they probably want to make the machine run faster with, you know, no financial problems, no inflation to get in the way. So, you know, in that sense, I mean, they're, in terms of what their goals are probably pretty much in line with every Fed chair we've had since 1913.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah. Q1, 2026, US GDP was 31.8 trillion.

[Prof. St. Ange]

So, yeah, there you go. Thank you.

[Mark Moss]

Just give you the number. But what I would say is a couple ways that I think about this and, and really, you know, I was busy making money building companies, selling companies up until 2008. It was 2008 that woke me up and made me go, what the heck is this global macroeconomic financial system? So I've spent the last, whatever, 12, 15 years absorbed in that. But it was really, you know, during that GFC and it was the $700 billion bailout, the TARP bailout. And I'm like, no, you can't just do that. And I think now, you know, I've kind of. I think about a little bit differently today. And it's like, if you can't beat them, join them, so to speak. And you mentioned the Cantillon effect. So those closest to the money supply have the, have the first benefit, right? So that's where the money's created, right? And then the people at the bottom, they get the money last after price is already driven up and, and they're, they're hammered the worst. But if the banks create the money, the commercial banks, which is what war wants, I can just get the money from the commercial bank too. I can also just do that. And I can also buy assets, and I can buy a dollar worth of assets or $100 worth of assets. I could also get in on the game. And so I think, certainly, sure, things should be more fair. And certainly I came up as a Ron Paul in the Fed. And I'm all for that. And maybe at some point, I think as Bitcoiners, we think maybe eventually we can sort of get past that at some point. I don't know how we get from here to there without having a lot of pain. But I think at the same time there's wanting the world to be a certain way, hoping the world to be a certain way. And even for, I think both of us probably working to bring that ideal world to fruition, but there's also just operating in the world as we have it. And so, you know, if we can understand what the Fed is doing, sure, we can be at the top of the Cantillon effect and we can get bank credit and we can buy assets. We can participate in that as well. And to the point that you're making, if there's a trade off, I mean, if we can just get 5 or 6% GDP and grow ourself out of that, and my wages can go up and my business can do better, it's not the end of the world. It's not the end of the world. Do you think that they'll be able to get that 5 or 6% GDP growth?

[Prof. St. Ange]

So, yeah, so first off, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. You know, I buy houses on credit.

[Mark Moss]

Right.

[Prof. St. Ange]

I take advantage of the fact that the Fed manipulates interest rates too low. I was very happy to get a 3% mortgage in 2020 because it was free money, you know, Anybody listening? You know, there's, there's this sort of standard advice that people get from the Great Depression where it's terrible to be in debt. Not at 3% debt, it's not.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah.

[Prof. St. Ange]

You know, like if you're invested in SPY in the s and P500, which, you know, over the past 15 years, I think it grew about 15% nominal a year. All right, so if your assets are growing at 15%, your mortgage is 3%. You're an idiot not to borrow. Like, what is this getting out of debt? And of course, that was great advice in the Great Depression because we had massive deflation. I think it was 40% deflation at one point. But the Fed learned its lesson. Never again. You will never again have deflation as long as the Fed exists. Because they can just print it. They have a giant money print. It's an unlimited money print in the basement. There is no way that you can ever have inflation. It's mathematically impossible. They would just print 10 trillion, 20, 30. So, you know, absolutely. Take on debt if it's Low debt. Right. So, you know, whatever your personal, if your alternative is that you would put money into a money market or a high yield account, then that's earning 5, 6% at the moment. So, you know, any debt below, call it, you know, call it 5 or 6%. Absolutely do that. Take the money, put that, you know, put that in the market. So yes, you too can, can take advantage of Cantillon effects and get as close as possible. Now it's a problem on a social level. Right. You know, because the vast majority of debt is not poor people, it's rich people, it's corporations, it's billionaires. You know, Sam Altman, for example, he hasn't shared or I don't think he sold any, literally any shares of OpenAI. But he's got a really nice cars and you know, million dollar houses. How does he manage? Well, he borrows it. All right? It's all borrowed. The, you know, sort of stereotypical image of like, you know, a poor person going in and borrowing on their credit card. That's almost none of the borrowing. In other words, the Cantillon effect, almost none of that. That's operating through manipulated interest rates. That's not going to poor people, that's going to extremely rich people. So that's a social problem. But on an individual level. Absolutely. Borrow everything you can at low rates and you know, nothing at high. And then there was another part of that question though.

[Mark Moss]

Well, about the GDP growth and do you think they can achieve these high levels of GDP growth and grow ourself out? I mean, with the re industrialization and the re onshoring and the automation and.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, I mean, I think so. There's a lot of Trump's policies that are solid, you know, obviously on regulation, on tax rates. The big beautiful bill appreciated depreciation, which is very important for investment. There's a lot of stuff that, you know, that he's pushed through that when you put it together, it might be good for a point, maybe a point and a half optimistically on growth. So that could get us closer to two and a half, three, which is good. That's good over the past 40 years or so. But to get beyond that, you know, there's, there's some factory reshoring going on that's helpful, but it also takes a while. There's also some, you know, you get negatives from tariffs themselves because they're taxed like any tax. So, you know, tariff may be on net, another half point at best. AI, the AI buildout is absolutely massive. PricewaterhouseCooper estimated 4.7 million blue collar jobs building the data centers. Everybody forgets about when they talk about the data centers like they fell out of a spaceship. Data center construction right now is higher than residential home construction, it's higher than office construction. It's kind of ironic, it is absolutely massive. And that is employing blue collars, which is one of the things that's boosting blue collar wages. You put all that together and you might be looking at a, I don't know, one and a half, 2% boost. You might be able to get to 3, 3.5%. If you're really trying to get the 6, 7%. I mean you would like, you would have to go back to 1913, you'd have to get rid of the income tax, you would have to throw out the entire federal code and go back to a tort based system. It's possible but it's, you know, those kinds of things don't happen unless you get some massive crisis like Fall of Soviet Union style where everybody just says you know what, this system is garbage, we gotta start over from scratch or

[Mark Moss]

inflation has to run really hot. And combination.

[Prof. St. Ange]

If inflation ran really hot, then yes, that's the kind of thing that gets people excited. Then they start questioning, you know, more fundamental aspects. I mean when we've looked at, you know, sort of the iconic modern version of inflation, waking the people up to the crisis was 1970s, we did have a great backlash, right? So I was born and raised in the 70s. It was horrible. There's all this nostalgia for it now I guess because people were skinny. But it was in general a terrible time. We in the 70s, we knew it was an awful time. And the 80s was just, I mean it was incredible. It was like just night and day, you know, cities came back to life. You know, everybody was excited about the future. So yes, if inflation runs away again, they can't get it back down. You know you could argue that Trump 2020 was you know, the same sort of Reagan style backlash to inflation. So you know, it could absolutely move us from the socialist side to the less socialist side. But to really get durably to 6, 7%, I mean we would need, you would basically need to repeal everything that happened in 1913.

[Mark Moss]

You wouldn't put all your money in one stock. So why have your whole life in one single country now if you've thought about another passport, Italy and bitizenship might just be what you've been looking for. Italy has one of the most underrated golden visas in all of Europe. Just a €250,000 investment threshold. And with citizenship, you can make that investment into bitcoin, not some risky business venture or real estate that you don't actually want. Approval times are usually about three to six months and you don't put any money in until your visa is approved. Plus, with the golden visa, there's no physical residency that's required. You can get full Schengen access from day one and it's renewable forever. Now. Italy puts you at the heart of Europe and with Schengen access, it gives you flexibility across the 29 countries. If you want another passport and you want your investment to have bitcoin exposure like me, then bitizenship may be the answer you're looking for. So go to bitizenship.com markmoss and check it out. Now you mentioned this giant capex spending, the boom, the AI boom, the blue collar boom. I mean it's not just AI data centers. I mean, obviously there's a lot of manufacturing coming back and all of that. But, but back to the capex, I saw a number today, I don't have it in front of me, but it was the amount of money that's gone into just the IPOs in the AI, you know, AI boom. And so in the bitcoin space, we talk a lot about how that sort of like sucked all the liquidity away from bitcoin, number one, I guess. Do you, do you agree with that? Well, you just said 100%. Do you agree with that? Number one. And number two, then do you see that sort of like we get through these big IPOs, you know, maybe over the next year and then there's a rotation that happens. How are you thinking about that?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, so I think AI is going to probably hold onto the money for a while here. If you look at the magnitudes, the CapEx to GDP, if you look at the dominance of VC deals, it is like an order of magnitude bigger than dot com. It is by far the biggest thing we've seen. Maybe the railroads came close at absolute peak 150 years ago. Electricity didn't come close to this. I mean, it's really a big deal and I think it's going to suck up all the capital. Now it's entirely possible that the whole AI complex collapses tomorrow because somebody cuts back and then everybody else gets scared. So if that happens, then yes, the capital comes rushing back and the number go up, people come back and hang out in bitcoin. But my base case is if you look at the economics of AI, they're kind of fascinating. So the closest analog, I think is dot com. And you had a bubble in dot com as well, of course. And so if you breakdown dot com, there were really two pieces of it from an investment perspective. In other words, something that would compete with Bitcoin as an investment right now. And those were the sort of consumer facing side of AI. So Yahoo, AOL at the time, Amazon and the picks and shovels. So Lucent, Qualcomm, WorldCom, the picks and shovels, they flamed out real fast. So they had a huge run up like Cisco, I don't know, it was up 8 or 12, whatever, it was up a bunch. And then it stayed up for six, nine months and it collapsed. And the reason was because what sort of the structure of the Internet was that? They came in and built these fiber optic cables. Basically they made like a highway that had a thousand lanes when only one lane was being used and it only needed like three. And the Internet, yes, like video grew into it gradually. Social media then started picking that up. But, but social media was about five years, actually closer to 10 years later when social media showed up. It took a long time to fill in those extra lanes. So what happened with Cisco or Lucent is that they built these massive pipes and it took, you know, in practice it took the Internet like 20 years to grow into it. So there was really like no durable value created there. It went up, it came down almost back to where it started. Where the value accrued in the Internet was the consumer facing. So, you know, Google, Facebook, Amazon. So it turns out that the eyeballs is where the value was, not the infrastructure. Now AI to me is fascinating because it's almost the exact opposite story. So there was a story the other day that Facebook now has a $2.6 billion token budget. There's another story. I think it was rumored to be Uber who blew through their annual budget for token. And it was massive. It was like half a billion dollars in six weeks or something. There is insane demand for AI tokens. Like you don't want to say unlimited, but it is a lot of demand. This is nothing like the Internet in terms of fiber optic capacity. This is like you build a highway with a thousand lanes and it's full next Tuesday and they want another thousand lanes. On the other hand, the consumer facing parts of AI. So ChatGPT, Grok, what's the other one? Gemini. Yeah, they're almost complete commodities. Like you probably use multiple AIs to ask questions. I, I can't remember which AI is because they're all the same. Like, not only that, but you've got. So I think it's Z AI, which is one of the leading Chinese open source AIs. So there was a benchmark measure that said that they are within like 1% of mythos. Right. Which is Claude's new fancy world destroying AI. This is an open source Chinese. The amount of money in AI in China is like 1/50 what it is in the US. It's almost nothing in AI consumer applications and that's almost matched to Mythos. So it's almost like AI is the exact opposite of dot com, which is where if you build it, they will buy it. There is nearly unlimited demand for tokens. On the flip side, the consumer, the eyeballs are worth nothing. You've already got companies where I can't remember the name. You go there and it'll route your query to different AIs, behind the scenes of which you know, they're overwhelmingly Chinese because labor and energy are so cheap in China, nobody even knows. Right. So like imagine if on the Internet you didn't care if it was Google or Amazon. There was some like, like, you know, interface in between that just sort of rotted it out and all magically happened. You got what you wanted. That's what AI looks like. So it's, it's fascinating from an investment perspective. I. My base case and I could be 100% wrong. The first rule in markets is it'll do whatever embarrasses the most people. So I could be wrong in the next 10 minutes, but my base case is that the value in AI is going to go into the guys who make the rails. The value is not going into the consumers. People are talking about trillion dollar valuations for ChatGPT or for Claude. I don't think that's going to happen. The competitive moats are not there. So, you know. But isn't that the rail?

[Mark Moss]

Isn't that the rail? That's who's selling the tokens.

[Prof. St. Ange]

ChatGPT is not right. Claude, it's a commodity.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah, but Claude is selling the tokens.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Or Claude. Sure, yeah. I mean, Claude is ahead of the game at the moment because their agents are better. But if you look at the competitive dynamics in AI, like services, like the consumer facing part of it, I've been shocked how shallow the mode is. In other words, almost every quarter, every year, the leading model leapfrogs each other. At the moment, it's Claude, then it'll be Gemini, then it'll be GPT then it'll be the Chinese again, whatever. So that to me has been shocking. But on the infrastructure side, you've got just bottleneck after bottleneck where if you sort of dig into the names there, whether it's Micron or Seagate, like the market keeps discovering, oh wait, this is the bottleneck. It's ASML lithography or whatever's next in line. That's where the value keeps accruing. So bringing all that back to bitcoin as an investment, my base case is that that all keeps going for another probably one or two years. That's going to continue sucking the oxygen out of the room. Whether it's in my opinion misplaced optimism about the models or whether it's the picks and shovels guys, I think those are going to continue hogging up the assets. I think they're going to do it on a much larger scale than they are today at a much larger scale than happened during dot com. So I think bitcoin is going to struggle a little bit price wise just because the number go up. Guys who provide a lot of the liquidity, they're going to be partying over there on their AI stonks. Now, the party eventually ends. You know, if you're optimistic then you'd say, okay, the asset is 200 today, it goes to a thousand and it falls back to 500. So you might still make money. You went from 200 to 500. However, at that point the Stonk bros come running back and then they'll, you know, look at whatever went up at that point. And I think that a lot of them will come back to bitcoin. But you know, I think in terms of the sort of freebie that bitcoin usually gets for the number goes up crowd, I think those are temporarily out of the game. We which leaves, you know, the diamond hands who understand the thesis, who are doing it for debasement reasons or for, you know, personal freedom. So I think, you know, those guys are of course going to stick around. I don't think that we have, you know, the bottom is not going to fall out of bitcoin. However, I think that for a while the speculative froth is being occupied by AI.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah, I know we went long here. Do you have time for one more question?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, of course.

[Mark Moss]

Okay, so as somebody who, you know, with heritage and Mises and an Austrian, I'm curious your take. So the Trump administration, you know, there's good things and bad things about them. There's a lot of good things that they've done that. I'm, I'm very supportive of. One thing that has me very skeptical is the Trump administration wanting to take ownership in pri, in, in some of these private companies. So, you know, taking percentage of Nvidia. Now, of course, people are talking about maybe they'll acquire parts of strategy. That seems pretty scary to me. I'm curious, your take on that again, as an Austrian, as a Mises guy, as a heritage guy, how do you think about that?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, so I'm with you on Trump. For me, the vast majority of what he does is either good or it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Having said, I agree with you. This, this taking, you know, bits of companies. It was bad when he was talking about, like lithium mines or what they had to deal with intel, where they get a chunk of intel. Okay, that's bad enough. You know, that starts to look like the defense industrial complex, where these guys are going to get free handouts forever doing it with AI, you know, which, like, ultimately, I think AI is going to absolutely dominate free speech. It's going to absolutely dominate discourse between voters, the formation of voters, opinions. You know, what we saw in 2020 with the censorship of voters, I think that just AI is going to be that on absolute steroids. And to have the government involved in that, I think is absolutely catastrophic. So I think this is a disastrous idea. I don't know why Trump keeps doing this. He's going to be in office for two years, not for 50 years, like, whatever he builds. And he's not going to be handing it to Joe Biden. He's going to be handing it to Gavin Newsom or, you know, whoever, whoever they pull out of their rear necks like you really want Gavin. I mean, so I think it's absolutely insane that they keep doing this.

[Mark Moss]

That's the information side of things. But I mean, so taking a share of a strategy, so to build the strategic bitcoin reserve, they take a percentage of ownership and strategy, for example. I mean, so there's certainly the censorship side of things, and you're absolutely right, I agree with you on that. But then it's just like the government controlling the means of production. Like, isn't that kind of going away from free markets? I guess that was the kind of part that I was thinking. So there's certainly a censorship side and I agree with you. But is there some precedent? And again, as a heritage, as a, as a Mises person, like, how do you think about, as a libertarian or whatever, you know, not to put Labels on you. But you know, how do you think about the government's sort of ownership of the, of the economy?

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's us saying in the earlier part on the defense contractors who sort of operate as if they're government owned, we don't get the profits. But, but yeah, no, I think it's, it's a disastrous idea. You know, so that's something called industrial policy. Every country is always trying to push it because the corrupt people who fund the government or who, who, you know, lobbyists, they always want it. They want the government to get involved because they know that, you know, it's, they basically want the deal that Wall street gets, which is that, you know, the, you keep the winnings, we're going to cover the losses. Every industry wants that. And unfortunately, you know, Trump is in love with the idea. So. Yep, I think it is an absolute disaster. Now when you talk about bitcoin, like, I'm not concerned about the government owning bitcoin for the same reason I'm not concerned about them owning gold. Right. That is a non voting asset. You're not actually controlling. Now I don't want the government to own strategy because that is a asset that has shareholders where you're actually voting on things. So, you know, that I'm like the notion of a government controlling a company and effectively guaranteeing it, I think that's an absolute disaster. It is, you know, textbook crony capitalism. And notably, you know, when Trump has suggested these kinds of deals, Democrats have loved the idea. So, you know, this is fundamentally a Democrat idea. You know, one of the jokes when Trump won last year, and for people who don't know me, broadly pro Trump, I get attacked all the time for being a Trump bootlicker. When he won last year, there were a bunch of memes going around how the Democrats won. Right. It was like, you know, it was like a picture of him, RFK Tulsi. And it's true, like, you know, most of Elon for that matter, most of these people were lifelong Democrats. You know, I would argue that they're the old Democrat party. They're not the freaky, you know, faculty gender, you know, whatnot. Yeah, pronoun gang that it is now. But there are some pieces of the old Democrat party that are very destructive and that public, private, you know, frankly, fascist style partnership is something that, you know, I would like him to move away from that.

[Mark Moss]

Yeah, he's a deal maker. He just wants to make a deal with everybody.

[Prof. St. Ange]

That's what it is. And, and I understand his point of view, which is that, you know, the taxpayer should get taken care of. And, you know, if somebody's going to make a trillion dollars, then some of that should go to taxpayers. I understand that. But the threat is exactly what we saw with Wall street, which is that even aside from, you know, the censorship and the rest of it, you end up creating these industries where they gamble more because they know that you're covering the losses.

[Mark Moss]

All right, we'll wrap it up with that. Man, what a what a good conversation. So many different threads to pull on there. I know you do these videos is almost daily on X, I think. Shout out to where people can go follow you.

[Prof. St. Ange]

Yeah, I do daily videos on the economy and freedom at Prof. St. Ange on X the Artist formerly known as Twitter Us have weekly newsletter and then a monthly newsletter where I do investments.

[Mark Moss]

We'll make sure to link all that down in the show notes down below and we'll wrap it up with that. Thanks so much.

[Prof. St. Ange]

All right, thanks for having me back, Mark.

[Mark Moss]

He's dribbling the ball with everything on the line. He's driving down the pitch.

[Prof. St. Ange]

He's facing price hikes and cuts past him. Carrier contracts, tries to block him. Oh, he leaves him in the dust. He's at the edge of the box. He cuts past the nonstop group chat, trash talk. He clears on goal. He shoots no unlimited data for $25 a month forever.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

Visit your local Boost Mobile store today to get unlimited data with a price that never changes. Boost mobile after 30gb, customers may experience lower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the

[Prof. St. Ange]

Boost $25 Unlimited plan.

[Mark Moss]

To some, a baby's babbling doesn't mean much. But it does, especially if there's no babbling at all. Little to no babbling by 12 months or later is just one of the possible signs of autism in children. Learn [e-mail] brought to you by Autism Speaks and the Ad Council.

[Prof. St. Ange]

If you're alignment in charge of keeping the lights on, Grainger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing. Which is why you can count on Grainger for professional grade products and next day delivery so you have everything you need to get the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

Wasabi is purpose built to free your business from skyrocketing storage costs and fees from the big guys. Wasabi is the go to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams around the world. Check out Wasabi's AI enabled intelligent media storage, Wasabi Air and the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cyber criminals. Wasabi Driving innovation in data storage for up to 80% less than market competition. Try for [e-mail] Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage proud partner of iHeart Podcast Network.