WTF is Happening in 2020? With Guy Swann, Ben Prentice & Heavily Armed Clown - WBD252

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Peter McCormack Show – "WTF is Happening in 2020? With Guy Swann, Ben Prentice & Heavily Armed Clown" (WBD252)
Release Date: August 18, 2020

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Introduction

Peter McCormack welcomes listeners to a pivotal episode of The Peter McCormack Show, featuring guests Guy Swann, Ben Prentice, and Heavily Armed Clown. The central theme revolves around Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), following a previous discussion with economist Stephanie Kelton. Peter expresses his intention to dissect and challenge MMT's premises with the help of his knowledgeable guests.

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Note: Advertisements, intros, and outros have been omitted from this summary as per instructions.

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Deep Dive into Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

Time Stamp: [05:11]

Guy Swann initiates the conversation by adopting Stephanie Kelton’s perspective to present MMT’s viewpoints. He aims to critically evaluate her arguments by juxtaposing them with Austrian economic principles.

Ben Prentice shares his journey into economics, initially finding MMT appealing due to its logical monetary perspective. However, after extensive research and debates, particularly with economist Warren Mosler, he encounters significant contradictions within MMT. Ben underscores a fundamental flaw in MMT: “The one fundamental across the board mistake that modern monetary theorists make is conflating money with value.” He elaborates that money serves as an accounting tool, not as intrinsic value, emphasizing that without goods or services backing it, money holds no real worth.

Colin adds to the critique by highlighting that MMT often misattributes economic prosperity to monetary policy rather than technological advancements. He argues that “productivity for the sake of productivity, if there's no demand to support it, it doesn't equate to real wealth creation.”

Heavily Armed Clown emphasizes the prevalence of logical fallacies within MMT, referencing Henry Hazlett’s Economics in One Lesson. He contends that MMT and Keynesianism are inherently flawed because they offer governments the power to print money without aligning incentives toward genuine economic value creation.

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MMT vs. Austrian Economics: Key Points of Contention

Time Stamp: [12:31]

• Quality of Production: Emphasis on producing goods and services that satisfy actual demand rather than indiscriminate productivity increases.

• Government Incentives: Colin argues that government spending mechanisms inherently lead to misallocation of resources due to politicians’ incentives to favor special interest groups, perpetuating deficits and inflationary policies.

• Deflation vs. Inflation: Ben advocates for deflation as a corrective measure to align economic behaviors with sustainability, likening it to ceasing destructive spending habits for long-term well-being.

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Logical Fallacies and Government Incentives

Time Stamp: [21:37]

Heavily Armed Clown discusses how government-funded economists are less likely to support Austrian economics due to conflicting interests in maintaining the power to print money. He asserts that increasing inflation targets, like the 2% nominal inflation, leads to continuous money printing, which disrupts economic stability.

Ben Prentice further critiques MMT by illustrating how it enables corruption and poor resource allocation, using the analogy of giving children oversized tools that can cause more harm rather than solving underlying issues.

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Potential Solutions and The Role of Bitcoin

Time Stamp: [35:34]

The guests explore hypothetical scenarios to rectify the issues plaguing MMT:

• Colin suggests removing the government's ability to expand the monetary base, advocating for a return to sound money principles over a generation.

• Ben aligns with the idea of replacing centralized monetary control with decentralized systems like Bitcoin, arguing that “prices are the most information-dense metric you could possibly find” and cannot be accurately managed by any central authority.

Heavily Armed Clown proposes abolishing patents and ending monopolies, alongside removing corporate tax benefits to restore competitive market dynamics.

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Bitcoin as a Catalyst for Economic Reset

Time Stamp: [43:12]

The conversation shifts towards Bitcoin's potential to act as a decentralized alternative to traditional monetary systems:

• Guy Swann highlights recent corporate investments in Bitcoin (e.g., MicroStrategy's $250 million allocation), viewing it as a significant step towards widespread adoption. He remarks, “Our central bank policy tends to be what everyone else mirrors,” indicating Bitcoin's ability to serve as an independent store of value.

• Ben Prentice parallels Bitcoin adoption to the internet's evolution, emphasizing the long maturation process required for a decentralized financial infrastructure to replace centralized systems. He notes that “MicroStrategy's investment is the first clearly fallen domino”, signaling a potential rapid shift in financial paradigms.

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Closing Thoughts and Future Outlook

Time Stamp: [89:50]

Peter McCormack reflects on the episode's impact, noting his increased bullishness on Bitcoin leading to significant personal and business investments. He underscores the importance of critical thinking and encourages listeners to engage with Bitcoin as a hedge against flawed economic policies.

Guy Swann and Ben Prentice express optimism about Bitcoin's growing acceptance and its role in dismantling problematic monetary systems. They advocate for continued education, investment, and the adoption of decentralized financial tools to ensure long-term economic stability.

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Notable Quotes

• Ben Prentice on MMT's misunderstanding of money:

  "The money isn't value. It's an accounting system to allocate the actual stuff... The money itself is meaningless." [05:11]

• Colin on government incentives:

  “Nobody is ever going to be better than their incentives.” [12:47]

• Heavily Armed Clown on logical fallacies in MMT:

  “MMT is kind of like an evolution, or more of a propagandist, actually version of Keynesianism.” [20:07]

• Guy Swann on Bitcoin's arrival:

  “It is coming like a freight train.” [27:12]

• Ben Prentice on deflation:

  “Deflation is actually the best possible thing that we could want for coming out of this because it means that everyone's life gets better.” [35:04]

• Peter McCormack on his bullish stance:

  “Straight after that show, I went out and bought a load more bitcoin... I could not be any more bullish right now with bitcoin.” [89:26]

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Conclusion

This episode serves as a comprehensive critique of Modern Monetary Theory, juxtaposed with Austrian economic principles and the transformative potential of Bitcoin. The guests collectively argue that MMT's flawed understanding of money leads to unsustainable economic policies, fostering inflation and corruption. Bitcoin emerges as a viable solution, offering a decentralized and sound monetary system that aligns incentives with genuine value creation. The discussion underscores the urgent need for systemic economic reforms and positions Bitcoin as a cornerstone for future financial stability.

Listeners are encouraged to critically assess current economic policies, explore decentralized financial alternatives like Bitcoin, and engage in informed discourse to navigate the evolving economic landscape.

Transcript

[Colin]

It doesn't matter if the world is ready for bitcoin, because it is coming like a freight train.

[Peter McCormack]

Hello there from the United Kingdom. How are you all? Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by the mighty Kraken. The best place to buy, sell and trade bitcoin. I'm your host, Peter McCormack and today I've got an interview with three guests. Today I've got on Guy Swan, Ben Prentice and Heavily Armed Clown, where we review the ideas behind mmt, which I discussed recently with my guest, Stephanie Kelton. But before that, I do have a message from my amazing show sponsors. So first up, we're going to talk about casa. Who are the leaders in bitcoin security? They're the best out there and with bitcoin on a tear, I mean, you must have seen it this last few days. We're over 12k. Could we be heading to 15k? Who knows? But there's going to be some of you out there making some good profits right now. So it is time to get your bitcoin security together. If you've been leaving bitcoin on exchange or you're worried about holding it yourself, or the risks of just having that single hardware wallet, then there's no better solution out there than casa. And I'm a customer now. I signed up a few months ago. Honestly, the peace of mind of knowing my bitcoin is protected not just from hacks, not just from my stupid mistakes, but any eventuality, it is really just something I'm glad I've done now. Casa, they're such badasses. They've got a product for every bitcoiner out there. With their gold product, you get triple the security of a hardware wallet and it only costs $10 a month. With Casa Platinum, you get their three or five multisig, the best protection for large bitcoin holders at a great price. And with CASA diamond, you get the full badass service offering which includes a customized personal security review, inheritance and of course, their best in class security. There has never been a better time to get your bitcoin security sorted than and have total peace of mind. If you want to find out more, head over to Keys casa, which is K E Y S casa. Also we have Sportsbet. Have you checked out Sportsbet IO yet? Do you like to get online? Do you like to have a little bit of a bet?

[Guy Swan]

I do.

[Peter McCormack]

Especially on football, especially if Tottenham are playing. I like to have a good bet that they're gonna lose. It's usually a Winner. But these guys, they're not just any gaming firm, they accept bitcoin. They are the best in gaming because of that. And I've spent time with them. I've got to know the business and I know they really care about it. And we just have a few football matches to clear up before the end of the season before we can get ready for next season. We've got the Champions League semi finals and final and the Europa League final coming up. It's your last chance to have a bet on the football this season. If you want to find out more, head over Sportsbet IO, which is S P O R T S B E T IO okay, so onto the show today and we've got another banger following the very popular show between Samson Vitalik, which, by the way, I had two record days of downloads. Very interesting. But I've got another banger. So a few weeks ago, some of you will remember, I did an interview with Stephanie Kelton on modern monetary theory. And going into that one, it was obvious that there would be plenty of bitcoiners who would not appreciate the MMT point of view. So I really wanted to talk to some people about this, talk about her arguments, kind of break them down. And during that interview, there were a few things I definitely wasn't convinced on and I tried to push back, but I'm not an economist, I didn't have the conviction in some of my ideas, so it was a bit tricky for me. So after that interview I definitely wanted a follow up. So firstly, I spoke to Guy Swan and I said, come on, man, you haven't even been on the show yet. What the fuck's that about? You need to come on. And he agreed. And then I discussed getting the WTF 1971 guys back on. So I asked Ben and Colin to join us too. And it turned out to be a great episode, a massive one. It actually made me really, really bullish on bitcoin again. Straight after the interview, I went and increased my bitcoin holdings. I'll tell you more about that in the outro. But went on and bought a shitload more bitcoin. So this is a monster. I know you're going to enjoy it. If you've got any questions or feedback, you can reach out to me. My email address is. Hello? What Bitcoin did Calm. Also, if you checked out my show, Defiance. Yeah, I've got an amazing story up there at the moment. Part one of 1333 days. It's about this band, the Ghosts Inside. They had this accident back in 2015, their tour bus was in a fatal bus crash. And then four years later, they made a comeback show. The story is incredible. Definitely go and check that out. That's available at Defiance News. Outside of that, have a great week and I'll speak to you all soon.

[Guy Swan]

Sometimes I think you just have to shoot the shit.

[Ben Prentice]

What was.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

What was your idea for bringing the four. The four of us together? So.

[Guy Swan]

Well, so originally I was going to do it with Guy. By the way, we're recording, so it. We've started.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Okay.

[Guy Swan]

Who should have is like, well overdue coming on the show, so. Welcome Guy. Good.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Ben Prentice]

Thank you. Thank you. It's awesome to be on the show.

[Guy Swan]

It's been well overdue. So I was gonna do it with Guy and talk about the Stephanie thing, but because I brought up the 1971 stuff during the interview, probably very badly, I just thought, you know what? I need to do a 1971 Revisited. And I just thought I'd get us all three together and just kind of shoot the shit on this. But I think what I'll do is I think I'm gonna take the role of Stephanie Kelton in this. I'm gonna, like, throw out my objections or things I think she possibly could have been right about to. To see a different. Different argument. Just try and break down your arguments. I always like doing that.

[Ben Prentice]

So try to steal, man.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

It.

[Guy Swan]

Try my best. Try my best. But I know it triggered Ben especially. I know it triggered you all, but I'm gonna let Guy have the first word because, you know, first time on the show, you're. You're not a big fan of Stephanie Kelton's work, are you, Guy?

[Ben Prentice]

Not so much. When I went down the economics rabbit hole a handful of years before, bitcoin was a thing. Oh, by the way, I'm Guy Swan, by the way. I host a bitcoin audible podcast, and particularly for economics. But literally about anything on bitcoin at all. I mean, I've read Murray Rothbard's stuff, I've read Hayek stuff, I've read Nick Szabo stuff, Pierre, Richard, Jimmy songs. I have going on getting close to like 450 reads. 550 some odd episodes. But if you want to read or dig into any piece written about around bitcoin, economics, game theory, cryptography, any of it, I probably have it in audio on the show. If not, just hit me up, let me know what you wanted to read and I'll have audio of it in short order.

[Guy Swan]

People know who you are. People Know who you are.

[Ben Prentice]

Well, just in case.

[Guy Swan]

Just in case, hey, all those you just listed, all the people have me blocked on Twitter.

[Ben Prentice]

But so going down the economics rabbit hole, I actually bumped into modern monetary theory first. And it actually appealed to me because there is something inherently. There's something inherently logical about it from the monetary perspective. Like, it did make me realize, like an analogy that they use a lot is about the SP sports board, like the this just points kind of thing. And that made a lot of sense to me because that was true. In a sense, the deficit doesn't matter. It is just a tally system for things supposedly that have happened in the economy. But after about two or three months of exploring it, and a big, big person in the MMT school is an economist named Warren Mosler. And my brother and I agarus view on Twitter. We had been digging into economics and we had a lot of conversations with him. He was actually nice enough to debate with us over email. And after about two or three months of digging into it, there were just some painful contradictions that I couldn't get around. And then we bumped into Austrian theory and it was like, finally, it makes sense. But the one fundamental across the board mistake that modern monetary theorists make is conflating money with value. The money isn't value. It's an accounting system to allocate the actual stuff. Like if we all have a million dollars, but we have no valuable stuff, we have no houses, we have no TVs, we have no cars, nothing that we can do anything with. The money is meaningless. It's only when somebody produces actual value that it becomes worth something, because you can now exchange it for a thing that makes your life better. But the money itself doesn't is completely pointless. It's like a container with or without water in it. If you have water, it's useful, but if not, then it's just an empty container. And they constantly think that if you just print a whole bunch of money and make it look like on the accounting side we ran a surplus, well, then things will be great. But what all you're doing is cooking the books. You're just lying about what actually happened. Because what really mattered is where the resources went. And you just gave resources to somebody who's not producing anything. But I could go down that rabbit hole for a very, very long time. But the fundamental misunderstanding is that money is value, and it's not. It's a ticket to redeem real value somewhere else in the economy.

[Guy Swan]

Colin, you look like you were, you wanted to jump in. There were you getting triggered.

[Colin]

There's a lot said on these things. I think that a lot of modern academia conflates spending and productivity with wealth creation. And Guy kind of touched on that in terms of the unit of account of money. Safedin explains this really well and, and it was sound bited into the hard money documentary where he says, if all that mattered was consumption, well then let's sell our houses and sell our cars and sell all of our stuff and throw the biggest party the world's ever seen. Tomorrow consumption and productivity will go through the roof and then next month we'll have nothing. Right? And I think modern monetary theory is based on a flawed premise, which is the premise that employment, maximum employment and stable prices are the desirable goals in an economy. And when you think about productivity, at least from the Austrian perspective, you hear this phrase productive use of capital, and you hear it all the time where people say things like, oh, the velocity of money has to be kept high in order to maximize the productive use of capital. That's what the modern monetary theory, banking system that we have today is designed to do. It's designed to take as much of the money as possible and keep it recirculated back into the quote unquote greater economy. And that's why you have debt leveraged as assets. That's used to borrow more debt that's used and it's rehypothecated over and over and over. Because the Keynesians believe that maximizing the productivity of capital is what makes us wealthy, but that in an economic relationship where you have acting individuals and an entrepreneur, the entrepreneur creates wealth by satisfying individuals demands, not just by producing more of things. If those things just so happen to coincide with demand of acting individuals, then yes, that creates wealth. Because now the entrepreneur makes a profit if he's doing that competitively and the individuals have their needs met. But productivity for the sake of productivity, if there's no demand there to support, we could put every man, woman and child on the planet on their hands and knees in the fields and make them fill buckets with dirt. We would maximize employment, we would maximize productivity. But is that productive use of capital? You could force every single person to always invest every single dollar they earn. You could make it so that you can't save money in your bank account, or it would disappear the next morning when you wake up. But is that money going to be invested productively? According to the Keynesians, yes, but according to the Austrians, only if that capital is used to satisfy the demand of acting individuals.

[Guy Swan]

So what you're Basically saying is that it's. It comes down to the quality of what is being produced, satisfying the demand and a real demand. Not just like, like a frivolous demand.

[Colin]

Not just because if you have to. Peter, the, the most important thing is that it's profitable. Because if it's not profitable, then it's mal investment. The market is very. Is ruthlessly efficient at determining what entrepreneurs are producing value and which ones are not. It rewards those who satisfy the needs of. Of consumers with profit and it punishes those that malinvest by liquidating their assets. By liquidating.

[Guy Swan]

But that's not always true.

[Colin]

Yes, it is.

[Guy Swan]

I mean, well, as I say on certain, certain time frames. So, so for example, if you were to create a business and you were to borrow capital to start that business, you can maybe run at a loss, at a loss for a time being to grow market share. So that's not.

[Ben Prentice]

It's a trend. Yeah, it's a trend. You're talking that it's an incentive structure that, that reveals itself across time. So it's not always like any one static point in time that it just is true. But generally to run a profit means that the market has told you that you've produced more value than you have destroyed. And to run a deficit means that you have destroyed more value than you have produced. But we need the market.

[Colin]

Okay, sorry.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah, sorry. The other thing I was gonna say there, I'm calling, but what you're also saying is it's also that I am purchasing things that I want to purchase rather than being forced to purchase because I quickly need to spend the money. You're saying if you had to spend it, you may be buying things that you don't need and create an artificial demand.

[Colin]

Naturally, yeah. Anytime you have more time to accumulate resources and gather information and make informed decisions, those decisions are generally going to be better. I think that that's a pretty fundamental idea that most people could agree with. Like take the economics out of it. Right. If I give you 30 seconds to make a choice and I give you three weeks to make a choice, you know, who, chance, which scenario, do you think you're going to make the better choice?

[Guy Swan]

And also holding Bitcoin forces you to make those decisions. Now, where certainly I hadn't in the past, I'd pretty crap at saving and things like that. But my Bitcoin, I'm very precious about. I'm very protective of. I very, very rarely spend it. I actually give it away, probably more than I spend it. But I'm always conscious of what future value am I giving away? So when I spend it, I really want to spend it. Which I guess is kind of proof of this theory.

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, there's, like, back to your analogy, talking about how, like, you know, you. You might spend it a whole lot better if you wait three weeks versus being forced to do it, like, tomorrow or today. Is that, like, that's actually the very thing that money, like the. The core role that money provides in society to give us that incredible benefit of efficiency is. It's the double coincidence of wants. It's that today I might not have a good place to invest something, or I might not have a need that I have to meet right now. Maybe my need is in three weeks. My air conditioner broke, which. My air conditioner is broken right now. So I'm potently aware of how, like, it might just happen at any time. And so I hold that value over time to when it's actually needed or when there's actually a good, useful, productive, valuable place to put it. And in the meantime, I can actually get around this huge problem of the double coincidence of wants that maybe nobody has what I need right now or what's going to make my life better. It's literally to uninvent the role of money, to just kind of obliterate it. If you're trying to force everybody to just dump it somewhere immediately, well, we might as well just try to exchange shoes for cars. Why have money in the first place if you're not going to have a place to store value across time for when we actually need it?

[Guy Swan]

All right, before we dive into a bit more detail, Ben, you should. You should chime in as well, because I know the interview triggered you a little bit. So, like, throw. Throw your hat in the ring right now, and then I'll start. I'll start framing some different ideas and questions.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Yeah, thanks, Peter. I reached out to you after the interview because it's. To me, it's clear as an Austrian that. That she makes logical errors. Right? So I'm a big proponent of critical thinking and avoiding logical fallacies. And one of my favorite Austrian economics books that I read was the first one that I read, and it's called Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlett. And I really recommend even just trying to start reading it, because right at the beginning, Hazlett goes over what he calls a network of logical fallacies that are required in order to arrive at the conclusions that Keynesians arrive at. And we're mentioning Keynesianism here. It's. It's not in contrast to mmt. MMT is kind of like an evolution, or more of a propagandist, actually version of Keynesianism, in my view. So you'll notice the theme here that both Guy and Colin pointed out is the. The logical breakdown in arriving at the conclusions she did. And that's what I wanted to go over. I mean, he goes over in the book the broken window fallacy, the seen and the unseen. I like to talk about the miracle of prices. So you can look up the miracle of a pencil, but the prices are set in aggregate on a free market. But one thing I think was touched on briefly is that price inflation. See, I think this is where one of the biggest misconceptions comes around. So you talk, you listen to the episode, you listen to KELTON Talk. And Ms. Kelton is talking about, well, we may not see prices rise even though we're printing money. And then she does talk about inflationary pressure versus deflationary pressure. But I believe, as Colin mentioned, that stable prices aren't desirable, that 2% inflation aren't desirable. In fact, we should be expecting from the natural course of economic progress for prices to be lowering. This is very simple to understand. If I am in a competing firm with you, I'm going to constantly increase the productivity, right? And we do that a lot through computers and technology these days and through automation. And when I do that, that means I can compete with a lower price and therefore garner more. More business from the market. You know, I'm going to try to undercut you. This is economic competition. So decreasing costs leads to decreasing prices. However, if we target 2% nominal inflation, it doesn't matter how quickly we are actually decreasing these costs. We guarantee that the prices will rise. Because inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Something that Stephanie kind of nodded to. But just to finish out this thought here, is that not only is creating this 2% inflation a terrible goal. Right. That we expect the prices to be falling, the fact that a. I argue that trying to measure prices is.

[Colin]

Is.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Is impossible. Right. And I think you tried to push back on her on this. I actually think you did a fantastic job, Peter.

[Guy Swan]

I agree.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Of, Of. No, you. I thought you would. I thought you did really well at pushing back on some of these things. I mean, you said, why do we focus. Or, yeah, why do we focus on aggregate price inflation? You're saying it balances out. You asked Ms. Kelton this and she said, I. I don't know if it balances out. It's hard to say. She doesn't Even know. I mean, these people are just twisting knobs on the economy. Right. Like a child twisting knobs in a toy. But in this case, that toy is the aggregate machine of all human activity. So I don't. I don't mind pushing back on this, like, pretty hard.

[Guy Swan]

Well, I. I thought I did well. And I was. Thought I was doing okay. I thought I was holding my own. It's about the last 20 minutes.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

No, that's when you had the best thing, Peter. That's when you had the best.

[Guy Swan]

I know, but what I did about.

[Ben Prentice]

I think towards the end, you hit a lot of really great points, actually.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Can I. Can I.

[Guy Swan]

But, well, so I was going to just say I thought I was right. My problem was, is that I. And I think the pro. Yeah, I think the problem was if I felt so logically right and that she couldn't see it, that I must.

[Peter McCormack]

Be being an idiot.

[Guy Swan]

I must be being wrong here. And I. I just didn't have the conviction to hold it now, say, no, hold on. You're definitely wrong here.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

At the beginning of the episode, she mentioned that she loves Twitter because it's a great place where she can test out ideas. Right.

[Ben Prentice]

That's the only thing I agreed with her on.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

But she's testing out ideas for what I call propagandist economics, where she's trying to find what sticks with people so that she can keep printing money. And Peter, you asked, her savings increases the value of the dollar. And she said, no. And you said, this is wrong. Yeah, and. And she said, I think so. Why would it increase the value of the dollar? And you said a bunch of stuff, but then you said, basically it's because of supply and demand. She goes, I don't think it works that way.

[Peter McCormack]

I know. And that's where I was like, oh.

[Guy Swan]

I must be out of my depth here. And I should have had my conviction. I should have, like, I should have had a lot more conviction, said, no, you're wrong here. But, like, I just don't have conviction in economic ideas. Because, look, if I. If I had them, people would invite me on their show to discuss economics. They don't, because I'm a fucking moron. But that's why I get people like you on. But I just didn't have the conviction. But I was like, okay, I know with Bitcoin there is a limited supply. And I know the HODL mean basically means the value relative to other currencies. It goes up the more it's saved. Like, I know this. And the fact that she couldn't see that. I was like, oh, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I'm wrong. Let me ask you another thing then, Ben. Okay, okay. Why do they do it? Because I don't believe Stephanie Carlton's a horrible person. I don't believe she sat there thinking, I just want to print money because I want to get out of the situation. I do believe once you've, like, nailed yourself to a cross and you've got a book, it's very difficult to run and go, you know what, guys? I'm a fucking idiot. I got this all wrong. I don't. I think that's a very hard thing to do. But I believe when she wrote the book, I think she believed she was right. And I add to that Keynesians themselves, like, why is it they do this? Because reality, there's lots of different economic theories that, you know, we have Keynesians, we have Austrian, we have fucking Marxism. The economy will operate with any of them and collapse or have issues, but it's still a structure it operates under. So for me, the main difference between Keynesian and Austrian is fairness. What is fair and what isn't. It feels to me Austrian is just a much fairer economic system which rewards the individual in a more fair way. That's the way I've always felt about it. What do you think is going on here? What do you think they believe and why they prefer Keynesian?

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things going on here. Peter. I agree with you that Ms. Kelton is probably not some evil person. That's not what I'm trying to get at. I think a. This idea of logical fallacy is very important. If you, if you're not familiar with logical fallacies, for the audience, they are. They sound like sound logic, but they will lead you to the wrong conclusions because they're incorrect at their premise. And therefore anything that you draw afterward will lead you in the wrong place. I also believe that so, so government funds economists and they won't fund Austrian economics because it doesn't give them the power to print. I also think that because of this basically 50 years of inflationary regime, we're stuck in a very hard place. You know, I don't envy the people that are at the head of the Federal Reserve because they, they. There's no good option. If they stop printing money today, there will be lots of pain if they print money.

[Guy Swan]

They don't always print money. There are times where the deficits have been reduced.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

They target 2% price. Price inflation, Peter. Right. And I told you earlier that we should be expecting prices to go down. Therefore they're always printing money, they're always running deficits. Right?

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah.

[Guy Swan]

But let's just to play devil's advocate, okay. There are those people that believe that a small amount of inflation is required because deflation is dangerous. Deflation potentially leads to recession. And there are potentially sound arguments behind that. And I've heard the arguments for why deflation, we should be scared of it. But in an, in an inflationary based economy to then switch to deflation does feel to me kind of risky. But I don't believe every single politician and every central banker is thinking, I just need the ability to print money. Because some will, some will reduce the deficit, some will try and target reducing the deficit. So I think there must be a little bit more to it than that.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Have you had Jeff Booth on the, on the podcast yet?

[Guy Swan]

I have, yeah. And he makes very sound arguments. But there will be people who will turn around and disagree with his arguments on deflation. I'm just again playing devil's advocate.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

I don't think you should think about it as switching to deflation versus being on inflation. I think that natural order, yes, it's just try to understand what the function of money is and how the different properties of money affect our use of that tool in society. And that the form of money we have now tends to allow inflation. And that I believe in the long run, despite the short term pain, that switching to a form of money that doesn't allow unprecedented and undue inflation which disrupts economic activity, that we would be better off. And it's that simple. There's, there's no other perspective that I can see and I can't unsee this perspective.

[Guy Swan]

Well, what about the economists who don't even work in, don't even work in the government and aren't funded by government, just economists out there who believe in Keynesian theory. What is it? You can throw in that one, Colin, what do you think? There must be people who, independent like of their own independent thought believing in inflationary economics.

[Colin]

So I, I think it's, it's just based on observation. I think that they, they look at the last 50 years and they say, well, it's worked pretty well. I mean the world, we're better off today than we were 50 years ago. 100%. Nobody could deny that. Nobody could deny that the, the lowest level of extreme poverty is, is gradually that that floor is coming up. Yes, the middle class is being hollowed out in a sense. The wealthiest are becoming more Wealthy at a disproportionate rate to everybody else. However, the general standard of living continues to rise. Our dollars go further, our productivity goes further. I think perhaps there's a misattribution of the cause and effect of our prosperity today. I think it's largely a product of technology, not a product of our monetary policy. I think it's happened in spite of our monetary policy because of things like computers and the Internet. But at the same time, I would say that, that the biggest driver of these monetary policies is government spending. Government spending is the most powerful tool of capital allocation in the current paradigm. Government picks winners and losers. Long before the Fed was bailing out companies that, that were failing the, the government was picking winning winners and losers in the form of regulatory capture and in the form of spending contracts. And, and you have to look at this from the perspective of the incentives of the, of the politicians. There's a reason that today we have two political parties in America and neither of those primary political parties are fiscally conservative, right? They're both economically almost identical. They are based on deficit spending towards whatever their flavor of political ideology special interests are. And oftentimes they make compromises, right? They throw bones to the other side of the aisle to curry political favor in the right circumstances. But at the end of the day, the only tool that a politician in a democracy has to increase his broad range of appeal, his or her broad range of appeal is to increase spending towards special interest groups that can represent voter bases for them. They can do that by one of two ways. They can either increase tax revenue by raising taxes in any form, whether that be income taxes or sales taxes, or excise taxes or tariffs. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. It all comes down to taking money away from the productive members of its society to line its coffers to allow it to spend more. Or it can finance its deficit spending via money expansion. It can borrow from this private organization that it created to print its money because of a constitutional loophole, because the Congress was never supposed to be allowed to create its own bills of credit and then lend to itself via its own organization that it created and to which it appoints board members. But it created this private institution that allowed it to deficit spend continuously and then borrow from itself from the money which it creates. You have a feedback loop where it becomes what are the incentives for any politician to turn, to turn away from that model, right? You're only going to be doing yourself, your own political career a disservice. And with the revolving door of Washington and Wall street. You want to curry as many favors as possible. You want to build up as many relationships and set as much stage for regulatory capture and government contracts as you can because you're setting yourself up for a great career in the private world once you leave the public sphere of influence or vice versa. Maybe you're in the private sector, you want to get buddy buddy with the legislator so that you can turn around, turn right around into a career in Washington. These things are all about incentives. Nobody is ever going to be better than their incentives. And in a democracy, politicians are always going to be incentivized to satisfy the majority through a tyrannical manipulation of the economic means.

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, I actually wanted to put in a point on this because this is where I actually think Peter did a really good job of pushing back. And then Kelton totally just kind of dismissed the whole point was that you brought up during the interview that doesn't this just enable all of the corruption that the incentives of government and control over other people like, would lead to? Like, isn't that the consequence of basically just giving them an unlimited tool to soak up however many resources they want to use for whatever purpose? And, and then she just said it's like, well, she dismissed it with like, well that's a policy issue. It's like, well no, it's an MMT issue. Like if you create a system that it's like, it's like, you see, you see this little kid running around in a play playground and just jabbing a spoon into all the other kids and then if you, if you take the spoon away and give them a 10 inch butcher knife and then they keep doing the same thing, like yeah, the consequences are going to be horrible. You're giving them a bigger tool to do far more damage. But the incentives are terrible and there is no.

[Guy Swan]

Well, she said. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, she said, didn't she, that well I've got a whole chapter in my book dedicated to that point. And, and I said, and I think is where I came to the conclusion. I said look, if people were good, if humans weren't greedy, corrupt and power hungry, then perhaps, you know, I could certainly certain times I could buy into the MMT theory. You know, we're in a pandemic. We all agree that we should probably lock ourselves down because we're all a very cohesive society and believe this is best for us. We know that this is one of those scenarios where we may have to print some money and we all agree to do it. Like if humans were good. And if you have a constitution in the US because you understand the flaws in humans, right? You understand the flaws in humans. And that is a great. Like the fact. I'm so jealous of your constitution. But the problem is humans are flawed. We are greedy. We. We are corrupt. Power does corrupt. And. And that is the problem. And she couldn't get around that point.

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah. And she's giving. To promote MMT is to basically give. Such a potent tool for that corruption is to change the incentives and make the reward so vastly greater than anything it ever could be otherwise. To be able to hide how you're just consumed, like the ability to print money that you have that you were also able to force the economy to use is the. Is the godlike power to consume all resources and produce nothing in return except for a ticket, like just a paper ticket, you know, like a ticket is useful because it buys you a seat in an auditorium. If there are a thousand seats, you need a thousand tickets for the ticket to actually be worth something. If you print 10,000 tickets, it doesn't mean we get to go see the show. It doesn't mean that everybody has another seat. It's only worth anything if there's a seat in the auditorium. There has to be real value behind it. And if the government just buys up a thousand of them, well, then they get all the seats. They just print all the tickets and give it to all their cronies, all their corporate buddies, all their subsidies, all their political friends. Well, then they fill up the theater and everybody else is stuck outside with their worthless tickets.

[Guy Swan]

There's no incentive, right, for any. All the people who benefit from MMT are the decision makers or the people who finance the decision makers. There's no incentive to move away from the model which we saw during this pandemic, right? We've seen how. I think the wealth gaps increased, right, during this pandemic. And hugely. Yeah. All right, listen, Colin, I give you the big red button, right? I give you the special power. You got the big red button. You can press that. You can change anything you want here. What changes?

[Colin]

So if I could change anything, it would be people's willingness to ignore reality or. Or people's. People's desire to see. And this is the problem with democracy. And I don't want to come out and say that I'm. I'm not. That I'm anti democracy. In some ways, I probably am. But I don't want to say that I'm anti democracy because I like the idea of democracy. But there's a reason that America anyway is a constitutional republic and not a democracy. And the reason for that is because democracy is tyranny of the majority. And you know, we know this. The majority tends to be uninformed about a lot of things. And that's a natural product of a society. People specialize. And if I could change that, if I could make it so that people would only seek to reform aspects of society on which they were already well informed, how do you change that? I don't know that you can. But this problem that we're facing today, it isn't new. Roll the clock back 100 years to the panic of 1907. We were going through a lot of the same problems. There was huge concentration of wealth, there was massive mal investment happening and there was a liquidation that occurred and a huge stock market crash. It was called the panic of 1907. And this financial crisis laid the groundwork for something called the Aldrich Bill, which was ultimately what led to the creation of the Federal Reserve. And the narrative back then was, oh, we need to break up the money trust. We need to give the government more power to control the monetary system, to take power out of the hands of the wealthy elite in Wall street, right? That was the narrative. The narrative was that the source of all of our problems are these greedy corporations and these greedy business owners. And the government has to, we have to give the government more power to interven on our behalf and quote, unquote, break up the money trust. And this was a continuation of Theodore Roosevelt era anti trust law, antitrust. That was his platform, was breaking up the quote unquote monopolies, which if you study history carefully, you'll see that very often those monopolies are enabled by governments. But now, fast forward 100 years, right? And what's the narrative? The narrative is that these economic planners don't have the power that they need, right, to make our lives better and we have to give them more. Right? But the same problems are happening and they're exacerbated and the government has more power over the monetary system than they've ever had probably in the history of human existence today. And yet we're hearing it's not enough. They need the ability to manipulate it more. But the problems haven't gone away. The problems in the same.

[Guy Swan]

I'm going to push you harder on this. So I'm getting, I'm going to give you back the big red button. Like you can do anything. You can dismantle government, you can change the Constitution, you can have certain rules in place financially about you can get rid of government entirely. We can go to an anarchist society. Like what is it you would do? Because we're talking about what the problems we have here with government are. So I'm trying to get to the like, how would you solve it?

[Colin]

I think if you take away the government's ability to expand the monetary base, given enough time, the rest of the issues sort themselves out because it realigns the incentives back to sound economics, back to fairer participation in an actually productive society. Bureaucracies are no longer able to subtly skim wealth because that's what inflation is, is a subtle tax. It's an unseen tax and it's a regressive tax that affects the poorer at a greater proportion than the wealthy. So I think if you could take away the government's ability to print wealth because we're always going to have organizations that are in charge. There's always going to be somebody that has more power than you. Right. And maybe you're the guy at the top, you know. Good, good on you if you are. But there's always. These things have always existed all throughout human nature. And as much as I'd love to see an anarcho capitalist society exist, you know, Gults Gulch, so to speak, if it were to happen tomorrow. Right. The power vacuum would be enormous and we might end up in a worse place than we are today. That said, I think if you take away. If I could hit the button and just simply stop the ability of the governments to create money and finance debt, I think that a lot of the problems would sort themselves out within a generation.

[Guy Swan]

So back to a gold standard or perhaps a bitcoin standard, but a standard, yes.

[Colin]

And a willingness or at least a general understanding amongst the average person that that is a principle which much be upheld because it only took a generation or two for that. The importance of sound money to, to completely disappear from the public consciousness. And history repeats itself. Right. There's nothing new under the sun. So we've been told it'd only be a matter of time. I think if we went back to a gold standard, it'd only be a matter of time before we ended up exactly where we are now.

[Guy Swan]

Guy, the same to you. What would you change?

[Ben Prentice]

So prices aren't arbitrary. Like they're the most. Like the price of something in an open market economy is the most information dense metric you could possibly find anywhere. It, it accounts for millions of trades, probably trillions. If you just start extrapolating out the second, third, fourth order trade like Ben brought up I pencil, like the miracle of a pencil and how there's literally nobody in the world who could possibly create a pencil which is so cheap and freely available as to basically be socialized. Like, nobody really cares if they lose a number two pencil. Yet the. I read that one, Leonard Reed's piece I pencil or whatever, it's one of my favorite episodes on the show. And then Hayek's the Use of Knowledge in Society is another one that just really expands on this topic. Prices are the most important thing in the market economy and there is no boardroom of politicians or whatever that can replace that. No set of experts that can be like, okay, well this is where the market should go. This is where we should put our investment. This is the direction we should push things. We need a market to even tell us how to compare one thing to the other. There's no way to know without an actual market to aggregate all of that information. If I had a big red button, it would to be eliminate any central control over prices and money. My big red button would be Bitcoin. It would be force. Like eliminate the ability to control it because all you can do is destroy the function of that thing, which is why society works in the first place.

[Guy Swan]

Okay. And Ben, yourself, just to be fair.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Yeah. So obviously I'm not going to disagree with these gentlemen. So I would try to build on it by saying I would abolish all patents and end legally enforced monopolies. And I would also take the tax benefit that corporations receive through paying health care in the form of wages which is not taxed, and end the monopoly on the healthcare industry as well and restore choice and competition to the market.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Guy Swan]

Okay, so I think you could kind of like group all three of you under the idea of separate economics and state, especially like Colin, you have that acceptance of there will be a state. I've kind of have that acceptance when I talk to the anarcho capitalists. I kind of have this idea that if you had the big red button dismantle the state, it would rebuild itself. Because I think humans organize themselves and you have leaders and followers and you end up building structures and groups and we've had tribes and, and warlords and leaders in all different geographies all around the world. I just think it's a human thing to organize ourselves. I think you always end up with some form of governance. But the separation of economics and state I think is an interesting idea. But what are the consequences of doing that? Because one of the things that especially when I talk to like libertarians, like someone like Eric Voorhees, and they'll talk to me about his desire for a society. And it kind of scares me a little bit. But I agree directionally of the idea of dismantling the state in that I think we need to kind of wean ourselves off the state, if that makes sense. Because I think there are unintended consequences of suddenly, say, removing all social welfare. If you just suddenly remove it, what. What is the unintended consequences of that? But to wean yourself off step by step, I think is something that logically makes sense. Do you understand what I'm saying there, Ben?

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Yeah, and I think Colin alluded to that. I mean, that you rip.

[Ben Prentice]

Rip it.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Rip out the. Rip out the power structure and then there's a power vacuum, right? So I think that's why both of these gentlemen said instead of just dismantling everything and deleting the government with the, you know, backspace key that just fixing the money first. You know, this whole meme about fix the money, fix the world. It's just the society will. Then the incentives are aligned. The tool by which we collaborate now functions probably the best it could have ever functioned in society because we all believe that, or at least the people here believe that bitcoin is the best form of money that has ever existed and may ever exist. Right? So fix that first and then build a society from that. You know, I argue with one of my friends who he's like, well, you know, I think like, libertarian socialism might work in, like, a really small scale. And I'm like, dude, listen. You know, most of the youth today that are arguing for any kind of socialism or welfare are pissed off about how capitalism is broken, right? But the youth in this country was not pissed off about capitalism not working in the 40s and 50s. When Ms. Kelton said we did a good job managing inflation and managing finance, it seemed to be working pretty well back then when we were on the Bretton woods system and we had some kind of tie, some anchor to reality. So fix that and. And then let's see what happens. Let's wait 10 years for it to work, and then we can talk about maybe making some adjustments.

[Guy Swan]

So I agree, but I also think there is something else we have to throw into the mix. Like, it's a very different society in the 40s and 50s to what it is now. I think information technology has changed everything. It has created a wider awareness of the haves and the have nots. And. And I think if you add into that we've just become a more liberal society. So which Means we've probably, especially youngsters have grown up with a. I'd say a larger ability to complain and be heard and make a noise. And I think you can throw that into the mix as well, because there are times where people were pissed off. I interviewed Keith Levine, who was in the Clash, founding member of the Clash, and, you know, he talks about when the punk movement started. He said we were pissed off. So we were angry. But I just think their anger was a kind of. Like, in smaller circles, they weren't able to find allegiances with people all over the planet and get into groups of Reddit and start bitching at each other. And I think we have to think about that a little bit as well.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Maybe I misunderstood you, Peter, but you said something about technology, and it's created a wider information gap between the haves and have nots. I. I think the opposite.

[Guy Swan]

No, no, no. Not a wide information gap. What I'm saying is I just think we lived in smaller circles.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Okay.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah, I think people. I think. I think we stayed in. Well, I don't think we. Because I wasn't there, of course, but, you know, I remember as a kid, like, and my parents, the kind of. Their circle of geography was a lot smaller than mine was. Their circle of. Their geographic circle was mainly our town, with perhaps a visit a bit bit further to some friends, maybe in the next town and one trip away a year. Whereas my. My circle is global and I've traveled globally and I. Before the pandemic at any point, and, you know, I can get. We've got information technology. That means we can. Four of us in different parts of the world can talk. And so I think. I just think there's been societal changes that have created different expectations where people have.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

We're at the very beginning, Peter. I think the effects of the Internet and technology are just starting, and our society is trying to adjust to it. And I think there's a lot more change coming. And part of that is what Jeff Booth talks about. Massive, massive deflation. Making everything cheaper if we just embrace it. And the information, the tools that we have today to share information and to have logical debate with the people that are willing to do so. I. I think that makes things better. It's just harder because we're trying to adjust to the information asymmetry and having it all level out. And it's. It's a, you know, somewhat painful process, I suppose, but I don't have all the answers, you know.

[Guy Swan]

No, no, definitely not. Colin, do you want to jump in here?

[Colin]

I I think it's tough. This, this is a hard conversation to have. But the, the reality in my opinion is that the standard of living will have to adjust for the transition to happen. I think that the west in particular has become so accustomed to getting something for nothing be in because of deficit spending, because of inflationary economics, that even to try to wean them off of it, I think is almost an impossibility. It almost has to happen suddenly and painfully. As much as all of us hate the painfulness of liquidation, nobody wants to see liquidation, right? And this is not a new concept. This was a problem long before in, you know, the, the arguments of MMT came about. This was being talked about in the 30s, right, that when they wanted to do whatever they could to ease the pain of the Great Depression. But in reality all they were doing was, was pumping the bubble back up, preventing the liquidation of malinvestment as such. You know, if you had a friend who was living off of credit card debt, right? And every single day they were going out to fancy restaurants and enjoying expensive meals and they were hemorrhaging their, their living standards, you know, for the sake of today, right? They were sacrificing their future. They're sacrificing their children's future as they pile more and more debt on top of more and more debt to finance the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed. Would you say to them that the best course of action is to wean off of that lifestyle or to just quit tomorrow? Yeah, it would be painful. It would be difficult adjustment. I mean, they'd wake up and feel miserable, right? They'd be like, this is awful. You know, I had it so good. Why can't I go back to that? But for the long term health of their life, you know, not just their finances, but their long term well being, you would want them to stop that behavior immediately. And really, that's what this is, is we're looking at a circumstance where our behaviors are so destructive to our long term well being that the sooner they stop, the better for everyone in the long term. Like if we're looking at what life will be like for us in 50 years or for our kids, the sooner we put a stop to this, the better. But it's going to hurt. It's going to really be painful and it might cause a lot of schisms in society. Like, you think the riots happening in America now are a big deal? Boy, just wait.

[Guy Swan]

Well, listen, there's three nicotine addicts on this discussion right now, and all three of Us know you can't just wean yourself off it. You've just got to stop cold turkey. That's the only way. And you're going to go through that painful first day, then first week and then first month. I, I agree with you on that guy. Are you there?

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you hear me?

[Guy Swan]

Yeah, your video is cut out. What about you? Do you want to throw yourself into this one?

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, I think the analogy of like weaning off credit card debt or whatever is a good one. Like it's, it's, it's like it's a question of like how quickly should we stop drinking the poison? Like well, no, we should just stop. And in fact, I think deflation is actually the only, is actually the best possible thing that we could want for coming out of this because it means that everyone's life gets better. Like what deflation is in the economy for people who are particularly like people who are on wages and who are have produced real value into the economy and saved. Deflation means they are actually splitting all of that production fairly among them. The people who produce like to save a million dollars mean that I produced $1 million worth of services or help or goods or whatever it is into the economy and that I didn't take anything back yet. That all I did was give and produce a whole bunch of favors and great stuff for other people. And I didn't take anything back to. That's a great thing. We want to incentivize saving and if we could get everybody who can afford to produce extra and not consume to do that, that would be the most. How the market is screaming that that is exactly what we need. It's trying desperately to liquidate all of the poison that is just draining us of value and drowning us in debts. And it's not allowed to. It's not allowed to. We're propping up the. We're, we're feeding the cancer when the body is trying to evict it as quick as possible and yet sucks. It sucks. But, but there was a point you made that actually ties right into this is that the Fed isn't always printing money. Well the fractional reserve system is. It's always creating new debt and that's why we have inflation. And in fact the CPI and all the government indexes are garbage. If you look at something like the Chapwood Index, which is just a blanket. What are the top 500 goods that everybody purchases and what are the prices of those goods? Go to chapwoodindex.com. you'll see, the average per year in all the major cities around the country is about 10%, somewhere between 10 and 12%. And it's been that way for a long time. That is the real inflation. And that's because that inflation is based on the fact that we continue to issue new debts based on no production. We are inflating the money supply always. The monetary system that we have does it naturally and constantly. And what the deflation is when we have like a credit crisis is that the market is trying to undo it because it was all unsustainable. If we're expecting an 80% crash in prices and housing and corporate stocks and education and healthcare, it means that we were 80% over the real sustainable price and we should come back down. And that's actually great for anybody who is poor right now, because now housing is 80% less expensive because all the people who were taking up all the houses because they just wanted to sit on luxury apartments in New York for five years just to park money, no longer get that benefit, no longer get to take the money from them. Imagine if we never, ever, ever had to care about raising the minimum wage again. If prices just fell and we could just, we could just mark that off as like, we're done, we're done. Like wages will always just increase in value because we produce more every year. We're a good efficient economy and we have real prices and we have real money. It would suck so bad because of all the damage we've already done and we have to correct it. Just like if I built a house wrong. Like if I build it on a crappy foundation and all the framing was garbage and I used nails that were made out of plastic that just like degraded after a couple of days. Yeah, it would suck to have to start back over, but it would also be really a terrible idea to try to live in the house and pretend it's not happening, because then I just die. At least if we let it correct. I think the best thing is cold turkey, cut it off, let the defaults happen, let the people who are actually saving and producing all of this time, all of the responsible people, to buy up the asset at 10% of their prices. Let somebody who actually knows how to run a surplus buy the airline that's been running a deficit for 12 years and let them get it at fire sale prices. We turn around employment like that, it'd be six months, 12 months before we were actually on a productive forward path again because we let prices tell us the truth about the economy. If we just keep Believing a lie. All we do is keep building the same house that we know is going to fall on us.

[Guy Swan]

So therefore, Guy, like, we've had. It's obviously, it's really strange year, right? Just, I don't think, I don't think any of us really kind of like, know what's going to happen next now, because it's been such a strange year. And I, I was talking to my son about this. I've mentioned this on the show before, but like I said to him, we're living in historic times. You, when you're my age and you have kids, you're going to tell them about the year 2020 and everything that happened. You can explain to them that you had a lockdown, you couldn't go to school, that you didn't finish your exams, that you were stuck in the house for months, that people were forced to wear masks. And potentially, I mean, maybe it's this year or next year, there's going to be some massive economic changes. But I was like explaining to him that you're living through historic times. But Guy, do you also see this economic times as an opportunity? And I guess it's an opportunity and a threat. It's an opportunity for this great reset that obviously you're a proponent of. But do you fear that we won't get the reset in the way? There's obviously the logical reset, the acceptance, and then there's the kind of, I guess, print your way out of it reset, whereby currencies fail. How do you see it playing out?

[Ben Prentice]

Well, I would be completely. I would be depressed and hopeless if it weren't for Bitcoin. Genuinely, I would think that we were going to go the way of Japan, which I thought was funny that Kelton actually brought that up in your interview is that she was like, well, Japan's been trying to have inflation for decades and they can't hit their target. It's like, well, yeah, Japan's economy is a bucket of garbage. Japan has absolutely destroyed themselves. And they've literally done every single thing that we're doing right now. And you actually see, it's actually such a great example of exactly the Austrian theory. Like, they ran huge, huge deficits and massive debts, like, up into the early 90s. And then they had their collapse. And what did they do? They tried to print their way out of it. And you see the way the actual correction is, if the Austrian theory is correct and what they did was a debt bubble that was collapsing. What you would see is a shift toward a service and retail economy. And a shift away from a production economy. And when the crash hit, you would see those higher order goods hit the hardest. You would see mining and like the top order productive, like commodities and things get hit. And then it would be manufacturing and then it would be retail and like kind of front facing business. And then it would be services. Services would be hit less the least, mining would be hit the worst and it would be in that order. And that's exactly what we saw. That's exactly what happened at like one after the other, fourth, third, second and first place. And, and what did they do to get out? They get out of it? They did, I think they did 10 stimulus packages all the way into like 2004, 2005. They had a decade of a bleeding economy. The Nikkei fell from 50,000 to 15,000 and they started buying stocks, loaning out corporate debts, trying to pump everything back up. And again everything shifted towards the retail, towards the service. I mean it is a cookie cutter 30 year experiment of exactly how horrible it will be if we just keep doing this. So she gave the perfect example of A proving the Austrian theory, right? And B that this is the dumbest possible course of action that we could have. So I thought it was just hilarious that she brought that up. It's like they weren't able to hit their inflation targets. It's like who cares? It's a disaster. We do not want to copy that. Regardless of what inflation numbers that your board of experts pops out.

[Colin]

Japan also had the advantage of international debt arbitrage, something that we, at least in the United States likely would not have. Being the economic leader of the world or certainly being the country whose economic policy tends to drive or certainly have ripple effects to the economic policy of the rest of the world. Our central bank policy tends to be what everyone else mirrors, with certain exceptions depending on unique circumstances. The debt arbitrage that happened in Japan sort of ate up a lot of the pain that that was happening on, on their ability to prop up their failing economy. And then look at the second order effects of Japan on, on the Japanese society, right? You have a shrinking birth rate, people aren't getting married anymore. The young men sit at home by themselves, resigned to a life of, of loneliness. Why? What's the point? What's the point? They can't. Why go out and work hard just to try to get a job that doesn't pay them enough to start a family, to buy a house, like to do the things that people want to do in life to feel successful and satisfied. They can't do those things that's been taken away from them by their monetary policy. And I wanted to expand a little bit on what Guy said at the beginning of that there about the inflation. You know, CPI is so hilariously bad. And it's, it's. Of course it is because it's a government metric and, and it's designed to obfuscate the real inflation and shadow stats is a step in the right direction. But in my opinion, the only way to accurately measure inflation is to measure the expansion of the monetary base. Go and look at the M2. Right. And because Peter, you said that they don't print money every year. Go and look at the M2 on a year over year basis and you'll see over the last 50 years, with the exception of a few years here and there, right after depressions when there was severe deflation, severe credit liquidation, the M2 has expanded year over year for the last 50 years. Right. And that's the only accurate way to measure inflation. This whole idea of weighted basket of goods and hedonic adjustments and you know, it all comes back to the acting individual. Right. Peter, you might drink twice as much coffee as me or maybe it's tea over there, I don't know. But you might drink twice as much tea and if tea goes up 10%, but I buy half as much tea as you. Well, now that inflation has disproportionately affected your purchasing power and the preferences that you have when you go to the grocery store. So this idea of a basket of goods being an accurate representation of that our purchasing power in a society is completely foolish and completely out of the touch with the fact that expansion of the monetary base means that your slice of the pie becomes relatively smaller. This is not a. You know, it's amazing to me that people push back on this at all. The people that say that printing money doesn't cause inflation. It, it absolutely does. By the core definition of inflation is increasing the money supply. And of course that's going to make your purchasing power decrease. Your relative share of the aggregate wealth is now smaller.

[Guy Swan]

I think I drink way more than double the amount of tea than you. And I think you pay a lot more for the tea because you keep throwing it in. Is it Boston Harbor?

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Yeah, yeah, we do.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah. We don't even give you the good anymore.

[Ben Prentice]

Well, considering we're just consider. We're just going to pour it in the port like. Yeah, it makes sense to give us.

[Guy Swan]

A cheap stone fucking waste.

[Ben Prentice]

That is.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Speaking of which, inflation is taxation without representation.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah. And I found out recently if you live in Puerto Rico, you can't vote because you don't pay tax.

[Colin]

Well, it depends on. That isn't completely true. It depends on. So they do have a congressional representation. I don't believe that they can vote in the presidential election because they don't have an electoral college vote.

[Guy Swan]

That was Peter.

[Colin]

But they do have congressional representative representatives.

[Guy Swan]

That was what Peter Schiff was talking about. I can't remember it was on mine or Rogan show. But he said about that because he's based in Puerto Rico. But I think he, maybe he can vote because he also has a place somewhere else. But yeah, I heard about that. Ben, what about you? And I'm going to throw this into the mix and I think all three you're going to want to answer this but like guy talks about bitcoin giving him hope and I know all of us are. Bitcoin is here. You three probably understand it a lot more than I do. But like are we ready for a bitcoin based economy or is it a bit too early?

[Heavily Armed Clown]

I mean maybe this goes back to kind of this whole, you know, see I like the way that bitcoin was released on the world that those that do the diligence to verify its viability as a means, means of exchange and store value then continue to verify that, defend it, promote it and then risk their capital disproportionately in earlier times with much higher inflation and much more risk stand to gain more reward in the eventual monetization of this thing. And the late comers, the further, you know, the more skeptics stand to benefit less. Right. And the, you know, this is a very, very large range. You know, the people that finally come in, you know, let's say hyper bitcoinization takes another, what was it, you know, three years according to Bitcoin, Tina, or whatever or, or 10 years according to, you know, 10 or 15 years according to some of us more conservative people. You know, the guy that, that, that decides he don't wants to no longer wants to use the euro or the yen or the dollar on that last year, you know, he doesn't stand to benefit, you know, monetarily from the monetization itself. He's not going to gain more purchasing power, you know, just from. Because he didn't help bootstrap the thing. Right. So I, I think the incentives just work out.

[Ben Prentice]

Right.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Does that make sense? Is that a good answer to that?

[Guy Swan]

You tell me. All I know is I, every year, apart from my year attempting to trade a Mine where I, a complete moron and lost most of my bitcoin. Like every year I just accumulate more bitcoin and I'm very scared to spend it and its relative value to the pound and the dollar keeps going up. Yeah.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

And if in a few, like last year, you know, you were still kind of giving some voice to, you know, I think it got a lot of flack for giving some voice to some of the. What was it? Bitcoin cash or some of these other. These other altcoins or whatever. And you have grown more in your conviction through the growth of your understanding of this thing as a monetary asset and maybe your understanding of monetary maximalism, and that's grown the amount that you're willing to risk in the potential monetization of this thing. Right.

[Guy Swan]

But also, more recently, I increased my bitcoin position by over 10% in the last month because of fear over my cash holdings. Like, genuine fear. And I wanted to buy gold because I, I still think there's a role for gold and bitcoin. I, I think there are still certain limited risks to bitcoin that could see the value get here. Like a, A US attempt at banning bitcoin, if that ever happened, which isn't. It isn't zero chance. So I felt like I've got half of my wealth in bitcoin, maybe I'll put 5% in gold just as a backup. End up ended up becoming just a fucking pain in the ass. I just bought bitcoin again, but I went up 10% in the last month just because of fears over. Actually, it's about 12% just because of a fears over the cash I'm holding. And I'm thinking of buying more.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

This kind of goes back to, I think what guy was saying that it doesn't really matter.

[Ben Prentice]

Right.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Like, incentives are aligned. If the government's print more money, people are going to be more incentivized to buy more bitcoin because it's a hard asset that if the government spends less money, then the society will be better in general. So, you know, it's like I have more hope, right, than I ever have before when I was, when I was a young guy. I've said this on podcasts before that I. The more I try to understand the world, the more confused I got about why everything was so messed up. Because we were making so much progress from a technological perspective. I felt like there was social progress of some kind, but. But I never really had hope that things would get like, like enormously better. And, and I Finally do. Because I understand that it doesn't really matter what happens. That now that this thing exists, the implications of it existing just make the hope real.

[Guy Swan]

I throw another thing in there, guy. Obviously we all saw the micro strategy thing yesterday and that was kind of breathtaking in some ways because it wasn't like we've. Yeah. It wasn't like we've allocated 10 or 15. Right. Yeah. I don't know what, what the, the percentage allocation was.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

I don't know if it was 130 of their cash. 30, 30, okay.

[Guy Swan]

30 allocation. $250 million. They, they ended up buying point just over point 1% of the. Firstly like the bulls on the guy to do that. Fair play. Because there is risk in doing that. I mean in, in a number of different ways. There's a price risk. There's also a regulatory risk. It should, you know.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Oh yeah.

[Guy Swan]

Like I say, if, if Steven ever said like ban bitcoin and it became a serious option for the US government, that would hit the price severely short term. We know. But it was still hit it.

[Colin]

But also, Peter, just so you know, when the government banned Bitcoin in 1933, the price skyrocketed.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah. But I remember when the China banned bitcoin two years ago and the price crashed, it came back.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Right.

[Guy Swan]

All I'm saying is like it is a potent. There's a lot of different risk factors. And the fucking balls of the guy to allocate 30% into Bitcoin I thought was pretty incredible. But also the other interesting thing there is they swallowed up 0.1% of the supply now. Yeah. By the numbers. Only a thousand Companies can buy 0.1% of the supply and then you run out of bitcoin. Right. But they can't do that really because there's too many other holders it just bid up.

[Ben Prentice]

Right.

[Guy Swan]

So the smart thing there is it's first mover advantage. But what did you make of that? And because that gave me so much.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Conviction, they're going to be the capital allocators of the future.

[Ben Prentice]

Serious. Exactly that. Exactly that.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

And I want them to be.

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah. And what's, what's funny is their reasoning. I read like a piece in my. I thought I'm not gonna like stand behind this just because Ben said it was 30, but I thought it was 60. I read somewhere it was 60 of their cash holdings.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

It was, it was like 50 of their cash holdings. It was 30 of their total assets, I believe.

[Ben Prentice]

Total, total assets. Okay. I was comparing it to their decision to hold cash. I'LL confirm it, though. I've got a. I'm going to be doing a guys take episode on this because I think this is a massive development either way.

[Guy Swan]

It was a fuckload.

[Ben Prentice]

It was a fuckload. That's exactly right. That is the way to describe it.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah.

[Ben Prentice]

But I.

[Guy Swan]

Let me tell you something funny first as well. This is kind of funny. So anyway, I get, like, in the morning, yesterday, I get a message in my DMs on Twitter and I'm like. And I'm just, like, ignoring it because you know where you get DMs and people just. They don't say, hey, hello. They just. It's just. You got to do a View Media and they've shared a tweet, right? And I look at it and I just see something microstrategy, Bitcoin. I'm like, yeah, whatever. Anyway, I go on my way and then I just start seeing through the day, the news coming through. I'm like, wow, this is super interesting. I should try and get that CEO on. On the podcast. So I Google the company and then I Google the CEO and I Google his name and Twitter and his page comes up. I hit dms and he's the fucker who sent me the message. I was like, what? Yes.

[Ben Prentice]

That's awesome.

[Guy Swan]

I mean, I expect at some point it'll happen. I mean, I hope it'll happen. It'd be a great guy to talk to. Be very interesting. And another thing to throw in there, I don't know if any of you saw, but somebody found a very old tweet of his from 2013 where he dismissed bitcoin. I mean, amazing, right? Like, full circle. He's not. He's not only gone from dismissing bitcoin to allocating a fuckload of money of their asset or their cash holdings into it. Anyway, sorry, I should. That was just an interesting story.

[Ben Prentice]

That was great.

[Colin]

I think that was Bitstein who tweeted that. And, you know, like, I've talked to Bitstein several times, and I don't think, like, when he posted that, I don't think he's doing it in a way where he's sharpening that and. And throwing it back at him. I think he's doing it in that Bitstein way where he's like, this is how bitcoin changes people. This is how it gets you, like, because I think the vast majority of people in bitcoin today would have also dismissed it in 2013, obviously, or else the price would have been a lot.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

I knew about it in 2011. And I dismissed it. And 2012.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

In 2013, I was reading slashdar articles probably once a. You know, once every two, three months. I was like, like, that's interesting. If it works.

[Ben Prentice]

I, Yeah, I did.

[Guy Swan]

I didn't see that as a criticism of him. I saw that as that look, you know, he's dismissed it.

[Peter McCormack]

It's not only.

[Guy Swan]

But it's not just. It's this. There's a big difference between dismissing it and then going on buying a couple of bitcoin and then dismissing it and allocated $250 million. Like that is a massive change in your conviction. Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Blew my mind.

[Guy Swan]

Mind, yeah.

[Colin]

Who is it that says that? Bitcoin is a game of transitional musical chairs and there's only so many seats before the music stops.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

That's good.

[Guy Swan]

Sounds like a downhill thing.

[Colin]

Could be. I don't know, Maybe it's like bitcoin Tina or something. I don't know. Somebody says that and I really think it fits here. If you look at how much bitcoin they just bought up and somebody keeps throwing around this metric like, oh, there's only enough bitcoin for 800 or so more companies to do this. Right. And that number is going down by the day.

[Guy Swan]

But there isn't as. As there really isn't enough for 800 companies.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Right.

[Guy Swan]

Because that's Right.

[Colin]

Like theoretically there is, but we know that number is. Is likely very much a whole lot smaller. And all it's going to take is, you know, a little bit of Chase and. And this thing will be the sole focus of the entire world. You know, you'll wake up one morning and it will be the only thing anybody can talk about.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

The only thing anyone can talk about. Yeah.

[Guy Swan]

I mean, because if, like, if 10 companies want to do it, that's 1% of the allocation. 100 companies do it, that's 10%. It will become difficult, actually. What will happen is they won't be able to get 0.1%. They'll have to get.05% or points.

[Colin]

Well, they won't be able to do it at the current price, that's for sure.

[Guy Swan]

And that's the point. And it also, it plays into Plan B's cross asset stock to flow in that. Look, I know some people have run the numbers, some statisticians, and that's not me. And I don't know if I can know it works. But he did talk about evolutionary stages and actually this is an in between stage because when I spoke to him, I was like, well, the next Stage feels like nation state adoption, but actually, no, this next phase is definitely corporate balance sheet. And then perhaps there's another stage which is nation state adoption. And they could happen in parallel or staggered. But it certainly backs up his thinking of these evolutionary stages.

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, I think it's moving towards cash holdings. Back to the original question of are we ready for this? This is a great example of the incredibly long maturation process that we have to go to because it's not merely a, oh, are we now using Bitcoin? It is the restructuring and rebuilding of an entirely separate financial system and getting companies that are outside of it to allocate resources toward understanding, learning and building onto a completely different infrastructure. It is an infrastructure change. Same as the Internet. Like, and like we had phone networks and walled gardens and AT&T monopoly essentially, and then everything went to the Internet. It's that same transition. We're moving from a centralized, walled garden authority based network of money to an open, decentralized, permissionless infrastructure for money. And that is going to take a very long time. Same as it took 30 years to get where we are on the Internet. Like you could see in 92, it's like, holy. Like we might have, like, we could have like streaming Internet over tv, but we didn't have any companies that could do it and we didn't have the infrastructure that could handle it. But in that, the people who do adopt it, who do start to move into that, into the economy and start learning first and start allocating capital first and start building first. Like the, the change in behavior and frame of what's important and where to focus your energies. Like my life. And it's not just because the bitcoin price went up, but just because of how it's changed my actions and what I should be focusing on. Bitcoin has massively benefited me. It has massively improved my life in the bear market. Just in making me realize where I should be pointing towards the future and giving me something to aim at. Whereas I feel like I'm just in a spaghetti bowl of everybody fighting and screaming at each other when I'm elsewhere. Like you said you'd get scared when you're holding cash. If I have money in the bank, I start to like kind of have an aneurysm. Like I can't, I can't sleep at night. I'm like, I gotta get this out and put this on my treasure. Or like get this behind my keys. I could. It's. And the micro strategy thing is this is the first step to realizing the financial infrastructure side of it, of realizing like they did an assessment of, they did a long term assessment of its, of its scarcity. Like their, their whole like little report thing that they announced of it was amazing. And they looked at like, okay, what's, what is, how do I compare this to my cash holding? Should we hold cash or should we hold bitcoin? And they decided bitcoin was a safer, better bet with, with high potential in the future. Now there have been a lot of shaking and leaning dominoes in this mix. I feel like that is the first clearly fallen domino in this mix. And the other major point is that their price, the price of their stock jumped 11%. I know their price jumped any CEO, investment company, firm fund, anything that is looking at that and not thinking holy crap, what are we doing here? And not reconsidering. Bitcoin is totally stupid. They're absolutely leaving themselves in the dustbin of history. Everyone is paying attention to it after everybody who is anybody and is, knows how to actually plan for the future and wants a escape valve on this monetary madness that we are stuck in is, is looking a second time right now.

[Guy Swan]

You know what, it's funny. I'm sat here with a third of the essentially like bitcoin enterprise as a media company, right? A third of my balance sheet is bitcoin right now. And I'm like, I'm hearing you saying that I'm thinking, right, I'm going to finish this, I'm going to take it up to 50%. No, because I am worried. I am worried. Like one of the things I was thinking of doing was buying like digital dollars and just lending them out on something like block fly. Because I'm like, Well, I get 8%. Wow. Will I, will I, will I outpace inflation? But fuck it, I think I'm just going to go up to 50%. Bitcoin allocation.

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, I think this, with this will be the situation where Paul Tudor Jones is like I allocated 3% or 5% or whatever it is where they're doing exactly what you're doing. Where he's like, maybe it should have been 20.

[Guy Swan]

Man. What did you make of it, Colin?

[Colin]

That I, I totally agree with Guy on this kind of being like the first domino. That, that, that the fact that you're seeing, you've seen with after Paul Tudor Jones and, and probably Raoul Paul, you're sort of seeing this shift in the greater macro environment where people are, their heads are turning, right? They're saying best performing asset of the last decade. Best performing asset in A pretty much in this recessionary environment, I mean, you know, if you started dollar cost averaging, bitcoin at its height and like the beginning of 2008, the end of 2017, if you started dollar cost averaging at the height, you're up like almost 75, 80% now. That's crazy. It try do the same thing with the stock market. Go back to the height of the stock market. You started dollar cost averaging, dollar average. So that's how it is. The, the domino that I'm looking for. Because now that we're seeing this, this, these macro guys say, okay, this is better than cash in our investment paradigm. The thing that's the next best step from cash, treasury securities. Right. We're watching a world where treasury security yield is trending to zero. In real terms, it's already been negative for the last 10 years. How long until people start making the decision that they rather have Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is a safer bet than sovereign debt? It won't be long because if you can make that connection with cash, you can make that connection with negative yielding debt too. I would, I would go on record to say that it doesn't matter if the world is ready for bitcoin because it is coming like a freight train. Like the, the whole world is going to change more in a few weeks than it's changed in the last 10 years. When it does happen, the whole world will change faster in the matter of weeks than it's changed in a decade. I really do believe it's a black hole. It cannot.

[Guy Swan]

The interesting thing about that microstrategy thing is that also there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to see that. Yes. And go, hold on, what have they done here? And because it wasn't like a small amount, because it's $250 million, people like, Whoa. And imagine a lot of companies gonna be looking at that because of their internal processes procedures. It's gonna take a little bit of time before other companies can suddenly go, right, let's put 10 million and 50, 100, whatever it is. But I imagine it's coming and I imagine we've just got a lag now until that hits. And then I think we're talking about we've got a few small dominoes here and then the big ones are going to be coming. And the next 18 months I'm expecting fucking crazy times. I don't know about you. What do you think, Ben?

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Yeah, I agree with actually both of them, but I think Guy in particular hit on Some really interesting points. Guy, who said that we're not ready for bitcoin from a financial and infrastructure standpoint, but I think this whole conversation highlights that. You know, let's just go back to like 2015 for a minute. And MicroStrategy says we're going to put $250 million into Bitcoin. They would have been laughed off the scene. Their board would have fired whoever made that decision. And, I mean, it just wouldn't happen. Right. That would have been the stupidest move. And everybody knew it. Everybody knew it. Now, them doing that. Oh, that's interesting. So we're. We're getting there, right? Not only from the infrastructure point of view and building the technology out and building the tools that allow us to do all these things and protect our wealth, but to be able to exchange it freely, but we are building liquidity from a monetary perspective, and we're building liquidity from a mental perspective. It's just slowly happening. You know, I thought when Raul started talking a lot about bitcoin, it was huge. And, you know, we're talking about Paul Tudor Jones Now, MicroStrategy. Who's next? You know, who's next and how many companies are going to be and what percentage is it going to be? It's just a slow movement and then it, you know, gradually, then suddenly like a freight train, like Colin said.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah. Listen, guys, this.

[Peter McCormack]

This session's made me even more bullish.

[Guy Swan]

Than I have been and very excited. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna get straight off here and change my allocation. It's made me very, very bullish.

[Ben Prentice]

We do it.

[Peter McCormack]

Awesome.

[Ben Prentice]

Do what we can, people.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah.

[Colin]

Yeah.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Disclaimer.

[Guy Swan]

I. I got some financial advice. Buy some bitcoin if you haven't got it. If you're listening, you haven't. You're more. Listen. I loved it. Very bullish. Guy, great to have you on. We will do a solo show, you and I, one day, because that's. That's been well overdue. But I just. I knew the three of you together, I just. I just knew it would work. But, Guy, do you have any closing notes?

[Ben Prentice]

Yeah, dude, thank you for having me on the show. This is awesome. And finally to meet Colin and Ben, actually hang out and talk to you all. This was great. So a huge thank you to everybody. And check out bitcoin. Audible is probably my closing notes. One thing I'll leave with a thought on anybody who's still questioning MMT because Kelton had a comment early on that said that one person's Deficit is another person's surplus. And this is one of those things where she just so painfully misses the point of money isn't the value, right? The ticket for the seat isn't the seat in the auditorium. But she says, you know, when the government goes into a huge deficit, it means that somebody else ran a huge surplus. Well, that is also true. If I just counterfeit money. If we all just counterfeited money, we could all have deficits and everybody that we traded with would have surpluses. You could have a surplus, you could have a surplus. Everybody could have a surplus. But is that going to make things better? Is that if we all just stop producing houses, cars, TVs, everything, and we all just ran a surplus by counterfeiting money, is the economy going to get better? So that's what I'll leave with on MMT and then just, you know, buy Bitcoin invest dollar cost average swan Bitcoin cash app, all the best stuff. Use those. They're, they're absolutely the best in the business. And listen to Bitcoin audible.

[Guy Swan]

All right, cool, cool. Colin, your closing thoughts.

[Colin]

Totally agree with what Guy just said. You know, if you want to see the, if you want to see who's running the surplus, look at, go split comb through the central bank's balance sheets. Go see who's got trillions of dollars in assets, right? Quote unquote, excess reserves of the banking system. Where is the money going? Because it's going somewhere. It's going to the central banks. The amount that their assets have increased in the last six months is unprecedented in, in throughout their entire history. So certainly I, I agree actually with what Kelton said. There's our deficits are, are the Federal Reserve's surplus. So go figure there. But yeah, Peter, it was, it was cool coming on again. I love talking with, with these guys and you're a grateful host, so I really appreciate that. It's fun to come on and talk, you know, same stuff as before. You guys can find Ben and I on on WTF happened in 1971. Check out our newsletter. We do the Bitcoin Echo Chamber podcast from time to time. And check out river too. River is a great way to get bitcoin.

[Guy Swan]

Yeah, man.

[Peter McCormack]

Love having you on new up and coming.

[Guy Swan]

You're welcome on anytime the two of you. And it's especially been cool recently to see people like Eric Weinstein sharing out your website. And the website's appearing more and more. I see it in the feed from people I didn't expect. So that's very Cool. Ben, from our first beer in Boston. When was that? Like 18 months ago. You came up to me and you were like, let's have a beer. From that to now, we've come a long way, so you can have the. You can have the final words.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

My final words are, you know, I again appreciate you getting us on, Peter. I love what you do. I. We've been working on this WTF happened in 1971 project for a while, and I think why it's important just to toot our own horns is because we're getting the attention of people outside the. The space. And that's. That's the ultimate red pill. And as you mentioned, Eric Weinstein, he, you know, he. He shilled bitcoin to a sitting US Senator on, on his podcast, the Ted Cruz Podcast. And we're, we're trying to see if. If Eric will have a conversation with us. But keep going out into the world, folks. Keep learning about bitcoin. You know, ask. Ask the, the important questions. Avoid logical fallacies, use critical thinking, Think for yourself. Question authority and buy bitcoin, not financial advice.

[Guy Swan]

And when do you turn WTF Happens in 1971 into a book? Because that book will fucking fly.

[Ben Prentice]

Book and documentary. I'll do the audiobook. I got you.

[Guy Swan]

Oh, yeah, documentary, cool. I'll help with the documentary. Unless you're doing it already.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

I mean, Colin's been working hard on. On the newsletter where we just shared little tidbits. It's tough because we like keeping the meme intact where it's literally charts and just questions and we're encouraging people to ask questions. So it would feel weird to just write an entire book about exactly how we think you should think.

[Guy Swan]

Do a pop up book, then do a pop up book. Just all the charts.

[Heavily Armed Clown]

Well, maybe.

[Guy Swan]

Listen, guys, this has been awesome. You're all welcome on the show whenever you want. I love talking to you all. You help me try and navigate things I find kind of complicated because I'm. I'm not an economist. But yeah, big, you know, big thanks to you all and good luck and see you soon.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, let's buy bitcoin and fuck mmt.

[Ben Prentice]

Oh, yeah, man. Thanks again, guys.

[Peter McCormack]

All right, come on. How fucking good was that? Did that make you bullish? That made me so bullish, that show. I shit you not. Straight after that show, I went out and bought a load more bitcoin. So with my business, essentially, my podcasts are a media business and we have a balance sheet and we have cash on that balance sheet. And I also have bitcoin on that balance sheet. And, you know, talking about the microstrategy thing and thinking about, I was like, screw this. So I want to increase the bitcoin holding for my media company to 50% bitcoin. I also added 10% to my personal holding. You know what? I wanted to do more. I could not be any more bullish right now with bitcoin. And you know what? The show was great. It was really good to break down and go through the MNT stuff with these guys because they're the experts. They're the guys who study economic. I mean, I had my issues with Stephanie during the interview, but I didn't, as I said in the intro, I didn't really have the conviction to stand by. I mean, the guy said, look, you were majority, right? But, you know, it's good to have Guy, good to have Ben, good have Colin, good to have the three of them to confirm my thoughts and the things I thought that Stephanie had wrong. Anyway, listen, I hope you enjoyed this. If you want to reach out to me, I'll answer any questions. My email address is [e-mail] also go and check out my other show, Defiance. I keep telling you about it. I've got this amazing shop there at the moment called 1,333 days. That's it. Defiance News. Outside of that, have a great week and I'll see you all soon.