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Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Nick Carter, welcome to the show.
Nick Carter
Thank you. I was 30 minutes late. It's kind of.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
I wasn't gonna rat you out, man. It's all good. I am super excited to have you on. So for people that don't know you, how do you. So I think of you as one of the leading sort of philosophical voices in bitcoin. How do you describe yourself?
Nick Carter
That's a great question. Because most people know me more as a writer as opposed to an investor. The main thing I actually do is invest through my venture fund. But yeah, I enjoy writing and doing podcasts and things like that. So I guess it's kind of a weird thing whereby the thing I'm known most for is not actually my job.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
I know the feeling very well. So yeah, that's because when you're in front of a camera, that's what people begin to associate you with. But we're building a true studio, like Disney style studio. But of course, what everybody knows me for is interviews like this. I want to start somewhere really specific. So about, I don't know, two years ago I started to change the style of my interviews and moved away from being just purely mindset stuff and getting into thought things that matter. And that ended up leading me hardcore down the crypto rabbit hole. And that brings us to today. And I've started covering this a lot because it's become extraordinarily important in my own life. And I'm very curious if, if somebody is from a 30,000 foot view, they are trying to navigate this world well. Do you think bitcoin matters?
Nick Carter
I think it depends. It depends. So strictly speaking, if you are an American, you probably don't 100% need Bitcoin for anything. All of that said, you may find it very useful in the coming years. I think it's probably important to have a general awareness of sort of monetary trends around you because it's kind of one of those things that, you know, people say, you know, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. I think it's the same for, you know, your monetary system. You may not care to learn about it, but it's going to alter your life, your quality of life. Asset price inflation affects everyone, some for the better. You know, let's say if you own property, you own financial assets, and some for the worse. If you're starting a career, you're trying to save and get on the property ladder and things like that. Currency devaluation affects everyone. Inflation affects everyone to varying degrees. So having a keen awareness of sort of where you sit in the monetary landscape and how you stand to win or lose based on sort of inflationary trends, that certainly matters. That's something that you should pay attention to. Some of us pay probably too much attention to it as you're bordering on obsession. And then bitcoin is a part of that. It's a part of the landscape. You have sovereign currencies, you have savings devices, like stocks is effectively savings device today. Property, real estate, and then these commodities that live outside of government control. Gold has obviously historically been the most popular one. And in that same subcategory, I'd put Bitcoin. And to that extent, to the extent you're trying to diversify away from these systems of saving wealth that can be interfered with, I think bitcoin is a pretty good choice.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
All right, so there's a lot of sort of fractal paths that we could go down. But I think the first, Robert Breedlove introduced me to a really interesting concept which I think you inevitably encounter as you begin to go down the finance rabbit hole. And I was somebody that I never wanted to learn about finance. I didn't find it particularly interesting. It doesn't speak to my skill set. It doesn't even necessarily speak to my natural inclinations. I had always focused on getting good at generating money rather than investing money. And as you begin to learn about it, though, it begs the question, what is money? So if you're talking to somebody who is really. They believe us that the financial system cares about them, even if they don't care about it. But how do you explain, like, what it is, what is money? And why does the financial system matter?
Nick Carter
The interesting thing is that your answer to that question tends to be laden with actually ideological or political views. And it's interesting because you'd think it would be a factual question, but one's answer tends to reveal a lot of how one thinks about the world. So there's a big school of thought which would say money is a system of credit that effectively the government underwrites and creates and it can't exist without the state. So money is something that's sort of brought into existence by the government, whether it's through striking coins or cultivating a sort of financial environment like the one we have today. And then there's another school of thought which is, well, money is something that people sort of spontaneously begin to use in order to gain efficiencies in trade so that we don't have to barter. And so you have sort of the commodity theory of money, which is latter, and then sort of the credit theory, which is sometimes referred to as chartalism. And those are pretty opposing views because one of them sort of presupposes that the state, the government, is sort of the guarantor and the instigator of the whole system and that money exists at the pleasure of the state. And the other one is, well, no, actually it's sort of a private sector thing and it just happens spontaneously on a bottom up basis so that people can find efficiencies in trade. And both of those are laden with ideology. Right? One is sort of the collectivist, one is sort of individualist. And so the answer to the question, and I don't think either of those is precisely the right answer, the answer is more about revealing one's general predilections and views as opposed to nobody really tries to answer it in a straightforward way is what I'm getting at. My own personal best answer would be it's a system of effectively societal memory to store a record of sort of prior work done. And the quality of that record varies. It doesn't have to exist as a ledger. It doesn't have to exist instantiated in a physical commodity that is struck into a specific coinage. The form of that memory can differ whether it's commodities, whether it's piece of paper, whether it's, you know, a record, a database entry that exists in a bank. The important thing is that you are preserving a somewhat honest account of historical work done, you know, in order to basically facilitate the process of taking that work, storing it, and then actually being able to sort of, you know, take advantage of the proceeds of that work in the future.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
All right, so that's a really interesting way to look at it. And I don't know if you'll agree with a slight shift in the wording. But instead of calling it work, it's. You're basically accruing the value of your energy spent across time. So I have done a thing that cost me time and energy and I'm able to at least transmit some of my energy into a monetary form that allows the. And it starts to get weird and complex because the amount of productivity that I get out of that time and energy is going to vary wildly across how people spend that time and energy. So you could have an entrepreneur that pours his heart and soul into something for 10 years and have nothing to show for it at the end. And then conversely, you could get somebody that, you know, spends 10 months pouring their time and energy and it makes them a billionaire. So it's. That starts to get really fascinating. But if you think about it in terms of have energy. I made that energy. Time and energy might be a better way for my mind. I have time and energy that I put into something and I make it productive to a certain level that then goes into this thing we're going to call money that allows me to carry that with me across time. Now, if that's all it were, I don't think I ever would have become fascinated by it. And here's the second part. I've heard you talk about it, so I'm pretty sure you're going to agree with this. But given that we live in a fiat system, I'm putting all of that time and energy, or I'm converting it into something that people can pull levers on that retroactively affect the value of that. And it could go up, as you're saying, like with, if I have financial assets and the system is being flooded with money like it is now, and we're going to have to explain what that means, but then the assets that I turned my time and energy into will go up in value and yay. I love that people are pulling the levers. But. But if I don't have those assets and people pour money into the system and now my buying power goes down, they have essentially devalued my time and energy retroactively, which becomes very distressing. But you can be very blind to it and then just feel like what is happening. I don't understand. How do you help people wrap their head around that idea?
Nick Carter
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely correct. I think it's spot on. I mean, that's effectively what inflation is. And you know, devaluing the monetary medium that we store our, our work and labor in is always redistributive. So it's effectively a way to reapportion societal resources from some group to another group.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Can you walk through the mechanism of that? I've heard you talk about there's a name for it, I forget, but that your proximity to the spigot of money, basically how the money is actually entering the system is like a real thing. There are some people that actually are closer to that and benefit from it. Can you walk people through the mechanism?
Nick Carter
Yeah, certainly. I mean it's a big concept. So there's this economist called, I think Richard Cantillon, well, I suppose you should pronounce it the French way. Cantillon maybe. And he posited that the flow of money as it's injected into the economy is non neutral. So new money that comes into existence through whatever mechanism is not going to be evenly dispersed throughout everyone. It'll start with whoever is the recipient, oftentimes the government. And then the folks who have the most proximity to the new expenditures benefit the most because it gets spent into the economy before the economy fully appreciates the devaluation effect of the new units of money. And so if it goes to the elites, then the people that benefit are immediately the elites and then it's the people that the elites spend money on.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
How do you define elites? That's become like the code term for shadowy secret coder. It's like, I don't know what that means.
Nick Carter
Well, in this example it's simply whoever is the sort of initial recipient of the money. But money can take any number of different trajectories through the economy. So in the last decade or so it's primarily been injected through the financial system. So everyone that works in finance has done great. Everyone that owns financial assets has done great.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Because the government gets money from the central bank and they go and buy bonds. How is it actually getting in?
Nick Carter
It's very obscure and opaque. And that's actually part of. I mean it's deliberately obscure. Right. Because if it were transparent, people would be pretty scandalized by the whole thing. And so it's mired in jargon and impossible terminology deliberately because the whole thing is quite scandalous, I would say. And so some people describe quantitative easing as an asset swap and try and mitigate its impact. But what's happening is that the central bank is effectively buying government debt that would otherwise be bought by foreigners and so that keeps interest rates low. So if the central bank didn't exist and they weren't buying that government debt, then households, investment trusts, Pension funds and foreigners would have to buy the government debt that the government is issuing. And that debt would be more expensive. And if it was more expensive, that would impose more discipline on the government because they'd have to pay a higher sort of interest rate on that debt. So because there's this other buyer, the central bank, that effectively buys the debt and just kind of sterilizes it, sort of goes into this void, this black hole, because the central bank exists as a buyer for the debt, the government is able to finance itself by issuing structurally more debt than they otherwise would. And so that's sort of effectively the way that the government is able to grow itself and finance its expenditures, even if foreigners and households don't want to own government debt. And so that's sort of the quantitative easing process. And that has the net effect of driving up the value of financial assets. The Fed now is buying all sorts of stuff, bonds in the secondary market. Other central banks buy equities directly. So there's all number of assets that end up being bought. And that has pretty deleterious effects on society, I would argue.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Why?
Nick Carter
Well, because it is redistribution.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Can you define redistribution?
Nick Carter
Some segments of society being empowered relative to others.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Financially speaking, right now that's like a word people want to hear, that wealth is being redistributed. Why do you think it's bad?
Nick Carter
Arguably we should have a redistribution in sort of the inverse way that we've had it. And maybe we're going to get that. But right now the redistribution is going in the wrong direction, which is that people are the most proximate to the capital spigot. That work in finance, which has been engorged as a sector of the economy, it's too big. It's bigger than it should be. Because finance is ultimately just intermediation, intermediating financial transactions. It should only be a certain size. We don't need that much finance. Everyone that works in that industry has done well. People that own financial assets has done great. But that is partially what's driving up inequality to levels that are enormously high historically. I mean truly, truly like Gilded age levels of inequality. And everyone's kind of aware of this, but they're not exactly sure what the culprit is. And I would say people underrate the effect of the Federal Reserve and low interest rates. They underrate their level of complicity, basically. And as of right now, the Federal Reserve understands that quantitative easing money printing does have the net effect of increasing financial asset prices and thus by extension driving up inequality. Alan Greenspan admitted As such, today, the Fed won't admit it, but effectively, if financial asset prices go up, that causes growth for gdp, because there's a wealth effect whereby people feel richer and then they spend more. Like, if the value of your 401k goes up a lot, you're probably willing to buy that nice new car. If the value of your house goes up a lot, you might spend money on an expensive vacation. So that is the transmission mechanism through which quantitative easing now actually supports gdp, supports economic growth. But the cost of all that is that inequality continually increases because most people don't have stocks, most people don't have financial assets. And so society is just getting more riven by these enormous structural differences, which is going to reach a breaking point pretty soon.
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Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Ooh, that's interesting. So when you say going to reach a breaking point, are you talking upheaval or something else?
Nick Carter
Well, there's kind of like a mathematical regularity to it whereby if inequality reaches a certain point, you get civil wars, you get revolutions, you get debt defaults. Something has to give, basically. And historically in the US once you've had political polarization and inequality reach enormous levels, you've had the Civil War, or you had strong movements in favor of labor as opposed to capital, or you had really high inflation. So there needs to be a mechanism to reset inequality back to a structurally lower level. And I don't know what the mechanism is going to be. It's probably going to be really disruptive. It could be high inflation for a long time. High inflation would probably hurt financial asset prices, but it could also.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
How does that redistribute though, like, so is that just. Is that the mechanism by which we make the rich poorer and so we scrunch it down that way rather than bringing the poor up.
Nick Carter
So bitcoiners have a weird discourse on inflation, which I kind of disagree with, where they say inflation disproportionately hurts the working class. If you look at it, that's actually not really the case. Like, inflation kind of just generally hurts, but it mostly actually hurts financial asset prices because what actually happens is, well, and it certainly hurts the middle class too. But the working class often benefits, relatively speaking. They may lose in an absolute terms. So everybody may lose, but they may lose less. So if you sell your labor for a wage or salary which is not fixed and it can adjust to inflation, you can stay abreast of inflation. You can swim with the current and sort of keep your head above water. If you're on a fixed salary, you might be continually losing to inflation because maybe your salary is only renegotiated once a year. If you're on a fixed pension, that's non inflation index, you're also going to lose to inflation. If you own financial instruments that have a lot of government debt in them, you're going to lose to inflation. So the middle class generally suffers with inflation. The professional classes suffer with inflation. But importantly, and you're not really going to hear this acknowledged in Washington, high structural inflation does affect asset prices in a big way because corporations lose the ability to forecast what their cost of capital is going to be a few years out. They lose the ability to predict the future, because what happens when you get inflation, you don't just get inflation, you have volatility in inflation. If you look at the 70s, you look at the 40s, you get extreme levels of volatility. So they lose the ability to predict things a few years out. Often inflationary movements come in conjunction with a growth of political power in favor of labor. So it's always the struggle between capital and labor, and the two things are often in conjunction. So I think that might be one way to sort of reset this, is have inflation effectively decrease the value of government debt and crush financial asset prices and effectively reduce inequality that way. So it might actually be a genuine objective of central bank policy at this point to encourage inflation to sort of run hot. Whoa.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
But they're not openly discussing that.
Nick Carter
No, because if they admitted, okay, we are going to do a soft default on government debt, then no one would own the debt. I mean, people would. Anyone that could would try and sell it. I mean, foreigners are already divesting themselves of US Government debt. But so they have to kind of, Luke Grohman says, ride two horses with one ass, basically. So they want to hold interest rates down and have inflation be high so that they can reduce the level of government debt in absolute terms. And they also want to convince their creditors, the people that hold the debt, that they're not going to screw them over. But one of those has to give. And my guess is that people that hold the debt are going to lose money.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
And so in what way is one holding the debt? Bonds.
Nick Carter
Yeah. So if you own Treasuries, you might own a money market mutual fund. If you have a pension fund, they are often by mandate, holders of government debt. There's just a number of public institutions, banks, that hold government debt. And so if the government debt has terrible returns in a real sense, over the next decade, and just based on historical multiples, it probably should, that might be passed on to you if you have exposure to these sort of financial instruments.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Okay, so let's take the average person right now, if so you've talked about when people meddle in the financial system, it does not necessarily go anywhere good. If we could put a message out to the public, as we are doing right now, would we encourage them to learn about financial assets so that there just isn't this huge discrepancy between the government, when they're pouring money into the system, that they're pouring it into a system where more people are like, would that actually solve the problem? Forget whether we can actually get the behaviors, but would that solve the problem? Or is there something that I'm still missing?
Nick Carter
I would encourage people to think critically about the financial system, but not necessarily to start engaging in speculation or trading financial assets or getting really into stock picking. Because I think one of the consequences of the devaluation of the dollar is that speculation increases. And you see this in all other historical episodes of inflation. People feel that their money is a hot potato, so they want to trade it for something or other, Whether it's
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
foreign currency trading, they just feel it. Because, I mean, that seems like such a complex idea to understand. Or does it just happen in other ways? Like with what's going on in Robinhood, for instance, the whole gamestop, like all of that? Is that part of this phenomenon?
Nick Carter
I mean, the growth? Robinhood is totally part of it. I mean, it's not like people are looking at the CPI statistics and saying, oh, energy prices are up 7% year over year and used car prices are up 24%. They intuitively feel that things are getting more expensive. People go buy groceries, they're like, huh, this carton of eggs is like, you know, $3 more expensive than it should be. And like, this steak is more expensive and gas is expensive now and everything's more expensive. So, you know, you don't have to like, be a genius to figure out, wow, like, huh, seems like the value of the dollar is going down. It's not just that the prices of everything are going up, the dollar's going down. And that is a force that pushes people into wanting to get rid of the dollars. Effectively, their personal discount rate goes, goes up.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Do you think that inflation drives the average person to get more involved in investing? They won't think of it as investing, but like you're saying, they're trying to find somewhere to put their money. And I ask this as somebody who got into my mid-40s and generated a substantial amount of money, but never thought about like, oh, holding money in the banks, actually devaluing it over time. I just never even thought like that. So. And look, I'm not the brightest guy ever, but good Lord, if I'm not even thinking about that, I have to imagine there are a lot of people for whom the idea of I need to do something with my money is just not a thing. It's like, what's in my bank account? Or I'm living check to check. It's like, is it a class of person that finds themselves suddenly speculating because they can feel that things are going up, or is this really a phenomenon that just blanketly impacts humanity?
Nick Carter
Well, not everyone has to care about it, especially people that sell their labor on a short term basis and don't tend to hold a lot of money in their bank account. And also, frankly, you weren't alive the last time we had a significant experience of inflation or certainly weren't, you know, probably financially active in the 70s. And so that's the thing. It's just there's not a lot of living memory of the last time we had an inflationary episode. And so no traders are thinking about it, no asset allocators have this embodied understanding of what it's like to go through very few. And so we've lost this societal experience of inflation. So it's not sort of as ingrained into our culture. But now that it's returning, you do have to start thinking more dynamically about what you're going to do with cash. And of course, I think one of the dangerous things is that everyone believes that public equity is A good savings device which is kind of like, I call it the cult of like the Bogle heads, you know, and this is
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
stock market, public equity, stock market.
Nick Carter
Yeah. I mean it may have initially been good advice because like from the 70s to now, like public equity did return, you know, 7ish percent on a real basis after inflation. And we've just had 100 years of amazing public equity market returns in the US like incredible. You know, the risk premium on US equity the last hundred years probably been 5 to 6% real, which is very, very, very strong. But so everybody got collectively indoctrinated into this idea that stocks always go up. But if you actually look at what you're buying when you buy a stock, you're buying cash flows. And the share of the cash flows that you're buying today are minuscule relative to the price you're paying for them. So that's just another way of saying that price earnings ratios are at the highest, they've pretty much historically ever been. And that's all you're buying with a stock. You're buying a claim on future cash flows. But there is the price that you pay for a dollar of cash flows really matters. If you're paying $35 for a dollar of cash flows on a yearly basis, you're putting yourself at risk. And so I think that's one of the issues with this sort of inflationary period is people like, well, it's fine, I'll just put my money in stocks, it'll be my savings device. Well, the Japanese stock market after 1989 went sideways for 30 years and that can happen in our stock market too. Oof.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Okay, so let's talk about how that ends up happening. So what when I look at Japan, Japan's always the thing that people talk about and you know, use as an example of stagflation. What brings that about? How do we trade sideways for that long? And if, if that's a mechanism of inflation, then I have follow on questions. But first I want to understand that.
Nick Carter
Well, I'm not going to sit here and claim to be a Japan expert, but they had the mother of all asset bubbles in the 80s.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
And does what we're going through now look similar?
Nick Carter
Arguably, yes. I mean it's certainly a financial asset bubble. It was built on enormous growth in Japan. If you recall, Japan was like the China of their day. They were really the manufacturing center of the world. They were built the best cars and they had the best technology and things like that. And I can't claim to know the Exact mechanism. But basically, financial markets got way ahead of their skis in terms of pricing and expectations of future growth because that's a lot of time. How you get bubbles is people just get too excited about future growth opportunities, so they overpay.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
And by overpay you mean that they break some sort of rational connection between the cash flows and what they're paying for. A dollar of cash flow.
Nick Carter
Yeah, exactly. And, and is there a normal number that we should be at for equities? For instance, your historical price earnings ratio is something like 15 $1 buys or,
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
sorry, $15 buys me $1 of cash
Nick Carter
flow earnings on a annualized basis. Yeah. So in theory, it would take you 15 years to recoup your investment. That's with stocks, of course, it depends on the country in question. Countries with weaker governance and less rule of law. Generally, public equity markets trade at a lower price earnings ratio because investors demand excess compensation in exchange for taking the risk of buying stocks in Russia or, you know, Iran or something like that. But yeah, in the US I believe the historical average is around 15.
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Nick Carter
And in Japan, you know, things just got completely crazy, in particular with property, but also with public equity. And then there was sort of a slow bust and a demographic crisis. Right. The population got older, the productivity and the dynamism in the economy wasn't what investors thought it would be. The banks themselves had to be bailed out in this really slow motion way. There were a number of what's called zombie corporations, which is corporations that should have failed but were kept afloat. And so that stripped a lot of the dynamism out of the Japanese economy. And they've had this sort of slow motion crisis for the last 30 years. And even though they're one of the richest nations in the world, probably number two by gdp, at some point, the returns that public equity investors had were absolutely terrible. And so that's all to say it can certainly happen here. There's nothing that guarantees that public equity investors in the US are going to earn 7% every year for the rest of all time.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Well, so Let me ask the obvious layman's question here. So been to Japan, it's amazing. Go there, it's wonderful. It's beautiful. Clean, freakishly clean. Does not feel like a country in crisis. So what's the problem with stagflation if that's really what's going on?
Nick Carter
Well, I would say arguably they had just structurally low inflation. Low growth and low inflation. Strictly speaking, there's nothing like that wrong with Japan. I mean, they have a birth rate crisis, so their population is shrinking.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Do you think that's tied to. There's no growth, there's no excitement. And so there's this just weird human factor of there's no energy in the streets. And this is why I started with bitcoin. There's some it factor about excitement, about energy flowing into a system, cultural momentum. And when we don't have that, there are these second and third order consequences. Is that sort of a hypothesis of Japan is just it's fine, it's stable, but stable isn't sexy?
Nick Carter
Well, it certainly isn't fine from a returns perspective, just looking back historically, which was kind of the lens I was approaching it with. But you know, leaving finance aside for a moment, if you look at GDP growth, it's composed of two things, the growth in the labor force and then growth and productivity. And if your labor force is shrinking, your GDP is just not really going to grow, even if you have productivity growth. And it's an interesting question, when you talk about bitcoiners and optimism, do low interest rates and low growth, are they a consequence of demographics? People like to say demographics is destiny, which I have a lot of time for that, or is it the other way around? And so I'm not sure which way the causality goes, but I think it could well be the case that if you have more optimism, structurally, you're likely to have more kids. And so bitcoiners actually kind of just anecdotally have a lot of kids. They tend to be pretty family oriented and things like that.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Really.
Nick Carter
I would love to see a survey of that, actually.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
That's interesting.
Nick Carter
Yeah, I think there's a correlation between general societal optimism, a belief in the quality of the future, a belief that the future can be better than the past.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
But through the lens of finance, this is where this gets so interesting. So here's why I found you just incredible, incredibly fascinating. You take like a values approach to bitcoin, you talk a lot about the values of it, that there's this thing that like undergirds everything that is Distinctly human. And you know, when I think about Japan and look, I'm totally ignorant to this stuff, but I actually think that it gives me a way of looking at it which is just psychology based. So you right now, there's something so insane happening in the transition to everything becoming digitized. I'll sum it up that way because to me it isn't just around currencies, it's around all the new ways that we're finding to put value in some way, shape or form into a digital space. So NFTs has been my lens. That was what drew me into all of this stuff and sort of accidentally taught me about finance, made me start asking the question of what is money? Was all through that lens because I realized as an entrepreneur, it opened up vistas that weren't there before. And so I get into it and all of a sudden I can feel this energy and there's all this excitement and there's just like, you know, OpenSea does 3.8 or whatever billion dollars in August alone. It's just like pandemonium. And you spend any time with these people and there's the euphoria, right? And so it just made me start going, whoa, like, what is this? As a cultural movement, this is very intriguing. And as an entrepreneur, your ability to understand, I'm sure the same is true as an investor, your ability to understand cultural momentum, where's it going? Where's the energy pouring? Because that's going to be where there's growth. And if you're viewing this through the lens of finance and obviously growth is what you want, but the real, like, mind fuck is when you understand that all of that is simply a function of psychology far more than it is a function of like, first principles, reality. It is a function of psychology. And that's why. And I always love asking a question to which I don't know the answer. And I wasn't sure what you would say about whether Bitcoin is a meaningful part of someone trying to navigate this world. Well, but to me, given the importance of understanding where energy is flowing, given that, I think we do have to redistribute wealth, but in a way that like the people decide based on things that they like and are excited about and want to move towards instead of just moving away. Crypto seems like the right answer. And then I'll bring it all together. But the question is what behavior you want the masses to do? Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept I'm delusional and just they're never going to do it. And so we can't deal with the system in that way. But I look at it and I have built over the last, whatever, seven years a megaphone and now I'm using it to say you at least need to research cryptocurrency. The blockchain NFTs. You may reject it and say that it's dumb. I can't see the future. So you should definitely do your own research. But you need to look at it. It seems like the most important thing happening right now.
Nick Carter
Well, to answer your question, I wouldn't ordain anything because that's pretty contrary to the principles of sort of bottom up approach. But I think as like, you know, an entrepreneur in the crypto space and someone who allocates capital, my best hope is to sort of create the tools and the systems that regular folks can use to potentially escape a ruinous fiat system. And I think bitcoin and cryptocurrency more generally is one of the most profound tools that's ever been created to give people the option to opt out should they choose it. Now we can't make so really fast.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Just remind people the difference between what fiat is and why bitcoin isn't fiat.
Nick Carter
Well, if you look at, if you go to the Latin, fiat means kind of let it be. I believe so in the Bible, the Latin version in Genesis it says fiat, luxury, let there be light. And if you think about what God was saying at that point, it was a command, right? It was an ordainment, right? There will be light regardless of what you may want. And so in English, fiat came to mean a decree. So something that was handed on down from on high, ordaining a certain state of affairs. And so that's what fiat money is.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
That's money, Government money, basically.
Nick Carter
Yeah. But it could be some other source of authority. But yeah, it's money created by decree. And of course that's not saying that the value of money is being enforced at the point of a gun. That's actually not how the dollar works. People sort of stylize it that way. But there aren't any police officers, you know, bashing down my door. I'm like that, you better like treat that $5 bill as if it's worth $5. You know, that's not how it works. The government cultivates an environment in which the dollar has, has value. They have certain like tools to do that. One is tax policy. So you have to pay your taxes in dollars. So they create a tax liability on all of us. And Then you have to satisfy that liability in dollars. So that's kind of like a dirty trick, but it works pretty well. Then they sell their debt for dollars. Right? So all securities markets in this country, and they're enormously sort of rich and robust, you have to use dollars to sort of participate in the game. Right. And so, so there's, you know, and then of course there's laws, there's legal tender laws. Legal tender laws don't actually mandate the use of dollars. You could create a, you could start a store which just accepts gold, and that actually would not be illegal. That would be completely fine. But what legal tenor laws say the dollar is a permissible way to satisfy debts in this country. You have the option to use it. And so the dollar is kind of like privileged in a certain way. And then so if you look at actually El Salvador, where the dollar and now bitcoin are on the same, they're on a par. The way the government did that was with tax policy. They said bitcoin is not subject to capital gains taxes because when your dollars appreciate in this country, you don't have to pay taxes on the dollar going up, but you do have to pay taxes on if something else appreciates, property, stocks, even foreign currency. So the dollar is privileged in a certain way, mainly through tax policy. So very long winded way of saying fiat money is money that is, you know, privileged by state edict, by decree. That's literally what fiat means, decreed money. And now commodity money is something that does just come to have value regardless of what the government thinks about it. So gold is the perfect example. It's a spontaneous thing. It came to have money. Of course, many governments did embrace gold and we had the gold standard for hundreds and hundreds of years. Today governments hold gold, but they don't give any special status to gold. So gold is a commodity money. It's still worth $10 trillion. Similarly, Bitcoin, I would say, is a commodity money. Its value is spontaneous. At one point it was worth zero and then it was worth something. Right. I think the first price was like $0.0008 back in 2010. So no government, well, until this year did anything to encourage bitcoin to have value. El Salvador has now, in a small way, gently encouraged the adoption in that country. But that's not really the reason bitcoin has value. It's because the market spontaneously decided this is an interesting commodity that we can sort of store our wealth in.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Okay, so the bitcoin story, I'm going to take a more aggressive Approach. I think you will be the balancing force here, and you know far more about it than I do. But what bothers me. So I've worked in the inner cities a lot, and I've seen really incredible people that, that are truly bright, but their perspective on life is nonsensical. And because that's just what they've been taught. Right. And so because of their frame of reference, they don't behave in a way that moves them forward. And, and that has given me a very deep passion around trying to help people that aren't necessarily getting useful information from the school system or from their parents or from their friends to tap into the Internet basically and say, hey, it doesn't matter where you grew up, you can now learn from anybody. So now let's look at things that could really move you forward now. Bitcoin, and we'll keep it relatively tight to that, though I find more currencies than that interesting. But bitcoin is a highly volatile asset, so you could lose everything that you put in. So it's super important that people be clear on that. But you and I are recording this at a time where bitcoin is doing extraordinarily well. And so just looking at how my portfolio is going up, I'm like, we can't do this again. Where it's like the, whether it's elite because I have information that other people don't have or that I have the capital to put in the system, whatever, like, I have found a potential opportunity. Again, it could go to zero. But like, if people don't at least look at this, it's so insane, the gains are so potentially outsized that I feel a moral obligation to get people to do the research.
Nick Carter
I think that's fair. I. Moral is an interesting lens to put on it. I mean, I think money is sort of imbued with morality. Um, but, you know, I, I, at this point, I, I don't try and evangelize bitcoin too much just because you try to evangelize.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Do you want to see. I'll give you the universal I want to see. I want to see every human being who meets what I call minimum requirements intellectually to research finance to understand that your money can be safe in a bank and losing value every day, and that you need to understand that to protect yourself against that devaluing substantially over time. So I want everyone to take that action. Do you have an action that around finance that you think people should take?
Nick Carter
That's a great question. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good framing. I would just suggest that people look into the rate of money issuance in this country, which is substantial. And don't, don't buy the narratives coming from the Fed, because remember, the Fed does not have your best interests at heart. What they're telling you about inflation being transitory, about being there not being a connection between the rate of money creation and the price of money, which doesn't make any sense, of course. Like, it's funny, like you've econ PhDs telling you something. And it's like anybody that's sensible, you know, that hasn't been indoctrinated into sort of like their dogma would be like, well, this doesn't make any sense. What do you mean? Like, you're telling me there's no relationship between the quantity of money and the price of money is like, completely nonsensical. So just apply a skeptical lens to what they're saying and then in terms of direct action. Yeah, I mean, just look at the data and look at where the inflationary trends are going. Look at energy prices, look at the shortages we see in the economy and consider, okay, well, what historical epochs could this be like? Could this be like the 70s? Could this be like the 40s? Could be like the 1850s? So there's a lot of work to do there. But I think the first thing is just not accepting uncritically the narratives coming out of sort of our monetary elites in this country.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
All right, so we have a system by decree, fiat. We have grown up with it for so long that it just seems so second nature that most people don't look at the fact that the US Government makes you pay your tax bill in US Dollars is like a sneaky trick to make sure that US Dollars essentially stick. It just is the way that things are. And as this moves forward and we are printing money and we've got potential inflation coming, why does it matter if we're looking at Bitcoin and thinking of a way to, okay, potentially they need to do their own research, but potentially get into something like that. What is it about the values of the. Of Bitcoin versus the values of a fiat system that caused Satoshi to create it in the way that he. She did?
Nick Carter
Satoshi was actually pretty deliberate in terms of putting the pieces of Bitcoin together. And they were chosen for kind of a specific reason. So the first thing to understand is monetary discretion. And so that means, is there anyone that can control the flow of monetary creation? Does anyone have the choice in that and in fiat, the government has that choice. So they can choose to ramp it up, they can ramp it down, everything in between. In the last few years in the US the rate of monetary creation has been enormous, truly enormous. And we're told that that's to sort of save us from a recession. But of course we still have financial crises. And the rates of financial crises and recessions has not gone down since the Federal Reserve was created, certainly hasn't gone down, and the severity of those recessions hasn't gone down since the 1970s when we fully got onto the fiat system. So the claim that we need government to put their thumb on the scale and periodically change things, tune, pull that lever of interest rates and monetary creation, things like that, that claim doesn't seem very sound to me. And so if you look at what Bitcoin does, it just fixes the variable, it sets it completely fixed. So you know there's going to be 21 million units ever. And the first 50% were created in the first four years and the next 25% were created in the subsequent four years, next 12 and a half percent. So it's a decaying curve. So right now the rate of issuance for Bitcoin is 1.8% per year. That's going to get cut in half in three years. Cut in half, cut in half, cut in half until we hit 21 million. And so that curve, that rate of emission is totally fixed. I don't think anybody has the authority to change that. Satoshi said it that way. And that's kind of what we got. And you know, the thing that that compares to would be a non state monetary commodity like gold. Now gold is an attractive thing to use to backstop your monetary system for much the same reason, which is that no one really controls the rate of gold issuance either. Over the last few hundred years it's kind of fluctuated between about 1 to 2% and it very rarely exceeds 2%. Even when the conquistadors found all the gold in the new world, people think that was, you know, that caused rampant inflation, that caused the rates of inflation to increase by 1 to 1.5% a year for about 100 years. So that wasn't even that significant in terms of new gold issuance. So that's a natural feature of the world because gold is really well distributed in the earth's crust and there's not that much of it and it's really hard to get out. And so because of those natural physics based features, we get a monetary outcome which is if you link your currency to gold, your currency is not going to be created at a rapid rate.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
I want to say that in a really basic way for people, because this was a big sort of moment for me when I realized gold is valuable, not so much because it can be melted and turned into jewelry or whatever. It's valuable because stars had to explode and get coalesced into the crust of this earth so that there is a finite amount that is really hard to get out. And so it literally becomes proof of work, as they call it, that I know this was hard to get. So there's no way that somebody is like secretly in the back room, like making more gold and putting it into the system, which would essentially be counterfeiting. So it becomes an anti counterfeiting, anti inflation mechanism. And that is what makes gold valuable. And so it's like, wait a second. The very thing that makes gold valuable, you're saying that the fiat money just like, hey, fuck it, like make it rain, like, you know, money printer, go, brrr. It's like you, you start to get skitched out of like that scandal you talked about where it's like, what is happening? So, yeah. Do you buy into the narrative that bitcoin is like the ultimate digital gold and that it perfects those elements of scarcity?
Nick Carter
Well, that's why I introduced gold. I mean, you know, I'm not a gold bug or anything, but bitcoin mirrors, and it's actually a synthetic attempt to recapture those qualities of gold. Right. And now, of course, gold wasn't perfect either because technological innovations or gold finds, like in California in 1848. 48, yeah. Would increase the rate of gold creation. So that would be a shock. Right. You don't necessarily want the money supply to increase dramatically based on a technological change, but even so, it didn't increase it that much. And so what bitcoin took was this relatively strong but not perfect commitment to not increase the money supply too rapidly, to just give us strong predictability, which worked very, very well for hundreds of years. And bitcoin made it even stronger. It made it a perfectly sound commitment, which is we are going to adhere to this monetary schedule and we're never going to change it. And this is just what you got. And no one has the authority to change it ever. And it's going to be perfectly predictable. So it's like the most hardcore version of gold possible. Gold gets those traits from the explosions of stars and the nature of the earth's crust and also the atomic nature of gold. It's not radioactive, doesn't corrode. So it's very stable, which is important because it's not going to decay or rot or anything like that. And then bitcoin gets those traits by looking at the natural world and creating a synthetic version of that, which is designed to recapture those ideas. And satoshi compared bitcoin to gold a lot. That wasn't a coincidence. The proof of work function satoshi compares to the mining of gold because it's expensive and difficult to get the gold out. It's expensive and difficult to get the new bitcoins out too. And it should be that way. It shouldn't be easy to create. The money should be really hard. And the people that create the money shouldn't have a huge advantage in doing so. So gold extraction, the gold mining companies, sure, they're worth a little bit, but the people that mine gold are not like these princes of the universe that control everything. They have to compete in the free market like everyone else, so they eke out a margin. It's the same with bitcoin miners. Bitcoin miners aren't princes of the universe either. They earn a return doing it, but it's just kind of a normal corporate activity. It's not something that endows you with fabulous, unfathomable wealth. And that's by design. That's because it's a free market equilibrium where if the miners were earning too wide a margin, other miners would come into the industry and compete with them and compress that margin. So the fact that it's a competitive free market process, bitcoin inherits that from gold. But that's also a great feature. So a lot of bitcoin's design, arguably is kind of inspired by gold.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
So now we get into the other day, I was thinking about, you know, I'll get asked a lot, like, who's the person that you want to interview that you, you know, haven't yet? And I was like, satoshi. I want to interview satoshi. Now, I understand why people would not want me to interview satoshi, but I am utterly fascinated by the mystery around satoshi. I know at one point you said, somebody should write a book. Maybe you going through, like, all the different things that satoshi said, and I'm really curious, what were they saying? Like, when you think about the value system that's driving this, and this gets into my core thesis around, there's something happening culturally right now, and the. The value system of cryptocurrency is resonating with people in, like, a crazy way. So Going to that idea of demographics or destiny. There's something here where the upcoming demographics really resonate with what I lovingly call the fuck the man philosophy of decentralization. So what is the value system of bitcoin?
Nick Carter
Yeah, I think that's such an important and great question because we've had all these sort of civil wars about it, actually, all these internal conflicts. And Bitcoin in many ways is kind of a reflection of your own expectations and your beliefs. And so no two people come at bitcoin and consider it to be the same thing. So that's where we get all this conflict from. I mean, a lot of people thought it was this peer to peer Internet payment system, like a high powered Venmo. Some people thought, okay, well, it's more of a digital gold type product. Some people were like, well, actually it's a programmable substrate for the new Internet. And all of those conceptions imply different development directions and they imply taking different angles on the trade offs within bitcoin from an architectural perspective. So that's why we had all these wars, all these conflicts. They're not fully resolved, arguably. And part of the reason, I think is because Satoshi left so early after a year or two. And we didn't get that much guidance from Satoshi.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Did Satoshi say he was going to bounce or did he just disappear?
Nick Carter
Yeah, Satoshi sort of suggested that they could leave and the project would be okay without them. But still, I don't know if it's a good thing. I mean, I suppose it's for the best that Satoshi isn't here because it eliminates a point of centralization and Satoshi has apparently never spent any of the coins that they mined. So it seems to have been a very sacrificial thing whereby they didn't capture the spoils of their wealth creating the system, which is incredible. So, you know, I think it was a very sort of humble thing to do. No one knows who Satoshi was, so they didn't get any of the clout that comes with creating bitcoin. They apparently didn't financially, you know, take their reward or anything like that. You know, something like a million coins. So. So, you know, that's all very important. But the trade off is that now it's a tug of war between all the different factions in bitcoin trying to determine what bitcoin actually is and what it should be. But I think undergirding all of those conflicts, there still are a few things that you can say. Yeah, these are the sort of Key fundamental values of Bitcoin. And one would be very strong respect for property rights. So of course the anti inflationary characteristics are key because inflation is a way to effectively compromise your property rights. Two is the ability to have strong seizure resistance. So if you own Bitcoin, it's, you can very plausibly defend yourself against a powerful adversary that wants your bitcoin, particularly through legal means or through intimidation or force. You know, as a fully digitized money, it's something that you can store in your brain. For instance, if you can memorize 12 words, you can store an unlimited amount of value in your brain. And so that is part of the property rights idea. And then eliminating centralized points of control I think is a political idea, which is to say we want a monetary standard that is not something that can politically be interfered with. And so the architectural design is inherited from that core idea. And Satoshi even said look at these other historical digital cache systems like Satoshi talked about digicash. It failed because it was centrally controlled. But if you look at these P2P systems like Tor and sort of like BitTorrent style stuff, Satoshi says, well those succeeded, so let's inherit those ideas in terms of our design, our architecture. And so, you know, if you think about it, these are actually political ideas first and then they get processed into technological designs. But the designs are not arbitrary. The designs are a function of the underlying idea. And so that's why bitcoin is the way that it is, because Satoshi had some pretty definite ideas about the world.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Yeah, this gets really interesting. So the more I look at like the sovereign individual, the book the sovereign individual and think through some of the implications of what it means to say to have demographics that already at least some faction of them have a anti establishment bent. They're young, they're tech savvy, they immediately understand the idea of digitizing anything, whether it's art, you know, and NFTs is born from that, or whether it's money. And obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum are examples of that. But they take to this really fast. And then as nobody knows better than you, this space moves so fast, if you put your head down on a different project for three weeks, you will be disoriented when you come back up because things will have changed that rapidly and that's going to make it a nightmare for regulators to try to stay on top of this. What do you think is going to happen as this upends the apple cart you talked about, there can be enough disparity in wealth that you get these moments of revolution. What do you think the government response is going to be really, really when they start realizing, holy hell, there is a flight from the US dollar, let's say, into Bitcoin?
Nick Carter
Well, I think political power is always litigated between individuals and between the state. And it's kind of a tug of war. And one of those sides may believe a sort of set of conditions holds that doesn't hold anymore. And I think that's the case where we've reached this nexus of political centralization. Right now, big tech companies have completely enormous levels of power that we've virtually never seen before in history in terms of a small number of individuals being able to exercise control over a large number of individuals. And some governments co opt that technology, like the Chinese government, and they wield it directly. In the US it's wielded sort of indirectly where effectively big tech companies work alongside the government today. I know not everyone sees it that way, but there seems to be a convergence of objectives there. And so, you know, we're at this historical zenith in centralization, whether it's corporate or state power. And I mean, if you just look at, you know, the trends of authoritarianism happening in the west, like it's very real. And you know, the question is like, what will the pendulum swinging back look like? And I think states aren't prepared to witness that. They believe that people are still geographically, you know, indexed to their particular location, so they can't be portable. They believe that people's assets are linked to the state, ultimately to the banking system, to the financial system, and they're not portable. And once those assumptions prove to be false, they're going to be taken by surprise. And so the crypto industry is so interested because it's created $2 trillion of wealth for young, kind of mobile, very driven, sort of very technical, talented people globally, not just in the US and those people are engaged, whether they know it or not, in a negotiation versus their governments. And should the governments misbehave, they can convert the rest of their wealth into crypto native format such that it can be untethered from its local context, which was never really possible before. Never possible. And if necessary, they can sort of flee. And you're not just fleeing with the clothes on your back, you're fleeing with your wealth and your assets intact. And that's kind of a new thing, right? I mean, historically, if you were fleeing the Nazis, you'd have to sew the gold into your clothing and you wouldn't really be able escape with any of your wealth. And now everything's digitized. You can escape with the wealth in your brain. And so we have this class of mobile, entrepreneurial, skilled individuals that are effectively breaking the linkage, the linkage between themselves and their governments. And they don't really feel much allegiance to the government anymore because it's not working for them. And so I'm like a miniature version of this because I moved within the US from somewhere that I felt was pretty authoritarian and hostile to crypto to somewhere that was the opposite. But this is going to happen on a global scale, and it's this exact sovereign, individual idea. And now we've been technologically enabled to actually do this. And so you'll see some states that are very slow that will try and ban crypto and, and stem the capital flow, and maybe they'll insert capital controls and extremely onerous tax policies. And then a number of other states will realize, well, we can create a special crypto economic zone and attract all these people and get this concentration of wealth and talent. So that's obviously what we're going to do and then we're going to win out with regards relative to all these other states. So I think we're right on the brink of seeing that. Yep.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Yeah, this is. Man, this is such an interesting and crazy time. And my goal is just to get people to pay attention to it. I think you're one of the voices to listen to. Where can people follow along with you?
Nick Carter
So I'm on Twitter, Nick Carter. That's two underscores. And if I get banned from there, which is very possible, my personal website is nickcarter.in fox. Hopefully I don't get banned from the Internet, so that will always be off.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
Awesome, dude. I really hope that we get round two, round three. This has been really incredible. I will be following you closely. Thank you for putting out what you put out. And yeah, keep doing what you're doing, guys, if you haven't already, certainly dive into his world. I can't say this enough. I just think it's so important for people to do the research and to figure out what's happening, because there is something tremendous happening right now. And I will say miss it at your peril. Again, you need to do your research. When I say miss it, I just mean look at it. Look at it. If you look at it and reject it, fair enough. But don't just reject it without looking at it. Speaking of things you should look at, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care.
Nick Carter
Peace.
Host (possibly Joe Rogan or similar podcast host)
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Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Nic Carter
Release Date: July 27, 2024
Duration: Approx. 68 minutes
Theme:
A deep dive into the truth behind monetary trends, the mechanics and morality of money, the impact of inflation, the function of fiat versus Bitcoin, and what financial literacy means in a rapidly changing digital era.
This episode brings on Bitcoin thinker, investor, and writer Nic Carter to uncover monetary truths beyond headlines and hype. Host Tom Bilyeu drives a candid, philosophical, and practical discussion about navigating modern finance—especially as it intersects with politics, inflation, psychology, and technology. Listeners are challenged to question narratives, understand the underlying mechanisms, and take action to secure their financial future amid rapid disruption.
| Time | Topic | |----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:04 | Introduction to Nic Carter and his background | | 02:47 | Does Bitcoin matter for regular people | | 05:40 | Theories of what money is | | 10:48 | Inflation as redistribution | | 11:28 | Cantillon Effect and proximity to money creation | | 15:13 | Redistribution, finance sector bloat, and rising inequality | | 18:48 | Breaking points and historical parallels | | 24:09 | Investing psychology in inflationary periods | | 29:56 | Lessons from Japan’s asset bubble and stagnation | | 36:15 | Crypto, digitization, and cultural momentum | | 39:42 | Crypto as tools for opting out | | 40:26 | The meaning of fiat and Bitcoin’s distinction | | 44:48 | Moral responsibility to research Bitcoin | | 47:21 | Skepticism toward central bank narrative | | 49:50 | Satoshi’s vision and Bitcoin’s monetary rules | | 53:59 | Bitcoin perfecting digital scarcity | | 56:56 | Satoshi’s legacy, Bitcoin’s core values | | 62:21 | The “sovereign individual” and upending the state-citizen balance | | 63:45 | Governmental response to crypto migration |
Tom Bilyeu and Nic Carter urge listeners to learn about and engage with the changing financial landscape. You don’t need to buy Bitcoin blindly, but you can’t afford to ignore its principles or the trends behind monetary policy, inflation, and the rise of digital assets. Do the research, question easy truths, and don’t let opportunity or risk pass unnoticed.