Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney and The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance and writer of the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter, joins Pinchbeck to examine the post-election surge in cryptocurrency. Scott, who once tried to live on Bitcoin and pay rent and interns in it, argues that it never became a currency and now functions as a limited-edition collectible whose price is driven by successive waves of speculation, from early experimentation through the hodler era and the FTX collapse to institutional ETFs and, most recently, deliberate political promotion under Trump. Pinchbeck brings in Gramsci's crisis of hegemony and Peter Turchin's End Times, with its accounts of elite overproduction and the wealth pump, to ask what is driving the broader political rupture.
Guest: Brett Scott
In brief
- Scott argues that a proposed strategic Bitcoin reserve is best understood as state price manipulation, needed because a political promise of enrichment through crypto collapses if the market falls.
- He contends that dividing Bitcoin into small units does nothing to address ownership concentration, comparing it to grinding gold into dust while a few people hold tons of it.
- Scott describes a manifest-destiny narrative within the crypto sector holding that early adopters were rightfully selected and will use their new wealth to liberate humanity, a story he says exists to justify extreme unequal distribution.
- He argues that Trump's appeal rests on treating the system as rigged without questioning the imperative to compete and win, which is why the crypto industry's populist finance framing fits his narrative so well.
- Pinchbeck argues that crypto absorbed much of the ecological and spiritual energy of the transformational festival and Burning Man scene around 2011 to 2013, redirecting it into personal enrichment.
- Scott says he deliberately holds no Bitcoin to preserve his independence, and plans to re-enter the crypto debate to build counterpower against what he calls the swampification of the sector under Trump.
Full text
hey people uh today I am here with Brett Scott who writes the Altered States of monetary Consciousness uh substack newsletter and is the author of a few books Cloud money cash cards crypto in the warf our wallets and the herex guide to Global Finance hacking the future of money uh and um yeah Brad and I last hung out in person at the medicine Festival uh in England which was a great time and we kept it was good it was good over and over again in in different human configurations that was that was exciting you're you're where you're from South Africa I'm from South Africa yes you're based in Berlin strange South Africa is for the first time in a long time getting weird Global prominence because of well musk being this you know South African and also David saxs and it's quite weird because suddenly we getting this quite bad press of these white South Africans from from the kind of 19 1980s generation 1970s actually CL League um so yeah I'm actually excited about South Africa because I have a um I have a think tank or an incubator I'm not quite sure exactly what to call called the elevator the elevator. Earth uh that I started with tarell newat in Norway who runs the Catapult fund and catapult future Fest and it's still very nent kind of a thing uh the idea is to sort of try to elevate Global Consciousness and also kind of um yeah think about what could be an alternative Paradigm to reductive materialism uh taking into account you know quantum physics and you know people like Bernardo castrop and D Hoffman who are kind of arguing for idealism and um yeah kind of thinking that um kind of ontology is is uh something that people don't often think about as being important you know politically socially and ecologically and financially but actually it kind of uh defines yeah how people relate to their reality and if if there was an ontological shift you know from reductive materialism to let's say idealism that might actually have a lot of um impacts on yeah just how people conceive themselves in relationship with each other in the world and so on so I've seen I've seen you been you've done some some pieces around that I need to I need to delve more into that somehow yeah a chance kind of my little you know baileywick you have your baileywick but um yeah I really I think so how does sou Africa figure NS you say you got because I found uh we found an executive director who is a amazing South African woman from a Zulu background Shanti Kuni she was actually working with culture hack labs for a while you probably know those guys um and and yeah she does a lot of cool stuff uh and yeah I love her I'm excited I'm really excited about about her and someh it felt very um kind of uh yeah it feels very proper at the moment to sort of elevate you know a black woman from South Africa and um as as a sort of counteractive to as a counter to here the others yeah good work uh okay so I wanted to reach out to you because I mean I we just you know before we before I turned on the recording oh and by the way people blah blah blah subscribe like all that stuff you know forever you know sell your soul and feelsy the You Tube channel whatever you're supposed to do uh but um yeah I've been thinking recently about um I mean you were saying that you don't really follow politics on a you know regular basis um I you know which I admire I've gotten sort of mired into you know kind of trying to figure out well I do follow I do follow I just don't throw myself and every hour yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I've been kind of like um yeah trying to understand I mean I was you know about a month in a half before the election I started to realize that it was you know I found the idea of trump winning to be you know worse than I had conceived of and I somei I didn't think he was going to win I thought this is just not going to happen somehow uh and then of course he did win uh you know maybe fairly maybe there were some Shenanigans there or CH Chini chick Chi Cher Chenery I guess is the word behind the scenes um you know you know I know we talked about the musk Trump fusion into into MP or or trusk or whatever Tusk um but yeah there was a you know Tusk talked about um he could you know he could anything could be hacked and yeah there's some weird little things about uh the voting machines nobody wants to talk about but anyway um yeah so um and obviously one of the things that's coming up strong with this new you know Tusk uh situation or monk monk musk mp uh is the um crypto cryptocurrency and a lot of enthusiasm around crypto and um and I and I I just you know feel in my heart like I just I just don't love Bitcoin and I have a lot of friends who have become very wealthy on bitcoin and and and love Bitcoin and um yeah I guess like uh I wanted to talk to you a little bit about um why why is everybody going you know so crazy for this thing you know because you know you've you've written about it pretty uh intensively you know sort of seeing it as more like a speculative uh commodity or you know sort of a almost like a I think you described almost like Trading Card kind of like a limited edition numerical nouns yeah exactly um and I've checked Bitcoin for a long time I mean I was involved in the early Bitcoin Community I hope I hope you bought something too you probably didn't I've never actually bought Bitcoin or I've earned a Bitcoin yeah I've been yeah that's the thing I don't want to buy it but if people give it to me that's that's nice well in the early days of Bitcoin I actually tried to use it as a currency yeah I mean I'm probably one of the few people in the world who ever done that I mean it's because it isn't the currency right but I was interested in the in the early days when it was still a kind of nent thing and it was an experimental phase I was involved in lots of alternative currency movements and I was intrigued about how you would turn it into a currency so I I would I would uh accept payment in it I paid interns in it I did all sorts of stuff with it paid for like loads of things my rent and things in Bitcoin and stuff so I had a lot of experience with the Bitcoin the Bitcoin World um but of course it's gone through multiple phases over time and um so the phase one like the innocent phase then phase two the sort of speculation started kicking in then the kind of hodler generation emerged all these people who just like obsessed about holding it then there was the FTX Scandal which kind of like hit the whole legitimacy of the industry very big and then now the latest wave is is the kind of trump um political manipulation of the market essentially they're going to pump the price as a political political project um and of course that's yeah that's why everyone right now because all the fund managers are getting involved all the ETFs have been set up so all the big institutional money is pouring in plus the US state so then every single person in society then also thinks to themselves oh we better get in two because if we miss out on this I was just writing in Berlin and on the street that all these like adverts right now being like have you yet got into Bitcoin you know basically trying to play on that fomo and that will work yeah so that's the latest phase so yeah but always try to like step back and try to understand what the hell is happening on maybe more like meta systemic levels like right now I'm really intrigued by like the Antonio gramsky's ideas around like a crisis of hegemony uh and that actually like um what we're seeing with the sort of Rise of like Christian nationalism and fascism you know represents yeah some kind of hegemonic Crisis for you know Western Capital civilization uh that's the sort of liberal Progressive consensus wasn't really offering people um anything anymore in terms of like meaning or purpose or function um or future um so this whole new thing has jump started has has grown uh you know I also think like the you know although they don't take it they won't ackn the climate emergency which is also what I think is Le leading to like the refugee crisis all over the world is an underlying driver of the sort of right-wing you know Neo fascist populism or whatever that's rising up um yeah um and um another lens that now I'm looking at actually through through Alexander beiner uh in one of his essays he talked about Peter turchin who wrote a book called end times um Elites uh counter Elites and uh political disintegration I think is is the book and turchin is a historian who uses mathematical models so he basically argues that that um there's a sort of inherent uh cyclical um thing that happens where uh you know wealth concentrates in a small group um they then reach a point where they sort of take over the leverage of society where they turn the whole rest of the society into a wealth pump that pumps the wealth up up to the small Elite group this leads to like a miseration of the masses which then leads to resentment and fury and it also leads to a situ situation that he calls Elite over production where you have too many PE too many too too too many people in the elite group vying for too few power spots so these two conditions ultimately then lead to um breakdown Revolution Civil War and he basically argued you know argues that the US has entered into that disintegration stage um okay yeah interesting so yeah those are different you know lenses but then I'm also kind of like you know looking at it from um the lens of like you know you know it tends to be that when you have you know I don't necessarily love to use the word fascism but something like a sort of you know authoritarian right-wing and anti-democratic uh regime that comes into power and holds power you know what what's the dynamic that like breaks them out of power I mean I guess sometimes they get exhausted or they run out of steam but often it requires like a war like obviously with you know Nazi Germany it required all of Europe kind of like um joining Force you know Europe and then America coming in but there's no you know there's no other America waiting in the wings to um kind of contest authoritarianism uh and um yeah so I don't I don't know as we go into this how we ever get out of it uh and and and you know that so you know it's a big that's sort of where I'm thinking right now but then also yeah so like and what role is crypto playing you know or insights into the financial system as a whole which I'm sorry for such a long you know Meandering you know not even a question kind of thing but I mean um you know if we look at 2008 and how yeah and essentially like the the financial you know system kind of collapsed in 2008 and maybe ever since then it's been kind of like a somewhat of a fraud um in that we never fixed the underlying dynamics of it and we just um you know created more financial capital and gave it out to these institutions that that were yeah like what what you know what where you at what's your diagnosis what's what what are you thinking I mean maybe on your first story what was the first story was around how you the crisis of the story maybe the crisis of the story yeah yeah I mean that's a complex one because the new Story coming out is a bit like convoluted and a bit contradictory but obviously there's a new ideological hybrid that's been formed um with the whole kind of trump thing or the sort of populist populist right more generally um but the hybrid being between this kind it's sort of like um I mean I think there's a whole kind of resurgence of some kind of libertarian libertarian ideology on the one hand all right um which is always hanging around in the background of capitalism right but there's a whole bunch of quite hard libertarian ideas coming out in then with all these kind of protectionist ideas and stuff like that which actually can sort of Quasi be leftwing in certain forms right so there are these sort of quote unquote left-wing elements to the Trump program um you know which Ian not they're not necessarily leftwing but they could be used in these sort of context right you could imagine them as sort of um qu you know worker protection type of efforts they're not sort of like uh Global globalization Financial globalization kind of tropes right so in a previous wave of capitalism with your kind of big Tech and finance as your big players they're all about destroy friction make everything Global like you know very standard acceleration and expansion stories um which is a basic underlying tendency of capitalism anyway right like a capitalist system always wants to expand and get faster like they Factor as a sort of as like a baseline default tendency but then there are obviously a different interest group within that who vying for different forms of power and so you know that story is particularly prevalent in the financial and Tech Elites um but obviously there's there's like fighting within the different capitalist classes right so like um Trump has gone in and sort of sided with various parts of that of that that group and doesn't necessarily operate in the interests of like Financial capital for example um so there's those kind of things happening um in the terms of the actual just on that point of like the elite over production thing I mean also in any economic system there's going to be points where it hits when it's trying to expand and it hits barriers right this is like kind of like an old sort of marxist sort of thing it's like you know your your system can only expand so much before it hits it stagnates right it hits against barriers and various Industries who have previously enriched themselves in those Frontiers start to stagnate and then you've had these sort of new capitalist classes of emerging and somewhere else in the system so right now the current wave of new capitalist overlords being created are in the crypto sector right so there's a whole new wave of those people and I think Trump is aligned with them so they got a bunch of money from that industry so they're a they they weren't previously favored by the previous previous regimes right so they've managed to get favor with this particular regime and get this regime to to focus on them but then I think IDE logically the crypto sector works very well for Trump because it hares it carries the same story that he he tells so his story has always been something like vaguely you know the system is rigged he I think I mean my in my sense of trump is he has this kind of um he goes around with the system is rigged but then he doesn't question the underlying idea that you should compete and win at all costs what his his main complaint tends to be something like we're all trying to compete but there's some kind of you know swamp Elite that's stopping you from truly succeeding in the market and therefore we destroy the swamp and then that's why you then suddenly flourish as a kind of underlying group of people individuals right so you become winners rather than losers um and so the crypto industry actually has a lot of that kind of populist Finance Vibe which is like you know Finance for the little man um and it also has a lot of this kind of hearing winners versus losers thing going on right so Trump you know the alternative Narrative of course if you're faced with um a corrupt system is you say we should form bottomup solidarity and Collective power and join unions right that's the kind of leftwing perspective I like that that sounds good to me Trump doesn't do that he's like yes the system is corrupt but what we need to do is take out one group of Elites and then you fight your way to the top right like that's the kind of thing and the crypto industry works very well for him for that because I mean he's very obviously engaged in a new plutocratic project of enriching a new group new group of capitalists or an old group as well right a bunch of Silicon Valley people but he will enrich yeah but also his like you know his treasury secretary kind of nominee is from the mainstream system he work George Soros and stuff like that yeah and I I think the they don't really care that much about the cognitive distance of this I mean it's sort of like they're like well yeah they've managed to capture the narrative such that they have this license to just at least temporarily engage in outright plutocracy um but then they can say things like well you know we're opening up the gambling halls for the common person you know go and speculate on the the new uh crypto ETF and something you know like that's so the whole sort of meme stock that that is the situation I mean obviously yeah when you have like I mean yeah New York like a you know an Americano coffee which used to be like two bucks is now 650 you know in my local cafe yeah yeah and they're going to play on that so this that that act that underlying economic stress that's probably hitting the kind of lower middle class especially people like that who are on the verge of being pushed into poverty who especially in the states where doesn't you know doesn't have the kind of European style social welfare states like it's you know you get pushed off the bottom you're screwed so it's quite an interesting project you have there where you on the one hand he's got Elon and crew about to engage in some kind of austerity program which seems to involve gutting various parts of the of the state while simultaneously being like yeah but you're going to get a chance to like enrich yourself through crypto and this becomes very important so things like the Bitcoin strategic Reserve that they're talking about if their political Gambit is going to be like well if we've told people that they're going to become rich of crypto and crypto markets inherently especially Bitcoin is in apparently circular right and can go into why that's the case but that's a big political risk because if that markets tank suddenly everyone's like yeah but you said the crypto markets were going to go up so what do you do you obviously you get the US state to buy up crypto to keep the mark you manipulate the price essentially um so that's to me the Strategic Reserve is very obviously an attempt to manipulate the crypto price for the political project to succeed basically handing our patronage as it were to the people in in the crypto um and the main patronage is actually to the crypto Elites right the sort of new wave of the big holders of those of those tokens right but the the sort of trickle down element for the people who holding small Holdings or crypto they get like enough that they sort of feel like okay well we won in some way from the system be in mind the number of well go ahead the number of people holding crypto is incredibly tiny actually and if you think about um at a global level at least right um but it's mostly among your kind of sort of middle class lower middle class people hold small amounts and so you can sort of plausibly claim that you're doing something for people by pushing the price up but if a person's holding you know 2,000 bucks worth of it then that goes to 4,000 right so then they make they make a small amount which makes them feel like they got something but of course the massive the massive beneficiaries are people who are holding huge amounts of the stuff right because they get become they become completely as as you as you noted in your article those are the people who in 2009 happen to be in the right circles and have like you know Advanced understanding of certain Tech protocols and stuff like that yeah the actual distribution is like insane um and of course there's there's a lot of ideology in the crypto sector designed to combat critique of this so they'll say things like oh well but you know you can um break it down into small little pieces it's like you know it's like taking gold and grinding it down into gold dust and sort of being like well look you can have a you can have an atomic particle of gold for you there right the point is if somebody's holding two tons of gold and you're holding a particle of gold they have an immense amount of power relative to you okay so the point is isn't that you can fine you can you can grind Bitcoin into tiny little pieces and sort of spread it around but in the end there's like you know very small number of people holding an enormous amount of that thing that then is is drifting down now that would be a serious problem if it was actually a monetary system but it isn't a monetary system um it's just an asset right so um right now the main effect is going to be to try to essentially enrich a particular new Elite and there's particular ideological justifications I come across for this in the crypto sector because what some people in that in that scene say they have this kind of manifest destiny story where they say things like well what happened in the beginning of Bitcoin was that all the liberty-minded people um you know this particular kind of person was attracted to this almost like a evolutionarily attracted uh to they saw the potential and these people will inherit the Earth because they're basically going to become extremely enriched as the US state pumps the price and then they will be in positions of power and then they will be in this position to liberate Humanity as a whole right because all the positions of Power are going to be held with the sort of new plutocratic libertarian Elite who became insanely wealthy through the US State pumping this assets class yeah it sounds terrifying it I mean but that's that's a justification they will use because if you if you look at the actual distribution of the tokens it's incredibly unequal so to justify the unequal distribution you have to say it was given to a rightful Elite who will then be use their power for the good of the of the world to liberate everyone and that's what they will that's what they will believe so what is like you know what do what does somebody like you or I do or people we know like you know there's there's a part of me that you know does assume it is going to keep rising in value and I'm like oh should I take my my scanty little savings and like throw it into the casino um you know or or am I just going to get swindled because every time I've tried to do something like that I always be the the last one in and the before the thing you know melts down again uh even on a very tiny uh level you know like a like a play money level you know I mean I personally don't get involved because I try to maintain my Integrity in this and also so um it's important for me to not get involved because people who get too caught up in crypto it's like a it takes over their mind it's a viral life form that they then start to they'll they'll start to create all these elaborate justifications for what's going on right um I think it partially ruined like burning man and the transformational festival movement also people yeah well no because I remember back in like you know 201 you know 11 12 13 you know people had a sense of like oh the ecological crisis is like really severe and like the sort of spiritual movement somehow needs to connect with you know changing society and then you know crypto came up and everybody a lot of those people just gravitated towards that and then then just became focused on you know personal enrichment you know I was I was saw this video the other day from some one of these kind of like commune type places in b or something you know where the sort of spiritual Travelers of the world gravitate to Wards like um and there was the there was some some video of this guy doing this rap it was kind of a spiritual rap where he was riing on like the powers of be that control the world and how you know like screw you but we're going to get the indigenous people crypto wallets and uh like okay so it's like this was this was the solution you know the indigenous people are going to get crypto wallets and this is going to somehow so this kind of magical thinking right and it sort of um uh yeah yeah it's it is a very interesting life form crypto and one of the one of the things about Bitcoin which is so fascinating is just how empty it is and this is partly why it's successful so um if you actually look at what Bitcoin is I me it's it's numbers that you write out after you expend energy if you have to if you have to give a is it the word ontological I mean like I kind of the sort of like this you act like the what what is it at like a like a sort of level of reality it's like literally a guy writes out 50 that's it okay then you can split it into pieces but there's a whole process behind that it's restricted it's very hard to do that process it's hard to write the number out right and that's the sort of proof of work stuff on bitcoin but in the end if you say what is the thing that you created here it's like I wrote out a number right so the whole f about Bitcoin is that that's simultaneously incredibly weak and it's also quite strong in the sense that um like if I if I have for example this this cup of lemon tea here that has an inherent use to to a per to a human being you don't have to convince somebody about that that thing's use it's like well it's lemon tea it has a particular thing right but also there's limitations to how fixated people can get on it because they know what it is right at some point they're like well I have enough lemon tea it's sort of you know it's not going to be a speculative asset whereas a totally empty like object that has no features to it is actually incredibly captivating to people in many ways right this is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is so resilient but also why it's so incredibly volatile because nobody has any idea what it actually is and what it is is it's numbers written out of to expend energy so it has to have this entire sort of marketing apparatus for people to continue to believe or to sort of buy into this idea but it's inherently circular in the way it works so it'll always be incredibly vulnerable to to crashes unless it's subject to manipulation which is what the US state wants to do now um I mean you could delve into the monetary Theory parts of this right because from a monetary perspective it isn't money right it's it's just a digital object that you can move that has a price um but it sort of looks like money has The Superficial surface appearance of a monetary system and um this is why it's such a kind of right mind mind for people s you addressed it in this piece but it's I think it's always worth sort of like going back to this like a lot of people would say like um you know the US dollar fiat currency is also just made up you know uh and there's really no difference um you know I have my own reputation for that but I'm curious how you how you would Express yours well there is a difference between the act of me writing a number out and a gigantic powerful state that has the ability to coers taxation from people and has like military bases all over the world and fight to Jets and incredible cultural power like a credit instrument issued by the US government is of a fundamentally different sort of of thing to a object that just has numbers right they appear before you they might look the same you know like you look at a dollar bill it has numbers written on it right and a Bitcoin has numbers written on it but one of them is a gigantic kind of credit Vortex um now if you think about a Monet system I mean I don't know how how trippy you want to get you but you got to kind of think about it in like three dimensions what's that you gotta think about it in three dimensions so it's a three diim I mean I think about it in three dimensions there's like a horizontal Dimension to it and a vertical Dimension to it um the horizontal Dimension is kind of like all about human interdependence right the fact that humans are interdependent we depend upon each other but we go in and out of credits and debt to each other in the process of being interdependent right so I do something I'm going positive you then you do something and and so so on right so if you look at like look at my hands like that that that point there is a point of equality but when people go out of equality one person's goes positive another person goes negative right that's what the sort of Prim the Primitive in a monetary system is is somebody going positive and another person going negative right so all positive units in a monetary system actually have to have a negative counterpart somewhere else in the system all right for in a situation of interdependence all right right so money is not merely an asset it also has a liability side right and that's that's kind of on the sort of that would happen for example if you in a very small scale hunter gatherer band or something like that or um an example I might use is like let's say You Get Shipwrecked on an island with five other people and you find yourself having to survive together and you say Hey you know we're going to all we all have to pull our weight and I'm going to do something and then you know you're going to go to but then you also to do something and you you could have you could form an accounting system in that situation where you measure people going in and out of debts to each other normally we don't do that in small scale situations but you could all right so that's that's sort of horizontal Dimension but and for for that to work at a very very large scale how modern capitalist systems are constructed is that you have that but then you also have this huge vertical Dimension which is that you have these massive issuers of units of money that other people use in their interdependent situation so um I know that sounds a bit complicated but the state and the banking sector essentially now form the negative whenever you see a positive unit of money there's a negative somewhere else in the system in the banking sector and in the state right there's actually a bunch of layers of money so you know money appears before us as a sort of object that has numbers on it but it has this whole sort of legal structural apparatus but then also this whole kind of network structure as well with with interdependence now that like that whole like three-dimensional Vortex is incredibly powerful incredibly hard to break out it right now the mere Act of presenting somebody with something has a superficial appearance of money all right so you you you say something like here is something that has a number and a symbol next to it you know one BTC it's true that a person who's immersed in a large scale capitalist system might not actually be able to tell the difference between that and the monetary units that they use because most people AR trained to see the whole structure of the system that they they're immersed in right um so it's very easy to confuse people with this um and this is what Bitcoin does in many ways it kind of has this sort of almost viral like quality where it sort of has this ability to to appear before people as if it was a monetary system when really what it is it's an object priced within a monetary system um and if you have an object price within a monetary system any object it could be this T here it could be this microphone it could be anything any priced object can be used for exchange through a process called counter trade and counter trade is a process where you use something's resale price to buy stuff okay so um Bitcoin Works purely through counter trade in the sense that if you're trying to quote unquote buy something with Bitcoin what you actually do is you look at what its US dollar pric is and then you compare that doll price to the price of the thing you're trying to buy and then you work out a counter trade ratio to work out how much Bitcoin you'd have to get to for that kind of thing the example I used this recent piece I did is like you know imagine you're in your house and the the the the boiler repair guy has has come and he's he's finished fixing your boiler but you owe him 100 bucks right but you don't have 100 bucks on you but you do have a you know vintage vase on your desk that costs 100 bucks and you say Hey you could to resell this for 100 bucks do you want to take this as you know in that situation you're not paying him with the vase you're actually paying him with the resale price of the vs right and this is how the Bitcoin system works um but because it is an object that's disguised as money rather than being for example a vase which is easy to easy to see what it is people often mistake that process of counter trade for a process of monetary exchange this takes kind of a while for people's minds to get around but um helps it's incredibly successful think I think I basically finally got it finally so so there when I read your stuff I feel like my brain is like trying to like clock it I I was even going to suggest to that you could try using chat GPT to sometimes like say write this for like a 16year old or something or for 12y old you know um it's just that little you know that little abstraction is hard to break through when it comes to thinking about monetary systems but that made perfect sense to me well I mean one one what maybe a sort of more down home kind of like example would be the you know a med like medallions in a in a in an antique shop yeah right so if you walk into an antique shop all the objects that you see are going to be priced within a single monetary system right yeah so you'll see they all have prices on them and like you say there's the Vintage hip flask is sitting there and he like okay that's that costs so money then you see like an old Medallion and a medallion actually has the surface appearance of being like money it looks like money right it's not anything collectible and tradeable like an antique comic book or whatever yeah but let's take let's take something that actually looks like money yeah right that sort of you know and then let's you take it right and you say well this costs 150 bucks or 200 bucks whatever and it's got and it's price within this network um if you handed that person a medallion and said you know hey can I exchange this for something that looks like Monetary Exchange yeah but you would still be counter trading using resale price to to engage an exchange but people often can't uh struggle to tell the difference between um I'm trying to think the the the the the it's okay one last example of counter trade to help make make this clear the the the the easiest one people is often when you're thinking about returning something at a shop okay so you buy let's say you buy this jacket for 100 bucks you leave the shop right and then you come back to the shop and say I don't actually want this anymore right and the guy says okay you can swap this for something of equivalent price so you hand it back and you get a handbag of equivalent price now if out in space there were these alien anthropologists watching that in that interaction and they just saw that part they would see a person handing over a jacket all right and they'd see that a bag coming back and they might go back and report to their to their plan they're like oh these people use jackets as a form of money right they would see this interaction but but what was actually happening there was counter trade you were handing back a jacket implicitly getting a $100 refund handing the $100 back and getting a bag so the actual monetary the actual monetary system was the dollar system there but it sort of superficially looks like I think that's relatively clear yeah but like if if for example instead of a jacket you had bought some kind of like money like looking object and then you did that it would then really would look like Monetary Exchange and Bitcoin trades on this whole idea right it's sort of it looks a lot like money it has a sort of feeling of money um but all its interactions are completely based on counter trade and you can always see this because you can if you go to look at quote unquote Bitcoin prices for things they're constantly fluctuating as the US dollar price fluctuates and then an actual pricing Network that doesn't happen right when you're buying coffee in New York you don't see the price constantly fluctu uating as for example its exchange rate against the Euro changes anyway sorry that's that's quite a complex part of the Mak sense yeah um well I guess my my thoughts go in a couple different directions I mean one is um what do you think is likely to happen in the future I I mean you know with all this I mean um you know I I my intuition which of course could be totally wrong is that this will be like you know this will turn out to be like the subprime mortgage crisis of like 20 you know 28 or something like that you know 20 you know assuming we're still alive at that point we haven't blown ourselves up in a nuclear war um you know um or 27 or something like like you know all this speculation will go into these things um Doge obviously and and somehow it'll it'll spectacularly collapse um yeah I I I don't know you know and also we at Trump's you know kind of you know grifter history like all of his businesses go bankrupt you know it's like he pumps and dumps or or or you know then then and then um yeah and even and even you know musk I mean there's some questions about you know his businesses I mean obviously he really does create things of value but um how he does it and the effects it has and anyway so yeah what what what you know as as somebody who looks into all this stuff you know where do you see this going on on a on a sort of you know yeah well the the reason that I'm I focus so much on the actual deep nature of Bitcoin is that if you're interested in thinking about what is going to happen to it in future um its deep M nature makes a difference right because at some deep level it's an incredibly weak system right so from a it actually has it's it's really vulnerable to big price drops precis because it actually really has nothing holding it up right um and this means and you know in the past when I've actually advised Bitcoin groups before you know like yeah how would you actually turn this into a monetary system for example um there's really only two ways to do it in with the Bitcoin system um and just just a little side the reason why the question of how do you turn it into a monetary system the reason why the important to consider is the only claim that Bitcoin has as an asset for why you should buy it is that it's supposed to become some future monetary system right it's not like shares in a company that actually makes something or you know real estate that you can live and it actually has no other story other than well one day this will be like the monetary system of the world right so this is why that story is like okay so like let's hypothetically say it somehow becomes a monitary system I how would you even do that with this this incredibly constrained Supply thing um that has this very weak structure I mean the sort of first way is the one that has no State Intervention which is you try to turn it into a completely fetishized object a little bit like gold right which is the crypto industry has been quite successful at doing they've essentially taken this numbered digital object that has no real features other than you can sort of move it around and they've created an an incredibly powerful hype machine around it and actually if you carry on that process for long enough it's true that it can become culturally embedded in human society people can say well I know that it's just a sort of numbered thing but we've built whole cultures around this thing now and that that kind of gives it some sort of cultural nesting in society the other technique which is how money actually works historically is you get a powerful political body to stand behind it and accept it in taxation right to actually become the sort of create the liability side of that money system so it's not just this floating object now if the US state did that if the US state came out and said we're actually going to start authentically backing Bitcoin um accepting it for Taxation and things like that that would be a that would be a big story big big story right it will probably break very quickly because there's such an incredibly like limited Supply system that can't handle the dynamism of a global economy but that would be very big I don't think that's going to actually happen I think what's what's going to happen is that the Trump crew are going to pump the the price for the next few years for their political project to work because they've promised all these people this thing and at some point it'll fall apart right because the whole Bitcoin system relies upon this endless new streams of buyers coming in to keep their price up right and it's important to contrast it to things like the share market because you know with shares like actual capitalism works of massive corporations and stuff at some at some level extracting profit from from people right um and the sh the stock market is where that gets channeled through at some point so like you know the money that comes through in a stock market at some theoretical level at least through dividends is coming from actual Enterprises in the world people actually buying and selling stuff profit that comes from Bitcoin is purely speculative AKA you buy it at one price and try to resell it at another price there's nothing being produced there's nothing happening in that system other than you know buying and reing something that's already been created um so this is why it's inherently vulnerable to to to crashes which then what requires that endless pumping up new people coming in new stories and so on um and those stories are often running out with the FTX scandal in crypto people were actually starting to starting to lose belief in crypto right remember people were like ah I remember here you know in Berlin in sort of 2019 and stuff every party would have all these Bros talking about crypto at it right everyone wanted to talk about it after the FTX thing no nobody wanted to talk about it it was like a bit embarrassing it was kind of cringe to talk about it right um and that's a big problem for the crypto industry because for them to keep that buying pressure to keep that price up they need people constantly talking about it they need new people um and so I think the current wave Trump will bring in a whole bunch of new people but then it'll go through the same the same crash cycle once that once that pressure runs out once that once that hits its hits its limit um and so I think there could be a massive crash in terms of as all the funds and stuff start buying into it so you know when Bitcoin was still just a kind of retail investor thing that was one thing but now you're having all these big funds getting leveraged exposure to bitcoin right they're borrowing money and buying the stuff up and getting you know that's a a serious systemic systemic um systemic risk in the financial sector potentially emerging um especially with all the ETFs and stuff so I would say yeah there's a potential for for something quite serious going on um especially because the price can go down so fast most Financial assets don't go down that fast most Financial assets can't drop 40% just like that whereas Bitcoin can right A change in sentiment can send a thing flying so far down so fast so quickly and if all those those those groups are exposed to it at a large scale that's that's like a financial weapon of mass destruction right um so that's a phrase of comes from a friend of mine who talk about this but but it's um so I think that's a that's um you know if if you if you catch it right you know you could you could if you want to join the wave but you know people are going to do um but I think it's very dangerous um in the US we had this recent um shooting you know of this healthc care executive uh and it was um yeah that's been sort of like a fascinating cultural moment just the level of outpouring of enthusiasm for that um you know and then it turns out the guy was not particularly leftwing he was like watching Peter teal videos and you know listening to kind of like you know I'm sure you know some crypto stuff and so on um yeah I mean you know did you think that points out to the sort of legitimation Crisis how fragile the uh the legitimacy has at this point yeah I mean I mean i t to go with like you know Grace you know Grace Blakeley I know her I haven't read her books yet I've watched a few of her videos what what's her book again it's um she's coming from like a socialist perspective kind of like yeah yeah she's she's had a few books um stolen was one of her books and you know she um the whole sort of you know if you if you're in the situation where Collective solidarity has been undermined for decades yeah right in the old days in the 1950s and so on you if you were a disempowered young man you you know your options were were slightly different you could be like okay I'm being screwed I'm going to go join a union right I'm going to fight for my rights so like you know unions are not sort of um kind of pie in the sky sort of ideological things it's like this is like an actual practical method for me to protect my rights as a person who is in a disempowered situation in in a capitalist economy right um but as that ideological attack against Collective action in your sort of working parts of the the the capitalist system has been undermined you the sort of replacement theories that that come in is like well meritocracy you have to fight your way to the top etc etc so libertarianism actually becomes this kind of self basic self-help narratives that's what libertarianism essentially is is you know what the whole self-help industry Works upon is like you know the the reason that you're doing badly in this world is that there's you know you're not trying hard enough or you haven't thought of the right strategy yet or you know you're not quite as motivated as you should be it's got nothing to do with the structural situation go out there and be like a hero of some sort and so you know that kind of sort of libertarian thing has spread and I think the sort of Trump World operates on some variant of it which is that uh they'll point out that sort of current Elites who are the sort of you know the current Elites in our system were people who often espouse libertarianism right you're kind of corporate Elites but there there's a sort of like play theyve kind of captured a lot of sort of almost like left leing people by using a bunch of anti-corporate rhetoric it's saying oh you know the the existing Elites kind of got there through corrupt methods they didn't do competition properly they didn't do they weren't really doing capitalism they were like kind of crony capitalists and um so you can have this almost like kind of semi leftwing kind of thing going on while simultaneously promoting this kind of libertarian vision of like true capitalism in the crypto world and the meme stocks were a big part of this because they were like the little guy who was being you know Wall Street is like not real capitalism it's just kind of like crony capitalism but we're going to like band together and become this kind of the sort of mem stock brigades and that's like you know we we'll get back at them so these new hybrids emerging of libertarianism with a sort of like yeah um people power from below and I think maybe this um I just want to catch a few ideas if if um if I may because yeah you brought up a few things that yeah just so I'm one is um this idea that what they're really engineering is an attack on kind of like the professional middle management class uh like all the Civil civil bureaucrats and so on so rather than going after the corporate you know sort of higher up class um that's kind of the target um yeah yeah that's interesting yeah yeah um I I just I just uh did a synopsis of one of the of a very good podcast that talked about that in depth um and then the other thing I want to say is that Union movements are actually getting revitalized apparently in the US U and also that would sort of make sense because in a way like um if you're saying that it's all about America First and you're going to bring industry back to the US that means local workers have more stand in a way because you know the reason the whole Union thing disintegrated was corporate globalization right like if you don't if you don't take $2 an hour we're just going to Offshore we build we'll build like a free enterprise Zone uh you know in Honduras or whatever and make the stuff there um so um what I what I imagine they're going to try to do uh I mean is um you know because they also now they you know Trump is claiming they're going to deport you know tens of millions of immigrants um which would be catastrophic for the US economy which relies on all of that labor but I guess you could take those people into camps and deprive them of Rights uh and then make them work for you you know I I mean I think those Trump strategies I mean maybe I'm being naive but I think it's just like hacked together from a range of contradictory stories that don't necessarily work together right so you know your P pure your pure capitalist kind of like Elite in a sense don't think like quite quite like Trump I mean like there he's taken a bunch of things that sort of don't probably actually can't work together you know like so that sort of um on the one hand an attack on the corporate class because what what does the corporate class do with they want to undermine workers they automate and they offshore yeah as I said well it's not so much the corporate Elite it's more like the middle management class seems to be what they're what they're aiming at well it's actually like shareholders I mean that's those ones who benefit from that in the end right so so the managerial class will do that for shareholders which is like Black Rock and crew right so who who benefits from you know the the local Workforce is being undercut and you know it's it's in the end it's going to come out for the like shareholding class um so on some ways the kind of anti-immigration thing um has why I said it has almost a leftwing feeling to it except you know not a true leftwing feeling it's not it's not like an old school socialism which believed in sort of international workers rights it's like okay American workers and we're going to like throw out all the outsiders to kind of somehow give give you back some power that's been undermined through corporate globalization um and movement of people right at the same time he's trying to empower like people like Elon Musk who are like big automation people and that they're also they're going to attack the working class through automation right that's that's their thing so there's contradictions there um I don't actually believe self driving truck when you have three million truck drivers in the US that's like the biggest Workforce people who don't have like a college degree who can actually make a decent living and so on I that's what I don't actually think the campaign is coherent I don't and I don't think that's really necessarily matters I think What mattered for people was it was just that it it wasn't some like the kind of middle of the road sort of Centrist thing yeah that's I mean that's really the feeling I scared it's not it's not that his actual campaign really makes sense it's it's that like he's just kind of a little bit erratic and and a bit like exciting in some sense right which is important and this is actually on this piece I'm doing that my last piece of the art of crypto kayfabe and I use this term kayfabe very deliberately because Kay faab is this term from professional wrestling where you uh it's in the term in wrestling where you the the industry pretends to be doing that what it's doing is real right but there's an interesting thing with kayf which is actually many people in the audience do actually know that it's fake but they kind of go along with it anyway right and Trump is a master of this he everyone kind of knows that he bullshits all the time but there's something entertaining about that process and the reason you know all the kind of like ca Harris and this stuff they don't do this they're like oh we're going to kind of have this sort of like stayed you know like presentation like like we're going to talk normally as if we are trustworthy people but they don't come across those trustworthy you know a friend of mine Aris was talking about this recently just like they don't come across they might be saying something that's real but it doesn't feel like it's it's um trustworthy and in a sense there's something about what Trump Taps into which is like there's a certain absurdity to the world and to capitalism and he's going to play into it he's going to do the Kay faab and you kind of know that he's bullshitting and you know that his plan doesn't really make sense but still it's entertaining and it's a bit like something refreshing but but I think there's limits to how far that goes I mean like at some point people lose interest in that entertainment they're like okay now my life's actually being affected by this so I don't actually know how far is I'm I'm like kind of morbidly fascinated to see how this combination of contradictory things can play out and I know for you it's you know you're right there while it's happening well I don't know you know I'm looking at the Berlin artist Visa you know I could come and uh hang out with you and you know berine and stuff like that you may see me you could be you could be one of the sort of Exile the Americans in in Exile every here it is possible I mean I am a little concerned you know you know CU he's also uh and he's starting a campaign against the Free Press obviously yeah nice you know and you know we don't know how far that's going to go in terms of you know where he's going to take that uh I it could be interesting to leave America for a couple years and come back and then see what it feels like you know um so I wanted to you know since you know we we I really appreciate this conversation I yeah really uh appreciate your your views and insights I'm kind of curious also in the last piece I read which wasn't the kayf piece I forgot about that one uh I did enjoy that too but you were talking about uh yeah more kind of like positive ideas about what are some real Alternatives and of course that's kind of exciting you mentioned my my old friend Tom Greco who I wrote about a bunch published some of his Works um yeah so what what what do you seeing on the Forefront you know I mean I guess you know having been around this stuff for you know quite a while now it always feels like the Alternatives fail uh and um you know the the the thing that's bad just keeps getting worse and worse uh but I mean you know maybe that doesn't have to happen forever you never know uh there could be a surprise reversal so what what what are you seeing anything out there you mentioned a few um you know Mutual Credit clearing which which piece which piece were you reading oh shoot uh what was it called um interesting uh I don't think it was my last piece maybe what's that my last piece was on surveillance capitalism no I didn't read that one I'd love to read that one uh shoot now I don't know where I don't know was it was it was okay yeah okay no worries no worries uh but yeah you're talking about Mutual Credit clearing you know Mutual was not Z zero is a future of money maybe yeah exactly yeah yeah right so yeah what what are you seeing as some embraceable options here yeah so zero is a future of money is piece where was it was um set up as a thesis antithesis and synthesis so the as a sort of structure you know like being like you know sort of we have a standard system which is the standard monetary system which is this you know big three-dimensional system I was just discussing earlier it's massive hierarchy is also very Dynamic um underpinned by these big nation state monetary systems Bitcoin presents itself as this antithesis to that right it's like we're gonna have this distributed but like very static like money system it's very like rigid and and like weird right and doesn't doesn't work and as I was mentioning it actually becomes a counter trade object traded within the normal monetary system but ideologically it claims to be an antithesis to the normal monetary system and actually there's a synthesis that's possible where you take elements of all those things so you take the dynamism of an expanding Contracting credit money system or the fat system that we have and you take the sort of distributed nature of stuff like crypto um and so some of the most interesting movements for me over the last few years have coming from the sort of co-fire scene collaborative finance and Rippling credit type systems that are people trying to design so these are these systems where you'll um um I don't know how bigger detail you want me to do into credit theories of money but basically you drop this will you drop the weird hard money fixation yeah right and you say you know um money is money is a system of credit between interdependent people all right and so you and then that's an expans that that expands in a contract right like that's a it's a dynamic system it doesn't so so fixating on this weird hard like limited like concepts of limited tokens is is counterproductive it's also like doesn't reflect reality in an actual economic system and so I think some of those interesting stuff is when you when you start to try to take the dynamism of a fat system and flatten the power hierarchy um without going down this hard money route of Bitcoin and that tends to be where the sort of Mutual Credit thinking comes in so if anybody's interested in this kind of stuff you really got to immerse yourself in credit theories of money right you got to stop thinking about money as a thing and start thinking about money as a system of credit and that takes a little bit of practice it takes takes some some um uh doing but once you do that once you understand credit theories of money it really really opens up a lot of stuff in terms of understanding um things um so I I'll park that there as a as a topic of you if you want to explore that that's a thing um the other thing that's also interesting me is breaking down standard progress ideologies and in some ways you know Trump and crew are one version of this right they they've got this kind of like pent weird sort of nationalistic thing that's going in some ways is a reaction against standard capitalist progress ideologies around endless expansion and acceleration they're kind of going to sort of defensive type of thing um but I'm I'm become very interested in you know how do we how do we start to break out of um or diversify our progress ideas and this comes out of my work on cash protecting physical cash because um my last book was all about protecting physical cash and I get a lot of people coming out coming at me because of that saying oh you don't believe in progress you know how could you possibly support something that's slower than digital money and so on right so I've had to do a lot of work on how do you respond to people's um sense of what progress means um so that's like another big project of mine is uh deconstructing typical progress narratives typical typical iic progress narratives and I think there's a lot of potential potential in that because I think people in general are starting to get sick of standard Silicon Valley progress stories like they're told that you know you should always desire more and faster and more automation Etc I think many people don't actually resonate with that with that that Viewpoint um yeah of course the far the far edge of the tech uh you know Singularity uh transhumanist kind of um ideology you know is a uh I I actually kind of think that maybe musk has even said this to Trump because you know as we we talked about before like you know um you know are they gonna are they gonna you know is Trump going to get tired of musk is he G to throw him out or whatever is like an ego battle but I think musk has said look buddy let me run the show I'm going to put all the resources to the artificial super intelligence within like five years we're going to have cracked immortality and and we're going to get you a body that's like you know you'll be back to like 35 years old in great shape and you'll live forever uh and you'll you know and so just let let me take take over and that that's what what we'll get you know yeah yeah it's that that's quite possible yeah um and I you know it's not even impossible that it's possible yeah it's it's definitely yeah um if nothing else the Trump the Trump moment is is um providing a lots of um what's the word it's creating some interesting cocktails hybrids of ideologies that don't fit the standard standard stuff because in some ways um you know from my work on cash protecting physical cash you know I was coming up from a leftwing perspective right so um cashless Society is a privatization process it's also a capit automation process surveillance system yeah but it's also something you'd expect in an accelerating system right it's like um you know capitalism is a bit like a kind of you like an aoris snake that eats its own tail to try to shed its skin you know so it's it's constantly trying to like push stuff that's you know slower out so the cash system of course it's like like destroy this slower thing that we once was our old skin you know yeah like that kind of like the the sort of then that manifest ideologically on the ground was a bunch of anti-h rhetoric of people be oh it's so inconvenient whatever you know it's this is what happens in in the capital system um and in some ways people who aligned with me I get lots of trump supporters who would come to me being like Oh yeah yeah we we're also proach I've had lots of this over over my years of doing cash work realizing that in this new right are lots of people who have an inherent concern about basically C capitalist Automation and acceleration processes they they they sense it there's like something insecure about a capitalist system they're like we don't like these big Tech players we don't like what they do to us and they were actually captured by lots of that kind of new protectionist rhetoric that Trump puts out right A lot of these people were formerly leftwing people this is what sometimes gets called diagonalis right this weird mix between leftward left and right which like Russell Brand and stuff specialize in right so they um Trump actually has captured all these people who actually at some level feel sometimes disempowered by Capital systems while simultaneously like hiring people like musk who are like hyper like utopian capitalists where they're like we will automate everything and like create immortality and go to the Moon maybe dystopian capitalists is yeah exactly exactly so it's a really like crazy mix right so um if I'm being dark about it then it's like okay what's probably happening here as a new phase of capitalist accumulation where a new Elite's going to use the crisis of an old Elite to grab power for themselves whilst maintaining that they're actually doing it for the working classes which is quite a fasy sort of thing that's like that's a very classic fascist move yeah right also know as I said this attack on like the middle management like the you know like like what musk did to Twitter where he took out all the people who are like doing content moderation so you centralize it you streamline it and actually now with AI you know for a lot of these systems you really are only going to need like a tiny fraction of of the people that you once needed you know and this is a very like this is a very fascist this is where the fascist analysis partly comes in because historically fascist movements did this they would they would play on workingclass spheres to actually install like a new sort of capitalist elite and anti-worker stuff they would destroy unions and they would do all this stuff to actually break worker power whilst being like making out that they were actually the sort of new um and it wasn't free free market capitalism and this is the mistake that a lot of people make with when they think about these systems they're like oh well but capitalism is when you have free markets it's like capitalism is when you have certain people owning things and other people having to work for them right like and you're stuck in this kind of Market vortex in the process um you can do that with authoritarian Elites you can do it I I just read the um new book by the president of Heritage Foundation who was one of the um architects of project 2025 and uh yeah it's pretty intense read but um yeah there he basically says that this whole Milton fredman free market idea was was completely wrong uh and um yeah that's not that's not you know they're they're they're jetting jetting that now it's much more about controlling the economy but also um you know and we'll see as we said there's different factions because obviously the musk faction um you know RFK they're not religious zealots but you know these guys are also like we want to um you know this is going to be a Pious Christian Nation and we're going to force you know prayer in school and he wants to actually uh not only destroy the the board of education but if possible seize the endowments of um IV League schools like Harvard and so on um and you shake out all the all the progressive um uh liberal kind of thinking uh and build like a whole new uh system just based on you know Christian uh nationalism you yeah well that's that's the sort of that's the fasy side of that yeah and it suppose it depends on the strength of the US Civil Society culture and stuff because I mean you know that's that that that ability to to do that depends on you know your political organism that you're in you know um in South Africa where I'm from we actually have quite a strong Civil Society culture right so this is you know South Africa is way poorer than the us and stuff but the government actually has limits to what it can do because there's push back people actually do especially post- aarte South Africa um there's there's quite a strong sense that like you can't mess with us but that but you can slowly erode that belief over time if you cross the border into Zimbabwe for example people that that that belief has been eroded you don't have people basically just sort of are often cowed down by these these political systems and I suppose in the US the thing is like you know would a increasing authoritarian regime be able to essentially Crush that spirit that you find historically in the US people will sort of push back at certain points um I don't know I mean the US still has quite a lot of the US has a lot of capitalist Elites who might not like certain things that are going on who might start forming counil power yeah well ultimately also I mean you know Trump himself and all these people are going to be very responsive to the stock market market so if the um you know if they gut you know Americans capacity for like business Innovation and all that kind of stuff um um you know I mean yeah I mean I always go back to my my little personal history and thinking about how like you know my first book was on psychedelics and Shamanism and if I'd been living in Russia and China or China that book would never have even been published and you know that that book and a few other things I think started to catalyze like a shift that ultimately led to like now it's like you know a multi-billion dollar industry in in in in psychedelics so it's now fed the capitalist machine you know which was not obviously my intention and I'm not really happy about the development but um yeah so if you don't allow for free thinking and Innovation um you ultimately will you know saw off the the the the the healthy Branch upon which your your thing is growing I think you know yeah yeah anyway weird times um let's uh let's do soon maybe it' be interesting to do like a triangulated conversation maybe with you and me and rush cof for something uh yeah I mean I'm going to be doing more I mean basically I'm re-entering the crypto debate because of this this new thing I stay Stayed away from it for a few years but now now I'm feeling motivated to get back into it and to start to form you know um I'm always interested in talking to people who's trying trying to form some kind of like counterpower to this to the sort of new big crypto narrative that's going to start coming out yeah um empowering more Progressive um forms of crypto I'm not against you know uh underlying decentralized technology Concepts right but the current version we're seeing now is like a swamp ification there's like an inchi ification of crypto that's going to that's going to occur under Trump and I think we need to start forming counterpower against that um but also to start to study like how it works with his with his ideology and his narrative and I think it's I think it's quite important ideologically for him right well then you also have like whatever has happened with ethereum and and vitalic Budan and all and that whole Squad um I mean that thing is still holding value but I but I don't understand what it what it's doing yeah maybe that's maybe that's for another conversation yeah another conversation because I I have to cook I have to cook my yeah yeah you cook cook great to see you and get to chat and we and we'll talk have a great have a great uh we're talking right before Christmas have a great Christmas and we'll touch soon all right Daniel peace out
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.