Inflation, Architecture, and the Death of Beautiful Buildings - a Yoeman Podcast Guest Episode

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you Time preference really did change how we approach building and I feel like it seeped into our psyches. I want something that smells nice, that smells new, that looks great. I don't care how it's gonna look in five years. I wanna see it and feel it and smell it today. But really houses should be understood as consumption goods. They're not an asset that is generating a return for you.

Speaker 1

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tennell. I'm excited to share a guest episode I did on the Yeoman podcast with Jeff Graham. It's a really fun podcast. It's a little bit different, a little unique, and we actually had four guests. We had me, we had Jeff Graham, who's a developer. We had Jamie Azurieta. who was on the podcast a few episodes ago and also Seifedean Amoose, the author of The Bitcoin Standard. And what's cool is I actually read The Bitcoin Standard earlier this year. And The Bitcoin Standard is actually not about Bitcoin. I'm not a Bitcoiner. didn't own any Bitcoin. I still don't own any Bitcoin. I wish I did. But The Bitcoin Standard, what was so interesting about it is the first three quarters of the book has nothing to do with Bitcoin. But it's really about the history of money and what is money and ultimately, what is the problem Bitcoin is trying to solve? And after reading the book, I had such a better understanding and appreciation of why Bitcoin exists. I don't know enough and I'm not a technologist to say I believe Bitcoin is going to be the future currency of the world. But what I do understand now is why does Bitcoin exist and what problem is it trying to solve? What is the difference between hard money and easy money? And why is that so important? And frankly, it's a fascinating book. I recommend everyone read it. I actually recommended it to my dad. Totally not a bitcoiner, and he really enjoyed it. Was really surprised by it. So I recommend that book. And here in this episode, we're kind of tying this idea of money. to building great places in architecture. And those things might sound like, why did they go together? Well, because of the financialization that's happened over the 20th century and particularly the past 50 years. And a lot of that financialization can be tied back to our monetary system. And it has all kinds of downstream effects about our architecture and our city building and how things get funded and how things get built.

Speaker 1

Really interesting and we're only kind of scratching the surface on this episode. I might do a solo episode sometime, but for now enjoy and also thank you, Jeff Graham for having me on and please go check out the Yeoman podcast. Y O E A N. If you are in the market for high quality windows or doors, whether residential or commercial new construction or remodels, I highly recommend you check out Sierra Pacific Windows, who we use at Building Culture on a lot of our projects, as well as if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out One Source Windows and Doors and want to thank them for sponsoring this podcast. Welcome to the Yeoman podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Graham. Today is the 21st of October. I'm recording here from the studio at Big Ridge Mountain Club in lovely Glenville, North Carolina. Last week, my daughter and I were passing through the little town of Isla in Madison County, Georgia. Isla was incorporated in 1910. It has a population of just under 350. The census tells me that over the last 75 years or so, that number has fluctuated between 300 and 350 people. It's a small community. And presumably it was smaller before that, you know, going back in the early part of the 1900s. So 350 people today and far fewer way back when is not many people. But the intersection of Main Street and Commerce Street There stands a string of beautiful, quintessentially Main Street Americana buildings. They are inviting two-story brick, tall glass storefronts, know, exactly the kind of small town Main Street building that I'm talking about. They're modest, but they're beautiful, and they're certainly enduring. I'm guessing they're about a century old, and still they stand in that little town.

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of Isla, Georgia. Caddy Corner to that string of pearls is a contemporary gas station. It's exactly what you think of when you think of contemporary gas station. Garrish and disposable. I don't mean to not. The owners, it actually looked very tidy. It looked well run. It's the kind of place that I'd be fine with my daughter if she was by herself, you know, stopping in to get something. But still, it is clearly disposably built. And around the corner from that is the town's post office, which looks to have been built in the 1980s. And despite its important civic purpose, it's not beautiful. It is not enduring. You've seen dozens of these little small town post offices before. I'm sure you can picture this one. So this brings me to the topic I'd like to explore today. A hundred or so years ago, out of the farming community of fewer than 300 people, Those beautiful little buildings sprouted up in Isla, Georgia. How did they do it? And why are each of the buildings that followed progressively less beautiful? Why did they become less and less enduring? And why are the ones built today effectively disposable? What happened? To explore that topic, I'm pleased to have with me three guests, two who have joined me before on Yeoman, Austin Tanel, and episode two, my very first guest, thank you, Austin, and Jaime Isurrieta Varela in episode 14. And our third guest is the economist and author, Seyfadeen Amoose. Welcome, gentlemen. Glad to have you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2

Austin, I'd appreciate it if you could get us started. You are a Mason, a builder, a real estate developer. Paint the picture for us of what it might have been like to build that little string of pearls in a relatively remote rural American community in the early 1900s. How did they do it? And why are eyeless buildings still standing? Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. I'm not a historian, so it'll be interesting what you guys all think. Like, I don't know how exactly were things built in 1900, but I can give you the things that come to mind for me when I think about it is one, you're limited by local materials. You know, the transcontinental railroad 1870. So you've got start having transportation throughout the country, but still from the train station to wherever you're building your little town, you still got to get the materials. So. You've got a lot more local materials. You've got like real vernacular, know, brick you've made on site timber you've cut down around. You also it's not professionally designed. This is a product of culture and people. There was no such thing as a professional architect detached from a general contractor with, you know, national bank financing backed up by the Fed. These are people. practicing the tradition of building that's been around for hundreds and thousands of years and saying, we need to build a little cottage. And they're building it out of simple materials. It's a little rectangle on a main street. And it still managed to be incredibly beautiful. The other thing that comes to mind is it has to be, you know, there are banks then, but this is the banks operated very differently where things were locally financed. know, there weren't pension funds or financing this from people in a boardroom in New York. These are local people self-financing within the community, doing something incrementally over time. And the amazing thing is, is you end up with all this stunning beauty because it's a real product of the community and the place and the people that are there, not some imported culture distorted by financial incentives. So those are some of the things that come to my mind. Local materials.

Speaker 1

not professionally designed and more locally financed. The thing I wonder about, and I see all that like it's Georgia known for our red clay. They were all those bricks. They probably made those bricks right there nearby. But a thing I wonder, like today, we can get the greatest, most amazing materials from essentially anywhere in the world. Like we could, why? So this question I have, it's like, Why are we not able to do better? Why is better than that not the standard? And that's the thing that I just constantly think about when I pass through these little southern towns or little towns wherever when I travel to Europe. think I want to make sure to ask safe about this and the Bitcoin. I think it was the Bitcoin standard. Talk about what one of the One of the moments you were inspired to begin writing about this was visiting Florence. Am I right about that? Yes, that's true.

Speaker 2

And it's unusual in my read of economics for an economist to speak so much about beauty. And I think about this relationship to these little farmers, not they were normal sized farmers, but these farmers in rural Georgia in 1910 or 1920. It seems like what they built there was intuitively beautiful and yet It's so hard for us to do that now. And so that's the thing I want you guys to ask yourselves. Thank Yeah, I mean, I think so. I'm not an architect. I'm not a builder, but I've lived in homes all of my life and that's more than 40 years of experience in houses. I do have some kind of familiarity with the topic, but that's not really where I get my my main idea is really an economic idea and it has to do with money, which I discuss in the Bitcoin Standard, my first book and in more detail in the Fiat standard. And it ultimately comes down to the impact of inflationary money. And so one very important thing that happened in 1914 around that time is that the world effectively went off the gold standard. The few years around the World War I with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and European countries suspending the gold standard and then the US suspending the gold standard. That really was the

Speaker 3

move of the world economy and the majority of the world's productive activity off of a gold based monetary system onto a government money based monetary system. And I think that's a big deal. And I think that doesn't get talked about quite enough. So my contention is that what money you

Speaker 3

allows us to do is save into the future. And so it allows us to think about the future and it allows us to provide for the future. And so the better our money is at providing for the future, the better it serves the function of storing value into the future. The more it makes the future certain for us, the less uncertain the future becomes, the more we can plan for the future, the more we can think about the future. This is the idea of time preference. would enable us to have low time preference rather than in an uncertain future would lead to high time preference, valuing today much more than the future. Excuse me. Yeah, so the idea of time preference is that time preference is always positive. Everybody always prefers the present to the future. So given a choice between having something today or having it 10 years from now, you would always choose to have it today. There's no situation in which you're indifferent between getting something today or getting it 100 years from now or 10 years from now or even one year from now or even one day from now. Your preference is always for the present, but the degree to which you discount the future varies between people. And so the better we are at thinking of the future, the less we discount the future. Effectively, we call that low time preference. It's low discounting of the present, low discounting of the future. So we favor the present, of course, but we only favor it a little bit. So the lower your time preference, the more you think of the future. And the more likely you are to act with the future in mind. So I think the ability of money to hold onto its value is like a control knob for time preference. And that's the way that I think of it. And so when we live in a society in which everybody uses a form of money that's hard to make, that means that's good at holding onto its value to the future. That gives you a level of certainty.

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about the future gives you level of understanding of how you expect the future to be. And of course, there's no certainty in life, but there are degrees of uncertainty. And when the money is destroyed, when the value of the money is declining over time, you have less reliable ways of providing for the future. So the future becomes more uncertain for you. And so you're more likely to discount the future in favor of the present. So I think this is a pervasive idea. Once you see it, you see it everywhere because our degree of thinking about the future in this country, the future affects all manners of decisions. And I discussed this mainly from the perspective of economic decision making in terms of people's savings and people's ability to get into debt. And you see that when the money's inflationary, everybody's more likely to be into debt, whereas when the money's hard, people are more likely to save and to not get into debt, which is more of a low time preference behavior. But in the VIAF standard, I explored the relationship with architecture. And I think I'd posit that this is probably one way of explaining the difference between what people think of as beautiful architecture in general and what people think of as ugly. I should say these are Highly charged terms, many people will disagree with us. Many people will say that modern is beautiful and classical is old. I think that modernism has jumped the shark, so to speak.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I certainly agree on that. Well, mean, so I should mention I have thought about this question, like, why are buildings not as beautiful? And I've had I've I felt like there are a lot of culprits from the introduction of, you know, modernism and kind of its capture of the architectural profession via the academy infrastructure policy. which lends itself toward cars and all kinds of other things. But it was listening to an episode that's safe that you recorded on the Bitcoin standard with Michael Diamante. not sure I'm... I know Michael via X, but I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his last name correctly, but we'll link to that in the show notes, which introduced to me this notion of how time preference was connected to architecture and... It was intuitive, made intuitive sense to me. when I'm working, I do a lot of things on my own for enjoyment, largely. I'm not a great carpenter, but I like building things. But when I'm building something to serve a purpose that will only be temporary, I make zero effort into making it beautiful. And when I'm building something that is going to be there for a long time and I want it to be there for long time. I put a lot of effort into making it beautiful. And this notion of time preference and thinking about that gas station in Isla and comparing it with the handful of little two story, not little, they're actually pretty, they struck me as large for a community of that size. That little string of pearls I described on Main Street and Commer Street in Isla as beautiful. I think that was so early on, it was, think before

Speaker 2

Before infrastructure policy, it affected things, and before academia, it affected things, and before monetary policy, it affected things. I'm like, God, know, that time preference really did change how we approach building. I feel like it seeped into our psyches and affected the way we even value beauty in our thinking of this contemporary view that Beauty is totally in the eye of a holder and what's beautiful today might be different tomorrow. And so we shouldn't even care about it in any way. I'm rambling a bit, but if you guys could rattle that. What I think is two things. Number one, we have ascending societies and we have descending societies. Ascending societies are building and they are constantly looking for creative ways to make their lives better. And in that process, they make everyone's lives better. We are building, we are building up, we are ascending. And then on the other hand, we have the descending ones where we basically stop building. Architecture, I feel, is a manifestation of culture. Right now we are having this debate. Right now we are talking about architecture. We're talking about time preference. We're talking about... how this beautiful string of pearls that you referred to in ILA came about in a society that was not thinking about these things. And this is the second important distinction. Right now we are thinking consciously about those things. We are trying to figure out what is low time preference? What is high time preference? How can we move from our high time preference to our low time preference? What are the roles of central banks in destroying the capacity of people to look in the future. Before there was none of that before they just lived within beauty because the time preff what it does the time preference is it pervades culture. It becomes culture. People were not thinking about, I have a low time preference. So I will build beautifully. Like fish and water. They're like, right. Like fish and what these are utilitarian buildings. Those people who build them.

Speaker 2

They were probably, like Choc Marron says, they were probably illiterate workers that had no idea about beauty, had no idea about architecture, probably had never in their lives seen a picture of the Greek canon for architecture and the orders or anything like that. They just had this sense of they live in this world that has this water in which they are swimming, the fish are swimming, and they just build it that way. These buildings were probably for a tailor, which he himself built. Another building was probably for maybe a cobbler, which he himself built. And these were not buildings meant to be beautiful. These were buildings meant to be utilitarian. It's just the beauty was all around us. We were able to manifest it in our buildings, which are probably the largest or the greatest manifestation of human. intelligence and knowledge, buildings. These are the places like Safe said when he started. He's not an architect, but he's lived in buildings his whole life. We live in buildings our whole lives. And this is what we see. We see great buildings and we just emulate those great buildings because this is what we have. Sometime, and I will say that, yes, it is the beginning of the 20th century, right before the First World War when things started to break. Up until then, we were swimming in beauty. were manifesting beauty. Our culture was a beautiful culture that was ascending. We break that and then we begin a descent. And the descent is manifested now in horrible gas stations, in horrible government buildings, in just buildings that are hostile to the people who not only inhabit them, but who come in contact with them in the city.

Speaker 2

Historically speaking, US was not the... People had been going down this road of central banking and fiat currency well before the US started on it. Is that right? Yeah, mean, historically, countries, governments, it's a cycle. start off with the market has a choice of money, then the government starts telling people, hey, we're just going to regulate it. We're going to print the coins or print the money, mint the coins or print the paper. And then they start making coins adulterated with base metals, or they start printing more money. Did this too? Yeah.

Speaker 3

than they have gold and reserve. It's a story as old as time and it keeps playing out. But I think 1914 was a pretty major milestone. And that was the The Federal Reserve Act was 1913 and then it sort of began happening in 1914. Is that right? Yes, and at the same time World War I started and when World War I started, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Austria, all of these countries suspended the gold standard and they've arguably never been back on the gold standard since then. That was a war measure for to to. finance the war. I mean, before that in the 19th century, since 1870, practically all of the major world economies had been on the gold standard and the rest of the world was catching up. And before that, before 1870, the ones that weren't on the gold standard were on the silver standard. You'd have occasional episodes of some inflation here and there, but mostly the whole world had been on a hard money standard.

Speaker 3

for the majority of the previous century at least. describe the hard money because I didn't know until reading your book, the Bitcoin Standard, exactly what that meant and why it's important. And a couple of other things while you're explaining hard money, kind of remembering back to the book, things that really struck me was going through history where you even use the example of the first money on the islands with the big stones. For example, the Roman Empire clipping their coins, coin clipping, Dark Ages and even Florence. What did they do? They created hard money. And that's, think you make the argument of that bringing us out of the dark ages in some ways. So I was just wondering if you could hit on those few things for people listening, because those are pretty interesting points that I didn't understand. Yeah, so the concept of hard money refers to the difficulty of making more of the money. I think the best way of measuring this is the supply growth rate. So what percentage gets added on to the supply at any particular year? And this is a very powerful metric. So all of human history, we're constantly moving toward harder and harder money. And then that helps us become, as I was mentioning earlier, more future oriented. It helps us save more. It helps us accumulate more capital. And it allows us to trade more, allows us to engage in more productive economic activity. So as money gets harder, our civilization advances. But then every now and then we, you know, like a college kid who just goes out and ruins a good semester by boozing and doing drugs with his friends on final exam week. Every now and then we

Speaker 3

go and we destroy our monetary system and then watch all of society collapse like a giant paper machete installation in the rain. And the way they do it, you know, it differs from time to time as I was mentioning earlier, but effectively what happens is that the supply growth rate of money increases. In other words, money goes from hard to easy. And that you see that happening in, you know, in poor countries and third world countries. You see that happening quite often. see it happening at a fast pace wherein a new president takes over and says we're going to build schools and hospitals and all kinds of nice things. Then his bank account in Switzerland gets full and all kinds of money is being spent on all kinds of things and then prices begin to rise and then people get upset and then there's a fiscal crisis and a monetary crisis and a foreign exchange crisis and then there's a dollar shortage and then they start locking up people for buying and selling dollars on the market because that becomes a criminal activity because you're buying at the real market rate rather than the rate that the government wants you to pretend believe. But that is all of these things, all of the problems that you see on TV essentially are symptoms of the one economic problem, which is inflation. Everything is a symptom of inflation. real issue is inflation. Once they start destroying the money, everything falls apart. Everything begins to fall apart. And all of the other economic problems are essentially a consequence of that. So unemployment, the destruction of the value of the currency, inequality, all kinds of issues you can really trace back to the destruction of the currency. So historically we see that all throughout history people just move to the harder money and then when you have a situation where there's a harder money and an easy money, the value that is stored in the easy money gets destroyed and people move on to the harder money. And this is how the world ended up in the 19th century on gold because gold is the hardest money ever or was before the invention of Bitcoin because gold supply increases every year at only around one and a half to 2 % per year. So

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As much as much as can be mined. That's is that right? Yeah. Because the thing is with gold, it's indestructible. So we've been accumulating gold for thousands of years. So the gold that Cleopatra wore thousands of years ago may be in your wedding ring today or in a coin of gold, a gold coin you own today. So because we have all of this supply that has been accumulating for thousands of years, even as we keep getting better and better and better at producing things, we can only add a tiny little fraction to the supply that we've accumulated. over thousands of years. So every year's production is only around one and a half to two percent of existing supplies. And that's effectively what's been the case for gold for about a century now. So because of that gold is hard to make, it's hard to increase the supply substantively. And so people who use it as money benefit at the expense of people who don't use it as money. And so over time, everybody ends up using it as money. That's how gold becomes money. And now when people use it as money, they have the ability to save for the future, they have the ability to provide their future selves with economic energy, economic spending power. under the gold standard, the people who built those nice houses in Isla that you saw, could work a day's work, get paid in gold or a month's work or a year's work, get paid in gold, put that gold under the mattress and then only take it out from 10 years time. And 10 years later, that same gold coin will have become more valuable. can buy you more things usually in 10 years time it'll likely buy you more apples, more oranges, it'll buy you more of a house, it'll buy you more of a horse or car at that time. Because we make more cars, we make more horses, we make more houses, we make more of everything at a higher rate than we make more of gold. So overall, you know, not always sometimes things do become more expensive but

Speaker 3

Overall, the trend would be that the purchasing power of your gold coin increases without it having to do anything. So you just stick it under your mattress. You keep working. You keep accumulating gold and then you're able to provide for your future self. So this, I believe this is what I was arriving at with my previous answer to the question. I think this can help us explain something about architecture in that when the money that you have allows you to provide for your future self, reliably like gold did. You have the option of just holding on to the gold and then having that gold into the future. So if you're going to spend it on something, it's more likely that you'd want that thing to be there in the future because if you don't buy the thing with it and you just keep the gold, the gold will be there. You know, the gold will be there and it'll appreciate. So it's more likely that you would want to spend it for things that are. able to last because the default option for you is that you have hard money that you could store it into so it can last. So if you're going to buy a house, it's more likely that you're going to want the house that's going to last. Similarly, and I think equivalently to that, your ability to provide for yourself in terms of saving makes your discounting of the future lower. And because you have a low discounting of the future, you care about building a house that lasts for a long time. Whereas when your money is broken and your money doesn't allow you to save effortlessly for the future, you have to go into the stock market casino and you have to learn foreign exchange and you have to understand what the central bank in Japan is doing. And you have to understand bond markets. If you need to basically have a PhD in geopolitics and economics and finance in order to just simply keep the value that you've already earned. which is what you need to do in the current fiat monetary system, then it's not very easy for you to provide for your future self. The future is uncertain, unreliable.

Speaker 3

And therefore you have a high discounting rate for the future. So when you're building a house, are discounting very highly, very heavily the state of that house 30 years from now. If your discounting rate is pretty high, then you're not going to care about what the house is going to look like in 30 years time. So you're going to maximize for utility in a way that heavily discounts the future and prioritizes short-term uses. So I think You.

Speaker 3

I mean, some of the ideas I have about how that affects architecture is that, well, why use the sturdy rocks that will make this house last for 500 years when you could use plaster and cheaper materials that can do the job for the next 20, 30 years, no problem. And then after 30 years, who cares? Right. So a thing that I have trouble wrapping my head around is that I get. And I feel like there's an explanation somewhere in there for why, despite the disposability of newer construction, real estate values are generally, people are wanting to put their money in real estate. Real estate's appreciating generally. I feel like that has to do with supply constraints from the regulatory environment. But I don't feel like that's a complete answer to the question. You have a perfect storm. You have the economy. What the economy is doing is turning the dial on the, like, same size as turning the dial onto the higher time preference. But also, we are over-regulating everything. And I have this meme that I, whenever someone someone talks about how Europe has achieved this sort of regulatory environment, whatever. The meme is a Venn diagram. On one side is China, on the other side is the US. And of course, China has quantum computing or whatever. And the US has, I don't know, nuclear, whatever. And then in the middle, where AI is meeting, you know, middle of the Venn diagram. then there's outside of the Venn diagram is Europe with regulation. And I think we're doing the same thing.

Speaker 2

I think what we're doing is we're creating this box in which things just cannot be built because we are maybe not even thinking that we're doing it, but because we see the affluence of society, we see how far we've come, we see, and we have basically solved most of our problems. We only have the top of the problems to, Thanks.

Speaker 2

fix. And so what we're doing is we're trying to make everything safe. We're trying to make everything delegated because we don't want to get our hands dirty and everything gets sent to this agency, let's call it government, that regulates everything. When that happens, we are trying to, I don't know, I'm trying to build a new business and I want to put up a sign. And there's 75 agencies I have to apply for. because the sign, because the historic preservation, the sign may not be accurate with the Commerce Department because the sign might be the name of my business might be taking. And there's so many instances that I have to go through, so many hoops I have to jump through to be able to create that sign that if I don't have the backing of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, I may not be able to sustain myself while I am waiting for those permits to come. Right? And then maybe the California Coastal Commission might not like my tweets. And so they may fill my project. This is not a joke. mean, it's, it sounds like a joke, but it is not a joke. It's not a joke, but it's an extreme. You're, painting the most extreme example that sadly is a real example. Right. I have to jump through all these hoops and then where am I going to put my money? Am I going to put my money in some thing that will be sinking and sinking and sinking costs for years until I get the approval or. will I put my money in a place where everything is nicely regulated and I can just, I don't know, pay and go through super fast and build something that is horrible, that is cheap, that is zoned out. So it's just residential in the middle of nowhere that is not serviced by anything. So exacerbating all the problems that we have right now in urbanism, right? Because that's the easy part. is, everything is so regulated that If I go through the proper channels and I do things as fast as I can, the outcome will be horrible. So we have created this bounding box of regulation that is compounding with the high time preference, that is compounding with the inflation that is impacting the cost of materials, and also with the high time preference of the people who are wanting things right now.

Speaker 2

I want something that smells nice, that smells new, that looks great. I don't care how it's going to look in five years. I want to see it and feel it and smell it today because this is where I will make my Instagram selfie. Everything is compounding, right? I think that's probably a good way to see it. It's just boxes that are put on top of each other, not letting us see the other side. Something that I think here that you're talking is just distinguishing between wealth and money. know, Jeff, to your point of people like putting their money in real estate because in inflationary monetary policy, that's at least an asset. know, and so for me, I went a long time without really understanding the difference between wealth and money. You know, that money, it's a unit of account. It's medium exchange. And it's a store of value, but it's not wealth because you don't have anything to buy with the money. If you don't have a house to buy, if you don't have a car to buy, people are producing things in the economy. You could have all the money in the world. could have all the gold in the world. And it means absolutely nothing. You can stack it. You know, it's a game. So that idea of wealth and part of the problem with inflation is, you know, too much money chasing too few goods. And we all saw this in COVID. where it cost me 40 % more to build today than it is four years ago. And you have all these people hemming and hawing about why and how did this happen? Well, we printed a third of money in existence, you know, in four years and injected so much money into the economy. And what happens is the people with assets, you know, the people with real estate, the people with capital means of production. I mean, they call it the greatest transfer of wealth and history, I believe some people say just kind of during the COVID policy. Lastly, thinking about

Speaker 1

disincentivization of creating quality stuff and how it continues to destroy culture and actually centralize wealth in a few and then destroy wealth society as a whole is because we can never get ahead. And when people like worry about the cost of housing, well, one, we have inflation, but two, we can never increase the supply of housing because one, yeah, regulatory, we don't build enough, but two, the stuff we build you know, gets destroyed in 30 to 50 years. And I think of the idea of just like compound interest, compound architecture. Most of Europe basically has this idea of compound architecture wealth they built during the 15th and 16th and 17th century that still persists today. If they were having to rebuild that because Europe in so many ways economically is starting to fail, but they still have all the societal wealth that they built. And if they didn't already have that, they would not be in very good shape. I mean, they're not in good shape and it was totally disastrous if they didn't have all those. If they were having to build hell, they'd be over and over again. Yeah. I think about, I think I heard a long, time ago, I think it was Tim Ferriss, but said something, a longer version of to be wealthy is to be unrushed.

Speaker 1

I'm going to share a little trick we use at building culture. So if you're designing a house, you have to have egress windows or egress in any bedroom, for example. And the problem with that is egress windows are very large, especially if it's a double hung window or something like that. And because of design constraints, sometimes we want a smaller window if it's in a dormer or just for the hierarchy of the elevations. Well, a really cool trick that we use with our Sierra Pacific windows is we'll take something from their urban casement line and we'll put what's called a piano hinge on it. And so rather than a kind of a normal casement that kind of slides open where only part of the window is open, this is almost like a door hinge. And so the entire window opens and you can meet egress with a two foot by four foot window, a 2040 window. It's the smallest possible egress window anyone makes. And that's a nice little design trick. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will actually think that's really cool. So check out Sierra Pacific windows and if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out one source windows and doors. We at building culture use both of them regularly. ... I should say, think another point to what you mentioned, Jeff, on why the prices of housing continues to rise. I think it's because in this world in which money loses its value, people start using all kinds of other things as their savings accounts, as their method of saving into the future. So 150 years ago, you could just take a gold coin and stick it under your mattress and wait 10 years. And that was your saving account.

Speaker 3

performed like a stock portfolio that probably returns something like 10 % after tax today. Because if you think about it, I would say, I think a more realistic estimate of the devaluation of the dollar is something in the range of 7 % per year. And so if you're getting 2 % return, which is what you were maybe getting when money was gold or what we would be getting if we were just holding onto money, That would be the equivalent of making 9 % on your stock portfolio in today's world after taxes and fees. So if you were just able to have that by just holding the gold coin, that is clearly a very good thing because the alternative is if they make it so that your money that you need to use is the dollar, it's not the gold coin and the dollar is no longer backed by the gold coin. And then the dollar is declining in value at 5, 10 % or so per year. then you need to hold other things as stores of value. And one of the most common things that people hold is housing. So people use their houses as their savings. They buy a house and they think of it as a saving account. They think of it as part of their net worth. But really houses should be understood as consumption goods. I mean, they're not capital goods. They're not, they're not an asset that is generating a return for you. It's a Consumer good you're consuming. It's like a washing machine. It's like a car. It's like a pair of pants It just lasts a lot longer than those things, but it is a consumer good It's something that you're consuming and I think the destruction of money has resulted in people treating their houses as Saving accounts rather than as consumer goods. And so the result of that is that everybody needs to buy a house because if you don't buy a house, you're going to be financially ruined by the inflation. Cause at least when you hold the house, your net worth is invested in the house effectively and houses are harder to make than money. So they appreciate more or they appreciate in terms of the dollars. So it looks like it's an investment that's making you money because the value of your house is going up. But in reality,

Speaker 3

It's just the value of the dollars going down and all that you've done is that you've used the house as a way to escape the inflation So you've I mean you're better off by doing it because you've avoided to the inflation So instead of having say a million dollars in a bank and you watch the million dollars lose purchasing power every year you buy a house with a million dollars and Then every year the house goes up in dollar nominal terms, although likely it's not really going up in real terms. It's just that the dollar is declining. So next year your house is worth a million and fifty thousand dollars and the year after that it's worth a million and twelve, a million one hundred twenty thousand dollars and so on. So it looks like you're making more money, but really you're just there making more money and your house is not declining in value. So it makes sense in this situation to think of houses as financial assets because it's a better deal than putting your money in a bank account or putting your money in government bonds and watching them get destroyed as has happened over the last couple of years. And that then means that when your average 25 year old, 30 year old is looking to buy their first house, they're not just out there competing with other 25, 30 year olds of the same socioeconomic. the status and same neighborhood looking to buy a house in that place. They're also out there competing with all kinds of people looking for an alternative for a saving account. Somebody who's now 60 years old and already owns a house and doesn't know what to do with the rest of his money and is not sure about putting it all in stocks and decides he's going to buy a house and rent it out as a way to generate income. Because that's better than putting the money in a bank or better than holding cash or better than holding government bonds. And so he buys the house and rents it out to the 25 year old. Now he has no business being in the business of being a landlord. He's not a landlord. He's a dentist. He's an architect. He's doing some other business. He doesn't want to have to run a rental property, but he does it because it's an effective way of beating inflation.

Speaker 3

And the result of that is that your average 25 and 30 year old gets price out of buying a house and all he can do is rent the house. So I wonder how much of that also ties in with the discussion of beauty in that you're building these things as financial assets rather than as homes and as consumers. will use. Related to that, we are in an environment, as I may describe, that is the regulatory climate makes it very difficult to create new product. And the climate for saving is such that people are looking for reliable stores, reliable places to store their money. so when you and I'm trying to talk through this, I'm not sure this is right. And so the people who are in the business of building, who are proficient at navigating the process, which is a very difficult process, and real estate developer Austin is as well. It's super. I think it's more regulated. environment than the medical industry. Honestly, I think it's really, really, or maybe comparable. But so people are, they have assets, they have money they want to put somewhere. And so there's more that is going into housing than would otherwise go into housing. so, but because of the constraint and production, like how difficult it is to produce one, you're more likely, there's a limited supply of things you can get. So there's more money going into fewer houses. And I wonder how much that is driving up the cost of building. is just like insanely expensive to produce structures. And I think about this little town, that little town of Isla, where these guys were farmers and I'm sure they were, you know, they were good at their jobs and family going back and rural.

Speaker 2

Georgia and they were all, you know, kind of poet, preacher type folks. But, you know, they didn't have a lot of money, but they built these beautiful things. did not. They could not. To do that today would cost way more than I would think they could afford. Is that that thing, the constrained supply and the pressure to put money into real estate, those two things together, pushing up the cost of production? think there's another factor. OK, please. There's the factor that before buildings were allowed to have flaws. my house has a draft. So I just grab a piece of wood and I nail it and yeah, draft is gone. Right now you would actually go and have to buy a door that is rated for whatever hurricane forces and the hinges have to be whatever. And it has, of course, there is a law that obligates me to buy a specific kind of door, which was enacted with the help and funding of the door lobby. And I have to go and buy that door. It's going to cost me $3,000. And I have to put that door in my home. And I cannot put the door in before an inspector has to come and look at the hinges and say, yes, you can put the door in. So there's this, I guess, and willingness to let buildings have flaws that have ironed every single kink that we had while building. we're not allowed, the buildings are not allowed to fail. To conform to the, to conform to the standard building code, there's, there's a lot of uniformity, which leads to standardization of material production, which. Yeah, mean, me know why. Oh yeah. The window example drives me crazy. Like. It's just complexity.

Speaker 2

Yeah. It was not long ago where everybody built their windows pretty much on site, like certainly somewhere, you know, it's not very long ago. And now between wind and energy requirements and that the window must be rated. You must build windows of a sufficient scale that you can afford to have them rated, which means you're buying them from a factory or a retailer or a manufacturer that might be in Minnesota or something. They're buying all their parts from all over the globe to produce all these things because Windows are super complicated now. the chart on gas in between, you know, like I think what you're saying, Jamie is really important that like allowed to have flaws where I was just reading Chuck Marrone's escaping the housing trap recently finished that. You know, mean, there's a lot of positive things that happened in the 19th century because there wasn't really a lot of bad housing and people living in pretty terrible conditions. But part of the problem with kind of bringing everything up is like housing is. We are a federal, I mean...

Speaker 2

yeah.

Speaker 1

We live in the nicest housing ever. And then a lot of people can't afford it because it's, it is very expensive to actually build on top of the inflationary stuff, on top of the regulatory environment. The standard is actually like too high. I say this a lot about, I would rather see rather than a complex stick frame house, I would rather see a less energy efficient concrete block house. Super simple, nothing else to it. a little mini split on the wall. Is it super efficient? No. And maybe it's only 65, you know, varies between 65 and 80 degrees even. But how much longer that would last? You wouldn't have mold issues. It would be cheaper to maintain. But we get in our way a lot, especially with things like energy efficiency. everything inflates. Money inflates, regulations inflates. I wonder how much of that, I should say here, wonder how much of that all of this, particularly environmental stuff. Another chapter in the Fiat Standard, I discuss all of the ways in which people are coping with poverty by inventing silly pseudosciences. And the best example of that is you shouldn't consume oil because it's going to destroy the weather. You shouldn't eat meat because it's going to boil the oceans or something like that. So this notion that meat and hydrocarbons are going to destroy Earth because of destroying the weather or something or the other. I mean, it's completely fictitious, nonsensical, pseudoscientific, primitive, it's nonsense. It's no different from the societies we like to mock.

Speaker 2

It's kind of malfeasance, right? where does the there's a lot of that out there? Like, where does that desire to like human existence is bad? Where does that come from? I think it's inflation cope. I honestly think it's no coincidence this stuff started to pick up in the 1970s because it was a way of trying to explain why we're running out of all of those things. Well, we weren't running out of them. They were just becoming unaffordable because the money was destroyed in value. So the prices of commodities went up enormously in the 1970s because in the 1970s is when the last link was severed between gold and the dollar. They went off the gold standard arguably in 1914, 15, 16, something like that. But the complete divorce was in 1971. That was when it was completed. But then in 1971, that's what led to the big surge in prices. Before that, it was a lot more gradual. But then 1971, prices increased. So then you get this idea that, and remember, initially in the 1970s, it was all about, we're going to run out of all of those things. There was a population crisis. had a population bomb. The earth was going to suffer famine because we don't have enough of those things. Then in the 1980s, when inflation slowed down and prices of those things normalized and they stopped rising so much because we stopped having such an inflationary dollar. During that point, the doomsday cult had to shift their messaging because clearly we aren't running out of everything. you

Speaker 3

But they shifted their messaging to we have too much of everything and because we have so much of it, we're going to burn and destroy Earth by consuming so much of it. So notice the conclusion is the same. The conclusion is that you should cut down on these things. But the rationale is the complete exact opposite. And depending on where we are in the inflationary cycle, the aesthetics and primitives shifts from one to the other. But the idea for me is that big, essentially inflation makes the essentials unaffordable. And so energy becomes less and less affordable. And so the focus is, all right, let's get you on a windmill solar panel thing so that you don't have to be buying fuel so that the inflation doesn't show up. That's essentially the motivation for most of what passes for science when it comes to energy and sustainability and climate and modern fiat American universities and around the world, I should say, and it's just the US. But I wonder how much of that is also the case in terms of building. I mean, the reason that we need to impose such stringent insulation and wind regulations on buildings is because we're trying to save on energy costs because energy keeps spiraling out of control.

Speaker 3

Yeah. That's a product of inflation. I I wonder if we hadn't really had this kind of inflation, then it's entirely conceivable for me that we would be consuming significantly more energy than we currently do. And then it just wouldn't be an issue. We wouldn't be having to put up with mold because of all of the insulation and all of the health problems that come with that, because we'd just be building proper sturdy houses from stone that isn't as They breathe, they're breathing house, you know, they're not perfectly hermetically sealed and to make sure you use no energy to, yeah. Yeah, but you still use a lot of energy and you can because well, energy is just quite literally this come of the earth. It's coal and gas and oil that we take out of the earth and what's better to do with that thing than just burn it to meet our needs. Related to that, I wonder if it's a consequence of or a reason for a lot of this. I see...

Speaker 2

In the window example, energy efficiency, I see lot of institutionalization of everything, like centralization and institutionalization of all the processes and the production and less distributism. a consequence of the energy requirement or the fear over energy, a consequence of that is Well, we need to make the super complicated windows. We have requirements for super complicated windows that can really only be met if they're produced at scale. so that can then now your carpenter is not building your windows. It's you're buying your windows from a private equity owner, publicly traded window manufacturer. So it's no longer a carpenter that's in that process. And there's many, many steps in that supply chain. But also on the energy side, like, yeah, can't. Energy is, it's, we'd have ever more complicated ways of creating energy, say through solar or giant wind turbines or whatever, which by the very nature, solar you would think would be a distributed way to generate energy, but really to create a solar panel is so complicated, it's actually you have to. by solar panels that are made by the manufacturers or whatever. now we have giant solar fields that are, it seems to me to be moving us in a direction of centralization and institutionalization and away from distributism, which was kind of the natural way of things until James Scott talked about it as, I think his term was the late James Scott, it just passed away. I think he called it the second great enclosure movement or something this move toward industrial institutionalization and centralization that happened in the 1900s. So is it I guess fear is this this fear is bringing us towards this the desire to have it all controlled and predicted is causing us to. To lose our.

Speaker 2

beauty and affordability, is that right? But I do see disruption and this I think is great to notice is that you have your Amazon and your Google now moving towards nuclear. And the fact that you can, that you have in what incentives for a private company to invest in nuclear energy, which is probably the cleanest and the most efficient form of energy that we have right now. And, and on the other side, you have the wind and solar, which needs massive suicides, I'm going to say, supporting and slip subsidies for functioning. And you have governments creating all these sort of complex mechanisms to prop up those sources of energy, whereas you have the companies that invest their own money, they're going to nuclear. So I see this disruption going on and the more probably maybe it's wishful thinking, the more we see these disruptions that are creating or that are making abundant and cheap sources of energy available for anyone, maybe then the need for those complex systems of regulations, for example, the windows will be unnecessary and will implode on their own. Yeah. If you think like because of AI crypto and all the push for electric cars, solar and wind are kind of like Nuclear like kind of has to be the option. There's a reason Google's, know, Microsoft paying whatever, how many billions of dollars for a plant because energy is so in demand, they starting to recognize wind and solar can't produce that amount of energy. Speaker 2 (01:01:41.902) Can I ask one more thing or touch on one more point? guess I'm in nuclear even massive centralized power production and yet it is there. technology is known to us to do safe, small scale regional and local nuclear production and via molten salt reactors. But it's it's where it's illegal to do it. So So there's tons and tons of investment going into and to not building small scale molten salt reactors, but getting approval to build them. We still can't build them yet, but it can be it could be that nuclear 20 years from now is powering this community right here from a from a safe facility that's the size of a tractor trailer. That technology is available to us, but but not able to be produced. That would be amazing. And as you say, or one of the two of you said, or Austin, or if may, that when we have energy abundance on a small scale will be detached from a system that's sort of pushing us toward centralization. Austin, I interrupted your question there. Go. Speaker 1 (01:03:03.278) I just had a question for safe. know, we're talking about inflation and even, you know, you've been mentioning you could keep your gold coin under your pillow and it'd be worth, you know, 10 % more or whatever annually for 10 years. Isn't the argument for inflation that, you know, and modern economists is that, yes, that's part of the point is it incentivizes investment and incentivizes people to go do productive things with their money rather than just hoard it under the mattress, which does produce produce more. wealth as a society. So how would you how do you what's your argument counter argument to that? Because I can see the logic in that. Yeah, the argument is that if you take away people's ability to save by destroying the value of their money, then they're just going to have to consume that money or invest it. And you want consumption and investment and you don't want saving. That's kind of the, if you read through the complicated math that they try and present in those models, this is ultimately the idea that saved money is just sitting there, it's doing nothing. Whereas money that is spent when you consume, get more people to be working. Let's say you go and you buy dinner, so the restaurant needs to buy the supplies and they need to hire more waiters. So the more people are spending, then you have more employment. And because you can't save, you have to invest. So then you go out and you provide capital goods for those consumers to meet the needs of the consumers. So you, as an investor, you go and you invest in restaurants as well. people spend and invest and that gets the economy moving. That's nonsensical though, because the way that things actually work in the real world is that things have an opportunity cost. And so what happens is people have to, people have an insatiable desire for consumption. We always want to consume more. So what they're saying is from the Keynesian perspective, Speaker 3 (01:05:03.928) They're trying to present the problems of the economy as being insufficient consumption. People are saving too much, they're not consuming. But that's not the problem because we always have desires for consuming more things. People can always think of more things. People would always like to upgrade their car, operate their house. The vast majority of people always have a lot of ideas for consumption. The issue is not that there isn't a desire for consumer. The issue is that there is a trade off between different options and options between consuming today versus consuming tomorrow. So yeah, you can buy a better car today, but you could just make do with the current car that you have and keep saving so that in five years time, you can buy a nicer house or something like that. So it's because people are trading off these choices that they decide to forego consumption. And when they decide to forego consumption, what happens is they take resources away from consumption and they've saved them. And then the more resources are saved, the more resources are available for investment. So investment only comes about because of people saving in the first place. And destroying the value of money destroys people's desire and an incentive to save. And so reduces the amount of capital available. The Keynesian idea is that we could substitute for that by destroying the value of money. So then we just force everybody to save. But all that you're doing is that you're destroying the value of people's savings. You're taking away people's ability to provide for their future. You're undermining their financial security. And you're generating all kinds of economic activity that should not be there. I mean, there is a very naive understanding of economic activity wherein it's viewed as being good for its own sake, regardless of the value of the output. Whereas in reality, we don't value economic activity because it's good to have people working. We don't want to work for the sake of working. I don't want to work just so that I could count as a working person. I want to work for the outcome that comes out of the production. And what determines that outcome in the production is how people value it. It's not some abstract blob of economic GDP that we churn out by the hour. And then the more hours you put in, the more economic GDP you get. Speaker 3 (01:07:26.162) If you get a million monkeys and you try and make them build an airplane, it doesn't matter how many working hours they do, they're not going to come up with an airplane. So it's not about the quality, it's not about the quantity of resources that we dedicate towards economic production. It's about the quality and the value that people attach to economic production. And the value of economic production is subjective. So what determines that is people's own valuations and That's what determines how they allocate their resources between saving, consumption, investment. And so in a world in which the money is hard, the money is constantly appreciated. So people are able to save more. And the more they save, the more they make resources available for capital consumption. So if you're not consuming things, if you're not spending your money in restaurant, The fact that you're not spending that money in the restaurant means the restaurant doesn't hire the marginal worker. So the marginal worker instead goes to a factory. And equivalently, your money, because you have a bigger saving account now, you are more likely to lend out some of that money to the entrepreneur who's going to build that factory. And so by decentivizing saving, they're really decentivizing capital accumulation. You're not incentivizing investment. You're decentivizing it. disincentivizing it because you're taking away the the pool from which capital comes from is saving. We have to first delay gratification in order to be able to consume. And so what is happening is you're destroying the value of money to the future. You're forcing people to spend on things that they don't value as much because the alternative is that you're going to hold on to money that's going to be devalued. So you're taking away from people the ability to have financial security and you're forcing them effectively. to spend it on crap that they don't value as much as financial security. And how do know that? Because if left to their own, they would have valued saving the money for the future more than the thing that they spend on. So the Keynesian perception also views it in a kind of aggregate manner wherein if we're not spending enough, then the restaurant is going to fire all the workers, then the workers will stop spending enough. So then they will stop buying from your t-shirt shop Speaker 3 (01:09:56.106) and then you are going to hard fire your workers and then they're going to stop buying from the other restaurants. And then there's a big giant recession everywhere. And the way to fix that is to increase the spending. But this is of course nonsensical because the decision to buy and consume is marginal. People don't just stop consuming overall because why do people need to consume? We need to consume to survive. You need food to consume. So We don't need to have our money destroyed in order for us to figure out that if I don't eat today, I will starve tomorrow. That's really what it comes down to. People need to eat to survive. People need clothing to survive the winter. People need a roof over their head to survive. Those are things that most human beings have figured out on their own and they don't need to have their money destroyed because no human being will say, you know what, I'm not going to eat for the next year because if I save all the money, for a year, then I'll be able to get 2 % more cheeseburger next year. So I'm going to pass on the cheeseburger today so I could get 2 % more. That's not the trade off. People don't compare the value of what your money can buy you today to what your money can buy you tomorrow. You compare the value of your money today to what you can buy with it today. And so you value not starving more than having an extra $5 in your saving account. So you buy the cheeseburger, even though you know that you could get it at a lower price next year. So we don't need an incentive to consume. And all that they're doing is that they are effectively providing a rationale for redistribution, or in other words, less romantically known as theft, basically. That are y'all. Speaker 1 (01:11:43.822) connected real quick, just the inflation kind of creating a more service economy. You know how we've shifted the American economy to a service economy. We'll always hear that. I don't really connected that inflation and like this, the way you're describing it is incentivizing more of a service economy, which is actually less an entertainment economy, which is inherently less productive. That doesn't mean we don't want services. Just mean we're kind of, uh, I'm really graded here now. Sorry, Jeff. tool helped. Speaker 2 (01:12:13.582) You were saying the same thing I was and I was reminded, have you all read Brave New World recently? Have you gone back and reread it? God. That's so good. The beginning of it opens in the hatchery, you know, where they're making all the, they're incubating all the babies. And Mustafa, I think it's Mustafa Man, who's the world director or whatever. I need to. Speaker 2 (01:12:37.568) Like he's answering questions, he walks in and all these students start asking questions about like why we do things a certain way we do. Why do we condition the the various castes of society to do certain things? And he has a long Aldous Huxley, so brilliant. He has a long speech about exactly what Safe just said, like conditioning people, conditioning people to to consume frivolously. That was a big part of what they were trying to do with the betas and whatever the betas and the deltas and gamma, the lower cast of people. you read that and you contrast it with a lot of... And I'm sure Huxley was totally aware of Keynesian economics and he was completely making... Or he was actually taking them seriously. He was like... This is something we need to be, this ideology is something we need to be concerned about, because it is very, very bad. Anyway, that's a good book to go back to every few years. We have been bellyaching, and I would very much like to pivot in the last bit of time we have together to say, like we've, I think we've been describing. why things are the way they are and how they came to be the way they are and how it affects us to have the water that we're swimming in changed to the way it is now. I try to be optimistic. I am optimistic. And I'd like to get back to a low time preference world. What's the path from here to there? Speaker 2 (01:14:29.496) Sound money. How might that, how might, so that would be, yeah. So how do we get back to sound money? What would be the path from where we are now? Someone might have created it around 2009 and we're, know, that's right. But, don't know. Do you think Argentina or Venezuela? bus. You're at where you're at, A-flag, think that's big. Yeah. It's our one civilizational shot at not living in pigsty for all the rest of our history. Speaker 2 (01:15:03.692) What is the path you see for like how would you see the United States like realistically doing that? I think it just happens one person at a time. One person figures out Bitcoin and they rewire themselves from being a high time preference fiat slave effectively to being a sovereign low time preference, long-term oriented individual. And that just brings about all kinds of changes. And I think you see it all over with Bitcoiners. It's really striking, I think, how common this experience is that people will have been I mean, it almost makes it sound like a religion, but in the case of Bitcoin, you have the functional mechanism clearly laid out there. It's not having to invoke something mystical. It's very simple. You've moved to a form of money that is harder to make. So now you have a better ability for providing for your future. And as soon as you realize that something in you changes, and I think so many Bitcoiners report the same thing, among the many stories are things like I used to drink every day. used to spend so much money on alcohol and then I found Bitcoin and I quit drinking and now a Bitcoiner or somebody else will have a story along the lines of I used to do. because we have not, we have talked about gold, but we have not really talked about Bitcoin at all in this podcast. And so that would be a long, a great long conversation. And so I'm going to point in the show notes and y'all, can find the Bitcoin standard podcast and safe work. think he's probably the, the, the most accessible and articulate voice on Bitcoin that's out there. I'm sorry. So we haven't actually talked about that. Speaker 2 (01:16:50.946) topic at all in here. But am I hearing you correctly? Like it doesn't matter what the Fed does. It doesn't matter that the Fed exists. We can chart our way toward that path independent. Bitcoin enables us to find our way toward the irrelevance of the Federal Reserve. Is that right? The dollar collapses. I'm not saying I think it's going to happen next two years of five or 10 or 20. I don't know. But you've got thirty five trillion dollars a day and we just had a five hundred billion over the past two weeks. I mean, there's only so much longer that the world buys our our bonds. Right. I would think like there's just at some point there is a tipping point of no longer the reserve currency and that starts to make a path to Bitcoin. Is that does anyone think that? I don't know. I I wouldn't go as far as saying that the Federal Reserve doesn't matter as you were trying to say, Jeff. I think it does matter, but you isolate yourself significantly from the most important negative consequences that it has on you as an individual by protecting yourself with Bitcoin. And so that changes the way that you're able to make your economic calculations and plan for the future. And I think this then begins to... change the way in which you engage in all sorts of things. So I think it's more you know, you see a lot of Bitcoiners who decide they don't want to be in the they don't want to be borrowing to buy a house. They just want to pay for the house upfront. And I think I'll say more and more of that people just have a form of money that they can hold. So they save and then they spend from that money. And then you'll see I would imagine more and more of concern for the future in architecture. So you see it develop in small little pockets of individuals and then they start gravitate toward each other. And you know, everybody else is going to be getting robbed by their central bank, whereas Bitcoiners are not. And so there's only one end point to this game is the Bitcoiners keep doing better and then everybody joins them or perishes. I think people will have the good sense to join. I'm optimistic about it, but I think it's... Speaker 3 (01:18:57.26) I mean, there are all kinds of horrible things that can happen along the way because fiat money is built and optimized for creating because that's freezing disasters. Remember, every time there's a crisis, they get to print a lot of money. So don't be surprised that they find a crisis for you every day. I think that would be part of why we have such a belligerent global environment. would think that it's like war. It is the justification for a fiat. Exactly. This is why the United States government needs to be fighting all these weird people in all these weird places who weirdly have this weird obsession, all of them together at the same time to hate the US government. At the same time that the US government got a money printer to allow it to finance all these wars by robbing the planet. Suddenly it develops an infinite array of enemies it needs to fight all over. Coincidences. What are you going to do? Right. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us on Yeoman. I think Austin will probably also share this on building culture. that right? Great. Yeah. You guys are wonderful, my guests, today. And I will link to more of their work in the show notes. Jaime Azariada Varia, Safedin Amoos. Austin Tanel, thank you so much for joining us on Yeoman. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much, Jeff. Speaker 1 (01:20:27.054) Thanks, Thanks everyone. Thank you very much. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five star review. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.