Week 24 Listens

11/05/23 - 11/11/23 A week of listening in 10 minutes of reading

Listener

Dec 02, 2023

11-05-23

Podcast: DarkHorse

Episode: The Illusion of Consensus: Rav Arora

Link to Podcast 2 hours 6 minutes

There are two types of experts currently:
1. Anointed experts
2. Off label experts
The off label experts = half may be crazy and half are right.
The anointed experts are wrong on everything : racism, Covid, Russia collusion.
The anointing is based on pre-approved ideas.
On most topics there is no expert consensus. Anyone who says there is shouldn’t be trusted.
Why were amateurs beating the CDC during Covid? The CDC wasn’t trying. Why not?
Substack and podcasts have the highest signal.
We need institutions we can trust and rely on.
Not having organizations devoted to the truth in their realm is highly dysfunctional.

11/06/23

Podcast: Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Episode: #392 This Podcast Will Polarize You - And it Should | Matt Taibbi

Link to Podcast 1 hour 40 minutes

Taibbi spent 11 years in Soviet Union/ Russia doing journalism.
Putin was the end for him: crackdown on his newspaper.
NATO expanding to Ukraine was a huge instigator of current war.
Does US establishment really want regime change in Russia?
Take a scroll through Russian history. Big portion of that list is worse than Putin.
Why haven’t trumps Abraham accords gotten more credit? He might have ridden into the sunset.
What happened to the left’s anti war movement that was there during Iraq war?
Democrat “peace letter” in congress got scuttled by democrats.
In post-Soviet Russia, the corruption was transparent and easy to see.
When started covering American politics, couldn’t figure out why nothing interesting happened.
Then realized uniparty-type influence anointing candidates.
Trump really screwed this up.
Response was total rage an incomprehension. Must have been cheating.
Didn’t realize he was running against their system.
Victor Davis Hanson “The Case for Trump”.
Hilary Clinton’s 6 decade quest for power was too obvious and disturbing.
The best way to become a leader is to be asked by others.
Hilary lost more than Trump won.
People vote their dreams, not their reality. They don’t hate the rich unless they think the rich are cheating to get there.
It is very difficult to get close to a male elk. Except when they are in heat. They become single minded in their focus.
This is how politicians get when close to the presidency.
Bankruptcy allows you to fail without dying.
Still - there need to be consequences for failure like the Great Financial Crisis.
Otherwise the system is corrupt and breaks.
The left and the right should be able to cooperate on a fair game.
Trump discovered and exploited resentment against a variety of institutions.

I’d add that Trump also exposed a lot of the rot in these institutions. I was slightly distrustful of many institutions before Trump was elected. The institutional reaction to Trump was eye opening and made me much more skeptical of the competence or expertise they supposedly held.

Valid concerns in many cases.
Shift for journalism was from scarce bandwidth (networks/newspapers) to infinite bandwidth (internet). The correct answer isn’t clear.
Taibbi won the monk debate with Douglass Murray by widest margin ever vs. Malcom Gladwell & Michelle Goldberg.
Part of the win was a reaction against condescending racist aspersions by Gladwell.

I watched this debate and was very disappointed by Gladwell. He is an incredibly talented writer, but was so off base here as to be delusional.

11/07/23

Podcast: What is Money

Episode: #388 The Most Important Question in the World Today | Episode 8

Link to Podcast 1 hour 9 minutes

Money is a grassroots voting system for what gets produced in the world.
So fiat is voting fraud.
If you paid a dollar per second it would take 32,000+ years to reach $1 trillion. We are $33 trillion in debt.
Money is superordinate to political systems.
When you violate people’s private property, you loosen their grip on reality.

11/08/23

Podcast: Investors Podcast

Episode: BTC155 Dylan LeClair - Bitcoin Market Overview

Link to Podcast 1 hour 19 minutes

Massive dollar flows on both sides of TLT.

(TLT is a long duration U.S. Treasury ETF.)

Dylan not convicted on medium term outlook due to government debt and yield curve un-inverting.
Nobody is buying the 30 year UST to hold to maturity.
This is speculation.
Stocks and bonds are acting very different vs historical patterns. Which one is wrong?

11/09/23

Podcast: DarkHorse

Episode: #198 Czech Your Privilege

Link to Podcast 1 hour 40 minutes

The sharedness of culture is as important as the quality of the cultural artifacts.
Example: songs you can all sing together are as important as how good the songs are.
Markets are the best at determining how to do something. They shouldn’t be in charge of what to do. They will find every defect of human character and exploit it. The end is a dystopian nightmare.
What we’re seeing in Europe is a disagreement about how to live together.
Multiculturalism is the opposite of cosmopolitanism.
Multiculturalism means isolation.

This is deep. If you live in a ‘multi-cultural’ society, it is by definition fractured into different cultures that isolate from each other. Cosmopolitanism is fine with everybody no matter where they came from - but they have to live by the laws and customs of the place they have come to.

Asian immigrants expect their kids to become Americanized.
Countries have a right to determine whether new immigrants are hostile to the country.
It is a linguistic trap. Who is against multiculturalism?
It’s like ‘Trust the science.’

11/09/23

Podcast: What Bitcoin Did

Episode: Bitcoin vs. The Infinite Money Printer with Luke Gromen

Link to Podcast 1 hour 9 minutes

Unallocated derivatives are where games are played to manipulate gold prices.
They will try this with BTC ETF.

Good luck.

11/09/23

Podcast: What Bitcoin Did

Episode: Bitcoin’s Full Potential Value with Jesse Myers

Link to Podcast 1 hour 9 minutes

For the US Government to pay back its bonds, the asset class has to have negative real returns.
Thesis: assets shift from other asset classes to BTC.
This leads to various valuation models based on assumptions.
If over the next 20-30 years, if BTC gains 25% of the store of value market, that would = $10 million per coin in 2023 dollars.
If you are high net worth, check out onrampbitcoin for multi-sig, multi-institution custody.

11/10/23

Podcast: Jordan B. Peterson

Episode: #395 Difficult Conversation as the Precondition to Progress | Adam Smith (U.S. Congressman [D])

Link to Podcast 1 hour 53 minutes

Important to talk to people you disagree with: both for you to learn and them to learn.
Doing the hard thing is important, but our reflex is to avoid it.
Agreeable people don’t like conflict.
Conflict delayed is conflict multiplied.
It’s challenging to be shown to be wrong.
Our beliefs orient us like a map.
If you find out your map is wrong, you don’t know where you are, and that produces anxiety and hopelessness.
And the bigger the mistake, the more of the map is invalidated.
So why challenge your belief?
It is a lot better to have your ideas tested in the abstract than your convictions demolished by reality itself.
We believe students should be shielded from difficult conversations.
Totally wrong.
You need exposure to challenge to grow.
Why should I have a difficult conversation?
If you are 100% right and your life is paradise, no need for this challenge.
These challenges help you put your house in order.
It shows you where you are stupid and wrong.
This is painful, but not as painful as being stupid and wrong.
There’s not much difference between agency and hope. If you believe you can do something - that is hopeful. Hope is a positive emotion and it indicates probable success.
Removing agency removes hope for the future.
Meet people where they are but don’t leave them there.
Meaning comes from responsibility not the other way around.

Smith keeps saying things like the right says there’s no problem or the right says this doesn’t exist. This is frustrating and I hope we don’t do it on the other side of the aisle. Democrats consistently use this tactic of saying “Conservatives don’t agree there is a problem.” when what is really happening is ‘Conservatives don’t agree on your solution.’ If we could break this pattern of argument in good faith by both sides, we might make progress. Otherwise, it’s an excuse to ignore each other.

Equity means no ownership of property by definition.

Smith’s speaking formula on any negative topic:

Acknowledge both sides are wrong then explain how your side really isn’t wrong but the other side is. Do both sides do this and I don’t notice?

11/11/23

Podcast: Bitcoin Rapid Fire

Episode: Bitcoin & Macro Hang #6 w/ Pysh, Booth, Foss & Dromen

Link to Podcast 2 hours 14 minutes

In a free market, the cost of everything should be going down every year due to productivity gains.
If it isn’t, the mechanisms are being manipulated.
The entire global system is not marked to market.
BTFP is just one piece.
The market is betting that the fed will have to cut again. Soon.
Things haven’t been marked to market because there is no market. In Commercial Real Estate (CRE) and Single Family Residential markets there is no buying or selling yet.
The banks will take huge losses on CRE.
When China stopped buying U.S. Treasuries in 2014 and we continued massively importing from them, it was a massive wealth transfer to China.
Where did it come from? Whoever bought the U.S. debt. >25% was the Fed printing money.

Here’s the basics. U.S. borrowed money, sent that money to China for stuff. China has money, U.S. has stuff - whoever holds the debt is screwed. What did China do with that money? Did the printer wreck them too?

Free markets are naturally deflationary.
Moving your savings to Bitcoin allows you to participate in a system where prices naturally fall instead of rise.
In the fiat system, AI will be used to control you. In the Bitcoin system it will be used to free you.

Why: incentives.

It is going to be chaotic.
What would a dishonest ledger say about an honest ledger?
You can’t have innovation without creative destruction.
We keep manipulating the system to avoid the destruction or repricing that is necessary for healthy progress.
As the debt crisis gets worse, the manipulation will get worse and it will require more and more control.
Destruction is just getting delayed, and it is building. One day it won’t be able to be delayed anymore and the repricing will be shocking.
The longer they wait to fix this, the bigger the financial repression will be.
We can’t do Yield Curve Control like Japan.
If the Fed starts buying all the Treasuries, they now have to do Mortgage Backed Securities, where does it end?
Book: Financial Accounting Manual for Federal Reserve Operating Banks
Mechanically, they can write up the value of gold to increase amount of money Treasury has to buy down debt.
Creates dollars without debt.
One time reset.
“Parity moment” concept:
If the world is shifting to storing value,
There will be a moment where it is 50/50, and
If you convert at that moment, you will break even, so,
If you do it earlier, you are ahead, and if you do it later, you are behind.
It’s closer than you think due to our deteriorating fiscal position.
As BTC gets bigger, the big drawdowns taper off.
We’ve already reached the event horizon.
We just need to stay decentralized and secure.
You can’t negotiate with BTC. It is what it is.
If you price things in BTC you are already watching it happen.
The fed’s 2011 playbook for dealing with USG default was treat defaulted treasuries at par value.
The base layer has to be energy.

Not from this podcast, but saw this graph recently. The U.S. has gradually been shifting away from the Petro-Dollar to the Pharma-Dollar. Interesting.

ETF challenge: BTC psychopaths aren’t selling.
Long term holders at highest ever.

>70% of Bitcoin hasn’t moved in over a year. >50% in over 3 years.

People won’t sell them until they get equities at 5 to 7 PE. Valuation of anything has to make cash flow sense to attract Bitcoin.
Has faster, cheaper, more secure tech ever lost to slower more expensive less secure?
The ETF will teach initial investors to learn BTC and self custody.
There will be fees to capture via lightning routing.
Looks like yield but are fees. You hold your own keys.
Fiat is tragedy of the commons, Bitcoin is prosperity of the commons