February 27, 2025 • 32 mins
In this episode, Rich Lassiter explores the economic insights from Jeff Booth's book, *The Price of Tomorrow.* Rich delves into the 2007-2008 financial meltdown and how experts' misjudgments led to rapid unraveling. He explains the dynamics of trust-based financial systems and the Ponzi-like nature of current economic structures. Rich also covers the transformative power of technology and the unique position of Bitcoin as a true free market, offering a comprehensive breakdown of platform dominance, creative destruction, and the Minsky Moment's impact on modern economies.
Show Notes: https://atlbitlab.com/podcast/rich-lassiter-first-currency-wars-then-trade-wars-then-real-wars
00:00 Introduction: Currency Wars and Global Meltdown
00:30 Event Recording and Sponsors
02:13 Introduction to the Speaker and Book
02:51 Chapter 1: How the Economy Works - Printing Money
16:40 Chapter 2: How the Economy Works - Creative Destruction
28:16 Conclusion and Speaker's Final Thoughts
29:25 Closing Remarks and Support
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Rich Lassiter (00:00):
First there's currency wars, then there's trade
wars, then there's real wars.
We're in the midst of aserious global meltdown.
And of course, you know, all of usare old enough to know that we were
in a big meltdown in that year, right?
2007, 2008. point is experts gotit wrong and they didn't know it
until it was right on top of them.
Bubble popped and people realizedthat debt could never be paid off.
(00:20):
And when the credit is taken away,everything unravels very rapidly.
Stephen DeLorme (00:34):
This podcast episode is an event recording.
If you're listening to the audioversion, you might be missing some
context from the speaker's visuals.
You can find the videoversion at atlbitlab.
com.
That's A T L B I T L A B dot com.
There might also be audiencequestions or other background
chatter that's not audible.
Look, event recordings are neverperfect, but we're sharing it here
(00:56):
because we think you're going tofind something valuable in it.
Let's talk a little bit about our sponsorsfirst, and then we'll get onto the show.
This episode is sponsored by ATL BitLab.
ATL BitLab is Atlanta'sfreedom tech hacker space.
(01:17):
We have co working desks,conference rooms, event space,
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There is a very activecommunity here in the lab.
Every Wednesday night isBitcoin night here in Atlanta.
We also have meetups for cybersecurity,artificial intelligence, decentralized
identity, product design, and more.
We offer day passes and nomad passesfor people who need to use the lab only
(01:37):
occasionally, as well as membershipsfor people who plan to use the lab
more regularly, such as myself.
One of the best things abouthaving a BitLab membership isn't
the amenities, it's the people.
Surrounding yourself with thecommunity helps you learn faster
and helps you build better.
Your creativity becomes amplifiedwhen you work in this space.
That's what I think at least.
(01:58):
If you're interested in becominga member or supporting the space,
please visit us at atlbitlab.
com.
That's A T L B I T L A B dot com.
All right, on to our show.
Rich Lassiter (02:13):
So, I'm Rich Lassiter, I am an emergency room doctor,
I love Bitcoin, I love you guys.
And I had a twist in my armand said, you must present.
So I am presenting on,on The Price of Tomorrow.
Um, I had never, actuallynever read this book until now.
Uh, and I haven't read it allyet, but I read these chapters
and I'm ready to talk about it.
So, um, here's our book.
(02:35):
I want to point out something,um, The book is from 2020.
Obviously, it's been, you know, fourand a half, five years, whatever.
Probably he was writing it in2019, I'm guessing, and published
a time, etc. So, this is five yearold information, more or less.
That was today's block heightwhen I was typing up these slides.
Um, so, uh, onwards to chapter one.
Uh, how the economy works,part one, printing the money.
(02:59):
And he led off with this interesting storyabout this guy he knows, uh, who is named
Chen Fong, who his parents were afraid.
And he, this is what his parents,uh, they were elderly Chinese
people, I'm guessing, had said, firstthere's currency wars, then there's
trade wars, then there's real wars.
And You know, the other week, whenDoug was talking about this, he was
(03:20):
talking about how kind of, uh, uh, thepremonition, that's not a word, but
there's a word I'm looking for that Ican't find right now, about, um, the
foresight, basically, that Jeff Booth had.
How these things have kind ofcome to play, like, we were seeing
trade wars, that wasn't 2020.
(03:40):
And it became a topic in the Trumppresidency, you know, after that.
So, very interesting, I thought,to see that, and real wars, right?
Then we have the stuff inUkraine and the stuff in Israel.
Like, we're having real wars now.
So this is kind of coming to, comingto, uh, fruition, if you will.
Alright, um, and then his next topic was,he's talking about all these financial
(04:01):
experts and how they were, you just, wejust started, Joe, you missed nothing.
Um, and so, um, What they got wrong.
And so I thought thiswas pretty interesting.
I know there's a lot of words uphere, but, uh, I want to point out.
So the first one is Ben Bernanke,who was the chairman of the federal
reserve from 20, 2006, 2014.
(04:22):
And he's like, you know,the bold bit there.
So they, their, their job is to makesure that there is not excessive
risk in these institutions thatthe federal reserve is related to.
And obviously, as weknow, with the hindsight.
That's exactly whatthey did not do, right?
There's plenty of riskin these institutions.
Um, and then, as we go along, sothat, that first quote was in 2005.
(04:44):
Three years later, January 2008,we're not forecasting a recession.
In July, and I've made this an orangebold here, so in July 16th, everything's
well capitalized, no danger of failing,and then September 18th, holy shit,
the world is falling apart, right?
Uh, the Treasury Secretary says we mustspend several hundred billion dollars.
And then, you know, a month later,Janet Yellen, who became our treasurer's
(05:06):
secretary, she just left a moment ago.
But at the time, was the head of theFederal Reserve Bank of 2000, of San
Francisco, basically saying that thisdownward trajectory is hair raising.
We're in the midst of aserious global meltdown.
And of course, you know, all of usare old enough to know that we were
in a big meltdown in that year, right?
2007, 2007, 2008. So point is expertsgot it wrong and they didn't know it
(05:33):
until it was right on top of them.
Also, I'm going to, I don'tmind being interrupted.
We can talk about if you guyshave insights or additives,
these aren't my thoughts, unlessa few things are my thoughts.
Mostly this is Jeff Booth'sthoughts, so we can interrupt and
add color whenever you guys want.
Um, then he goes on to talk abouthow the, uh, uh, the bubble,
(05:54):
the financial, the great, great.
Financial crisis, the bubblepopped and people realized that
debt could never be paid off.
And when the credit is taken away,everything unravels very rapidly.
The system is, as we all know, asBitcoiners, this is a Ponzi where we're
all trusting that banks have the assetswe think they have until everyone
(06:18):
wants them and then it all unravels.
And so the system works on trust,remove the trust, and it falls apart.
I think back, um, to, you guys probablywatched, uh, It's a Wonderful Life,
and you see that movie, and like,there's one of the banks, right?
And like, that's the reality of theworld, before the Federal Reserve Bank
was propping up all these, all theinstitutions that were gonna fail.
(06:39):
Alright, crazy formula here, this isthe formula for the Gross Domestic
Product, um, and he's really talkingabout the trade between nations.
Um, and so the GDP ismade up of four things.
Consumer spending, or personalconsumption, investments,
exports, and government spending.
And you add all these up, you get the GDP.
(07:01):
So, um, he talks about there beinga balance of trade between nations.
And that nations are basicallygoing to do whatever helps them.
And so if we are in this country,as we all are, um, what we
might do to drive up our GDP isgoing to be to increase consumer
spending, which makes sense, right?
(07:21):
And that we are like the mostconsumer society on the planet, right?
We spend and spend and buy and buy, right?
That's the kind of the Americanway is to buy more things.
Whereas if you're in a lower incomecountry, then your main Uh, way to drive
up your GDP per that formula up thereis to increase your exports, because
maybe you can't buy things from othercountries, so you export other countries.
(07:43):
And so from a Bitcoin standpoint,I kind of put it in the orange
there that the country is goingto do what helps them the most.
This is a game theory, right?
The game theory is dowhat is to your advantage.
So Countries are going to maintainthese policies that incentivize
their side of the equation with help.
And the government health is, isusually those things, tariffs,
taxes, or subsidies, right?
(08:04):
The government helps you out by makingyour, your widget cheaper, or it taxes
the people they don't like, or it takestariffs to make you not buy these guys
and buy these guys instead, right?
No, don't buy the Canadian goods, buythe American, don't buy the Chinese
goods, buy the American goods, right?
By just driving the price up.
But, as we all know, you reallyshouldn't tinker with the economy
(08:26):
that takes away the free economy.
Okay, then he goes on totalk about the Ponzi economy.
Um, and he, I like thisfirst bit, this first quote.
We fool ourselves into believingthat asset prices always go
up over the long term becausethat's what we've always seen.
Right, we've always seen,we've lived in this world where
house prices always go up.
(08:46):
Until they don't, right?
In 2007, I don't know how manyof you were homeowners in 2007.
Maybe a lot of you are, and thenall of a sudden, your thing,
which is always going up, poof.
It's not worth what it was, right?
And then there's lots of, lotsof bankruptcies, lots of people
foreclosing on their homes.
Um, alright, so to keep the systemrunning, central bank monetary
(09:07):
policy all around the world has atarget inflation rate, and the one
we favor in this country is 2%.
That's a completely arbitrary number,like, there wasn't anyone that was like,
There wasn't like a bunch of research.
It was just the, the New Zealand, theKiwi banks decided 2 percent in the 1990s.
And everyone's like, Oh, thatseems to be like a good policy.
We'll go with that.
So that's where our, that's where our2 percent target inflation comes from.
(09:30):
Just was made up 30 yearsago, almost 40 years ago.
Um, and then he talks aboutthe rate of inflation.
So like, uh, hourly wage of 3 and 25cents, which I believe was minimum
wage back in 1970, I can't be mistaken.
Um, It will be the same purchasing poweras having 20 per hour today, well, in
(09:51):
2020 when the book was written today.
Um, and then, uh, this is adirect quote from the book.
Uh, currency found on trustis the value of the currency.
And so doesn't that mean that by settinginflation targets, governments have
a stated goal of eroding that trust?
So in other words, like, if you lookat this objectively, the government's,
their mission is to be nefarious.
(10:14):
Kind of weird to think aboutit from that perspective.
Audience (10:16):
Little comment.
Yeah.
So last week, um, guy came infrom Rabobank in England and did
Rich Lassiter (10:24):
Christian Lawrence.
Audience (10:25):
Yeah.
And, uh, I was at the morning one andhe was talking about this and how he was
talking about how the Fed was trying tobasically craft policy to get us down.
And that they hadn't really beensucceeding, and that the rate was
getting, was still in the high twos.
And I asked, it's like,is 3 percent the new 2%?
(10:48):
Or I mean, it's 2, yeah.
Yeah, you said it right.
Really quickly said, yeah.
Rich Lassiter (10:53):
Yeah, he, yeah, he,
Audience (10:54):
uh.
It's like, you can tell thatthey're, they're like, steering
us to start accepting 3%.
As the new norm, and that weshould expect it all the time.
And I thought that was interestingthat he so readily just agreed to that.
Rich Lassiter (11:09):
Yeah.
Yeah.
That, uh, for context that, thatgentleman, um, one of our Atlanta folks,
um, Ed Juline had suggested that wewatch, uh, that we come to this talk
that he gave at the Dutch embassy, not,not embassy, Dutch chamber of commerce.
Um, and this guy, Christian Lawrence worksfor a Dutch bank and he gave a really
(11:30):
interesting, really interesting talk.
It's probably somewhereon YouTube, I don't know.
But, uh, yeah, it was interesting.
That was last week.
Alright, um, Cheap money.
Talking about the global financial crisis.
Uh, we had this, uh, choice.
The government had thischoice between one and two.
They could bail out the banks and risk,bail out the banks and the risk takers
(11:53):
to create a moral hazard by saying,oh, these guys are, We're going to
absolve them of their sins, and here,let's just make them whole again.
Or, we could let them fall, right?
And, obviously, we all know what happened.
We chose door number one,and not door number two.
Door number two would have had probablya better outcome, like objectively, for
like, the, the monetary balance aroundthe world, if we had let them fall.
(12:17):
But banks would have gone under,and people would have been
unhappy, and much, much misery.
Instead, we kicked the can down the road,printed money, bailed out the banks,
and we'll have the misery later on.
I don't know when it's going tohappen, but it will happen eventually.
Um, and so, uh, going to thethird paragraph there, the central
banks decided who won and lost,and so now we're experiencing the
(12:39):
second and third order effects.
of people having this discontent, and thisis maybe leading to the rise of populism.
People are so unhappy because theyare so financially disadvantaged,
if you're far away from the moneyprinter, i. e. the cotillion effect,
if you're far away from that, you aregetting objectively worse and worse.
Um, and I, I will say, I actuallyplanned on having a bit more, um, To
(13:02):
the slides, one of the slides that Itook a stole from Chris and Lawrence
the other week really showed how muchworse off the lower, like, say, 20
percent of the economy is due to themoney printing over the last five years.
Um, and I didn't have enoughtime to get that put together.
So
Audience (13:20):
just quickly, is it, uh, is it proportionate or is it disproportionate?
Rich Lassiter (13:24):
It's disproportionate.
Yeah.
So the top tier has accelerated.
The middle tier has kind ofmaintained like that, like the.
Um, I think he had it broken down, um.
Audience (13:36):
It seemed to be related to asset ownership.
Rich Lassiter (13:38):
Yeah, I agree, asset ownership.
So if you're the top, you know, 5 or 10percent of society, you've accelerated.
If you were the middle, like,50, 60 percent of society,
you're slightly better off.
But if you're in the lower 20 percentof society, you're much worse off.
Like, you know, 15 percent worse off.
Audience (13:54):
So if you double the money supply, people aren't twice worse off?
They're even more than twice worse off?
(inaudible)
Rich Lassiter (14:02):
Uh, I don't I don't know,
Audience (14:06):
(inaudible)
Rich Lassiter (14:12):
Don't think that the ratio is quite as dramatic as you
said, because if you think aboutwhere, like, we're going to get to in
a slide in a minute here about, um,Oh, here we go at the bottom here.
So, um, so the Fed balance sheet,for example, it was nine under
a trillion dollars, 2008, right?
And when the book iswritten, it was 4 trillion.
And then today it's a littleover 7 trillion, right?
(14:33):
So we're accelerating at a. Jeff Boothlikes to say exponential rate, right?
So we're going up much more than like,you know, doubling or whatever, right?
Um, but I don't know that we're, that the,that correlation is as dramatic as it is.
Yeah?
(14:59):
Oh yeah, if you, if a dollar more, yeah,a dollar more cost for your bread, like,
most people aren't going to, anyonewho's making a reasonable amount of
money is not going to feel that, butif you're living paycheck to paycheck.
You're probably going to feel thattremendously if you have to pay a
dollar more every week for your breadthan, than you were the week before.
Yeah.
Um, and so, one of the things thatgovernments get to do is change the rules.
(15:23):
And this is where tariffsand trade wars come in.
And he's referencing, because again,we hadn't had the ones, we hadn't
had the ones with China yet thatwere going, that were in the news.
Um, so he's talking about afterthe Great Depression, that there,
the government enacted reforms.
To, um, to basically, uh, help outthe farmers by their, they raised
(15:46):
the, the, they raised the prices ongoods imported from Canada and Europe.
But apparently, uh, that, um, harmed thefarmers and it took them longer to recover
from the Great Depression because of that.
Um, I was not aware ofthat before the book.
Uh, so government, uh, changing therules and distorting the market.
So I think, uh, I think that Bitcoin.
(16:08):
Is unique, because it's the onlytrue free market in the world.
Because no one is manipulatingthe supply of Bitcoin.
Um, maybe some whales are.
But like, there's no governments that aremanipulating the supply of Bitcoin, right?
So, so, you can't What's that?
The dolphins?
So, um, anyways, it's not, uh, It's, it'san opportunity for anyone in the world
(16:30):
to get in or out whenever they want.
All right, that was end of chapter 1.
Anyone want to talkabout chapter 1 anymore?
Any questions oradditions about chapter 1?
So chapter 2, part 2 of How the EconomyWorks, is called Creative Destruction.
He touches on this topic a lot,about creative destruction.
This is, the coined this term,the word was coined, term was
(16:52):
coined, by an Australian Americaneconomist named Joseph Schumpeter.
who lived through those years.
And he basically said that innovationby entrepreneurs is the disruptive force
that sustains the economic growth eventhough it costs the value or destroys
the value of an established company.
(17:14):
And so basically, this is, he's basicallysaying technology disrupts things.
Right, that's really, if you summarizethis, technology disrupts things and
that hopefully we get new and betterthings when it disrupts things.
And I think that's one of the pointswe'll get to eventually in the book.
And so here's an example of,uh, of creative destruction.
So Blockbuster was this, you know,such a huge entity, and it had 84,
(17:37):
000 employees, or 9, 000 stores,and then Netflix's upstart, right?
It doesn't have to have all the stores,it uses the postal system, and it mails
DVDs, and some of you might not be oldenough to know that there were DVDs in
Netflix, and it wasn't just streaming.
But it's, you got a DVD in the mail,it's like this, you got a little DVD
in the sleeve, and it came in the mail,and then you had it for like three
days, you put it back in the mail,and You, I don't know, you paid ten
bucks or something like that for themonthly subscription to get up to three
(18:00):
DVDs at a time or something like that.
And so, Netflix had to mail DVDsbecause we didn't have a fast enough
internet to just do streaming.
But then eventually there wasjust streaming, right, and we
didn't have to do DVDs anymore.
And you got your Netflix on your device,on your computer, on your, on your
thing connected to your TV, whateveryour Apple TV or whatever that was.
(18:20):
And so, that totally disruptedBlockbuster, and Blockbuster's advantage
of having all these employees in all thesestores became a disadvantage because now
it was now a giant overhead for them.
And, uh, so, in result, Netflixcreated, and Blockbuster destroyed.
And one thing I want to, that Jeff didn'ttalk about, but is, is I think pretty
key to this, is DVD technology, right?
(18:44):
So DVD disrupted.
The VHS technology, right?
So, this wasn't going to happen.
We had to mail around these bigbox cassette tapes of VHS's.
You could go to thebox store and get that.
But then once VHS's became, the moviedata became smaller and flatter and
you could put it in the mail andsend it around the world very easily.
That was another thing that wasanother technology that disrupted the
(19:06):
existing technology prior to this.
Plus it was a better picture,right, than the VHS was.
Audience (19:11):
Question?
Just ask yourself.
Why, why couldn't Blockbuster win, right?
Rich Lassiter (19:20):
He talks about that though.
Blockbuster would have had to, theyhad this existing momentum, right,
of having all these stores, and allthese employees, and had to pivot
from all those, had to unwind allthat to have just DVDs in the mail.
And so how do you, how do yousee in advance that you have
to unwind this giant, you know,business that you've created?
Audience (19:45):
There's a popular book called The Innovator's Dilemma, and it talks
about this exact effect, which is whenyou try to innovate within an existing
company that's successful, it almostalways cannibalizes the existing revenue.
And when that is the threat withinthe company, then the existing company
(20:06):
always wants to resist the innovation.
And that's why startups can always runcircles around existing companies, whereas
existing companies struggle to innovate.
Rich Lassiter (20:15):
He talks about that with Eastman Kodak, uh, in a later chapter.
Um, Bill direct.
So this was Jeff's company andhe, uh, started this company.
It basically was like abuilder's supply company.
And he talks about how he went all in andhe had like three kids under four with
his wife and like, they sold their housefor all their money into the company.
(20:38):
And they went like all into thisbusiness and it was working.
He had a marketplace and then he realizedhe could change things were kind of
almost like the Amazon model wherehe let suppliers give him the data.
Like instead of him having to choose,he says, flyers, art suppliers, you
can show me how many products you have.
(20:59):
And he went from 6, 000products to 150, 000 products.
And it was working.
The business was successful.
And, um, Then, uh, you know, it tookhim a while to figure that out, to
iron out the kinks with the business.
He did his big switch when he did theswitch to having this many products.
(21:19):
But he said along the way he realizedthat family, friends, and integrity
were the things that were importantto him and basically not the business.
So he decided, this was his quotein the book, to betray myself.
Was the only way to truly fail.
So he basically decided like, business,business, his business job isn't
as important to him as his morals.
(21:42):
Um, and he mentioned this TED talk that hewent to about Bill Gross, who I'm pretty
sure was a famous investor, but I cannot,I didn't Google him and, and look up what
his, uh, what his, um, background was.
But he had a TED talk and he talkedabout the success of startups and
basically most of it is timing.
So when you launch your book, your,your, not your book, sorry, uh, when
(22:03):
you launch your business is mostimportant as not anything else, right?
It's not your funding, it's, it's thewin, it's the, it's the time right
for you to launch this business.
And then that was 40 percent of the,of the success, 30 percent was the team
and how they executed, 20 percent wasthe idea, I'll let you read the rest.
But, um, interesting that timingwas the most critical thing.
(22:24):
And then he goes on, I didn'twrite it all down, but he goes
on to talk about, um, Ford.
And how, uh, when Henry Ford started theFord company and it didn't work well.
And then, uh, a couple of years later,he got the assembly line worked out
and then it worked well, and then howthese other countries around the world
had their different, uh, automotivestartups that started different times.
So like, you know, when GM startedand when Volvo started, and they
(22:47):
all were like, it was timing, Iwas like, when did this start?
Uh, and then he talks about DeLorean.
You guys remember DeLorean, probablythe famous car from Back to the Future.
That was a man, I forget his firstname, last name was DeLorean.
He worked at, uh, at Chrysler, Ibelieve it was, and decided to start
his own company, and it didn't work.
And basically, uh, Jeff's attributing thatto timing, which is why it didn't work.
(23:08):
Alright, speaking of, um, successfulcompanies, we have Amazon.
So, he mentions that in 2001,Amazon had lost 94 percent of
its market share, market cap.
From this peak just two years earlierand that's got to be pretty hard, right?
If you're like an Amazon investoror even if you're a tech investor,
this is the dot com bubble, right?
So 99, well, you know, the peak wasI forget the month of this peak.
(23:31):
It was somewhere in 2000, but um, thebubble popped Amazon went down in value.
Lehman Brothers wrote this really,uh, awful Uh prediction report saying
Amazon's gonna blow up They have topull a rabbit out of a hat in order to
like succeed and then Um, obviously theysucceeded because we're, Amazon is one
of the biggest companies in the world.
(23:52):
And so, when the book was written, ithad 8 percent of all retail sales were
from Amazon, which is astonishing.
And they had nearly half ofevery dollar sold online.
Like, that's just kind of crazythat one retailer had nearly
half of all, all e commerce.
Um, and Amazon Web Servers, uh,was 80 billion in business in 2020.
(24:12):
And at 30 percent of crowd computing,I looked it up, today it's 91 billion.
Um, of, uh, the AWS service, but theyalso have about the same amount of
the percentage of cloud computing.
And of course we all know that LehmanBrothers is gone because they weren't
able to predict their future very well.
Um, this was interesting as well.
So the book has these first twocolumns, um, the largest company
(24:34):
2009, 2019, and how they changed.
I went ahead and added in the 2025.
So we can see how these companies were.
And if you look at the ones in 2009,we have lots, mostly we've got like.
Um, uh, energy companies andbuilding companies, right?
And if you look, look down thelist, it's building and energy.
And now then we've got in 2019, wehave mostly technology companies.
(24:59):
And then in 2025 again, I thinkthey're all know Saudi Aramco.
Everything else is technology, right?
The only one that's not technologyis Saudi Aramco, which is.
Uh, you know, oil plus business, becauseI think that's the Saudi national firm.
Um, but then I threw in ourbeloved Bitcoin there, 2.
1 billion today.
Uh, sorry, 2.
1 trillion today.
(25:20):
That's one thing I wanted to pointout on this, uh, set as well.
So these are all in the billions,and then we have billions slash
trillion, and then we have trillions.
So, that just goes to show themoney printing and how the asset
inflation is going on, uh, over these.
What is that?
16 years.
That's not very long.
16 years, that's not very long.
(25:41):
Anyone have comments about this one?
Okay.
Um, oops.
Uh, platforms.
So what we saw on the last slide reallywas it's not just technology, but it's
platforms that are, uh, becoming the mostdominant, uh, things and value in society.
And that has to do withthe network effects.
So, So, uh, he mentioned Amazon,Airbnb, and YouTube, how these are
(26:05):
platforms that allow the suppliersto put the content on, right?
Well, your, your content is your, yourAirbnb, like it's your unit that you're
selling, or it's your, it's your SKUsthat you're putting on Amazon, or your
videos that you're putting on YouTube.
Um, and then supply can scalealmost indefinitely when you're
just aggregating this, these liststhat someone else has given to you.
(26:29):
So you're not, if you don't haveto, if your business is not to.
You create the product.
You let the creators create the product.
And you just are the base of thesearch engine for the products.
He also talked aboutthe illusion of choice.
So he mentioned like, Google search, hementioned that if you search something
in Google, you're probably not evengoing to go to the second page.
Right?
Much less the 35, 000thitem that's on the list.
(26:51):
So you have the illusion of choicebecause whoever's on the search
engine optimization has gotten theirproduct to the top of the list and
you're just seeing the top list.
Um, and where this is the end, um, uh,he mentioned this, uh, Hyman Minsky,
uh, was a, uh, I think it was an,I think it was a professor at NYU,
(27:14):
um, and is the, uh, tipping point.
He's talking about the Minsky momentis when the debt fueled asset bubble
collapses and the assets become difficultto sell and market collapse ensues.
So that even when governments preachfree market rules, they will still act
as a lender of last resort when theireconomy is, uh, faced with collapse.
(27:38):
And so Jeff says that it's not thedebt that undermines capitalism,
it is the act of stabilizing theeconomy through socializing losses.
If we reference back to the, you know,door number one, when the government chose
to bail out the banks, that's the problem,is bailing out the banks is the problem.
You know, I think the people atthe time, Made the best decisions
(27:58):
they thought they could do.
At the time, I don'tthink it was nefarious.
Maybe it was, it probably wasn't.
I don't know.
Who knows?
But it's very easy for us to all likesecond guess in hindsight and decide
they should have done a differentthing than they did, but panic.
Yeah.
It, they did what they did andhow now we have to live with it.
All right, that's, uh, I'm gonna go,that's the end of chapters one and two.
(28:20):
That's me.
I'm Rich Lasseter.
I'm a neurodoctor.
I love Bitcoin.
I took this from Doug.
Nothing to sell you.
No financial disclosures.
I own Bitcoin.
Uh, I have a website.
I write a blog post every oncein a while on the website.
But I spend most of the time on Twitter.
I spend an irrationalamount of time on Twitter.
Um, so, I'm on Twitter.
I know, I should probablygo to Nostra, but I haven't.
(28:41):
I, I, I, I have an account, but
Audience (28:45):
What's Twitter?
Rich Lassiter (28:47):
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I spend an inordinateamount of time on Twitter.
That QR code is my website.
It's just the CryptoDoctor.
com.
Oh, I will say Before Ifigured out Bitcoin, I thought
all crypto was important.
And I haven't, uh, you know, undonethe work that I did years ago.
(29:08):
So, that's why I'm a cryptodoctor, not the Bitcoin doctor.
But all the, there was all the Bitcoindoctors, they were already there.
So, yeah.
Audience (29:15):
(applause)
Stephen DeLorme (29:29):
Hey, thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you want to learn more aboutanything that we discussed, you can
look for links in the show notesthat should be in your podcast
player, or you can go to atlbitlab.
com slash podcast on a final note.
If you found this information usefuland you want to help support us, you
can always send us a tip in Bitcoin.
(29:51):
Your support really helps us that wecan keep bringing you content like this.
All right.
Catch you later.
First there's currency wars, then there's trade
wars, then there's real wars.
We're in the midst of aserious global meltdown.
And of course, you know, all of usare old enough to know that we were
in a big meltdown in that year, right?
2007, 2008. point is experts gotit wrong and they didn't know it
until it was right on top of them.
Bubble popped and people realizedthat debt could never be paid off.
(00:20):
And when the credit is taken away,everything unravels very rapidly.
Stephen DeLorme (00:34):
This podcast episode is an event recording.
If you're listening to the audioversion, you might be missing some
context from the speaker's visuals.
You can find the videoversion at atlbitlab.
com.
That's A T L B I T L A B dot com.
There might also be audiencequestions or other background
chatter that's not audible.
Look, event recordings are neverperfect, but we're sharing it here
(00:56):
because we think you're going tofind something valuable in it.
Let's talk a little bit about our sponsorsfirst, and then we'll get onto the show.
This episode is sponsored by ATL BitLab.
ATL BitLab is Atlanta'sfreedom tech hacker space.
(01:17):
We have co working desks,conference rooms, event space,
maker tools, and tons of coffee.
There is a very activecommunity here in the lab.
Every Wednesday night isBitcoin night here in Atlanta.
We also have meetups for cybersecurity,artificial intelligence, decentralized
identity, product design, and more.
We offer day passes and nomad passesfor people who need to use the lab only
(01:37):
occasionally, as well as membershipsfor people who plan to use the lab
more regularly, such as myself.
One of the best things abouthaving a BitLab membership isn't
the amenities, it's the people.
Surrounding yourself with thecommunity helps you learn faster
and helps you build better.
Your creativity becomes amplifiedwhen you work in this space.
That's what I think at least.
(01:58):
If you're interested in becominga member or supporting the space,
please visit us at atlbitlab.
com.
That's A T L B I T L A B dot com.
All right, on to our show.
Rich Lassiter (02:13):
So, I'm Rich Lassiter, I am an emergency room doctor,
I love Bitcoin, I love you guys.
And I had a twist in my armand said, you must present.
So I am presenting on,on The Price of Tomorrow.
Um, I had never, actuallynever read this book until now.
Uh, and I haven't read it allyet, but I read these chapters
and I'm ready to talk about it.
So, um, here's our book.
(02:35):
I want to point out something,um, The book is from 2020.
Obviously, it's been, you know, fourand a half, five years, whatever.
Probably he was writing it in2019, I'm guessing, and published
a time, etc. So, this is five yearold information, more or less.
That was today's block heightwhen I was typing up these slides.
Um, so, uh, onwards to chapter one.
Uh, how the economy works,part one, printing the money.
(02:59):
And he led off with this interesting storyabout this guy he knows, uh, who is named
Chen Fong, who his parents were afraid.
And he, this is what his parents,uh, they were elderly Chinese
people, I'm guessing, had said, firstthere's currency wars, then there's
trade wars, then there's real wars.
And You know, the other week, whenDoug was talking about this, he was
(03:20):
talking about how kind of, uh, uh, thepremonition, that's not a word, but
there's a word I'm looking for that Ican't find right now, about, um, the
foresight, basically, that Jeff Booth had.
How these things have kind ofcome to play, like, we were seeing
trade wars, that wasn't 2020.
(03:40):
And it became a topic in the Trumppresidency, you know, after that.
So, very interesting, I thought,to see that, and real wars, right?
Then we have the stuff inUkraine and the stuff in Israel.
Like, we're having real wars now.
So this is kind of coming to, comingto, uh, fruition, if you will.
Alright, um, and then his next topic was,he's talking about all these financial
(04:01):
experts and how they were, you just, wejust started, Joe, you missed nothing.
Um, and so, um, What they got wrong.
And so I thought thiswas pretty interesting.
I know there's a lot of words uphere, but, uh, I want to point out.
So the first one is Ben Bernanke,who was the chairman of the federal
reserve from 20, 2006, 2014.
(04:22):
And he's like, you know,the bold bit there.
So they, their, their job is to makesure that there is not excessive
risk in these institutions thatthe federal reserve is related to.
And obviously, as weknow, with the hindsight.
That's exactly whatthey did not do, right?
There's plenty of riskin these institutions.
Um, and then, as we go along, sothat, that first quote was in 2005.
(04:44):
Three years later, January 2008,we're not forecasting a recession.
In July, and I've made this an orangebold here, so in July 16th, everything's
well capitalized, no danger of failing,and then September 18th, holy shit,
the world is falling apart, right?
Uh, the Treasury Secretary says we mustspend several hundred billion dollars.
And then, you know, a month later,Janet Yellen, who became our treasurer's
(05:06):
secretary, she just left a moment ago.
But at the time, was the head of theFederal Reserve Bank of 2000, of San
Francisco, basically saying that thisdownward trajectory is hair raising.
We're in the midst of aserious global meltdown.
And of course, you know, all of usare old enough to know that we were
in a big meltdown in that year, right?
2007, 2007, 2008. So point is expertsgot it wrong and they didn't know it
(05:33):
until it was right on top of them.
Also, I'm going to, I don'tmind being interrupted.
We can talk about if you guyshave insights or additives,
these aren't my thoughts, unlessa few things are my thoughts.
Mostly this is Jeff Booth'sthoughts, so we can interrupt and
add color whenever you guys want.
Um, then he goes on to talk abouthow the, uh, uh, the bubble,
(05:54):
the financial, the great, great.
Financial crisis, the bubblepopped and people realized that
debt could never be paid off.
And when the credit is taken away,everything unravels very rapidly.
The system is, as we all know, asBitcoiners, this is a Ponzi where we're
all trusting that banks have the assetswe think they have until everyone
(06:18):
wants them and then it all unravels.
And so the system works on trust,remove the trust, and it falls apart.
I think back, um, to, you guys probablywatched, uh, It's a Wonderful Life,
and you see that movie, and like,there's one of the banks, right?
And like, that's the reality of theworld, before the Federal Reserve Bank
was propping up all these, all theinstitutions that were gonna fail.
(06:39):
Alright, crazy formula here, this isthe formula for the Gross Domestic
Product, um, and he's really talkingabout the trade between nations.
Um, and so the GDP ismade up of four things.
Consumer spending, or personalconsumption, investments,
exports, and government spending.
And you add all these up, you get the GDP.
(07:01):
So, um, he talks about there beinga balance of trade between nations.
And that nations are basicallygoing to do whatever helps them.
And so if we are in this country,as we all are, um, what we
might do to drive up our GDP isgoing to be to increase consumer
spending, which makes sense, right?
(07:21):
And that we are like the mostconsumer society on the planet, right?
We spend and spend and buy and buy, right?
That's the kind of the Americanway is to buy more things.
Whereas if you're in a lower incomecountry, then your main Uh, way to drive
up your GDP per that formula up thereis to increase your exports, because
maybe you can't buy things from othercountries, so you export other countries.
(07:43):
And so from a Bitcoin standpoint,I kind of put it in the orange
there that the country is goingto do what helps them the most.
This is a game theory, right?
The game theory is dowhat is to your advantage.
So Countries are going to maintainthese policies that incentivize
their side of the equation with help.
And the government health is, isusually those things, tariffs,
taxes, or subsidies, right?
(08:04):
The government helps you out by makingyour, your widget cheaper, or it taxes
the people they don't like, or it takestariffs to make you not buy these guys
and buy these guys instead, right?
No, don't buy the Canadian goods, buythe American, don't buy the Chinese
goods, buy the American goods, right?
By just driving the price up.
But, as we all know, you reallyshouldn't tinker with the economy
(08:26):
that takes away the free economy.
Okay, then he goes on totalk about the Ponzi economy.
Um, and he, I like thisfirst bit, this first quote.
We fool ourselves into believingthat asset prices always go
up over the long term becausethat's what we've always seen.
Right, we've always seen,we've lived in this world where
house prices always go up.
(08:46):
Until they don't, right?
In 2007, I don't know how manyof you were homeowners in 2007.
Maybe a lot of you are, and thenall of a sudden, your thing,
which is always going up, poof.
It's not worth what it was, right?
And then there's lots of, lotsof bankruptcies, lots of people
foreclosing on their homes.
Um, alright, so to keep the systemrunning, central bank monetary
(09:07):
policy all around the world has atarget inflation rate, and the one
we favor in this country is 2%.
That's a completely arbitrary number,like, there wasn't anyone that was like,
There wasn't like a bunch of research.
It was just the, the New Zealand, theKiwi banks decided 2 percent in the 1990s.
And everyone's like, Oh, thatseems to be like a good policy.
We'll go with that.
So that's where our, that's where our2 percent target inflation comes from.
(09:30):
Just was made up 30 yearsago, almost 40 years ago.
Um, and then he talks aboutthe rate of inflation.
So like, uh, hourly wage of 3 and 25cents, which I believe was minimum
wage back in 1970, I can't be mistaken.
Um, It will be the same purchasing poweras having 20 per hour today, well, in
(09:51):
2020 when the book was written today.
Um, and then, uh, this is adirect quote from the book.
Uh, currency found on trustis the value of the currency.
And so doesn't that mean that by settinginflation targets, governments have
a stated goal of eroding that trust?
So in other words, like, if you lookat this objectively, the government's,
their mission is to be nefarious.
(10:14):
Kind of weird to think aboutit from that perspective.
Audience (10:16):
Little comment.
Yeah.
So last week, um, guy came infrom Rabobank in England and did
Rich Lassiter (10:24):
Christian Lawrence.
Audience (10:25):
Yeah.
And, uh, I was at the morning one andhe was talking about this and how he was
talking about how the Fed was trying tobasically craft policy to get us down.
And that they hadn't really beensucceeding, and that the rate was
getting, was still in the high twos.
And I asked, it's like,is 3 percent the new 2%?
(10:48):
Or I mean, it's 2, yeah.
Yeah, you said it right.
Really quickly said, yeah.
Rich Lassiter (10:53):
Yeah, he, yeah, he,
Audience (10:54):
uh.
It's like, you can tell thatthey're, they're like, steering
us to start accepting 3%.
As the new norm, and that weshould expect it all the time.
And I thought that was interestingthat he so readily just agreed to that.
Rich Lassiter (11:09):
Yeah.
Yeah.
That, uh, for context that, thatgentleman, um, one of our Atlanta folks,
um, Ed Juline had suggested that wewatch, uh, that we come to this talk
that he gave at the Dutch embassy, not,not embassy, Dutch chamber of commerce.
Um, and this guy, Christian Lawrence worksfor a Dutch bank and he gave a really
(11:30):
interesting, really interesting talk.
It's probably somewhereon YouTube, I don't know.
But, uh, yeah, it was interesting.
That was last week.
Alright, um, Cheap money.
Talking about the global financial crisis.
Uh, we had this, uh, choice.
The government had thischoice between one and two.
They could bail out the banks and risk,bail out the banks and the risk takers
(11:53):
to create a moral hazard by saying,oh, these guys are, We're going to
absolve them of their sins, and here,let's just make them whole again.
Or, we could let them fall, right?
And, obviously, we all know what happened.
We chose door number one,and not door number two.
Door number two would have had probablya better outcome, like objectively, for
like, the, the monetary balance aroundthe world, if we had let them fall.
(12:17):
But banks would have gone under,and people would have been
unhappy, and much, much misery.
Instead, we kicked the can down the road,printed money, bailed out the banks,
and we'll have the misery later on.
I don't know when it's going tohappen, but it will happen eventually.
Um, and so, uh, going to thethird paragraph there, the central
banks decided who won and lost,and so now we're experiencing the
(12:39):
second and third order effects.
of people having this discontent, and thisis maybe leading to the rise of populism.
People are so unhappy because theyare so financially disadvantaged,
if you're far away from the moneyprinter, i. e. the cotillion effect,
if you're far away from that, you aregetting objectively worse and worse.
Um, and I, I will say, I actuallyplanned on having a bit more, um, To
(13:02):
the slides, one of the slides that Itook a stole from Chris and Lawrence
the other week really showed how muchworse off the lower, like, say, 20
percent of the economy is due to themoney printing over the last five years.
Um, and I didn't have enoughtime to get that put together.
So
Audience (13:20):
just quickly, is it, uh, is it proportionate or is it disproportionate?
Rich Lassiter (13:24):
It's disproportionate.
Yeah.
So the top tier has accelerated.
The middle tier has kind ofmaintained like that, like the.
Um, I think he had it broken down, um.
Audience (13:36):
It seemed to be related to asset ownership.
Rich Lassiter (13:38):
Yeah, I agree, asset ownership.
So if you're the top, you know, 5 or 10percent of society, you've accelerated.
If you were the middle, like,50, 60 percent of society,
you're slightly better off.
But if you're in the lower 20 percentof society, you're much worse off.
Like, you know, 15 percent worse off.
Audience (13:54):
So if you double the money supply, people aren't twice worse off?
They're even more than twice worse off?
(inaudible)
Rich Lassiter (14:02):
Uh, I don't I don't know,
Audience (14:06):
(inaudible)
Rich Lassiter (14:12):
Don't think that the ratio is quite as dramatic as you
said, because if you think aboutwhere, like, we're going to get to in
a slide in a minute here about, um,Oh, here we go at the bottom here.
So, um, so the Fed balance sheet,for example, it was nine under
a trillion dollars, 2008, right?
And when the book iswritten, it was 4 trillion.
And then today it's a littleover 7 trillion, right?
(14:33):
So we're accelerating at a. Jeff Boothlikes to say exponential rate, right?
So we're going up much more than like,you know, doubling or whatever, right?
Um, but I don't know that we're, that the,that correlation is as dramatic as it is.
Yeah?
(14:59):
Oh yeah, if you, if a dollar more, yeah,a dollar more cost for your bread, like,
most people aren't going to, anyonewho's making a reasonable amount of
money is not going to feel that, butif you're living paycheck to paycheck.
You're probably going to feel thattremendously if you have to pay a
dollar more every week for your breadthan, than you were the week before.
Yeah.
Um, and so, one of the things thatgovernments get to do is change the rules.
(15:23):
And this is where tariffsand trade wars come in.
And he's referencing, because again,we hadn't had the ones, we hadn't
had the ones with China yet thatwere going, that were in the news.
Um, so he's talking about afterthe Great Depression, that there,
the government enacted reforms.
To, um, to basically, uh, help outthe farmers by their, they raised
(15:46):
the, the, they raised the prices ongoods imported from Canada and Europe.
But apparently, uh, that, um, harmed thefarmers and it took them longer to recover
from the Great Depression because of that.
Um, I was not aware ofthat before the book.
Uh, so government, uh, changing therules and distorting the market.
So I think, uh, I think that Bitcoin.
(16:08):
Is unique, because it's the onlytrue free market in the world.
Because no one is manipulatingthe supply of Bitcoin.
Um, maybe some whales are.
But like, there's no governments that aremanipulating the supply of Bitcoin, right?
So, so, you can't What's that?
The dolphins?
So, um, anyways, it's not, uh, It's, it'san opportunity for anyone in the world
(16:30):
to get in or out whenever they want.
All right, that was end of chapter 1.
Anyone want to talkabout chapter 1 anymore?
Any questions oradditions about chapter 1?
So chapter 2, part 2 of How the EconomyWorks, is called Creative Destruction.
He touches on this topic a lot,about creative destruction.
This is, the coined this term,the word was coined, term was
(16:52):
coined, by an Australian Americaneconomist named Joseph Schumpeter.
who lived through those years.
And he basically said that innovationby entrepreneurs is the disruptive force
that sustains the economic growth eventhough it costs the value or destroys
the value of an established company.
(17:14):
And so basically, this is, he's basicallysaying technology disrupts things.
Right, that's really, if you summarizethis, technology disrupts things and
that hopefully we get new and betterthings when it disrupts things.
And I think that's one of the pointswe'll get to eventually in the book.
And so here's an example of,uh, of creative destruction.
So Blockbuster was this, you know,such a huge entity, and it had 84,
(17:37):
000 employees, or 9, 000 stores,and then Netflix's upstart, right?
It doesn't have to have all the stores,it uses the postal system, and it mails
DVDs, and some of you might not be oldenough to know that there were DVDs in
Netflix, and it wasn't just streaming.
But it's, you got a DVD in the mail,it's like this, you got a little DVD
in the sleeve, and it came in the mail,and then you had it for like three
days, you put it back in the mail,and You, I don't know, you paid ten
bucks or something like that for themonthly subscription to get up to three
(18:00):
DVDs at a time or something like that.
And so, Netflix had to mail DVDsbecause we didn't have a fast enough
internet to just do streaming.
But then eventually there wasjust streaming, right, and we
didn't have to do DVDs anymore.
And you got your Netflix on your device,on your computer, on your, on your
thing connected to your TV, whateveryour Apple TV or whatever that was.
(18:20):
And so, that totally disruptedBlockbuster, and Blockbuster's advantage
of having all these employees in all thesestores became a disadvantage because now
it was now a giant overhead for them.
And, uh, so, in result, Netflixcreated, and Blockbuster destroyed.
And one thing I want to, that Jeff didn'ttalk about, but is, is I think pretty
key to this, is DVD technology, right?
(18:44):
So DVD disrupted.
The VHS technology, right?
So, this wasn't going to happen.
We had to mail around these bigbox cassette tapes of VHS's.
You could go to thebox store and get that.
But then once VHS's became, the moviedata became smaller and flatter and
you could put it in the mail andsend it around the world very easily.
That was another thing that wasanother technology that disrupted the
(19:06):
existing technology prior to this.
Plus it was a better picture,right, than the VHS was.
Audience (19:11):
Question?
Just ask yourself.
Why, why couldn't Blockbuster win, right?
Rich Lassiter (19:20):
He talks about that though.
Blockbuster would have had to, theyhad this existing momentum, right,
of having all these stores, and allthese employees, and had to pivot
from all those, had to unwind allthat to have just DVDs in the mail.
And so how do you, how do yousee in advance that you have
to unwind this giant, you know,business that you've created?
Audience (19:45):
There's a popular book called The Innovator's Dilemma, and it talks
about this exact effect, which is whenyou try to innovate within an existing
company that's successful, it almostalways cannibalizes the existing revenue.
And when that is the threat withinthe company, then the existing company
(20:06):
always wants to resist the innovation.
And that's why startups can always runcircles around existing companies, whereas
existing companies struggle to innovate.
Rich Lassiter (20:15):
He talks about that with Eastman Kodak, uh, in a later chapter.
Um, Bill direct.
So this was Jeff's company andhe, uh, started this company.
It basically was like abuilder's supply company.
And he talks about how he went all in andhe had like three kids under four with
his wife and like, they sold their housefor all their money into the company.
(20:38):
And they went like all into thisbusiness and it was working.
He had a marketplace and then he realizedhe could change things were kind of
almost like the Amazon model wherehe let suppliers give him the data.
Like instead of him having to choose,he says, flyers, art suppliers, you
can show me how many products you have.
(20:59):
And he went from 6, 000products to 150, 000 products.
And it was working.
The business was successful.
And, um, Then, uh, you know, it tookhim a while to figure that out, to
iron out the kinks with the business.
He did his big switch when he did theswitch to having this many products.
(21:19):
But he said along the way he realizedthat family, friends, and integrity
were the things that were importantto him and basically not the business.
So he decided, this was his quotein the book, to betray myself.
Was the only way to truly fail.
So he basically decided like, business,business, his business job isn't
as important to him as his morals.
(21:42):
Um, and he mentioned this TED talk that hewent to about Bill Gross, who I'm pretty
sure was a famous investor, but I cannot,I didn't Google him and, and look up what
his, uh, what his, um, background was.
But he had a TED talk and he talkedabout the success of startups and
basically most of it is timing.
So when you launch your book, your,your, not your book, sorry, uh, when
(22:03):
you launch your business is mostimportant as not anything else, right?
It's not your funding, it's, it's thewin, it's the, it's the time right
for you to launch this business.
And then that was 40 percent of the,of the success, 30 percent was the team
and how they executed, 20 percent wasthe idea, I'll let you read the rest.
But, um, interesting that timingwas the most critical thing.
(22:24):
And then he goes on, I didn'twrite it all down, but he goes
on to talk about, um, Ford.
And how, uh, when Henry Ford started theFord company and it didn't work well.
And then, uh, a couple of years later,he got the assembly line worked out
and then it worked well, and then howthese other countries around the world
had their different, uh, automotivestartups that started different times.
So like, you know, when GM startedand when Volvo started, and they
(22:47):
all were like, it was timing, Iwas like, when did this start?
Uh, and then he talks about DeLorean.
You guys remember DeLorean, probablythe famous car from Back to the Future.
That was a man, I forget his firstname, last name was DeLorean.
He worked at, uh, at Chrysler, Ibelieve it was, and decided to start
his own company, and it didn't work.
And basically, uh, Jeff's attributing thatto timing, which is why it didn't work.
(23:08):
Alright, speaking of, um, successfulcompanies, we have Amazon.
So, he mentions that in 2001,Amazon had lost 94 percent of
its market share, market cap.
From this peak just two years earlierand that's got to be pretty hard, right?
If you're like an Amazon investoror even if you're a tech investor,
this is the dot com bubble, right?
So 99, well, you know, the peak wasI forget the month of this peak.
(23:31):
It was somewhere in 2000, but um, thebubble popped Amazon went down in value.
Lehman Brothers wrote this really,uh, awful Uh prediction report saying
Amazon's gonna blow up They have topull a rabbit out of a hat in order to
like succeed and then Um, obviously theysucceeded because we're, Amazon is one
of the biggest companies in the world.
(23:52):
And so, when the book was written, ithad 8 percent of all retail sales were
from Amazon, which is astonishing.
And they had nearly half ofevery dollar sold online.
Like, that's just kind of crazythat one retailer had nearly
half of all, all e commerce.
Um, and Amazon Web Servers, uh,was 80 billion in business in 2020.
(24:12):
And at 30 percent of crowd computing,I looked it up, today it's 91 billion.
Um, of, uh, the AWS service, but theyalso have about the same amount of
the percentage of cloud computing.
And of course we all know that LehmanBrothers is gone because they weren't
able to predict their future very well.
Um, this was interesting as well.
So the book has these first twocolumns, um, the largest company
(24:34):
2009, 2019, and how they changed.
I went ahead and added in the 2025.
So we can see how these companies were.
And if you look at the ones in 2009,we have lots, mostly we've got like.
Um, uh, energy companies andbuilding companies, right?
And if you look, look down thelist, it's building and energy.
And now then we've got in 2019, wehave mostly technology companies.
(24:59):
And then in 2025 again, I thinkthey're all know Saudi Aramco.
Everything else is technology, right?
The only one that's not technologyis Saudi Aramco, which is.
Uh, you know, oil plus business, becauseI think that's the Saudi national firm.
Um, but then I threw in ourbeloved Bitcoin there, 2.
1 billion today.
Uh, sorry, 2.
1 trillion today.
(25:20):
That's one thing I wanted to pointout on this, uh, set as well.
So these are all in the billions,and then we have billions slash
trillion, and then we have trillions.
So, that just goes to show themoney printing and how the asset
inflation is going on, uh, over these.
What is that?
16 years.
That's not very long.
16 years, that's not very long.
(25:41):
Anyone have comments about this one?
Okay.
Um, oops.
Uh, platforms.
So what we saw on the last slide reallywas it's not just technology, but it's
platforms that are, uh, becoming the mostdominant, uh, things and value in society.
And that has to do withthe network effects.
So, So, uh, he mentioned Amazon,Airbnb, and YouTube, how these are
(26:05):
platforms that allow the suppliersto put the content on, right?
Well, your, your content is your, yourAirbnb, like it's your unit that you're
selling, or it's your, it's your SKUsthat you're putting on Amazon, or your
videos that you're putting on YouTube.
Um, and then supply can scalealmost indefinitely when you're
just aggregating this, these liststhat someone else has given to you.
(26:29):
So you're not, if you don't haveto, if your business is not to.
You create the product.
You let the creators create the product.
And you just are the base of thesearch engine for the products.
He also talked aboutthe illusion of choice.
So he mentioned like, Google search, hementioned that if you search something
in Google, you're probably not evengoing to go to the second page.
Right?
Much less the 35, 000thitem that's on the list.
(26:51):
So you have the illusion of choicebecause whoever's on the search
engine optimization has gotten theirproduct to the top of the list and
you're just seeing the top list.
Um, and where this is the end, um, uh,he mentioned this, uh, Hyman Minsky,
uh, was a, uh, I think it was an,I think it was a professor at NYU,
(27:14):
um, and is the, uh, tipping point.
He's talking about the Minsky momentis when the debt fueled asset bubble
collapses and the assets become difficultto sell and market collapse ensues.
So that even when governments preachfree market rules, they will still act
as a lender of last resort when theireconomy is, uh, faced with collapse.
(27:38):
And so Jeff says that it's not thedebt that undermines capitalism,
it is the act of stabilizing theeconomy through socializing losses.
If we reference back to the, you know,door number one, when the government chose
to bail out the banks, that's the problem,is bailing out the banks is the problem.
You know, I think the people atthe time, Made the best decisions
(27:58):
they thought they could do.
At the time, I don'tthink it was nefarious.
Maybe it was, it probably wasn't.
I don't know.
Who knows?
But it's very easy for us to all likesecond guess in hindsight and decide
they should have done a differentthing than they did, but panic.
Yeah.
It, they did what they did andhow now we have to live with it.
All right, that's, uh, I'm gonna go,that's the end of chapters one and two.
(28:20):
That's me.
I'm Rich Lasseter.
I'm a neurodoctor.
I love Bitcoin.
I took this from Doug.
Nothing to sell you.
No financial disclosures.
I own Bitcoin.
Uh, I have a website.
I write a blog post every oncein a while on the website.
But I spend most of the time on Twitter.
I spend an irrationalamount of time on Twitter.
Um, so, I'm on Twitter.
I know, I should probablygo to Nostra, but I haven't.
(28:41):
I, I, I, I have an account, but
Audience (28:45):
What's Twitter?
Rich Lassiter (28:47):
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I spend an inordinateamount of time on Twitter.
That QR code is my website.
It's just the CryptoDoctor.
com.
Oh, I will say Before Ifigured out Bitcoin, I thought
all crypto was important.
And I haven't, uh, you know, undonethe work that I did years ago.
(29:08):
So, that's why I'm a cryptodoctor, not the Bitcoin doctor.
But all the, there was all the Bitcoindoctors, they were already there.
So, yeah.
Audience (29:15):
(applause)
Stephen DeLorme (29:29):
Hey, thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you want to learn more aboutanything that we discussed, you can
look for links in the show notesthat should be in your podcast
player, or you can go to atlbitlab.
com slash podcast on a final note.
If you found this information usefuland you want to help support us, you
can always send us a tip in Bitcoin.
(29:51):
Your support really helps us that wecan keep bringing you content like this.
All right.
Catch you later.
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