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Episode 254: Economics, cryptocurrency, and job searching
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patriarchy's finer thank god all right dear doctor glad somebody's paying attention oh that's great oh i was going to tell you doug i'm going to just go ahead and without consent launch into small talk so the i always if you want to put on your tinfoil hat this is a really speaking speaking of the patriarchy in charge apparently michael bury our friend dr michael bury um uh had a twitter account which i can't believe i hadn't been following um but apparently is gone now because the sec paid him a visit um and took down his twitter account so uh he's no longer posting about markets and prognostications uh but this is where the tinfoil hat comes in uh evidently just a couple of days ago he posted a long uh treatise about uh pulling from some some piece on weimar germany about how we're heading into similar hyperinflation yeah and so so he posted that sec showed up shut down his twitter account so you know proceed accordingly that is unfreaking believable yeah that is unbelievable so for people who don't know who michael burrie is oh right after michael brewery doctor michael berry dr michael brewery is a much admired man in these quarters for anybody that uh has not seen the fabulous movie the big short uh dr michael berry is the savant-like uh character who saw this whole crash coming in 2007 and uh bet bet the farm on it and wouldn't be dissuaded by all of his screaming investors and he's a very unhappy investor and have been questioned what the hell he was doing and then he had they had to choke down a 5 billion dollar win [Laughter] for them for them yeah those who didn't manage to suffer their contracts in the meantime right so what what a fabulous and interesting character and i've been uh you know watching a little bit of his stock picking who which is outstanding because he's a uh he's an old school thinker in terms of he's not looking to use a bunch of technical analysis to try to predict uh things and what he does instead is he he diligently researches the underlying fundamentals and um and so he was you know he was picking apple as a big winner back in the late 90s uh when when other people were not when they were basically leaving it alone so he uh among among many other things that he's done so this is uh this is really interesting because i've been uh concerned for for people who've talked to me personally like jen that's why she's bringing this up that uh i'm certainly concerned about uh the fiscal irresponsibility of our government here in the last you know year or so uh i think cobit is a grand excuse it didn't doesn't matter which party's in power uh but there it's a it's been kind of a free-for-all and it's it's getting looser and looser around the edges and uh and so i i've been sniffing that we we could be headed into some fairly substantial inflation uh in fact i would be surprised if we weren't so the fact that michael bury is making the same kind of noises except his are even louder and more alarming than mine uh the the fact that the sec would shut down this guy's twitter account is downright nazi germany yeah and i'm sure twitter would deny both the sec and twitter would deny that that's what happened but the the timing is pretty suspicious and and it's clear that they did like literally pay him a visit it's unbelievable you need to you need to uh button it up yeah wow why would michael bury in a in a free society need to shut his mouth about anything the uh are they worried that their market systems are so tenuous and haywire and corrupt that a a very extraordinarily respected voice in the wilderness starts to warn people uh so that they can take appropriate action they worry that their worthless house of cards is going to collapse wow what an unbelievable thing to hear and of course i hear i am hearing it for the first time from jen so i don't have any haven't got a personal fact check yet [Laughter] i just heard about it today which is why i haven't had a chance to talk to you about it but i couldn't hold back the news when you've got uh our our dear friend the good doctor right right you can see the scene in the next movie already with you know he's he's sitting there barefoot in his office just watching watching stock charts and there's a knock on the door well that was actually that was actually a closing comment in the movie was that he went to the federal government to try to explain to them what happened so that they could go after guilty parties and so forth and nobody was interested but they did come investigate him it's like wow and now we have this [ __ ] what what an amazing uh story so oh well such as it's his life in modern america it's you know the more you think about it the more plausible it seems you know you've got the sort of uh stimulus spending you've got like a pen up demand you've got basically an overheated market very similar to weimar circumstances with sort of the end of war spending and also you've got parallel uh sort of sinking confidence in in currency and crypto and and you know all of that is part of the story so it could it could definitely lead to some interesting places mo agrees [Laughter] yeah what uh what an inter-interesting space well you know i i have no idea because i'm not a student uh i ever have been a student of deep deep economy and at that level and i'm just a surface level you know sort of milton friedman neo fight understanding the uh of this thing but i certainly understand that when the federal government starts throwing trillions of dollars around just so that people i mean people today are numbers are so big and people are so immune it's like we're living in colombia where like you make 20 billion a year you're like 20 billion of what you know is a guy that changes tires like you don't even know what what on earth this is and when we start talking about oh yeah there's another stimulus package for a couple of trillion it's like people just shrug their shoulders they have no idea what's involved here they're just to just to run some little math for you so that you understand you've got 350 million people in the country so if the government spends three dollars per head that's a billion if they spend three thousand dollars per head it's a trillion so that means that the government in the last year has rolled out i don't know three four trillion dollars worth of uh quote programs that means they've rolled out they've trotted out you know twelve thousand dollars per head uh is is is what's gone on up and over and above normal government operations this is extraordinary and so the um as a result you know it's it's almost inevitable they're going they're not going to go into the it's only three ways the government can can get money they can they can essentially tax for it uh they can also borrow it and but if they borrow it they stick their finger into the capital markets as a bidder or a buyer of money and if they do that they drive up interest rates well they don't want to do that because that uh that will then cause a a business disaster uh so as a result uh what they do is they do the most palatable thing which is to in effect through their processes that they utilize effectively they create currency or they create money out of thin air they just pretty much yeah it's effectively drive up the yeah yeah so when they do that they they do not raise the interest rates and they do not have to tax people for it they just create it and so the way this uh effectively works is as follows imagine that you have a little economy in your backyard where it's you know two dollars for an apple and a dollar for an orange and and uh and there's a certain amount of apples and oranges around they fluctuate a little bit depending upon which trees are in season but let's just say that there's you know you got a pretty bunch of stuff in the yard and at any one point there's a thousand units worth of we'll call them dollars there's a thousand units worth of apples and oranges and so one guy owns one tree and the other guy owns a couple other trees so you're trading this stuff around and you've got a thousand sand dollars okay the uh and let's suppose that just for fun that we turn and we make them paper so you've got a thousand one dollar bills and you've got a thousand dollars for the stuff of the tree so we know that the average price of the average transaction is one dollar as we keep trading these things around okay the uh the problem uh is that suppose somebody that actually knows how to print that stuff decides one day to print up an extra 10 bucks so you might say okay well what difference does it make it's just going to make that the average transaction is going to be a dollar and 10 cents it's not going to be a dollar anymore that's what will happen and i've had economics professors tell me oh no no no that is going to happen and it's like you're a [ __ ] of course that's going to happen let's you use your imagination to prove it suppose that instead of printing uh 10 extra dollars i print a thousand extra dollars so now i've got eleven hundred dollars in the economy and i've got the same amount of fruit in the tree what's going to happen to the price answer it's going to be you know whatever that is 11 of fruit that's what is precisely what's going to happen so the general price level can only rise or fall depending upon two factors uh essentially two factors the rest of its noise the for the first factor is going to be how much stuff is in the economy and the other factor is going to be how much money is in the economy so that's why you know a piece of bubble gum is you know two million coronas in in cali colombia or whatever the hell it is the uh it used to be three three coronas and now it's two million coronas why because they printed a hell of a lot of coronas that's what they did they they i recently was reading the do you know how do you know what inflation in zimbabwe under mugabe was and this is this is circa this is before he died this would have been like 2017. i don't even quite know what this number is yeah but i believe it was five sextillion percent oh my god like i don't know how many zeros i don't i don't know how to calculate that but that was that was the i mean the guy just printed money endlessly yes and let me let me explain for people just i mean just because you your fault billion dollar bills right yeah they did yeah so here's the deal yeah so here's the deal so what's going to happen is that if you are the first person that prints you're the person that prints that 10 bucks in our little backyard economy where there's 100 apples and oranges and 100 if you're the first person to spend the money everybody actually believes that you know an orange is worth a dollar okay nobody knows that an orange is actually worth a dollar and 10 cents they don't know that you're the only one that knows so you are entering in the market with a bunch of naive traders and you are getting goods cheaper than in other words you're stealing money out of the market by virtue not just for the fact that you printed the money but you're actually also getting the value in that trade that is uh that the market is naive to what the actual supply and demand of the money situation is so the government steals in two ways not only do they print the money up out of thin air so they don't have to earn it through legitimate tax processes and they don't have to borrow it like every other capitalist has to borrow it no no no they just print it up and they attack the market first before anybody knows what the hell's going on okay now the what's happening here is that because of that process essentially interest rates are artificially low as the government starts sucking capital and so what's happening is that everybody through that entire system is actually miscalibrated as to all of the values in the society so you're creating quietly economic chaos but in particularly one group of people is being penalized and the group of people that is being penalized are the people that are creditors so one group of people is being enriched the first movers the first movers are being enriched and also anybody that is holding a very long-term low-interest debt those people are also being enriched okay it turns out that the united states government is by far the biggest long-term low-interest debtor in the world nobody else is even close so the united states government uh basically uh essentially monetizes its debt devaluing the value of that debt to all the creditors those creditors are everybody that's gonna depend on or receive social security because your your social security is money that you put in there effectively the net value of that social security security is being debased by your government they'll give you a little 1.8 cpa adjustment uh cpi adjustment meanwhile they'll inflate the currency at 4.6 and they'll never tell you because they'll use a bogus statistics program so they'll just eat away at your income by they'll just chip away at two three percent a year that's how they're stealing the money okay that's one way they steal it they steal it in a whole lot of ways but a big way anybody that is a conservative reasonable responsible conscientious investor that is carefully trying to make put their money in and carefully uh careful instruments bond issues things of that nature forget it you're gonna get hosed but you're gonna get hosed slowly enough that you you're like a frog in water and you don't even know you're being cooked but that is exactly what this is up to so this is a disgusting process and uh and you know it's always sort of going on at a low level and it doesn't really get my attention and i don't really care uh but now suddenly we're finding that that they've taken the gloves off and they're going after um they're they're going after the responsible people very hard and therefore you know the wise you know wise people that can sniff the wind are getting themselves into long-term low interest debt by buying real estate right now that's why the real estate market is booming uh people people haven't conceptually figured this out they they actually accidentally can sniff it as they see the prices rise uh consistently and they and they understand that the payments even though a price might be very high because the interest rates are so low i.e they're artificially low given uh given how indebted and continually more indebted the us government gets the the interest rates are truly artificially low right now this is a a superb time to get into long-term low interest debt so uh you know i could be wrong as michael bury would say yeah i don't see him wow [Laughter] so anyway oh man that's uh wow they shh muzzled michael bury of all people and for all things this is not a guy that's inciting riots you know uh talk talking anti-vaxx or anything else into the sudden no this guy is talking about the american economy for god's sakes and who has more credibility than him and that is exactly why they're muscling him that's exactly why i don't know how many followers he had i i wasn't aware that he was on twitter i would have been following him but uh very interesting timing to say the last so outrageous yeah yeah well yeah you know what that is we all you know what everybody's little by little a lot of people are waking up which is a strange thing i i don't know i don't pretend to know anything about this area hardly at all which is cryptocurrency um it's a shame because the people that started it i guess are a bunch of libertarian you know what do you call it uh jeffrey jeffrey miller knows a lot about it we should have him on the show to talk about it oh my god that's hilarious yeah it's just new it's his new uh sort of core cause he's moved on from uh concern about a.i to crypto that's his that's a thing that's a new thing well the interesting thing to me about it you know you can't you can't be awakened in the united states and not be aware of crypto at this point and so the the thing about it is you know you're the one that drew my attention uh jen to the notion that the more the more weird it gets in terms of of uh how things are managed you know it uh the sort of top-down muscle management of both government and high-tech the more that happens the more paranoid uh uh people like jeffrey miller and others get and then the more it's interesting how much money has drifted into cryptocurrency in the last year or two it's astonishing this is this is no longer small money okay you know 100 100 billion dollars here 100 billion dollars there that's not going to get anybody's attention but when you start getting over a trillion dollars invested in an asset class that that's that's uh sniffing like an awful lot of people and basically institutional investors as well elon musk coming in this is uh this is telling you that a lot of smart people are feeling pretty damn paranoid yeah well i.e confidence and currency being wrong factors that drives hyperinflation so it's it's like these things that the political and economic forces are working together to produce a very quasi-apocalyptic scenario so i mean i think a little paranoia is warranted at this moment well for the record everybody uh i don't i don't see anything apocalyptic but i do see um possibly a mini a mini 1970s i was going to say 70s 70s which is no small thing no it's not and and and lives will be wrecked and and uh divorces will be had over financial stressors that are completely and utterly unnecessary their cause houses will be lost crime will go up all the narratives continue to be fed yeah yeah i.e uh the brad pitt line you know in in the big short when when the little guy was dancing because he knew he had made a fortune he said don't dance okay this is a tragedy and don't look like you're enjoying it too much yeah don't look like you're enjoying it too much like uh you know i personally feel pretty well insulated i could be wrong you know what i mean it it could get way worse i don't think so um but i do think that an awful lot of money will be effectively stolen and transferred and you know be aware that it's probably wise for any of our listeners that are within influence you know a lot of our listeners are international and it doesn't have anything to do with them but for those of you here you know just just realize that uh that if you're sitting on low risk you know high cash positions uh uh right now is a is a major thing or social security or anything else they're they're coming after you now they're not going to come after you with an enormous claw they're coming after you with little bites and and they're they will erode your uh your net worth in the world by uh by these actions this is the most aggressive uh period of action of this kind that we've seen since the late 1970s so what the hell and and they're going to shut up unlike the 1970s the so-called gold bugs that were uh that were the libertarian-esque people these are people like uh uh harry brown and jerome smith uh and these guys uh led the the interest in precious metals cryptocurrency is sort of the new wave and the new look at this uh it it smells similar uh and uh similar similar kinds of concerns and paranoia etc i remember the gold bugs in the day were all talking about where do you hide your gold and how do you transport it yeah it's really the same conversation yeah it is it's fascinating it's just 45 years later but you know we've had different kinds of collapses but we haven't had you know the collapse of 0708 was mismanagement of government uh uh was the cause ultimately that collapse which is not actually told in the big short but that is the fundamental truth there uh was that that was actually the root cause of that thing and then of course wall street does its corrupt thing that it does but you know that's that's fair enough the uh that never happens without the government disturbing the normal market forces uh of the mortgage market so this one though this is now behind i could just see behind the excuse of the coronavirus basically this uh these massive uh government uh intervention uh expensive really wealth transfer programs uh large infrastructure yeah in quote infrastructure that means my brother-in-law has a paving company in san antonio and he needs a big fat contract that's what that's what infrastructure means and so yeah this this all can can sound good but the truth of the matter is whenever you see government writing checks of this size you know you're you're looking at paola you're not looking at uh particularly in a time when the government's already been running massive deficits uh already so this is all very you know this is very seventy-esque and it smells like uh economic troubles times ahead so you know be smart get aware and and uh whatever else i don't know i don't know what else i would tell people other than uh michael bury might be somebody you would want to be listening to if you can find them yeah well i think he can if he's not on twitter anymore you can definitely um he'll move with everybody else to the the free speech platforms yeah yeah you can't get them the ones that are hosted in promoting trump's been promoting a couple of them um but you know gab is the is sort of the big one yeah they're holding a space for him over there um and i think uh gab and part is hosted on russian servers which is just hilarious to me that this is this is this is the free speech solution is the former soviet union is routing our free speech traffic it's insane but uh yeah yeah that's that's where we are so yeah there's gab there's you know uh the various other platforms i'm not familiar with all of them but i'm sure he'll resurface somewhere yeah and it's so now we've uh we had a perfectly nice situation and all we had to do was have the big players just continue to get rich and just be reasonable and now you're not going to be reasonable i don't know what this issue is with twitter and the sec and michael brewery but whatever it is it stinks to high heaven and um and yeah so we're going to have now more concerted effort into uh new platforms and and uh that's fine and it just it sort of splinters things i kind of liked it the way it was nicely organized it was fine uh all we needed was you know reasonable and we didn't get it so what the hell on we go but i don't like the idea of this stuff being routed through the soviet union for god's sakes it's like come on people no not the soviet union anymore but yeah soviet soviet-esque yeah what were you asking nathan you had some questions oh just curious if you were uh if you had any opinions about the different cryptocurrencies bitcoin ethereum dogecoin maybe i don't know i yeah everybody should rush to invest in dogecoin while you still can that's my favorite i actually am such a neophyte i just have no no uh no way to give anybody advice at all so uh all i can say is that uh you know i i thought the whole thing was just basically a fascinating pump and dump scheme and now it has such traction and i don't know if that other people are impressed by this kind of thing and maybe it's just a little stars in my eyes but when an elon musk puts a billion dollars into something or whatever the hell it is he put in it's like whoa that that wasn't a short-term investment strategy to be fair elon musk also thinks we're living in a video game simulation got it i mean okay good good i don't know anything i don't know enough about elon musk to know anything other than he's a successful business guy so that i guess that's uh he's he's a bit of a wackadoo got it yeah okay well doctor let's hope that by hearing that we're gonna see a twitter for dr lyle in his near future hosted by uh the eastend dynamics platform no we might have to get we might have to get doug on twitter before it's too late before they before they cancel it yeah it would be gonna be banned from twitter get banned and then you can join the crowd afterwards oh god that would be all very exciting yeah yeah it's all good the um there has there has been a lot of complaints on twitter with people posting screenshots of trump's press releases people saying he was banned for a reason and you don't need to share he's like okay seriously we're just we can't even pass on information in the public square whatsoever so yeah it's completely disastrous and it's uh just getting more and more more and more polarized so yeah i don't think doug would make it very long yeah oh well that's good that's good i i like that but anyway yeah the answer is i don't i don't know nearly enough about cryptocurrency to comment at all on it and so uh all i know is that it's uh it's a obviously an extraordinary it's a red-hot space and uh and when i start to see you know basically pretty amazingly irresponsible uh spending patterns on the part of the federal government um then i i start understanding why people are start starting to look for you know other places to put their money now for me i just soon put it in and people in the that are in the stock market that are looking to hold real estate with big long-term low-interest mortgages public storage for example sound sounds like a very virgo thing to do [Laughter] just put it in the mutual fund all right nathan uh what else is going on what do we got well we've got a few questions here and uh and so we'll see how many we can get through but i really appreciate the a little bit of the political and the economic talk because i think it ties in really well to the psychology side of things um so yeah our first uh first question is not political related it's not economic but it is economic related about a lady who is asking for some job advice so dear doctors i'm a single 60 year old woman i was laid off from my data analyst job two years from retirement i've been collecting unemployment which has been extended to all the cove due to all the covet stuff until september of this year i've been pursuing employment and have come up on three different job opportunities one is working in the police force as a financial analyst but landing this position has involved jumping through a lot of hoops background checks transcripts polygraph exam etc second job involves working for a high technology company four separate interviews third job is from the place that laid me off interestingly enough so here's my dilemma i'm going quite crazy sitting around the house collecting unemployment i work out i have written a book but i need some human interaction even though i am an introvert but it seems like these jobs all have qualities that make me question if i should take them like the police job do i really want to work for an establishment that hauls people to jail for not wearing a mask the way society is changing do i want to spend my valuable days putting an effort toward an organization that blindly upholds the norms of a society that i don't necessarily agree with the high-tech job entails writing computer programs to help implement the 5g technology which i know 5g is coming whether i work on it or not but i feel guilty porting my efforts towards it if i don't agree the third job where i worked before involves conducting scientific research on the long-term effect of coveted vaccines i feel bad about this job too i don't think anyone should have received the vaccine and it will be sad and depressing to watch the fallout what the hell is wrong with me i need the money and i need companionship it's hard to get a job in this economy and i've worked so hard to get these interviews why am i so confused about which job to take maybe i should just forget it and sit around on unemployment help i have to make this decision in the next two weeks well jen you just go right ahead and comment boy i don't know there's a lot going on in this question i mean i i think you need to break down the two the two needs that you have one is one is for money one is for sort of human companionship and to feel of use to the village so those are those are two different things and i would wonder two years from retirement you know what what is your monetary situation like how these all sound like fairly fancy jobs these are these are three you know highly skilled um jobs that are definitely a good fit for what you've been trained in and what you're able to do even though they present these i would i would say pretty intractable ethical problems i mean if they're this at odds with your personal and political convictions um before you sign on the dotted line uh i think you're you're putting yourself in a pretty bad situation going into any of those workplaces uh long term and you're not going to get your your you're putting yourself in a situation where you're not going to be able to get the village feedback that you're desperately craving because you're not going to be able to bring your best self to that job you're not going to feel um completely uh uncomplicated and and prepared to do your best work if you're at odds with the mission um and that means that you're going to be kind of uh suffering some some an esteem handicap essentially you're not going to be um getting the full kind of feedback that you deserve so i think if you're feeling that strongly about all three of them going in i would be i would be really questioning whether you should take any of these three and thinking about applying at starbucks like if it's really just a matter of needing a little bit of money if you're in significantly more financial distress than that um i i don't know how long you're able to continue collecting the unemployment but holding out for a job that's a better fit with your values seems like a fairly reasonable compromise and then just doing something in the meantime to give you this social outlet that you're craving whether it's a whether it's a job i say that somewhat facetiously as someone who actually did work at starbucks for a while like that where you can have some connection and feel uh you've got something to do during the day or just volunteering somewhere and meeting some people that way and then looking for something that just makes more sense in the medium and long term i i think all three of these just the way that you're talking about them and already presenting such a mixed cb it's it's sounding to me like all three of those are bad roads for you that's my my take on it i vote doug's more responsible than i am well i've been going to starbucks nothing like having to face a bunch of coffee addicts before they have their coffee to realize just how much he needs that human interaction it's a tough job man oh bad the um my take is a little different because the as jen is has signaled this we can't give a good answer to this because we actually don't know the person's uh parameter situation so two years from retirement has obviously been a high high intelligence high skilled person for a long time probably we have she says quote needs the money but that's a really funny word to use needs the money how much how badly and how much and for how long and for what so what could you sell instead like you know how how close to freedom are you really without having any of these jobs yeah i had somebody whining about some recent expenses that came up and uh and i said well do you have anything to sell and they said well other than the 1928 classic steinway that's in my parlor oh my gosh you you run into that a lot you know oh other than that other than the vacation home you know other other than the the extra condo like yeah yeah this requires a little bit of forensic analysis right so uh yeah i would say because on the one hand depending upon what your situation is my attitude is be fortunate that you're you have any choices at all okay the uh and that may be part of part of the dissonance that's going on is that you you are hinting from the marketplace with three offers that if there's three offers there might be a fourth and it's and that's sort of i think also going on in jen's competition that if you have that kind of a resume that actually has resulted in three job offers and you've got till september on unemployment hell you know what i mean the odds of you coming up with a fourth are pretty damn good so i think that's in the background but you know it all depends upon your natural risk tolerance and i think that you've got enough risk tolerance that you are hemming and hawing and finding problems uh that are there and they bother you a little bit you know what i mean it's just kind of like shoes that don't quite fit or they don't fit very well at all and so yeah my attitude is how bad do you need the shoes what are you going to be walking on and so that that's the only way to answer that question is with with uh more understanding and analysis of the real cbs that are involved and um you know if you're a few years from retirement that you're exceedingly confident that you're going to be able to get a position sometime soon you know within the next six months and you've got the resources to uh to make that fly and under the worst case scenario you could go a year even though you quote need the money you've actually got the support then you don't have to jump at any of these so yeah it's a it's a we we can't tell you all we can do is is uh is sort of make conscious what some of the parameter estimations are that are actually going on inside of you that are giving you such high risk tolerance right now so jen's inferring that your risk tolerance is pretty high jen herself has very high risk tolerance jen will live in her own personally built yurt okay so just keep that in mind when you're listening to her answer [Laughter] i think that's it's a fair fair risk tolerance if you're in a position to continue collecting unemployment um to to continue looking for another job i mean it depends it really like it's impossible to answer without knowing what the situation is but i just i'm picking up some clues in it that you you sound like you're in a pretty good situation and could afford to do that um even if it stretches the wallet a little bit and you know as long as you're ahead of this hyper-inflation anyway well she's probably got some crypto so yeah well good nothing to worry about oh guys um not for this particular scenario but just a couple of things that i picked up here about what i maybe perceive could be potentially enlightenment trap could you talk talk about the enlightenment trap and how it might play a role uh because i've heard this comment before from other people and sometimes i'll feel this way where you say oh i i don't know i don't want to be doing this because it's you know essentially i'm above it or or there's there's things that i don't agree with and sometimes it feels like enlightenment trap sometimes it doesn't but i'm just curious if you could comment on that oh that's right i tried yeah i tried to talk my way out i don't know if doug remembers this but i very shortly after starting my job at starbucks which was you know endorsed at the time by doug i i ran into the reality of the that job actually being very difficult so it's it's actually a very stressful you have to uh you have to memorize all of the drinks and all of the permutations of the drinks and you're dealing with a very high paced uh disagreeable clientele that wants their wants their stuff and they want it now um and not far into that i was i was kind of looking for a way out but i was looking for a way out that would cover my ass at the same time and protect my status and i remember trying to sell doug on the idea that i just couldn't possibly work there anymore because of all of the animal products that they were selling like you know they're just going they're going through dozens and you know so so much so many gallons of milk a day and and all of these horrible it's basically just a burger and shake kind of place and it's completely at odds with my ethical principles and so i can't possibly be expected to work here any any longer it's completely unreasonable um and that was absolutely at the time i was aware that that was a defense protection mechanism something akin to the enlightenment trap um and doug did not buy it he was like suck it up finish your dissertation yeah that's fascinating that's really interesting yeah all good so that may be the case here there's definitely you know that i i but i do i mean the flags that she's raising in terms of you know i think there there is a point at which being in a certain type of employee doing certain type of work that is you know completely at odds with deeply held values becomes a problem so it may look like the may look a little enlightenment trap-ish um but that doesn't mean that those two things are uh not still at odds they can really truly be at odds so we we just kind of don't know without talking to her oh good great good good thinking though nathan good good uh sixth sense they're sniffing that out good all right all right what else we got thank you our our next question uh dr lyle has explained on the podcast that people are not inclined towards harmoniously living together in community as was the utopian ideal of the 60s but why is that it would seem that our stone age brain would be wired for communal living as surely we humans were far more communal in nature in the stone age than we are today so why do you think intentional communities tend to fail wouldn't the default be interdependence sharing and cooperation and not rugged individualism um yeah there's all all kinds of misunderstandings here so uh jen feel free to pile in and make sure that i don't miss anything important but i'll just give it to you quick uh quick and dirty and that is that um that human beings live together in groups because the benefits of living in a group outweigh the costs that doesn't mean it's harmonious and communal and helpful or anything else it just means there's a there's a tiny percent more benefit than there is cost the it turns out that when you look at those situations uh they're not all helpful and nice they've got deep conflicts and huge conflicts arise between males over females uh that that is within villages and it's also between villages so that's a serious problem uh because this is not a little parabon species where everybody just takes their their one little thing and then everybody leaves everybody else alone it's not even remotely close to that and uh and so there's all kinds of problems and you don't have you don't have clear agreements you don't have written law you you have you know basically disagreements about what was said you know i'm sorry you got two gay men trying to grunt to each other trying to figure out what the agreement was they misunderstood each other and they're clubbing each other to death okay this is not the good news is they didn't have lawyers in the middle of it you know taking a piece of the action so the the truth of the matter is is that we are uh we are vastly better off under civilized circumstances which is why those things evolved uh naturally as you got large population bases based on the the uh the efficiency of agriculture so it's not just that also led to a warrior class and therefore larger accumulations of groups uh it's also the case that people are better off uh they're better off that the relief that takes place when a village of hunter-gatherers comes under the the protection of the leviathan national government is huge suddenly the men don't have to like stick up for their honor and then go throw a spear into the other guy's back and then wind up being killed as a result of the retaliation it's like it's way better living this way okay so there's a reason so if you think about some idyllic thing in the 1960s they're living somewhere in a nice place in colorado right oh that sounds nice so we're all peaceful loving hippies that smoke pot and get along with each other until we start fighting about the women but it isn't too bad why because you have a national defense okay you're heavily dependent upon free market processes whether you like it or not because you go down to the little village and trade okay god forbid you get into trouble you know somebody goes in and gets a local doctor because the one guy that had three years at the naturopathic college that everybody thinks is going to be the doctor of the group isn't worth a damn thing okay so no the answer is is that we are extremely interdependent now uh and trying to do it in your own little communal village is in fact rugged independence and individualism of the worst order and it leads reliably to abject poverty okay so uh no we we are uh this is we're seeing the fact that the world gets to the following space where people don't have to depend upon each other and their neighbors and have agreements to defend themselves and to trade with each other with a limited tiny little market of mediocre abilities instead you get to trade indirectly to give your best to the market for the best that there is in the world for genius okay so that's what you get to trade and you get the protection of a national government no matter how corrupt and incompetent it is unbelievably good i mean that's the beauty of the united states so i can criticize the hell out of it and roll my eyes and protect my wallet over its you know basically you know incompetence and corruption but the truth of the matter is it's still unbelievably good okay so we we live here very safe you also have a police force that people can [ __ ] about and worry about being hauled away for masks or because they're you know got pulled over for their race or whatever issue anybody has with it but the truth of the matter is it's unbelievably good okay so are are there imperfections and errors yes is it really good yeah it's really really good so no you're not going to beat a modern american society which is why jen says let's not have it go down the tubes people because we have it really really good and no uh a communal living uh is is a fiasco you know many people have tried and a lot of times they've morphed into little rural outposts uh in fact my first book was published by the people it's called the farm down in tennessee or wherever they are those were a bunch of hippies that were kind of into this whole thing but then they realized they better trade with the market to make their lives better and one of the things they turned into is publishing and in fact they published little alternative books of weird opinions and not fancy authors things like the pleasure trap so you know very cool and you know i've met those people and they're incredibly sweet nice people just like the kind and open just like the kinds of people that you would expect to wind up in a place like that and then they wound up raising their families and and integrating back into uh into the regular uh life to to varying degrees and all good you know basically living like rural uh entrepreneurs that are very peaceful but they get to do so under a tremendous umbrella and infrastructure of you know american national and local government yeah i would i would say the other component of the failure of intentional communities is you they're they're coming together behind a lot of uh ideological status status games to start the whole thing off so you know most of these things are vaguely cult-like and they have cult leaders who are defending their vision and you have a lot of zero-sum status dynamics that are happening within that community from the get-go um so i think unless they turn into what doug is describing which is essentially a a community that is more broadly integrated with a larger market and just kind of exerting some membership rules over who's in and who's out which is a is is going to be a very effective way to run your little community um that's not the quite quite the same thing as what we tend to think of as an actual intentional community which is we're going to go follow this guy and we're going to take ourselves in into the wilderness and and live deliberately around a certain set of ideas that are coming from him or or horror but it's usually him um and then we're all going to be jockeying for proximity and favor and and uh all of these things that emerge from that whether it's a legitimate cult or not so i think that's a big thing that is uh poisons these kinds of arrangements so so would you recommend unintentional communities instead yeah well that's what it sounds like doug is describing with his little hippies who who are just finding personal affinity with each other um you know they they like each other's kind of approach to the world they find some shared values um but they're not sort of opting out of the existing system to go try to do their own thing that that is something that is i think very rarely going to succeed um yeah and there's also the the this question kind of raises the specter of this myth of stone age life being all egalitarian um which which has really been pretty roundly debunked a lot of that was came from the um the the harvard of course it's harvard's fault the harvard kalahari project which was this group of anthropologists that found this this tribe in the kalahari and and sort of identified all of their mystical rituals and cosmologies and uh sharing procedures and all of these things and was like oh well we came from this you know sort of um this this very uh magical time in our history and it's really just the dawn of agriculture and and uh nation states that ruined it all um and i think that influenced a lot of this kind of paradigm that people think that it was it was oh yeah we all shared equally everything was great yeah stone age life was just as hierarchical and just as brutal much more so than agricultural life um and so we've we've got these things very deep in our nature and you you can't gloss over them in any kind of community intentional or not so i think to to paraphrase dr lyle's comment on marriage and apply it to this you don't get an intentional community you discover if you are an international community that that's actually beautifully said that's really good very good nathan well done yeah you
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