Crazy Wisdom ft. Brad Costanzo - The intersection of AI, Economics, Bitcoin, Depopulation Effect You

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. I've got Brad Costanzo here, and he is the founder and CEO of Accelerated Intelligence. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Hopefully, I don't know if I'll help you out with the wisdom part, but maybe the crazy part I can cover.

Yeah, that's where I started. The show is like, I felt like I was going crazy in 2018, 2019, and I wanted to figure out whether there was any wisdom behind it. Still unclear. I'm still figuring it out.

Say that your mess is your message.

Well, that's cool. That's cool. What's the deal with that one? Where'd you find that?

I think I've just heard that from personal development circles. And, you know, throughout my career, I don't know who made. Maybe made that popular. It could have been Brene Brown or somebody where it's much more so, like people who've gone through traumatic life events who've had, you know, made all the wrong choices, hit rock bottom, whether they were, like, alcoholics and, you know, hit rock bottom and whatever, or they've just made a lot of mistakes. That the mess you've made is your message to help others. Right. So people can actually, you know, people have created tremendous careers out of turning the mess they've made out of their lives and the turnaround into their message to others. So I thought it was kind of poignant but powerful as well.

I. The original name for the show before I settled on Crazy Wisdom was beautifully broken. So, like. Yeah, broken in this beautiful way. And it reminds me of the Japanese.

The.

They have the. The one where there's gold. They put together the portrait or the.

Yeah. What do they call that? That's. I know the name of that. It's. Oh, I can't think of the name. There's a whole name to that style where it's, like, with the golden streaks through it. I try to tell my. I've tried to tell my wife at times, honey, my mess is my message. And she's like, it is not. Clean the damn dishes. No, it doesn't work so well with her.

Yeah. Okay. So Accelerated Intelligence. I love the name Accelerated Intelligence. We talked. We had a great conversation a couple months ago when we were talking about doing this podcast, AI. What is the relationship between personal development and AI?

You know? So I look at it in several ways. So I'm going to cover that with two answers. Number one, the reason I called it Accelerated Intelligence, the company, you know, when I was really getting into this space and I was looking for a Domain name. I was like, I found it like, that looks really cool. But then it actually, like accelerated intelligence AI. But at the same time, it really hit the nail on the head with my philosophy on this stuff. Because artificial intelligence is just a tool, right? It's a. It's a. It's a highly leverageable tool, but it's just a tool. And in most cases, the word artificial is a negative connotation in life, right? Like that person. So artificial or artificial sweetener, artificial grass, artificial this, that, and the other. But yet we're so expected to accept artificial intelligence with open arms. But in reality, we don't want artificial intelligence. We want to accelerate what we're able to do with our intelligence, right? And intelligence is the seed of everything else that humans create. And whether it is intelligence about technology, about business intelligence, marketing intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spiritual intelligence, you can name all of them. That's really what we want. And then this gave me the breadth to take my platform beyond just the tech aspects, because I like the tech. My career is helping businesses understand, demystify, and enable them with artificial intelligence to make more money, to save more time. But ultimately, where my passion lies is using it to increase human potential. And I love the ability for AI to unleash creative resistance and unlock dormant creative abilities. When it comes to how it works with personal development, AI has already proven to be such an amazing tool to give us insights on ourselves. I mean, just simply going into. Simply going into ChatGPT, if you've been using it a lot with memory on, and asking it to deconstruct your, you know, your personality traits, your psyche. In fact, one of the things anybody could try this. A friend of mine gave me this prompt the other day, and it's so simple. Go into ChatGPT and say, based on everything you know about me, describe me in one word. And. And it's great. Like, it's great. Like, you try that right now if you want. But mine was Catalyst, and then it actually did an explanation of why. But so in the. In the field of personal development, you know, a lot of people get nervous. They either don't want to spend the money or the time or be vulnerable enough to talk to a therapist. And I believe that most people in this world need therapy. They need somebody who understands human psychology to talk to. But most of us, myself, I've never hired a therapist. I've hired coaches and mentors, but not therapists. And so this is giving people access to a form of therapy they've never had. I think the Question is, will they. Will they take the advice that the AI insights give them and really sit with it and think about it, meditate on it, and then. And then take actions based upon what it says? Because if I go to you, whether you're a friend, a mentor, a colleague, or a therapist, and you give me advice, I'm much. I'm much more likely to take a human's advice than I am a machine's. But I do believe that going forward, the ability for machines to recognize patterns in our personal lives is going to help change lives for the better. For the worse, too, but hopefully for the better.

Yeah, well, so let's talk about that. The. So before we go down the rabbit hole, I wanted to. I mean, so the rabbit hole will be related to AI psychosis, which is a rabbit hole of its own, which I'm sure you've heard of. And there's a lot of interesting territory I want to talk about, but you brought up the word artificial, and I had some insights into this word. I've been been reading this book by Francis Yates, who is a historian who is going back into memory palaces and the history of memory palaces and how it got took by Neoplatonic magic and then actually created science. Our whole scientific revolution was based off of these crazy guys who had rediscovered the works of Plato and 2nd century A.D. roman magic, basically. And so in this it says artificial of or belonging to art. That's originally what artificial meant, was of or belonging to art. And then it became artifice. There's some way that it got into our current understanding. Oh. By the early 15th century, artificial came to mean made by man, contrived by human skill and labor. And from the 16th century onward, it was applied to anything made in imitation of or as a substitute for something natural.

Oh, interesting. I love little trivial tidbits like that. That's awesome.

My whole life is researching trivial tidbits. We'll get into that later. So, AI psychosis. What do you think about AI psychosis? And do you think it's real? Do you think it's something that's hyped up to click bait now that clickbait is going away?

So how would you define. I just want to make sure I'm contextually. How would you define AI psychosis?

So I've seen it. Yeah, I've seen it a few times with people I'm not directly connected with, but mutual acquaintances and that interaction, and it was before it started becoming a clickbait thing, made me realize that I do think it's Real. I think it's. And I'm not a therapist. Nobody listened to what I'm about to say and take it as fact. But schizophrenia, there's a schizophrenic therapy thing which is sort of shoved off to the side in a lot of our modern culture. And that schizophrenic thing is interesting. And I think because it's sort of like shoved off and not really given a place inside of our culture, it can lead to autodidactic loops. I actually got into this in 2015 and 2016 back when Google was really good and I just found all these spiritual practices and basically got myself into a hole. Spiritual hole. The rock bottom we were discussing. And it was just like autodidactic. I was not asking anybody else. I was just in this loop. And eventually I broke out of it with the help of human beings who were very wise, are very wise. So I think it's the same thing that I went through, but with a much more intense intelligence, which is sycophantic in nature. And if you know how these things, like, it's just like token predicting. But if you don't know how these things work, it can be magical, it can feel magical. And I think that's where it totally.

It started.

Yep.

Yeah, I think that it's. I mean, it's exactly like every other technology out there, neither good or bad. It's how people use it, but it's also not. Not necessarily how people use it intentionally. But, you know, there are some people who are much more gullible and not right. The whole idea that we're all created equal is not true. But, you know, there's some really dumb people out there. As George Carlin. I love George Carlin's. My favorite quote is, think about how dumb the average person is and then realize that mathematically half of them are dumber than that. So I've always loved that concept. And so the truth is there are some extremely gullible people. They will end up using AI. They will start talking to it, whether these are the ones who are using it for romantic bonding and emotional, you know, support, etc, and they will get caught up and they will feel as though it's real. Etc. Those are going to be the unfortunate casualties of the technology. The exact same way as, you know, that social media is such a, you know, such a strange thing that.

That has entered our consciousness in our egregores. Yeah.

Best and worst thing. Right. So, yeah, there's going to be a lot of casualties of it, but I Think the goal is to minimize those as much as possible and then not be one. But what do you think about cognitive armor?

Do you think it's something that. Because it's something we talk about in our AI Whisperers group. Because we. About two weeks ago I do a post every week which is the high signal, like what happened this week that was really important that people should be aware of. And so two weeks ago I got a little bit into the psychosis thing and because here's the other thing which I would love to talk about with you, which is that the hype machine in Silicon Valley is going full on, full steam ahead and they're doing it. It's the same thing. If you know how Silicon Valley works, you know why they're doing it. They're doing it because they have to market to people and they have to raise their next round. And the bigger the talk. And so OpenAI is talking about. AGI has already reached. You got Mark Zuckerberg saying we're creating the machine.

God.

All these different things like, and so that, like that's not different from the psychosis because I think that's actually leading right into the psychosis. I forgot where I was going with that. But do you have any interesting things to say?

Not a lot. I mean I thought like when you talk about cognitive armor.

That's right.

Protecting yourself from that.

Right.

So I mean I talk a lot. I, I don't know if it's the exact same thing I kind of talk about. I wrote an article on this, the sovereign mind, how to keep your brain while everybody's outsourcing theirs. And that it is so easy. It's the same way as, I mean I use my GPS everywhere even when I, when I'm going somewhere. I've been a million times. One of the reasons I use it is because it, it will redirect me if there's bad traffic. So there's a utilitarian thing there. But I'm completely, I'm highly inept now directionally. Like when I'm driving, I used to have a great sense of direction. My sense of direction has gone down a little bit because I just rely on that. And it's exact same thing with AI is you have to understand it this the ability to make you lazy. It's very easy to succumb to that. And I have to catch myself going just because I can do this quick. Like I'm going to get. The more I do this, the more the stupider I'm going to get. It's no different than, you know, I force myself to go to the gym. I don't love to go to the gym. I'm in good shape because I go to the gym, but I don't love it. I would much rather be sitting around watching tv. But you know, in the past, prior to the gym, we didn't need the gym because we had to go. We had to work in the fields, we had to work on the farm, we had to work with our bodies. Now that, you know, over the past few generations we've become a white collar workforce for the most part and we don't have to do those things. Those and a lot of people don't. That's why the majority of America is a bunch of sloppy fat asses like to, you know, and I just got back from three weeks in Europe. You don't see that as much, right? You see it over here. You've got lazy people who just don't go to the gym. And so those of, those of us who force ourselves to do the things we don't want so that we can stay in shape are the ones who are going to excel. That's how you put the cognitive armor on as you just realize if I don't do this, I'm going to be an idiot. So my little sovereign mind framework is like first think intelligent intentionally. You know, I like to come up with my own hypothesis or do the first thing without AI just so that I do not atrophy. Even when I, even when the AI makes it easy, I'm like, nope, do it first. And then I try to collaborate intelligently with it, you know, think through it, enhance it, critique it, etc. And then just remind myself that I'm the bookends of anything I produce with it. I'm the first. I have to define what I want and then I have to refine what I get. And there's so many people who will only do the first two. They'll say here's what I want, create this for me. And then they'll put out AI written slop out there that everybody sees and we're all sick of it. It's that last part, that refinement that is so critical to maintaining this sovereign mind or having this cognitive armor and it just keeps you from using it as a crutch.

And that brings in mind the human in the loop. Niels Ferguson, he a historian who I loved his book called Ascent of Money and we're going to get into deflationary economics later and it's related to that but he also went on somebody's podcast recently and said that he wants to build a cloister because students are going to use this. They're going to cheat everything. There already are. There's like. And there's no way to stop it, from my understanding. So he says, no phones, no nothing. Go inside the cloister, and you can only read and write. And, like, that's the way that education is going to do. I think it's a bit extreme. Like, I get.

I actually don't like that. I like it to a point, but I don't like it completely because it's like, you know, it's like. It's almost. It's not that different than saying, no, computers. Like, you know, people are using computers. Computers, they're here. It's not. Artificial intelligence isn't going away. So I don't think that people educationally should avoid it and go, no, you're not going to use it. I think aspects of it, like, hey, for this we're going to just do X. In fact, I think one of the easiest ways. If I was in control of the education system, the first thing I would do is I would go back to what's called the trivium method of classical education. Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah. Have you ever heard of the trivium?

No, I have not.

So the trivium is a way. There's the trivium and the quadrivium, and if I remember correctly, the trivium is a framework that has been taught since, like, ancient Greece, which just means grammar, logic, and rhetoric. So the grammar part is you have to learn the foundations. Yet if you're learning a new language, the first thing you have to learn is the grammar of it. Now the logic is like all the. You know how this works in a. How do you do sentence construction? How do you conjugate verbs? How do you do all this? Now the rhetoric part. Rhetoric is basically speaking it. So since time began, you know, when people were really. Since classical education started, it was learn the basics, then the logic, and now go speak it and in essence teach somebody else or prove that you know it through rhetoric. And rhetoric is. Can be debate, or it can just be speech. We got into the industrial education side, like in the 1800s, where we followed the Prussian education system in order to create mass. It's like mass production of students just like rote memory. Educate them, remove critical thinking. We need people to work in the factories. We just need them to be smart enough automatons, and we will keep the classical education the Trivium is still done in the elite schools. They still do it. Right. And therefore, like I can't remember how many, like I had a speech class in college. And every once in a while, throughout grade school, high school and college, every once in a while would I have to give a speech. And it was maybe represented 1% or 5% of my, my academic life like most people who've been through the mass education system. But if you want to know, like you can let somebody use AI to write their paper on, you know, macroeconomics or whatever it is, put them on, put them up in front of class without notes.

Now there you go, that's prove you.

Know it and then debate. And in fact, I think those two things, not only they lost, but it's the single best way to learn something is to teach others and interact and to defend your ideas. And instead of going in in history class and junior year high school going all right, what year was the Battle of the Bulge? Talk about what you know. Instead ask was World War I, was World War II good or bad discussed from both perspectives?

Yeah, right.

Argue it. Now I think what we can do is we can let them use AI to get research and content.

Research.

Yeah. And then, but then they have to turn on their critical thinking part. So I think that to me is the easiest way. Just bring back, bring back mandatory rhetoric.

It's really good. The Prussian model of education is a great segue into Bismarck. It goes back to Ascent of Money, the book that I just mentioned by Neil Ferguson. He mentioned how Bismarck basically innovated on the insurance model where before Bismarck there was no concept of insurance for the middle class, insurance for these people. And then Bismarck, not from the left but from the right, essentially established a welfare state that he was the first one to be like, okay, here's the welfare state. And part of that was the just put people into the factories or keep the children away so that humans could go into the factory and teach them its things so that they can then go into the factory later. But then the left, particularly with fdr, took over that idea and then realized it. And then interesting enough in Peron in the 1960s, Peron in Argentina actually is really similar to Bismarck. So it kind of like flips back and forth of like who can, who can get the welfare state ball? And that's going to feels like it's going to collapse very soon just because it's so in the education model, it's just not prepared for the future. What do you think of that?

Yeah, no, I tend to agree with it. I haven't read his stuff, but I do tend to agree with exactly what you're saying. There's another great book if you ever want to go down this called Dumbing Us down by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto. So one of the most amazing books on education that it's just jaw dropping how he, he brings receipts showing how intentionally down the populace was with quotes from everybody from Woodrow Wilson to a lot of the other people. Like, he brought, he brought the. He brought receipts. And it's like, wow, this is, it was real.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like. And this is the craziest thing about where we're headed. It feel. Because it feels like, you know, I have nothing wrong with the elite. Like, I come from the elite circles, but at the same time there's so much animosity from the elite, particularly like the real guys, the guys in the room making the real decisions. Like there's something really interesting there. I haven't thought too much about it.

But I look at it, you know, the whole concept of the elite versus the masses, etc. Yes, there are some evil, nefarious people, etc. Some of them are just doing it out of. Also out of fear. It's in disdain for that. I mean, heck, I'm, I'm in. Everybody is an elitist to a degree. I'm an elitist against absolutely stupid people. Just stupid idiots, low class. I'm elitist. I look down at them and I think I'm better than them right now. Does that make me a bad person? No, I don't mean I think I'm a better whatever. But yeah, I don't want to be around them. I look at them like, eh, I can't believe you have a vote. Right? There is a big. If anybody says that there's not a big part of them that is somewhat elitist on that. I think they're a complete and utter liar. We are hardwired natured to, to do that. It doesn't mean we're bad. It's just like, you know, who are you? What have you done? Especially the higher you get in the echelons. I also believe that people in power do what people who aren't in power would do if they were in power. Right. I think it's natural. People in power do what people who aren't in power would do if they're in power.

Right.

It's, you know, we're all, we're all just a bunch of monkeys doing what.

Monkeys do and that. But. And that's the interesting thing because the, the, the welfare state kind of created this idea that everybody could have the same power. And it was very egalitarian, but also very dishonest because essentially you can't. There's no way that humans don't get together and form circles with hierarchies. It's a product of our animal nature.

Is that right? It's 100%. I was literally just reading about this on a. It was an X post. Today I still have to get used to saying X instead of Twitter, but there was a, there was a study called the, the K. Something about cave. I want to say I liked it. I'm just looking this up here real quick. But it was really, really interesting about cave robbers. Robber cave. Hold on. Robber cave experiment. I gotta find it. Anyway, I found it earlier. It was back in like the 50s or 60s when this guy took a bunch of like 22 year old Oklahoma kids. Like they were all like 12 or 14 years old and they were all almost exact, like none of them really knew each other, but they were all the exact same age, same race, same everything. It's like we want them to be as uniform as possible. They took them to summer camp. So one summer, like one, but one bus they took and you know, they let these kids hang out for like a week by themselves. And another one, you know, they came up with names where the eagles were the Rattlers. They didn't even know that it was going to be another group. So then they were doing something separate. And then once they, once they were at the camp or whatever they got, they got to meet each other. Now they didn't introduce, hey, this is the other team. They just like, oh, look, there's another group here. Within 48 hours. It was vitriolic, fighting, resource, everything. They separated themselves into camps. Like, and it wasn't just. It started off like, oh, well, no, this is our ball field. No, this is ours. Well, let's play for it. And then it became like vandalism. Within 48 hours, it was Lord of the Flies. Yeah.

And that's basically. Yeah, go for it. Yeah.

Anyway, it's just, that's, that's. It goes back to human nature. And if you look back now, we go back to. I don't get too far off this subject. If you look back at the elites, the elites are absolutely doing some stuff to keep down the masses. Well, and it's, it's in their best interest. Like you blame them, but you don't blame them. They're there to protect what's theirs, Right? The financial elite, the ones who started the Federal Reserve, the ones who run the banking systems, the ones that, the big corporate oligopolies, they got a lot to lose. People with a lot to lose. Protect what's theirs. Yeah, interesting, right? So you can look at it as they're bad, they're evil, or they're just self interested like we all are. So this is one of the reasons I love bitcoin. Just to like talk about a segue. It's, you know, we were talking about economics. If you want to, if you want a revolution against the elites that, who control especially, you know, if you control the money, you control the world and the elites do control the money, you can't beat them, you can't outspend them, you can't buy more firepower. I think it was Mises who said, was it Mises or Hayek? What did Hayek say about government money? I should be able to quote this because it's one of my favorite quotes. But he said something like, I don't believe we'll ever have a sound money again until we take it out of the hands of the Federal Reserve. Yeah. But he said, I don't believe we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of the government. But he said, but we cannot. I'm looking for the whole thing and the full quote is something about the only way to do it. You cannot just take it from them. You have to introduce some sly, roundabout way of something that replaces it which they can't stop. And this was written in the, I want to say the 80s. So he's describing bitcoin like, you cannot, you can't beat them at their own game. You have to start a new game that they cannot do. So the people who invest in bitcoin, you could think of it as like, if you don't know anything about it, it's just a speculative crypto. But if you understand what it is, it's a, it's a, it's a silent, nonviolent, societal financial revolution disguised as a get rich quick scheme. Because you're taking their power away in the one thing they can't control it. So you, you.

But now they've, but now they've, they've. It's so interesting what's going on with bitcoin right now.

Yeah. Governments. Yeah. Governments and Wall street are co opting it.

Yeah.

But I look at it like this. It was always going to happen. If you ever want it to be mainstream, you have to Trojan horse it into the, into them. So you trojan horse it with they. Wall street sees it as a get rich quick scheme. They're like, I don't know what it is, I don't know if it's going to replace a dollar and maybe it never will, but we're going to get rich off of it. Cool. There's your Trojan horse. What the metaphor I like to use real quickly is when we send, when NASA sends a rocket to outer space, we always send it to a. To get into another planet's orbit to slingshot around the gravity of that planet and slingshot it further. Bitcoin was shot into orbit. It's getting sling unintentionally slingshot around the ones with the biggest gravity.

They're gonna be all in. So what I mean, I'm so curious about the stable coins because I've been doing a lot of really interesting research into the stable coins. There's an analysis which I probably most agree with that the US government is in some trouble.

Yep.

Although it's really interesting that the US government's in some trouble and was trying to get paid Powell to change the Fed and open up the floodgates for the low interest rates. And definitely, probably the funniest moment in the last hundred years of history was watching Powell say no to Trump on television is the funniest thing. But stablecoins, is it the milkshake theory in practice or is it the US government trying to get bring Bitcoin into its sphere through the stablecoin?

I think it's more so the second one. So as I understand it, one of the big reasons that they're for it is now monetary policy is no longer being like the Fed. I think, I think the Fed basically took it over and they realized, look, not the Fed, the, the Treasury. So now it's all administrative based. You know, one of the biggest, the Fed. What's that?

Is the treasury versus the Fed. The treasury is seeing the stablecoins as a way to do monetary to create.

Demand for the dollars. Because I think the stat may be slightly wrong, but I think Tether is the, maybe the sixth or eighth largest holder of U.S. treasuries because you know, if, because they're backed. Supposedly, you know, people argue they're unaudited, but so is the Fed that it has to back one, one to one. So if they're, if you go buy Tether because you want to interact in the crypto sphere, they buy Treasuries and other cash equivalents. Right. But mainly Treasuries they're like the eighth large. They own more than, they own more treasuries than Germany does. And therefore now the more that the US government blesses and gives regulatory clarity to the crypto market, especially stable coins, the more people and institutions are likely to buy stable coins. Well, if they buy stable coins now, they're basically just saying, look, you have to back these one to one, like with in essence risk free assets. But yeah, I say that with a smirk with treasuries. So that creates a new artificial demand for treasuries that prior to this was only done by either getting governments or big companies or the Fed, like, we don't need you guys anymore. There's something like $11 trillion in money markets and other stuff that, and if they, you know, so the more that they encourage the, the crypto, I guess, environment, the more demand for stable coins, the more demand for stable coins, the more demand for dollars. But conversely, the more demand for stable coins, the more demand for Bitcoin and other treasure and other crypto bitcoin projects. But the, but so yeah, so now they're like, hey, you know, hey pal, drop the rates because we have to refinance trillions of dollars of debt and it's going to break us if you don't. And Powell says, nope, they're like, all right, cool, we're going to go through the back door and we're going to tap into a whole new demand for stable coins which is going to let us continue to create money. And, and it's going to be the.

Banks, it's going to be the banks who, who build the new stable coins. Right. I got, I got the stats here from chat GPT for as of spring summer 2025, Tether owns 64 to 68% of the stablecoin market. USDC Circle, I believe the Coinbase associated one owns 22 to 28%. Dai which now I'm most excited about given the kind of other stuff that's going on in the US government is only 4 to 5% and there's another 2% collectively. Yeah, those numbers all make sense. So, man. So we were. Oh. So well, yeah. What do you think on that? Do you have any other thoughts?

I mean, my thought is that, you know, the government is going to continue to print. It's the only, it's the only thing they have. But the way they print. Everybody thinks that the Federal Reserve creates money. It doesn't. Banks create money.

Yeah, interesting.

Federal Reserve enables the individual banks to create money and so they, they're going to continue to do what they're going to continue to do. They're going to, they're going to push asset prices up, they're going to continue to print, they're going to find ways to borrow money. And one of the ways to borrow money issue the issuing T bills. Well one of the ways to issue T bills and have a buyer is to encourage crypto adoption. You know so now the big banks.

The banks create money and now they're going to issue stablecoins. Yeah, that's from what I understand based on US treasuries. So it's. And do you remember the M2? Is it M2 like where the Treasuries fit in? I'm going to go research this.

I'm not sure exactly. I always get confused. I know M2 is like the main one that's monitored versus like M1, M3. I think M1 is like what's in savings accounts and check INS accounts. M2 is like the biggest number that we're looking at. It's already increased and it's continuing and it's their only option in the world of you know, macroeconomics and government. Well governmental macroeconomics. Governments only have four options when gets out of control.

What are the four options?

Yeah, they can increase taxes, they can encourage austerity. Yeah, meaning okay guys let's not spend so much, let's do this or let's cut all the things they can print. And there's one more. What are the, what was the fourth one? There's a fourth one that is somewhat negligible. I can't remember exactly what it is off the top of my head. I'm sure it'll come to me but it, it's like it never gets done. You can only raise taxes so much and once you start to raise taxes to a point the people who control the damn government say hey stop that. Like we run this stuff. Quit your shit. You know like stop. And then. And austerity doesn't work for very long. You know because the, the have nots rebel because austerity hurts the, the lower and middle class.

Yeah.

When they rebel and or they vote you out. But the one thing that most people go back to Carlin most think about how dumb the average person is. I'd say 80 to 90% of the world doesn't understand anything about money. And they do not understand how invisible of theft inflation. They just see prices going up but they don't see how nefarious that they.

Do see it in Argentina. This is the most interesting thing I've been to the.

Because they've been through. Because they've been on the, on the extreme end of it. Folks in the US And Europe have not been on this extreme.

Yeah, yeah.

No idea.

No. Definitely agree that 90, 80% of the population in the United States has no idea. Although the millennials and the zoomers are starting to understand a little bit. Because the. Why.

There's two reasons why. Number one, Bitcoin.

Yep.

And so they've gotten into bitcoin or crypto. And the minute you start to get into it, you start. It's confusing. You start to read about it. The minute you read about it, those people who aren't just, you know, trying to get rich off meme coins and are actually studying, okay, what is the reason this exists? And then you go to the reason. I'm just going to use Bitcoin as an example. Because it's really the only one that truly matters. Although stable coins are very important. Bitcoin wouldn't exist if it wasn't a solution to. It wouldn't be valuable. If it wasn't a solution to a problem, nothing would. Things only have value in, in relation to the, you know, the value of the solution it's providing. So in order to know what this, what it's a solution to, you have to know what, what's broken. In order to know what's broken, you need to know how something's supposed to work. And it doesn't take long to just go back into simple Austrian economics to go, wait a minute. Oh, okay, this is fixing this. And the whole $21 million supply cap is important because it can't be inflated. Well, why is that important? Well, because you look at what is being inflated and what that means that, you know, they're creating so much money. So every dollar you hold in, in your savings account is being rot. It's getting less and less. And in order to prevent that, it means that you have to invest your money and take risks that you are not an expert investor. You do not know about this stuff. So you're forced to buy real estate. You're forced to buy stocks. And people typically buy real estate and stocks. Most people buy high and sell low because they don't put money in investments until they see the investments already doing well. Which is why most, like bitcoin and crypto entrants get in when we're 3/4 through the bull market. Because they're dumb. They're. I'm sorry, they're ignorant.

Yeah.

And this is Just human nature. And so now, you know, Gen Z's, millennials and Gen Xers like me have seen that. We've seen the pattern. We're like, wait a minute, I'm reading about this. I read the Creature from Jekyll Island. I've read this. This shit's intentional. Like you guys are. This is not just like you've engineered this. Yeah, you SOBs. So now I think the. And the younger generations are feeling more. What's the word? Vulnerable or like taken advantage of. And they're not stupid. They're reading about this stuff and they're like, you know what? I see past the, the veil now.

Yep.

Because it doesn't benefit them. It benefited their parents and the boomers really big. It doesn't benefit them. And they, and they wonder why, why am I poor? Why does it take such a dramatic amount more money to buy a house than it did when I was, you know, my parents were a long time ago.

It's so crazy.

Go ahead.

The real estate thing is so interesting because that's like a great asset generally for what we're headed for in terms of instability. You know, the things that go did really well during the war, during any war are agricultural, farmland, property and commodities like silver, gold, iron, like copper. All these different things. Like so in real estate kind of fits into that. Although not real estate in a bad market which a lot of the United States markets. So that's really something really interesting. But I want to go into like the deflation stuff.

Yeah.

Because the bitcoin is deflationary on purpose for the reasons we just discussed. Artificial intelligence.

Actually just to be grammatically correct. It's not because a lot of people think it's deflationary. It's actually disinflationary because there is inflation in bitcoin up until about 2040 when the, when the last 2121.

Interesting.

Is issued. So it's. At the moment it's disinflationary and then it becomes non inflationary. So deflationary would be like what Ethereum claims to be, which is, you know, we're burning. So if we had a $21 million supply cap in like every month, I'm going to make this up every day. 100 Bitcoin worth burned. That's deflationary.

Yeah.

Okay, so it's, it's disinflationary until it's just. And then it's non inflationary. So just, Just because it's important.

Yeah, but the, cause that.

So the, but usually the word inflation is used in Relation to prices like, oh, prices going up. That's inflation. That's not true. It's. It's a, It's a really poor. Like, I hate the wording that society has accepted, including economists, because inflation means the money supply is being inflated. We're adding more to it, which causes prices to necessarily rise because there's more dollars chasing the same amount of products. So. But what happens is if we were theoretically on a bitcoin standard or any even, even gold standard, right? And if you cannot artificially inflate the, the money supply, prices will tend to deflate or they will go down in comparison to other, you know, or in comparison to what it was. And it's just by nature because technology is, is deflationary.

Right.

As technology gets better, it's easier to, you know, it's easier to make things and it's cheaper to make things and it's way cheaper to make computer now than it was 20 years ago. Why does it cost, you know, why am I paying like $2,000 for a computer now and I should be paying $500, right. Like, what's the deal with that?

And that's Moore's Law. Moore's Law plays into that. And Moore's Law is super interesting because now Moore's Law is done. But I find it very ironic that as soon as Moore's Law stops now, we've got a whole other law which is probably not to be named yet, which is. Well, it's the, the bitter lesson. The bitter lesson. You just throw more compute at it. And then all of a sudden each of the different layers of artificial intelligence brings us back to artificial intelligence. Also, we can have a conversation in terms of it being inflationary or deflationary as well. Because now the intelligence, like, I don't. It's really interesting. Last few months, as I've become done the mind meld with the LLMs, it just is not surprising to me anymore how powerful they are. But it is very surprising still. Like, there's nothing. And that is a deflation of my expectations. Right. Like, so that's going somewhere. Where is that going? While we're, While this other thing's happening.

Yeah. So I want to bring this into a little bit of. What do you call it? Focus here on something. I'm pulling something up so I can look at it. I got a lot to talk about on this stuff.

So.

All right. We were. One of the things we were just talking about is, you know, prices of home or why, like baby boomers, millennials, Gen Z. So I'M looking at one chart from the Federal Bureau of Labor and Statistics that says for baby boomers in like in 1985, the, the median household income for a baby boomer was 20. I'm, I'm going to use round numbers. 24,000. The median house was 84,000. Okay so 24 to 80 income to house. 24 to 84. For in 2022 it was 74,000 income to 468,000 in, in, in median house price.

Right.

So you went from 4x your income to 468 divided by. It used to cost. Well yeah, not even four times. Three times. Three times your income. It now costs 6.3 times your income. So no wonder they're like I can't afford anything. And it's getting out of control now. Baby boomers are like hell yeah, this is great. So the young people like I can't even afford a starter home.

Yeah.

Now, so that, that's one piece. Then there's a whole other piece. We're talking about deflation. And I want to get to you and I on a prior conversation. We're talking about Jeff Booth's book the Price of Tomorrow and why deflation is actually the key to an abundant future, which is, is sacrilegious to modern monetary theory. It doesn't work. Like the one thing we all are scared of in this fiat debt based economy is deflation because everything falls apart. I'm going to get to that piece in a second. How I think that Bitcoin, AI and other transformatives and population as well, we could actually be. There may be a really interesting light at the end of this tunnel. So there's my hopium injection. So this is another post I saw yesterday on X by a guy and he was, he painted it perfectly. So he was talking about, you know, if bitcoin was your money. If you denominate your wealth in bitcoin, like let's just say you're worth a million dollars and you put it all into bitcoin, for instance, just theoretically. And instead of thinking about prices of things going up in dollars, you think about prices of things, of things in terms of what you're storing your value in. So in 2020, Amazon prime cost $119. Five years later it cost $139. So that's it. That's an inc. A US dollar increase of 17%. Right. However, if you were to price bitcoin as how much? You know, based on bitcoin, it used to cost 1.7 million Satoshis which is the unit of Bitcoin. So 1.7 million Satoshis got you prime in 2020. Right now it costs 117,000. There is a decrease, there is a, you know, the price of Amazon prime is deflated by 93% in five years. And pretty much the, you know, eggs down 85%, milk down 93% even though they're up 24% in terms of US dollars. So it starts to show you that, wait a minute, deflation is a good thing if you're denominating your own wealth in something that is non inflationary. So that's a really interesting thing. And I think that, and as more people see this, it, it creates more converts and more converts and more converts. Now the hardest thing in the world is going to be can the US or can the world economy ever get to a place to become like to have a bitcoin based standard where this is the, the, the, the asset that underpins all. So it's got a hell of a, it's got a hell of a disincentivized elite structure to prevent that from happening. Unless they start to make so much money with bitcoin too, they're gobbling it all up and they're like, okay, now that we own a good amount of it now let's go ahead and do that. And then everybody else doesn't own it is left holding the bag.

Let's bring geopolitics into this because China, I was doing a deep dive on bitcoin mining yesterday and bitcoin regulation and the spread of data centers, which is now basically making AI. They're being able to convert the bitcoin mining to the AI conversion as well. So they're doing both. So I was trying to figure out like how many data centers wouldn't have existed without bitcoin. There's a lot of them and there's a lot not in China. But in 2021 there were a lot of in China. 80% of the mining was in China. And then the Chinese government because for environmental concerns decided to, to get rid of it. But it wasn't environmental concerns, it was capital controls. They were trying to keep all their money inside of China. So then it decentralized all over the world, which is a great thing for bitcoin. And so geopolitically, the United States is now clearly pinning all of its hopes there. But you still have the BRICs, you still have China with its transformative technology, with its AI models. This dropping open source models over and over. You still Have Russia with its huge amounts of natural resources, and you have Brazil, which is an interesting story in of itself, but so like in India, I imagine India will probably go closer to the United States at some point. It feels like there's a long history of an alliance there, although maybe not with Pakistan. But geopolitically, where does that fit in with the theory? Because the United States is now very bitcoin crypto. They're going to now use it as a weapon, as the previous administration was using. Was planning on using AI regulation as a weapon now. Yeah. What do you think geopolitically? Like, where's China? How does that play into all this?

You know, it's hard to say. I mean, it's. It's a big cluster f. And it's. You know, I don't. The honest truth is, I really don't know. What I do know, however, is the. Is the, you know, the fact that this is going to continue to be more tumultuous as countries and sovereigns start to rebel against what is happening. So we will see more and more, and the more chaos there is. Things like bitcoin thrive on chaos. Be as chaotic as you want. We're over here. They say TikTok next block. Bitcoin has is 95%, you know, relatively speaking, the same as it was 15 years ago. It doesn't change. It is the. It is the rock in the storm. And people are realizing that. They're like, oh, the fact that it isn't that it is static, it's not innovating, it's. But it's just getting more valuable. Like, maybe I'm going to go over here just to have. Just to kind of like have something that doesn't change. One thing that doesn't change is everything everybody else is vying for, you know, financial superiority, etc. I don't think, like, Brics and Yuan will never, ever, ever. No, because it's too. It's too backwards. Capital controls nobody, you know, you need transparency, etc. So I just. I think it'll continue to happen until maybe there's enough upheaval, global geopolitical, financial upheaval that the people just start, you know, saving and spending in bitcoin. Because the truth is governments create currency, people create money.

Interesting way of going to that.

People decide, you and I decide what we're willing to trade for our time and energy on something. When. When a large number of people decide that gold was okay, you guys are trading seashells, and then gold's better, and they Go, yeah, gold's better. People start doing that, then governments form up and they go, okay, well gold's the official thing. So when the people decide we're trading this and then the people are the ones who run, you know, the, you know, the world, that's how it might change. Now let's get into what does this really mean? Like Jeff Booth in the book Price of Tomorrow talks about deflation is such a powerful thing, and this is so hard for most people to grasp. But you know, technological progress is inherently deflationary as, as things advance, storage costs, cost of production goes down, but prices are going up because of more money in the supply. And you've got, imagine this world where you're not forced to become an investor, you can just be a saver. I look at saving as putting your money in a checking account. If you put money in a checking account, you're guaranteed to lose way more than 2% inflation a year. Right. But so now you're forced to be an investor. Well, what if you didn't have to? What if you knew that every dollar you kept that prices were just going to get cheaper? That means you would not be forced to invest in startups and IPOs and penny stocks and real estate. Now cynics will argue, well, yeah, but now you're disincentivizing investment into the, into the economy, productive economy. It's like, no, what you're doing is you're disincentivizing stupid the Ponzi schemes.

You're disincent.

Yeah. What you're saying is like, listen, if I'm going to give, let's say I've got a million dollars worth of wealth stored in Bitcoin and you come to me with a business idea that you want to start and you need $100,000 or 100,000, you know, whatever worth, let's just call it dollars. Now if I'm a big player and I can always go borrow money and I know more money's coming, that's cool. But if I know that, look, if I give you this and you screw this up, I don't get this back, there's only so much, you know, wealth in the world. I'm going to be a lot more, I'm going to be a lot more careful of where I invest my money. Because what now you have to do is your investment better outperform the deflation of the price. Like you better out make my purchasing power greater. Right. So now let's tie what I call the three legged stool together. If you follow Elon and a lot of other, you know, economists, etcetera, they talk about the alarming trend of population, the. The decline in population growth. It's not population decline because population is growing, but the growth rate is stagnating in all these developed countries, except for places like the Middle east and India, et cetera. Even China is having issues of birth rates. And in our existing system, birth rate decline is tragic because that means there's less people to support the older people. As every, you know, somebody removes themselves from the workforce. You need, like, typically two people, you know, to take care of that. But now we've got AI and AI is obsoleting people. So one person can now do the. The job of four people arguing like, I'm making this number up. So as population growth declines and birth rates decline and we have less people to support the older people, but those people can be more productive with AI and technology. That's. That could be the savior. But now, if we were ever under a real, sound hard money such as Bitcoin, and the prices of, you know, the prices of the cost of living decreases with these deflationary effects. That means the people who are there may not have to work until they're 60 years old. Because you work hard, you save your money. You save enough money, the prices of things go down. It's like, hey, I don't have to work as hard because I got the capital. This is an insanely complex thing, and I'm only scratching the surface and I'm not a professional economist, but it's a really. To sum up all the word salad I just said, if we were under a bitcoin economy where cost of living decreases naturally with that monetary system and AI makes people, makes less people as productive as more people, right? And the population growth declines, you could have this stabilizing homeostatic force that is anathema to the, like, all the. The doomsday. So that's my. That's my Pollyanna perspective.

And, well, so, yeah, it disarms like, well, the degrowthers, the accelerationist. I would say that that fits into an accelerationist sort of viewpoint. And I like the vision there. What you said about saving in Bitcoin is really interesting because it reframes the. This is what I've learned from living in Argentina is that money is fake. It's fake until you need to pay the bills, but up until that point, it's really fake. And the government can come in and say, oh, your money's only worth 50% and it's in the bank and everything like that. So it's fake until it's real. It's more real if it's backed by gold. It's potentially even more real if it's backed by bitcoin. And there's the digital property. I really like the reframe of, like. No, I shouldn't compare what I'm investing in in terms of dollars because that's inflating. I'll just compare it in terms of bitcoin. Maybe I should start doing that.

Yeah, it's a personal bitcoin standard. There is a. There's a macro bitcoin standard which is. Okay, what, what are things priced in? Well, they're priced in dollars. So I could say we live. We don't live under a bitcoin standard, at least not yet. And we know, never in my lifetime. I'm okay with that because if I theoretically have, you know, the majority or a large amount of savings stored in bitcoin, and I'm saying I, I'm not saying that I do, but I'm saying, like, theoretically, if people do, they. Because I don't own any bitcoin. Boating accident. I lost it all in a boat. In a boat accident. So, but, so let's, but let's say somebody has their entire net worth in bitcoin, right? Like, I'll just say. Let's say they got a net worth of $5 million worth of Bitcoin everywhere they look. Everything's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So now you're in a person, you. You've changed your own denominator because you're not storing it in, in an asset that is going down. Like, this is easy. Like, yeah, Amazon, Amazon just doing 87 cheaper. Right? But that only works. Yeah, you can only have a personalized bitcoin denominator standard if you have assets in that that you're using to fund your. Fund your life. And so, so yeah, the government doesn't need a bitcoin standard. If, if a person takes it upon themselves. Now you take a risk because you're. That means that your wealth may vary. It may be down 70 or 80% percent, you know, any given cycle. And you have to be able. And you have to be willing to deal with that right now. But as, as adoption increases, volatility will necessarily decrease.

So which it already kind of feels like it has. Like it's staying pretty stable compared to. I'm sure it'll continue to be volatile, but maybe only in one direction.

But I think that, I think that, you know, Bitcoin and AI have such an interesting synergy together. Like you mentioned, not only the, the training, economic effects, but like the data centers and miners. Because what you're seeing is a lot of miners are, you know, if in the way bitcoin mining works at a high, high level, you know, you buy a bunch of ASIC computers that are, you know, running these things in order to generate some bitcoin and they suck energy in. And if you are every four years the amount of bitcoin that you receive goes in half and you hope that the price of bitcoin is high enough to where you can still pay for your energy. But there's a lot of miners after the halving that get shut out of business because they're unable to make money because now they're making a lot less. They're making half as what they used to, but their, their electricity prices didn't go in half. So what happens is they, they leave the bitcoin mining market and you would think that that would make everything more, you know, just more consolidated. And it does, it does consolidate miners, however they leave and they don't just necessarily quit and sell their shit on ebay. They can now end up powering AI, right? So now they have an outlet which also incentivizes people to get into bitcoin mining when things are really good because they know they have an extra outlet. But then with, not to get too nerdy on this, but then whenever miners leave and the hash rate decreases, the difficulty rate to mine something decreases. So that increases the profitability which brings more miners in. And it's this beautiful, beautiful system. There's one other thing. We were bringing up macroeconomics and just yesterday I watched one of the best videos and 90% of the people would think it's the driest thing they've ever watched, but it's. Tucker Carlson on X and YouTube interviewed this guy, Richard Verner, who is a world renowned economist and you know, he is very anti central bank the way it works. He's not, I've never seen him say in the Fed, although he probably does think that I've just synthesized like some of my things that I got from this yesterday. But I thought it was really fascinating. So number one, he was the first one like way back, a long time ago he, I think he's the one who invented the term quantitative easing. And his whole claim from a long time ago is that it's look, commercial banks, not the Fed, creates money out of nothing when they issue loans rather than let you know they don't lend out existing deposits. Right. Like, nobody. I don't think anybody who understands banking thinks that the only money that's being lent is money that the banks have. No, they're just saying, okay, I can lend out nine times what I have in the bank. Like, you understand how fractional.

Yeah. So the bank creates money, and it creates money by taking in money from savers. And then.

No, no, actually, stop there, stop there, because you got the first part wrong. They do not create money by taking money from savers. So the way it works, the very simple version is I have $100. I pay you. I pay you a hundred bucks. You put that in your. I'm say a thousand bucks. You put that in your bank. Right. You deposit them in your bank. Fractional reserve mean the rules say. And this might even be a little bit worse than what I'm about to say, but the worst, your bank now has $1,000, you know, in its assets. It can now lend out $9,000 worth of dollars. And you like, what do you mean it can lend out 9,000? It only has one depositor. It's like rules say I can lend out nine. Well, what does that mean? It means it types a number on a aboard. So somebody else comes in and they borrow $9,000 from your bank, and now they pay off. They go buy a car for $9,000. And then. And then they. Then the seller of that car puts it in his bank. Now that bank can lend $81,000. So every time a bank makes a loan, it is a ledger entry that allows them to create money out of thin air. The Federal Reserve is the one who allows this to happen. They backstop them. They go, oh, it's all good. We've got you covered. Well, where are you getting the money? Well, it's like, don't worry, we make it up, too. So. So, number one, he was the first one to really, really claim it's commercial banks that make money. Then he also said that, you know, macroeconomic theory is extremely flawed for a couple of reasons.

Commercial. Commercial banks being what type of banks?

Just commercial banks.

Like, banks.

JP Morgan Chase, your local.

Interesting.

Your local. Your local credit union. Every time they issue a loan. Because of the way it works. Yeah, they don't. They don't. Yeah, they don't need to have their money in their ledger in order to issue money. They're just creating it out of thin air. The next big thing that he did was he realized that there's two types of money being created. So the first One is, let's say I own a factory and I'm borrowing money to buy a new machine that will help me be more productive. Okay, that's, that's, that's productive money. So I borrow this Money, a new $100,000 was created. I buy a hundred thousand dollar machine that produces $200,000 worth of output. Great GDP growth grew because I was more productive. The second type of money that is created, he realized, and it's all being lumped into one. But the second one is, is speculative money for asset purchases. So now I decide I want to buy. I'm going to borrow money in order to fund my company that like an app company. Or I'm going to borrow money to buy a large piece of real estate or I'm going to borrow money to buy stocks. And that this happens in Japan where it's called the carry trade. Japanese interest rates are like at near zero, if not interest. So, so big hedge funds and private equity, they borrow yen at zero interest, they buy assets over in the U.S. maybe they pay 5% interest, you know, and it, and it, you know, it's free money, it's arbitrage. Right. So, but they're what they're now they're buying assets because they've got free access to all this debt. Now that bids up asset prices. And as asset prices go up, everything else goes up. But that doesn't mean the economy got more productive. It just means asset prices got more expensive. So he's the one, he calls it the disaggregation theory. Like let's not aggregate all money created, it's not all equal. Like some money actually makes productive people, some money just makes rich people richer. And the Federal Reserve, the CIA went after, they're like, hey, we're watching, we don't like this. So the next thing he says, he goes, the Japanese economic crisis back in the 80s, they were Japanese was on fire. Everybody was worried about Japan. And then there was a huge bubble. Right. And it burst. However, what he asserts is that the central banks, most importantly the Fed engineered that recession on purpose with the help of the bank of Japan. Because the bubble burst.

Yeah. They needed to do something. It's this long line of tradition where they just need to do something. Right. Because it's too big to fail. Yeah.

And then what he argued, and supposedly he has the receipts and the proof is that. So Japan's economy went to hell in a handbag.

Yeah.

Now they dropped rates to basically zero, but they did not start lending to the productive like small businesses. Etc, those guys weren't, still weren't getting the loans, but the people who were getting the loans were foreign companies and foreign hedge funds as well as big companies so they can buy assets and that they put pressure on the bank of Japan to make this happen, to play the game, because this is the game.

Yeah.

So it was this heavily distorted use of quantitative easing. Like, we're not helping financial warfare. Yep. We're not helping you guys be more productive. We're just helping the rich buy more assets. And so what he asserts, his entire thesis, as I, as I understand it from all the research I did yesterday, is that, yeah, the bigger the bank is, the more incentivized they are to lend money to big players who are trying to speculate the least. The bigger the bank, the less they make for small business loans. Small business loans are done by like the same thing with companies.

It's the same thing with, when a company is selling to small businesses and medium businesses, they immediately, once big fish, they start selling to other stumps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he asserts that a decentralized banking system. Now, I, I don't know if he talks about Bitcoin or anything else, but his whole assertion is that decentralized banking is what it should be. It should be a lot of small banks making loans to their communities, to individuals who are trying to improve their communities, not the big, too big to fail banks who are running up the price of everything else because they're creating trillions of dollars out of thin air. Right. So the only, the big problem with that is that goes against the elite narrative. The ones who are in charge, they want bigger banks. The ones who pull all the strings, they want the bigger banks because they're getting richer. So he's saying decentralized small banks are the key to making it work. And so I just found it insanely interesting. I'll send you some of the research. I've got the video and a whole Gemini thread, like breaking down all of his stuff. I'll send it to you because it's crazy fascinating.

It solves the problem.

Go for it. I guess at the end of the day, the bottom line story is too big to fail. Central and central banks are bad. Very, very bad for the economy at whole, they're very good for the people in power. The only way to fight them is to do something they cannot control. And that finding a way to have your purchasing power go up over time without taking an extraordinary risk is the name of the game. And right now, in order to do that, you have to do one thing, buy assets. Assets are the name of the game in a, in an inflationary economy. And to me, there is one asset that rules them all if you can stomach the volatility, and that's bitcoin, because you have to understand it to realize that. But that's why you don't necessarily put everything into Bitcoin, because if you, if you, if you do risk the volatility going down 80%. Yeah, it may hurt you, but it's the only thing that is gets the highest return with the greatest amount of fundamental stability. So cool.

Thank you so much. How can people find more about you?

They can come over for dinner. They can. You can email me BradceleratedIntelligence AI or go visit AcceleratedIntelligence AI. Jump on the newsletter. I actually don't yet talk that much about macroeconomics and bitcoin, et cetera. I would love to. I talk a lot about, more about innovation, AI, business, et cetera. But I'll probably be going more this way because I really love it.

Cool. Thank you so much.

Thank you.