1643: Understanding “Time Preference,” Saifedean Ammous, Part 2

Talk about this.

Yes, but first I need to. I'm sorry, I have to interrupt this for a minute. You're going to laugh. My wife just sold the chair in which I'm sitting, so the people are outside of their hand.

That is so funny. Okay. This is like an economics lesson right here. I love it.

Yeah. No, and you don't understand the running joke about people selling shares to buy Bitcoin that's going on in Bitcoin Twitter. Tell Mark about this. He's going to crack it.

I love it. This is great. Of course, this show is about real estate investing. But in order to understand how to. To be a great real estate investor, one must understand the value of money. Does it have intrinsic value or is it just fake news? And that's what money or currency, government money is.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1643. 1643. And today we have part two with Safe or his more formal name, Seifudine Amos. And some fascinating insights into sound money, fiat money, and why this is important. Now I must tell you, I am in the beautiful, gorgeous fountain blue hotel in Miami and noticed that on the wall of our hotel room.

You know, last time we talked about art and why art is related to sound money, it was a correlation that I did not until recently understand until interviewing Saifuddin. And we'll be back with part two with him here in just a moment. But on the wall there is a. I don't know, I wouldn't call it a piece of art. Would you call that a piece of art?

No, I would not.

Okay. What is it?

A decoration?

It's a decoration. Well, there's a decoration on the wall in a frame. So some would consider that art, I guess. And it is. Remember when you had to write? Well, you probably didn't have to anymore, but in the old days when Kids did something wrong. They had to write. Okay, and that means they had to write a hundred times on the chalkboard. Yes, they used to use chalk before whiteboards. And they had to write over and over or maybe on a piece of paper, I will knot something, right? Whatever bad thing they did. So this one says, I will not make any more boring art. And it's written over and over on this piece of art, decorative wall hanging, whatever it is.

So just wanted to tie in the importance of this. And next week, hopefully we'll get time to talk about progress, technology and innovation as it relates to sound money. Of course, we'll have other guests talking about other topics, but I think this is so critically important to society. And of course, understanding sound money and fiat money and inflation is so critically important to us as investors because we of course want to do what we want to align our interest with the most powerful forces the human race has ever known. Very, very important. Align our interests with the most powerful forces the human race has ever known. And what are those? Governments and central banks. And by the way, I'm watching CNBC right now. The TV is on, no sound and more talking about Robin Hood and all of this. Wow, it's just amazing. So listen to this clip from Saifuddin, who will be with us live here in just a moment. And then I want to just tell you a little bit about more about what I saw at the Norton a few days ago. And I think you'll find this very interesting. So listen to this as we talk about how inflation and sound or unsound money influences art.

The terms asterisk results in free markets. The winners are always the ones who provide the goods deemed best by the public. When government is in charge of deciding winners and losers, the sort of people who have nothing better to do with their life than work as government bureaucrats are the arbiters of taste and beauty. Instead of art success being determined by the people who have succeeded in attaining wealth through several generations of intelligence and low time preference. It is instead determined by the people with the opportunism to rise in the political and bureaucratic system. Best. A passing familiarity with this kind of people is enough to explain to anyone how we can end up with the monstrosities of today's art.

So remember, low time preference versus high time preference. What does that mean? That means when the money is unsound, when it is not money that holds its value over time. And that's of course what we have not only in the United States, but of course around the world. We have unsound money that does not hold its value over time and it gets debased by inflation because it is not of limited supply and it is unsound in so many ways. We've talked about that in 1642 prior episodes. I won't go into it now because it's a rabbit hole. So the high time preference is where the mentality of people shifts to. Not that. That was great grammar. Sorry. I think you get it shifts to when we don't have sound money. When we have sound money, there is a low time preference because we know that the money will hold its value. We don't have that. So our entire society, not just in the US but worldwide, has become a high time preference society in instant gratification society. And that influences virtually everything in life. And by the way, I forgot to mention it last time, but I want to thank our client and Venture alliance member Keith Gibson, who actually booked this interview with Saifuddin Ammas. So you heard part one of that on Monday and part twos today. And let's listen to this clip before we get to him.

In their fiat fueled, ever growing realm of control, fiat money, almost all modern governments dedicate budgets to finance art and artists in various media. But as time has gone by, bizarre and barely believable stories have emerged about COVID government meddling in arts for political agendas. While the Soviets funded and directed communist art to achieve political and propaganda goals. It has recently emerged that the CIA retorted by financing and promoting the work of abstract expressionist mattress and cardboard molesters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

Mattress and cardboard molesters. Okay, here we need a comment from Ashley. Okay, because when we were at the Norton Museum on Sunday, the Norton Museum in Palm beach, right here in Palm Beach, Florida, we saw.

An exhibit called Smashed Cardboard. And it was basically like a smashed cardboard box hanging from the ceiling with a red chain. It was. Yeah, like a red.

It wasn't made of cardboard though. And it was neither aesthetically pleasing nor provocative. So.

So it wasn't art art.

And we also saw a pile of candy in a corner and you are supposed to go up and take some.

Well, that makes the art interactive. Yes, right. So let me just describe that better for the listeners. Okay, so this exhibit in quotes art exhibit was a joke, of course, and it was a bunch of green hard candies in cellophane wrappers thrown into a corner of the museum. And I thought, well, is this just trash that they didn't clean up or what is this thing? But there's a Little card there on the wall that explains what the art is. And this art exhibit, installation art, was these candies thrown up there. And then we kept reading the thing in disbelief that this was actually considered art.

I think you had to ask the man working at the museum, is this art?

Oh. And he said, take one. And he said, yes, it is take one. Yes, it is take one. And then we read on the card, it said, you can take one, right? So you can go and take one of these candies. And that makes the art interactive. Yes, very interactive. So is that art questionable?

Very questionable.

Very questionable. And think about that, though. That shows a high time preference because it's really easy to buy a bunch of green candies and cellophane wrappers and throw them in a corner versus the Sistine Chapel, versus the David, Right? I mean, versus Monet or Degas. Thoughts? I agree.

And, well, the point of the candy as well was that it was unending, that supply was going to be. Was going to be replenish forever. Replenished forever. So that is an art exhibit that you can go see in 100 years.

Wow.

So impressive. I doubt it will last as long as the Sistine Chapel, though. I just have a feeling. Interesting.

To serve as an American counter. Only with unsound money could we have reached this artistic calamity where the two largest economic, military, and political behemoths in the world were actively promoting and funding tasteless trash picked by people whose artistic tastes qualify them for careers in Washington and Moscow. Spy agencies and bureaucracies as the Medicis have been replaced with the artistic equivalents of DMV workers. The result is an art world teeming with visually repulsive garbage produced in a matter of minutes by lazy, talentless hacks looking for a quick paycheck. By scamming the world's aspirants to artistic class with concocted, nonsensical stories about it symbolizing anything more than the utter depravity of the scoundrel pretending to be an artist who made it. Mark Rothko's art took mere hours to produce, but was sold to gullible collectors holding millions of today's unsound money, clearly solidifying modern art as the most lucrative get rich quick scam of our age. No talent, hard work or effort is required on the part of a modern artist. Just a straight face and a snobby attitude when recounting to the nouveau riche why the splatter of paint on a canvas is anything more than a hideous, thoughtless splatter of paint. And how their inability to understand the work of art unexplained can be easily remedied with a fact check. What is astounding is not just the preponderance of garbage like Rothko's in the modern art world. It is the conspicuous absence of great masterpieces that can compare with the great works of the past. One cannot help but notice that there aren't too many Sistine Chapels being constructed today anywhere. Nor are there many masterpieces to compare with the great paintings of Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, or Vermeer. This is even more astonishing when one realizes that advances in technology and industrialization would make producing such artwork far easier to accomplish than it was in the golden era. The Sistine Chapel will leave its viewer in awe, and any further explanation of its content, method and history will transform the awe into appreciation of the depth of thought, craft, and hard work that went into it. Before they became famous, even the most pretentious of art critics could have passed by a Rothko painting neglected on a sidewalk and not even noticed it, let alone bothered to pick it up and take it home. Only after a circle jerk of critics have spent endless hours pontificating to promote this work will the hangers on and aspirant nouveau riche begin to pretend there is deeper meaning to it and spend modern, unsound money on it. Several stories have surfaced over the years of pranksters leaving random objects in modern art museums only for modern art lovers to swarm around them in admiration, illustrating the utter vacuity of our era's artistic tastes. But there is perhaps no more fitting tribute to the value of modern art than the many janitors at art exhibits worldwide who, demonstrating admirable perceptiveness and dedication to their job, have repeatedly thrown expensive modern art installations into the dustbins to which they belong. Some of the most iconic artists of our era, such as Damien Hirst, Gustav Metzger, Tracey Emin, and Italian duo Sarah Goldschmid and Eleonora Chiara have received this critical appraisal by janitors more discerning than the insecure nouveau riche who spent millions of dollars on what the janitors threw away.

So the janitor in the modern art museum can just leave their mop in the corner and someone will consider that an art installation.

But if it looks like garbage, it probably is.

Yeah. And so this is the interesting thing. So there's a little bit of a flip side to this. And you know, of course this show is about real estate investing, but in order to understand how to be a Great real estate investor, one must understand the value of money. Does it have intrinsic value or is it just fake news? And that's what money or currency, government money is. You know, I'm not a gold bug, I'm not a bitcoin bug, but I do love collecting these phenomenal, artificially cheap, fixed rate mortgages and using them against commodities that have universal need. You know, it's interesting. I'm speaking at this conference here in Miami this week, and when we were on the bus this morning to go on a little harbor cruise, the person sitting in front of us was talking about real estate investing and talking about how he. I asked, you know, what did you do before? How did you get into this? And he said, well, I was a professor. And I said, what kind of professor? And he said, psychology. And I said, well, as a psychology professor, all you really needed to do to become interested in income, property, in real estate as an investment, was to simply refer to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And of course, all of you remember this because you undoubtedly studied it in some psychology book or class in high school or college. And at the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which looks like a pyramid, is the safety need. And safety essentially equates to what? Shelter, shelter. People have three basic human needs, food, clothing and shelter. And then their needs increase after that as they go up Maslow's hierarchy to what Maslow considered the ultimate need. And I disagree with Maslow, by the way, but he called that self actualization. Now, I disagree. I think there is spiritual actualization or actualization in God. I think that's a higher form than self actualization. But hey, you know, with a narcissistic culture, we have, let's go with self actualization. But real estate is right at the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So it's a pretty great commodity. It really is. And so one flip side though, that seifudine alluded to and what he just said here is a clip from the Bitcoin standard book is that these collectors will spend millions and millions of dollars for this essentially trash. Why is that possible? Well, fiat money makes that possible because if they take a few great bets on a few real estate deals, a lot of art collectors are certainly real estate owners and developers. They take a few great bets and all of this money comes into their hands because they're using my technique, inflation induced debt destruction, whether they realize it or not, and they are benefiting from the fiat money explosion while others are getting hurt by it. So that money to them looks cheap to pay $120,000 for the banana taped with duct tape to a wall or a piece of canvas that we talked about on Monday's episode. So this fiat money problem and high versus low time preference problem works in multiple directions, and of course you see that. So let's go ahead and get to Safedine Amos, otherwise known as safe. And let's hear more about this.

Been bitten by the bug. And now you're just like all the other bitcoin victims. You're just thinking about it and thinking about how to serve bitcoin and how to further Bitcoin, because that's it. You've been bitten.

Yeah, you got the bug. Right. Well, there. There are certainly. There's no shortage of gold bugs in the world. Right. So, you know, similar concept, I guess, but. Okay, so you don't think that any government can shut it down, but they could make it illegal. Right. I mean, you know, look what the example I used over the years many times in interviewing crypto experts is, is. Look, you know, cocaine is a commodity, right? It's a. It's an illegal drug. It's a comm. People trade it, but it's not traded widely because it's illegal and people are afraid of going to jail.

But it is a commodity nonetheless. If they said bitcoin is illegal because you've got to use fedcoin, for example, their cryptocurrency that they'll eventually make, and they want to control velocity and inflation and so forth, couldn't that displace it and really hurt the store of value?

I really don't think so.

I mean, first of all, let me just be clear. You know, the governments can do all kinds of things. I don't know.

They can do whatever they want.

Yeah, well, within the realms of the laws of physics and economics, yes. But I mean, I think.

The way that I see it is that ultimately any kind of action against Bitcoin can hurt Bitcoin, but it can't eradicate Bitcoin. That's the difficult thing about it. It's almost impossible to eradicate Bitcoin because bitcoin can shrink to the size it needs to shrink to in order to survive. If you restrict people buying it and you restrict people mining it, the mining declines in volume and the price of the bitcoin commodity declines in volume enough for it to be essentially able to run at a very small scale that is very hard to detect. And so it fades into insignificance, but it doesn't die. But Then the fact that it doesn't die will likely spur the rebirth, in a sense. So we always have this. The fact that it's not easy to eradicate it means that you don't want to pick a fight with it because you don't want to undermine your authority and credibility by picking a flight and then losing it. And then also the aspect of preferring to use it. Now, I think you're correct in that central banks can introduce their own digital currencies. And in one of my recent podcasts, I discussed this in the Bitcoin Standard podcast. But I think ultimately these kind of currencies are really an advertisement to Bitcoin more than they are a competition to Bitcoin. Because what they do is they really serve to illustrate the Bitcoin value proposition, because what they show you is the national currencies that will be linked to the central bank. The reason they're doing them is that they want to control monetary policy. And the reason they're doing this so that they can have full surveillance over financial transactions. So you have the two main value propositions of Bitcoin cannot exist in a central bank currency, because that's the whole reason we have a central bank, is because we want to have financial control over financial flows and because we want to have control over inflation. So if you introduce a central bank digital currency that offers the central bank the ability to survey all transactions and to unilaterally and arbitrarily set monetary policy, discretionary monetary policy, then all that you're doing is just providing a much more efficient way of illustrating the superiority of Bitcoin. You're telling people you can have your digital currency which is connected to the central bank and the government, and that is being devalued every year at anywhere between 5% and 20%, depending on your luck, or you can have Bitcoin, which is being devalued every year at exactly this percentage, which we know exactly before going into the year, and we stick to throughout the year. And you know exactly how much is going to be devalued over the next 100 years. Whereas with national currencies, you have no idea about what's going to happen in five years or maybe even one year last year. Who had any idea that?

And when those national currencies start coming in digital form, as they inevitably will, it will become extremely convenient for the powers that be, governments and the central banks that issue them, and extremely negative for the population because they can control so many things. They can control, you know, undoubtedly they'll Come on your phone. They will control where you spend.

Which merchants and businesses can accept the currency, how far they can be from your home. If there's a lockdown or a quarantine, for example, they may have expiration dates on them. So they can increase or decrease the velocity of money. They can devalue over time, maybe overnight, whatever. I mean, they can just do whatever they want.

The possibilities are endless for them.

They can do it already with dollars, some of those things, but they can do so much more and so much more conveniently with a digital currency.

Absolutely. And really, Bitcoin is. I mean, I think people miss the point of Bitcoin when they think that the point is that it is digital and that these currencies are digital. Well, national currencies are digital too. The vast majority of dollars is not out there as dollar bills and coins. It's digital. It exists on bank ledgers. The physical dollars are a tiny little fraction of the total supply of dollars. The digital aspect is not something unique or interesting about Bitcoin or about central bank digital currencies. What's unique and interesting about Bitcoin is the fixed monetary policy.

Absolutely. So as a segue to your new book, which is a really interesting thesis, talk to us. You talk a lot in the Bitcoin standard about time preference. And can you explain what time preference is and what it has to do with currency? Time preference.

In the Bitcoin standard?

I spent a significant chunk of the book talking about time preference because it's one of the most fascinating or the most fascinating topic in economics for me. When I was at university, every class that I would teach, every course that I would teach, I would always sneak in a lecture on time preference. Whatever the topic of the course, I'd always have a lecture on time preference. And I always tell students, you know, this might not be the most important thing for your exam, but this is going to be the most important lesson you'll learn in this class and probably in all of universities. So wake up and pay attention to this one, because I really think it's the most important thing economics teaches you. Time preference refers to the degree, to the extent to, at which you. To the extent to which you discount the future compared to the present. So your time preference is a measure of how much more money would I need to give you one year from now in order to take away a sum of money from you today? So if I owed you $100 that I needed to pay you today, what sum of money would you accept for me to pay you the $100 plus interest next year. If the answer is 105, that effectively means that you discount next year by 5%. So you value $105 next year as much as you value $100 today. The higher your time difference means, the more you discount the future, the less value attached to the future compared to the present, and the lower the time preference means, the less you discount the future. So you keep attaching more and more value to the future. So it seems like a very simple concept, but it's actually quite powerful in understanding individual choices and all manner of important questions in economics. So, for instance, in the Bitcoin standard, I focus on this because in my mind it's really the most important economic question in all of economics. The trades that you do with your future self are more important than any trades that you do with anybody else. You trade with your employer or your supermarket once a day or once a month or once a week, but you make trades with yourself thousands of times every day. Every single decision you make every day is a trade with your future self. When you decide whether you're going to have that cheesecake after lunch, you're making a trade between you today being happy with the cheesecake and you tomorrow or next week being unhappy with your shape or with you're being out of shape.

That's the old saying, 30 seconds on the lips, 30 years on the hips.

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. So it's a really, really, really powerful analytical tool to start thinking about all manners of decision, because you see that it applies to everywhere. The example I like to give to university students is how you study for an exam. If you come into a course and you start studying for the material day by day, then you know you're constantly keeping a low time preference and prioritizing the end of the semester throughout the semester. You get to the end of the semester, you review the material and you get a good grade. Whereas if you have a high time preference, then you discount the end of the semester very highly. So you spend all semester partying around, and then you need to cram in the last couple of days and it doesn't work. And it applies on all manner of things in our personal life and in my mind. The reason I bring this up is because I believe that money is instrumental in determining time preference. And I discuss this in depth in the Bitcoin standard as well as in my next book, the fiat Standard, and in the economics textbook which I'm writing right now, which is Principles of Economics. The way that I see it is. If money is hard, then you expect people to effectively, or let's begin even a step earlier. The reason that people hold money in the first place, the reason people use money as a technology is because it protects us from uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty about the future, you would not need any form of money because you could just simply make it so that all of your earnings come at the same time that you need to get your expenditures and you don't need to hold any money. Your paycheck comes in and it pays off your bills at exactly the right time.

Well, you wouldn't need of the three components. You wouldn't need the store of wealth component of money. Right.

Because if there was no uncertainty, then you could just store your wealth in capital. You could just own stocks and companies and businesses instead of actually owning cash. Instead of owning cash. The reason you want to own cash is because the future is uncertain. You don't know what's going in the future. And so money is our way of hedging against the uncertainty. It's our way of providing for the future.

The harder the money, the more we.

Are able to provide for the future and the less uncertainty we have about the future. If we're able to provide more for the future and if we have less certainty about the future, well, then we have less reason to discount the future. Our discounting of the future declines and so our time preference drops. So we now have a lower time preference. Basically, this is how I think money affects time preference.

Okay, so what does that do to us as well? Before I ask what it does to us as people, I want to ask you, is there a distinction between time preference and the time value of money that we've all heard of, which is just inflation? Right. Is there a difference between those two?

I mean, they're kind of related, but.

Yeah, they're distinct concepts. And that, I guess the time value of money is how much you're discounting money over time, which is determined by time preference. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so what does time preference do? It really messes with our heads, doesn't it? Safe. It really sort of causes bad decisions and it has huge knock on implications for culture and society, doesn't it? Tell us about that. Which by the way, I believe is the subject of your new book. So feel free to talk about this.

Yes, but first I need to. I'm sorry, I have to interrupt this for a minute. You're going to laugh. My wife just sold the chair in which I'm sitting. So the people are outside and they're whispering, so I have to hand it.

That is so funny. Okay. This is like an economics lesson right here. I love it.

Yeah. No, and you don't understand the running joke about people selling shares to buy bitcoin that's going on in bitcoin Twitter. Tell Mark about this. He's going to crack it.

I love it. This is great.

Got a replacement.

Okay.

That is fantastic.

Okay. Okay. So going back on now.

Well, I think the impact of time preference, I think money shapes it, but many other factors shape it. And time preference, really the lowering of time preference is the process of civilization. As we become more civilized, as we become more human, more cultured, we become more future oriented. We start providing more for the future, we start accumulating more capital and we start discounting the future more. We start becoming more future oriented, become more civilized, more peaceful. And that's essentially the process of civilization. And I think it's inextricably linked to our ability to provide for the future by holding money for the future and.

By saving for the future and reducing the uncertainty. So when the money that we use begins to lose its value, when money starts becoming easier rather than harder, when money starts becoming less reliable as a mechanism of transferring wealth into the future, then money becomes, then that reduces our ability to provide for the future. It increases the uncertainty for the future and that makes us discount the future heavier. But not just in economic affairs, in everything. And I think you see this reflected in all manners of economic and non economic decision making that people do in everything. And one my favorite example maybe might be art. You look at art under the gold standard, you look at the golden era of art, Artists would work on a masterpiece for years and then the thing would be expected to survive for centuries. And much of that art continues to survive for century. You look at 20th century art and you see that people spend 15 minutes scribbling a bunch of lines and then they make up a story about how it represents something or the other.

I love how you talk about that in the book, by the way. I resonated with that heavily. My favorite is the impressionist. Okay, so that's, that's where I like. But when you talk about the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo and then you look at a stupid banana with duct tape on a wall and that's. Can somehow art, I mean, give me a break. It's just.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's the.

Excuse that we've blown up, but clearly.

I don't understand how to interpret that banana on the wall.

Of course Exactly. Yeah. We've spent our life basically being gaslighted by art industry that wants to tell you that the reason you don't see the banana is because the problem is with you. You're not artistic and you're not cultured. And maybe that is the case. But, you know, why is it that those people that produce those things cannot produce anything that requires a little bit more time and attention? Why can't they make a Sistine Chapel in between all of their bananas? Why is it all bananas and scribbles and random stories on empty pieces of canvas rather than anything that requires actual time and effort?

So it sounds like what you're saying then is that when we have a low time preference, we become more civilized and the craftsmanship improves. Is that correct?

Very much so. And craftsmanship is one part of it. It's just in my mind, the ability to hold wealth that you can trust, which is what people had under the gold standard, that you knew this coin was yours and it's going to hold value into the future. That security, in my mind, is what is necessary for people to be creative. To be creative because they have the security and they're producing because they want to produce. And it's very different from the kind of creativity that you need to do when you're on the treadmill, where you know that the money that you're holding in your hand is like a melting ice cube. It's losing its value. It's not going to be there for you. And so you're constantly having to continue producing more and more on that treadmill. I think that's really the difference in it. And it reflects in craftsmanship, in art. I think it also reflects in innovation. People think of 20th century as being the century of technology, but really all of the things that we think of as 20th century technology were actually invented under the gold standard and were popularized and commercialized, and they spread all over the world in the 20th century. But the main and most important innovations came in the 19th century. In fact, in the 20th century, we saw some regression in many of those things. So aviation, cars, the telegraph, communication, telephone, so many of the most important technologies that we've had, 24 hour electricity supply, all these things that completely revolutionized our life. They came under the gold standard. And I don't think it's entirely coincidental that that happened. What the gold standard allowed the world to do was to have a large global market where everybody trades with everybody else and you have the ability for everybody anywhere in the world to save. Anybody could make returns that beat inflation effectively. And inflation at that time was negative one, negative zero percent. So you just holding money allowed you to have appreciation. You didn't have to be an expert investor, you didn't have to study real.

Estate stock, you didn't have to take inordinate risk. Exactly.

The same coin that you got paid in as a child or as an.

Old man or as a worker, that.

Same coin, you just had to keep hold of it. And that's it, that's your saving account.

That'S your stock portfolio.

Right. And it was good as gold, if you will. And I don't know, we've got to wrap it up here, but this is so fascinating because, you know, when I think about that, I definitely buy into this. However, it kind of strikes me that does the common everyday Joe Sixpack think about that or is it so sort of just in the air, if you will, that it just influences everything and we don't even know. It's like a subconscious thing. And I almost wonder if it has a knock on effect even to relationships. In business, in love, in romance, divorce rate. I don't know how much does this really affect?

Oh, I think so, absolutely. I think it's highly pervasive everywhere because it shapes time preference is there in everything, in any decision. It involves a short term versus a long term outcome. And so family, I think is an excellent one. As people's time preference rises, they are less likely to think about their future and more likely to think about their present. And I think you see this with time. You see that people have developed into.

A world in which they are far.

More likely to have many more temporary and short term relationships rather than fewer and much more long term relationships, which was the case a long time ago. And obviously there are many other reasons there. The contraceptive pill and the sexual revolution and the female introduction to the workplace, all of that of course plays into it. But I think another important fact in it is that the movement away from hard money to easy money has two economic impacts. Number one, it reduces the family's ability to save for the future, so reduces the incentive that parents have to provide for their children in the long run or for children to provide for their family in the long run. And it reduces the incentive that people have to invest in a family because it's less likely to pay off in the long term and also increases the emotional investment in the government or in the state as a replacement of the family. Because that devaluation, your savings are being devalued because the government is Effectively taking that extra money. And with that money, the government has so much more power that it can provide the family with a growing list of things. And so over the 20th century, over the century of government money, we've normalized the idea that it is government's role to provide things like healthcare and education and dietary guidance and all kinds of different things that the government is supposed to solve for you and provide for you. Which historically, these are the kind of things that family was there for.

Well, you know, there's this whole movement of men and it's, it's really sadly a kind of a big deal called men going their own way where they've just, they've just kind of given up and they just don't care. They don't care to start families, they don't care to find the love of their life. And they would say the government has become the new husband. You know, it's, it's, it's like, well, since when was the government supposed to have this role of interfering in every area of our life like this? You know, people view relationships and culture in a much more disposable manner when they have a short time preference. Just want to make sure I've got this right. High time preference versus if they have a long time preference or, you know, they consider their reputation to be more important. And those relationships, I don't to want, want to burn bridges. That person might be useful to me in some way in the future. I'm going to act in a more proper way because I'm going to value the future more. Whereas everybody just kind of becomes a hedonist and values the now if they have a short time preference. And it almost at first to me, but I'm really starting to see the connection. Seemed like a bit of a leap to say, well, that's because of the currency. Right, I can see your point. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, a lot of people have the inclination to just laugh initially.

But it's no, when you think about it, it really, it really matters.

A lot of people prefer to laugh and think.

Yeah, well, sure, because it's instant gratification. That's true.

Actually.

Thinking is hard work.

Yeah, exactly. And in particular, you know, thinking in particular that needs to involve several chains of reasoning. When you know, all right, well this.

Happens and then that happens.

So what if we take that as a thing and then what is the implication of that?

Right.

That kind of reasoning is very hard for most people who, you know, prefer to just get to laugh at the things that their TV tells them to laugh at.

Sadly true. And you know, we see on social media today it's, it's very apparent that we have at least a couple of generations of people that lack critical thinking skills. So, you know, and you know, thinking is hard work. It's not instant gratification. So I would agree. Safe. Thank you. Thank you for spending so much time for us. Wrap it up with any closing thought you have. Give out your website, tell people they can find out about your new book, whatever you like.

Yeah, you can go to my website seyfeddin.com or my Twitter as Saifeddin and that's spelled S A I F E D E A n. And on seifedeen.com you can subscribe to receive weekly chapters of my forthcoming two books, the Principles of Economics and Fiat Standard. You will get a new chapter every week alternating between the two books and the two books should be finished published in 2021 this year. So you'll be getting a sneak preview of the chapters as they are being finalized if you sign up. And you'll also have access to my four online courses in Austrian economics.

Excellent. Good stuff. Safe. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, Jason.

Have a good day.

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