Brett Scott (author on cashless societies)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts on expert.

[1] I'm John Berenger and I'm joined by Melinda Pitts.

[2] Hi, Pitty.

[3] Hi, wife of Brad Pitt's.

[4] That's not related to Brad Pitt, the movie star, no, no, but also an incredible realtor in his own right.

[5] Today we have Brett Scott on.

[6] Brett Scott is a monetary anthropologist.

[7] This is so embarrassing, you know, we anthropologists.

[8] Sure.

[9] Me and the anthropology community, I didn't even know there.

[10] we're monetary anthropologists.

[11] Yeah, I'm sorry about that.

[12] He's also a journalist and a formal financial broker.

[13] He has a book out now called Cloud Money, Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets.

[14] This is a very fun departure from our normal fare.

[15] This is about the war on cash.

[16] Yeah, it's very interesting.

[17] I just didn't know a lot about this.

[18] Like, I hadn't thought about it, and it's interesting.

[19] Yes, it's very fascinating.

[20] Please enjoy Brett Scott.

[21] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

[22] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[23] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[24] He's an armchair expert.

[25] Hello.

[26] How's a guy?

[27] Wonderful.

[28] Right out of the gates, I didn't think we were going to be talking to a supermodel today.

[29] The handsomeness is unparalleled.

[30] I actually used to model for my brother.

[31] He's a fashion photographer.

[32] Oh, really?

[33] Yeah, when he was training, that was my role.

[34] You were the guinea pig?

[35] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[36] You're in Berlin?

[37] Berlin, yeah, which is like having some kind of heat wave right now.

[38] Uh -huh.

[39] All of you are kind of bacon?

[40] Yeah, for sure.

[41] Yeah, I just read a really promising article that we're going to have a lot of blackouts this summer.

[42] That was a good revelation I read last night.

[43] Oh, boy.

[44] Exciting times.

[45] I'll probably be around there during the summer.

[46] I look forward to that.

[47] Well, apparently they're supposed to.

[48] to hit the Midwest particularly harshly.

[49] So, you know, I don't know, try to stay on one of the coasts, I suppose.

[50] Okay, Brett, this will be the first conversation of its sorts on this show.

[51] Now, mind you, we interviewed Ray Dalio a minute ago.

[52] I listened to that one.

[53] Oh, okay.

[54] Your book is, I don't want to say a counter narrative to him specifically, but just a counter narrative to current finance in general and the prevailing appeal of simplicity and ease and crypto and all these different things that are being sold as utopian goals for us to reach.

[55] Your book is called Cloud Money, Cash Cards, Crypto in the War for Our Wallets.

[56] Let's start first with an anthropology degree.

[57] Most important thing to talk about.

[58] Do you know I have an anthro degree as well?

[59] Oh, really?

[60] Cool.

[61] It's all he can talk about.

[62] I'm a massive anthropology fan.

[63] And actually, I think economic anthropology is one of the most useful disciplines in the world, especially for monetary stuff.

[64] The economics discipline to me has a really poor understanding of money in general.

[65] So I think economic anthropologists historically have much stronger groundings in money, partly because they go beyond the Western tradition and look at pre -capitalist societies, whereas economics as a discipline was really formed in the context of societies that were already market societies.

[66] And do you think anthropologists look at money as much more its impact on culture as opposed to just its immediate usefulness?

[67] How do you say the anthro lens differs from just an accountant?

[68] There's no single anthropology take on money.

[69] In general, there's a lot more diversity, a lot more sort of holistic thinking when thinking about money.

[70] It has a very different starting point to economics.

[71] Economics historically, its starting point is just to assume that everybody just trades naturally and that something like money, for example, just emerges because of this everyone's naturally trading, therefore everyone had to invent money somehow.

[72] But anthropologists just don't make that assumption.

[73] They sort of start from the assumption that's, What human beings have to do is survive, and there's many different ways of doing that.

[74] You can survive through subsistence farming, you can survive through being a wilderness man or something like that, or you can eventually develop market systems, but none of those necessarily require money, and some of the earliest forms of money aren't anything like the kind of money we would see now.

[75] So, for example, if you look at things like shell money, people often think that cowrie shells and stuff like that were money a bit like how we imagine money, but really things like Kari shell money are so, so different to what our money is.

[76] That would be a very ceremonial form of money that could only be used in very specific context for very, very specific things.

[77] You couldn't just rock up at a shop and try and buy Coca -Cola.

[78] It's often to appease spirits.

[79] You can give them Kari -Shell money.

[80] You know, in Papua, Shell Money, that's precisely what you can do.

[81] You can use it to mobilize the spirit world.

[82] But you can't use it to just buy groceries.

[83] Yeah.

[84] Anthropologists are very interested in that kind of thing, whereas historically economists would have rocked up in a society.

[85] often with the advent of colonialism, they'd be looking at it for, say, London, I'd see these examples of shells and stuff, and they'd say, oh, well, this is some kind of crude, primitive money.

[86] People haven't yet developed the sort of advanced types of money we have, but it's basically the same.

[87] Yeah, if they were capable of metallurgy, they too would have exactly what we have.

[88] Yeah, exactly.

[89] I mean, you see this to this day.

[90] You see it in many communities, even as apparently sophisticated finance communities, you still see people perpetuating these very crude ideas of money.

[91] I mean, one of the most striking things that these anthropologists have done is tried to destroy the barter myth of money, this idea that in the beginning everyone just bartered, which is a very, very strong assumption in economics.

[92] And anthropologists have long disputed this.

[93] In the beginning, many people would use promises and things like that rather than bartering.

[94] And David Graber was one of my mentors, and he was a very big anthropologist of money and wrote a really amazing book about this called Debt the first 5 ,000 years.

[95] Yeah, I guess, too, there's also the kind of Yuval Harari lens in Sapiens, which is looking at money as just a story.

[96] I think that's kind of a groundbreaking or paradigm -shattering thought that were just born into a system where money was a given.

[97] It seems to have an actual intrinsic value because your only experience with it is it does have an intrinsic value.

[98] So the notion that, oh, it's a story that we all agreed upon.

[99] There's also the fascinating aspect of it having allowed more and more groups of people to gather peacefully.

[100] And that goes for the marketplace and a bunch of other aspects that allow us to gather in much bigger groups because we have this shared story that this thing has value.

[101] I mean, I've got to be honest with you, I don't really go for the money as a story type ideas.

[102] I do understand what that idea is, and I do at some level agree to some extent.

[103] I think a lot of people don't actually experience money like that, at least modern money.

[104] Oh, I don't, but I think that's what's fascinating.

[105] I mean, let me ask you, do you think money is intrinsically valuable, or do you think it's not an agreed -upon?

[106] story that we all are buying into.

[107] It's certainly not an agreed upon story in the sense that what actually happens is people are born into these systems.

[108] If you think about your own upbringing, there's no point where you ever had any sort of conscious process of saying to yourself, I agree to buy into the social fiction.

[109] It's actually a lot more useful to sort of think about it in terms of network structures.

[110] Whenever I'm imagining monetary systems, I'm imagining these giant network vortexes, like tornado or something.

[111] Any individual person in the monetary system, it doesn't really matter.

[112] If they believe it's real or not, it's a network structure that you can't escape.

[113] Although we would agree there is a critical mass of belief.

[114] Like, it's quite easy for there to be a run on banks and a run on currency, and currencies do collapse and institutions collapse because our belief in Bear Stearns goes out the window.

[115] One of the sort of key questions in alternative currency design, which is something I've been involved in, is what's the best method via which you can kickstart that sort of network process?

[116] There's certain institutions, certain types of players, you're very good at kick -starting a network structure.

[117] The state is particularly good at doing it because it can issue units or money and demand it back in taxation, for example.

[118] So there's a whole school of monetary thinking called Chartilism, which has a new version in the US now actually called MMT, modern monetary theory, but chartalism is a very old theory of money, which basically says powerful institutions are the best place to kickstart the monetary systems or kickstart that sort of network process.

[119] So there is an element which is to do with what ordinary people believe, but there's a massive power structure as well that sort of underpins that often.

[120] My family is from Zimbabwe, so I've experienced a currency disintegrate.

[121] I know that the network structure of a currency can collapse, but there's different contexts in which that happens and so on.

[122] And one of my reasons why I sometimes push back a bit against the money as a story idea is it sort of imagines that it's just in our heads, rather than there being these external institutions that will often underpin a currency and make it far more likely that it actually works.

[123] It's a little bit like saying a national border is in your head.

[124] It's just a belief.

[125] And then you actually arrive at the border and there's police there who will stop you going across it.

[126] Well, right, though.

[127] I would argue that we're kind of talking semantics, logistics, chicken or the egg, because a nation state is a story.

[128] We've been here for 150 ,000 years and we've had United States of America for 300.

[129] That's not a true aspect of planet Earth, the United States of America.

[130] That aspect's a story.

[131] But then the belief in the story results in guys with guns on borders.

[132] But this notion that I am a thing, the thing is an American, that's in our heads.

[133] A U .S. dollar has value.

[134] We have to agree on that.

[135] It doesn't have value.

[136] But the story has been enforced by now other pieces, by the government.

[137] Yeah, yeah.

[138] And also, I think in economics, they call like a coordination type problem.

[139] If I run out onto the street right now and shout to everybody, do you all realize that there's all a fiction?

[140] That social field will literally reject me. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

[141] My belief is irrelevant, actually, in that situation.

[142] So it's fine to say things like it's a sort of shared belief, but in reality, very few people actually experience that.

[143] What you most likely to experience is more like a coercive network, that if you don't buy into it, you will be rejected.

[144] So if I, for example, say I choose to not use money, it's going to be very hard for me. I actually have a friend who did choose to not use money.

[145] You better have a great friendship network if you're going to do that.

[146] Yeah, exactly.

[147] The moneyless man, you wrote a book about this.

[148] It's really, really hard to try to exist in a society if you try to not bind that network.

[149] I totally agree with you.

[150] We could agree that you could also reject your tribe's religion and also suffer and die.

[151] For sure.

[152] Yeah.

[153] Okay.

[154] I do think it's important right out of the gates because I like how you set up your book in the foreword, which is this isn't actually a counter story too.

[155] people as much as it is to systems.

[156] You make the distinctions that I'm going to be critical of a lot of things in this book, but I'm not actually critical of people per se.

[157] I'm critical of systems, which is what we were just kind of circling just now.

[158] Yeah, exactly.

[159] I actually worked in mainstream finance.

[160] I worked in the world of high finance derivatives.

[161] So I've experienced the financial world and I often got very frustrated by how many people who are critical of finance would often imagine that what was going on inside were all these demented type of bank these devious people.

[162] But in reality, what you have is totally normal people in many of these large institutions, large banks who are like anybody else.

[163] They have to find a job in the economy and they've found a job in this particular institution and then they end up having to replicate the logic of that institution.

[164] If you don't, you get fired essentially.

[165] It's kind of an evolutionary process within a company which if you don't actually act in its profit interest, you will eventually either leave yourself or you'll be slowly forced out.

[166] So there's a whole sort of process in these institutions where you're slowly pushed towards certain actions.

[167] This is why I say I'm not really interested in demonizing bankers or saying that a person who works at a big tech company is somehow doing something wrong.

[168] I'm more interested in what do these overall structures do and trying to move past that good people, bad people sort of binary as you often find.

[169] Well, could you give us a quick history?

[170] I think it would be fun for us to go from cash to the arrival of other means, be it checks and credit cards.

[171] What is the historical ladder by which now we can be on our phone and transfer money all over the place and buy things.

[172] It might be a bit more useful just to sketch out a distinction between different players who are able to issue money.

[173] Okay, great.

[174] There's a few different things going on in the history of money.

[175] There's who gets to issue money, and then there's what form will they issue it in.

[176] So, for example, in the history of the U .S., there used to be private commercial banks who were able to issue banknotes.

[177] So they were issuing a private form of money in the form of a banknote.

[178] That then ended.

[179] Nowadays, what they do is they issue a private form of money in digital form.

[180] And the state is the only one able to issue banknotes.

[181] So you can put these in this quadrant of different types of things, where the state is able to issue money and private banks are able to issue money.

[182] But one of the big things in the book I'm trying to actually get across is that there's two major parts of a current monetary system.

[183] The first one which people most think about is the central bank.

[184] The central bank issues cash, which is actually the only form of government money that people can hold in the U .S. So cash is issued by both the central bank and the treasury.

[185] But then there's a secondary monetary system, which is controlled by the commercial banking sector.

[186] This is often very poorly understood in the public domain.

[187] I didn't understand that until you just said.

[188] I guess I thought all digital bank currency was tethered or anchored to the first currency issued by the Treasury.

[189] It is, but it's a different form of money.

[190] And actually the best metaphor to use for this is to just think about casinos.

[191] If I walk into a casino with a wudge of cash and I hand it over at the cashier, they give me casino chips.

[192] Now, those casino chips are a secondary form of money that can be used within a very specific setting.

[193] Let's say Caesar's Palace casino.

[194] But they're backed by money sitting at the cashier.

[195] In the casino, at any one point, there are two forms of money.

[196] There is that state cash and then there's the chips.

[197] This metaphor is slightly dangerous, but it's initially useful because actually all the digital units you might see in your Bank of America accounts or your Wells Fargo account are essentially digital chips issued out by the bank to you and then you are able to move them around using your cards and apps and stuff.

[198] But actually, legally and psychologically, they're tethered back to the state cash system.

[199] So when you go to an ATM, what you're basically doing is, quote, unquote, redeeming your chips.

[200] You're sort of going back and saying, I want to redeem this digital chip back for state.

[201] cash.

[202] And the unit always still remains in U .S. dollars, not unlike a casino.

[203] Linguistically, it's complicated because we use the term money to refer to both of these.

[204] Yeah.

[205] In a casino we don't.

[206] In a casino, we say, oh, it's a chip and there's the cash.

[207] But in the world of large -scale monetary systems, we just say money for both of them and we say dollars for both of them.

[208] And that's confusing, right?

[209] And actually, one of the massive superpowers that banks have is the ability to issue far more of these chips than they have in government money.

[210] This is what sometimes gets referred to as fractional reserve banking.

[211] That's a bit of an old -school way of saying it.

[212] Actually, there's a third part to the monetary system, which are players like PayPal and Venmo and stuff, which are almost like third -tier players.

[213] So they take your bank -issue chips and then issue their own chips.

[214] Chips on chips.

[215] Chips on chips.

[216] So a PayPal unit is essentially a promise for a bank chip, which is a promise for cash.

[217] So you have these chains of money.

[218] Yeah.

[219] And they're all called dollars.

[220] Yeah, it is so confusing.

[221] No one's thinking about this.

[222] No, no one is.

[223] You were just saying how you had a moment in finance in 2008.

[224] And one of my great obsessions is credit default swaps and how few people knew that were buying them what they actually were.

[225] How few people within all these different institutions understood how they would work or how they could be manipulated.

[226] But everyone was forced, of course, to just, to your point, do what the bank said we do or do the investment house said we did.

[227] And then a lot of them were too complex for the people that were selling them and buying them.

[228] One of the ironies, though, is I used to work in derivatives and swap contracts.

[229] There's always this perception of the public that these are massively complicated, exotic instruments.

[230] And so on the one hand, you have this idea of high finance being complicated, this world of fancy jargon and numbers and stuff.

[231] And then on the other world, there's sort of ordinary low finance or sort of everyday retail finance and stuff like, you know, payments apps and stuff like that, which often people think is simple.

[232] For me, it's often the other way around.

[233] Derivative contracts and stuff like that are superficially complicated, but essentially they just bets, you know.

[234] kind of like elaborate contracts where you bet on different stuff.

[235] But actually, the monetary system is far more poorly understood than things like derivatives.

[236] When I was working in derivative contracts, many investment bankers who could calculate the price of some equity swap often wouldn't actually understand the monetary system because they didn't need to.

[237] So I'm actually become a lot more interested in the lower levels of finance, because finance is all about these contracts built upon contracts and the sort of monetary layers are at the bottom.

[238] Okay.

[239] So within that, we've definitely taken a big leap from when I was a kid and my mother had a diners club card, which I guess is chips on chips.

[240] American Express is giving you chips that is backed by the bank chips that's banked by the U .S. dollar.

[241] Or is that wrong?

[242] Well, actually, the card networks are mostly specialized in telling the banks where to move chips.

[243] Okay.

[244] So, for example, Visa says, hey, Brett is trying to pay Dax?

[245] Is he able to do it?

[246] They contact my bank saying, can you?

[247] contact Dax's bank and arrange a transaction.

[248] So essentially, Visa and Mastika, these big systems, essentially work to help the banks coordinate the movement of chips between themselves.

[249] Yeah, but in our comfort level, these are baby steps.

[250] If you had gone back in 1980 and said, you're not going to hold anything tangible or physical, I'm going to give you this electric device that the battery dies on and sometimes gets wiped out.

[251] And you'll have your life savings right there.

[252] That couldn't have happened.

[253] There were baby steps.

[254] I'm asking you to help us understand how we woke up here.

[255] and I think for younger people, they just woke up here.

[256] Sure, yeah.

[257] In your parents' generation, grandparents' generation, there's a very strong distinction made between money outside the bank and money in the bank.

[258] And actually this concept of money outside the bank is cash.

[259] It's a type of physical money you hold.

[260] And a lot of your older generations would have assumed that this is your default idea of money.

[261] And if you go into Google Images and you type money in, the default image is cash.

[262] You don't see bank data centers.

[263] You see cash.

[264] In the public imagination, this is the main way people conceive of money, especially in the older generations.

[265] And the idea was what banks were starting to do over time is to sort of try and target people to get accounts.

[266] In the 1800s, very few people had bank accounts.

[267] Banks would target rich merchants and stuff like that.

[268] Well, also they failed like every six months.

[269] Exactly.

[270] They would offer some very elaborate payment structures, but it was mostly for these people doing trading and for ordinary people, having a bank account wasn't something that was necessary.

[271] It's only in more recent years that more people started getting bank accounts.

[272] And what this idea was that you would take your cash and stick it into the bank and many people still have this imagination of what's happened there as you put your money into the bank and they're storing it for you.

[273] What's actually happening is that they taking that cash out of circulation and issuing you digital chips that they control instead.

[274] And so what's basically happened with younger generations is that they've almost forgotten this distinction between money outside the bank and money in the bank.

[275] They've been born into a situation where, at least for future generations, there's a potential that they'll be born into a situation where they can't even conceive that money exists outside of an account structure in the banking sector.

[276] And that's basically an enclosure.

[277] It's a psychological enclosure, but it's also, you know, political enclosure and economic enclosure and has a huge number of consequences for people.

[278] Well, okay, so now I think we should look at the kind of three players in this move away from cash and into a world of cloud money, which is you have the government, the state, and then you have the banks.

[279] And then now increasingly, and they're conflating, is you have technology.

[280] Do you want to walk us through how that has?

[281] has evolved and why they're all vested in this transition?

[282] Basically, right now we have these two forms of money, which is, you know, your physical form issued by the state and these digital form issued by the banking sector.

[283] The fintech sector is a industry that basically tries to automate finance, more generally.

[284] I mentioned earlier that finance is built upon the monetary system, but you can build new layers upon the monetary system.

[285] Let's put it that way.

[286] Of really hard, easy examples, there was like $68 billion in time.

[287] Loans, but then on the back of that real $68 billion had been built, bundled security sold on the German stock exchange you had, the derivative market, you know, it was a $59 trillion thing built on the back of a $68 billion something.

[288] So basically, the financial sector as a whole is broader than the monetary system, but it's built upon the monetary system.

[289] So fintech is all about automating the broader financial sector in whatever form that takes, whether that's trading stocks or getting.

[290] a loan or applying for car insurance or like basically anything that the existing financial sector already does, the FinTech world just says, how can we automate it?

[291] And one of the reasons why the FinTech world was able to appear very revolutionary, at least initially, was that it started to rise to prominence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, where the banks had a super bad reputation.

[292] And I don't know if you guys remember this in 2008, but actually big tech didn't have a bad reputation at that point.

[293] People still kind of thought, that Google was this angelic type of geeky thing rather than a massively powerful institution.

[294] Yeah, Facebook was just where you were still hooking up with ex -schoolmates.

[295] Yeah.

[296] Exactly.

[297] So actually, anything that had the glow of Silicon Valley had a sort of positive spin, whereas finance had this negative spin.

[298] So a lot of the early FinTech innovators took that Silicon Valley glow and they arrived in the finance world and said, how do we apply basic Silicon Valley models, say using apps and take it into finance?

[299] And if you think about an app, all it really is an interface that steers you to some system.

[300] So they would say, hey, rather than walking to the bank branch, which a bank branch is actually also an interface, I walk there, I touch the banking sector by walking into the branch.

[301] They say, rather than that, we'll just build an app.

[302] And often these fintech companies weren't even banks themselves.

[303] They were just literally builders of these facades.

[304] And they would plug into banks in the background.

[305] Because if you're running a small startup company, you don't actually want to do the stuff that banks have to do, which is dealing with oligarchs and oil exploration deals and all this kind of stuff, which is actually massively difficult political work.

[306] If you're a little startup, you don't have the expertise to do that, and you're not really interested in it either.

[307] What you like doing is building UX systems, like fancy -looking apps.

[308] Banks were way slower than fintech companies in building the Silicon Valley's skin.

[309] So the fintech were basically front -running the banks, building that kind of stuff before the banks could.

[310] But often what would happen is the banks would simply buy up the fintech companies once they had built these interfaces.

[311] Initially, there was a story that this fintech was this massive attack on the banking sector and it was coming to revamp it.

[312] But really, what's actually happened is it's being absorbed into the standard financial system and actually used to often extend that system further and get lots more data in the process.

[313] Why should we be worried?

[314] Because, you know, right out of the gates, if I'm on a website and I want to buy a shirt and it says Apple pays an option, I'm like, Oh my God, I'm so happy.

[315] Boom, boom, click, click.

[316] If it doesn't, have Apple Payne?

[317] I think I've got to enter my two different addresses.

[318] I'm like, I guess I don't even want it that much.

[319] So from my end, from the consumer end, thus far, it just seems incredibly convenient and a time saver.

[320] Bear in mind what I'm doing in Cloud Money, the book, is I'm trying to fill in the dark side of a system.

[321] It's often presented in very positive light.

[322] I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits to people.

[323] I'm not saying there isn't this light side and people might enjoy it and so on.

[324] Yeah, yeah.

[325] I'm saying what happens is that process conceals a lot.

[326] And in particular, convenience is often a code word for corporate domination.

[327] Think about what creates that convenience.

[328] To have those huge structures, you essentially have gigantic centralised systems that you become incredibly dependent upon.

[329] And so this is the sort of shadow side of endless convenience is that you become ever more dependent.

[330] There's a kind of a trade -off between your level of convenience and your level of dependence in general.

[331] If you think back to sort of very early human society, they're not very convenient societies in a sense, right?

[332] you're having to go out and fend for yourself.

[333] I like your compass analogy as a kid.

[334] Yeah, on the other hand, you've got a very, very strong idea as a person in that society of where you are, how you survive, and you look really personally embody that.

[335] You really feel it at a deep level.

[336] You really have agency because you don't require anything else.

[337] Yeah, you also have lower needs in the sense that you don't have all these artificial needs built up from being in a complex system.

[338] If you're in a simple system, you have lower needs.

[339] So there's a kind of an irony we often believe we need more of these things, but it's partly because we're stuck in a complex system that requires that.

[340] Let me give you an example in Los Angeles.

[341] I've spent time in Los Angeles, and if you don't have a car in Los Angeles, you're kind of screwed.

[342] Yeah, yeah, don't be here.

[343] You're going to miss it.

[344] Now, picture, for example, some kind of time traveler who arrives in Los Angeles from 200 AD, and they find themselves facing a teenager who's really, really frustrated that they don't have a car, and they're bitching, they don't have a car.

[345] And this person says, hey, why don't you just walk to your workplace?

[346] and the person says, well, it's 30 kilometers away.

[347] And the time traveler says, why do you live so far from your workplace?

[348] Why don't you just live closer?

[349] The teenager's perceived need for the car is partly because cars have made Los Angeles into a sprawling megalopolis.

[350] Yeah, a lot of chicken and the egg happening.

[351] Yeah, we often believe that we need these things, but actually what's happening is technology altered society in such a way that it necessitates its own existence.

[352] And so this is very similar, things like Apple Pay, you know, actually rewind to the 1800s.

[353] Nobody perceived it to be...

[354] inconvenient that they didn't have Apple pay.

[355] Even 10 years ago.

[356] Oh, last year I was fine.

[357] I was late to discovery.

[358] And actually, future generations are probably going to think that your system here is very redundant, right?

[359] But you don't currently experience that pain or what future generations will imagine.

[360] So actually, there's a kind of futility to this whole convenient story.

[361] What's really happening in the end is that you're becoming ever more dependent on ever larger and more complex structures, and often those require very, very large corporations to operate.

[362] So that's partly what I'm trying to get across the people.

[363] as, okay, fine, you might like convenience, but often this convenience is artificial and also it entails a lot of power.

[364] What do you think about that?

[365] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[366] What's up, guys?

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[381] Okay, so let's get into specifically trying to get rid of cash.

[382] Why would anyone try?

[383] What are the benefits to them and what price do we pay for that transition?

[384] Well, there's a few players who want to get rid of cash.

[385] Go back to what I was saying before.

[386] There's two major players in the monetary system.

[387] There's a state who controls the cash system.

[388] And then there's these private banks, Bank of America and so on, who control the underlying accounts of the digital money system.

[389] And obviously the banking sector benefits massively if you depend upon it for all your transactions.

[390] The Bank of America's CEO openly said this.

[391] He's openly on record.

[392] It's saying we want a cashless society, aka we control the underlying account infrastructure that you will have to use if there's a cashless society.

[393] It's obviously in their interest.

[394] But of course, it's also in the interest of the payments companies like Visa and MasterCard because, as I said, they specialize in intermediating between telling the banks where to move all the digital money.

[395] and they openly attack cash because it's a direct competitor to them.

[396] Visa just entered into a deal with the NFL.

[397] The NFL's agreed to host these cashless Super Bowls because Visa's sponsorship deal kind of requires that.

[398] This goes on to 2025.

[399] When you think about the Super Bowl, it's a massively powerful cultural event that's loved by many, many people.

[400] And they basically said, we're going to use that event to try and, in a sense, shame people who use cash and make them kind of think that it's a redundant, old type of thing.

[401] Obviously, the payments companies are very open about their attack.

[402] on cash.

[403] The FinTech companies too, they depend upon the automation of finance.

[404] Cash jams that.

[405] You can't automate things with an offline form of money.

[406] And finally, big tech.

[407] Think about Amazon.

[408] It's not an Amazon's interest to have a strong cash system because digital money is far more likely to go towards Amazon than cash is.

[409] And then, of course, there's our state players who also want the end of the cash system.

[410] And this is a more complicated one because states tend to have a lot of different institutions within them.

[411] But there have certainly been states that have overtly attacked the cash system.

[412] For example, in India.

[413] Is there a primary incentive that they can't necessarily tax cash at all times?

[414] In the case of states, tax departments will tend to be anti -cash.

[415] So, for example, in the UK, HMRC, which is the tax division of the government, has attacked the cash system because obviously cash is harder to track what you're doing.

[416] So if you want to avoid petty tax evasion, then that's one thing you attack.

[417] Of course, they neglect to mention that the mainstream banking sector, which runs the digital system, facilitates large -scale offshore tax avoidance all the time.

[418] How much access does the Treasury or the U .S. men or any of these state agencies, how much access do they have an oversight over the digital world that the banks control?

[419] Well, they can request access.

[420] You have to subpoena, so, for example, visa, if you want to get information about somebody, the FBI and stuff can.

[421] Obviously, for security agencies and stuff like that, they like to look at digital payments.

[422] And actually, there has been cases of large, scale illegal information gathering, essentially spying.

[423] There's legal ways of getting information, and then there's illegal spying.

[424] That's happened a lot.

[425] And obviously, the more you go digital, the greater that information becomes.

[426] And cash is obviously something that stands in the way of that.

[427] Now, one of the dynamics, though, for enforcement agencies is precisely that cash is actually quite hard to use transnationally.

[428] It's actually quite hard to send a suitcase of cash across borders.

[429] Well, right.

[430] And even if you're traveling with more than 10 ,000 U .S. currency, So you have to declare that.

[431] Exactly.

[432] So even a certain percentage of it is used for criminal transactions, it's still limited in what you can kind of do with it.

[433] There's a certain natural slowness to it.

[434] Whereas when you're looking at transnational digital forms of money, that's way harder to actually track.

[435] The FBI has entire teams that specialize in just trying to track bank transactions for fraud and money laundering.

[436] Well, I remember reading Pablo Escobar.

[437] He had so much money buried.

[438] It started rotting.

[439] And then their new crisis was trying to prevent all this buried money from rotting.

[440] It became such a fucking pain in the air.

[441] They didn't even want it.

[442] Well, yeah.

[443] Think about how easy it is to steal money from your credit card or credit card fraud or crypto.

[444] We had a friend who lost a lot of money that way very quickly in like five minutes.

[445] And you can't do that with cash.

[446] No one to call.

[447] A lot of the people who attack the cash system will often point out things like, you know, oh, it's unsafe.

[448] And it's like, well, have you ever had your account hacked and drained?

[449] I mean, you can lose a lot more through that process than losing your wallet.

[450] I can tell you that.

[451] It's going to take guys a little while to dig a hole in your backyard and find it.

[452] And I'm from South Africa, and, you know, South Africa is a dangerous country.

[453] You can get mugged in South Africa.

[454] This is very true.

[455] At the same time, it's not like criminals in South Africa are going to somehow stop if the cash system goes down or declines.

[456] What they're going to start doing is holding people up gunpoint saying, you've got to give me access to your account.

[457] Yeah.

[458] Or fraudsters prey upon people in the digital realm very, very easily, especially elderly people who often don't understand what's happening there and suddenly, you know, their whole account is drained.

[459] Whereas, you know, with cash, there's limits to these types of attacks.

[460] So I think there's a lot of spin going on from the digital.

[461] payments industry where they say, oh, you know, cash is unsafe and so on.

[462] Well, also COVID.

[463] I think COVID really helped the war on cash.

[464] He has a chapter about that.

[465] Good guess.

[466] Yeah, tell us how COVID was used to accelerate the war on cash.

[467] This war on cash, which is a way I talk about top -down institutions, slowly undermining people's belief in the cash system.

[468] That's been going for a long, long time.

[469] It's not new, but of course, COVID was used to sort of supercharge it, to really accelerate a lot of the rhetoric around it.

[470] All these fintech companies started saying, oh, you know, it's unhygienic.

[471] and this is directly rejected by health organizations.

[472] I'm currently living in Berlin here in Germany.

[473] There's a very well -respected Health Institute in Germany called the Robert Koch Institute who just openly rejected this.

[474] They said there's no evidence that this is actually a significant risk factor.

[475] And the Bank of England as well came out with the studies saying, actually it's far more risky to touch those automated checkout screens and the terminals, card terminals and trolleys and things like that have far higher risk factors.

[476] So this whole idea that cash was somehow this COVID risk factor was massively overblown.

[477] But the problem was that lots of big players went straight ahead and used it to push forward a process that they were already trying to do.

[478] A lot of these big retailers were saying, you know, it's actually easier for us to work with Visa and MasterCard than to have a deal with cash.

[479] I'm not saying it was a conscious process, but certainly it was already happening.

[480] It was convenient for them.

[481] A very, very good example of this is that deal with that Visa had with the NFL.

[482] The first cashless Super Bowl was in 2020 and it came out during the pandemic and it was sort of pitched as somehow being a pandemic response.

[483] But Visa signed that deal in 2019, all right?

[484] Before the pandemic, and the NFL spokesperson has openly said, we were planning to do it even before.

[485] How does crypto fit into this?

[486] Well, a lot of the early development of the components that would come together to make cryptocurrency comes from the 90s, from the cypherpunk movements.

[487] The cypherpunk movements were political activist movements who basically said, look, in the future, we're increasingly moving towards a digital realm.

[488] And that digital realm is very, very dangerous in terms of surveillance by both states and corporations and can centralize power.

[489] And if we are going to that future, we really need to find some kind of way to have a digital form of anonymous money, like a digital cash.

[490] So a lot of the early pioneers of the South Punk movement, like David Chalm, for example, is one of the players, they were building based on this idea that the cashless society posed a very severe threat to civil liberties.

[491] And that eventually culminated in 2008 in the Bitcoin White Paper, which took a bunch of components that had already been designed by other sort of cyphabunk movements and put them together into a sort of recipe, as it were, and came out with Bitcoin.

[492] So Bitcoin does have a heritage that can be traced back to fears around cashless society and has since then been pitched as if it were a type of digital cash.

[493] And actually the title of the original Bitcoin white paper, which is the design of it.

[494] called it a peer -to -peer digital cash system.

[495] In the imagination of the cryptocurrency movements, a lot of people imagine that they've tried to create this digital cash that can create an anonymous form of money in the age of the internet that doesn't depend on corporations, all states.

[496] Really quick, because we're talking about punks.

[497] What are the big fears when it's all centralized?

[498] What are the loss of civil liberties or potential losses?

[499] The major concerns can be broken down into a few categories.

[500] The first one is surveillance.

[501] Obviously, when all your transactions are going through the banking system, or through your Venmo apps.

[502] They're all centralized systems in a certain sense.

[503] Huge amounts of data builds up on you.

[504] So there's concerns about surveillance.

[505] Both corporate surveillance, so the use of your data to manipulate you for commercial reasons, but then also state surveillance, punishing political opponents or watching what they're doing.

[506] Does that happen, though, or is that just a fear?

[507] It hasn't ever happened on any large scale, partly because we don't actually live in a cashless society.

[508] In a hypothetical future cashless society, this would become a much bigger problem.

[509] But clearly, already enough people are cashless.

[510] that we could be tracked and surveilled and state agencies could be doing this already.

[511] Absolutely.

[512] Bear in mind, payments data is just another type of data to add on to an already big data pool.

[513] Payments data is very, very sensitive because it shows you how a person actually acts in the world.

[514] This phrase, you know, put your money where your mouth is.

[515] It says if you're actually buying or you're actually acting in the world through money, this really shows you what your priorities are.

[516] So this is a very powerful form of data if you can get hold of it.

[517] Compared to Google searches or something like that, which sort of maybe show you aspirations.

[518] It reminds me in Anthro, the birth of garbology, which is they were taking these ethnographies in these towns asking people what they fed their children and they gave them the whole list.

[519] On Monday, I made this on Tuesday, blah, blah, blah.

[520] And then they went to the city trash dump and they found, well, that wouldn't be possible because look at all these boxes of macaroni and cheese.

[521] Look at all these frozen pizzas.

[522] Yeah, what people think they did and or wanted you to think they did versus their garbage says exactly what they did.

[523] That's a data goldmine, payments data.

[524] But of course, bear in mind, all cash transactions are essentially invisible to data black hole.

[525] What's actually a greater political concern or as greater political concern is censorship.

[526] So once you have people dependent upon a digital payment system, you can actually stop them doing certain things.

[527] How would that work?

[528] With cash, for example, I can't stop you using cash at a shop.

[529] But if I control a central institution that can watch your payments and I see you're trying to buy, for example, a political magazine, I can say, no, Dax is not allowed to do that.

[530] that.

[531] Reject the transaction.

[532] We already see examples of this in places like Australia where welfare recipients have been given this thing called the cashless welfare card, which prevents them doing certain things like buying alcohol, cigarettes, non -approved goods at non -approved stores.

[533] It also stops them taking out cash.

[534] It's a very paternalistic system.

[535] People can argue for it or whatever, but basically the principle is illustrated there.

[536] Digital payments allow you to fine -tune what you will authorize and not authorize.

[537] With kids, like a pocket money app, and you can monitor what they're buying and put limits on what they can buy.

[538] Imagine that at a state level where you can do that for all people.

[539] Of course, this is not necessarily technologically possible at a large scale yet, albeit in places like China, this is already being piloted in the social credit system.

[540] Well, they have the ability to control what's in the market.

[541] I'll also just add that this digital form you just explained in Australia is no different than the food stamp system that's been around.

[542] here for 60 years, which is you can't use them to buy certain items when you use your physical food stamp and you step up to the register.

[543] Yeah, absolutely.

[544] There's a scholar called Natalie Marenkel who actually has written about how welfare recipients are often the first to be on the receiving end of paternalistic types of payments control.

[545] I guess the point is that there are different ways of doing payments control, but digital systems just make it far, far easier.

[546] It's interesting, though, because if you label it as paternalistic, sure, that whole system was designed to keep people fed and nourished not to get people drunk.

[547] So if you call that paternalistic, now you're adding a pejorative to, I just got to push back on that.

[548] That's why I said there's a debate to be had.

[549] I mean, in Australia right now, they are trying to scrap that system.

[550] Precisely because it doesn't actually work.

[551] People find ways around it.

[552] Well, right, they just buy a bunch of stakes and they trade it for the booze their buddy bought with cash.

[553] I'm not saying there aren't legitimate potential arguments you could make for why this is the case.

[554] I'm flagging that a lot of the people that are concerned about this.

[555] I don't want to be surveilled.

[556] What are you talking about?

[557] You're already surveilled.

[558] But it's looking forward if before Facebook started, they were like, well, actually, it could lead to this and it could lead to this.

[559] It might have been helpful for us to have thought about some of that.

[560] Now we're deep in it.

[561] We don't know how to fix it.

[562] It's just so Orwellian, and there's so many Americans storming the Capitol with some notion of privacy that they're holding onto that they have not had in 30 years.

[563] The concerns around censorship and surveillance are very heavily skewed often towards the libertarian.

[564] right.

[565] Yes.

[566] The whole idea that don't tread on me and so on, you know, which is a legitimate impulse that a person might have.

[567] It's not necessarily a coherent political movement.

[568] A hard example in this country is Second Amendment.

[569] The premise of the Second Amendment is we need to arm ourselves so we can fight back against a tyrannical government.

[570] Great principle.

[571] I'm in.

[572] We don't have drones or nuclear weapons.

[573] So either the citizens have to have drones and nuclear weapons to prevent themselves from being controlled by a tyrannical government.

[574] You can't live in 300 years and pretend the principal's still the same.

[575] The gun culture in the US, this fantasy that you will be able to fight against the government.

[576] But actually, there are legitimate examples of how the cash system has actually allowed forms of political resistance to continue in a different kind of way.

[577] So, for example, if you think about the legal cannabis industry in California, the cannabis industry for a very, very long time depended on the cash economy.

[578] The cash economy gives a lot of areas in society.

[579] they're not considered legal, but people consider them gray areas that are kind of fine.

[580] It allows those types of activities to survive.

[581] More extreme examples include prohibition in the U .S., in South Africa, homosexuality, interracial mixing, all these types of things where activities that are considered illegal at one point, but have now since become legal.

[582] And actually, what's great about the cash system, the one side of it, is that, well, fine, it might enable these types of shadow activities to occur, but it also enables positive social change.

[583] It gives breathing room.

[584] In an imagined future cashless society, you can't take it for granted that you would have that ability to transact in underground economies and not be seen.

[585] What you sort of politically think about that as a debate, but I would argue that you need to have a form of payment that gives you some flexibility in a society in case.

[586] So that was the promise of crypto, but where are we at currently?

[587] So that was the exact promises.

[588] Okay, in the absence of cash, when we want to have an industry that the federal government doesn't regulate and or a state government, could decide.

[589] So crypto had that promise.

[590] Yeah, the best way to understand the crypto ecosystem is, it's a very, very sophisticated technological system, but a very crude monetary system.

[591] How so?

[592] So it's essentially a very, very crude type of token implemented on a very sophisticated technological base.

[593] What makes it crude?

[594] I get roasted for this kind of stuff all the time because crypto Twitter is a very enthusiastic community, should I say.

[595] There's no casual players.

[596] It's a religion.

[597] It's totally a religion.

[598] I was involved in the early Bitcoin community, actually, in London.

[599] I know when I was reading that you had bought pizza with it and shit, all I could think of is the greedy pygamy was like, God damn, I bet that pizza right now is worth $26 ,000.

[600] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[601] I actually transacted quite a few things with Bitcoin.

[602] In the early days of Bitcoin, there wasn't the speculative mania.

[603] Bear in mind, when it first came out, there were just these sort of units that nobody quite knew what they were.

[604] It's only later that they developed this whole mythology that is now rampant, and which I always get lectured by, by sort of crypto newbies, which always grates me. They're in a multi -level marketing machine, and they just had their orientation, and they're telling you about it.

[605] It's like, I know all that.

[606] I got you, man. Yeah, exactly.

[607] I remember there's this movement to buy Iraqi Dinar, and you'd meet people, and they'd tell you all the reasons of Rocky Dinar.

[608] And it's like, I know, I heard it 80 times.

[609] It's very frustrating because they think you've never been exposed to Bitcoin rather than you've gone through the high.

[610] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[611] So that phase.

[612] Pink cloud phase.

[613] Some people say frozen in that phase for quite a long time because they make lots of money off it.

[614] Sure.

[615] If you zoom out and you just look at what the Bitcoin system is, okay, at a high level, what it's supposed to be is a system to move tokens around a network of strangers, people who don't know each other, without there being a central party involved.

[616] But a token system is not a monetary system.

[617] A token system is a token system.

[618] A token could be a very useless thing.

[619] For example, imagine if I just got a piece of card and punched a bunch of circular discs out of a piece of card and handed them out.

[620] I mean, that's a token system.

[621] And I might have a very, very sophisticated way of moving them around, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to translate into a monetary system.

[622] So in the early days of Bitcoin, what you had was a very generic token system.

[623] You could move them around, and that was the real innovation.

[624] You could move them around without a central party.

[625] But people started to imagine, well, because there are tokens, because they've got numbers, they must be kind of money, I guess.

[626] They superficially look like money.

[627] They have monetary imagery branded over them.

[628] They have the ability to move them and you see numbers changing, which looks a little bit like a bank account.

[629] Originally, they were just Pokemon cards, really.

[630] They had less character than that.

[631] Yeah, that's true.

[632] I'm just saying, like, you can trade Pokemon for a pizza, maybe.

[633] Imagine a Pokemon card that has no picture on it at all.

[634] No IP.

[635] Like a blank card.

[636] I mean, that's more like what they actually were.

[637] This is why the community had to create all this mythology around there precisely because what is the thing.

[638] When you study it at a technical level, what it is, it's just numbers.

[639] So you essentially exert energy and you write out numbers.

[640] The genesis block of Bitcoin, basically Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote out the number 50 and said, there's 50 tokens.

[641] And then you can split them up and you can move them around.

[642] Okay, I divided the 50 by 2 and now it's 25 there and 25 there.

[643] It's a system for moving numbers between accounts.

[644] But to create the mythology that those numbers are actually a kind of hard commodity, takes a huge cultural effort.

[645] And that's what the Bitcoin marketing community specializes in doing.

[646] they create all this idea of what you're trading is digital gold.

[647] But at a technical level, they're literally just numbers written out.

[648] Again, talk about story.

[649] They had to create story and get people to buy in.

[650] And actually, one of the things that Bitcoin promoters will try to claim when you say this, they'll say, oh, yeah, but normal money is also just numbers.

[651] I would argue they're different.

[652] Very, very different.

[653] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[654] The US dollar is tethered to GDP.

[655] the FDIC, if someone steals your money, there's an agency that will investigate it, there's an entire system and infrastructure that has value that you can't save for that other thing.

[656] But there's actually something deeper than that as well.

[657] A Bitcoin token, if you look at how it's created, a participant in the system essentially writes it out after they've managed to perform a certain amount of work.

[658] I often call the miners in the system, the people who sort of maintain the system as techno clerks.

[659] One of the rewards they get to do if they're successful in their job the techno clerk is they get to write out new tokens for themselves into existence.

[660] They get to write 25 or 12 .5 or whatever the current reward is into their own account, essentially.

[661] Now, that's very, very different to what happens in a bank.

[662] When a bank issues money, so think about the casino chip metaphor that I used earlier, that's a liability to a bank.

[663] A chip is a liability to a casino.

[664] It's something they actually owe.

[665] It's not something they own.

[666] You own it.

[667] They owe you something.

[668] Similar with all those digital money that banks use.

[669] use.

[670] All those numbers are liabilities of the banking sector.

[671] When a bank creates money, it's not just writing out numbers for itself.

[672] It's writing out liabilities that are your assets.

[673] That's a very, very strong legal difference and technical difference.

[674] And it takes quite a long time to understand why that's important.

[675] Well, one could get called in and one can't.

[676] Exactly.

[677] But they superficially look the same.

[678] Yeah.

[679] They look like numbers.

[680] One of the sort of ways I sometimes use to describe this is the difference between numbers as nouns and numbers as adjectives.

[681] So if I say, there is one dog behind you in that picture.

[682] I am referring to that number is an adjective.

[683] I'm describing a dog with that number.

[684] If I say there's three dogs, three is just used to describe something else.

[685] Whereas if I say there is three, that's a noun.

[686] That's a mathematical object.

[687] Right, right, right.

[688] And actually, the Bitcoin system is a system of mathematical nouns.

[689] You just write out literal numbers that don't refer to anything, but that take a huge amount of energy to produce.

[690] So actually, conceptually, it's a little bit like hiking up Mount Everest, and then once you get to the top, carving out the number of 50 and a piece of rock.

[691] It's a noun, it's just a number, but you say, well, I exerted huge amounts of energy doing it.

[692] Therefore, it's more than a number somehow.

[693] But actually, if you show that number to somebody, they say, well, it's just 50, right?

[694] Yeah.

[695] It takes a huge cultural effort to convince somebody that the amount of energy that went into producing the number is relevant for any particular purpose.

[696] But what is the energy?

[697] Computing power.

[698] I know, but...

[699] And human toil.

[700] What are they doing on this computer?

[701] I don't understand.

[702] Trying to understand Bitcoin, one of the metaphors I use, it's a little bit like trying to do a Rubik's Cube, where you have all these different components and you're trying to sort of see how they interact.

[703] And it's only once you've done it for quite a while that you suddenly see the structure.

[704] Yeah.

[705] Before that, you don't quite know how it relates.

[706] One of the components is that in order for these techno clerks who run the system to update the system, they first have to essentially run through a maze.

[707] And the reason for this is that there's a reward built into the system that says, if you are able to update the system, you can give yourself these new tokens.

[708] But that reward creates an incentive for people to constantly try to update the system to get more tokens.

[709] If that was allowed to happen, you would have massive inflation in the system.

[710] So you need to deliberately slow people down to stop them.

[711] You have to make it harder and harder to update the system.

[712] You have to raise interest rates.

[713] It's metaphorically.

[714] Yeah, so you basically have to introduce these arbitrary obstacles to the system to create the psychological structure that makes it worth your while to try and find the tokens.

[715] This is why people imagine themselves to be mining the tokens.

[716] Really what's happening is that you're running through this algorithmic maze, and once you get through, you're able to write out a number and call it new tokens.

[717] Monica, because the energy involved is so expensive, you see miners moving to cities with super cheap electricity.

[718] There's a whole physical aspect.

[719] China's hoping to host a lot of that with that damn they have.

[720] They have too much energy.

[721] Right now what the crypto industry is trying to do in order to resolve the massive public relations crisis, it has, is that it has to try and make these arguments that somehow this energy usage is good for balancing the grid or inspiring us to move towards renewable energy.

[722] So there's this whole cadre of essentially Bitcoin theologians right now who specialize in building these sort of sophisticated arguments for why the system is actually really good.

[723] And I call them theologians because actually at core, it's a faith -based system.

[724] And much like ancient theologians could develop very sophisticated theories around a faith -based core, Bitcoin theologians are very similar.

[725] They can give you very technical, physics -based answers for why this is going to do X, Y, and Z. But in the end, what you're saying is, we require a huge amount of cultural effort to turn these numbers into an imagined commodity.

[726] And to do that, we have to use all this energy and we better find a way to convince the public that's fine.

[727] Well, my other thought I've had as I've watched all these ones have meteoric rises and crashes is how it also differs from the US dollar is there's no competition in the US dollar.

[728] There's not a million different mince trying to get a more appealing currency to be embraced.

[729] So the mere fact that you have endless competition for the next this coin is such a destabilizing force.

[730] Yeah, there's different ways to debate the Bitcoin issue.

[731] You can imagine that it actually is a currency competing with the dollar.

[732] That's what the Bitcoin industry specializes in trying to create that story.

[733] But really, that's a red herring.

[734] What it is is a type of collectible system.

[735] It's a sort of a limited edition digital object that you can trade.

[736] It's an NFT, right, which came out of all that.

[737] But a very sort of generic blank style of token, which it's only marketing possibility is to pretend that it's money, to sort of use monetary imagery, because it doesn't actually have a Pokemon card to say, this is a unique collectible.

[738] It has to trade on something else.

[739] One of the metaphors I sometimes use, actually, with this, is to think about WWF wrestling.

[740] You know, you have all the different types of wrestlers who come in, and each one has a backstory.

[741] Yeah, yeah.

[742] Each one has this particular thing about why they're, you know, the Undertaker or whatever.

[743] But imagine there was a WWF wrestler whose particular backstory was that they hate the WWF, and they hear to bring it down.

[744] And then they get into the ring and they fight like The Undertaker or some other player.

[745] Bitcoin's quite like this.

[746] It has this whole story that it's fighting the US dollar.

[747] But what it actually is, it's an object within the US dollar market, the ring, as it were, fighting things like GameStop shares or Rare Art or houses, other things you can buy with your savings.

[748] So when somebody buys Bitcoin, they're not buying GameStop shares.

[749] So really what it's competing against is other dollar denominated assets, but its only marketing story is that it's competing against the dollar.

[750] Because GameStop shares don't have to do that.

[751] They can say we're an actual company.

[752] They don't need that marketing story.

[753] Yeah, they're just another product that's competing against other products.

[754] This is actually quite interesting because it's essentially trading on this monetary imagery to become this object with a price, but that actually does have certain benefits in the end.

[755] You can actually use that for exchange, but it's dependent upon first getting a price in the dollar market.

[756] Okay.

[757] How does the Metaverse fit into all this?

[758] Well, I mean, the Metaverse is going to be...

[759] I actually read Snow Crash many years ago, which is the book that the concept of the Metaverse comes from.

[760] Oh, I didn't know that.

[761] What's the book?

[762] Snow Crash.

[763] It's by Neil Stevenson.

[764] It's a book where essentially there's this virtual reality version of the Internet, and that's the Metaverse.

[765] And it's a dystopian book, so it's not supposed to be something that's considered positive.

[766] But in the worldview, big tech, sci -fi often precedes it.

[767] So as far as I understand, I mean, I haven't delved super deeply into Facebook's metaverse plans.

[768] But as far as I understand, to create this virtual realm, you need these virtual assets that can be traded within it.

[769] Yeah.

[770] And the world of NFTs becomes one way to do that.

[771] You can create these digital objects that can be moved around within this virtual world.

[772] And obviously, you won't be able to bring the US dollar into that.

[773] You'd have to trade for their chips, ultimately.

[774] You can't walk in, right?

[775] Bear in mind that Facebook was behind the Libra project, which they claimed was their own currency in 2019.

[776] And really what that was, going back to my earlier example of players like PayPal who issue these third -tier chips on top of the banking sector, it was actually very similar to that.

[777] Libra was Facebook just taking a bunch of currencies in the background that would be held in bank accounts and then issuing a new digital unit that would just be rebranded.

[778] So imagine you had a PayPal account with five different currencies.

[779] currencies in it.

[780] And then he just squashed it together into a single unit.

[781] That was the Libro unit.

[782] They claimed that that was going to be their currency.

[783] But really, in the background, it's a bunch of different state currencies.

[784] It's not really in Facebook's interest to be untethered from the U .S. dollar.

[785] It makes all its profits in U .S. dollars.

[786] So it might create a surface level appearance that somehow it's attaching, but that's certainly not going to happen.

[787] And how does this play out geopolitically?

[788] The payment systems, how are they used to protect power?

[789] It's a very interesting time for your book to come out because we're looking at Russia and we're looking at what had previously been a failed approach, which is sanctions.

[790] I think we all thought we would be so interconnected that war would be rendered obsolete, but that hasn't proven to be the case.

[791] But it does appear that perhaps right now this may be the first example that it is just way too interconnected.

[792] Yeah, absolutely.

[793] Payment systems have been used.

[794] used for a long time as tools of geopolitical influence.

[795] Russia's not the first country to be subject to different types of sanctions.

[796] The swift system, which is the big international system via which banks in different countries coordinate to move these chips around internationally, if you get cut out of that system, you face being choked out of the global economy, which then forces you to try and develop new networks or new payments networks.

[797] There is a huge geopolitical arms race in a sense between states to gain prominent.

[798] within the global currency system for various reasons, but partly because there's geopolitical power.

[799] This is one of the reasons why China developed its own credit card systems, union pay.

[800] They don't want to be dependent upon Visa and MasterCard, which are American corporations.

[801] If all of China's citizens are suddenly now subject to the potential whims of Visa and MasterCard, that's a danger for China.

[802] So they want to have their own network.

[803] This has been a very, very big part of international politics.

[804] And am I right that you can't use Amex in Russia now, right?

[805] I don't know the specifics in Russia.

[806] So certainly, Visa and Mastercard stopped transactions cross -border.

[807] I think internal you can maybe still use them.

[808] For example, I had a Russian friend who got essentially stranded in South Africa because they cut off her card.

[809] It was a visa card and she couldn't use it internationally.

[810] Yeah.

[811] It was interesting.

[812] She was sort of marking me for being pro -cash.

[813] I was saying, ah, you know, that's ridiculous.

[814] And then she got totally stranded with her car.

[815] She couldn't use it.

[816] She had to actually ask strangers for money to try and get from the airport to a hostel.

[817] Wow.

[818] So there was a pretty visceral example of what can happen to you if you suddenly caught on the wrong side of geopolitical decision.

[819] And bear on my, many Russian citizens are not Putin allies.

[820] They can often be shafted by a system.

[821] They're not the actual targets of the sanctions.

[822] Right, they're collateral damage.

[823] And in that situation, for example, the cash system does help an elderly Russian pensioner who otherwise wouldn't be able to transect.

[824] This is why historically cash is used of people on the sort of lower rungs of society.

[825] And this is partly why they shielded from these types of international payments attacks.

[826] Yeah.

[827] My last thought is I live in somewhat of great fear of a very small percentage of my savings exists in cash or gold or something.

[828] And I think, yeah, man, it is all on a mainframe.

[829] Everything I've worked for, what happens if there's some crazy collapse in California?

[830] I hope the mainframe's talking with somewhere else that's not going to be affected by the earthquake.

[831] I hope when the hackers come, there's some other backup.

[832] It's a little bit vulnerable, right?

[833] This whole electronic system.

[834] Sure.

[835] And one of the main arguments for cash isn't actually really political.

[836] It's actually about resilience of systems.

[837] Earlier we're discussing about fears around big brother and so on.

[838] But actually a lot of the cash debate is very practical.

[839] If you want a resilient economy, you need a multi -faceted payment system, much like with transport.

[840] This is why I often call cash the bicycle of payments.

[841] If you have a big city, for example, Los Angeles, you don't want the auto industry dominating the entire city.

[842] You want alternative forms of transport.

[843] You want bicycles you want trams and so on to moderate it out when one goes down the others are there and cash actually has that role and that's a very very important role i mean this is one of the reasons why the federal reserve records massive increases in cash demand from ATMs when hurricanes are approaching people don't want to be holding digital money when electricity goes down they know you want offline money it's much better it's much more effective a very good way to think about this convenience versus resilience is if you live in a tall building you might say it's very convenient to use the elevator to get to the top.

[844] But that doesn't mean you want the emergency stairs removed from the building.

[845] Ooh, I like that.

[846] That's a great analogy.

[847] You know, you've got to make sure you maintain that alternative system.

[848] Otherwise, you're in serious trouble when that thing breaks down.

[849] How do we play a role in keeping it around?

[850] This is always a perennial debate in political circles, who should be acting on this?

[851] Because often people don't realize what's going on.

[852] These sort of people being sucked into these systems without realizing the dangers.

[853] So at some level, there has to be a top -down push from political institutions.

[854] Central banks should be saying we need to protect these systems.

[855] You know, the U .S. cash usage remains actually quite high, but places like London and various European countries, it's completely collapsed.

[856] Oh, yeah.

[857] We noticed that when we were in London.

[858] We were like, oh, my God, we can tap our credit card everywhere.

[859] And we would hand a cabby, a cash tip, and you could tell they were like, oh.

[860] Yeah, you didn't want it.

[861] What was going on here?

[862] I used to live in London, and I remember London was far cash heavier before.

[863] And I remember when Visa came out with a campaign called Cash Free and Proud.

[864] And in the background, what they said about this campaign was that they wanted to make cash seem peculiar in London by 2020.

[865] Oh, God.

[866] They totally nailed it because now it does seem peculiar.

[867] And of course, it's a huge class divide in this.

[868] The first places that quote -unquote, go -cashless are always these bougie establishments.

[869] And then it slowly filters through society and people who want to use cash basically start to get pushed out.

[870] Once central banks let that process get too far, it really is a danger to them.

[871] So they actually have to act to counteract that system.

[872] a citizen level, there should be a lot more campaigning around maintaining payments choice.

[873] So I'm very, very interested in getting involved in any countries with people who are trying to form citizen campaigns that say we need to protect the right to use cash on these inclusion grounds and on these resilience grounds.

[874] Yeah.

[875] Am I naive to think the fact that our US dollar says, you know, it has to be accepted as legal tender.

[876] I'm sometimes places where I've seen they've gone cashless and I'm like, isn't that against a lot?

[877] Like, don't you have to receive?

[878] Legal tender laws don't say that you have to accept cash.

[879] Legal tender laws are to prevent creditors stopping debtors getting out of debt.

[880] Oh, okay.

[881] So the legal tender basically says if you're in debt, this is guaranteed to extinguish your debt.

[882] Okay, not buy you a Snickers bar.

[883] So, for example, if you go into a restaurant, this would actually be an interesting legal case to test.

[884] If you go into a restaurant and you eat the meal first...

[885] Ah, that's a debt.

[886] You're technically in debt.

[887] If they then say we are not going to accept with cash, they are potentially in breach of legal tender laws.

[888] But if you arrive and they say up front, we don't accept cash, then they've already notified you.

[889] They can do that.

[890] But it's when you're in debt that legal tender laws come into play.

[891] Oh, I hope that finds its way on to a more perfect episode.

[892] Let's make you the guinea pig.

[893] Yeah, let's make you the plaintiff in this case.

[894] I'm happy to.

[895] When I was in Sweden, which is a super low cash society, they refused cash at the bar for me when I try to buy.

[896] So I went up to my hotel room and I just drank from the minibar, which technically put me in their debt.

[897] And then I went down the next morning and I said, I owe you this money and here's the cash for it.

[898] And they said, we don't take it.

[899] And I'm like, well, what are you going to do?

[900] And they just gave it to me for free.

[901] Wow.

[902] So another great hack.

[903] You might be able to do everything for free.

[904] You tried to pay.

[905] Hey, I tried.

[906] Yeah, I'm trying to escape the debt.

[907] What if you just fill your grocery cart and then you just eat all the groceries in line?

[908] Now you're in debt.

[909] Oh, my God.

[910] There's so many ways we can be in debt.

[911] Talk about the punk rock approach to this.

[912] Seriously.

[913] So interesting.

[914] Really incredibly interesting, Brett.

[915] This is fascinating.

[916] I hope people will check out cloud money, cash, cards, crypto, and the war for our wallets out July 5th.

[917] Thanks so much for giving us your time.

[918] I really appreciate it.

[919] It was a lot of fun.

[920] Thanks so much.

[921] All right.

[922] Take care, brother.

[923] Cheers.

[924] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[925] Are those new shoes?

[926] Well, they're new and old.

[927] Okay.

[928] They're a French company that you've seen me in them for years now.

[929] I usually have blue or gray ones.

[930] I famously was wearing them when I had to set the electric bicycle down at 25 and burned a hole in the side.

[931] But I've never gotten the black ones.

[932] And I'm wearing a whole new style this summer.

[933] I think you've already noticed probably.

[934] Linen, French.

[935] Linen and pants, like not jeans.

[936] kind of pants that are a little high on the ankle and a lot of room to move around right but also nice is it bother you that i'm doing both of these things because i don't want to bother you no no no i can do both but it bothers you it's fine okay i just wanted to see if you're okay with it yeah i'm fine with it are you trying to find the dip yeah i'm trying to get lincoln on the horn so i can ever go into my backpack upstairs and thought you were checking if it was okay that you wore nice pants and loafers like that or if it bothered her oh Oh, no. Well, he should check with me about that because I'm fashion.

[937] But I already know the answer to that, which is you tend to like when I go prepier.

[938] No, I like all your looks.

[939] Oh, thank you.

[940] I like all your looks.

[941] I like a high and low, which is what you're doing right now.

[942] You have pans and simple shoe.

[943] Yeah, very simple shoe.

[944] And then, but then you're wearing a tank top.

[945] Yeah, a handmade tank top at that.

[946] Hank Williams.

[947] I'm doing that too because I'm wearing tennis shoes.

[948] Okay.

[949] Is that what you're mixed?

[950] messages because you look very you look like you just walked off the cover of you won't like this j crew but you know that's my only reference point for like people looking stylish thank you hold on one second yeah well you ask lincoln to grab my um cana dip out of my small pot or my backpack and run it out to the attic yeah i want her to do it because she's a kid thank you it might be in the big pouch it's in my backpack somewhere's thanks love okay that was easy.

[951] The kids are getting to the age where I can make them do shit for me. Responsibility.

[952] I love it.

[953] Yeah, it's nice.

[954] It's hard for me, you know, that's a pattern of mine.

[955] I don't like asking for help, period.

[956] I'm experimenting a lot with my kids, which I'm making them do all kinds of dumb stuff for me. And they seem to be fine with it, which is great.

[957] They don't have the chip on their shoulder that I had as a kid.

[958] Which makes me think, okay, good, they're kind of raised in a nicer spot.

[959] Of course.

[960] Yeah, like they're happy to help me out, because I guess they're just feeling like I help them out a lot.

[961] Most people are happy to help you out.

[962] That's not really the issue.

[963] It's that you won't accept the help.

[964] Okay.

[965] I accept that diagnosis of the situation.

[966] Okay.

[967] This just reminded me because I have a tiny bump on my tongue.

[968] Too many toothies?

[969] Toothies?

[970] Probably.

[971] Yeah.

[972] But no, you said something to me the other day.

[973] You, like, slipped it under the radar.

[974] Oh.

[975] An egg?

[976] An insult.

[977] Yeah.

[978] Okay.

[979] You said I have gross toothpaste.

[980] Oh, yeah.

[981] Mm -hmm.

[982] Well, that's not even, that's an objective fact.

[983] No, it's not, yes.

[984] What are you sorry about?

[985] It smells like a bird's in here.

[986] It, no, it smells like a salad in here.

[987] Oh, no, do you think her guest is going to think it smells like farts?

[988] I had, um, get the door open.

[989] To open the gate.

[990] Checking with a person.

[991] Nicole and one, we're doing a video so I couldn't go through.

[992] Oh.

[993] So it's a girl on the ground.

[994] You like an army person.

[995] Oh, my gosh.

[996] Oh, my God.

[997] Okay, one other thing while you're here because you're, now you're here.

[998] Will you get me a water out of the bottom of there, the liquid death?

[999] It's six feet.

[1000] Oh, my God.

[1001] Well, but I'm in the middle of recording.

[1002] I'm all wired in here.

[1003] But that's a good objection.

[1004] You're right.

[1005] Yeah, it's okay for you to be upset about that.

[1006] Yeah, we were very similar distance.

[1007] Thank you, my love.

[1008] Hey, I appreciate it.

[1009] Thank you.

[1010] You ever think pretty or girl in your life?

[1011] No, never.

[1012] Okay.

[1013] Okay.

[1014] Your toothpaste.

[1015] Your sucks.

[1016] Let's talk.

[1017] Well, when you said that, I got shook.

[1018] You did?

[1019] You took a real personal?

[1020] Yeah, because then I was like.

[1021] Ask Rob what his opinion of the brand of toothpaste you use is because he's an objective outsider.

[1022] I'll Google it.

[1023] What is it?

[1024] It's Arm and Hammer paroxicare.

[1025] You don't need to Google it.

[1026] No, that's not fit.

[1027] Then that's not fair because he hasn't tasted or smelled it.

[1028] Halo effect.

[1029] Paroxone.

[1030] I was leading the witness and I apologize.

[1031] It's baking soda.

[1032] M -Proxite tooth paste.

[1033] It looks like a grandparent's toothpaste.

[1034] Okay, so just aesthetically.

[1035] You made it way worse for you.

[1036] How come?

[1037] Because now I feel piled up on and I already told you I was sensitive about it.

[1038] I'm sorry.

[1039] I thought it was a joke.

[1040] I didn't think you were really sensitive by your toothpaste.

[1041] Well, I did get scared because I was like maybe my breath smells.

[1042] God, no. Everything's working perfectly.

[1043] Your teeth are fucking shockingly white.

[1044] I even told you, I think you heard me, just last week, you have the latitude to drink a lot of Ingy Brecky tea because it stained your teeth, but you are in such a great position with the whiteness, the cleanliness, the straightness.

[1045] I think what you said was since my skin's brown, I could get away with my teeth getting brown.

[1046] That's not.

[1047] No, that's what you said.

[1048] Don't you dare let people think that I said that.

[1049] You said that it'll be turned brown like my skin.

[1050] I said, you should be so lucky.

[1051] I complimented your skin.

[1052] Oh, okay.

[1053] Okay, okay.

[1054] And then I said, don't worry about it.

[1055] You can just use some of that crummy toothpaste right when you're done.

[1056] because I do think it's effective as fuck.

[1057] I think that's a great toothpaste.

[1058] It's an incredible toothpaste.

[1059] And so back to the bump on my tongue.

[1060] So I stopped using it because that's how fucking scared I am.

[1061] Why?

[1062] Because you thought your breast tank?

[1063] No, because I guess I care about your opinion.

[1064] Oh, well, I'm flattered.

[1065] But also, this is kind of bumping up against peer pressure.

[1066] I know.

[1067] I stopped using it.

[1068] I started, I have crest or whatever, some regular old minty flavor.

[1069] that all of you normal is like.

[1070] And I was using that.

[1071] And I remembered why I first started using it.

[1072] Oh, it brought you back?

[1073] Yes.

[1074] Because I get mouth ulcers very easily.

[1075] Okay.

[1076] And so does my dad.

[1077] Oh.

[1078] And my dad is the one that told me, he said, I found this toothpaste.

[1079] It works.

[1080] This is years ago.

[1081] Okay.

[1082] And he's right.

[1083] It works so much that I hadn't even remember that I had that issue until I stopped using it and now I have my mouth is hurting.

[1084] Full of ulcers?

[1085] Yes.

[1086] We'll go back to that crummy tooth face.

[1087] I did.

[1088] I bought some yesterday and I'm going back.

[1089] I think Arm and Hammer's a great company, so I'm not trying to throw any shade to them.

[1090] But I think this is a very, very apropos analogy.

[1091] Okay.

[1092] What if I used a toothpaste that was called Comet?

[1093] And it was the Comet Company or Ajax.

[1094] I know what?

[1095] I'd be like, wow, that shit works.

[1096] Well, there's no question again.

[1097] Your teeth are stunning.

[1098] I know, but do they, does it smell?

[1099] No. It's that toothpaste that tastes like baking soda is a rough hang for me. And it sounds like maybe for a rub too.

[1100] A rough hang?

[1101] Yes, it's a rough hang to put baking soda.

[1102] Look, when I was younger, I would like once a month be like, fucking time to get a baking soda brush in because it does remove the stains.

[1103] I take the box and just dip my brush in it and then scrub, scrub, scrub, oh, this is miserable, but, you know, I'm willing to do it because it works.

[1104] And so when I saw your toothpaste on your countertop, what I said to myself is she's brushing her teeth with a box of Armandhammer.

[1105] Great product.

[1106] It's powder.

[1107] Is it powder or liquid?

[1108] No, it's a toothpaste.

[1109] I know, I know.

[1110] Anyway.

[1111] There we are.

[1112] So, hey, I'm so, I'll be more careful.

[1113] Okay.

[1114] Just be careful.

[1115] I'm sensitive.

[1116] Okay.

[1117] Not sensitive dine, but sensitive.

[1118] I will be the censadine of opinions going forward.

[1119] It's okay.

[1120] You're a lot.

[1121] You're going to tell me. Products are not my favorite.

[1122] Oh, yeah.

[1123] But you said gross.

[1124] Well, again, if I used Ajax or Comet to brush my teeth, is it com?

[1125] It's not comment.

[1126] If you did that, I'd be like, whoa, that's weird.

[1127] But if your breath smelled great and your teeth looked nice, I'd be like, huh, I'll try it.

[1128] The efficacy is off the charts.

[1129] There's no question.

[1130] It's just whether you want to put baking soda in your mouth every time you brush your teeth.

[1131] Okay.

[1132] So that's that.

[1133] I apologize.

[1134] And I'll be more sensitine in the future.

[1135] You don't have to be more sensitive.

[1136] You can tell me your opinions on things.

[1137] I was also making kind of a fun joke out of it because I said you can use that terrible toothpaste or whatever I said.

[1138] The gross toothpaste.

[1139] Yeah, I was being, I was nagging the toothpaste for sure.

[1140] It was just a good reminder that I cared too much about what you think.

[1141] Okay.

[1142] Okay.

[1143] So I'm going to work on that.

[1144] Okay.

[1145] You know?

[1146] Well, now I'm scared.

[1147] I still want you to care what I think.

[1148] How do we have both?

[1149] I just don't know.

[1150] Okay.

[1151] Number two.

[1152] Okay.

[1153] Glad I'm seated.

[1154] I got a wallpaper.

[1155] For your apartment?

[1156] Yeah.

[1157] And are you allowed to put up wallpaper in your apartment?

[1158] You don't care.

[1159] I don't care.

[1160] Good for you.

[1161] I asked if, I didn't ask the people.

[1162] But I ask the wallpaper people, will I be able to take this off?

[1163] Generally, when you ask a wallpaper salesman, if it can be removed, they're going to definitely say yes.

[1164] No, okay, it's my designer, Nikki Kehoe, her wallpaper, Amy's wallpaper.

[1165] So I asked her.

[1166] Okay.

[1167] She knows the whole sit.

[1168] Sure, right, right.

[1169] She knows the lay of the land when it comes to wallpaper.

[1170] Do you want to see a picture of it?

[1171] Of course I do.

[1172] Send it over.

[1173] Okay.

[1174] Back to your outfit.

[1175] It's absolutely adorable.

[1176] It complements your stunning smile wonderfully.

[1177] Thank you.

[1178] Have you ever tried to take a stain out of a blouse with that Arm and Hammer toothpaste you use?

[1179] I haven't, but it could.

[1180] I bet it'd work like crazy.

[1181] What about peroxide is probably bad for our clothes.

[1182] That would be my guess.

[1183] Yeah.

[1184] But I don't know.

[1185] You know, the baking soda wasn't a rough enough hang.

[1186] They're like, you know what?

[1187] You know what really make this better?

[1188] peroxide.

[1189] That's how you get.

[1190] The ulcer's gone.

[1191] Okay.

[1192] All right.

[1193] I mean, the only thing they are missing is ammonia.

[1194] I'm happy to take that in.

[1195] I'm happy to.

[1196] You know some people, your friend, you bleach.

[1197] My friend Maher, well, what he does is he swishes.

[1198] He swishes with chlorox bleach.

[1199] Yeah.

[1200] Because he is of the belief.

[1201] I tend to agree with him that many, many, many of our diseases start in the mouth.

[1202] That's true.

[1203] The one he most is on top of is.

[1204] Alzheimer's.

[1205] Oh, he thinks that starts in the mouth.

[1206] Yes.

[1207] It moves up into your brain.

[1208] So, because he's concerned about that, yeah, and his teeth and gum health are nearly unparalleled.

[1209] Okay.

[1210] Well, I'm going to my dentist, my fancy dentist that would be like.

[1211] Oh, right.

[1212] Uh -huh.

[1213] Oh, I think I'm supposed to go this week.

[1214] I think it's supposed to be there right now.

[1215] Off to resched.

[1216] Anyway, I'm going soon, and I'm sure my teeth are going to be, well, they're probably going to be worse.

[1217] They're going to be like, what happens?

[1218] What happened to your teeth?

[1219] I'd be like, ugh, I took a week off my toothpaste because of it.

[1220] Oh, I thought you were going to say because of the Ingy Brecky tea.

[1221] Oh, no. Because what I would hope would happen is that thing from George Washington, I love so much, the chapter on the tea.

[1222] Yeah.

[1223] And how one of his dentist thought he had been soaking the dentures in port wine.

[1224] Oh, God.

[1225] That's horrifying.

[1226] But I do, I would love it if you were at the dentist.

[1227] And they said, have you been soaking, have you been rinsing with port wine?

[1228] at night, swishing, like Marr does.

[1229] Yeah.

[1230] Okay, I sent you both the picture.

[1231] Okay, let me fire up my device.

[1232] It was also on my Instagram, so some people probably saw it.

[1233] Oh, okay.

[1234] I like it.

[1235] Thank you.

[1236] Oh, wow.

[1237] It's pretty, right?

[1238] Oh, yeah.

[1239] Yeah, it's a nice wallpaper.

[1240] It sure is.

[1241] Yeah, it's like a little floral pattern, but the two pieces of art on the wall are Anne Monsu.

[1242] You are.

[1243] Yeah.

[1244] Mon Frere.

[1245] She's back.

[1246] She's back in the house.

[1247] Oh, boy.

[1248] Well, it looks gorgeous in there.

[1249] You got six, seven rugs down on the ground.

[1250] I have one rug.

[1251] That's one.

[1252] That's one.

[1253] That's one layer of another one.

[1254] Oh, okay, okay.

[1255] Jesus.

[1256] My goodness.

[1257] That's a jute.

[1258] Is that what that's called?

[1259] Is that a jute?

[1260] It might be.

[1261] I got it at the Rose Bowl fleet, many a year ago.

[1262] I had a nightmare last.

[1263] night about you what happened did I die I was in a situation it was very junior high there was like some super tough dude who wanted to fight me and I was trying to sort that whole thing out and I was like am I going to be able to get out of this or I do have to fight this guy and you were dating the guy and what did you do well I was very worried about you I was like why is she dating this guy he's a fucking piece of shit did you tell me I knew better.

[1264] In the dream, I knew better.

[1265] Oh, my God.

[1266] You knew better in the dream to not show your opinion just not in life.

[1267] Not in real life, yes, exactly.

[1268] In the dream, I knew not to intervene if you liked some guy.

[1269] Okay.

[1270] But I was like, yeah.

[1271] Jesus Christ.

[1272] Yeah, it's a bummer.

[1273] It was like that when I came in, the ceiling just fell down to the listener.

[1274] The cockroach piece is.

[1275] Ew.

[1276] Ew.

[1277] On the other side of it.

[1278] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1279] And if I just tear it off right now, All the electrical equipment is going to fall to the ground.

[1280] So we need that little bit that's still there, but we should just remove.

[1281] It's so gnarly.

[1282] Just cut it.

[1283] Okay, there really is.

[1284] No one is, is there.

[1285] You do?

[1286] Oh, right, great.

[1287] Of course Rob has.

[1288] Well, come check out the other side.

[1289] She shan't see it.

[1290] I already saw it earlier today.

[1291] You will not be comfortable ever again.

[1292] Oh, my God.

[1293] You're going to look.

[1294] There's a whole microcosm of, is that what you call them?

[1295] Oh, oh, my God.

[1296] Ew.

[1297] Maybe we should leave it like that.

[1298] Let's just tilt it more so it faces Monica when she's sitting in the interview position.

[1299] I can't believe we've been living like this.

[1300] I know.

[1301] It's not super reassuring when you see that.

[1302] Okay.

[1303] Don't touch it, Rob.

[1304] Rob's really earning his money right now.

[1305] This is where the rubber meets the wood.

[1306] Oh, shit.

[1307] Put it on Monica's face.

[1308] By the way, what is, there's murders and stuff in there.

[1309] There's so many different kinds of insects and what appears to be probably termite dust.

[1310] Ew.

[1311] And then there's been some murders.

[1312] Like there's some bigger bugs in there that got taken out by some of the smaller riffraff up there.

[1313] Okay.

[1314] You can touch the outside, Rob.

[1315] You'll be okay.

[1316] No, it's okay, Rob.

[1317] You protect yourself.

[1318] Touch the outside, actually.

[1319] I did earlier.

[1320] I just smeared that all.

[1321] I was like rubbing back and forth that hurt crunchies, crunch, crunch, crunch.

[1322] Oh, my God.

[1323] All right, my catch -up is simple.

[1324] Okay, I want to hear.

[1325] Went to Nashville.

[1326] Last minute invited Ruthie and Aaron.

[1327] Nice.

[1328] They came down.

[1329] So we were with Houston, who I've renamed.

[1330] Okay.

[1331] Houston hoghose.

[1332] Okay.

[1333] Anytime I buy Huey something and I send it to his house, I always send it to Huey Hoghose.

[1334] Oh, all right.

[1335] As, well, you know what a hoghose would be.

[1336] A penis?

[1337] Yeah, like a huge penis.

[1338] Oh, I do.

[1339] Mr. Hoghose.

[1340] Okay, got it.

[1341] So while we were down there, Huey is the most likable man on the planet.

[1342] We went to his country club because the girls wanted to swim and there wasn't a pool at the hotel.

[1343] And he has been saying, let's go to the club.

[1344] Let's go.

[1345] I'm like, I'm not a country club person.

[1346] Yeah.

[1347] Guess what?

[1348] I am.

[1349] It was a party.

[1350] All it is is two huge pools.

[1351] Uh -huh.

[1352] with diving boards, kids playing everywhere, and you can get a Diet Coke while you're partying.

[1353] It was awesome.

[1354] It was kids galore.

[1355] But we watched Huey Hogman the whole time at the Richmond Country Club.

[1356] And he was glad -handed.

[1357] He was the most popular guy there.

[1358] Oh, I'm not surprised.

[1359] Everyone was talking to him.

[1360] And I think Aaron said he's like, if he doesn't run for city council or something, and it would be a real missed opportunity.

[1361] Yeah.

[1362] Anywho, we had a boy.

[1363] We had such a good time.

[1364] The hotel was so lovely.

[1365] Everything was great.

[1366] Good meals, fast driving, lots of swimming.

[1367] Good.

[1368] It was great.

[1369] Mm -mm -mm.

[1370] How do you feel about your new identity as...

[1371] A southerner?

[1372] As a rich southerner.

[1373] Oh, the fact that I was at a country club?

[1374] Well, that's the funny thing is, of course, I'm going in there going like, I hate country clubs.

[1375] They're so stupid.

[1376] I hate country clubs.

[1377] But I'll do anything if my kids want to swim.

[1378] And then I got there, I was like, you know what?

[1379] This is wonderful.

[1380] This is just wonderful.

[1381] It's a big, huge pool, and all the kids are running around, and you can get a Diet Coke.

[1382] And how could I pretend this isn't wonderful?

[1383] It was lovely.

[1384] Yeah, except that it's exclusive and doesn't let certain people in.

[1385] Well, people have a bunch of money.

[1386] Yeah.

[1387] Mm -hmm.

[1388] Mm -hmm.

[1389] Yeah.

[1390] Well, I enjoyed one.

[1391] and I just went to one.

[1392] I know.

[1393] I'm not telling you you, you can't join one.

[1394] But I got to tell you, it was pretty persuasive.

[1395] I was like, if you don't, if it's basically like, when you're at a hotel with a pool, the way that your kids go bananas.

[1396] Like, they're so goddamn entertained.

[1397] I'm like, this is so cool if you, you have a normal life, but on the weekends, you can go take your kids.

[1398] It's basically like having a hotel on the weekends.

[1399] Yeah.

[1400] Pretty cool.

[1401] Yeah.

[1402] Are you nervous about my new identity?

[1403] Yeah, a little.

[1404] Tell me. Tell me. I also feel like we're the opposite now.

[1405] Like, I used to...

[1406] Want to join a country club?

[1407] Yeah.

[1408] Like, I would have loved to have been able to do that.

[1409] Like, we had a bunch in Atlanta.

[1410] Yeah, the South seems really into country clubs.

[1411] Yes.

[1412] Not a huge thing in the North, by the way.

[1413] But, you know, I couldn't...

[1414] We couldn't get in.

[1415] We wouldn't be able to get in.

[1416] Sure.

[1417] But so I really wanted to, and it was very cool.

[1418] But now I'm like, fuck country clubs.

[1419] Like, I am not interested.

[1420] in that.

[1421] I absolutely hear you.

[1422] I have often hated being in line behind two guys, and they'll be like, well, at the club last weekend, I'm like, I mean, I'm sure they're fun, and there's, like, so much great stuff.

[1423] And I think there's a million kinds of country clubs.

[1424] I'm sure some are like, you know, I don't know.

[1425] I'm assuming there is varying as everything in life is.

[1426] Of course.

[1427] Yeah.

[1428] as our hotels.

[1429] Like, you can say hotels are one thing or another.

[1430] Definitely.

[1431] Anyway, I just, I don't like that kind of, I like limited a dish and I like exclusivity, but I don't like that kind.

[1432] I'm sure there's a huge dynamic of being excluded as a human.

[1433] Because you could say, like, if you love expensive clothes, those are exclusive.

[1434] People can't have them.

[1435] And when they see you, they're reminded that they're poor and that they can't have that.

[1436] I mean, you can take all these, anything that's expensive you can take in that direction if you want to.

[1437] I mean, this is such a generalization and so many people are in country clubs that I'm sure are lovely and wonderful Huey being one.

[1438] But it attracts a specific type of person, generally speaking, and that's normally not my cup of tea type of person.

[1439] What type of person?

[1440] I guess this is just based on my experience as a kid.

[1441] But I feel like very white, rich, obviously, a little entitled.

[1442] I'll leave it there, yeah.

[1443] It is an interesting thought experiment, though.

[1444] Like, let's say I created a country club.

[1445] We call it something different.

[1446] Day Club.

[1447] Dan Gaines, B -Foss, Day Club, right?

[1448] Cool.

[1449] And it's everyone in the pod.

[1450] And it's a place in the weekends you go, and there's food, and there's swimming pools, and everything.

[1451] The notion of a gathering social spot is in itself appealing, right?

[1452] Sure.

[1453] Right.

[1454] And now if we did the pod, we wouldn't want everyone to be a member at that place.

[1455] We would have our own preferences of who we wanted to be there and who not.

[1456] Don't you think?

[1457] But I wouldn't judge who was there based on money.

[1458] Right.

[1459] Or based on...

[1460] We would be trying to attract.

[1461] like -minded people to spend the weekend with.

[1462] We certainly wouldn't want a dude in Army fatigues that has AR -15 everywhere he goes.

[1463] That dude doesn't, like, that's not for us, right?

[1464] Yeah.

[1465] Among many different types of folks, we wouldn't really want at the club.

[1466] So do you think the concept of like going and joining something with like -minded people is not innately appalling.

[1467] It's not.

[1468] Yeah.

[1469] I guess what I'm saying is, in general, the mind that's like -minded there is not someone I feel connected to.

[1470] Well, the stereotypes would be like rich, Republican, probably a history of excluding non -whites.

[1471] Exactly, yes.

[1472] Yeah, yeah.

[1473] Yeah.

[1474] Those are all legit.

[1475] Yeah.

[1476] Anyway, I just hope you don't change.

[1477] No, but if I start one in Tennessee that has none of those principles.

[1478] Great.

[1479] You like it?

[1480] Of course.

[1481] I'm not I'm not against fun pools and shit I'm just against that kind of exclusion especially on race and especially people looking like side -eyeing a family that doesn't look very rich or is this person supposed to be here it doesn't look like they are those things happen at country clubs because they're paying a lot of money and they expected to look and be a certain way yeah I can only speak on my experience this weekend and it was really really fun and everyone was super nice.

[1482] I'm glad you guys had fun.

[1483] Yeah, and I loved it.

[1484] Okay.

[1485] Did the Bank of America CEO say we want a cashless society?

[1486] Yes.

[1487] Oh.

[1488] Brian Moynihan, Bank of America CEO, openly declared we want a cashless society, adding that his firm has, quote, more to gain than anybody from a move to digital transactions.

[1489] Do you think that's Bobby Moynihan's father?

[1490] I wonder.

[1491] Or brother?

[1492] Oh, well, he's, I imagine there would be a big age gap.

[1493] Right?

[1494] I mean, but how old is Bobby?

[1495] He's not...

[1496] Bobby's much younger than me. I have to imagine the CEO of...

[1497] It's 45.

[1498] Bobby is or Brian?

[1499] Bobby is 45.

[1500] Wow, he's not much younger than me. No. Okay.

[1501] Okay, Pablo Escobar's rotting money.

[1502] Oh.

[1503] There is money still being found.

[1504] Sure.

[1505] Rats ate billions of dollars of his money.

[1506] Billions?

[1507] Yeah, because it's just like he would leave at places and...

[1508] Oh, rats like to eat money?

[1509] I guess.

[1510] Yes.

[1511] Now we know.

[1512] At the peak of their powers, the Medellin cartel, Medellian cartel, were reportedly raking in around $20 billion every year with Pablo Escara's personal wealth reaching $30 billion.

[1513] Pablo was earning so much that each year we would write off 10 % of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost.

[1514] Oh my gosh.

[1515] Yeah.

[1516] That would be about $2 .1 billion.

[1517] That's interesting.

[1518] Yeah, I wonder what the, like, market forces of that are, because you're virtually taking money out of circulation when you're letting rats eat it.

[1519] Yeah, we know.

[1520] You know, like they think there's a total known amount of money in circulation.

[1521] No one's factoring in 10 % is getting eaten by rats or molded out.

[1522] So I wonder if it had like an inverse inflationary outcome.

[1523] Maybe.

[1524] Interesting.

[1525] Rats.

[1526] Rats.

[1527] Mice don't eat money.

[1528] Don't worry.

[1529] All the money you have it hidden all around your apartment is safe.

[1530] You know, I looked under my bed yesterday, and there's a part of my rug under there that looks fucked with.

[1531] Oh.

[1532] And I think maybe the mouse.

[1533] Like, nibbled on?

[1534] Uh -huh.

[1535] Really?

[1536] Well, I don't know nibbled, but like scratched.

[1537] Oh.

[1538] I think you would hear a fucking mouse scratching up your carpet.

[1539] I don't know what I would hear.

[1540] Okay.

[1541] I just don't know.

[1542] Maybe a country club member came in with his golf shoes on.

[1543] Yeah, probably.

[1544] Slid him under your bed.

[1545] Didn't give a fuck about what he was destroying.

[1546] Evidence that money is a risk factor for COVID or cash.

[1547] Cash is a risk factor for COVID.

[1548] Under realistic conditions, infection with SARS COVID -2 from cash is very unlikely, says a lot of places.

[1549] Yeah.

[1550] Okay.

[1551] Can you use Amex Visa and MasterCard in Russia currently?

[1552] globally issued American Express cards will no longer work at merchants or ATMs in Russia while cards issued locally by Russian banks will no longer work outside of the country on the American Express Global Network.

[1553] Another article.

[1554] Visa Master Heart and American Express have announced they will suspend all operations in Russia in protest at its invasion of Ukraine.

[1555] Shoppers will still be able to use the cards for purchases within Russia until they reach their expiration dates.

[1556] But Visa MasterCard American Express cards issued abroad will no longer work at shops or ATMs in Russia.

[1557] Not to bring it down, but I'm a little, I hate how short our attention span is.

[1558] Like, it was on the news every night.

[1559] I watch it every night.

[1560] I'm super interested in what's happening in Ukraine.

[1561] And it's barely in the news.

[1562] It's just plotting on, and I imagine that's what Vladiputi knew.

[1563] Like, well, yeah, they're making a big stink about it, but everyone will just get tired of talking about it and thinking about it and it'll blow over something new will happen yes and i hate that about our nature yeah i know our tension span i understand that there's so much competition i guess that's new you know the vietnam war that was on the news every single night for a decade yeah but there wasn't a ton of other stuff stimuli i guess but it's just as heartbreaking as it was on day one oh yes absolutely god i want to fight him to the death oh i know you do i know you do it's like point I mean 0 .1 % of me that thinks he's so macho that just knowing I've challenged him, he'll accept.

[1564] I know, but you know, I am scared of him actually taking you up on this.

[1565] Why?

[1566] They're going to embed poison in his fingernails?

[1567] Well, he might, yeah, find a way to kill you.

[1568] You think me and Vladimir Putin in a death match in the octagon?

[1569] I'm not coming out on top.

[1570] I mean, somebody might shoot you while he invites you in.

[1571] He's not playing by rules.

[1572] We're going to fight in Switzerland, neutral ground.

[1573] he's a crazy person you can't expect someone to follow he doesn't know karate but he knows crazy boy what if i got completely humiliated though what if that 70 year old man or however old he is absolutely destroyed me in a minute i'd be glad to be dead at that point oh you'd be well yeah well i'd be glad to be because there's no way i could hang my head high anywhere You know, I was thinking about, you told a story, it's coming up, about you getting stung by a wasp and you were a boy.

[1574] Yeah.

[1575] And that's such a sad story.

[1576] It is?

[1577] Yeah.

[1578] Why is that?

[1579] Because I was so earnest in my, in my pursuit of my edmology project.

[1580] Trying to do good at a science project.

[1581] I was.

[1582] I can just picture you.

[1583] I'll make it even sadder for you.

[1584] I was in second grade, man. I was not functioning.

[1585] You know, this is in the depths of the dyslexia.

[1586] I don't even know if it had been diagnosed.

[1587] I couldn't read.

[1588] I couldn't do shit.

[1589] And all of a sudden, here's this science project that I'm like, well, I've definitely got gumption, you know.

[1590] I'm not afraid.

[1591] This is maybe the only thing I can shine at in school.

[1592] And I'm mad at that school for asking you guys to catch.

[1593] Yes.

[1594] Asking you guys to catch a wasp.

[1595] Well.

[1596] That's insane.

[1597] You know, I'm not, you know, I can't remember what they told us to catch, but I do think a was because we were doing moss, we were doing butterfly, you hope to get on that styrofoam.

[1598] Also, that's bad.

[1599] It's like they wanted you to kill all these, well, moth is fine, but butterflies.

[1600] Well, they die so quickly anyways.

[1601] I bet they were hoping we would just find a bunch of dead insects and put them on our stuff.

[1602] I'm sure.

[1603] I just don't think they should have asked all these little kids to go running around looking for flying bugs.

[1604] What they most certainly didn't anticipate was that one of the kids might try to put an entire wasp nest in his net.

[1605] That was you.

[1606] I was going to be a hero.

[1607] I was going to have like a styrofoam board the size of a van just fucking peppered with wasps.

[1608] I could hand them out to other kids who are afraid to get their own wasp.

[1609] I could horse trade, wastes trade.

[1610] I could probably trade like 30, 40 wasp for a butterfly if I hadn't gotten one.

[1611] Oh, yeah, you were probably thinking along those lines.

[1612] Sure, sure.

[1613] But listen, I just have thought about it a lot.

[1614] You have?

[1615] And then your friend who put a little washcloth on your eyes.

[1616] I love classmates.

[1617] You were, quote, the toughest boy in school, but you're just like, oh, not.

[1618] You're just like this little kid, like, trying to catch wasp and having a towel over his eyes and then not wanting to touch a scaly fish.

[1619] It's sweet.

[1620] Yeah, I know.

[1621] I was scared, so I fought.

[1622] All right.

[1623] Oh, boy.

[1624] Well.

[1625] Bye.

[1626] Follow armchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcast.

[1627] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

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