Blake (00:00.732)
Sovereign Reset with Mr. Jimmy Song. How are you, Jimmy?

Jimmy Song (00:04.639)
I am good, how are you?

Blake (00:06.191)
Fantastic. Uh, grace guys here in Colorado, but otherwise can't complain. Things are going well. Um, so for the folks out there who don't know Jimmy, Jimmy is an OG Bitcoiner. He's been around for a long time. He's a Christian. He's an author of multiple books, father of six, and most recently, uh, Fiat ruins everything, which, um, I've been rolling through lately.

Jimmy Song (00:12.878)
Hmm.

Blake (00:33.383)
Um, so we'd love to love to, uh, so many topics in here. I want to cover with you, Jimmy. I know you've been on the podcast circuit, uh, promoting this book and all your other great, great works, uh, which we'll link to in the show notes. Um, how's it been going for you with the new book?

Jimmy Song (00:48.066)
Well, I've been surprised at the number of podcasts that are willing to have me on. I guess they're all lacking for content or something. But yeah, it's been great. I'm talking about the book, something that I've been thinking about for over a year now. And just distilling some of the ideas for people and talking about it, it's been fun.

Blake (00:56.228)
Yeah.

Blake (01:12.267)
It seems like a natural evolution from your earliest book. The earliest I know of is programming Bitcoin. It seems like you still have a course around that for developers or would be developers, but it looks like you're on a steady pace of about a book a year. Maybe you had a little, little skip in there in 2022, but so did everyone else. Is this the latest evolution of your thinking on Bitcoin or is this just kind of how you pulled it all together with Fiat ruins everything?

Jimmy Song (01:41.402)
Yeah, this has a different audience. All my other books are meant to bring people into Bitcoin from various angles. So if you're a programmer that's interested in the technical aspect and programming Bitcoin is that book. If you're somebody that doesn't know anything about Bitcoin and is interested in human rights, then little Bitcoin book is for you. If you're a Christian, you're wondering about the immorality of fiat money, then...

You know, thank God for Bitcoin is for you. If you're somebody in politics or a regulator or something and don't know how to think about Bitcoin, Bitcoin and the American dream is for you. But this one is different because it's aimed squarely at Bitcoin. And so it's aimed at people that are already into Bitcoin, already understand Bitcoin to a large degree, and it's to give you insight into how corrupt the fiat system is, how immoral it is, how it changes the incentives, how it

creates very bad anti-civilization incentives all over the place. And that's what I document in this book in 34, I think, different chapters to talk about the various ways in which fiat money has changed society, for the lack of a better phrase.

Blake (02:59.711)
Right on. Well, I think you're answering questions that inevitably people who discover Bitcoin ask themselves. They say, well, if fiat money is a lie, I'm starting to suspect that maybe the medical industrial complex is lying or lied about everything during this pandemic. Maybe schooling and the way they're churning out our kids from the state institutions is a lie. So I like to think it has a wagon wheel. You know, you might come in on the Bitcoin spoke or the rail.

And then you start questioning your food supply, your doctor's advice, your the sort of neo-Marxist promotion of atheism, for instance, and the destruction of traditional religion in our country at least. So I love the way you pulled it together. I think it's gonna give people a much stronger legs to stand on as they go about their lives wherever they might find themselves. That's exciting stuff. Yeah.

Jimmy Song (03:52.826)
Yeah, that's the hope anyway.

Blake (03:56.015)
So one of, you know, in this podcast, sovereign reset, the ideas you might suspect was a counter to the, um, sort of Davos think group think, and a way to, we talk about escaping the matrix. And when I saw your break free, the matrix was like, Oh my gosh, I didn't ever think about that when you wrote it. I was like, okay, we're escaped the matrix, which is fine. I mean, we're all kind of on the same page, but our idea is to not only talk about what's wrong with the world, but also, uh, the hope that is in.

Jimmy Song (04:05.915)
Mm.

Jimmy Song (04:18.859)
Uh huh.

Blake (04:25.551)
Uh, faith and family and, and hard money, but giving people a reason to kind of pull themselves up by their bootstraps, wherever they may be, you know, college, younger, older, you know, post sort of corporate world, even retired and to make a, uh, a difference in the world. So I'd love to kind of dive deeper on some of these topics, especially around, um, maybe the family aspect, cause I think we've got a good audience of folks that are a bit disgruntled with the current system. Um, they're probably on the

more the right side of the political spectrum, I would suspect. So they're not necessarily lining up for vasectomies in Austin, you know, as a response to the climate hysteria. But I'd love to kind of talk a bit more about, you know, the need for family, the importance for family, finding a mate, ideally, and having children, procreating. And I saw your video just recently with Marty Bent and it was at Will Cole.

Jimmy Song (05:07.543)
Mmm.

Jimmy Song (05:18.632)
Hehehehe

Jimmy Song (05:24.756)
Mm-hmm.

Blake (05:24.763)
Cause he talked about living in New York and just being in that environment where many people don't even think about getting married till they're 40, much less having kids. And that's kind of counter to the world I lived in Texas where people get married out of school. Uh, you're in Austin, I believe. Right. Okay. So very Texas oriented, uh, if not a little bit, uh, politically left in some cases.

Jimmy Song (05:39.031)
Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Song (05:46.498)
Heh.

Blake (05:48.695)
So I was curious if you want to talk a bit more about maybe some of the chapters even, or some of your thinking around family and children.

Jimmy Song (05:55.838)
Yeah, so it's a very strange world that we live in where people aren't trying to have large families and stuff. And historically that's not the norm. Almost all throughout history, people are very excited to have lots of children. And the mentality has shifted significantly in the last 110 years or so with the Edmenta Fiat money. Now in the book, I talk specifically about

the sort of Marxist antipathy towards family. And that's very much a part of the cultural conversation today, part of the woke left, if you will, and all of their ideology. But more than that, there's sort of like a dependence on the state that's been inculcated over the last 110 years where...

people sort of expect the government to take care of them. And this was never the case in any other time in history. It was always family that took care of you. And having other people around you was the way you had insurance for all kinds of things. And it was...

You know, it was bi-directional, obviously. If somebody else is in trouble, you try to take care of them. And if you're in trouble, then they try to take care of you, which was why, like, if you look biblically, being an orphan or a widow was so devastating because you really just don't have a family. That was your support network. But, you know, we've gone towards a society where basically everyone's kind of a widow or an orphan, where you cut off.

family ties to a large degree because you depend instead on companies, on the state to take care of you in some way, shape or form where the company becomes your family. And it's a very weird or very bad trade off if you think about it because your family cares about you or at least they should. Maybe you come from a bad family and that's not the case. But...

Jimmy Song (08:10.882)
the very least that's kind of what's expected. They care about you, love you, try to do the best for you and stuff like that. A company does none of those things. They really couldn't care less about you and neither does your government. It's, they just want your vote, they just want your work output, whatever it is. And that's it. And they, you know, if once you're sort of no longer or your access to requirements or something like that, you get laid off or...

sort of cut off from once you're not useful to them. So it's brought about sort of a psychopathic, nihilistic, Nietzschean morality around family or around relationships because of this dependence on corporations and governments, which honestly are not anything like families. And it's an unfortunate.

sort of transition that we've gone into but But one of the results is that we have much smaller families you know very few people that are Interested in having families right away out of school for example and instead focus on career or Going up in status or finding a better rent seeking job or something like that rather than you know propagating the human race which every ancestor

of yours found the priority in.

Blake (09:42.165)
It's may come as no surprise to many that those rent seeking jobs, at least the better paying ones are the great, the high paying ones are in the big cities, which makes it even more difficult to, uh, have a family of any size, right? With both, uh, both parents working. Um, think of New York, for example.

I want you to have kids, you use getting that scramble, that rat race of trying to find $50,000 a year kindergartens, or you decide to move outside the city and commute a couple of hours each, each day, um, or move back home to Kansas city, what have you. And it seems like a lot of people made that choice during the COVID bit.

Jimmy Song (10:16.302)
Yeah, I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I

Yeah, it gets very difficult to live anywhere and make enough money. And really it all comes down to the money. The reason why a lot of people aren't having kids. As you mentioned, both parents need to work to fund their stuff. And this is a stark contrast to say like 70 years ago, 1950s. You know, you just had one breadwinner and the other got to stay at home and...

Blake (10:42.539)
Yep.

Jimmy Song (10:47.874)
raise the children and stuff. And unsurprisingly, we had a big boom of babies because you had more resources that were going towards the children. But if both parents are working, you just can't devote that many resources to the children. So of course you're going to be capped out at two or three at the most. And with significant help in the form of nannies and daycare and things like that. But that's the reality today is that

Blake (10:52.313)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Jimmy Song (11:17.046)
Their costs of everything have gone up so much that you need both parents to work. And if both parents are working, you're just not gonna be able to have that many kids. And furthermore, there's this real estate premium on pretty much any kind of housing in the United States, where there's a significant portion of that is a store of value premium. So instead of real estate going towards people that are using it for its utility,

number of bedrooms or whatever, people buy it so that it's a good investment. I think there's, I read a statistic about like the premium condos in New York City, how like 60% of them sit vacant. And it's because they, you know, it's too much of a bother. The people that bought it are using it as an investment vehicle because they know those apartments are going to go up in price. So to beat inflation, to store their value, they're using real estate.

Blake (11:48.862)
Mm-hmm. Mm. Yep.

Jimmy Song (12:16.67)
for that particular purpose, which of course means that, you know, everybody else that wants an apartment, you know, can't get these ones. So they, you know, they end up paying more for the apartments that they have. And of course that means that if they want to have a large family, even if they have the means to do it otherwise, the real estate just keeps them out of that market. So, I mean, there's, those are just two, but there's a whole lot of other.

you know, cultural factors that are influenced by fiat money that cause lower birth rates. And we're seeing them go down pretty much everywhere around.

Blake (12:56.044)
Do you think that's also part of kind of the Marxist strategy to push people to the big cities? You're this talk and enthusiasm of, you know, increasing people moving to the cities, be it the developing world, the Ascended world, or the US, right? It's this great satisfaction with people moving to the cities.

kind of future dystopian conspiracy of them wanting to control people in mass. Hmm. Right on.

Jimmy Song (13:20.642)
Yeah, certainly surveillance is a lot easier in a city because you have just less square miles to cover and stuff like that. And if you go to a lot of cities in Asia, it's very obvious that there's a CCTV pretty much covering everything. And it's an interesting thing because at least in those cities, what they use it for is to reduce crime. So.

You know, like Japan, like Tokyo and Seoul are extremely safe. You can leave your laptop out in the middle of like the city and no one's going to take it. Why? Because if they did, they're going to get a phone call. They have all of the tracking technology. They know exactly who's going to know who did it. And you're going to get a phone call. You're probably going to get arrested. So they just don't do it. Right. So that's what they use that surveillance for.

Blake (14:02.402)
I'm sorry.

Jimmy Song (14:14.974)
And the United States is a little different because there's this push towards, uh, you know, uh, sort of like pseudo reparations or something where if you're black, you can go and steal things with impunity pretty much in a lot of these big cities. Um, and it's, it's become sort of this weird, uh, thing where you have the surveillance tech to go and arrest all of these people if you wanted to, uh, but they're purposefully not doing it.

and they're doing it in a way as to maybe drop the price of real estate in a lot of these places or something. It's kind of a weird set of incentives that they have at play there because they want the urban vote. So they're defunding the police, which means that crime is kind of running rampant, which makes a lot of people want to leave. So it feels like...

uh high time preference political maneuver to me but you know i don't know who what do i do

Blake (15:18.829)
Yeah, a lot of times I wonder about that end game and let's just take San Francisco as an example. It's such an easy target, right? You've got multi-million, not just multi-million dollar, 10, 20, $50 million homes in the hills of San Francisco. Who would want to live there? These so-called elites that own these properties, the city is unlivable for the most part.

You know, I saw, I heard a guy last year, you know, he left his kids in his car, you know, all buckled in to go to school. He ran into the house to get to something, get something else. His car, his car with his kids is stolen, carjacked, you know? Um, so you can't really live there. You can't enjoy that elite lifestyle in San Francisco anymore. So if you run off all the people and the businesses, it seems like it'd be really cheap to scoop up that real estate and to orchestrate some sort of Renaissance. Um, I don't know how that works. Maybe the time horizon's really long.

So they don't care that it takes 10 years to recover and rebuild this city. Um, in the meantime, you push all these people to another city. I don't quite understand the goal there, but, um, I think anyone who can leave is, has left.

Jimmy Song (16:21.179)
Yeah, I don't really understand what the end game is, but what it does is it gives them sort of clout with their voter base. This is why I say it seems like a very high time preference thing to do. You might satisfy them now by defunding the police and decriminalizing a lot of stuff,

Blake (16:43.756)
Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Song (16:48.522)
becomes kind of unlivable. And at that point, you're just kind of opening yourself up long-term to having worse demographics, turning the city over to your political opponents and so on. So I'm not sure exactly what's going on there, but with regard to families, obviously a dangerous place is not somewhere where people are gonna really wanna have children and so.

So you get a lot of suburbs that are getting much higher value in real estate and so on. And one of the things that's demographically been very interesting over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of suburbs are now very heavily democratic, especially richer suburbs.

that richer suburbs voted Republican, they're almost all exclusively Democrat right now. You go to any rich suburb of any major city in the United States, cities themselves are very liberal, but because so many of those people have moved out into the suburbs, many of them are really very, very liberal as well. And we've kind of flipped where...

you know, Republicans used to be kind of the party of rich. It's not really anymore. Like the Fortune 500 CEOs and stuff, they all contribute to the Democratic Party and so on. It's become, it's kind of become flipped. I mean, not to say that Republicans are great or anything. I far from it. I think they've been horrible on a lot of stuff.

But but the demographics have definitely changed because of the rent seeking because of fiat money because of all of the political favors and so on and you know a Robert F Kennedy is probably the only guy that's trying to bring their The party back to their base from you know 30 40 years ago and You know, they're shutting him out. It's it's a very strange kind of weird phenomenon that's happening

Blake (19:02.726)
Yeah. They don't want to hear it, right? What did he say this week? He was going to run as an independent if he couldn't get into the mix for the debates and you know what that means, right? Just split the vote. That's really interesting though. What happens in the, you know, a lot of people moved to or bought property in San Francisco because it was just going ever up and up and up. You know, that was the game 20% a year or whatever.

Jimmy Song (19:12.142)
Mm-hmm.

Blake (19:28.255)
And if these people leave the jobs leave, uh, Elon says Twitter staying or access staying, that'll be interesting, but what happens that real estate when people just need to get out, they can't, they can't get the extra, um, they're going to be underwater. Everybody's going to be underwater. Commercial guys are walking away from their hotels, billion dollar hotels. Yeah.

Jimmy Song (19:42.976)
Yeah, I-

Jimmy Song (19:46.718)
Yeah, and this is the really weird thing. It's very self-destructive. It's, but you know, the real estate prices have been allowed to go up like crazy because of, yeah, money. There's always money printed and that money goes towards assets that store value and the two things in the United States, at least, that have been decent stores of value have been equities, right, stocks and real estate.

and real estate, especially in desirable areas, have gone up and destroyed or have beaten inflation by a significant amount. That's where money has gone. This is sort of like injecting reality back into this whole thing because the prices have gotten out of control. A lot of people are locked in 3% mortgages. They're not refinancing or selling. They're pretty much stuck where they are.

In a sense, I don't think all of these people are leaving yet. I think it has to get really bad for people in a lot of these places to even consider selling. But you get a rising interest rate environment and reality is kind of slapping you in the face. You don't have the means to cover this mortgage or whatever. I can see a giant crash coming.

then again, the Fed might start printing again, and then we can suspend reality for another 15 years, and then prices go crazy again. And this is basically what's happened over and over again, is you get corrections, you get recessions, you get something to indicate, okay, you can't just keep doing this, and then they try to pull back on the money printing, and they can't, and they end up money printing again. Yeah.

because reality is too hard to deal with. So that's what they do.

Blake (21:46.798)
Well, when you add a trillion dollars to the debt in a couple months time, where I said the news this week was 33 trillion, obviously the first time in history, but those were the headlines that's no one has any context around that. And if they're, if things seem good, you know, the, the money's flowing, they can do buy what they need. Even the price is going up.

It just, maybe that was the plan is they realized that no one has a context around this debt and it'll just keep growing and growing and growing. Um, so we need a great. Yeah.

Jimmy Song (22:14.214)
Yeah, well, I mean, they don't really have a choice because they're not going to raise taxes. If they had to raise taxes to like, you know, fund all of this stuff, then people would be up in arms. But with inflation, you can sort of redirect the anger a little bit and say it's greedy corporations or something like that. Unless and less people are buying that line. This was a line from the 50s and 60s.

You know, all these greedy corporations are making too much money. And even Trudeau is like telling people in Canada about the about grocery. Yeah, it's like, oh, these greedy food companies are like ripping you off. And this is what politicians do. And this is why they like inflation so much, because they have plausible deniability. As long as people are economically ignorant. Thankfully, people are starting to wise up and realizing, okay.

Blake (22:46.512)
I was just about to go there. The greedy grocery stores, right?

Jimmy Song (23:08.386)
They just printed like a trillion dollars. Of course, that's going to have an effect on prices. It's not greedy corporations. It's just the money being printed and it's stealth taxation. And once you get more of that mentality and we've been and this is where Bitcoiners have been at the forefront of like education. Once we make it clear that this is actually what's happening with fiat money,

then I think people start coming around. Unfortunately, we've been muddied with all coins and crypto and metaverse and NFTs and DeFi and all this other crap that has no relevance whatsoever, sort of muddying the water significantly. And people aren't getting the main message, which is that fiat money is evil. It's stealing from you every which way. And that Bitcoin is sound money where they can't steal it. And that's ultimately going to be the argument that wins.

You know, how long that takes, I don't know. But there's enough stuff that's going wrong where there's actually hope for more people waking up and getting out of the matrix.

Blake (24:20.587)
Yeah, Bitcoin, you know, in that contrast with crypto and everything that went on over the last five years, let's say, that's where Bitcoin maximalism was a way to be able to set themselves apart or for the other side to poke fun at people because they were close-minded and couldn't see the benefits of Ethereum and all this stuff. But I think of it more as a fundamental Bitcoin being a fundamental layer, a firm foundation upon which we can right these wrongs and to go to your quote from

You have this Fiat, Delinda Est. I was reading up on Cato the elder. I didn't realize that originally came from him. I saw your other, uh, write up in Bitcoin magazine about that, but I love how you use as a rally call, uh, to get people on the right track, uh, maybe mentally, emotionally, and to really, uh, invigorate the people, the masses.

Jimmy Song (24:51.498)
Mm-hmm.

Blake (25:12.547)
So how do you see this Bitcoin is hope developing? How do we put some legs under that for people to really grasp how Bitcoin is the way out of this fiat madness?

Jimmy Song (25:23.002)
Well, what I'm seeing is that there are people in places where they kind of have to adopt something else. And if you visit Argentina, if you visit Lebanon, if you visit Turkey, if you visit Egypt, you realize right away that the people there have suffered tremendously as a result of inflation. And we complain about groceries going up like 20% and they laugh at us because it's

You know, their groceries went up 20% like in a week, you know?

Blake (25:55.875)
Train tickets 10 minutes ago went up, right? In Turkey, they say you got to buy your tickets within like, yo minutes of departure. Right.

Jimmy Song (26:02.51)
Yeah, and this is the sort of thing that's been prevalent since the advent of fiat money around the world is you get hyperinflationary episodes. And there's a lot of different literature talking about the different hyperinflationary episodes that happen in different places. And what you find almost universally is that first of all, it is just mentally exhausting. It is very difficult to live that way.

You get a lot of strikes and things like that because prices and wages don't keep up. So, you know, there are constant strikes all over the place. And if you're looking at like what UAW is doing, the Screenwriters Guild is doing, you know, like we're going to see a lot more strikes just because that's what inflation does. It puts things out of whack and contracts don't make any sense anymore because the numbers that you agreed to four years ago.

Blake (26:39.727)
Hmm

Jimmy Song (27:00.526)
are completely off from what they are now. So, you know, once like the denominator of all the money that exists changes, well, you have to redo all of these contracts and do things differently because one side is going to be completely advantaged over the other. So you're starting to see that. And I imagine that's going to percolate throughout the economy. I think UPS just settled with their drivers.

There's going to be more of that. But in these countries, what you find is that they recognize just how bad their currency is. And usually the backstop currency for them is the US dollar. And the US dollar has historically done pretty well in those countries, or at least you're losing money less slowly through the dollar than you are.

Jimmy Song (27:56.006)
But we're getting to a point where the US dollar is also going to start losing money. And this is where Bitcoin is going to come into play. I can't say that this is like a very popular thing yet in these countries. But we're getting to the point where Bitcoin will be 15 years old come January. So pretty close to that. Once we get to like 20, 30 year mark.

people are going to see it more as something that's going to last because it's already lasted a long time. So I imagine that the backstop becomes Bitcoin, then there's a lot more commerce with Bitcoin rather than with dollars, at which point there's sort of like a giant flip towards it. Now, exactly how that happens and...

what the dynamics are. It's very hard to predict because central banks have, you know, their own sort of tools that they can use to forestall some of this stuff. And, you know, geopolitically, there's a lot of other things that can affect us, not the least of which is Ukraine, right? Because I've already said $100 billion worth of stuff and that's all money printed out of thin air.

This is choking the economy in Europe because they no longer have the energy that they used to from Russia and so on. So I mean, you know, if that...

Blake (29:29.481)
At least they get all those renewables though, you know, Germany, you know, shut down nuclear, get all this intermittent, uh, you know, um, capacity, right? That's so helpful to run a large factories.

Jimmy Song (29:38.106)
Yeah, I mean, there's so many little things that are sort of showing themselves to be fragile. And the main point, I guess, of this rant is that fiat money lets you suspend reality for a while because you can print money out of nothing. So you can keep the Ponzi going as long as you're printing. But once that music stops, once you have to reassert reality, once rates start going up,

or inflation starts rearing its ugly head. Well, all of the reality just shoots right back and you have a lot of rent seekers losing their jobs and things like that. You get sort of like a rejiggering of the entire economy and that's what we're seeing. Are they going to let it sort of like...

Continue this way for a while. I don't know next year's an election year So who knows like how much pressure the Biden administration is gonna put on the Federal Reserve or other? Countries are gonna put on their central banks, but I suspect that it Like this is the thing about fiat money. You can't predict anything You don't know how things are gonna go and they can change their mind at any time and suddenly start printing like crazy and buying Up all kinds of distressed securities or something

Or they might not. They might let the rates get even higher. Like go, you know, early 80s style, like 11, 12, 13, 15, 19 percent. And, and, and let that go. Who knows? It's very difficult to predict. And that's, but what we do know is that Bitcoin is sound money and that sound money will, hard money will always be, have an advantage over easy.

Blake (31:12.11)
20.

Jimmy Song (31:31.79)
That's what fear money is.

Blake (31:34.024)
I meant to interject earlier. What do you think about the bricks and their decoupling from the US or their, in the case of India, you know, they're kind of aligning the kind of multi alignments of sorts, but there's a lot of talk from the Bitcoin world about what that backstop becomes for that combined currency if they do it. But it seems like there's a lot of moves with just stacking gold and several of the key bricks countries as a, as a kind of hedge against the

U.S. geopolitical heft it has in turning screws on neighboring countries, UAE, Saudi, etc. I wonder if you have any thoughts on how that shakes out.

Jimmy Song (32:09.202)
Yeah, so I talk about that a little bit in the book with, you know, the global incentives and sort of the establishment of the dollar hegemony at Bretton Woods and how it then turned to the petrodollar after the Nixon shock and so on. The main thing to recognize here is that the US has been in control of the world economy for the last 80 years. Probably, and you know,

probably the last eight years, certainly the last 50. And it's because of having the world reserve currency and the reason why the US has been involved in so many conflicts that are nowhere near where the US actually is, right? It's on the other side of the world, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, and Ukraine. Like they're just nowhere near the US, yet we find ourselves in all of those conflicts.

largely because this is part of the central bank complex, the monetary complex that the US has built. So one of the things I point out is that the countries that tend to experience hyperinflation, the Argentinas of the world.

Jimmy Song (33:27.334)
and stuff like that. Venezuela and Zimbabwe, certainly. They all have something in common, and it's not what you would think. Of course, they have terrible monetary policy and probably more socialist governments and stuff like that. But the real sin that they've committed is that they've pissed off the US. They're not engaging in the foreign policy that the United States wants.

This is one of the major weapons that the US has for getting cooperation from a lot of other governments is monetary policy. So if you don't follow the US's lead on certain foreign policies, then you're not going to get the bailout when you need it. What a lot of central banks, you know, they get into pickles all the time. So.

If you don't have enough of US dollars to defend the peg of your own currency, well, you're kind of out of luck unless the US bails you out. So, you know, in central bank terminology, this is called the swap line. So you lend them dollars and they pay you back later. So it's a way of money printing for a different central bank. And for US allies, this facility has opened up.

many, many times. So if you're South Korea, if you're Japan, if you're Taiwan or wherever, you're going to get access to these swap lines so that as you're running out of dollars, you have more ammo to keep that peg. But if you've pissed off the US, if you're not part of the Alliance of the Willing in Iraq, for example,

then they're going to not be so kind as to give you that swap line. So what happens? Well, you enter into hyperinflation. It's a political and confidence thing that you can't escape from. So a lot of these countries end up sort of doing the will of the US, not because they're so aligned and they believe in everything that the US is doing. It's because there's a big stick at the end.

Jimmy Song (35:47.058)
It's monetary rescue that you're not going to get if you get into trouble. And lo and behold, a lot of these countries have gotten into trouble. And Erdogan in Turkey, for example, has pissed off the US a lot. So the US is not going to give this guy any sort of swap line for a central bank. And what's happening? Well, they have over 40% inflation.

Blake (36:00.715)
Yep

Jimmy Song (36:15.134)
You know, their currency is devaluing all the time. And this is the game that the US gets to play. So with regard to your question on BRICS, what happened with Russia is kind of unprecedented in the sense that the entire world was on the dollar standard, whether they wanted to admit it or not. Even the USSR, to a large degree, was under the dollar standard. They just got euro dollars off of communist friendly banks in Europe, and they printed money on.

on the Soviet Union's behalf whenever they needed external goods and services. What's happening now is very different because the US basically cut off Russia. And that was an unprecedented move in the sense that Russia can't do anything with dollars anymore. All their bank accounts were seized, taken, stolen, more or less, but justified or whatever.

they are no longer on the dollar and they will never be on the dollar again. And being who they are, they now have this alliance of BRICS and these are not the G 20 countries, the countries that tend to follow us policy. They are a second poll in this monetary world order. And instead of a mono polar world, now we're going to get a bipolar world. Now I don't really think that BRICS is going to be that

successful, but the fact that they exist tells you that they need a different system. The countries that make it up aren't exactly trustworthy, and I have trouble believing that a third world country is going to suddenly start trusting authoritarian regimes that have very little history of keeping their promises, but they're going to try. And within their sphere of

they may be able to get something up and running, at which point you have a bipolar monetary world. And that's something that hasn't happened in a very long time and it causes chaos.

Blake (38:25.755)
Well, they happen to be trading more than 50% of the world's most precious commodity being oil in their own currencies. So if nothing more, that is a huge sort of threat to the status quo, the American hegemony, and doesn't really matter what the other G19 countries do, given that. And I agree with you, the trustworthiness of the countries, but they also happen to be home to some of the

Jimmy Song (38:30.678)
Mm-hmm.

Blake (38:51.879)
I guess, but countries with the most potential and growth, you know, billion, four people in India, you know, a lot of challenges there, but you can't deny the thirst of those people, uh, you know, Balaji's, uh, Balaji's trained a bit with that one in terms of the woke West, you know, and you look at China, India, and then this collection of other countries in some pretty aspiring countries in Africa, like Nigeria, for instance, maybe South Africa turns the corner. Um,

And that getting back to your point earlier about the increased adoption of Bitcoin, I think you said, and places where people are more likely to use it as money. What is your stance on the criticality of Bitcoin becoming actual day-to-day monetary usage? And we think about lightning and such in the countries like the US, but how do you see that developing and how critical is it to the next five years of Bitcoin? Do you think?

Jimmy Song (39:40.972)
Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Song (39:48.878)
Well, people tend to spend the bad money first. So I think what happens first is you spend whatever fiat money that you have and only at that point are you willing to part with your Bitcoin. And really, it's going to come down to the merchants. It's when merchants demand Bitcoin that it becomes a medium of exchange. If there's any other option, people are going to pay with those other options because...

Blake (39:52.189)
Yeah.

Jimmy Song (40:14.53)
This is your storage currency. This is your store of value. This is what allows you to plan for the future. You can't do that with fiat money. So what are people gonna do? They're not gonna be spending Bitcoin if they can help it. But if a merchant has a good or service that you can't get any other way and they're demanding Bitcoin, then that's what they're gonna use. Now that's very infrequent today. I mean, I do it for my course.

There's some other Bitcoiners that demand Bitcoin for their goods and products. But a lot of other people have lots of other payment options. And that's one of the, dare I say, virtues of fiat money is that it is extremely easy to pay with over a lot of space. And this is actually one of the Keynesian

fallacies is how you need like a velocity of money, lots of money sluicing through the economy. So in a sense, they've been motivated to make that very easy. Is Bitcoin going to be as easy as fiat and even in like the next couple of years? Not really. I think fiat is going to be always easier, at least for the time being. It's really when people recognize Bitcoin for

Blake (41:12.714)
the

Jimmy Song (41:36.814)
for its store of value and the hyperinflation of the dollar prevents them from taking the dollar, that it's going to really become the medium of exchange or method of payment that I think a lot of people envision. That's not to say that it isn't useful. There are places in El Salvador, for example, where there aren't credit card terminals and stuff like that. There, it makes sense. But yeah, a lot of...

places, it's like trying to get into 7-Eleven or something. There's nobody that's interested in paying for it. I mean, maybe a few people, but the vast majority of people would rather keep their Bitcoin and spend their dollars.

Blake (42:18.929)
I think remittance is one kind of a bright spot, right? Because it may be a bit difficult to figure out the first time, but the savings when they're not scamming you for eight and 10% of your money to send money back home to Nigeria or Ukraine or wherever it may be, that's been a great use case, Russia. Oh yeah. Right.

Jimmy Song (42:21.09)
Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Song (42:33.598)
or Russia, if you have relatives in Russia, there's zero ways to get it there right now, other than their-

Blake (42:41.127)
So I think that's where we see it take off. So in terms, kind of wrap it up here in terms of hope, um, what it's kind of summarizing your book, you know, we know, uh, people need to go read this. Great book, um, covers all the bases in detail, but I think we need to kind of focus on the hope piece, especially for, uh, maybe the younger generation. Like you said, with coming up on 15 years of history, it's like, uh, when they talked about folks that the kids that only grew up with iPhones in their hands, right, the iPhone generation. Before that, it was folks.

Jimmy Song (42:51.731)
Hehehe

Jimmy Song (42:57.262)
Mmm.

Blake (43:14.042)
And we're getting to a period now with this group coming up that maybe it's young Zoomers, for instance, Bitcoin has been a part of their lives. Maybe their parents into it, maybe they're not. But in terms of entering, I guess their adult years and potentially first jobs, Bitcoin could really kind of write the course for a whole new millions and millions of people. How do you think about?

Jimmy Song (43:20.111)
Hmm.

Jimmy Song (43:36.978)
Yeah, it could. Unfortunately, they've been sort of debased by Keynesian propaganda and so on. So they think climate change is the biggest thing because they've been told that all their lives and so on. I am seeing though that there are young people that are very interested in this stuff and mostly they have to learn it on their own because they're certainly not learning it through our current education system.

The few places that have courses on it, it's all infested with altcoins, right? They give some sort of grant to a university and that's so of course, the university is going to be pumping that altcoin or whatever. And that's really where the hope is, is that there are a lot of people, like you said at the beginning, that are trying to find out what the truth is on their own. And this is always the hope is that more people...

Blake (44:18.672)
Right.

Jimmy Song (44:35.138)
go and verify and not trust the authorities because the trust that we've placed in the authorities has been abused every which way. And unfortunately, that's meant that we've been manipulated, we've been abused, we've been taken advantage of, we've been exploited in all kinds of ways as to benefit them. And young people are no exception and they've unfortunately gone through.

probably some of the toughest three years that you could as sort of like an adolescent or somebody in college or something like that. But that hopefully also makes them more resilient and more questioning of the narratives that are around the mainstream, which is hey, climate change is a big problem and we needed to do all of this even though it doesn't make any logical sense. There is hopefully a respect for truth

Blake (45:09.314)
Yep.

Jimmy Song (45:31.674)
is at the core of the human heart that leads them down the right path. And the nice thing is that with the advent of the internet and so on, you can find out anything you want if you just are willing to dig enough. And it requires some confidence in your own cognitive abilities to suss out what's true or whatever. But all of the information is out there. If

details of the vaccine or this or that. It's all there. It's just a matter of you like going out and figuring out what's true. Similar thing with Bitcoin or any of the topics that I wrote about in the book. It's not like the information in there is like completely hidden and you have to go to some obscure journal to find out. It's all out there. Most of the information is public.

The thing that we need from young people is courage to have their, you know, to trust their own mind and rational reasoning capabilities. Because unfortunately, what I've seen is that most people, not just young people, but older people too, they find comfort in trusting experts or authorities. And they just sort of spot whatever opinion their authorities say. And

This is unfortunately very common in the fiat world. If you have a job, you take the opinions of whatever the company that you're working for and so on. But getting out of that and thinking for yourself, I think that's the hope. And I believe that a lot of people want to do that. I believe that a lot of people recognize reality and are rational and can't suspend reality for too long without going completely crazy. And

Of course, we do have a lot of people that have gone completely crazy, but there are enough people that don't want to that are starting to look at the reality of monetary shenanigans that have been happening under fiat money, as well as a lot of other stuff. So that's the hope, is that reality has a way of storming back and we are the agents of the...

Jimmy Song (47:57.834)
rebellion against fiat money.

Blake (48:00.349)
The Rezzi Stans. Yeah, Seek and You Shall Find comes to mind, you know, the truth will set you free. And when you were talking there about people, if they just get out there and search for the truth, instead of listening to the broadcast, you know, many people, 40 and older grew up at the broadcast age when mom trusted the local television reporter from her favorite channel, The Weatherman, you had comments on his style or what have you.

No one watches that stuff anymore. Now we're seeing big, big voices escape that matrix. So the broadcast matrix, the likes of Tucker, we don't have time to go into Malay and the whole Argentine thing, but to see him getting 350 million views, which is well over a hundred X what he would have gotten on a good day on Fox. That's pretty encouraging. And we've got platforms like X, we've got Nostra of course, and other places. But I was also thinking about the parallel.

with like you said, people gotta wake up, they gotta think because they've been propagandized by the universities and Keynesian economics and everything else, but it's not really different from the secular world. And what am I getting from maybe pursuing this life that's broadcast by Hollywood, this secular sort of hookup culture, no marriage, delay marriage, no kids, you'll live for yourself, nihilism and everything else is not dissimilar from the general revelation in the Bible of if you just observe nature.

You know, you can, maybe you aren't trained in how to develop your opinions because they don't do that in school these days. Uh, just, just take the, take the, uh, what the teacher says is verbatim as truth and go about your way. But in this general revelation idea, when people seek out God, they can see evidence of God in the rev, you know, the general revelation of nature. Um, and I think that leads people down a similar path. So as these doors start to open, I think we're seeing kind of an awakening.

Jimmy Song (49:43.391)
Mm.

Blake (49:50.111)
of people and it takes, it takes an army of people like yourself, ourselves to spread that word, to talk about it, to massage those, those narratives. But, uh, I think people do see the truth in that. And we're not just trying to sell them, uh, a product, this thing called Bitcoin, right, that's going to, um, fix everything. It's like, yeah.

Jimmy Song (50:10.926)
Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of people are still enslaved and don't really know that they are. And that's really at the heart of this analogy that we've made with the Matrix and escaping or breaking free from it. It really does take a lot of courage. I don't know if this is something that you observe, but a lot of people that were just so adamant.

vaccines and stuff. They've kind of gone quiet, right? Because they, you know, they're seeing all the evidence and they don't want to admit that they're wrong. And so they're sort of in an existential crisis almost because what do I believe? Am I just supposed to shut up? And they're realizing something really dark about themselves.

with regard to a lot of that. And I think in many ways that's a good thing. You need to sort of recognize that you were wrong in many ways and that you did something honestly pretty horrible, but it might come to something like that happening at an even larger scale for a lot of people to wake up.

But I do find it encouraging that, like, you know, I've done some polls on some of these sites and stuff. I don't think there's any, like, tolerance for another lockdown or anything close to it. Just, those people that were Karens at the beginning of the pandemic, they've mostly gone quiet. And I think in many ways, it's like the shame inside them that's keeping them quiet.

because they can't admit that they're wrong, but they're not gonna go do that again. And at the other end, you have people that were protesting, were shouted down, but then now you have a lot of righteous anger on the side of the people that are essentially in rebellion.

Blake (52:28.946)
Yeah, I haven't heard many apologies. The day that Keith Obermann issues a mea culpa about all this will be, you know, something that's probably never going to happen.

Jimmy Song (52:38.122)
I mean, his passion, like he was very passionate, right? A lot of people on the left were very passionate. The only thing that they can get up that same level of passion about these days is Donald Trump. Like there's, there is like, they're not going to be, um, uh, they, they just don't, like, they don't have the same sort of energy, if that makes sense. It's, it's just not there anymore because.

This whole thing was just so obviously bad.

Blake (53:12.519)
Yeah, it was a bad hill to choose to die on and unfortunately many people died suddenly on that hill. So yeah, the future is going to be interesting. I think Bitcoin is going to continue its momentum forward and I think it'll fix a lot of things on the way. So where can people find you, Jimmy? And where will you be next?

Jimmy Song (53:34.378)
Yeah, so you can find me on, I guess, X now, at Jimmy Song. And I have some links that you can click on my profile. But yeah, the book is Fiat Ruins Everything. You can go to fiatruinseverything.com and I have links on various places that you can go order it, you know, using Bitcoin.

Blake (53:58.83)
Fantastic. And you'll be speaking in Amsterdam at Bitcoin Amsterdam next month, right? Opacific.

Jimmy Song (54:03.334)
Yeah, so the next conference is Pacific Bitcoin that I'll be at in LA. And then after that, I'll be in Bitcoin Amsterdam. And finally, I'll be in Lugano Plan B Forum in...

Blake (54:16.533)
Good to wait around up the year. Well, thanks so much for your time. I know you're busy, busy man. Keep up the great work and we'll look for your next book in 2024. Right? All right, Jimmy. Peace out. Have a good one.

Jimmy Song (54:27.356)
We'll see.