I'd like to share some thoughts on the modern economic system so hopefully you ate your breakfast this morning your brain's working this is a pertinent topic especially with all this interest in crypto today I had let's see it's it's the end of January 20125 and I fielded some questions and
had some conversations with a few friends this week with you're were probably closer to normal Gen X Type people as far as their exposure to Modern economic ideas which are more popular with the younger generation so they were asking me questions about crypto and everything so I figured maybe it's a good time to share some of these ideas which have
been stockpiling for a while but before we get into this I I want to make some disclaimers I'm going to say some things that are pretty negative about modern investment options if you want to call them that but I want to be clear I'm not telling you not to first off I'm not giving you investment advice at all the only investment advice I have is find out what Jesus would do in your place
and do it and uh that's the that's the best investment you can make the particulars of that are both up to you and uniquely your responsibility the decisions you make will determine where you end up and so you're the one that's on the hook for that so you have to figure it out but anyway and as far as particulars go specifics I'm not
saying don't invest in the stock market I'm not saying don't invest in crypto I'm not saying I wouldn't do those things I'm not saying that the Lord wouldn't do those things I'm certainly not saying that there aren't people who are making tons of money by doing those things and this is definitely not a Prosperity Gospel pitch I'm not saying if you live the gospel you will get or
stay Rich the Lord said a lot about that particular part and actually we're not even going to talk about that a whole ton in this presentation we're keeping it focused on some other things namely I'm telling you that as the economy becomes increasingly unjust you're going to have to increasingly choose and intentionally choose choose to live by the principles of justice of
God's justice and you're going to have to discover what those are you're going to have to realize that the battle is not the war you're going to have to make specific decisions knowing full well that they're not long-term optimal but that long-term optimality requires this short-term decision that's the the battle versus the war
and basically what this situation looks like is a steamroller rolling down the street and imagine a handful of change out in front of it and and Modern Life requires you to go and pick up that money but you need to know what that Steamroller is you need to know where you are relative to it how fast it's moving and in this case you know a normal Steamroller just just has a set
speed and it moves pretty slow it's a big heavy thing but in this case in terms of the modern economy this thing lurches forward so there's really no amount of money that's worth grabbing at that's right by the steamroller because that thing even if it looks like it's moving slowly it could Lurch forward and run you over and we'll learn later in this presentation why that kind of life not
only is a bad to get run over by a steamroller but in in terms of how this analogy applies today living that way makes you least prepared to get run over by a steamroller there are ways to live where you have deep meaning and purpose that will if you do get run over by a steamroller it will actually lead to the best possible
result of that because it doesn't have to crush you anyway so what what's modern wealth like it's like a lottery most it it so not only do most ways of getting highly wealthy today require you to make bets that are very bad bets but this is increasingly
spreading out from just ultra wealthy paths so it's it's becoming the case that increasingly that just a normal middleclass life requires you to make very risky decisions and very dangerous decisions that wasn't the case in the past but this is this is an
outcome that that stems from the fact that our money is fake and the value of the dollar just continually crashes every day it's it's less than it was before so to help you understand this I want to talk a little bit about the game of roulette so roulette is a spinning wheel and it's got black squares and red squares and there are numbers and you can place different bets but 50% of the
places the marble can land are red and 50% of the places the marble can land are black so one of the bets you can make is on whether it will land on a red or black space And so there's a 50% chance for either of those outcomes you I I saw video people have done this people have have bet massive
sums of money on red or black I saw a video where a guy actually sold his house and went to a casino and put it all I don't remember if it was on red or black but who did this bet now let me ask you why would a casino allow you to make this bet so anytime you're making a bet in a casino realize that the only reason a casino allows you to be there embedding in the
ways it allows in the games is because over the long term The House Always Wins now that doesn't mean that there won't be a specific case where a specific person will not come out ahead people do win when they when they make bets in a casino there are winners but if you look at the long term whether
it's a cross all people or if that if that person keeps betting even if they won even if they won big if they keep betting they will lose the casino always The House Always Wins that's what you have to remember okay so here here we go with some with some math so hopefully like I said hopefully you ate breakfast the first time you bet
everything on red there's a 50% chance of winning the second time you bet there's also a 50% chance of winning so say you win and I don't know what the return is but let's say they double your money okay hey so you walk in there with $100,000 you put it all on red you just doubled your money that's an enormous gain like
let's say that 100,000 is your life savings you you scraped and saved and you worked your crummy job that you don't like and you ate beans and rice every day to save that money and you just doubled it you have just doubled because you didn't really do much to do that you just doubled the value that you find in all the things you had to
sacrifice to get there you just doubled it that's what happens psychologically okay in this situation then you bet it all again and you're hoping you're going to double it again and now you're fourfold in the in the value right over what it was before if you win but what are the odds of winning what are the odds of betting it all on
red twice in a row and winning it's not 50% each time is 50% but the math on this you have to multiply those probabilities so what's half of 50% it's 25% there's a 75% chance that you will lose everything if you bet twice what about three times in a row that math gets a little harder four times five times each time you cut it in half the
odds of winning over all of those you cut it in half from the time before right and the odds of losing go to very close to 100% very quickly in the modern economy you increasingly have to make bets like this this in order to come out not just wealthy but to come out normal you have
to make very risky bets and I'm not just talking about financial bets although that's the specific focus of this presentation you know getting married is a very risky bet and it's an increasingly dangerous bet to make with each passing day because of all the societal changes even asking someone out is get get pretty dang
dangerous because of the false accusations that can occur and increasingly do occur you know what job you choose is a risky decision and it's becoming more dangerous so we could go on about this but that's the pattern this rule roulette principle is something you have to think about okay so anything you can do to move away from the the big
dangerous bets and to focus on ones that have a much higher return probabilistically the net benefit the the net expected benefit is much higher that's a good thing to find those things and focus on those right so we're going to talk about that here now just so you know I'm not making all this stuff up here's a quote from the open
AI scammer Sam Alman this guy he tricked a bunch of people including Elon Musk into thinking that he was starting a nonprofit to produce AI for everybody and then he decided to actually make it a private business after it started to get a lot of traction and uh this weasel said the most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion and this is true today it's
true today it's been true for a while but this is a feature of modern Society modern monetary policy actually and we'll get to that okay people who are entrepreneurs today are not rational people they believe in themselves to the point of delusion why because almost every startup will
fail and most of the ones that succeed don't actually result in the kind of benefit for the founder that would make their sacrifice worthwhile it just benefits the investors and I won't get into the Weeds on explaining all of this but it's true the unicorns you see the the Zuckerberg the Altman's the
musks these are people who put everything on red 10 times in a row and one 10 times in a row the Bezos what they have been paid for if you had to boil it down to one thing is not their Merit even Elon Musk who has solved all of these impossible problems or
or um Steve Jobs who managed to collect and Lead teams that did incredible things if you had to boil it down to one thing that caused all that to happen it wasn't Merit it was their willingness to bet everything over and over again which was irrational that's not
something that everyone should do it it helps everyone that there are people crazy enough to do it and most of them are motivated by this lottery payout that's statistically speaking they are not going to get and we all win because they're they're willing to do things like that to an extent if the products they make
are actually good and useful but it's very irrational for a person to do that now here's where again it's a feature of modern economics here's where this roulette principle falls apart because in the
modern world and this is an aspect of the Injustice in the modern system in the modern world one of the reasons that that people like Elon Musk exist and you know about him is because modern entrepreneurship becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy once someone has won the
lottery if they play again I'm talking about the literal Lottery if you play again your odds winning are as low as everyone else but with successful entrepreneurs the money will flow to you more easily investors line up against entrepreneurs who've already gone public with one company or sold a company
profitably investors will throw money at you but you'll also get press and between the money and the press your odds of winning go up by a lot because that money is needed and the Press is needed and customers will come to you you'll get you'll get news articles and things you'll get notoriety right and so it becomes easier to build a company once you've had one successful one it's
much more likely you can do it again but it's not because of Merit now is there an aspect of Merit sure like if you if you can successfully run one company and you figured out the challenges of that is it easier to do it again absolutely but the odds are so low and so many of those things lie outside of your power like making a product Market
fit that's it's almost black magic right it's so hard to do that it hard's not the word it's it's a complex system that's beyond Discovery the only way to find it out is to do it and doing it is going to cost millions of dollars in years of time so I've I've gotten bogged down on this
slide but there are a lot of ideas wound into this right so modern Prosperity is different than historical Prosperity so my question is why and here's my joke for you it's a it's a baby making joke which I think we're going to come back to again later in this presentation so there might be two baby making jokes where does Modern Prosperity come
from well when an oil well and a money printer love each other very much that's the answer we live in a time of unprecedented cheap energy and unprecedented debt and if you look at any aspect of modern prosperity and you drew a pie chart of where does it come from it's
not some brilliant inventor it's not some new fangled discovery almost all of the pie chart will be because of coal oil and printed money and that's relatively new and and like I've already said it's unprecedented the amount of resources we have it's
unprecedented and what it does is it drives a disconnect between reality and what we have in our modern world what do I mean by that well just these ideas we could spend a lot of time talking through and so I'm only barely touching the surface here but basically everything in your life
from the food you eat to the convenience you enjoy to the car you drive to the toilet that you flush everything you need to look at that and say people historically did not have these things through all history right what do you do
personally that entitles you to that degree of wealth versus the historic norm and the answer rounded to the next nearest Truth for everyone is nothing you don't do anything to deserve any of those things you might say but I go to work every day and I do this and I you know even from before the guy who's eating
beans and rice to save some extra money and invest it still rounded to the next nearest truth that is blatantly insignificant compared to the difference between the historic norm and modern wealth the fact that you can eat beans and rice and save money and invest the difference and you still have a place to live and all these other
things do you see so what happens is this Prosperity is so disconnected from cause and effect that it softens the consequences of really bad ideas what do I mean by that here's an example suppose that you're a parent and you have a child who's 27 and that child lives with you and that child's getting
a gender studies degree and that child's spending let's say as a girl spending her Summers backpacking Europe that child has never had a job the child has her own car she's got a cell phone she's got a computer that child is disconnected from reality and how is that possible who
makes it possible well you do how can you afford to fund her lavish lifestyle well through funding money it's it's because you have tons of money and how can you say that you don't deserve what you have how could someone outside how could I say that well you clearly don't have the wisdom that comes with that money which means you got it in a way
that you don't deserve you are disconnected from reality and now now you're perpetuating an even bigger disconnect in your daughter you see how that works and it Cascades and it corrodes Society the whole thing's corrupted from the head to the toe here is a graph these are
histograms of if if you imagine people and you're measuring them by their Merit versus how much money they make now we don't have have to dive deeply into what we mean by Merit but let's just simplify it and say people who work smart and hard we will talk some about particulars
a little later the top graph would be a just system a system where Justice is in play what happens is the more Merit you have the more wealth you have and it's exponential the reason for that is Merit like so many other virtues it's much more difficult to have
more of it the more of it you have and so accordingly you get paid more in an exponential curve okay hopefully that makes sense but what do we have instead we have this we have it so that some of the people who have high Merit also make a lot of money like maybe this is Elon
Musk he solved all these problems that the world hasn't solved and he should be rewarded for the risks that he takes okay I'm not claiming that that's not something that's worth something it is but here's a whole bunch of people who have a whole ton of Merit and they don't really make anything different from anyone else across the
scale Maybe the guy who fixes your car is 50 times better than the average mechanic that's completely possible he will absolutely not make 50 times the average mechanic salary maybe maybe you you're a programmer and you're 50 times better than the average
programmer you'll be lucky if you make three times what an average programmer makes that tops off very quick and then we go down to the bottom of the Merit scale let's say that you've worked for the IRS for 40 years and you're a GS whatever you're making tons of money relatively speaking and you're providing a service that actually makes the world a worse place but also your job's not very hard
you do the same thing day in day out you have forever you work from home and you you take like two weeks to answer a letter right you log in you C check a couple of emails and you go back to watching the pric is right so that's an unjust system you know you're you're a secretary and basically all you do is you write emails but you're making
75k because you happen to work for a successful company so the the Merit there is the the from the other people who work at this company not you you're just you know interchangeable with any other secretary and your job's going to get phased out by AI but for right now you're still making halfway decent money that's not
just and we could go on and on with this okay but the point is there's a disconnect between Merit and wealth in an unjust system so here's one of the first takeaways modern money like I said it comes from fossil fuels and debt government printing money modern money
is fake so I'm not saying energy is fake obviously it's not but it it doesn't have to be used for what actually has worth and most of the time it's not modern money is fake but what it buys doesn't have to be that should be doesn't have to be not is not it could be but it doesn't have to be
fake so what's real wealth what can you exchange fake money for that has real value a lot of people out there will tell you oh buy precious metals buy crypto buy this buy that the number one thing that you can purchase with money as far as value goes is time time is the most important thing
why because you can spend time on what actually has value why are we here it's a pretty fundamental question we are here to improve we are here to improve ourselves and others that's the reason well you need time to do that you might say well what about
social entrepreneurship you could build a business that helps people yeah and and hopefully hopefully there are a lot of businesses whose just normal products make life better that doesn't have to be this overtly charitable purpose right you know a paperclip makes life better you just a regular business can
make life better sure absolutely but if you want to to increase meaning in life it's going to diverge off of the profit motive those those things are not one and the same they're similar they're related but they're not the same no one's going to pay you to sit in
a room all day and improve yourself you know you you could subdivide that and say like if you want to improve physically maybe you could be an elite athlete sure okay and you might get sponsorship for that sure okay you you might want to improve yourself intellectually and you could be a writer and then people would pay you for that okay but in all these things at the end of the day someone else is telling you
what has greatest value if you're an if you're a p vter you don't get to decide that you're just going to train you know your your back all day along beyond the direct application of how it makes you a better po vter you have to focus on the thing that's bringing in the money same thing for writing maybe maybe
you write one good book and it's it's about you know some some story it's it's a novel about a uh a prince with magical powers or something and the book's successful and now you're stuck turning out sequels in this univers of this magical Prince and you might think well I want to write a story about an elephant you don't get to right it doesn't matter if that's the greatest Improvement you see how they're different and we could go on and on with
other examples of this Improvement is most important for yourself because that influences everything else second your family third your community fourth the rest of the world and that's the prioritization that's what money can buy you know the Beatles said money
can't buy love but it can buy Improvement it buys you time so that make you can make yourself and others better and time is one of other resources because along the way you're probably going to need other things not just time you need food you need a place to live you need need ways to get the message out to make the
difference but there's a critical cohort within the set of all resources it's food shelter and clothing and it's not just it's not just um you know you could fill up a bin it's not a one-time storage of these things you could fill up a closet with clothes you can fill up a bin with socks or something you can have food stored up for the next year or
two that's not the limit of what I'm saying the ability to sustain sustainably produce this I don't mean sustainable in an environmentalist way I mean to continue to produce these things and historically surprise this is what the first level of wealth consisted of building a family building yourself building a family having some standing
in your community I don't mean recognition I mean a place where you are positioned to help others having land being able to produce food on that land so the knowhow to do that and the the equipment whatever you need the wherewithal and the ability to produce clothing a house to live in right but almost no one thinks of these
things you'll find a contingent of people they tend to be Catholic I'm not sure why who were in the tech industry and have found ways to go remote and maybe they're still working maybe they've cashed out equity and they're totally off of that now but they're buying homesteads in the middle of nowhere and they're focusing
on these things now these are some of the smartest people in the world they did really hard things and solved a lot of hard problems in ways that most people couldn't and they're flush with way more money than most people have and what are they choosing to do with with those brains and that money they're buying land in the middle of nowhere they're having a bunch of
kids and they're homesteading now why do you think that is so going back to these graphs of Merit and wealth let me ask you in these two systems what are the differences what are the differences in the global benefit so however you want to Def
Define that benefit if you could somehow magically total up the benefit in the entire world from these two systems how do you think it would differ between them so if we added up the height of these lines on the bottom graph and the area under the curve of the top graph how would they differ the top one would be massively greater massively
greater why is that why is that well I said you could Define benefit any way you want and I stand by that but to understand it better let's fix some particulars to this we could talk about material wealth how easy it is to put food on the table can you pay your
your um utility bills do you have a car do you have the ability to put fuel in it and maintain it can you clothe yourself can you handle emergencies do you have health care what about stability how often do you move what radical changes occur in your
life do you find yourself suddenly out of work if you do how able are you to survive anyway through whatever means what about peace how much anxiety and depression do you think is in the top system a just system versus an unjust system do you think there's a difference why what about meaning which is obviously
related to the former question do you think people on the top are more likely to find deep meaning in their lives or the the people in the unjust system what about Joy I didn't put Power on here I'll Define the word because I know there's some funky definitions of it today
do you think it's easier or more difficult to obtain what you desire in a just system or an unjust system and this is connected to something else on this list which is mobility so I I was born poor I was born in a in a family and we didn't have any money and I'm not poor now well I guess technically I am but you know I live in a nice house and um
I'm able to I am where I want to be in my life we'll put it that way as far as what I'm able to spend my time on each day okay I I'm not chained to three- part-time jobs um in in in a in a business that I don't care about okay well that's Mobility I was able to go from from a place where
the normal thing would have been to inherit the situation of my parents and bootstrap out of poverty attain a career in a in a difficult rewarding field several actually and uh of course I was cancelled from all of that but now I am preaching the gospel
full-time and isn't that great and on that note this Channel and the books I write everything that I do for about 70 hours a week in Ministry each week is fully funded by contributions from people like you and if that's something that you participate in I thank you for it it's something that's always needed and if it's if if you're not participating in that and you find these things valuable
I sincerely ask you to consider making a monthly recurring donation you can do that at upward.org slash donate and what I request is something that reflects the value that you find in these materials up to the point that it doesn't displace anything more important in your life so I thank you for doing that so um and I apologize up front for
having to say that again and again uh but unfortunately very few people respond to this request and uh it's it's something that has to be said or else we risk not being able to do this um many people watch these videos very few contribute so I appreciate those who do so back back to the scheduled
programming here who do you think has a greater motivation to do the right thing people in a just Society or people in an unjust society and so you start to understand that these things matter quite a bit and this is more than just some ephemeral undertone to the societal situation this is deeply woven into the
tapestry of how we live each day I want to share with you something that I call the Eden Rule and I started developing this idea way back when I was a professor and I had the the dream of transitioning out of the research I was doing after I got tenure
um I was going to spend my sabatical finishing these books I I had been collecting notes on uh with with new ideas about complexity and of course that that didn't happen with the cancellation but one of the ideas from that material is what I call the Eden Rule and so you'll remember that in the Garden of Eden God quote unquote cursed it wasn't actually a curse it was a blessing but that's beyond the scope of this
presentation but God cursed Adam that he would obtain his Daily Bread through the sweat of his brow you remember that and so in a very deep way the output of humanity it's it's denominated in the physical labor that en able-bodied man can do in a
day and the case that I would make is it's also inherently limited to that now if you're familiar at all with gardening in any way and you understand that the vast majority of calories that we consume either directly or indirectly through feeding cattle come from grain and you understand in at least a limited way the process of of growing
and and processing grain from the raw item in the in the stock to say flour then then you will understand that subsistence farming is an inherently impoverished lifestyle it is dramatically labor
intensive so that's on on the one hand that's the bad news right if you look around you almost nothing in your life could be sustained if you had to grow it with the labor of your own hands or build it with your own hands and I'm talking about from the dirt I'm not saying like if I maybe you're an electrical engineer if I threw a couple of electronics components you
could solder together a breadboard or whatever that's not what I'm talking about I'm saying if I put put you on a piece of raw land in the wilderness and all you had was your body what could you build so why does this matter because you're probably thinking you're what is this you're crazy talking no think of everything beyond
that as winding a spring maybe maybe better put think of everything beyond that as rubber banded to it so imagine yourself on this raw piece of land and you got all these rubber bands attaching you to the land I know this is weird but just bear with me every step of progress above that towards the modern what what we consider to be the modern
situation puts more and more tension on that rubber band that tension doesn't go away the rubber band never snaps it's going to pull you back to that and the further away you are the more pressure there is the more gravity there is pulling you back now my point in bringing this up is that whatever we consider to be modern
wealth it's real but it's also an illusion you know like you can go to the grocery store and fill your cart with groceries still it's more expensive than it was a year ago or five years ago but you could still do that and you can eat all that food and but some people would disagree that it's real food but you know what I mean there are calories you can consume those
and it will fuel your body so Rob how could you say that it's fake it's mortgaged it's mortgaged anything you don't deserve think of it as a loan with a very high interest rate there is a debt to be paid it will pull you back back and it will pull you back with a velocity matching how far away you are
from what you deserve there are only two ways of escaping the Eden [Music] rule the first is the only real way to do it you establish a group of people who live a higher standard of righteousness the idea with that is if you want sustainable blessings from God
you have to be a better person than you are and in this case it actually takes a group of people one person isn't enough and I won't get into reasons for why that is but it is the other way is what Society offers us instead which is the fake way it's not actually successful in what it purports to be it's a big old bait and
switch and that is as you as an individual or as a group of people or even all of society you do things that cause net loss in the long term you live in ways that cause net loss in the long term and somebody has to pay that bill
now can you live this way as an individual and not have to pay that that bill in this life yes in fact as a general eration the Boomers did that and I'm not saying they were the first generation but they'll probably be the last to to live that way as a whole it becomes more individual after that and subsequent
Generations the problem is when the bill comes due and what you get what what people call a rug pool is when a system suddenly comes collapsing down because the bill comes due there's a scripture about this in Elma 3060 this is the end of the story of Kor so this guy went around preaching some really bad ideas
that he got from Satan and he knew they were bogus but he just repeated them because it felt good he liked the ideas and people gave him uh Fame and money for for sharing them with him with them but in the end he died in a terrible way he lost everything before
he died and the verse says and thus we see the end of him who perverteth the ways of the Lord and thus we see that the devil will not support his children at the last day but doth speedily drag them down to Hell Satan will allow you will Empower you to get away with certain things for as long as it takes to maximize the misery that you experience when he pulls
the rug and he's doing this globally so God wants to generate the greatest Global benefit and Satan wants to generate the greatest Global misery these are important things to understand the bill always comes due the principle is that what is contrary to God cannot endure
and so all these things that people see as good things are actually not good things when we talk about economic decisions you know you get the Dave Ramsey out there oh live off of less than what you earn invest everything into index funds and at some point after you turn 45 You'll Be A Millionaire right so live frugally invest what you save
and here's a really lowrisk thing that's that's extremely likely to pay off in a big way well that was wonderful advice as far as individual results for maybe a 70-year span of time it was really bad advice before that because you would have lost everything in the in the Great Depression and it's really bad advice now but there was a sweet spot for a few
decades where that was great advice and anyone who did that is a millionaire now so what's wrong with that well what's wrong with it is that it won't work today that's number one two I should say it's less likely to work today but two the long-term consequences
of this are bad people complain all the time about this generation who did this and they're really greedy people who have very little grip on reality they tend to be super selfish they're not interested in their kids or their grandkids and uh they're going to spend every scent they earn before they die and just live it up they've been
married four times you know they're very selfish people that's on a whole it's not everybody obviously but but those consequences came from getting a whole bunch of money that was detached from Merit now does that mean they shouldn't have done that no that that was a smart thing to do from the individual
perspective if someone didn't do that it's not like the world would be a better place if one person didn't do that this is one of these tragedies of the commons situations right everyone would have to opt out of that to make a difference but it's unsustainable what do I mean by that well the stock market is a Ponzi
scheme and I should say the modern stock market and it has been fueled by Cheap energy and debt the money that the government prints ends up on the stock market and it's way more complicated than that but that if you have to boil it down to a little blip that's it little bullet and
that's not sustainable you know every single fiat currency ends the same exact way it collapses and like most collapse it's not just a sudden thing it's a process the dollar has lost something like 98% of its value since the Inception of the Federal Reserve
you start printing money the value of the currency goes down and it just keeps going and the more debt we have the less valuable it becomes it's unsustainable now it's unsustainable in two ways at least one if the currency becomes less and less valuable then that offsets any increase in the
market but two eventually it's all going to come down and so it's not sustainable it's it's it's like injecting heroin you get a less and less a lower and lower high the more and more you use it and it takes more of the drug to produce the same results and eventually just get in this death spiral
where it's not possible to get the same high no matter how much you inject and then you kill yourself that's how this works all right well here's a more modern thing there are people out there playing the game of roulette and you know they decided to spare themselves a few avocado toasts or $7 coffees and they
have a life savings of about $675 and they throw it into a few random meme coins which are these dime a dozen cryptocurrencies that spin up every day and some of them will go up by 1,000% and some people win the lottery because it goes up by a lot and then they sell it and then now they have a bunch more cash this is no different
than some scratch off lottery ticket the difference is that there are a lot more people today that will fall for this than scratch off lottery tickets and a lot of young people they don't know any better because they've grown up in a system completely disconnected from reality and uh yeah this this happens
every day it's not sustainable again it's just a lottery that's not that's not a strategy to build wealth in your life oh I'm going to play the lottery every day until I win and then you've got the extremities of this you have people who have worked and accumulated wealth in the traditional ways who are liquidating
that and throwing it all into something like Bitcoin there's a family that got famous a couple years ago because they sold their house they put everything into Bitcoin you got people out there Hawking this you know charging people by the hour to give them quote unquote wealth building advice and they've got all kinds of little sound bites you know bitcoin's a battery it stores wealth blah blah blah
right I've heard people say things like oh you just fight your way to get one Bitcoin you're going to pass down generational wealth to your kids you're going to be the new robber barons I don't want to get into all the details of Bitcoin uh you know my background is computer science I know about the technicals on it I understand that there is technology behind it yeah
there's something called the blockchain there's math but it is not what it purports to be it is way overblown it's absolutely a Ponzi scheme and it will probably never go to zero until the lights go out but people are going to lose a buttload of money on this okay does that mean you can't make money in it in the meantime no it's just
another example of picking up change in front of a steamroller it's not sustainable could you sell your house throw it into something like this what ever it is and double triple quadruple your money yeah it's totally possible but the only way to do it is by making a chain of very irrational decisions you know people I saw a guy
bragging on social media I've been telling you about Bitcoin forever and blah blah blah and it ramped after Trump got elected yeah well guess what would have happened if if Harris got elected it would have collapsed and there are reasons for that and I I need to shorten this video we're we're dragging on way too long here okay it would have collapsed so what you're saying is I won
the lottery man you should have bought a ticket too if people apply that principle you you know to test an idea you need to abstract the principle and then cross test it on other applications that's that's one way of testing how valuable an idea is is how high up the the idea hierarchy can it go and still pass the test and if it doesn't pass at best
you're in a local maximum so with this idea if you abstract the principle and apply it to other things in your life it's disastrously bad and it's very obvious you just think about it for 5 seconds and it's obvious right but what people do is they look at folks who won the lottery they're like yeah maybe I should buy a ticket it
doesn't change the math so in a nutshell the world's Prosperity is today is in spite of justice and it is not sustainable it will come undone God's Prosperity on the other hand it's because of justice and even if
they're temporary so so with the world's Prosperity even if there are temporary blips upward and wealth it's always going to come down and when it does there will be nothing else remaining but God's Prosperity is the reverse it doesn't matter how bad it gets you're always going to have something much more valuable which which primarily is more
of God's character in you okay but secondarily it's his promised because he is just and in the long run everyone gets what they deserve in the Eternal span of time and this is very important so we're narrowing in on the point okay and we're almost through
here do you understand what the societal implications of modern Prosperity are do you know what what it does to Global benefit it's going to make everyone poor we're not there yet but we're getting there we've seen blips of it we've seen blips where with the Russia Ukraine war for
example when that broke out there were famines in the developing world because that that that food you know the debt the global debt was buying food out of of Ukraine for poor regions in the in the in the world and it all dried up overnight and you had places like Egypt that that could grow food if they wanted
to but they had rerouted the the ability to do that the resources for it into other things because they thought well we can get grain we can buy it cheaper than we can grow it so let's just buy it from Ukraine you know the United States does that California grows like 90 some per of the vegetables in this country that
are that are purchased in the store and grown in in the states well what happens when that can't be done anymore all the other Farms that I should say the resources that rerouted into other more profitable things are revealed to be a short-term optimal but long-term suboptimal
decision see how that works what what happens to material wealth with modern Prosperity it goes down haven't I I made a video on this I don't know when it's going to come out have you seen these tiny houses I don't mean the tiny houses on wheels I mean like houses that are being put up in subdivisions that are basically Apartments they're these narrow little things they're like the size of a shipping
container but they they have all the trappings of a normal house just really small what's happening to material wealth young people can't afford to buy a car people can't afford to have kids where does that come from this that's a consequence stability how many people how many Industries are losing their jobs it's happening left and
right peace have you seen charts on depression and anxiety on suicide what about meaning there's a crisis of meaning even wealthy people are complaining about the lack of meaning in life you know the people have won the the race allegedly
I'll show you an example of that in a minute what about Joy do you think people are happier today we know they're not it's been measured so earlier when I was ranting about being rubber banded to a sustain U sustainment I'm sorry a subsistance farm when I was talking about being rubber banded to a piece of raw land you
probably thought that was crazy we have been subjected to the largest bait and switch in the history of mankind where we think that having an iPhone in our hands is worth what we traded for it but on all the things that actually matter on happiness on meaning on peace on
stability and increasingly in all the things we traded it for namely material wealth increasingly the cost is so much higher than the benefit and we will be better off in a subsistence farming Community than we are here and now now there will be an enormous amount of push back on that comment
and I understand that and I don't have time to make the case that's not the point of this video I will get to that at a different time but just look at the things that we can measure you know is there greater motivation to do the right thing under modern Prosperity definitely not what's happening to Crime it's not only increasing but people don't even care
anymore it's getting worse in frequency and intensity and also there's a decaying reaction people are actually cheering criminals in many cases there are statues of criminals and it's going to get worse now what about Mobility we have inverse Mobility it's a race to the
bottom it used to be if you were born in a middle class family you had to do something very wrong to mess that up you had to get on drugs or something right and it and poor kids like me had a had a pathway to bootstrap out of that it was a choice being poor was a choice now it's still a choice but increasingly it's less of a choice and it takes way more
to get as far out of that than before and and most children of middle class families are going to have a very broke life they're going to be broke for their whole lives and you see this you know if if if you got a 9 10y Old at home the odds of that person will ever own their own home are basically
zero the odds that they will ever own their own car are declining towards zero think about that that's crazy but it's true all right well now let's uh let's call on Thomas Jefferson for a quote here to see that these ideas aren't new they've just been disregarded he
said all the capital employed in paper speculation is Barren and useless producing like that on a gaming table no accession to itself it is withdrawn from Commerce and agriculture where it would have produced addition to the common Mass it nourishes in our citizens habits of vice and idleness instead of industry and morality it has furnished effectual
means of corrupting such a portion of the legislature as turns the balance between the honest voters whichever way it is directed now our society has been sufficiently dumbed down that that probably went over your head I don't mean that as an insult to you it's just you know it's kind of like H well I won't get into that
anyway but back in Thomas Jefferson's day what happened was the debts from the revolution uh some some unscrupulous characters decided that they wanted to buy up all the debts from The Revolution and and essentially resell them at a much higher price using the government as the agent to do that and
the way they did that was uh through paper currency and so paper currency is easier to to inflate than uh precious metals and so that was the scheme and what Jefferson said was that uh speculation on currency on fiat
currency it it produced poor qualities in society and one of the problems he said was that once you've once you've experienced this massive gain through speculation so independent of Merit it's very hard to find meaning in the jobs that that normal people have to
work it's no different than during covid when the government started paying people to not go to work it crashed the value that they found in work and let me ask ask you has that been recovered are people happy with going to work again is it easier or harder to get young people to take entry-level jobs than it was before
Co well there you have it so what happens when someone invests their $200 in life savings into a meme coin and comes out with it out of it with $2 million just the other day this happened with with this new Trump cryptocurrency and people that got in on it in the first 2 hours they made like 5,000% return within 24 hours there's
stories all over the place of people throwing in ,000 dollar and and they came out millionaires what do you think that does for the meaning associated with normal life well it totally kills it it totally kills it and what does that do for society it corrodes it right rapidly right so let me share with you some tweets that I've collected on this
topic here's one this guy says basically if you're honest the system is against you the system only benefits Liars who fake everything now let me ask you this how many people have to believe this before everything comes crashing down so you might say well believing this doesn't mean that people want to participate in it they might fight the
system and do the right thing in spite of the system let me tell you the set of people who will do the right thing against the current it's like 1% tops and even those people will only do the right thing in some cases they won't do it all the time this is very very very bad that there are people out there saying these things and thousands of folks are agreeing with them it's very
very bad you don't go and risk everything and work against the grain and do much more than everyone you know if you don't think that there's a really good chance of you being compensated for that you take away those High performers and Society collapses very
quickly here's another one this lady says in 2022 we bought a rental property pause what does this tell you about this lady how normal is it for someone to to buy a rental you have to scrape and save for that that's not something that you just go and do right so here's a person who's oriented towards living at less than her means and putting away and
risking to make things better in the future let's continue the quote we put 20% down in and 50,000 into Renovations at the time Bitcoin was $220,000 if we would have put that 50,000 into Bitcoin at 20K we'd have 2.5 coins and today those would be worth $247,000 hindsight is 2020
Smiley how many people so we're talking about a very small percentage of the population who scrimps and saves to buy rentals okay who who has $50,000 to put into Renovations on top of 20% down how many of those people need to start thinking that they should just throw their money into cryptocurrency and get money for nothing and your chicks for free before Society collapses you think
it's hard to get affordable housing now just wait until would be Real Estate Investors I'm talking small mom and pop types are just dumping their money into cryptocurrency and then if that's not bad enough what happens when the crypto goes south and billions and billions of dollars just evaporate in thin air now you don't have crypto you don't
have middleclass people and you don't have rentals you see how that works here's one this was a video but this guy says me seeing a crypto guy make making $310,000 from $800 in 15 minutes with trumpcoin while I wake up at 6:00 a.m. to go to work see I'm not making this up people
are doing the value comparisons and they're talking about it normal people are making these calculations and they're talking about it you know why doesn't that lady want to get a job at Wendy's because she can make just as much money on only only fans 10 minutes a week and she doesn't care that she's prostituting herself why does that guy not want to work at Panda Express because he can go
on social media and see people turning $800 into 310,000 so why should he be the guy that has to work here's an interesting one this guy says I make about 200,000 per year I live pretty comfortably decent neighborhood drive a new but boring car eat good F food from Whole Foods and my
job's pretty good not going to lie am I supposed to feel like this is enough and I have no reason to start a company is it normal to feel like this is not enough should I quit and start a company so starting a company aside which is a terrible idea for most people there are stories on top of stories of people who make good money
I've seen amounts much higher than this who publicly say that they have no meaning in life and they they they feel like they should feel really good for where they are but but they're they're not happy at all why I don't know what this person does for a living but I can tell you that is worthless it only gives them money and
they have nothing to translate they they don't have they don't know how to translate that money into meaning all they do is go to work and have fringe benefits you know a nice car they go to the gym they eat food what would he do right most of these people
in the comments you'll see people say do you have any kids and they're like nope and if it's a woman she'll probably say I'm too old now but the guys also are too old to uh find women young enough to have kids because of the societal and this is also new this aversion to age gaps all right so enough of the
tweets we've been through all this we see the effects so what's the remedy well you need to start making changes so that your work is more just what is just work it means that you provide benefit that exceeds your cost and it also means that you translate the money you make into
meaning so applying the filter of providing benefit that exceeds your cost rules out a lot of modern jobs now the specific jobs you know we'd have to go through we'd have to shadow people at work to to make that judgment call but there are entire professions that this rules
out their entire professions the the lady a specific job we can pick on the mayor of Los Angeles or the fire chief of Los Angeles I think the fire chief is making close to million dollars more than three4 of a million dollars a year and pay but the reservoirs were empty fire hydrant were empty and and you know the
whole town burned down obviously she was not providing benefit that exceeded her cost okay what about entire professions I'll leave that to you because I think it'll be really offensive if I share that one but there are entire professions that don't provide the benefit that they cost and then we talked about converting that into real
wealth because real wealth is not money it's what you spend the money on that provides meaning you don't find that in get-rich quick schemes like these people who suddenly get rich on crypto or even in slightly less quick Get Rich scream schemes you know I saw a post from a guy got a job at a big tech company and worked really hard for 10
years 15 years did all the things and he's got a net worth of like $50 million now even though he's a totally normal guy not an executive or anything and no meaning in life complaining about it what should I do now you know well here's a recommendation have some kids have some kids now if you've
trained yourself for years and years of your adult life to be a narcissist that's going to be really hard and it's probably not a good idea to have kids because you're just going to give them a terrible life and make them into Psychopaths but having kids is designed as a really low I don't want to say low cost a really high likelihood of return on
investment source of meaning in life it wasn't said well but it's designed to be a quasi automatic source of high meaning in life now you can probably figure out how to have kids on your own that's my second make babies joke in this presentation but one thing I would advise you to do is to not fall prey to
this trap of thinking that good parenting consists of the degree of entertainment that you can enable for your children that's not going to provide you with meaning in fact that's guaranteed to rob you of meaning when you see them become terrible people as adults and you reflect on how much of that is your fault what I advise you to do is make
changes to spend more time with them in ways that actually benefit them that actually improve them and increase their ability to improve others now we're coming full circle to where we started the purpose of life is Improvement now something I could help you figure out how to do better is growing your own food that one's a little less natural in some ways at least and ease
to figure out how to do it at least okay but what I would advise you to do and I've said a lot about this in other videos is to get into a land situation that makes it more possible and productive to grow food to grow more food and the meaning that this will provide in your life will you you will be shocked you will be shocked at how much of the good things we listed
here uh material wealth as food gets more expensive stability you if you know that you're say that your house is paid off and you're in a low property tax area or you've somehow put your house into a foundation or something and gotten out of property tax is a wonderful thing to investigate but you know that you can grow your own food and your house is
paid off what kind of stability is that that's real wealth you know some of the Uber Rich lost everything in these La fires do you think they feel stable they're rich they're filthy rich but do you think they feel stable what about peace you might be surprised to learn how much peace you
can get out of working with the soil and raising animals growing your own food what about meaning and joy again you might be surprised how much you get out of homesteading all right so those are the shortcuts I have for you it's not exactly a get-rich quick scheme but that's uh how to get a massive amount of meaning out of your life is have kids and grow your own food okay or more of
your own food here's again Thomas Jefferson on the topic agriculture is our wisest Pursuit because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth good morals and happiness see you thought it was just some crazy dude giving you crazy ideas but I'm in good company the wealth acquired by
speculation and plunder is fugacious there's a nice word for you fugacious in its nature and fills Society with the spirit of gambling the moderate and sure income of husbandry that's farming begets permanent Improvement quiet life and orderly conduct both in public and private did you know that both Jefferson
and Washington mourned every day they had to spend in public office because they both preferred to be at home on their Farm now these are two of the wisest men who've ever graced this nation why do you think that they preferred their Farm
so here we have it surprise right now this is a particularly long video and I think we're we're probably going to lose a particularly High number of people so I will gift you with a little nugget here I'm putting my cards on the table as fast as I can I just wrote a blog post about how I don't I don't have
secrets in this ministry some people I guess some guys thought I had secret books that I haven't published I have books that aren't finished yet I don't have secret books I don't have secret anything okay but there is a limit in how much I can tell you but that's not because of me I mean I'm limited in the time it takes to put these things into words of course and I'm pushing that limit by doing this
about 70 hours a week uh I don't have more I can cut away from my family or my sleep uh just last night I got up at 11:30 p.m. it's 4:00 a.m. right now I've been doing Ministry since 11:30 last night okay I don't have more time that I can manufacture but I'm also limited by people's ability to receive
these things the more videos I make there's a limit the the reason that that you get a video every other day is because if there are more less people will watch I've tested it so I've got videos queued up for months they're already done they're they're already uploaded if I got hit by a bus tomorrow there would still be videos for the next six months every other
day so part of that limit is I I can only express things so far in the time given but I'm trying to push out as much as I can as fast as I can and these ideas tend to have benefit that far exceed what I'm able to express in the moment getting onto a rural Homestead is one of these ideas and in this
video we took a ton of time to lay out some of these benefits which Thomas Jefferson put so succinctly into this quote and more and more benefits will be shown to you over time and so I I really hope that you're listening and that you're making changes to shift out into the country there are a lot of other things to think about with that but you're
going to see tons of benefits especially if you either don't have kids yet or those kids are still young all right but here's my closing remark I encourage you to live for justice what I mean by that is live so that you deserve wealth whether you presently have it or not this is an immense key to
peace it gives you great power in your prayers to God you can live in such a way that any afflictions any any Financial afflictions that you face or temporal afflictions in terms of like danger of losing your house or you've lost your job or
uh a lot of things are pro process but to live in a way where where your simple but sincere prayer is instantly answered by God can you put a price on that and one of the ways to get there in in the temporal realm of things is as
far as having a house to live in having food to eat you know having a job having a way to earn money live so that you deserve wealth whether you have it or not don't look for shortcuts live so that you understand true wealth because it's not about the money you make it's about what you spend
it on don't seek to be free from toil seek to maximize meaning maximize your contribution to the benefit of the world that's what you should be trying to maximize and again it comes back to improving yourself and improving other people so I hope
that several things from this pre presentation have have stood out to you and give you specific ideas on things you can change to make your life better and make the lives of those around you better so thanks for joining