The current monetary system is fundamentally debt-based, meaning all money in circulation originates as someone's debt. This creates a mathematical certainty that the money supply must continuously expand to service existing debt with interest, which concentrates wealth through the Cantillon Effect—newly created money flows to existing asset holders first, while wage earners face inflation later. This system, which evolved from commodity money to gold to paper claims on gold to modern debt-based currency, creates inherent instability and inequality. The show argues that this debt-based system cannot resolve the contradictions created by AI's deflationary potential, as the monetary system requires continuous expansion while AI should theoretically enable abundance through increased productivity.
welcome to the age of abundance.Added:
What's going on, guys?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to the new show.
Uh 10 a.m. Pacific uh every every weekday from now on. Uh this is Age of Abundance. Welcome in. Seb, good to see you. Uh, good to see a few familiar faces. Look guys, I sent out an email to about five, six hundred people. Uh, and I said like streams live in 30 minutes.
So, appreciate any of you guys who are here for it. Um, but this is episode one. This is an episode that in the future, you know, we'll have hundreds of episodes and we'll look back on episode one and what it was like and all of the uh all the fun that we had on episode one.
I hope everybody's been doing well since I've been last um in the public eye. I suppose it's been a while. It's been a good time. Uh, you know, you guys, if you follow my journey, it's been what, eight years in the public eye doing Prince of Travel. Then I took a bit of time off and it was just really good to be still for a little bit and figure out uh what's next, right? What's next? And so I'm very happy to be back.
Humble beginnings again. This is uh Age of Abundance, a new show. We will be leveling up as we go. We will be recursively self-improving, right? like things will be getting better and better over time. And the whole point of this show is to be uh accompany you right during these times of rapid change that we're living through.
What one thing I want you guys to know is like, you know, we're going to be talking about some some some big ideas, okay?
We're going to be talking about some big changes that we're all going through. And it's not necessarily comfortable to talk about these things, but I'm very much sitting here right now uh 10:00 a.m. Pacific, right? Like having having uh turned these ideas over in my head over and over again and really thinking about like this these these are the ideas that I must share, right? Having thought about it, having had my time uh having some relative stillness and thinking about what to do next, what's the most impact I can make, what's the most impactful thing I can do uh in the world to contribute to next, the most impactful problems to solve. Uh you know, eventually I got to a point where these things are just flowing out of me and I'm here to share it with you on a day-by-day basis. Uh starting today. So today's chat, you know, will go for about an hour. will go for about maybe an hour, 30 minutes depending.
Um, I'll kind of sketch out the overall nature of the show, right? The overall shape of what I expect things to come over uh the coming honestly months and probably years, right, as we do this daily live show every day at this time.
If you can tune it in at 10 a.m.
Pacific, I appreciate you. If not, there will be the usual clips, the usual uh you know uh episodes from this show distributed to various platforms and over time the hope is that these ideas filter through uh more broader to the to the public and you'll see me appearing on other shows as well making appearances.
It's not necessarily about the absolute number of people that this reaches because I could reach a certain number of people and then those people potentially some of you watching right now could then reach and impact others.
Right? So this is like kind of the way that these ideas are spreading. But yeah, today I'll go over a quick overview of the show and the concept and some of the stuff that we'll talk about.
One thing I [clears throat] will say is this show is interactive, right? So pop in the chat over on YouTube. uh I want to kind of go off what the people are saying and thinking within the chat and how the ideas are landing and what are the questions that come forth from the way that ideas land.
Some of these ideas will take time to absorb, right? Time is a necessary ingredient. You'll hear me say that again and again like these things are uh we're we're living through some of the craziest changes at the fastest pace that humanity's been through, right?
Frankly, at the end of the day and uh you know my goal is to bring some of my my uh educational dididactic chops, right? My ability to like take big concepts and break them down into small chunks and over time change some of the ways that people think about things, change some of the ways that people see their own roles in these transitions. Um and yeah, really kind of play that play that role in terms of uh holding a daily space here for us to have these conversations, for us to go through these uh these transformations together. Okay, so we have about uh 10 12 of you here. Really appreciate you guys showing up on 30 minutes notice. You know, I appreciate the support. If you check out the channel uh if you check out the channel's banner, you'll see that there's four key pillars that I've set out for Age of Abundance the show. Okay, there's the changes we're going through across the pillars of money, intelligence, energy, and lastly, humanity. Okay, so when I say humanity, I'm referring to all of humanity, 8 billion people and each one of us. Because after all, we can often think of 8 billion people as a quite abstract concept as like this huge collection of people, which it is. But at the end of the day, it just consists of me plus you plus everybody else, right? And so any change that a billion people go through is going to consist of a change that each one of us who are living through it all go through. It's not the first time humanity's undergone changes. We've obviously come through 5,000 plus years of history uh from doing things way differently than before.
hunter gatherers, discovering fire, uh agricultural age, farming, right? You had to you had to farm. You had to make your own food to sustain yourself. And that took up a lot of uh every human life's basically focus in time was to grow food to sustain oneself and one's family. From there, industrial revolution from their computers um and now AI. Right? So, we've got we we we under we've gone under undergone this crazy journey of thousands of years um of learning how to do things better, right? To a point where now in May 2026, like the rocks are thinking.
We've taken sand and we've put it onto transistors and gotten charges to run across the transistors and now these things are mimicking intelligence, right? or coming up with a new form of intelligence that's perhaps different than our own intelligence uh but nevertheless plays a role in helping humans get what they want right and I think let's start with the intelligence pillar uh over the course of this hour I'll the goal is to lay out each of these four pillars and I think the intelligence pillar is the place that's most natural to start I'd say that because you know the the the the stories around AI the narrative around AI is very much mainstream right now. Basically, nobody who's like a upstanding participant of society, right, can ignore what the transformations around AI.
There's lots of questions. There's not enough answers and there's not enough I would say um approaches to to offering credible solutions. Okay? And I'll explain what I mean uh both today and over the course of the show. this this idea of like what's a credible solution to a problem we'll be coming back to but you know let's just start with AI because I think we're all it doesn't matter right it doesn't matter if you're uh like a white collar professional um and you're you know looking to maintain maintain a job maintain uh economic leverage in the world we live in right um and there's questions around that or if you're a creative uh a lot of creative work is frankly done very well by AI now and that's poses challenges of its own or it doesn't matter if you live in India or the Philippines and you uh you know you and your entire like cohort of people have been part of an industry that has basically been uh serving the western world and its white collar industry right and that part of the uh intelligence stack is also rapidly getting automated or if you're just you know a normal normal person you know there's lots of you know value you're getting from something like chat LGBT or Gemini are clawed. Lots of uh these models out there right now. But obviously there's also existential questions around you know how are these things working? What will be the effect on employment, jobs uh for one, environmental impact for two, right? Uh how we feed our families and what meaning uh we and our future generations get out of work like what is our relationship to work when the AI and the machines can do a whole bunch of the work. So tons of questions and one theme that we'll be coming back to in the show over and over again is that we will be going both wide and deep, right? Tons of questions to cover, a huge range of, you know, potential things to talk about, but then there's also a lot of depth to get to.
Give me one sec, guys. My cat intruded my office. I will get him out of here.
Okay. Thank you.
>> [sighs] >> So yeah, episode one uh pillar one intelligence I think is the easiest place to start and one of the one of the uh you know most natural place to start in terms of episode one explaining what the show is about. Now one thing that I will start to point out about AI right and I first of all like people's level of AI adoption is very differently distributed right now you've got some a very small portion of people who are moving aggressively and uh uh rapidly adopting the technology and you know I will count I will hold my hand up and say that I'm part of that cohort of people right like I've been over the past few months able to do work using um some of the latest we call them like agentic harnesses, right? So this basically a fancy term for um like AIs that can do code, right? So not just a chatbot, but uh you've got you've got the LLM reasoning over uh writing and executing code. And the thing about LLMs and chatbots is that as we know they're prone to hallucination because there's elements of randomness baked in due to the way that the trading happened, right? But uh the thing of the thing about code is that once the LLM writes good code that executes over and over again the same way, then that's reliable. That removes the randomness and deterministic element from what you're trying to do in terms of when you use a chatbot, right? So by adopting uh you know one one of the coding tools so you know latest models would be claude opus 4.7 chaptt 5.5 um and then you've also got free and open source models that are catching up right so by adopting these coding tools I've been able to do work that previously would have taken like a team of three to four people that I would have had to screen and hire and uh really examine their credentials and their capab abilities and it would have taken them six months probably to get to the level of quality the quality bar that I'd be looking for you know as somebody who sketched out the level of work required uh and there'd be a lot of back and forth communication a lot of friction in terms of communicating specifically the vision in my mind and then uh uh fine-tuning it based on the results right would have taken them six months three to four people hired you know crazy amount of salaries for something like that. Uh, and it still wouldn't have been probably as good as something that I've been able to build for uh by myself for about I don't know 2, three, four, five, six weeks depending on which phase of work it was, right? Uh, and so the the both the time savings and the friction savings and the ease of executing from idea to execution has drastically skyrocketed. Like it's it's it's it's an insane feeling. If you're somebody who are looking to uh who's looking to uh execute against a vision that you have, right? Or looking to uh create something in the world. Let me just message here. Uh, if you can see the screen.
Hey, how's it going?
Pretty sure we're live, right? Yes, we're live.
Okay, I let me know if you've got issues, but uh I've been yapping for a while, so if we're not live, then I'm going to have to start all over again.
Uh and then I will lose my train of thought if I if I have to do that. But look, guys, I'm just going to assume that we're we're good.
The point I'm trying to make right is we are at a point where very few people have actually followed this curve you know relative to the overall population. You've got a bunch of people who are using chat bots um chatpt Gemini Claude and getting a ton of value out of that.
But the full potential of what AI is capable of as of May 2026 is still bar we still barely scratched the surface of what that actually means in terms of how we do work, right? How we think about the value we're able to provide to each other as human beings.
We've barely scratched the surface on it. And even if AI advancement were to stop today, we'd probably be working through those changes for the next 10, 20 years. Uh these changes would cascade throughout, you know, what we know as the wider economy.
Uh you know, what we know as wider major corporations, what we know as employment, right? these changes would cascade throughout uh the entire space even if like based on what we have today even if advancement stopped and we know that advancement isn't stopping in fact we're on the steep part of the scurve now advancement is rapidly building and uh and increasing in in in pace and >> [snorts] >> Okay, I good to know that you're in because I was worried. I was looking at this. I was like, are we live? Are we not? Uh, welcome in. Good to have you and let's go. Let's keep going. Right.
So, the point I was trying to make is, yeah, these things are happening very quickly. And when I talk about all the changes that humanity's been through over the past 5,000 years, none of them happened nearly as quickly, right? These things took hundreds if not thousands of years. What? Hunter gatherer, agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, even computers, right?
Computers started probably computing, right? Late late late 19th century, right? Right. And then it was like a wartime effort and then it was 1969 was the internet and then uh and then you know it took time to for the uh the the the mainstream internet to come kind of come online in the 1990s and then you had the whole dotcom bubble and uh really only into the 2010s 2020s are we really seeing global adoption or close to global adoption. uh and really 2020s with the mobile internet is when we see like okay most of the global south come online right so that's what like 50 100 years it 20 years for the internet depending on how you want to count it AI right itself has been something that's been built also as part of the computing uh uh efforts right AI really started probably mid 20th century um but very very narrow small AI not the way we think about chat bots and LLMs right now right Uh so before 2022 a bunch of AI was in a bunch of the software we use but most of us never really thought of AI as like a thing until it was chat that was the first moment that hit the public consciousness and uh we were all you know asking chat to write poems and haikus and whatnot uh you know generate funny images but everybody at that point could see like oh could this work? um probably right on this trajectory of change most likely. But what I find and even now I find a lot of because this conversation is so uncomfortable. I find a lot of denial and skepticism, right? I find a lot of like there's no way AL will replace jobs. Um and look, everybody's entitled to their opinion and I'm never going to be on the show and tell you guys like what I say is absolutely right. Right. That's not the ethos of the show. uh what I'm doing is I'm contributing my ideas and opinions and stack of experiences right to the free market of ideas out there where my ideas will clash into other people's ideas and we will undergo this process of you guys the listeners will think about you know which ideas are true and which ideas to adopt and which new beliefs to enroll into.
So everybody's respect uh entitled to their opinion and I respect that. But you know I'm observing a lot of denialism out there about the pace of AI change. Uh I'm observing a lot of people who haven't used AI to its full capabilities and because they're fearful right because they deny that their their a portion of their identity is wrapped up in this idea that you know what I provide economically my mind intelligence is economically viable. um and AI can't replace that. They're therefore less likely to pursue AI to its final ends, right? To the most frontier, cutting edge capabilities.
So there's going to be a lot of such noise out there, right? And from my POV in terms of what I'm contributing on this show, um I'm speaking from experience of somebody who's used these tools to drive, you know, significant transformation in uh my ability to execute on the work that I'm I'm involved in. Right? So, so one of those things is, you know, my primary focus now is this show, Age of Abundance, and it will be my primary focus going forward. Um, as well as things that spring out of the show, right? There will be other things that, you know, we talk about and that will be available uh for you guys who are tuning in. But before today, right, my focus was uh my previous company called Prince of Travel. My previous chapter uh where my focus was traveling the world. Um that was my dream that I set out to pursue and in doing so built a brand and built a team and a company around the pursuit of traveling the world and traveling better. Um and during this time period right probably like 2017 to 2026 the focus was very much uh within Canada credit cards and points right so if any of you guys are tuning in that didn't know that about me now you know. Um, but you know that was my previous focus. And when I say over the past three months, I've been building stuff and changing the way that the company operates and even accelerating and leveling up my own thinking uh uh within like my work. I'm talking about the work at Prince of Travel, right? I had a fair bit of work to do to get the company in a good state where I could say, "Okay, I'm going to shift focus to this show, Age of Abundance."
Um, but I still want Prince of Travel to run and serve its uh it its audience, its community. And so there was a lot of work to be done. That work without the power of AI tools that Jayce just came out in February 2026 probably would have taken uh years and years of not just my focus and attention but focus and attention of a whole range of staff, right? And and by the way, I know this because um over the years I have hired a whole range of staff and we have tried you know different the other approach to fulfilling the vision and uh and it hasn't always worked right that's just me being transparent like a lot of things have worked and some things haven't and over you know over the course of the show like we'll get into a lot more detail about all all of these things but yeah okay let's bring it back to intelligence. Um, I'm speaking as somebody who has experience and if you have experience building something of your own, especially in a commercial capacity using AI tools at the cutting edge, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. You'll know exactly the moment that it clicked for you where uh things that were not possible before suddenly became possible just from the AI. And that is a that's momentous occasion for the person experiencing it because you know the amount of value that you as one human being can create has radically shifted compared to before. Uh I described I remember when I was going through this moment in February I I was I was I was feeling a bit overwhelmed almost. I spoke to my wife.
I was like it feels like plugging my mind into a jet engine. Right. It it's a it's a it's a significant moment. And look, you know, may maybe I'm somebody who's more uh predisposed to go on this journey to be among the first movers of this journey. That's also why this show exists, right? I want to share my experience and also share some of the bigger ideas about when the machines can do, you know, way more things than humans. way better and like not just a little bit better, hundreds to thousands of times better. What does that mean for all of us? And I'm I want to be a first mover in carving out the space to uh to share this message.
That's the intelligence pillar. Okay.
And I think it's a good time to transition the the focus. Um the kind of key point that I was hammering home is you're going to see a lot of opinions out there. you're going to see uh a lot of denialism, a lot of people who are uh AI forward, AI bullish, right? And and I I what I like to do right now is just like in my content diet, make sure I'm consuming a little bit of either end of the spectrum because there's a lot of both sides. Um, and at the end of the day, uh, just be aware that like your own predisposition to what you think AI is capable of could well be a reflection of, you know, how your relationship to your sense of agency up until this point, right? Like if you're somebody who wants to create, who wants to serve others, who wants to make impact, who wants to build things that haven't existed before that do things better than what existed before, right? That's basically all humankind does over the course of our existence. We find better ways of doing things and we make life better.
Uh if you're somebody of that profile, then you'll probably be delving head first into AI, right? But there's also a lot of people who understandably from the system we all grew up in, I'll pause there because this idea of the system we all grew up in is something we'll be coming back to again and again. But from the system we all grew up in, a lot of us were told like here's the path, right?
What you want to do, the unique thing to you that you want to do that you want to create. No, no, no, no, no. Here's the path.
And the path is what?
you know, we we all kind of understand like, you know, there's there's these jobs that you can get and um there after you get a job, there's these things you can do with the money that you earn from the job that comes in on a bi-weekly basis. Uh including, you know, these things that you should want out of life.
Uh and uh and here's, you know, the path. So, you know, you can buy a house, you can uh commute to work, and uh by the way, this is only if speaking from a very western lens, right?
uh you know other parts of the world have different lenses but those lenses are downstream of the western lens because other parts of the world uh the entire industries and entire sectors and entire things that people work on that are available for people to work on uh are are subservient to the western world, right? and and the and the concentration of capital and wealth what we currently perceive as wealth um that exists in you know primarily US over the past 100 years before that that was uh the United Kingdom before that it was the Netherlands and you know we've been through these cycles and cycles of of dominance and empire and we're kind of coming to a point where that's all changing and that that's again like going back to the theme of the show right but yeah going back to this idea of like latent agency that's in all of A lot of us, you know, from what I observe, followed the path and we are now coming to a point where the path is starting to look way shakier than before, right?
We're starting to be a bit shaky when we went through COVID and before that when we went through the great financial crisis and it seems like it's getting shakier and shakier faster and faster.
And that is a big problem, guys. That's a big problem that uh that we will all need to play our part in solving, right?
Because Keep in mind the we are on this path because we have been told from a young age that uh you know there is one path there is basically this path that's laid out um schooling university right uh uh career and earn enough money buy a house like there's this one path that's kind of laid out and sure a few other side paths but this goes way deep guys this goes way deep um the path is starting to show signs of no longer serving humanity. Okay? It's starting to show signs of having outlived its usefulness.
And there's a range of different contradictions and circular logic loops that I'll point to right now that kind of bring this to the four. Right? We talked about AI and how it's so useful, right? It helps us get so much done. Um it helps humanity essentially When you boil it down, it helps humans get what they want and less of what they hate uh in a shorter amount of time. When you the like when you use Chad GBT, you can ask it follow-up questions relative to Google where you had to browse through a bunch of uh search results that were static, right? You can ask, you can get the exact answer that you want from something like Chad Petite. Um that's why people use it. That's why it's the fastest growing product in all of history with what 900 million users something crazy when you use an agentic harness like cloud code or chut codeex right it's the same thing but creating code that can then be transformed to a product that serves the marketplace same idea one's at the consumer level one's you know potentially at the commercial level uh AI is going to make a ton of things better um but then why my is like this idea of the financial side of AI completely contradictory right everybody's you know the way we think of retirement you know uh retirement funds if you guys have been paying attention right most of the wealth most of the allocation of um uh the expectation of future returns are concentrated in what seven companies all tightly coupled around the AI narrative around the AI And uh what's the contradiction loop?
Well, if it's successful, then the AI will be so good that it will replace it will replace labor and income, right?
Which is the basis of retirement in the first place or how we perceive it. Uh now that's that's problem that's that's a problem that can't be resolved from within the system. Okay, you guys see what I'm saying, right?
pretty much everybody let's say US Canada let's just focus US Canada but also you know a whole bunch of other western countries whose um pension funds and uh yeah retirement funds you know are allocated in such a way where returns are demanded and the highest returns available right now on paper nomally are in all the AI companies it's not even in the S&P 500 it's in seven out of the S&P 500 companies and what are like what are your what's your money going towards right? In terms of uh it's going towards funding these seven companies and what are those companies doing? They're developing cutting edge models where as they become more and more cutting edge they will remove the very economic leverage that all of us count on for our income in the first place. So it's a circular loop that doesn't make sense and there's questions that need to be asked about the nature of what's happening here.
Illen, I guess you could call it that. my friend. I don't know if I would call it that because I think I have some ways to go until I, you know, really feel like, oh, this is like of a spiritual level.
Everything I'm saying here, I wouldn't like I can see why I can see how, you know, it it is somewhat, you know, adjacent to maybe a spiritual awakening.
And I and I wouldn't even say like I wouldn't even, you know, deny that it it potentially has a bit of a spiritual nature. But everything I'm saying here is grounded in reality, right? It's tangible like factual analysis of what the hell is going on right now. Um, it's based in my experience. It's based in, you know, things that I've lived in my day-to-day life over the past 3, 6, 12 months. I would say that, uh, you know, like having the space for me to really be still and go deep on some of these topics has been what has contributed to like, uh, the depth that I hope to bring to the conversation. Right.
It's all tied in, Ian. Okay, I'll take your word for it. Sounds like you've got um plenty of plenty of data points, experience to share yourself. So, thank you. Uh what I will say though is relative to my past chapter, right, where it was for me, it was very personal and it was very like, you know, selfish is maybe not the right word, but uh you know, it was all it was about the self. It was about what what do I want out of life and it was to travel the world and uh Prince of Travel sprung out of that and it was very much more um yeah more like more more within within like you know less abstract I guess right this stuff is a bit abstract right that's why like we need to that's why this is a daily live show format guys because some of these ideas we're going to have to break down over and over again um for for for for for some of the audience to really click because that's what I had to go through. I had to, you know, consult a whole range of primary sources and watch a whole bunch of podcasts and go for a whole bunch of long walks in the woods to really, you know, start to think about this stuff.
So, this stuff is abstract. It's on the ideas level. And the goal is to take some of these ideas and bring it into tangible examples of day-to-day life, right? Which is what I just did with the whole what's what's happening with the financial side of AI thing, right? So, I want to like pop in as many of these little anecdotes as possible to try to ground it in people's realities.
Um, and you guys will be key to that to like shade the conversation through the chat and through um this little thing up here, which I will get to in a little bit. Okay. So, yes, alien, economic, historical, geopolitical, for sure, all connected.
Um, that's why I said on this show we're going both broad and uh wide and deep.
Okay. and we have unlimited episodes to do so. So, it'll be a it'll be a journey that we all go on together.
So, yeah, contradiction number one, AI financial side like this something we can all perceive happening right now. uh what I will remind people is during the dotcom bubble and burst um you know financial side of the internet completely collapsed and very few companies were left standing and those had to rebuild from the ground up right you know something like Amazon went from $1,000 down to like $100 or something and uh but that doesn't mean that the adoption of the technology of the internet slowed down in any way in fact since the dotcom bubble right uh the internet only took off and Now that's how we're using to talk to each other in a way that would not have been remotely possible prior to the internet. Like you know, not just me talking to you guys right now, but ideas spreading in general, right?
There's no way that ideas would spread this quickly and there would be such an abundance of ideas that we all have access to on a day-to-day basis without the internet. And now we do have it. And now we we do have a whole bunch of ideas that clash into each other. Um some would argue too much, right? And others would argue that the very infrastructure of the internet um is undergoing a process of capture right now because uh we can observe that uh a lot of these ideas and a lot of these you know uh creators and opportunities for creators are concentrating into specific platforms with very powerful algorithms and both the viewer and the creator are beholden to these algorithms. So the media side of this conversation is goes way deep as well and there will probably be numerous episodes on the topic.
But look, let me let me take that contradiction, right? That's just one the whole the idea of like okay AI being powerful but the financial side is also removing labor right layoffs uncertainty and it's not just there's concrete layoffs which are happening there's concrete spike in unemployment rate which is happening there is uh scrutiny on what an unemployment rate even means when you have um you know a a system that publishes the unemployment rate but that depends on the unemployment rate being a certain below a certain percentage to not stress people out too much, right? Like there's scrutiny right now on what is an unemploy employment rate and why does it only count people who are in the labor force so to speak and not necessarily somebody who's, you know, driving Ubers and doing Door Dash, not necessarily reaching their full economic potential.
Why doesn't that person count towards the unemployment rate? Right? these people who are just getting by. These people who are being stressed out, squeezed out at the margins and not to even mention the people who, you know, didn't have the opportunities of white collar work before um you know, marginalized within, let's say, the the western world and then not even to mention the billions of people who are marginalized at the very margins um of the world, right? Global south, Africa, South America, uh uh a whole bunch of places.
Let me boil it boil it down to one point which is why I started with AI and where we're going next. Um, one point about AI, you just have to keep in mind that is that it's the most techn technologically deflationary force there is, right? And if you think about what technology does, and technology ultimately is just ideas that come out of our minds and into reality, like this platform you're watching this thing on right now, YouTube, right? It didn't exist at one point and somebody built it and now it's here and now it's free, right? It's you you can access YouTube for free and I can stream for free.
So everything like the whole story of technology is a force of human ingenuity that brings things from and essentially not existing right if if something is doesn't exist it effectively has an infinite cost like you can't buy it anywhere it doesn't exist right but technology takes things that we need and that are new things that haven't existed before and brings them into existence and the process is it's not technology is an abstract thing out there it comes out of all of our minds coming together and building things.
That's the story of tractors, right, that made farming more efficient. That's the story of steam trains. That's the story of of oil. That's the story of the internet. That's the story of computer chips. That's the story of um computer screens, you know, everything that that makes life better for for humans.
And so why then is are you know are we existing in a time of AI is making AI is the most like the latest manifestation of that right where the computer chips that we built actually start to think for themselves and can build a whole bunch of things way more than before when is a human directing a computer the computer can direct itself and can take a stated goal and a prompt and a context and build things that you know well surpass what a human would be capable of within a given time window and then you can have like you know multiple instances of an AI all doing the same thing. Why then is this forest AI not driving widespread abundance to humanity? Like why is it not why why why are we on a path where we're all stressed about what it's going to do to our work and our incomes rather than thinking that uh it'll actually let us stop working because that's what it should do, isn't it?
If AI can create all this abundance and create all all these things, the things that people want, you know, everything, which is basically everything, right? Starting with the digital first of all, starting with the digital, but then if you layer in uh, you know, the convergence of AI as a force and robotics as a force and when you put AI into robots and when you get AI creating other AIs and robots creating other robots, it comes into the physical world too, right? This is something that'll take place over the next 5 10 years probably.
Um [snorts] you're already seeing you're already seeing self-driving vehicles Whimo starting to you know populate American cities um as the as the sort of upswell as the starting point.
Why do we not live in a world where um we we have conviction we have certainty that AI is going to make our life better by removing the need to work because AI can do the work like that's the fundamental contradiction at play right that is the higher layer to uh the whole like financial stock market retirement thing you know what we what's currently perceived as an AI bubble sure may be the case um but remember separate the financial bubble side from the actual technology itself and the adoption of the technology, right? Same thing with the dotcom boom. Um there was a bubble but the adoption of the internet was was rapid and it was a force to be reckoned with. This is going to be the same thing with AI because AI materially, you know, tangibly helps us get what we want. But then why is everything getting more expensive, right? Like why why are we facing an energy crisis in the coming months?
That's bound to bring things more expensive when denominated in in dollars.
Why? It's like there there is no satisfying answer to this question that I've observed from out there and I'm posing this question. I invite you to sit with that for a second because the natural state of human coordination the natural state of the free market is deflation is abundance is humans creating new things for other humans that make all of our lives better. And when I say all, I do mean all of our lives. Not just a select few, right? Not just the owners of the means of production.
Everyone. Because that's what the story of human civilization has been.
Okay, Nikki, how's it going?
I'm happy to have some engagement in this chat. And uh Nikki, how's it going?
I uh I hope you're uh you and Daniel, right? You and Daniel, hope you guys are doing well. [snorts] Um thanks for tuning in, by the way. I uh you know, really appreciate you guys sent out this email and showed up. uh the 12 15 20 of you guys who are here uh with uh 30 30 minutes to an hour's notice really appreciate you guys. So I I love this answer because this is this is this is going to talk to like you know the the nature of the depth of conversation that age of abundance the show hopes to bring. Okay, the surface level answer to a lot of these questions uh goes to the company side, right? Companies like Google, Anthropic, uh OpenAI, doesn't matter which one. Take your pick. Um or or even other companies, right? Even companies just like your grocery store down down the road. Uh or or like trucking companies or you know companies that only deal with other companies rather than just consumerf facing. I think from a consumer's POV it's natural to look at the companies and you know we talk about like I think the dominant narrative for why is you know something like corporate greed something like billionaires something like uh you know all these other people that are doing this um that are you know putting down a a suppression on humanity. So let's sit with that for a little bit and I'll just like kind of leave that there. I'll come back to it.
the question of why, right? Like AI versus technological deflation and abundance. Let me go back to that point.
The natural course of human history is one of us creating value for others.
And it's it's it's a story of that value filtering over to society over time.
Yes. But uh but ultimately just think about what you guys do what all of us do in our day-to-day lives, right? Like our whole life is every second, every waking second of like at least at least the waking second where we're trying to be productive is about getting more for less. Right? If you're going to work, if you're working at a company, the company's mandate is to get more for less. Is to make more profits and uh and serve and and serve others better by making more profits. At the end of the day, it's about creating value for others. And who chooses that value? It's all of us that choose the value.
Like Chad BT is a fast grow is the fastest growing product because it delivered value to us, right? Because it gave dynamic answers to hit the exact questions that we're asking. It allows allowed us to ask follow-ups rather than Google which was static pages.
It's all about getting more for less.
It's all about getting more value. And who chooses the value? It's us who chooses the value.
So the fundamental contradiction here um guys I'll just present you guys with it.
You've got technological uh deflation and abundance on one side and the monetary system right now that we measure everything from is a debt based monetary system where all the money that we use is debt which is kind of crazy but there is a lot to get into here and this is the second pillar of the show right we've got money intelligence energy and humanity and this is the money pillar I'm going to be spending a lot of time on the money pillar because it's it goes way deep. It's the system that we were all born into and we are coming to a very natural transition point where the debt based monetary system and I'm talking about US dollars, Canadian dollars, you know, Chinese yan, um most of the other 180 currencies that all are pegged to the US dollar in some way, shape or form, whether through monetary policy or through an outright peg or through capital controls.
This system is currently in the phase of changing. Illen, you've na you've nailed it. We're undergoing not a not like a uh you know guys, one thing that this show will never be is is a show that portrays some people as villains and some people as victims, okay? Like there's too much of that out there. And this show is a space where you there's there's no there's no other people. There's just us. There's just us and our fellow human beings. And so the monetary system that we all use, if we trace back the history of how humans have used money has been a process of free market discovery, right?
There were lots of ancient civilizations that used forms of money that were available to them in their natural environments from seashells to beads to um you know, I'll I'll I'll I'll toss out a uh I'll toss out a uh a little bone for the travel folks in the room.
There's the uh Micronesian island of Yap where there was these giant limestones that were used as money and you wouldn't you wouldn't need to move these limestones around uh because they were just they were scarce and they were you know widely recognized. Everybody on the island recognized them as money. And so merely like having the limestones around um sitting around the island, there would be a collective ledger of who owns this piece of you know this piece of money.
And when when we trade something, we change the ledger. Um that was community based, right? So from ancient history, community- based uh you know, commodity money mostly. Then what what happened over the course of thousands of years was as civilizations came into conflict with each other the stronger harder form of money would win, right? And over time that became gold which uh which you know came came through and and and beat out all the other money because you know if you if you were a European uh conquest, right, and you met up with a you you traveled to the west coast of Africa and they were using beads as money and you could create way more beads than um than than were in circulation, then you could introduce hyperinflation into the local economy by creating a bunch of beads and importing them and buying up all of the goods and services and labor, right? Ultimately, labor is human capital. So, buying up all of the human capital available and you'd effectively uh enlist your the other civilization to slavery. And that would happen when different forms of money came into contact. And ultimately, the most uh most effective form of money that existed in the natural world was gold.
And we got to a point where gold was the standard, right? So-called gold standard. The problem with gold is when we started to transact with each other faster than we could move the gold, there became a need for a ledger, right? A a a form of credit on top of gold, a form of a piece of paper on top of gold that represented a claim to gold, but wasn't gold itself. And when you're transacting and trading with claims to gold, somebody has to keep track of what that ledger is the current state. What's the true state of that ledger? And in that in in that vulnerability in the system of money, right? The fact that somebody had to keep track of it. Don't get me wrong, that form of money has worked for us. It has delivered a range of uh abundance and progress that wouldn't have been possible if we were just transacting through gold and had to keep settling gold bars across large distances. Right? That's ultimately why humans chose to move on to the credit based money even though there were these waves of credit cycles, right? And banks would offer interest rates for your uh compete with offering higher and higher interest rates for your gold. They would keep the gold and they would issue way more pieces of paper than they had gold to back it. And then some banks would go out of business because a bunch of people would redeem their pieces of paper at once. And eventually we as people said or were, you know, or depending on how you look at it, we either chose or we were um put in a position where we where we couldn't help but choose that there would be a central bank managing the um issuance of the pieces of paper.
Uh and that's where we are now guys. Uh the Federal Reserve was 1930 1913, right? The um the suspension of redeemability to gold for individuals in the US was 1933. The suspension of redeemability to gold for nation states was in 1971.
And since then we've been uh been using these pieces of paper ultimately that by its very nature um comes into existence when there's a lending event, right? And this is like this is not widely known nor taught in um in public schools. And it makes you wonder why. Uh probably because if it were taught then the very nature of public schools wouldn't exist.
Um but yeah, it goes deep guys. It goes deep. And now's the time that it's important for us to understand because I think for a lot of for for the you know there's about 10 12 15 people tuning in right now and for most of you guys I imagine we we were we have been beneficiaries of the system right we have been close to the source of power that controlling the ledger that all of humanity uses as money has given to you know the people controlling the ledger we've been close to it if you live in the United States or you know aligned western countries Canada uh where I Right. We've been close to it. We've benefited from a standard of living that has been possible from others around the world uh being suppressed by this form of money, right? others around the world having their currencies be devalued at a moment's notice by um you know institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, other countries around the world being trapped in uh in predatory loan arrangements uh uh you know so-called debt traps, resource extraction, right? All of these things by the way guys I know it's like I know can get quite heavy, can get feel quite big. That's why we have unlimited episodes of the show to go through as granularly as possible as needed. um one of these topics at a time.
But I want you guys to recognize that like the reason this is important is you know and it's easy been easy to ignore that this has been like a problem in the background but we've been beneficiaries and it's easy to like continue in in our current state right but even the current state for us is starting to become a problem right what you're seeing is in Canada the housing situation is wild because housing is being treated as a form of money a form of an asset to hold wealth in Why? Because the money itself, the Canadian dollar can't hold any value. And why is that? Because it's it's a debt, right? The Canadian dollar exists. The money supply exists and expands when debt issuance occurs. And the key thing to understand is like this whole debt based money system, the the moment when I I see your comments here about tangible commodities, right? the moment when we split off from a pure onetoone uh uh arrangement to something tangible and hard and energybacked like gold. We split off into the layer of pieces of paper. That was hundreds of years ago, guys. So, we've all been like born into this and our all of our history lessons and history books that we've read have treated this as normal, you know, for the most part.
It's time to start stepping out of the system and looking at it right with a critical lens and thinking is this still serving us.
This goes back hundreds of years and once a loan is issued with interest.
This is really key. Okay, this like I'm going to keep coming back to this and uh it just it it's not easy to understand.
like it it's going to take probably listening to it a few times to understand, but the moment a loan is issued with interest due in the future, right? When the money is created, the interest is not created. So the only way to repay that loan, that principle with interest in the future [snorts] is for more loans to be issued is for the money supply to expand. It is mathematically certain right now that the what 39 trillion US dollars that the that the US is in debt will expand and likewise the $350 trillion of global debt um the debt must expand and the only way to keep servicing that debt is for the monetary system to become more centralized and controlled.
Right? And the reason that's the case is because when new money is issued, when new loans are issued, who does that money go to?
It doesn't go to the ordinary people. It doesn't go to you and me like, you know, like like just the average person trying to make a buck, right? It doesn't go to um people living in Africa or India or Philippines or South America, you know, who who are who are the same people as you and me trying to feed their families, make a buck. It goes to the existing asset holders, right? And and among the existing asset holders, who does it go to more, right? Those at the very top.
[snorts] I've been like before I before I went deep on all these topics guys I would always you know my previous chapter I was traveling the world and I was wondering like why do I get to have these experiences and like when I'm in an airport lounge or when I'm in a mall somewhere in like you know China or South Africa or whatever it is it's like why does this person um what what is it fundamentally not just like this person who's working here or this person who's you know cleaning cleaning the bathroom why why is it not just that they don't get to have these same opportunities that I did. You know, we were all born into different situations and stations of life. So, there's that. But why does this seem to be getting worse, right?
Why does the inequality and the um you know, just why why doesn't it seem like we're looking to solve these problems or that we're on a path to solving these problems? And so really only when I understood the mechanics of money creation and how like the whole system works, how money that's newly created. So that's when I when I say newly created money, it's like, you know, when there's a crisis, 2008, 2020, there's these crazy times when it's like, oh, everything's going to collapse unless we create new money, right? And for a lot of us, it's like, okay, well, if you create new money and give it to me, I'm happy. So ultimately, we've all played our small part in enabling this this whole phenomenon, right? Because we've all been a part of it. We all have basically had no choice or perceive that we've have had no choice up until now to be a part of it.
Uh the name for it is the Cantalon effect. Okay, just uh Cantalon, Richard Cantalon was a Irish French economist that gave gave a term to this effect. It's the fact that when new wealth is when new money is created, it flows to the asset holders first. It flows to the existing wealthy first, right? who get to spend the new money at today's prices before inflation hits tomorrow. And then who pays the price of that inflation? It's people furthest away from the money printer, right? People who are um in the in the, you know, wage earners, income earners, people who are regular Joe's trying to make a buck. They don't receive the new money as it's uh issued into existence. They only face higher prices long after that money has been issued. And so that's why you see things like wage stagnation. That's why you see things like rising inequality, right? That's why you see things like in Canada this another contradiction loop that I'll take you to. You know, young people don't really have hope for the same standard of living as their parents' generation did. Which is a crazy thing to think about. like, you know, human like humankind has been going generation by generation and we're you're telling me that we're going to sit here and be like, "Oh, we're just going to regress now while wealth keeps getting more and more concentrated, right? You're telling me that that's just how it's supposed to be."
It's not, right? It's not. And here here we are in this in this channel. We're creating a space to explore exactly what the mechanics are of causing these problems and the solutions to those problems.
So, uh there's, you know, guys, the nature of like the broad and deep is there's way more tangents that I could go on that I will inevitably go on in future episodes, but uh it's impossible for me to like grab all of them right now. So, I'll go to the chat. And we see two conflicting uh we see two conflicting perspectives here between aliens tied to uh tangible commodities, gold and oil, and Mark. Mark, how's it going? Bitcoin standard. So, I haven't mentioned Bitcoin yet the whole time because to understand the solution, you need to have an appreciation of what the problem is, right? And how deep the problem goes.
And so, before I get there, Mark, uh, I'll answer your question about Abundance by Ezra Klein. No, I actually haven't, uh, read that book that deeply. Um, I don't think Ezra Klein is, uh, has considered quite quite as much like, you know, this what we're talking about right now in this moment like the AI questions cannot be resolved from the debt based money system and I don't think Ezra Klein has gotten there with his approach.
Um I haven't read the book to be frank but from what I've gathered from the coverage of his book uh this the idea of abundance has been like let's build more stuff in the USA right so like more nation building and more more of a direction of like stuff that I don't think frankly is the direction that that we're going on and if you if you're just looking at a USAcentric lens or a Chinaentric lens right or a Canada or a western centric lens then you know maybe some of these nation building efforts especially in China. You can see like you know a lot of infrastructure projects, a lot of uh you know state funds being poured into these very visible signals of centralized uh control and centralized progress for sure and for a time that can work but um I don't think that is you know I I think that that's that's continuing to kick the can down the road so to speak right that's all still fueled by debt fueled by the debt based monetary system it's not something that can resolve itself in the long run in a steady state that serves all of humanity.
Okay. And Alien, you've been saying uh tangible commodities again, gold, oil, blockchain or something equivalent will certainly be a component backed by gold and silver. So, this is where I disagree with you. Um this is where you need to understand Bitcoin, right? This is where like we'll be spending a lot of time on what Bitcoin actually is. And uh one thing you'll never hear me on this show like say on the show is you should buy Bitcoin or you should you know I I'm not going to tell you tell you to buy something or to do something with your money right I'm I'm here to help you understand the the transformation in money that's that's happening and then from there allocate time energy and financial capital wisely right allocate your own time and energy you can think of that as your human capital and obviously to the extent that you know whatever financial capital you have um is something to be allocated to that those are decisions that we all make personally but it's not about buying Bitcoin guys it's not about and and this is my problem with a lot of the coverage out there this is why I felt compelled to start the show is because there's a gap in talking about Bitcoin and understanding this uh a new form of money that's only existed for 17 years there's a gap in it because a lot of it is you know centered around the price of it denominated in infinitely printable units of dollars.
Going back to the debt based money, right? We know the debt must expand. We know the only way to surf service or appear to service $350 US uh trillion US dollars. Sorry, forgot a trillion. Um 350 with 12 zeros after it. That amount of US dollars in debt, the only way to service it is to issue new debt, is to expand the debt.
Um if if you if if that's a challenging thing to grab grasp one's mind around it it is very challenging. We'll spend a lot of time on it. But one thing I want you guys to pay attention to and notice is how like people speak about the debt and the debt ceiling and like the national debt and Canada's debt or US debt or whatever China's debt. We kind of talk about these as like abstract problems that exist and nobody really knows why it's a problem or what to do about it. And uh but sometimes it's used for to score political points, right?
Like whenever there's an election process or a voting process, this idea of the debt being out there is like mentioned, but there's never any tangible solutions. In fact, every now and then you see um the US Congress uh uh shut down because they can't agree to raise the debt ceiling, but they inevitably do raise the debt ceiling every time. So, I want I just want you to pay attention to like the way that the debt is thought of as like this like boogeyman that can't be resolved. Um, and like no, like people talk about it, but there's no practical solution for it. It's kind of weird, right? Like it's just it doesn't make any sense to me. And the reason that's the case is because, you know, if like the all of what we've been talking about on this show this far has been is is quite not well understood, I would say. And the process of this show is to is to spread these ideas, to talk about is to make it well understood.
But if it were well understood, then I don't think we would stand for it, guys.
You know, I don't think we would stand for a a system when the money we use is somebody else's debt. The money in our bank accounts right now is dependent on the bank, you know, being able to give that money to us when we ask for it. It's actually, it's not, you know, it's not like a tangible thing sitting in a vault, right? It's a line item on a on a ledger somewhere that says if this person shows up to withdraw, give them this amount.
But if everybody showed up to withdraw, there'd be problems because every dollar that exists is somebody else's debt that was issued from a uh a lending event, whether it's commercial lending like mortgages and loans and credit cards or uh central bank lending. Right? In these periods of crisis when money supply rapidly rapidly accelerates, it's the central bank uh monetizing the the government's debt.
And so if you think about it, every dollar that we have and including all of our assets denominated in those dollars are depend like those val the value we think they have is dependent on all of the world out there being able to meet their debt obligations and continuing to be able to meet their debt obligations.
uh at at this time and that's why there's these stories of contagion in the financial system. There's this, you know, there's um something like 2008 happened. Banks took too much risk, but they did not pay the price. They were bailed out because um if they weren't bailed out, then we would all pay a huge price because debt jubilee. Like I you're bringing up good points here, right? Um if the banks were not bailed out then what I just said like all of our assets are denominated in dollars that those very dollars having value depends on debt being repayable. So the banks took too much risk. It wasn't they that were punished. They were bailed out because the alternative was to let everything fail. And that's the nature of the system that we continue to live in guys.
2026, 18 years on from 2008, we are still in the system where the debt has to be, you know, continually repay with interest.
That amount of debt has to expand because if not, if it doesn't expand, if it stays the same or contracts, it would be equivalent to letting everything fail. all of your bank account balances, the value of your real estate, the value of your stocks, all the all of the companies and stocks out there, those valuations depend on, you know, this belief system around the dollar and the Canadian dollar and all these other dollars and pesos and yans and rupees persisting and it's not a steady state. It's something that's unsustainable. The reason it's unsustainable is because, you know, yes, we can keep kicking the cat down the road. We can keep lending and creating new money. we can keep if there's too much stress in the system, let's bail everything out, right? And that is very much the plan because it's the only plan that exists. But as this continues over time, you see its effects in the world we live in. You see its effects in the future generations not having as much hope as previous generations.
You see its effects in people who are laid off by AI like and not able to replace their income. Like I mean what's going to happen, right?
Like [snorts] You see its effects in people being unable to capture the full um benefit and deflation abundance that AI brings.
You see its effect in uh you know when when you when you mess with housing when you change housing from a shelter you know a place to raise a family uh that you know a family owns place to raise the place for the the family to grow and nurture into assets and uh and a form of money that's speculated that's gamed that's uh highly regulated and the regulation itself right is what created this in the first place When you do that, you destroy neighborhoods. You mess with the fabric of cities. [snorts] You impact family formation, right? Young people, if they're not able to buy a home, like impacts the rate at which young people get together to create families. So, there's lots of downstream effects and we're only scratching the surface. Um, I do want to keep this opening stream at 90 minutes tops because I've been talking for a long time. So, I want to get to like Clarky and uh I some of your comments here. Illen, by the way, I appreciate the energy that you showed up today with you're you're on the you're on the right track here, my friend. 33 350 trillion US like it's it's even hard for us to grapple with like what that number even is, right? And I think it's time now.
There's a lot of conversations uh out there and and going back to you know when I said like this system persisting and continuing and the way it continues the way it blocks out the free market the way it suppresses human ingenuity by forcing us to remain on these hamster wheels um that cannot allow the free market and its continuence and its downstream effects results in a ton of problems.
Right? We just talked about housing.
There's a a lack of housing creates um a ton of problems around uh homelessness, right? Lack of housing available and that impacts our cities. Forgot to mention that big one. Um and again, I'm still being very Canadaentric here. I'm I'm still being very western centric, but there's lots of stuff that it may be more comfortable for us to not think about out there, right, that exists that the point of this show is to bring it into the light and to examine it with a keen eye.
What I want to say about all these problems that exist right now is that there's also a lot of media coming out, a lot of opinions, a lot of misdiagnosis, right? A lot of people treating the symptom as the cause and conflating the two. So you'll hear things like, oh, it's I mean you'll hear depending on your predisposition or your information space or your like just who you are as a person, right? you may be more inclined to see in your feed um either right oh this is like the immigrants are causing this the immigration we need to get rid of all the immigrants um or it's the billionaires and the corporations and the gre and the greed right it's it's one of these two polarized spectrums [snorts] both of these conflate the the symptoms with the cause right we're talking about the symptoms all of these problems I think it's time. Like if we're talking about billionaires and corporates and corporate greed, you know what is a billionaire and why do they attract so much attention if it's because they have a billion dollars worth of [sighs] net worth, so to speak? A billion dollars?
Well, what the hell is a dollar? Right?
I think it's time for us to have that conversation.
What is a dollar? And how does it come into existence?
And is that is the way it's coming into existence still serving us in terms of the money we use? Or is there a better way?
Because let me tell you guys this and I still have me mentioned briefly only very briefly Bitcoin in this whole stream, right? But these like Illen you're mentioning here like this is refreshing and we're talking about deep civilizational stuff and yeah I think look you know I'm just somebody who's done my first chapter of work. I've kind of pursued my dreams and lived it and what's left to do? Well I just had a kid and I want to contribute to building a better world for my kid, right?
um what's left to do. So, you know, that tends to be sort sort of deep civilizational type stuff. I I suppose I'm not the first one to have these thoughts, right? And I you're not the first. We're not the first to engage with these topics and we won't be the last. And in fact, even in the 70s, 80s, 90s, before the internet was a real thing that everybody used, there were people who knew that this problem was coming. Okay? In particular, there were people who knew that digital connectedness around the world could bring tons of abundance and value to people, but also it had the potential to create uh a surve a surveillance state or a, you know, a totalitarian hellscape the likes of which the world had never seen before. Because you know like if you're imagine if you're somebody in the 70s and you're quite deep in the in the DARPA sur circles and you're seeing this idea of TCP IP right which is the base layer of the internet coming together you're seeing that you have communication protocol that nobody can break and that anybody can opt into you're seeing the potential but also this thing came out of a government lab DARPA you know that there's you you understand the nature of um humans right who will seek power if they [snorts] can and uh if they can acrue a little bit of power to themselves at the cost of others we we can right we're fallible in that way so imagine if you're in the 70s ' 80s 90s you knew just like Ian you and I know and other people in the chat here you and I are having these conversations you knew there was a risk to something happened and it was in the 70s '8s 90s 2000s that a lot of work was being done to figure out when we have the internet can we have a form of money that is native to the internet that is also fair that is by the people for the people, right?
That is not controlled by like that leverages the power of the internet that connects all of us to put the power in all of us.
The power of controlling the money that power has, you know, been the greatest sought-after power for centuries up until that point because whoever controlled, you know, before that it was whoever controlled the gold until the until we started transacting on top of gold. Then it was whoever controlled the ledger of who has this many pieces of paper that are tied to gold. Whoever controlled that had a whole bunch of power.
And we can see that from everything from like, you know, um the Romans stealing other people's gold, conquering other people's gold to I mean the first form of debt money issuance was uh William Patterson and and a wealthy a wealthy what Scottish British family, right? lending to the state at the time, lending to the crown so that they could fund their war efforts and that war story has continued on throughout the centuries. So if you knew in the 70s, ' 80s, 90s, 2000s, and the internet was coming [clears throat] that could concentrate power, then there was a group of people working on this problem back in the day. So like I I'm showing up now standing on the shoulders of those giants, right? starting to like share the understanding of what the thing that came out of that work was built and that that has a name. It's called Bitcoin, right? It was launched in January 3rd, 2009. It's a decentralized protocol-based form of money. So, Ilia, the future is decentralization for sure. But the thing about Bitcoin 2026 is the you have to think about how it was released and it was released in a way that was released into the wild on a message board and it grew in the wild organically, right? Which is very different than most other things that we observe in our lives today. Most other things we observe in our lives today come to us from the top down from things we see as authority figures and we have expert bias towards these so-called centralized institutions, right?
And [clears throat] that's that started from a young age guys if we all you know came through the schooling system. Um so that's like you know we have to accept that we've we've all been through this journey and now we're coming across something that's brand new for the first time that is also emerging from the ground up from the people upwards in terms of its adoption and its use as money. So, Bitcoin like I notice what I said. Notice the specific language that I'm choosing, right? Its use as money, not as an asset, not as a crypto, not as a scam or a Ponzi, right? Like there's there's all sorts of opinions out there and there will be. And like I said at the start of the stream, it's a free market of ideas.
And the whole point is that these ideas clash into each other and change people's minds if they prove to be right for people who choose them. Okay? So there's about, you know, the 10 or 15 20 of you guys in there.
You're listening to the these ideas today and over the course of this show.
Uh it's up to you to decide like is what Ricky is saying true or am I off my rocker, right? Like and you have [clears throat] all the tools at your fingertips, whether it's AI or Google search or friends and family, right? Or other people who are in the know or who've done the work. You have all the tools and resources at your fingertips to figure out is what I'm saying true?
Is money based on debt right now? Is every dollar effectively somebody's debt? And does our continued use of the dollar perpetuate that system?
This isn't going to be comfortable um in terms of the overall journey that we're going through. We'll have to do some work. And uh you know for me the reason I've been able to show up to start this show is because I've done probably like you know 500,000 hours of deep work going for long walks thinking figuring this figuring this stuff out and figuring out okay what are my skills to contribute to this emergent phenomenon of Bitcoin as money right not Bitcoin as an asset that goes up relative to the dollar that's that is that is a way that a lot of people will enter this part of like that part of their journey right they'll which over the past 16 years, 17 years, people have seen that Bitcoin has gone from zero dollars worth in the free market to what 70,000 right now, 80,000.
So, there's still a ton of people who think that it's actually worthless, right? But then they need to reconcile their models of reality of Bitcoin being worthless to the fact that it's actually worth $80,000 in the free market.
There's a lot of people who think that it's going to be replaced by other cryptos. And uh for me, it's Bitcoin, not crypto. And we'll go into detail in this stream over the course of this show why. But Bitcoin was the money created to solve the problem, right? And uh other [clears throat] cryptos came after as a means for people to get rich from it. Basically, there's a lot of people who think of Bitcoin as like pristine asset uh pristine collateral and you can see like Michael Sailor Micro Strategy starting to like pedal [clears throat] some of those noises. And it's going to be really interesting to figure out, okay, what is the role that Michael Sailor plays? Because if it's an asset, then it'll end up like gold.
Illen, you're a gold bug. You like gold.
Then why are we using gold as money, guys? Like that's my question to you, Illen. Because it's impractical for one, right? It's impractical to go pay for my ice cream. Uh Uno Gelato on Broadway in Vancouver takes Bitcoin and it's an instant transaction. And it's impractical to pay them shave off a bit of gold for my gold bar. That's number one. But for the same reason it's impractical to pay because it's clunky and it's a a heavy piece of metal. It's also uh it also did not serve humanity in terms of being a store of value over time because the gold ended up centralized in government vaults and [clears throat] it created power for those governments and uh you know that that power was used against the people and alien we can have a very frank conversation right about like the history and the future but is life getting more or less digital? It's getting more digital, right? We need a digitally native form of money, especially in a world where, you know, AI is rapidly advancing exponentially.
Um, most of what we do in our lives, most of how we transact, most of how we most of how we meet like-minded people that we like, right, that then become friends is through the internet these days. You know, I can certainly say that's true for myself like through my work providing value to others. uh you know before with Prince of Travel like that's how I've built a huge chunk of my community and uh that's the reason you guys have shown up to this stream right for the next thing that I'm doing. So is life becoming more digital? Yes. Uh does gold serve that? No. It's a bit like uh you know saying that we're going to go back to horses instead of electric vehicles.
So alien yeah limited the spreading powers governments inflate and centralized power. That's the real reason and uh that's you can think of Bitcoin as like having some of gold characteristics, right? But also improving upon it in a number of ways such as the unlimited velocity across space and time. All right, across I can transact Bitcoin to somebody on the opposite side of the world um right now and send money that is not debt that's not anyone's debt. It's just what is it based in? It's based in the third pillar of this show, guys. Money, intelligence, energy. Uh I'd like to keep this at 90 minutes. Also, my voice is getting a bit horsearse since I need more practice doing these streams. But uh energy is the third pillar of the show, and it's probably the pillar that I'm going to have uh more more learning to do myself, too.
And I'll be sharing that learning with you guys uh as we go along. [clears throat] But the idea of Bitcoin and why it why it has credible characteristics to serve as money for humanity is similar to gold, right? Gold needed energy to dig out of the ground and Bitcoin needs energy to mine. And the mining process is really really captivating process that it does take a little bit of time to wrap one's mind around. But essentially what it means is it's it is the credible anchor on which we can say that Bitcoin is the people's money.
Bitcoin is not controlled by anyone because the right to mine a new block essentially validate the next set of Bitcoin transactions uh is based on computational race, right? A cryptographic race, a cryptographic hash around the world from specially built machines that uh that rests not on like having having this much power, having this much existing wealth, but it's a it's essentially a fair distributed competition across energy.
Clarky, it's been a while, my friend. You purchased $100 of Bitcoin weekly. So, look, that's probably not a bad move. I uh recommend that you not just purchase it, but move it into self- custody, right? And we can we'll talk about over the show why that matters. Uh yeah, let me know if you're in self- custody or if you have it on an app or a centralized exchange. Um, but also I would look I I I start this show guys age of abundance obviously understanding that the subject matters that we talk about are going to attract comments like inevitable global monetary collapse, right? Like and because I'm entering the arena and the arena is full of people who for my taste there's too much negativity going on.
There's too much uh uh dumerism going on. We talked about how this debt based money system is not sustainable, which by definition that means that it will come to an end one day, as all debt based money systems, as all fiat money systems have in the past. But I'm not going to sit here and be like it's a global monetary collapse and y'all should be scared because the way I see it and the you know what age of abundance the show will always stand for and it's in the name by the way, age of abundance is this is a transformation. It's a it's a process of growing up as humanity. It's all of us going from, you know, you can think of our childhood years as uh hunter gatherers uh and being violent, right?
Being like only having violence to resolve problems and conflicts to our teenage years where we found different forms of money and learn to trade and coexist and civilization flourished as a result. But as a teenager, we had access to a irresponsible credit card and we've been running up a $350 trillion bill that has to be repaid and can't be. And that's a problem. Yes. But it's not a global monetary collapse, guys. It's not this isn't a fear-based show. And you know, like I want you guys to hold me to that. This is Age of Abundance. And what that means is the transition to the new system is one of each of us choosing the right path and choosing to activate our own agency into it. Right? Our own I go back to the words human capital. I go back to our own time and energy. Like where are we allocating our time and energy and which system the old or the new are we contributing to? Because when we're living in a moment of great change, the the ending of something and the beginning of something completely new, each of us has that choice, right?
Each of us has the choice of how to allocate the 24 hours a day that we have. Whether we spend it in fear, fearful of what's coming, like the global monetary collapse, uh, or we choose to take action and choose to educate others and choose to help those around us, right?
And choose to restore, pillar number four of the show, guys, humanity, right? Pillar number four of the show is humanity. And humanity, like I said at the start, is eight billion people. It's also all of us individually.
When we get to where we're going, uh we we we you know, we are it's built around the pillars of humanity that has always served humanity. Strong families, local communities, human ingenuity, creation, um making tomorrow better than it was today, making today better than was yesterday. All of these powerful forces, the most powerful forces, right? Building a better world for the next generation than we've experienced.
We're a bit we're a bit stuck right now.
We're a bit lost in the sauce, guys. And it's because the money has shaped the world in a very specific way. And the first step before um understanding is awareness, right?
The first step before action is awareness. And that's what this show is designed to activate in everybody who's wa watching it.
I'm not telling you to buy Bitcoin. I'm not I'm never going to tell you to, but I'm telling you to understand what Bitcoin is because it's the highest leverage use of basically any free time that anybody has in my view, right? So, if you have some free time um on a day-to-day basis, if you have free time around 10 a.m. Pacific, tune into the show. I'd love to have you participating live. Clark, you asked me about this QR code before. It's a Bitcoin Lightning QR code. So over time, right, over time, I expect the show to be very much driven by audience participation both in the YouTube chat and here.
Clarky, you've got self-custody, you've got the ledger, and that's good. Um, when I say understanding Bitcoin, when I say using Bitcoin, I don't mean holding it. I don't mean hoarding it. I mean using it as money, right? Remember I said using it as money, not uh using it as an asset to lend against, using it as an asset to hoard um or to continue like increasing the collateral base against which the old system uh takes advantage of. Right? The old system needs the collateral base to keep lending against.
Whereas using it as money means using it in your day-to-day life, spending in it and earning in it. And these are going to be crazy leaps for some of you, right? These are and even I'm even I'm not quite there yet, right? I'm on my own journey and this show is a step in that journey. Um, a big step for me, right? And like I'm going to be showing up day by day here to uh to keep it going. But long run, where we're going towards is using it as money. And so that's why I have this QR code up here.
Over time, um, as we get more and more, you know, people in, you can send me Bitcoin. You can send me Satoshi's which are individual bits and pieces of a Bitcoin uh to the show and uh you can uh customize what the show looks like, right? And it'll be a free market of SATs chats uh what I've got to bring to the table and the ideas that are discussed on a day-to-day basis. And I appreciate when somebody sends me money that isn't somebody else's debt, money that's backed by energy, right? That will forever capture the human productivity uh that gets measured in Bitcoin. And as more and more people measure human productivity using Bitcoin, that's the transition that we're going through. We're only 17 years in. And uh guys, I'm going to wrap it up soon. But uh Satoshi Nakamoto, I've I've appreciated your contributions to the chat. Um let's get into some of this stuff tomorrow. Okay, we'll be back 10 a.m. tomorrow. Bitcoin ETFs.
Uh we'll get to There's a lot of stuff to cover, a lot of ground to cover.
[clears throat] I love these questions. I will take them back. ETFs, uh, when is this going to happen? That's a key question. The answer is whenever you decide it happens for you, right? Whenever you decide it happens for you. It's not about when it'll happen to everybody else. It's about when you will make the change uh to align your human capital with the world that's emerging rather than the legacy world that requires you to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place because that's what debt based money does.
I'm gonna come back to one comment that I had up here. Nikki, uh Nikki, sounds like you've got uh you know, you've got some ideas in your mind where uh the billionaires are psychopaths, right? And and look, there's a line between good and evil that runs through all of us.
And Nikki, if you if you keep tuning in over the course of the show, we will explore why the system selects for people who have perhaps psychopathic tendencies, people who have perhaps uh you know the more hard-edged, the more mavelian tendencies within humans.
Why those people inevitably rise to the top in a debt based system? Because a debt based system is naturally extractive, right? It can't allow the free market of all humanity to contribute.
I'm I'm starting to get into it, right?
But I'll I'll I'll kind of leave that as a teaser, but uh we will we will go through it. The format of future episodes, guys, I'm not going to be yapping the whole time. I'll start probably with some um some Notebook LM slides that I've generated. I'll walk you guys through one specific element of the whole range of broad and wide topics that we can cover. And day by day, we'll make inroads, right? We'll start to chip away at some of these preconceived notions. And it's it's really at the end of the day up to you guys as the viewers to determine, you know, am I on the right track or am I off my rocker?
Again, the the agency lies within you guys to think about what I'm saying and see if it resonates within your own lives. And if it does, that's where I will have delivered value, right? And if if it doesn't, then this show the show won't work. That's how that's how the nature of the free market of ideas goes.
Somebody had a question about books that inspired. So Mark, you asked about Abundance by Ezra Klein. Uh, and I'll just end it here with guys [clears throat] like I think one thing I wanted to do for episode one of the show. Uh, which you know 200 episodes later we'll look at look back at this show and be like, "Oh, that was episode one, right?" So one thing uh I will get I will get back to here along my journey and author that's had a big impact is uh goes by the name Jeff Booth. His book, The Price of Tomorrow, touched on a lot of the themes that we've been talking about here, the fundamental disconnect between technological progress and uh and debt based money that we live in and how that's those two forces are about to collide in a very big way. So, if there's one author I'd recommend uh podcast you check out, check out Jeff.
Uh happy to consider him a friend now as well now that I've done some work and we've connected. Uh maybe we'll have him on future episodes of the show. And yeah, maybe we'll have some guests, too.
I think it'll be interesting for the format to have the occasional guest.
Nikki, I'll wrap it up here. Comment about how companies that are leading AI development refuse to focus on safeguards. Yes. So, that is a great place to end because that's a great symptom of the broken money, right? When you have debt based money, the money ends up controlling the law.
So anywhere in history you look at whoever controls the money makes the laws and whoever controls the money tends to also control the media, right?
Whoever controls the money tends to control capture the regulators.
So a lot of AI conversations out there, there's a lot of conversations being had and they end at a point where it's like, oh, we need regulation. Oh, we need policy makers to step up. Oh, we need the pe the grown-ups in charge, the people in charge to do something. And Nikki, like it's a good question and thank you for pressing the point. The thing that everybody needs to wrap their minds around is the the people in charge are the people who have won this game, who have positioned themselves closer to the money printer than the average person.
the people in charge are not the it's by design that they are, you know, allowing AI development to progress and for the the the financial engine to continue to reach, you know, crazy uncharted levels of territory that don't make sense and that actually harm the average person, right? and that they're not doing anything about uh about uh the mass unemployment wave that unfortunately is about to you know be a really big challenging moment for a lot of people in our lives as this old model that we had of the world starts to break down or starts to show signs of cracking. [clears throat] It's because um you have to look at the money and you have to look at how the debt based money shapes human behavior shapes human incentives.
We'll keep coming back to this word incentives, right? All you have to do is look at Congress people and how they trade and how they invest and how they have access to information and how insider uh trading regulations do not seem to apply mysteriously. Or uh the you know more recently it's like one of the one of the soldiers uh going to invade Venezuela and capture Mudo uh was trading insider on Poly Market right on like the capture of Madro and Do you think the soldier was the only person doing that? Right? Like it's it's it's worth asking these questions. Now, I don't have answers. I don't have like I'm not sitting here and saying for sure these things happened, Satoshi Nakamoto, like you bring up a great point here, right?
Why is it that Nikki when we ask when we when we question like the the people who are supposed to regulate the companies um and to protect like individual ordinary people of the like the people of the country that government's supposed to serve right which is all of us all the people why do these regulators not uh these powerful people not actually do their job but not only that but why do they all end up mysteriously on this island in the Caribbean right that then there's photographic evidence But nothing happens.
I said this this rabbit hole goes way deep and over the course of the show, we'll we'll go deep on some of these, but remember like I'm not here saying that some people are villains and some people are victims. We are all rationally optimizing our lives. And that includes all the people I just talked about, the people leading AI development. They're looking to grow their companies. the people in government have have chosen a path that allows them to, you know, pursue their definitions of success. It's very much possible for something like a debt-based money system to result in unintended consequences which we're living through right now um that are completely like relative to the people who started the whole thing or who played a role in starting the thing, right? So whether that's William Patterson 1694 to the people who went to Jackal Island and formed the Federal Reserve in 1913, those people probably also had relatively good intentions or at least not entirely harmful intentions.
Sure, maybe somewhere along the way there's a small percentage of people who tend to be psychop psychopathic, tend to be, you know, more on the darker side, but I don't think it's most people, right? I think I think the line between good and evil like I said cuts through all of us and uh the system the the the system we've built that again is not any one person has built has been it's a system that has persisted through hundreds of years that we've all been a part of has resulted in the selection of some people rising to the top that tends to be uh the type of people who today are the people who are refusing to focus on safeguards and laws who are changing laws to serve the people who have the money and who uh uh who end up you know given that much power use it to serve themselves. Why you have to understand Bitcoin is because Bitcoin takes away that power as a form of money. It's the people's money by the people for the people. The way it operates, the way that rule changes happen go through the people. That's part of the code. That's part of the technical setup. That's the more interesting side to the Bitcoin conversation. The story that's really worth telling here um as humans, right?
Not the oh, it went up to 100,000. Oh, went down to 50,000. Not that. Most people can't look past that as of right now. That's what these episodes of the show Age of Abundance are designed to bring uh bring about. Okay, I'll go back to the idea of um recommendation. Tune in to Jeff Booth's stuff, his book, The Price of Tomorrow, and his overall ideas around if we can fix this coordination problem that we have as humans. When I say coordination, I mean the money means that some people are going to have way way way more than others and other people are going to live in economic slavery effect effectively, right? If we can fix this, then we can all achieve a level of abundance that far surpasses what we have right now with far less stuff we don't want to do. So when I say stuff we don't want to do, I I mean like the way we think about work right now, right? far less work, far higher standard of living, not just for us, but for eight billion people. That's the destination of truth, hope, and abundance to get there. There's a lot of new ideas to grasp and a lot of old ideas that are going to need unwinding.
And uh my goal is to always approach it from a educational standpoint, right?
From meeting people where they are and uh sharing these, you know, hopefully ways that can relate to moments that you're going through. if you want to participate in the chat or through a lightning zap, that's the best way to uh seek out a question like, "Oh, I have a question. Can you answer this?" So, today I appreciate everybody who's tuned in, you know, over the course of this stream. Um, I'm really excited. Uh, I'll be real with you guys. If you guys have followed me from the prince of travel days, right, you know the energy that I bring and you also probably feel that, you know, I'll just be very transparent like around 2023, 2024, I felt like the energy was slipping within me for just pursuing like traveling the world because I I did it and you get to a point of diminishing marginal returns, right? And so today, March uh May 13, 2026, I finally feel like, okay, I've had all this energy.
I've I've had all these plans and I've had to do a bunch of things before today to like get this ready, but um I'm I'm very happy to have gotten it off the ground. And uh I think that's it for today, guys. I'll see you tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific and weekdays 10 a.m.
Sometimes I may have to skip a day if I'm traveling or something, but I'll let you guys know. And uh I'll also be building stuff for Age of Abundance the show. So we'll have a website soon.
We'll have more stuff. have clips from this being distributed and it'll be a real-time practice, right? Talking about AI and abundance and what it can be doing, what it can do for us and me also applying it in my own life and in the show that you guys get to experience daily.
Okay, that's it for me episode one.
Thanks guys for tuning in. I'll see you tomorrow.
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