Foreign hey guys, Rafi here from the Endgame Investor with this week’s this month’s edition of the Bitter Endgame draft with Phil Lowe. Check out his channel in the description below or the comment that I pinned to the top. I haven’t decided which one I’m going to do yet. I guess I’ll decide once I publish this video or right before I publish it. And I just wanted to say I have the sniffles, so I might blow my nose once or twice, but I will put my microphone on mute. I probably have Covid. Don’t worry. I’ve already called the CDC recommending global lockdowns and I’ve put all of my children in quarantine.

I’ve locked them in their room and I will not let them out for an entire two weeks and I’m shooting myself up with everything imaginable. I’m not really doing any of that, but that’s what I the medical protocol said to do about three years ago, four years ago. So just remember we were all used to be insane and now people have forgotten about it. But I haven’t and neither should any of you. But I’m fine. Maybe I do have Covid, maybe I don’t. And I’m going to live. Anyway. Phil had some topics to discuss. One of them is Gresham’s Law.

One of them is Elon Musk. And I forgot what the third one is, but he will, he will introduce them right now. The third one is the concept of the Cosian solution and spontaneous order. So but we’ll start, we’ll start with Elon Musk because that’s the, that’s the big zeitgeist of the few past few days. And I just wanted to talk about how despite his libertarian face, you know, if you listen, if you follow his Twitter feed, he sounds very liberty minded. He’s hit. All of his businesses are major beneficiaries of the Cantillon effect like he is.

He is standing remarkably close to the, to the money printer and every, I think all of his businesses are major major beneficiaries of government largesse. And so when the, when the, the rumor behind the scenes is that despite saying he doesn’t want any electric vehicle, he doesn’t want any mandates or subsidies of any kind for anybody behind the scenes, people are saying he was pushing very hard for continued government electric vehicle mandates and more subsidies for electric vehicles. And, and all it would take is a quick look in the book of Tesla to know that, that Tesla is, you know, a dead man Walking.

It is massively, massively overleveraged. It’s valued at like 10 times more than Ford and General Motors combined. The whole thing is just the money printer being poured into Tesla. And so Elon Musk is not really the wealthiest man in the world. He’s just, he’s an illusion of the. He’s. He’s the receptor. He’s the inflation receptacle of the world, right? And that’s where his, that’s where his thing come from. He’s. He’s very. He’s a genius at getting close to the money printer. Look, and Teslas are a cool car. I just. We don’t know what, we don’t know what cars would look like on the gold standard.

We have no idea because we’re not on one. That’s like trying to see into the fourth dimension. So we won’t know what Elon Musk cars will look like on the gold standard until we return to one. Now you know what’s going to happen on the other side? I have no idea. These, these instances in history where you have people that structurally benefit from whatever there is of tyranny. You can call big government tyranny by different degrees. But yes, Elon Musk is not exactly a good guy and he shouldn’t be trusted. Whenever he does something good, I will obviously applaud it.

And I’m happy that he uses his resources for anything that’s good, even if he doesn’t intend for it to be good. Even if it’s just a cultural awakening that’s all fake. And you could call that. I never expected Doge to cut anything substantial. Well, it’s funny with. Can I interrupt real quick? Yeah, yeah. What’s funny with Doge is that the, that Doge was promising. Well, Elon Musk really misrepresented what he was saying. And he could have presented this in a way that would have made a lot more sense. Doge was saying they’re going to find fraud, which is people, you know, dead, dead people receiving Social Security checks, all that, all that kind of stuff.

Right? The problem was you don’t have to steal from the government. If you ask the government for money, they will give it to you. Like, they will send it. They, you know, the, the government programs having. Having worked in the government. The government, the bureaucracies in the government will order, you know, a thousand golden toilets for their offices just because the budget says we have a thousand golden toilet, or, you know, we have a budget for a thousand golden toilets. So we’re going to order a thousand golden toilets. Right. We’ve installed a device that makes them swirl the correct American way.

Sweet land of liberty. The corruption. Corruption is the government itself. It’s not stealing from the government. That’s the part where he misunderstood. If he wanted to say government efficiency, what he should have said was, we’re going to tackle these bloated budgets and expose them. Right. Because all, all the stuff he exposed was the government functioning as the government is supposed to function. You know, it’s supposed to function, you know, but there’s no, there’s no, there’s no, there’s not much outright fraud, apparently. Now maybe there is and we’re just not seeing it, but I’m, I’m not surprised that there’s not outright fraud the way they were thinking of it, where people were stealing from the government coffers.

The people who have access to the government coffers are legally using them to enrich themselves. Yeah, that’s, that’s how it is. I mean, I, I’ve come to the conclusion long ago there’s no such thing as stable equilibrium in government. Doesn’t exist. Once you start it, you’re already on the road to perdition. It’s not going to stop. And the only thing you can do is, is hope that. But that at the point that it blows up, it’s not bubblicious. To the point that it’s going to destroy all society. And you can start at a baseline once again.

But whether you’re talking about monetary corruption or, or just moral corruption, because you’re copying a culture that, that is inherently evil. And usually it’s, you know, the money inflating the money leads to that, but it doesn’t have to, it doesn’t have to be the money. That’s just like the most common cause of it. You can have an honest money and still have a corrupt society. It’s possible, it’s just harder. But, yeah, look, there’s, and you, you and I agree on this. I think 100%. There’s no stopping the collapse. We just hope that whenever we fall, we won’t eat each other.

You know, climbing back up or. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s going to be scary. What’s happening, what’s going to happen. And Elon Musk is not going to save us. And Trump isn’t. Nobody is. Oh, yeah, Trump’s side is. They’re talking about seizing SpaceX. I mean, you know, having the government see SpaceX and see Starlink now, I mean, that’s Just, you know, we’re being. We’re being run by. Trump is a child. Yes, he’s a very. Elon. Yeah, I know. Obviously, Elon’s a child. He has, like, 13 kids with how many women? 12. 13 women. He can’t. If you can’t sustain a family together and live in equilibrium and homeostatic equilibrium with yourself and your.

And your drives, then you have not grown up. We are being run by children that. These children, I mean, look, obviously Elon Musk and, And Trump are. Are more comforting children than Kamala Harris and whoever would run her, because then you’re talking about, like, she genuinely retarded people that are controlled by genuinely genius evil, whereas Trump doesn’t have room to be completely overrun by evil because his ego is too big. So it’s just whatever’s in there, and that’s. That’s better, I guess, but. And I’m happy about it, but in. In such a cynical way, it’s hard to even say that it’s really happy.

It’s just like, I don’t even know what to call it. We’re in such clown world. If, If Musk really wanted to destroy the system and bring in the libertarian utopia, all he has to do is pump his billions into gold, and then that would. That would do it. That’s all we would have to do. Actually, I had. I had a party. Now that we’re going on tangents for a second. I had. There was an. I said this. I tweeted this out, and somebody responded to me that wouldn’t do anything because I would only shift dollars around.

So I responded, well, isn’t everything shifting dollars around? I mean, when you dump dollars, you’re shifting them to something else. It’s not like they go out of existence. So what’s. What’s your response to that? Like, why would. Buying gold or silver. Why would. If, If. If Elon Musk tweeted, today, crypto is trash. Buy gold and silver. Why would that end the monetary system? Why wouldn’t it just be shifting dollars around? I know the answer, but I think you can. You can sure break it down better than I can. The, the monetary system, the way the current monetary system sets up.

It’s like this rubber band between the $42, the statutory $42 an ounce. Are you. Is that wine? You just. Are you just. It is. You’re like, I need a. Oh, Phil’s talking. No, no, no. I just. I just. I. I did my first tahara. Like, I, I dressed. I dressed a corpse by myself. So I, I kind of need to relax. I was in charge. I was in charge of it. I’m fine. I just. A little bit wound up. Yeah. It was just funny. You’re like, all right, Phil, start talking. Yeah, we’re going streaky. Hey, honey.

Hey. What the hell are you doing? We’re streaking. All right, it’s done. It’s. It’s done. Yeah. Pour another one. What were we talking about? The. Oh, oh, the, the. The. What would happen if elon Musk moved the 42 into gold? Or, sorry, moved the 42 told everyone to buy gold? So the statutory rate of gold is 42 an ounce. That’s. That’s what the statutory rate of the gold is. The dollar is a Note for. For 142 of an ounce of gold. And the market price of gold is right now $3,300. And they started. They started like this and that.

You know, it’s. It’s. If you imagine a rubber band stretching between my two thumbs, it’s getting more and more and more taut. And whenever that snaps, because this is not going to move whenever that snaps, this whole thing blows up. Now, he could. They were talking about the revalue, and the way Scott Best was describing is, oh, we’re just going to. We’re going to move this over here and the rubber band is going to go slack and there’s not going to be problems at all. That’s not what would happen if they revalued. Sorry. If they revalued, the whole thing would move over this way.

There might be a little bit of slack, but this tension is still going like they’re still. They’re still inducing more and more and more debt, which is stretching the current price of gold in dollar terms farther and farther away from its statutory price. So if Elon Musk was like, tweet, let’s say he put, you know, $40 billion or whatever into gold and total all his followers to go do that same thing. This would just be. And it would snap much faster. So that’s. That’s the quickest in the scope that we have of, of this 45 minute show.

That’s the scope. That’s the. That’s my explanation for it. Yeah. Okay, fine. So you wanted to go into. That’s my. That’s my response. Yeah. We don’t have much time. Gresham’s law. Gresham’s law. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So I. So Florida. Oh, you’re. Are you in Florida? No. You’re not in Florida right now? But you’re going in July. I will be, yeah. So Florida has just passed a law legalizing gold and silver as legal tender for. For purchases and debts. Go ahead. Actually, they haven’t. They haven’t. I just talked to a guy. I’m going to publish this video.

They haven’t because technically any bar or coin that has any printing, any. Any minting on it, even, even a serial number is not considered legal tender because they put in a technicality to the law to make exceptions for any gold or silver that has any imprinting of anything on it at all. So just a raw gold bar would be legal tender, but not a gold bar with a serial number. Right. So if I took a blowtorch and melted off the serial number, now I’ve legal tenderized it. I’ve legally tenderized it. Hey, tenderizing meat. Tenderizing meat again, Lots more tenderizing.

I don’t know. I mean, I talked to the guy and basically practically nothing is legal tender. No gold or silver is legal tender in Florida practically. But assuming. Let’s assume that, that, that we get over that next year. Because you talked about it, let’s assume that it is. Okay, then what? Okay, we can assume it does. It honestly doesn’t matter for right now anyway. So the question was if gold and silver are legal tender for that. So we, when we drive down to Florida, we should see merchants voluntarily exchanging and gold and silver and honest gold and silver credits, and that the US Federal Reserve note in Florida should just be, you know, floating in the wind.

Nobody bothered to pick them up, you know, littering the streets. And, you know, we should be in this libertarian utopia. But why not? Why is it when we drive down to Florida, everyone’s still using dollars? There’s really no fundamental change. And the reason is Gresham’s law. And Thomas Gresham noticed in the, I think the 1500s, because he was for Queen Elizabeth I. So he noticed that they had, they had debased the currency. So they had a, you know, they had like a pound sterling or whatever it was that was 90 silver, and they debased it down to 50%.

And what he noticed was that everyone had taken the old coins and they tucked them away in their treasure chests and they had used the new coins for. For transactions. Because. Because if you have a coin that is, you know, half the silver of the other coin, why would you spend the more valuable silver coin when you can just spend the less valuable coin and the face. Because of legal 10 now, in a truly free market, what’s the Merchant going to say, no, that has half the silver in it that, that one does. You need to give me, you need to give me two of those for every one of those.

But because they, because of legal tender laws, they both say one pound sterling. So the merchant has no, because he cannot reject one coin against another, he has no choice but to simply raise his prices, right? So he raises his prices to make sure he’s going to get the silver he needs. And that pushes the good silver out or the good coins out even farther. And more and more of the bad coins get spent in circulation. And we see this all the time. If you go into prisons where, like, cigarettes are currency, what do people do when the good cigarettes come in? They hoard them and they, they, they’ll even take cigarettes they’re going to use for currency.

They’ll knock out a little bit of the tobacco and like stuff in some dirt or something to, to fill it back in and then use that for currency. So the currency, the cigarettes get devalued in prison. The coins get debased in the, you know, in the old world. And the people, the people can participate in debasing coinage by clipping them. So you have a, you know, you have a coin that says it’s, you know, one ounce of silver or whatever fraction of silver, and people will, you know, get in there and clip off, clip off a little bit of the edges.

They take off, you know, 5% or whatever. It’s a little bit smaller. The government can participate by just minting coins with less silver in it. So, you know, they take a coin that has, that used to have 90% silver, and they put in 60% silver or whatever. Interesting. Interesting. In, in, in rabbinic law, there is a limit to Gresham’s law. This, because they’re trying to figure out you’re. There’s a, there’s a mitzvah called ona in transactions. It’s a form of stealing through unfair transaction. It’s like charging, I think it’s like 16 over the market price for something.

It’s some arbitrary number. I don’t know why it is that number, but it applies to the coin itself. So if a coin is more than 16% Shahuk or rubbed out, it weighs 16% less than a full body coin. Then you can’t use it anymore as, as, as a coin, and that transaction is not considered money. So they acknowledge Gresham’s law, but they give a limit on it. It can only go this far and then that’s it. You have to you have to get rid of only so much more wear and tear, right? And in the modern application.

So this isn’t the traditional application, the modern application of Gresham’s Law, what they’re doing is they’re printing notes for coins they don’t have. So they’re saying, don’t worry, I got all the gold. I got all the gold back there. I got 90 million tons. Trust me, bro, just take my notes. And they’re just printing more and more and more notes. Now. Gresham’s Law can be broken in only one of two ways. First is a reformer comes into the government, like Thomas Gresham, and he says, okay, we’ve made a mistake. We need to go back to full currency, and we need to eat the crash that comes from it, because a crash will come from it.

We need to eat the crash and just. Just plow through it. Everything will be okay. We’ll get through it. The other option is total financial collapse. So the market says, no, no mas. We cannot take these coins. And this is that usually because once Gresham’s Law started, it kind of keeps going until you end up with no silver in the coinage at all. And then the once. Once there’s no silver or no money in the coinage at all, then the coins lose contact with reality itself. You. And then nothing can be done to keep their. To keep them with some sort of face value of any kind.

And for. For a historical note of this, during the French hyperinflations, the penalty for refusing an assignment note was death. So if the merchant did not take an assignment, you could go to the, you know, the French Revolutionary Council and say, this guy is not taking my money. And the penalty was Madame Guillotine. And still the merchants wouldn’t take it because their choice was to risk the guillotine or to guarantee you’re going to die by starvation because you’re taking worthless notes, because the notes themselves, this is what a lot of people, they don’t understand. When a currency hyperinflates, it’s not that it’s worth a little bit.

It’s worth literally nothing. It’s worth less. It’s completely worthless. It’s undefined. And so what you’re saying, when you’re trying to pass off hyperinflated currency, what you’re saying is, give me that for free. And merchants will not do that. It’s like telling a mathematician, like, either you divide by zero or I will shoot you in the head. And they’ll be like, exactly, exactly. You’re trying to divide by zero in the real world, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work. Am I the only one around here gives a shit about the rules? Market zero. You think I’m zero? And so those are the only two solutions.

I was hoping the new Trump administration was going to come in and, you know, they were. They were toying with auditing Fort Knox and they were mentioning the gold standard stuff. I don’t think any of that’s going to happen, unfortunately. I think we’re going to. I think we’re going to have the second one. Honestly, at this point, we’re so close to the final, final total rejection of the currency anyway. The crash, the size of the crash is not that different, but it would have been, it would have been nice if, you know, we had had some public words of like, hey, everybody get a little silver.

Things are about to get gnarly. Yeah, we’re not. We’re not going to get that. But I, I have witnessed, I have felt a small awakening of people into silver and gold and more interested in it. I’m seeing that in my community. People have just. The Israelis have just started to discover me. I think that’s because I’ve had it a few Israeli Hebrew interviews with some. With some Israeli dissidents recently, and my boondock equivalent of Montana community have suddenly figured out that I actually have a following in there. Maybe that’s why they didn’t react when I yelled at them.

We, Phil and I talked about that before. It had to do with COVID I’m also like a local, a local star here for standing up to Covid regulations. So they know me about that from years ago. But anyway, yeah, Gresham. Gresham’s Law is not going to be overcome by anything other than hyperinflation. Right. And I just want to say, after Gresham’s Law, without fail, it’s a. The only, the only result of the end of Gresham’s Law is a return to honest currency. It happens without failing. The amount of. The amount of intervention to try and stop it is.

Only increases the suffering. So the best thing to do is just to rush back to gold and silver as fast as possible. And, you know, hopefully the government collapses to the point where it can’t interfere with the interaction between volunteer exchange of gold and silver between people. Right. And that’s. That’s pretty much all I have to say. Yeah, this, this is also. This also brings to mind why I am so optimistic about this end game. I’m paraphrasing Brett Weinstein. He’s one of the only podcasts that I actually listen to. I listen to a few others. Walter Kern and Matt Taibbi, America this week.

And, and Brent Weinstein is pretty much what I listen to. And he was talking about, he used the term end of dominion when he was, he was talking about, like, messianic times when humans suddenly realize that there’s nothing else to take over and we have to, like, all get along with each other or the planet’s going to be destroyed. Sorry about the end of dominion. And this, this end game would really be the first time that a monetary collapse includes the entire planet. It’s not like Rome collapses and then the transactions are still going on normally over in Persia or something like that, or one country isolated.

It’s really every. All of us at once are going to experience this. No one’s going to escape it. And on the one hand, that’s terrifying. On the one hand, it’s also very cathartic because maybe if we all experience it together, maybe we can wriggle out of it in a way that wouldn’t require a zombie apocalypse. I know we will. I’m not saying maybe there will be as. I don’t think there will be. I’m very, I’m very optimistic. I’m, I think it will be hard, but I think we’re going to get out of it and I think we’re going to throw away this AI thing.

We could, we could even agree on, on settling at a level of, of technology that won’t danger the planet. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but then again, I see these AI advances and I see the stupidity that it accelerates among our species. And I’m thinking like, we can’t handle any more technology really, or else we just won’t exist anymore. And I don’t know how it’s going to stop, but I think it’s going to include something like that, like the Amish were on to something. They, they might have stopped earlier than we were comfortable with.

But the idea, the idea of, of okay, we have a level of technology, we’ll, we’ll stop here and that’s it. It’s not entirely crazy or at least be more be very measured on when you bring technology into your, into your group. You know, maybe, maybe, maybe you can let it in. You know, we’ll let electricity in, but slowly and, you know, let people really think about it for a while kind of thing. Yeah, I don’t know. Anyway. And yeah, the Third one was spontaneous order emerging out of the in game kit. That actually ties in. This is why I’m optimistic as well.

And this is known as the Cosian solution. So Ronald Coase noticed this was in the 40s or 50s, I think, but he noticed, right? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I’m going to explain it. The Cossian solution is once property rights are established, the economically most beneficial outcome will occur regardless of the distribution of those property rights. So he noticed it with farmers and cattle ranchers. So the cattle ranchers need to drag their cattle all over God’s green earth to graze them. And sometimes they have to march through farmer’s fields. And of course, cattle marching through farmer’s fields is detrimental to the farmer.

So the question was, who has the property rights? Does the cattleman have the right to take his cows through the farmer’s field to his, to his pasture on the other side? And does the farmer have, or does the farmer have the right to protect his crop from it? I don’t remember which one, but I don’t remember which one actually happened. But the cosine solution is it doesn’t matter if the value of the farm is X and the value of the cattle is Y, then if X is greater than Y and the property rights belong to the farmer, then the cattle rancher will simply not bring his.

You know, the farmer says, if you, if you, you know, go into my property, I’m going to shoot your cows and sue you something. Right? And the law has backed him up, then the cattleman will simply not bring his cows to the other side of the pasture crossing the farmer’s field. If the, if Y is greater than X, however, so the cows are more valuable than the field, then, and the property rights belong to the farmer, then the cattleman will pay the farmer to destroy part of his field. He said, look, I have to get my, these cows are worth this much.

I have to get them to the other side of the pasture so they can finish their grazing. And so I’m sorry, we’re going to, you know, we’re going to transfer. I would like to buy or rent part of your field just to bring my cows across it. And the farmer will say yes, because he’s paying more than that. Whatever that corn or whatever that wheat is worth. Okay? So he’s saying essentially that there is a moral right and wrong. There is a right answer and wrong answer morally. But it will be worked out between them based on the values of each of their, yes, each of their utilities.

Each of these Utility functions. So if the. Now, if the property rights belong to the rancher, right? So the rancher has the two farms and he’s, you know, the government says that he is allowed to bring his cows across this field to his other pasture. And the farmer may not impede him. If the cows are worth more than the farm than. Than the. Than the grain that’s being destroyed, the farmer is just going to let the field. He’s going to let that part of the field go. He’s going to say, I don’t, you know, whatever you take, I don’t care if the grain is worth more than the cows, then the farmer is going to pay the cattle rancher to figure out another way.

He’s going to say, look, this grain is very valuable. I can’t have you destroying it. So I will. I will pay you some of this grain and you take your. Take your cows the long way around. Or we’ll build a. We’ll build a. What do you call those? A sky bridge. What are those? A pedestrian. We’ll build a pedestrian bridge over this part of the field. You know, whatever. We’ll figure out a solution so that you can bring your cows over. And the point of the. The point of this is all of these solutions are peaceful and they’re all maximally beneficial to both the cattlemen and the farmer.

Doesn’t matter who gets the property. Right now. The farmer. The farmer. In this scenario, the farmer absolutely prefers that he has the property rights, and the cattleman absolutely prefers that he has the property rights. But it doesn’t matter. Wait, wait. Misunderstanding something. One of them does have the property rights. The farmer. One of them does, but it doesn’t matter which one. If you homestead it. If you homesteaded the crops, the land belongs to him. The question is to let the farmer cross or not, for a fee. Sure. The only question. I’m not sure I. This had something to do with, like, obscure Montana rules where, like, you know, a cattleman is allowed to bring his cows to different areas of his own pasture or something even.

And there was some gray area for whether he was allowed to cross another man’s field or something. I agree with you. I would think that, you know, my land is my land, but, you know, I mean, we. We pay taxes on land we own, and if we don’t pay those taxes, then we no longer own that land. So it’s not as if we’re in some, you know, ideal land. I think you can make that. You can. You can make this much more succinct you, it can be made much more succinct by just saying, like if the, if the cattleman has to cross the farmer’s fields, he’s got to pay above the market price of the, the, the grain that he’s going to destroy.

Yeah, that’s, that’s the cosine solution right there. That’s all. Well, what I’m saying is what happened. But what happens if the property rights are opposite? What happens if the cattleman does? So let me, let me, let me bring this into an in game scenario. Wait, hold on. How, how could it possibly be that the cattleman has rights to land that the farmer is homesteaded? You don’t homestead land by having cattle graze on it. I’m not sure. I’d have to, I’d have to look into that specific example. All I know is the, the hypothetical was it doesn’t matter if the cattleman has the rights or the farmer has the rights.

Okay, anyway, I can look into this to get back to you, but let me, let me bring this to an in game scenario. So I want you to imagine, I want you to imagine there’s a 10, the dollar’s dead, we’ve. Everything’s collapsed and society is really having trouble functioning. So there’s a town here. I want you to imagine a town over here, dear viewer. And there’s going to be farms over here, dear viewer. And there’s a road that runs between the two. So the farmers need to get their crops to town and the town needs to get their, the stuff they make in the town out to the farm farmers so they can trade and so civilization can continue.

Now a group of highwaymen set up shop on the highway in between the two. And they start, you know, whatever trucks come through, they shoot the high, they shoot the driver, and they take all the stuff and run off into the forest. So the town says, okay, we have a, we have a problem here. We are not getting our food. And the farmers too, the farmers have to say, have that same problem. So the farmers in the town, they agree. We’re going to send out a posse and we’re going to go remove those highwaymen from the road.

And so the, let’s say the, so the town and the farmers get together, they make a posse and they go try and clear out the highwaymen. Let’s say the highwaymen win the battle. So, you know, they have this gunfight in the woods. The highwaymen beat off the posse and they maintain control of the road. What is the next step that the town does the town sends a representative to the highwayman and says, look, the farmers are going to stop sending the trucks through the town. They’re going to stop because you’re killing them and you’re taking all their stuff and you’re taking all our stuff.

And so we’re all going to starve to death. We’re all going to die and the farmers are going to stop sending us food and this road is going to disappear on us. So instead of killing us, why don’t we appoint you security ministers of this road and you can charge a toll and you will, you know, we’ll pay you, you know, whatever, whatever the going rate is, we’ll pay you a small fee and you can protect, you can protect the road and you can make sure the stuff gets back and forth and therefore, you know, the road becomes a toll road.

Basically, ladies and gentlemen, that is how government is. Well, okay, now let’s, now let’s say now. So the highwaymen have established their, this is not traditional property rights, but the highwaymen have established their property rights by being physically there and not allowing anyone to kick. Now let’s say the town wins. So the town and the farmers are organized to posse. They kill most of the highwaymen and the rest run off into the deep forest. And so now the town says, okay, well we’ve cleared them off, but this road is obviously not secure because highwaymen are going to come back if we all just go home.

So we’re going to need to establish a garrison here and to pay for this garrison we need to have a fee, we’re going to charge a toll. So you’re saying it’s the same result no matter which way? Yes, the same result, no matter what. Get a, you get a toll road. The same result, no matter what happens is you get a toll, you get a road that is secure, that is patrolled by armed security men and you get a, you have to pay a fee to use that road to get your goods and services safely through.

Now as the situation improves, right? So initially the situation is when you go to pay your toll, this, you know, this drugged up teenager comes out with a, with a semi automatic or fully automatic gun and is waving the gun in your face. So you need to pay me this toll, right? So the town, you know, whoever the people paying the toll are like, look guy, you know this, stop this. We’re going to pay the toll, but you need to calm down. And the brigand leader or the guy who’s running the militia says, okay, you know what, let’s these guys are kind of loose cannons and honestly, they’re better served doing other things Anyway, so we’ll get this old retired guy, we’ll give him a yellow vest and a little cap and we’ll put him on the toll road and we’ll make it all friendly, nice and service.

And then if nobody pays, then we’ll send the crazy teenager guy with the machine gun out to, you know, deal with it. Deal with any people not paying the toll, right? So eventually what do you end up with? You end up with a civilized toll road with a nice gentleman who takes your fee and you drive along secure road between the farm and the town. Regardless of who wins. That’s the cosine solution, the danger. So here’s the, here’s the date. This, the maximum danger in the, in this world is the world where the property rights are disputed.

So when, when it’s not clear who has the property rights, that’s when people get out their guns and go and shoot at each other. This is the same thing in a, same thing in a town with a mafia right in New York City, when there’s a mafia, when there’s one family running everything or the, you know, the five families all collude and they get together and they agree not to shoot each other, that’s fine. Suddenly the Latin Kings roll up and they want a piece of the town. And now the Mafia and the Latin Kings are in active gun battles on the streets of New York, shooting at each other.

And you know, that’s, that’s the period of most disruption, most violence. So the, the important thing in the end game is to either don’t lose property rights, so maintain the property rights. If the government completely collapses, then you should, you, dear viewer, whoever, you should work to reestablishing property rights as fast as possible, regardless of who will get those property rights. The only thing that matters is that those property rights exist. Because if those property rights exist, then you can negotiate and you can find the, you know, the economically advantageous solution without resort, without having to fight your way in open gun battles between the farm and the town to get your crops to market.

Okay, so this, this is a chicken and egg problem. It is counterintuitive. It’s absolutely counterintuitive. But that is the case in solution. So I’m not saying counterintuitive. I’m saying it’s chicken and egg because in order to agree on who has property rights, you have to have the guns to back it in or in order to agree on property rights you either need brute force and like a stable dominion among people with somebody who has all the guns. Some kind of Habitian or Hobbesian, however you want to pronounce it, Hobbesian tyranny kind of thing. Yeah, like a, yeah, a Hobbesian solution to this whole thing.

Or you need to have some kind of a system that is revered by the masses and they defer to it regardless of whether they end up on top or not. Now I don’t think that America had that, that there’s enough reverence of the Constitution in the American legal system among the public for any of them to give a, about, you know, who, according to American halacha or American judicial whatever, determined by a bunch of judges that everybody already hates anyway. Who, who’s going to have the rights to who. They’re not going to respect it. And even, even here in Israel, the yesterday, I think it was yesterday, there was a, there was a protest against the Supreme Court in Israel and then a window was broken by something in the, in the, the right wing crowd.

Like we’re not at the point here in this country where we’re going to kill each other. I think we stopped doing that around Hanukkah. That was the last time we really, we really like went at it and like killed each other in mass. And there’s, there’s a reason we made that a holiday. We’re like, okay, that’s it. But so here there’s going to be an end game too. We’re gonna have to fall back on something that most of the society agrees and reveres and whoever is the arbiters of this system that is so much older than the modern state of Israel.

I think we have enough stability, enough reverence for that system to have it barely hold on to some kind of a centralized control in terms of ideas, not in terms of authority figures, but authority figures will come from there. You know, determine on who can best interpret that system or who has the most smarts or who knows the system the best. Talking about rabbis. But who, who know the system. I don’t see how America is going to be able to agree on who gets what based on the Supreme Court or some kind of court system or some kind of vague cultural value on the Revolution of 1776, because there’s no connection to it.

You know, you could have in certain states you got maybe Montana, Nebraska, maybe Texas, Wyoming, who knows? But like you could have isolated states that will stay alive. I don’t think New York or California are going to make it. Well, in that situation, it’s like, I. I think New York’s like, court system is not going to be functional. Right? So it’s going to be. It’s going to be. I hate to, you know, I hate to scare anybody in New York, but I think it’s going to be like, okay, the Latin Kings run this neighborhood. And, you know, the Crips run this neighborhood.

And within these neighborhoods, there’s established law. And then, you know, the law of the. The Latin Kings, the. The Crips. Yeah, but. But joking aside, they actually do. I mean, the Mafia, the ma. The Mafia historically did provide protection. I mean, part of that protection was against them if you don’t pay. But a lot of that protection was also. They. They kept the drugs out of the neighborhood. If you had a. If you were a shop owner and there was a bum outside just shooting heroin and panhandling right outside your shop and scaring the customers, you call the police and they’re like, oh, I’m sorry.

It’s a public street. He has a right to be there. You call, you know, Tony Knuckles, he shows up and, you know, he encourages the bum to go shoot up somewhere else. Right. You know, and it’s just the way it is. So they will provide. They will provide protection for those areas, I promise. They are of that. You know, those are the people who live in that neighborhood. Their families are there, their people are there. The danger is that is this border between the two. You know, then. Then it’s gonna. You know, that’s gonna look like the Apache and the Comanche.

A border dispute like that, I mean, that could be. Go ahead. So, Phil, this is. This is why I get nauseous sometimes thinking about the end game. Even though. Even assuming the best case scenario that I’m going to be phenomenally wealthy, I’m gonna have to expend capital in such a way that it maximizes security over the greatest area of my influence in the most efficient way possible. And I have no freaking clue how to do that. Because we’re gonna. We’re gonna have to be the Mafia. We’re gonna have to be the fair Mafia. And we’re gonna have to imp.

Like impute. No, impute. We’re gonna impin. We’re gonna have to spread. Spread I don’t know the word. We’re gonna have to divulge our values across the widest area of our influence and then hook up with the next stacker across in the next neighborhood and then try to bridge something, some kind of cooperation and then build some Kind of thing. Yeah. So I, we can’t, you can’t possibly predict this. I mean, if things get really bad, then the heroes that emerge are going to be people you don’t expect. You know, like, you know, the Mike, your son’s high school gym teacher, might end up being, you know, the warlord of your neighborhood.

And you have to go before him and you go, oh, great Mike, you know, Lord of the cul de sac at the end of Cinnamon Tree Lane, ruler of all he surveys. I come to you with a property dispute. I bought this lady’s house with silver, and here’s the contract. And she refuses to. To leave and won’t pay me rent. Please settle this dispute amongst us, oh great one. Right? And then, you know, Mike is. Lord Mike is going to settle the dispute. Now, if he doesn’t respect the property rights, then again, property rights are the only thing that separates us from the state of nature.

If there’s no property rights, then we’re just, we’re. We are in the zombie apocalypse. And the property rights can be established just by Lord Mike, Lord Mike and his goons. And you’re, you know, maybe you’re contributing to Lord Mike’s defense fund for, with your silver stacks. But Lord Mike is going to say, okay, you have not, you know, here’s the contract, you have not paid it. And the results may be draconian from the cushy life we’re used to. You know, maybe, maybe one of you, maybe you or the other one gets stoned to death or something, you know, things get very Old Testament, I don’t know.

But, you know, he will establish property. A good ruler. That’s the only thing, that’s the only thing a ruler actually does is, is establish and defend property rights. If he fails to do that, if he says, I don’t, you know, I don’t care about your problems, go do something else now, you know, now he’s made an enemy of you. The town views him, is unable to, you know, dispense wisdom. You know, that’s why King Solomon is so revered. Right. He was able to accurately dispense wisdom and, you know, establish property rights between people and, you know, figure out who is the rightful owner of said property.

Like splitting of the baby in the famous story, right? That’s. But makes a good ruler. So if Lord Mike, you know, Lord Mike might turn out to be a terrible ruler, in which case, some point or another, he’s going to be replaced by, you know, Lord Chuck, you know, right? So, so on that, on that note, what historical precedent? And assuming I’m. I take the, I take certain parts of the Old Testament historically, not all of it, but this part I do take historically. What was the interval between total chaos and centralized functional government in the Old Testament? Well, at the end of the Book of Judges, in Shoftim, you had, you had a story.

The, the ruling, the ruling guy was Samson. We just read about him last week. Because he’s a Nazarite. And he’s the one with the hair. Yeah, he’s the one with the hair and he’s a Nazarite. He was told that his mother could not drink any alcohol, even in you, even when she was pregnant with him. Because imagine if you have a personality like Samson and he’s allowed to drink alcohol. He’d get extremely dangerous. You don’t want that happening. So you had this guy with superhuman strength, and there are genetic disorders that we know of that cause the muscles to have like five times the strength of an average human.

These things exist in genetics. He was basically in charge of the country. And that was like peak anarchy from that point to, to King Saul, which not. It wasn’t. It wasn’t exactly centralized government. He was like the first, you know, instance of that. But then you had King David, who really centralized everything. I think it was about maybe 50, 60 years right? From, from total cat, from total anarchy to centralized functional government. 50, 60 years. And I’m saying back in the Old Testament, communication is much slower and technology was much less. So I’m. I’m hoping we could speed that up by a factor.

Maybe like five or six. Maybe we would have some kind of like, uncomfortable chaos, you know, maybe for maximum 10 years. I think, I hope much, much less. But I, I think it’s gonna be at least a year. And if we can get through that, then maybe we can get to some kind of end of dominion where people are just in an equilibrium. And it, it might have to. It might require some kind of change in human nature not to be administered by people. But who knows? I’m kind of. I, I don’t know what’s beyond the end game.

So I, I see the closer that we get to it now I’m starting to think, like, how are we gonna. What’s the world gonna be like afterward? Yeah, I really, I really don’t know. Yeah, it’s an event horizon. Like, you can see. You can see the event horizon. You can see we’re rocketing towards it, but you can’t see what’s on the other side. I know what you mean we can only hypothesize, right? And we’re, you know, here we are and I’m just, I’m. I’m hypothesizing. Spontaneous order has always emerged in the past, it will always emerge in the future.

The only question is how long does it take to emerge? And you know, how, how chaotic. And a lot of that’s going to depend on where you are as well. I mean it’s going to, you know, there might be some areas that have a zombie apocalypse and a lot of areas that don’t. So yeah, just be, you know, if you’re a stacker, just be prepared to move if you need to. Be prepared to take, be prepared to take over to be Lord Mike. I mean it might be you, right? You’re the one who’s going to have all the silver.

And you know, if, if you buy some lady’s house and you know, she is trying to, you know, because the government’s completely down and she’s trying to dishonor the contract, then you need to show up with Tony Knuckles and say, look, you sign this paper and this is my house now until Mr. Knuckles here is going to, to show you that you’re not living here anymore. Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, that, I mean that, that’s the last thing I’ll say and then we’ll sign off. That’s the be. The beauty of decentralization is that not one thing, not one single thing happens.

There’s not going to be one zombie apocalypse where everybody disintegrates into nothing and just total chaos everywhere. There’s going to be some zombie apocalypses in the big metropolitan areas, in the big Arab cities, in like Cairo where everyone’s starving. And who, who knows, in Saudi Arabia where they’re not going to have any water, in San Francisco, in LA and New York, in Chicago. Probably not wishing any of these places any ill. But like if you’re going to, if you’re going to tell me, like I’m going to put money on where the zombie apocalypse centers are going to be, I’d say those places, Tokyo City, those kinds of things.

Yeah, the big Chinese Lagos Legos. Is that in Cambodia? No, Nigeria. It’s a, it’s a dumpster fire of a city. So, okay, so yeah, these are where the zombie apocalypses are going to be. But there’s not going to be one single centralized zombie apocalypse because we’re all going to be decentralized. We’ll see what happens afterwards. Good luck. Good luck to everyone. We’ve got. We’ve got a little bit of time. I hope I get home in time. I think I will. It’s very, very difficult living in between two worlds. Where you’re living in one world and convinced that it’s going to end, but trying to not take yourself too seriously so that you actually live in it.

And you just gotta. You gotta trust in a higher power. Because there’s nowhere else to function. That’s it. There you go. All right, Rafi, on that cheerful note. It is cheerful. It’s cheerful. I’m sure it is. It is. It is cheerful. Okay, in a way.
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