Religion and Logic Two Paths To Maintaining Sanity and Meaning Through the End Game | Rafi Farber

➡ Rafi Farber discuss’s his paths to understanding economic principles and how they relate to their religious beliefs. They discuss the concept of theft in the form of inflation and how it leads to economic instability. They also explore the idea of time preference, which is the concept that the value of goods and services changes over time, and how it was introduced in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. They believe that understanding these principles can provide intellectual and emotional stability.

➡ The speaker discusses the concept of scarcity and mortality, arguing that these realities shape our economy and debunk the idea of limitless wealth creation. They also share their journey from atheism to agnosticism, influenced by the events of 2020 and the people who stood up for liberty. They question whether religion is necessary for societal function and discuss the moral duty they felt to warn others about potential economic collapse. The speaker also explores the idea of literal and metaphorical truth in religion, suggesting that religion provides a moral code that encourages cooperation and balance.

➡ The speaker discusses their belief in a higher power, the human desire to create a comfortable world, and the importance of community and morality. They also touch on the impact of technology on society, suggesting it allows people to behave more freely but with less responsibility, leading to societal decay. They then discuss the concept of credit and its influence on people’s decisions and values, suggesting a return to tangible assets like gold could restore a sense of value and responsibility.

➡ The text discusses the historical disparity between the rich and poor, focusing on the struggles of the lower classes, such as serfs, who had little opportunity to accumulate wealth. It also explores the role of divine intervention in wealth distribution, suggesting that societal structures and charity laws can help the poor rise. The text then transitions to a discussion on the use of silver and gold as currency, suggesting that a return to using silver coins could indicate a lack of trust in the banking system. It concludes by suggesting that in the event of a financial collapse, a new system would need to be built from the bottom up.

➡ The text discusses the potential shift from a global to a local economy, using silver as a form of trade. It suggests that in times of crisis, people adapt and find ways to survive, as seen in historical examples like Venezuela and Argentina. The text also explores the idea of returning to simpler, localized systems where trust and personal relationships are key. Lastly, it touches on the concept of hyperinflation, using the French Revolution as an example, where the government confiscated church lands and issued notes based on this land, leading to economic issues.

➡ The text discusses a historical event where notes were issued based on the value of land, leading to overspending and debt. To solve this, more notes were issued, but this only led to the abandonment of the notes and a return to gold. The text also highlights Napoleon’s war strategy of only dealing in gold and silver, which prevented a financial crisis despite losing the war. Lastly, it compares this historical event to Bitcoin, suggesting that Bitcoin is a man-made solution to money that can be inflated, just like the notes based on land value.

➡ The text discusses the idea of people trying to play God, particularly in terms of gender identity, suggesting it could lead to negative outcomes. Despite the conversation not going as planned, they conclude that everything happens for the best, even if it’s not what was initially expected.

I prefer a corvette when I’m a young man than when I’m an older man. Because when I have a corvette when I’m an older man, everyone just asks what I’m compensating for. And don’t worry, baby, I’ll be gentle. I could bake bread with my own feces and then say, you know what? This smells terrible. This coffee smells like it is Austin. Oh, good, then it’s not just me. I’m gonna use this goat feces over here. I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to have a connection with the divine to come to that conclusion. Bone collectors with these kids, you know, these.

The bakers would pay them to go find animal bones and then he would grind them into bone meal and then use that as a filler into the bread. Cash. Cash. Cash for your bones. Too many bones, not enough cash. Cock, cash, bone, ribs, skulls, spice, even certain tiny ear bones. The leg bones connected to the cash bone. Hey, guys. RAF here from the endgame investor. I got Phil with me for our monthly stint together. It’s about 05:00 a.m. And Phil just got up. We’re supposed to have an interview with another guy, but he canceled on us at literally the last minute.

Like 1 minute ago, he sent us an email. So we’re just gonna do our thing together and today we’re gonna talk about what led us to the end game conclusion to separate paths we took. And we’re all going to have different paths to it and how we got here and what keeps us from losing our minds. Phil. Good morning. You don’t look too bad. 05:00 in the morning. You look pretty good. I’m not used to waking up at four in the morning. So this is. We’re going to tough through this one. Yeah, well, it’s twelve where I am, so I’m fine.

So I guess I’ll have a leg up on you if you sound like an idiot. It’s all your fault. It’s all good. So I actually came up with this question when I watched your show. You have your Patreon where you talk about the biblical commentary on gold and silver being money. And I’m wondering a what was the point at which you made that religious connection and like, how does it influence you? How does it drive you? Well, it’s hard to be intellectually honest with these things. Even if you try to, you end up fooling yourself. So I just try to keep that principle in the back of my head that I don’t know how much I’m brainwashed or how much I think I’m telling the truth.

So as long as you can sort of be meta aware of that and always double check yourself and triple check yourself, there’s some things that you just can’t escape from. Unless you’re like a buddhist monk that spends all his time meditating and separating his consciousness from his thoughts, which I’ve had a few stints of that when I, you know, I broke up with a girlfriend once, and then I had to sort of separate from my mind and try to practice separating from one’s thoughts, which is kind of eerie, but it only took me so far. I can’t separate myself from what really keeps me grounded from, you know, knowledge of that I’m not going to be here forever and that eventually I’m going to be dead, and then I really have no idea what happens.

So it all comes from that, that rounded level. And, you know, not many people can have that. So I was educated in a religious jewish institution as a kid, and I come from a background of purely logical school of thought that rejected any kind of mysticism and basically took Judaism from a logical perspective and proved it philosophically through mass revelation, sort of arguments made by medieval rabbis. And I threw out all the spirituality and I just said, okay, this makes sense, and this gives me about 3000 years of rooted history that I can look back on.

So, okay, I’m grounded now and I’m just going to stay here. This is my rock and I’m not moving from it. And economics came in later. So when I understood intuitively that Ron Paul was right, who was the guy that pretty much said that every question I had about this system that didn’t make any sense to me, he basically said I was right about these questions and this is how I’m supposed to look at it. It was the same structure that really cemented Judaism in my head. It was, okay, we take the basic principles of logic and we build it up and we make this stable mountain that you can now go back and you can access any part of it.

And that it gives, it gives you stability, intellectual stability, emotional stability. Whenever something is shaken up in my life, I just go back to that base. And now, since I knew that Rah Paul was right intuitively, I took what I knew from him and I looked for it in the Bible and in the Talmud, and look, people, people tell me, whoa, you’re cherry picking sources and you’re saying this source and not that source and what? Yeah, I am. Well, you know, there’s a lot of discussion in the sources behind me, and a lot of them agree.

A lot of them disagree. There’s a lot of different things going on, and I’m going to pick the ones that I think are right, and I’m not necessarily going to throw out the ones that I think are wrong, but I’ll put them to the side and try to organize them later. So if I can tie in, it all comes down to basically stop stealing. If you understand that inflation is theft and you’re not allowed to do that, well, then why are there booms and busts? Well, you can create all these academic books and all academic theories, which some of them might be true, about why there’s a boom in a bust, and you can explain how interest rates influence it.

And the builder analogy of mises and get all this into your head, and you say, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense. Well, what do you understand now? You understand how theft on a societal scale destroys everybody. Basically, that’s the answer. So stop stealing. It all comes down to the Ten Commandments, basically, and that’s what we have to realize. Why are there booms and busts? Because people are stealing from each other. So. And then it all fits into the sources that I have. And, you know, nothing’s going to sway that from me, no matter what academic argument you make or you don’t make, because I know that this is all stealing.

So does that. Is that, where is the divine. Where does the divine spark kick in? Is it only at the very fundamentals? Or is it, for example, is gold divinely provided to us? Okay, so if you’re asking me, like, I look at these things and then I look at stuff in the Bible, it’s not really just the Bible. It’s a lot of. Is the Talmud? I’m not. You know, Judaism is not a strictly biblical based religion. In terms of, we look at the words in the Bible, we always have a glass through which we see them.

You know, it’s called Torah Ped, the oral law. It’s a built up interpretation of all the 127, 128 generations since we got the Torah. We can’t just ignore a part of it and then come up with a new thing that isn’t based on anything in the past that just. It makes it unanchored. And then you just start building anything anywhere, and then you just break up as a people, so you have to stay together. But I can see things. I can notice basic things that I didn’t see when I wasn’t reading these stories in terms of an economic perspective, one is that, for example, immediately before the story of the garden navin is told, we have these random verses that Eden is in this place and it’s surrounded by these rivers, and there’s gold here, and the gold is good.

Like, okay, well, why is that there? And then you kind of just read over it and okay, well, there’s gold there. And then, well, it’s telling you he’s putting economic things in place so that when there is a society, there will be the materials ready for it. And then it was a few years ago where somebody, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who was actually in the US army, and he’s also a very intellectual guy like us. And we were going over the story of Eden, and he basically, he’s like, well, before they ate from the tree, right before Adam and Eve ate from the tree, they had infinite time.

They were immortal. And then once they ate from the tree, then they became mortal. So you have, you have the introduction of something called time preference. If you have infinite amount of time, you have no time preference. You can do whatever you want whenever you want. You live forever. There’s no economics, but once you have a limited amount of time, you immediately you have time preference. Therefore you have interest rates, therefore you’re going to die and you have to start working. I was like, oh, so this is the founding of the economy. This is why there’s scarcity in the world, because we’re all going to die.

And that kind of clarified it. So it puts us in a situation where we have to acknowledge the fact that there are finite amount of things in the world and that has us deal with our mortality. So whenever somebody comes at me and says, well, you can just print money and then people will be rich, well, that doesn’t really jive with the fact that we’re all going to die. So that has to be false. So I have some very, the way that religion helps me is that I cross reference everything that’s said to me in terms of basic principles.

Is this possible or is it impossible? Does it mean that we ate from the tree of knowledge, or we didn’t eat from the tree of knowledge and we’re immortal? Well, if the conclusion is we have to be immortal, then everything you’re saying is bullshit, and then I just throw you out. I was having a similar discussion yesterday with a friend. He was saying that the dollar will never die because the US can just take on the debt ad infinitum forever. There’s no limit to the amount of debt. The US can take. I said, if that’s true, then there’s no need to ever repay any debt because you can just take more debt.

So then that’s a magic money. That’s magic money right there. Yeah, no, he’s right. The dollar can never die. They can always be there. There could be a whole garbage dump of dollars piled up to the sky and they’ll be there. That’s the dollar. It’s just nobody wants it. Nobody wants the unit of debt. So I’ll tell you briefly my history. I used to be a rather militant atheist. After the events of 2020 and the mysterious virus of unknown origin, I became much more agnostic. And it was mostly because the people that I thought were going to stand up for liberty, freedom and human enlightenment turned out to be the most draconian bastards.

And a lot of the people, not all. I mean, you know, there, of course there were, you know, there were freedom loving atheists, there were freedom loving religious people, and vice and draconian on both sides as well. But the people that I would found myself standing tall next to were mostly, mostly christians. So I said, well, you know, I’m going to stop making fun of them because they’re, they’re the only people standing with me right now. And I softened my stance. I softened my stance significantly. And I also, I mean, I knew, you know, I’m a student of history as well, and I knew that atheism has a very dangerous side.

I mean, the, the Jacobins and the French Revolution were atheists. And, you know, they tore down all the old institutions and started putting up their weird, you know, they renamed all the months, you know, they confiscated all the church land. And of course the, the communists are atheists as well. So I know, I know there was a dangerous side to it. I was never someone who was like, oh, if we just get rid of religion, then we will, you know, then utopia awaits us here on earth. I was never, I was never of that mind. I came to the conclusion now, well, I don’t know, I’m very confused and conflicted now on that spiritual topic.

I think maybe, maybe there needs to be a religion of some kind for humanity function. But then I’m thinking, well, if it’s, you know, if it’s all just us convincing ourselves, then we’re, then it’s a lie. But lies don’t work. There’s no such thing as a lie. That’s a good lie. That’s gonna make society better. So then I’m like, well, maybe there’s something underneath all this, I don’t know. I’m leaving it up to that. But I approach the monetary system. Same thing is that there is a. It comes from our limited time on earth, so we have a time preference.

I prefer a corvette when I’m a young man than when I’m an older man. Because when I have a corvette when I’m an older man, everyone just asks what I’m compensating for, and I have a corvette when I’m a young man. You can attract the pretty girls, right? So the things you want when you are young are to. The things you want earlier are to make up for the time you have to sacrifice to get them later, if that makes sense. So. But how from. If you come from an atheist perspective, that’s where you started. Then what brought you to honesty? Gold and silver as money.

Why are you attracted to it? And why not just continue as you thought before and realize that, okay, maybe the system’s going to blow up, but why do you have to speak out? What’s making you do that? That’s a good question. I wonder myself sometimes. I felt a moral. I really just felt a moral duty to warn everybody. I was like, well, this is going to happen. And this is really, like, this is not a joke. This is really going to suck. So I said, I better announce the world, or whoever listened. This is what to do to prepare for it.

What brought me on was I told you this story before, was the silver squeeze leading to your channel. And then I said, oh, my God, he’s right. And so I said, well, I better let everybody know that I can. Well, my foundation is that I assume God told me not to steal. Yes. And if you were. You were saying, maybe humanity needs religion, maybe it’s not literally true. Bret Weinstein talks about this. He talks about literal truth versus metaphorical truth. That religion, in terms of that, it constrains our lust for just gathering resources to ourselves by any means possible.

And that forces a cooperation. If we have this moral code, that I can’t steal from you, you can’t steal from me, that forces us to work together to try to produce more things, and that eventually builds a division of labor. So, I mean, we’ll get back to what you were thinking about in a second, but this I disagree with Brett Weinstein a little bit. I mean, I do believe in a difference in metaphorical truth, like religion, as a system that prevents us from infringing on each other, gives us all boundaries. Private property defines those things. And literal truth, maybe one religion is not literally true, but it also emphasizes these principles.

Maybe another religion is literally true. Obviously. You know what I think? But what I think happened was there was one man who figured out that everything must be created by a single thing because everything works together, right? The sun rises, the sun sets, the moon rises, the moon sets. Everything goes in a pattern. There’s predator and prey. Everything goes in a balance. Everything’s balanced out. So then you need to act in a balance. You need to act in a balanced way, or things are going to become imbalanced, and then we need to have a boom and bust.

You could talk about that in terms of economics. You could talk about that in terms of society. And they pretty much come together when there’s a boom. There’s also an anti, an immoral boom. They go on the same timeframe, really. So I think what happened in terms of my literal truth is there was a guy who figured this out, and then God said, okay, well, there’s one guy who figured it out. So I’m going to kind of make his soil fertile for a family, and then I’m going to come down to his family and I’m going to tell them, well, he was right.

And here are the details. And now you take these and work with them, and, you know, I’ll give you advice from time to time, but, you know, don’t screw up or I’ll kick your ass. And that’s what happens. Interview. God is, like, literally intervening at times. Yeah, yeah. Literally intervening. I believe it literally. So, like, when we had this conversation with on Ezekiel where he was baking the bread and then he was baking with human feces, and he prayed to God, and God said, you can use. I think, was it. Was it sticks or was it goat feces? It was a goat feces.

He didn’t want to use human feces. So he’s like, but I can’t do this. This is too much for me. And guys, okay, fine. She’ll just use the animal feces. Well, so why couldn’t Ezekiel just change his mind? Why did that have to be. Why did that have to be divinely inspired? Why did it. Why did it just change his mind? And then, I mean, I could, I could burn. I could bake bread with my own feces and then say, you know what? This smells terrible. I’m going to use this goat feces over here. I didn’t have to.

I didn’t have to have a connection with the divine to come to that conclusion. But the Ezekiel chapter makes it sound like he was really torn over it. Well, I mean, I think he was actually talking to the creator of the universe in whatever way that he could. I’ve never actually done that. I don’t have the capacity to do that. I think you’ve. I mean, I’ve read certain theories on what prophecy might be, and even though the people that are writing about what it is, they don’t know themselves because they never experienced it. But I think it has to do something with what buddhist monks do, and they separate their thinking from their existence, and then they kind of calm their mind down so it can be spoken to.

I’ve never had that experience that strongly, but there are definitely points in my life where I understand that I have to go in a certain direction, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And even though I have the choice, technically, to not go in that direction, I feel like I would lose myself if I did, and I just. I’d just be dead. So. Sure, yeah, we all have that. And I think that’s. If that’s. That’s the most that God can talk to my brain, I just don’t have the capacity for anything higher than that. So you were asking me what.

Why. Why am I not just, you know, grounded in nihilism? Know, atheist nihilism? Yeah. What makes you, what makes you positive? What makes you, what makes you understand or. Or be okay with the fact that the human race is going to get through this? I’m a, quote, a guy I don’t really respect that much, but I did respect him, and I respect him on some very limited, limited spectrum or very limited places. And that’s Sam Harris. He says the. I knew you’re gonna roll your eyes. He says, the human mind wants to create a world in which it wants to live in.

So we strive to build a world that we want to live in pleasurably. If I’m sitting on the ground and I’m feeling cold and wet, and I said, well, you know what? I’ll chop down a tree stump and sit on the stump, and then my butt won’t be as cold. So maybe it’s just more animalistic desire to make the world more comfortable, and we are the discomfort of, you know, I could take your stuff. I could come to your house and kill your family and take your stuff, but that would be a, dangerous and b, displeasurable.

So it’s better that we work together, and that’s sort of that base drive. We have a prefrontal cortex that separates us from the animals and lets us cooperate in ways that the animals cannot. And maybe we, maybe the human, human psyche attributes divine cause to that, if that makes sense. But, and maybe I will admit when people turn away from God, they tend to act less morally than when they are not. And there’s another guy I want to bring up is Matt Christensen. He’s a youTuber. Do you know him? No. He’s a liberty minded guy. Very liberty minded guy.

But he said, he said everyone wants. The religion suffers from a free rider problem. So all of us, and he’s struggling with this himself. He’s in a, I think he’s probably philosophically very similar to me. But he said, you know, we all want to live in at least, you know, let’s just, for my example, in middle America, right, we all want to live in a, you know, a christian town. You know, you want a town where everyone goes to church on Sunday and they all help the old, little, old lady who needs a roof. Everyone, you know, you know, donates to the tithe and that gets in the little lady’s roof.

And, you know, nobody’s cursing and people respecting each other. And, you know, men and women wait until they get married to have lots of children and you have this bustling, you know, you have this bustling american town, right? But nobody actually wants to do any stuff. So we’re all just religious free riders hoping that the rest of the town is going to, is going to do that for us. Right. Well, we live in a life, you know, binging on cocaine and pornography or whatever. Well, if you, if you think this, you know, speaking of Sam Harris and I mentioned Brett Weinstein.

You mentioned Sam Harris. Those. They used to be. I think the, Brett Weinstein’s very first podcast was with Sam Harris. And then COVID really broke them apart and Sam Harris went to the dark side. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have, doesn’t mean that he doesn’t still have ideas that are valid. But, like, he’s definitely sold his soul. He’s dead. He could come back. But I doubt at this point, once you go that far down the hole, the chances that you’ll come back maybe right before death he will, but there won’t be much practical effect from that except, besides maybe saving his own soul.

But what I was going to say is that if you go back to Brett talks about this, if you go back 1000 years or so, and if a woman and a man, mostly women, if they don’t have extreme caution and dressing modestly, not trying to provoke sexually, staying away from men, not talking to them too much, then they can easily get raped, or they can end up with whatever tribe, and then there will be no family units and society will just be a big mess and mix together. And the Torah’s position on that is what happens then.

Well, then you have a big flood and you can’t really organize society that way. So now that we have the technology, like birth control and abortion, and basically people who don’t want children out of wedlock don’t have to. So they can act as if evolutionarily they do want that, or they don’t want to organize their minds in a higher order and they just want to act like animals without the consequences. Well, then, okay, so maybe you won’t have children out of wedlock, but you’ll have a society that otherwise acts like animals, just like mating with whoever they want whenever they feel like it, whoever they can conquer.

And then you don’t really have the society, you just have power plays. And that’s what we’re turning into. I mean, because we have technology that’s allowing us to loosen our morals with less physical consequences. But the consequences show up in a more diluted sense among the entire society, where it just starts falling apart once it gets too big to sustain. So how does the monetary medium bring us back to sanity? Oh, well, you try to answer that first, and then I’ll try to build on what you say. What you say? Oh, you want me to. You want me to answer that first? Yeah, I want to see what you say so I can see.

I mean, I can see it. Once you had that, once you made me understand that gold is money and everything else is credit, because that quote from JP Morgan has always been in my head and I never had the answer to it. I can see how it degrade like, I see it, how. How credit makes people just. It distorts the time preference so people think, oh, I can bought, you know, I don’t need to have, I don’t need to save for 20 years to buy the Corvette I’ve always wanted, right? I can go and take out a loan and buy it now with, you know, zero down.

And then that changes the mind. They say, oh, I don’t need to have kids when I’m, you know, as a woman. You know, if I was a woman, I don’t need to have kids at 30 or 2025. I don’t have to. Yeah, well, these days, yeah, but I can delay. I can delay my time prep. Technology will allow me to delay my time preference, and I can have, you know, I can have a kid at 40 to with, you know, IVF and I never need to get married. And, you know, all these, all these. All these ideas pop into your head and I can do it all on credit, too.

I can borrow money to get inseminated. I think the cold reality of having to hand over a bag of silver or gold will sharply. To buy something that you want will sharply decrease the time horizons and make people appreciate savings and investments all the better. We’ll also raise the value of their possessions in their own eyes and they’ll take care of their own stuff. Yes. Yeah. If you look at the architecture, people used to put a lot of time into their houses. If you look at the victorian architecture they really wanted their house to look really pretty.

And now we kind of, you know, a modern house in America it’s very little different from a modern McDonald’s. Like, it’s just, you know, four wall, then it’s indistinguishable for any other house. So I’m not. I’m not sure if that’s a fair analogy because, you know, if you’re talking about 1718 hundreds or even before that when they made beautiful houses that’s true. They made beautiful houses but not many people had houses. A lot of people just lived in holes or huts and. Or just hibernated for the winter and they didn’t have anything. So at that point you had the rich that had sound money.

They had a lot of gold and silver so they had a lot of resources to make very few examples of very fine architecture, very fine housing, very fine furniture, all this stuff that we come to appreciate. But there was like a whole mass of peasants that had basically nothing. Yeah, I think there’s a picture, I’ll see if I can find it, of a german peasant and his house looks. His house looks really neat, actually. Like they. I mean, there obviously was periods of poverty but I think there was a. In areas where middle class were allowed to develop I think people did put a lot of effort into their.

Into their domiciles when they could. Now, you know, obviously. Yeah. Being a tenant farmer in Ireland in the 1830s or whatever. Yeah. You’re probably not going to spend a lot of time making your house look nice, scrounging around for food. I would. But those guys, I mean, they were not trade. They weren’t. Weren’t they? They were basically debt slaves, weren’t they? What was life like as an indentured servant or as a serf? Yeah, you’re basically working your whole life and you can’t really accumulate capital? Yeah. So how does. Let me bring this back to the, to the, to our divine question.

How does the divine. How does divine intervention allow this person, this hypothetical person, to accumulate capital? I don’t understand that question. What do you mean? So, okay, if God exists. Yeah. Then why are some allowed to accumulate capital and some are not in this system? Right? If I’m born as a serf, maybe. Maybe there’s just another variation on why bad things happen to good people. Like, but if I’m born as a serf and I live my entire life on a farm that somebody else owns, and I never see a silver coin in my life, right? How am I supposed to accumulate capital? All right, so how am I supposed to live a divine life? I guess there are.

There’s some answers to that question. It can’t be done until there is an industrial revolution that frees the serfs so that they have more time to accumulate capital and then they can use their brains to try to figure it out. If you’re a serf and you literally you’re just living subsistence day to day and you have no other time to do anything, then you’re not going to become a capitalist. But once there’s some amount of capital in society that’s created by the rich people that have time to think of new inventions to produce more stuff more quickly, that frees the lower classes to be able to start accumulating, so what? So then the question is, if you’re in a society that’s almost purely agrarian and the biggest piece of capital you have is like a horse and a horse drawn plow or whatever it is, and that’s it, then what’s your society going to do? So in terms of how the israelite society is structured, right.

You have the capitalists are basically the land owning farmers, and they have a certain amount of land, and they’re commanded to leave certain portions of it for the poor. If they drop certain sheaves, they leave it for the poor. If they forget, if they forget to harvest certain areas of their field, do they miss it? They can’t go back and harvest it. So there’s a system in place. There is a social safety net of how the poor is supposed to function. And we have an example of this actually in practice, in the book of Ruth. If you go into the Bible and you read the book of Ruth, it’s a story of how a moabite convert, basically a rich family, leaves Israel or leaves Judah during a time of famine.

And they’re criticized for this because they’re just abandoning their family, and their kids end up marrying these moabite women, and then they lose everything. The kids die and the guy dies. And there’s this widow left with her two widow daughters in law who are not even jewish. And one of them decides to stay with her and go back to Judah, and they have nothing. They start rich. He’s like one of the richest people in the city, and they come back and there’s nothing. So what do they do? Well, they rely on the charity that is mandated by the Torah to feed the poor, to keep them alive and to respect them.

And that’s what happens. And then she ends up marrying the guy who owns the field. And then they have a. They have a kid, and his name is ovid, who’s the father of Jesse, who’s the father of David. So that’s where the king comes from. So it’s a story of how the poorest of the poor, who’s not even born jewish, can come and then, you know, give birth to the. The most powerful family in. In jewish history. So it’s. It’s possible, if you. If you. If you treat your society as a family and you realize that you all come from the same man and you have a shared history, then that’s what you do.

You follow these laws of charity because it keeps. Because if you don’t respect the poor, they all have the image of God in them. They all have the potential to think of these amazing ideas and to help society dig itself out of perpetual poverty. But you have to give them a basic level of respect. Okay. That kind of. That kind of makes sense. Yeah. I mean, again, I mean, I don’t, you know, we’re never going to, I think, solve the question of, like, is this all divinely inspired or is this people, you know, self organizing and coming up with it? But, yeah, no, I mean, both could be.

This actually ties in. This actually ties into the second question. I’m going to. I’m going to. It loosely ties in, and I’m going to use it as the transition. So the second question is, why is it that for silver to maintain its money ness for any long period of time, we have to go back to the 17 hundreds, civilization wise? So the way I see it, the way I think you’re explaining it, is that silver. Silver is a better money than gold, a raw money. But gold with derivatives works better than silver. So if we lock the gold in the vault and then pass out derivatives and redeemable, of course, and never overprinted, then that ends up being a better system than just using raw silver.

So if we have the raw silver, if we’re using the raw silver as the money, then that means that we’ve gone back to 70 50 trustless. It means there’s no trust of anyone to store money, honestly. Okay, so it’d be collapse of the banking system, basically. Collapse. Yeah. If we’re. If we resort to using silver coins directly, that means nobody trusts anyone to hold their silver coins for them and not steal them. Do you think that could happen? Do you think we can go back that far? Well, it has happened three times in the 20th century, just very briefly.

It was like, for a few days, everyone was like, I don’t trust the banking system. Then the banking system kind of rebuilt itself because the debt wasn’t that high yet. So the question really is what societal condition would we have to be for the trust in gold derivatives to completely erode to a point where it’s more than just a few days. Yeah, because if you have to pay, like, I’m thinking, like, if you have to pay the electrical bill with silver, then that means the utility company has to send a man in an armored truck to come knock on your door and collect the month’s silver and then turn it off.

If you don’t pay them. And then you got the milk, then you got the milkman coming by again. I mean, you get your. We’re really talking about regressing, and that’s maybe rough. I don’t know. That’s why I don’t think that we’ll be passing around silver coins for more than the initial blast radius of the nuclear financial bomb that falls, I think, in the next few weeks, maybe months, maybe a year. I hope not a year. We’ll have no choice but to pass around silver coins because it just won’t be the infrastructure to staff with anyone trustworthy to make it work again.

I mean, those, those times are going to be really tough, but the people with silver coins are going to be very well off, assuming they can protect themselves. So how would the derivative get rebuilt? Let’s say. So let’s say they’re trying to rebuild the derivatives. Maybe the private market’s trying to rebuild their. Talking about, like, kinesis, is that what we’re talking about? Like, just a gold backed crypto? Yeah, it would have to be from the bottom up again. That’s how, that’s how the whole system was built in the first place. There was never any big meeting on how are we going to create a global system.

It was just small systems that coalesced into bigger systems that is now coalescing into a humongous global system that’s all corrupted. It’ll start on a local level again. The thought of. The thought of having to trade in silver again is just wild. Especially, like non denot. Like if someone’s got silver bars or have to trade for that. I mean, is the government even recognized that? Like, if you buy someone’s car and you’re like, I paid in silver, do they recognize it? I mean, you could do this easily under the table. Yeah, well, but then you’re driving around with a car not in your name.

No, no. You could, you could. You could change the registry. Yeah. Okay, so just say you paid. Say you bought the car for 400 kajillion dollars. Really? Paid them in silver? Yeah, something like that. I don’t know how it’s going to work. Yeah, I think it was. Bill Holter said, people, in his research, he said people just figure it out. Like in Venezuela and in Argentina, it’s chaotic, but just spontaneous order. People just figure it out. So hopefully we’ll just figure it out, too. Yeah, we will. I mean, we have since the dawn of time. That’s what humanity has been doing.

And maybe you’re right and the divine will offer guidance to us in the tough times, too. Well, that’s also part of what anchors me. And people confuse this a lot with hubris or racism or whatever, but I mean, I do believe that we’re back, that the jewish people are back in Israel for a reason, not that we know what we’re doing now. We don’t. We’re definitely completely off the rails, really confused, not setting a good example. I’m not saying we’re good at what we’re doing right now, but we’re here for a reason. And the Bible says we’re supposed to be a light onto the nation.

It doesn’t mean we’re going to be all the time. Sometimes we’re going to be like a crazy disco ball on drugs, which is what I think we are now. But I still think that we have the potential, when things get really bad, to pull it together here and we have all the legal systems, at least theoretically, in place. And once big cities like New York and Chicago and La and Tokyo or whatever, once they’re all eating each other or whatever they’re doing, and here it’s less bad, I think that it can calm people down and show that even if there is a reset, we can rebuild, because this is how you do it, basically.

I think that’s going to be my job here. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to fit into this society. I don’t really fit into the society. I’m not israeli intellectually. I’m still in America, though. I’ve started to get into the israeli communities here, at least the sound money ones, and they understand me, and I can speak enough Hebrew to them well enough for them to start getting it. But we’re going to have a big role to play here, and I think the wars that are going on are fitting into it. I don’t know exactly how, but everything’s coming to a head.

I mean, the problem, if we go back to the 17 hundreds, like, abruptly, like, in the 17 hundreds, they were used to that. They were used to living in the 17 hundreds. They did have a thriving, you know, the wooden ships sailing. They had a thriving, you know, mercantilist empire, or, you know, not mercantilist empire. They had a flat, thriving trade empire. You know, people were trading everywhere, and they were used to it. You know, if we were to abruptly go back to silver. You’re talking about all the shipping containers not moving. Wait, what? Why is that? How are they going to.

How are you going to move the. How are you going to move a ship that size on silver and not on credit? I mean, I’m talking about, like a giant, you know. Yeah. The. The globalized systems are going to have to break up into localized systems. I mean, we saw. We saw that. I’m reading this book now, the Great Depression, a diary. It’s just some guy named Benjamin Roth who was writing entries in his diary every day from 1931 until 1940 or something, something like that. And he was saying the big farms in the 1930s were breaking up because people were growing vegetables in their backyard, because they couldn’t afford to buy vegetables from the farms.

So that’s an example of everything breaking up into subsistence units, right? There’s not going to be global trade, at least not in the initial stages of it. It takes time to build all that up because you got to build up the credit. In order to build up the credit, you got to build up trust. In the initial collapse of the system. There is no trust, which is why we’re using silver in the first place. So, no, there’s not going to be any global trade. There’s going to be local trade. Am I right? I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.

What do you think? No, no, I think you’re probably right. As disappointing as that is, though, I mean, it’s disappointing. It’s disappointing, but it’s also great because we don’t have to worry about what they’re putting in our food. Oh, it comes from some huge conglomerate that’s like, you know, GMO’s and fake meat and or whatever else they’re putting in it. I don’t know. Fetus juice, whatever it is. I don’t know, but we don’t know anymore. But if you localize it, and then, you know what? If it’s in your backyard, you definitely know what you’re growing. If it’s your neighbor’s backyard or your local farmer, you probably know what he’s doing.

You probably know him personally. We got to get back to smaller systems so we know who is in our local economy more, so we have a better relationship with them. So also, so we don’t want to steal from them because the closer we are to them. And then once you have local systems, you can build them back up to global assistance. But we’re not going to go from Endgame to global trade. It’s not going to be like that. We’re going to go from Endgame to subsistence, and then slowly again, we’ll build it up. All right, let’s move on to our final question.

It actually ties into silver in the 17 hundreds, which is hyperinflation in France, the booklet we were going to cover last week or last month. Cool. Okay, so there were a few lines in this pamphlet. Still haven’t highlighted them, but, you know, start. What did you want to say about this? About this little pamphlet from, what was it, the late 1920s, I think, or 1890s? It was written in the 1920s about the french revolution. Yes. Yeah, it was very. It’s very, very well written. It’s way better than when money dies. Just. Just in terms of, like, how engaging it is.

I mean, when money dies was like reading, you know, an instruction manual for a lawnmower. It was just dry. This one was way more engaging, and it had a lot more of the human elements. So if any viewers want to read about what a hyperinflation event looks like, then I think that’s then the hyperinflation France pamphlet. Who’s the author? Andrew Dixon White. Yes, that’s right. Andrew Dixon White. And he goes into how the french government and the revolutionary government, they confiscated a bunch of church lands and they wanted to redistribute it to the people, but rather than sell it for gold, they came up with the idea of, we’ll make a money based on this land.

Now that obviously has some fundamental problems and that not all land is created equal. So you can’t really sell land. You can’t make a note for land without properly essaying it, I guess. And one of the problems they quickly ran into was that the government was unwilling to actually part with the list. And people show up with the notes and say, hey, I actually want the land that the government was like, well, you know, we’re not actually going to actually give it to you. Now, you were, you said you were against church confiscations to begin with, right? You think? Yeah.

Well, if it’s. If it’s a system founded in the confiscation of anything, then it’s founded in theft and it’s going to be. It’s going to be destroyed through theft. Right? By the sword, die by the sword. But even if the church confiscated the land or, you know, took it had ill gotten gains to begin with. Like, if you. If you have somebody who got their money through theft and then someone else steals it, then the second thief is no better than the first thief. Yeah. Gone of Mina, Ghana. The second thief is still a thief. What would have to happen is that the church would have to return the land to the people that it stole from.

But what does that have to do with an entire nation confiscating land and divvying it up with notes? It’s not related. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, it is very true. And not even really. Not even really divvying it up. Like I said, it was hard. It was hard to actually turn it into land, apparently. But the notes, of course, the. Once they realized the note, I think the notes were indexed to gold too. It was basically the gold value of the land. Or it was. No, no, no, I’m wrong. I’m wrong. It was the land value of the land.

They said, if you show up with this many notes, you are theoretically entitled to this much land. Now, you know, obviously there’s, you know, land has different qualities, so I have no idea what they did to do that, besides not actually allow people to redeem the notes. But one of the highlights of the book is that after the initial printing round, they quickly, you know, they spent like drunken sailors and they quickly found themselves in debt again. And so what did they do? Well, they just issued more notes based on the theoretical land that they’re not redeeming.

And more and more and more until finally the notes were abandoned and then they tried to reset it to the. Was it. They went from the Asenot to the mandat which was the same, it was the same scheme, but they swore on all that was holy that they were not going to betray it. This time, however, that the mandot was stillborn, so it didn’t even get off the ground. And then they had to go back to gold. What amazes me at the end is they were talking about Napoleon. Andrew Dixon White, I think his name was.

He was talking about Napoleon. Napoleon ran his entire war and he didn’t go into deficits. He just paid everything in gold. He said, I’ll only deal in gold and silver. And he was losing the war at the end. There they were losing, and France did not have a financial crisis, which is amazing. When have you ever heard of a country losing a big, warm and not having a financial crisis? I mean, that’s amazing to me. Well, then what happened? I’m just building this logically. What would have had to happen for a country to lose the war but not have a financial crisis? If they’re dealing in gold and silver and they’re not inflating, then, yeah, if they lose a war, then they’re going to have less goods and services because some of their land is going to be destroyed, a lot of their people are going to be killed.

They’re going to have lower production, so prices are going to rise, but they’re going to rise in real terms in gold and silver, which they’re still trading. And so those price rises will keep people more frugal and more economic and they’ll preserve whatever resources they have left. So, yeah, people will be poorer for sure, but there’s not going to be, they’re not tricked. It’s like this huge societal phenomenon of everybody thought they had this and now they have much less all of a sudden. Right. That’s not going to happen. That’s, that’s, that’s the, that’s the consequences of a lie being revealed, not of people gradually being poorer and realizing it because they have less money and then trying to preserve resources.

That means they’re just becoming a little bit poorer. Okay. You know, it happens to everybody. Yeah. I mean, I thought that I always went under the assumption this is, you know, these are my old preconceptions that like, you know, you sort of had to run deficits during wars, but you really don’t now. He didn’t win the war, so maybe you do to win the war. I don’t know. Well, you can have, but he was so like, he was so, I guess, you know, France, society was so scarred by the asenas and mandates that even Napoleon was like, nope, I am not going to do that.

Yeah. The problem is, how long do scars last? You know, eventually you forget them and then you come back to it. I mean, reading this other book, 40 centuries of price controls. 40 centuries. We’ve been doing this to try to combat inflation by controlling prices with, like, you know, ham handed tactics that never, ever work. And we just keep doing it over and over and over again. So the scars, they don’t. They unfortunately don’t. They don’t last long enough. And that’s why, you know, going back to the Bible, you need a message from the past that tells you what happens when you do these things.

And you need to actually follow it, you need to read it, you need to understand these messages or you’re going to forget it. And you also have to. You have to teach your kids to take the messages seriously. It’s not just a book. It’s telling you, these are the mistakes we made in the past. If you want to do them again, go for it. But this is what happens. Look, it’s right here. So, people, do you know the. Do you know the profession of bone collector? I’ve seen the movie with. No, no, that’s just. Yeah, no, this is totally different.

Not. Not related to that at all. The, um. So people. People think, like, colonial America was like this, a totally free enterprise. No, you know, no regulations at all. And that’s actually not true. Things like bakers were extremely heavily regulated, but locally, and, you know, when a new baker came to town, he had to take a pledge of an oath of not to overcharge, not to dilute his ingredients because it was so important. But of course, market forces being what they are, sometimes there’s a bad grain harvest, but he is stuck with the grain price as it is.

Right. Or with the bread price. Sorry. He’s stuck with a bread price that he cannot undo because of whatever town ordinance. And the penalties were fairly harsh. So there was an underworld profession of bone collectors with these kids. That’s kind of the waifs of society. The bakers would pay them to go find animal bones, and then he would grind them into bone meal and then use that as a filler into the. In the bread. Cash. Cash. Cash for your bones. Too many bones, not enough cash caught cash. Bone, ribs, skulls, spies, even certain tiny ear bones, the leg bones connected to the cash bone.

And that’s where the jack and the beanstalk, when he’s fee fi fo fum smelling Englishman, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. That’s where that comes from. Bone meal was a common filler ingredient in bread to dilute it. My bones. Oh, my God, his bone itis. I was so busy being an eighties guy, I forgot to cure it. So, yeah, so the market will always try and clear. This is. This is my big message to everybody on my channel. And, you know, anyone who ever wants to listen to me, market will always try and clear.

If it can’t clear in price, then it’s going to clear the quality, so. Right. I was just. I was just watching this, this food blog on YouTube. I’m like, I’m a foodie. So, like, I watch these things and it was about the Philippines, and they have this whole industry called pogpog, I think it’s called. And it’s basically poor people going through the trash looking for half eaten pieces of chicken and whatever other fast food, and then they resell it to these food sellers who fry the crap out of it at really high temperatures. It doesn’t really taste good, but it doesn’t kill you either.

And it gives you some nutrition. So, I mean, I guess that’s a way to keep people out of starvation and sounds not so great to us, but it’s probably going to sound better in a couple of years. I don’t know. Yeah, these things happen in the Philippines. Okay, I’m going to make a note of that. So the last thing I wanted to say about fiat money, inflation in France, I would challenge you. I would challenge you to read it and just take a little marker. And every time you see asenyatt versus land, put in bitcoin and blockchain, and it’s the same thing.

They have this man made solution to money. We’ll just take the land and then we’ll divvy it up with these notes. And then everyone gets really excited about, oh, my God. We figured out the key to never ending prosperity. That’s basically what the bitcoin people think. We have this solution now, and it can never be inflated. Well, of course it can, because it’s. There’s nothing there to inflate. So every time you divide it, you’re inflating it. Right. It’s the same mania. Except the French had a better argument because they said, oh, look, we’re dividing up land and land exists.

Well, Bitcoin, you’re dividing up what? Nothing. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t just sell the land for gold. He never answered that in his, in his paper. He never said why like they had. Obviously they were sitting there thinking, what do we do with this land? They could just sold it solid, cheap. You know, sell it for pennies on the dollar for, you know, for gold. Like Louisiana. Like they did with Louisiana to America. I think the answer is they wanted to social engineer. They wanted to see if this experiment would work. Yeah. They just sold it for gold.

Nothing would change. This goes back to your divine. Your divine stuff at the beginning, if you. When man plays God, you know, bad things happen. Yeah. Yep. That’s definitely true. And we have. We have everyone trying to play God now. Medically gender affirming care. You can be whatever you want. Forget about what God created you as. Just like, you know, whatever you think you are, you are, and it’ll ruin your life. But what can we do? Okay, Rafi. All right. Well, this was actually a great conversation. I did it really, you know, it didn’t go as what we thought was going to be, but we still had a great conversation anyway.

Nothing will ever go as we thought it was going to be. But there’s a saying in the Gemara Gonzalez, everything for the best. And that’s really an admission that we don’t know what the best is. And maybe this will turn out to be a lot better than what we were supposed to be doing there. All right, I’m going to go lie down. Okay. Have a good bye..

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