For those of you that don’t know, I’m not just an OG when it comes to bitcoin. I’ve been lurking around the edges of the Mises Institute community for two decades now, first emailing Lew Rockwell thanking him for an article about FDR’s campaign of terror against Italians during WWII.
The Japanese got it worse, certainly, but there was sincere persecution of WOPs back then that I had zero idea about. My family didn’t talk about things in those terms. No victimology was really allowed in my dad’s house.
During that time I watched Tom Woods arrive on the scene. I remember reading his conversion from, in his words, a standard conservative to staunch libertarian in article after article. Tom’s journey was a memorable one and when I began tentatively submitting articles to Lew on occasion, I got great emails from Tom a few times, which I really appreciated.
Because I’ve always seen Tom as someone who ‘gets it’ when it comes to finding better ways to communicate the consequences and opportunities afforded by liberty versus tyranny. He’s been a good role-model, reminding me that we all have to find our particular niche in the division of labor to add value.
So, we’ve been in each other’s orbit for a long time but, like so many in the Mises crowd, we hadn’t met or chatted one-on-one before. My journey to where I am today has taken me on a slow tour of all of these folks, getting to meet and/or talk with them one by one. Having breakfast with Lew Rockwell before speaking at the Ron Paul Institute Conference in Houston is something I’ll treasure.
With all of that preamble out of the way, I was really happy last week when I got a Twitter DM from Tom asking to be on his podcast. I’m now committed to having him on the GGnG Podcast (RSS link) which I’ll set up in the near future.
For now this 35 minutes or so will have to suffice.
Every day I treasure my GG&G subscription. You do a great job in these extraordinary times. “Life is difficult” Chapter 1 P1 1st Sentence – “A Road Less Traveled” ~M. Scott Peck M.D.
One thought today. It is about your #Bitcoin reluctance. Why not OG? Why not maxi? We know all fiat is a Ponzi headed to zero eventually. Like socialism, it has failed everywhere it has been tried.
Jeff Booth teaches us the system is broken. Actually, he teaches us the system is fatally flawed. The models cannot work when money is manipulated. When there is scarcity in money at the base (no free money), there is abundance for all people; conversely, when money is manipulated at the base, there is scarcity for the masses, and theft / redistribution to the banksters, billionaires, kleptocrats and cronies (the 1%). Bitcoin is the most perfect money ever discovered / invented / created. It is orders of magnitude better than anything previous (seashells, salt, cattle, precious metals incl. gold and silver, or even the great stones of the Yap people).
Bitcoin is inevitable (Gresham’s Law) and it is already past the point of whether or not it will succeed. So why not go “All in”? It is early and needs all the study, learning, adoption in the layers, and the faster and sooner, the better the world can get back to civilized again. Bitcoin fixes the money, eliminates climate change, and defunds communism / fascism / statism along the way. There is no downside that hasn’t been improved or eliminated. Anyway, my two cents worth.
Jeff Greenlee, Cafayate, Argentina
I think Tom, not being a BTC Maxi, sets him apart from the multitude (of now almost indistinguishable) BTC zealots in his media niche.
At the turn of the 19th Century, there were many similar innovative technologies sweeping the world. Depending on how you viewed things back then you might have called those times the “Ford Motor Company Revolution” or the “Internal Combustion Engine Revolution”. Likewise, we are either living through a “Bitcoin Revolution” or a “Blockchain Revolution”. It is too early to tell. I suppose during the early 20th Century, there were “Ford-Maxis” and “Studebaker-Maxis”, with no one imagining that Toyota Motor Company would become the largest company in the world.
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To really get this point you may have to experience/observe the phenomenon firsthand. My earliest recollection of this was as a small child, during the “Betamax Revolution”:
https://groovyhistory.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-betamax/5
The thing that most stood out to me back then, as a ten-year-old, was not being able to watch the latest Star Wars sequels when we visited households that were BetaMax Maxis … I wasn’t enough of a home video connoisseur to appreciate the higher quality and rendering offered by Betamax to want to forgo my Star Wars fixe.
However, a lot of those households held on, with almost religious devotion to the “brand”, until the bitter end.
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Since Tom uses a lot cinema analogies, I will leave you with this, from Braveheart:
https://youtu.be/4bAuK3xobM0?t=56
That clip is so powerful because we ALL want to be on the side of Robert the Bruce, morally and emotionally, (as we do with BTC) however the Old King has the clearest perspective on reality.
And that scene almost perfectly mirrors Tom’s discussions with the BTC Maxi community. IMHO
Hi Tom,
I just saw your interview with UPThinking Finance (The Not-So-Great-Reset Part II, Ep #13) and then had to go back to Part I which featured Prof. Michael Rectenwald.
The Not-So-Great Reset, Part II, Ep #13 – Tom Luongo
https://youtu.be/_v6NzbHTCzU
The Not-So-Great Reset, Part I, Ep #10– Michael Rectenwald
https://youtu.be/XtaFK3suqQ0
I just want to suggest that you have Rectenwald on your podcast one day. One of the things I have noticed when talking to “normies”, is that they will say things like: “I understand everything Luongo says … BUT, ultimately it all doesn’t matter because the world is coming to an end because of Climate Change.”
Through such discussions I came to realize how complex Red Pilling yourself is … if you get ONE THING WRONG, the whole exercise can leave you in a worse state of anxiety than when you started. Imagine trying to do physics but not knowing that the speed of light is a constant… you won’t be able to sleep at night from anything you calculate.
That said, I would hope you and Rectenwald could talk about the origins of the climate change movement, maybe using your rubric of “elite turf wars”. Al Gore really threw gas on the fire in 2006 with “An Inconvenient Truth”, presumably to “gore the ox” of the Bush/Cheney (big oil, coal faction) and give his faction a portion of the energy industry (wind, solar, notice not nuclear) auto industry (Tesla) and a veto power over their projects, (like Keystone XL) and reinforce the gradient of globalization by making energy more expensive in the West. It also makes sense that the EU would be for alternative energy sources, as they are so energy poor, hence the convergence? Maybe you and Professor Rectenwald can add to that?
Anyway, just a suggestion.
PS: If you are not familiar with Rectenwald, he comes off as very low key but he is really an intellectual heavyweight… like Thomas Sowell, he started off as a far-left ardent Marxist (NYU prof) and made his journey from there. If you guys hit it off and establish a good dialogue, he could become another GG&G resource like David Collum. IMHO
Thanks for the suggestion. Ye gods I cannot believe people actually believe the world is ending b/c of plant food. So, so depressing.
I think you point out similar things quite often when your peers go full Manichaean (USA bad, Fed bad, etc.) …all it takes is ONE THING to derail you, and then you are out there protesting against J. Powell and playing into the hands of the WEF.
Podcasts 75, 76 & 77 were seminal, as they told a story. The motivations behind the groups. How they came together and how they are coming apart. If you just came out and said the Fed is one of the good guys, without the backstory and narrative, I don’t know that I would have been perceptive enough to get it. I needed it laid out.
That said, I just have not been able to do the same thing with climate. I thought this was brilliant, perceptive and precise: “Those are data sets so dirty I wouldn’t feed them to my dogs.” It is the “data”! However, there is no back story or narrative to go along with “bad data”: whose ox is being gored and who does the goring serve?
Obviously, “they” created an anxiety and are selling us a solution, as they did with the virus/vaccine, but it is still very murky. IMHO
BTW: This topic comes up a lot with Christaforou and Mercouris in their Q&As, and they are promising to do a podcast on it, so maybe a round table with the two Alexes and Rectenwald?
Anyway, thanks again!