I’ve never received so many views on a single post. It’s not lost on me that I’m able to share my ideas and I’m very grateful for engaging with everyone. On social these are just numbers, but I try to make each post feel more real by visualizing the impact. 300 people is a big ball room. 10,000 is a stadium. 1,500,000 is like having 2x the population of San Francisco see my post. That’s insane. I’ll try to keep the perspective that every post, interaction or idea could reach an entire city! My DMs are always open. Let me know if you have any questions for me here too. Happy to engage with everyone.

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Very provocative post, worth a read. The one thing I'd add is you can't have true free markets without free money. When money is controlled by central banks, they control the interest rates and who gets the hand outs. Money printing of course leads to the inflation crisis we're seeing today as well. It seems to me that the only solution is a free market money which has no central authority. I wrote about this extensively in my series "The Future of Money" (available for free on my site), but my conclusion is the only money that fits this criteria is Bitcoin.

When downswings happen, I’ve felt like I can’t win. And when they get really bad, it can feel as though I’ll never win again. Then one day the cards turn and I book a W. A small one, but it’s a green entry in a sea of red. Then another. A bump or two perhaps, but then another. Slowly but surely the graph trends upward. Next thing you know you’re on an upswing, flying high, feeling invincible like you can do no wrong. Right now, with everything happening in the world, it feels like we are on a cultural downswing. So when I think about The Fourth Turning, the “Winter” season of the cycle that we’re mid way through, but unfortunately still may have more dark days ahead, I try to remind myself that Spring always follows Winter. That wins eventually come, no matter how bad the losses are. The key is to make sure we don’t go broke. To stay in the game long enough and wait it out until the cards turn back our way once more. Like all downswings, I hope this one ends soon. We can’t control the cards. We can only control how we play them. The choices we make now and how we handle the swings will help determine whether the downswing seems to last forever or if the tide turns quicker than we thought.

The older the problem, the older the solution. Back to basics.

I should really stick to poker.

Spoke to a friend today in the heart of the chaos in France. Here’s the latest... He’s in the center of a town called Grenoble while his cousin is in the center of Lyon. His political lean: 10 years ago was center left, and is now centrist/center-right. It’s true that things have descended into looting and destruction. When he walked through town today, he told me that storefronts were destroyed. Cars were burned in the city was “quite a disaster.” I asked him about the nature of the protest here’s what he told me. There’s a difference between a protest and a riot. What’s most common, is a protest. This is how things began and often happen. It’s so casual and part of the zeitgeist of France that it’s almost a “rite of passage,” he tells me. An innocent but thoughtful protest that school kids participate in and learn at a younger age, to signify they are becoming adults and a sign they care about the culture and their future. “It’s something we learned growing up, and so benign that the teachers even participate.” He continued, “The past two weeks had been what’s called a “blocus,” which is a specific type of protest held at schools by students only, where they block access to the school and stop classes for the day.” This is what I saw and reported about in Aix en Provence from my last post. There’s a real problem and most everyone agrees with the nature of these genuine protests. This goes on peacefully for a while and get very little outside attention. Several hundred thousand people participate in these peaceful protests and have over the past few weeks, yet they only exploded recently. What happens after, towards the end is that things escalate and sometimes descend into recklessness and violence. Yesterday’s protest was different, organized and contained groups clearly taking advantage of the situation and looting. It takes place in the city streets instead of at schools. The looters then take advantage of the chaos to do their thing (not students). This was the first time this type of protest had happened since the start of the movement. These protests have historically become quite violent in France, as they did during the “gilets jaunes” movement, which happened years ago, during which they saw banks, bus shelters and advertising displays being smashed, along with fires and graffiti. The looting is somewhat new, he says. By his own estimation, this was the vast majority somewhat like 3% of the total of what’s going on. In short, there’s a difference between a protest and a riot. Most of what’s happening are protests, which is what I witnessed. Sometimes these descend into riots, which happened more recently. Most of what gets attention are the riots, and these seem to be happening with more intensity and frequency. For example, this is the third such event he described in the past six years. While these protests have been going on, mostly peaceful since late September, over the past weekend specifically they have ascended into riots. It’s tragic to see. Time will tell how long it goes on. My heart goes out to all the people affected and I hope for peace and prosperity for everyone in France, Italy and the rest of the world.

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I was in Milan all day yesterday and went all around. While heartbreaking and sad to see, and yes, it did happen, this isn't most of what happened nor representative of Milan overall. It's contained to a specific area, akin to something like Times Square in NYC or the Walk of Fame in LA, and then saying "all of LA and NYC is going to shit." It doesn't work that way. Notably, the majority of the people protesting all across Italy at this time are of course, Italians. There were literally 2,000,000 people protesting a year ago, most of them Italian, including the police, yet this was not reported abroad. xitter.cf/AlecTorelli/status/211…

It's true they started off peaceful when I was there and some have turned more violent. But consider this: There were literally 2 million Italians across 100 cities, including the police, protesting against the genocide in Gaza a year ago. This got almost no media coverage in the U.S., of course, and it was overwhelmingly peaceful. For context, 2M Italians would be proportionally akin to 12M Americans or 3.4% of the entire population. To pout that into perspective, it would be equivalent to every single person protesting in the streets in all of these major cities: Chicago Phoenix Fort Worth San Jose Charlotte Indianapolis San Francisco Seattle Denver Boston Detroit Could you imagine that? So the real point here is, when millions of people are protesting, perhaps consider why they don't show you the peaceful ones, but instead focus on the few thousand (minority) who aren't peaceful and the destruction that comes with it. Could it possibly be that if they focused on the peaceful ones, we all may be forced to consider why they are protesting in the first place, which nobody seems to be talking about? Read my latest post.

My heart goes out to everyone affected by the protests. I’d love nothing more than to see better living conditions, more opportunity, and, plainly, more peace and harmony. I don’t endorse violence or destruction. But while those acts dominate the headlines, perhaps there’s something else worth considering: What are the majority of peaceful protesters so upset about? My heart goes out to them as well, most of whom are peaceful and genuinely want a better life, like we all do. We can disagree about how to get there, but one of the things traveling and living abroad has taught me is, we’re mostly all the same and want the same things in life. So, is it really fair to say this is all just “a bunch of angry, lazy socialists who don’t want to work”? Perhaps there’s something more. If you talk to the locals, as I have in France earlier this month, and now Italy where I am today, most share the same concerns: deteriorating education, high rents, high fuel/gas prices, and overall cost cost of living due to inflation. One girl in France put it particularly well to me: “Our education is deteriorating while the government is busy funding wars.” It’s sad to see people feel that the system no longer works for them. And this isn’t unique to Europe. You can feel it, hear it, and see it in the United States, too. What if many of these problems are connected by a common thread: money? Our monetary system has profound consequences for how wealth is distributed and long term, how people behave. Expanding the money supply increases the cost of living. Those who hold cash and depend on wages struggle to keep up, while people who own scarce assets may benefit from rising prices. Americans love to dunk on Europeans for being “socialist” but perhaps there’s nothing more socialist about a society than having the money by centrally controlled and influenced by government. That happens around the world, as every major country is on a “fiat” standard, which means, money issued by the government that has no intrinsic value. Over time, the structure of the monetary system influences who gets ahead, who falls behind, and how much economic pressure ordinary people experience. These pressures can feed social unrest, particularly when people lose faith that hard work will lead to a better life. We’ve seen versions of this throughout history and we’re seeing it now. Ray Dalio has studied the rise and decline of empires and monetary systems. Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning explores recurring generational patterns. The concept of “elite overproduction” from Peter Turchin (popularized by Prof Jiang) examines what happens when competition for status and opportunity intensifies. These cycles happen predictability, like clockwork and have been for centuries. The issue is they are the long arch of history. Although predictable, they happen but once in a lifetime. The older generation passes away and the new one inherits a broken system while never experiencing the lessons from the past. By then, the reset happened so long ago that the system doesn't work anymore. Here’s what I think about daily and have been pondering since I began studying monetary history. History suggests that major systems often don’t change until the pressure becomes impossible to ignore. Sometimes that change is peaceful. Studying the work of Dalio taught me most of the time it isn’t. People say I’m cavalier about this; it’s the opposite. I’m extremely worried that it gets worse, far worse, before it gets better. Economic crises, political upheaval, and social conflict can reinforce one another before a new order emerges. The unsettling thing is how slowly these patterns develop, and how quickly they can accelerate once they reach a breaking point. As they say, Gradually, then Suddenly. I hope we can learn from history before things get worse. But it seems we shouldn’t rely on mere hope alone as a strategy. The question is whether we can change the incentives that produce these outcomes. I’ve explored this in my series The Future of Money, particularly A Brief History of Money and The World on a Bitcoin Standard, both of which are on my site, for free. I believe Bitcoin offers an interesting potential part of the solution. Why? Because money shapes incentives. As Munger reflects, “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.” A monetary system that allows governments to expand the money supply can use it to fund wars, genocide, or anything they want really. The government spends with relatively no consequence and ordinary people pay the price. It’s tragic. Worse, those costs can be difficult for ordinary people to see or challenge directly. Bitcoin introduces a different model: a monetary asset with a predetermined and fixed supply that no government can manipulate. So instead of using voting for politicians who promise peace and deliver war, we'd have to fund the war directly. That could only happen if war was truly valued by the people, which most of the time it isn’t. This is why 2,000,000 people protested in Italy and across Europe a year ago, which of course got no media attention, but was far greater in magnitude than the protests happening now. War and the aftermath is so unpopular that the right in the U.S. won in part on promising to avoid it, and will lose the mid terms in part because they didn’t. So the question becomes: What if financing war became harder to conceal, harder to sustain, and more costly to future generations? What if governments had fewer ways to shift the costs of today’s decisions onto tomorrow’s citizens? Perhaps one way to encourage peace is to change the incentives around war itself. We can’t eliminate all human conflict. But we can make the worst of it much more expensive, so much so that perhaps there’s very little will for it and certainly none to sustain it. (Wars are often popular in the very beginning, but quickly fall out of favor, yet they last for decades. US/Iraq being a clear example). After all, if we want different outcomes, shouldn’t we examine the incentives producing the current ones? The fourth turning postulates we’re heading into Winter, the most challenging season. But Winter never lasts forever and is always followed by Spring. The sooner we understand why it came, the better our chances of building something stronger when the flowers arrive. Love you all. 🙌🙏

I may not have explained myself as well as I could, so let me clarify. There’s clearly problems. Nobody is saying there isn’t. I’m also not justifying any of the violent or malicious behavior. My point is that one’s normal life in France and Italy, where I’ve spent the last month or so, isn’t the majority of what you see. Most places are completely fine. Most people are peaceful. That’s why the extreme things are outliers - they aren’t the norm. The photos are from Milan today, where I spent the entire day. I walked several miles, and drove around the whole city. Never saw a single protest. Yes, they happened and some were severe, but it’s like saying “all of NYC is going to hell”, when there’s a protest in Times Square. I speak with many Europeans who are afraid to go to America because they think they’ll be abducted by ICE, which, of course, is very unlikely. Yet this is the majority of what they see on TV about the U.S. It’s of course serious and a problem, I’m aware of that, but it’s not like a normal daily experience to witness across America. The same nuance is true for Europe. I understand how this may be hard to believe. I’ve spent months away from America and witnessed it from abroad, and found myself feeling some of the fear Euros felt after seeing what’s going on. Then I go back to the States and it’s not what you see from Euro media. My point about France being safe wasn’t that it excuses what’s happening or that it’s better than America. I love the States and it’s the greatest place in the world for many things. It’s that in most cities in most places, if you just lived life without watching the news, you’d have no idea anything was happening. Perhaps you can relate to lockdowns. You were told a bunch of stuff, but when you went out and walked around, was anything really as different as they said? Did you experience things the way the media portrayed it, or was it exaggerated and was there a disconnect? My experience in Milan today was like that. If I didn’t watch the news, I’d have no idea anything was happening. That’s all I meant. Will try to do a better job being more articulate. Happy to answer more questions.

If you work on a computer, it's basically AGI at this point.

I don't know France from the inside so admittedly this is a completely biased perspective of a tourist who gets all the high without the pain. What you're saying also makes sense. That said, I visited France three times this year, spending nearly two months there, from Paris to Nice to Aix en Provence to Bordeaux. As a tourist, it's quite likely the single nicest place in Europe, pretty much across the board. High energy, happy people, amazing quality of life, wonderful food, safe and clean, extremely classy cities that seem, on the surface of course, very well organized. I'm always fascinated to hear these perspectives from locals, who of course I have to trust are more accurate than my superficial experience as a tourist who doesn't speak the language, precisely because they are the completely opposite of my reality while there.

For as long as I can remember, I've been exploring the latest tech - literally chatting on AIM at 8 years old. I've been at the forefront since, from web3 to spending 1,000+ hours using AI. I built a PokerGPT a week after it launched. I vibe coded an app - "The Poker Edge". I've done it all. Nothing even comes remotely close to what is possible today. It's rare I'm in complete awe - progress is incremental and we get used to it - but this is one of those times. What's happening right now is unlike anything I've ever seen. People think AI is chatting with a half demented hallucinating bot. Of those who do that, perhaps 1-3% actually pay for a subscription. Of the people who pay, most don't use agents. The word "agents" gets thrown around a lot, but what's possible now is completely unprecedented. Most notably, the rate of change is like nothing I've ever seen. 6 months ago, AI could barely build a solid website. Today, it not only builds the site to near perfection in one prompt, it can do literally everything else. It can research ideas, buy the domain, build the site, do SEO research connected to gold standard 3rd party tools, write the articles using best practice, setup google analytics, build a spreadsheet with prospects, do cold outreach (connects directly to gmail), then message your team on Slack/Trello/Monday with instructions. It'll host everything in a Notion folder of the "Master Business Plan" and execute everything in the background. The flex of the future will be, "my Agents make me $10K/month". This is truly unreal. I'm literally blown away.

Front page of Yahoo Finance today. Longed oil when headlines broke out saying a deal was "imminent". Still love oil stocks as a cycle hold into the 2030's.