In this special edition, I break down how the Federal Reserve gaslights us all about inflation with complicity and assistance from the media and politicians.
Links:
- Yellen Or Talkin’ | BitMEX Blog
- Lagarde says inflation crisis came from ‘nowhere’, describes Putin as ‘a terrifying man’
- Fed’s Powell: ‘Urgent’ for US to focus on debt sustainability - POLITICO
- Fed Chair Jerome Powell: The 2024 60 Minutes Interview - YouTube
- The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047: Shriver, Lionel
- Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better: Alden, Lyn
- The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking: Ammous, Saifedean
Music:
[00:00:00]
Chris Fisher:
Another economic hangover after the pandemic is a sharp increase in the national debt. Thirty years from now, it is projected to be $144 trillion, or $1 million per household. Music. Hello, friend. Welcome in to 379. We gather together a little early this week because on Sunday, 60 Minutes released their big, long interview with Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. And this is a whopper of a piece. And in fact, I have to say, as far as CBS goes, this might be some of their best work in years. And I'm not being sarcastic. I genuinely mean this might be some of their best work in years.
It actually asks a couple of tough questions. It raises a couple of good points. But it's not perfect. There's still quite a bit of doublespeak in here. There is some false premises that we just operate from. And there's some inferences that if you don't understand the full context around what they're saying could just go right over your head and not seem that bad. But when you appreciate the fuller context, well, it means a lot more. So we're going to do something kind of special. And I'd love to get your feedback as we go throughout this.
So continue to boost in as we're listening to this so we can do a follow-up episode. I'd love to just do sort of laying the primer right here and getting the primer down, and then we'll kind of do a full paint with everybody's thoughts after I've collected, because this is an extremely complex topic. And it impacts you if you're in the States, definitely. And, man, it has been these last two years. But it also can dramatically impact you outside the States, because the dollar is king, and Jay Powell and his crew are the gang that set the price of your money.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, may have just rescued the economy from inflation without throwing millions out of work. When Americans were suffering through the highest inflation in 40 years, Powell's Fed raised interest rates 11 times to cool the economy. Economists expected a recession. But now, inflation is tumbling while employment is near a 50-year high. All right. Let's start with the premise right here. So we're in. We're 30 seconds in. Unfortunately, the premise is flawed. Let's start kind of at the very beginning. There's two in here that are wrong.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, may have just rescued the economy from inflation without throwing millions out of work. So the narrative for two years was the only way to bring down inflation would be to raise unemployment. The idea being that if more people are unemployed, that would destroy demand for goods. If we destroyed demand for goods, we would take pressure off of the supply chain. If we take pressure off the supply chain, inflation goes down. You'll recall inflation really kicked off because of the lockdowns the way we kind of uh news speak around that now is we say covid covid related issues and you know the covid slowdown or the covid lockdowns but that was actually government policy government policy instituted lockdowns which destroyed the economy and affected the supply chain greatly along with the vax mandates dates, specifically with the truckers.
Those policies destroy the supply chain. So J-PAL, since he doesn't create policy, he doesn't create law, he's not responsible. They're not even a federal agency. All he can do is control the interest rate. And so if he wants to destroy demand, he can raise the interest rate. Raising the interest rate makes businesses have tighter budgets because money isn't as free. They can't get cheap loans. Before interest rates were raised, a loan was free money. It was better than free money because you could get a loan at an interest rate that was lower than inflation.
So if the real world economy inflation, if the real economy inflation was around two or 3%, this is like before COVID, and you could get a loan around, around the low, almost zero, you are getting money for better than free. So businesses could expand like crazy. They could hire like crazy. VCs could invest in every little stupid idea, and that business never even had to earn a profit. And we saw this just metastasize over the last 13 years, really since 2008, when quantitative easing became the norm. Quantitative easing is really impactful at the asset level. So when they print money, it was what people, it was what we, the citizens call it, that goes into assets, right?
It goes to the banks and the banks buy assets. They buy real estate. They buy stocks. That's why the stock market and real estate went up like crazy over the last few years. But regular folk, they don't have access to that. The regular folk don't have the money to go buy assets. In fact, the top 10% of U.S. Households own 65% of all financial assets that get affected by the Fed pumping. I'm going to say it again. The top 10% of U.S. households own 65% of the financial assets that get impacted when the Fed pumps. The top 10% has around 65% of all financial assets. You understand what I'm saying? The top 10%.
65% of all financial assets. That's stocks, that's real estate, that's things that go up in value when money is created. Your car, your house goes up, and that's the only thing most of us have is our house. But your car and those things, most of those things lose money over time, and they lose money even faster when money prints. Food gets more expensive, right? All these things kind of that we use on day-to-day are negatively impacted, with the exception if you have real estate, which is the most common form of investment for most of us.
But outside of that, and that's getting harder and harder for especially newer generations to get access to. Outside of that, the average folk don't have much. In fact, the bottom 90% holds 92% of all the debt and only 35% of the assets. 90% of the bottom, that's us, holds 92% of the debt. But we only have 35% of the assets. This is a highly unequal distribution, and the reason why I bring this up is because when the Fed prints, which is not technically what they're doing, but when we have the money printer go burrs, we like to say, that money goes into assets. It's called the Cantillion effect.
You can look this up. It's not the focus of this episode, but it's called the Cantillion effect, and I would invite you to look it up because it explains why about 10% are doing fantastic and the rest of us are kind of different to grades of doing not so well. Well, so the idea that Jerome Powell saved us all from inflation is bogus on the premise, because from the very beginning, he said we had to get to around a 4% unemployment rate in order for inflation to go down. He was saying that for two years. That turned out to be completely untrue. But also, the concept that inflation has gone down, well, it doesn't really work like that.
Inflation is a cumulative thing, and I want you to understand this. If they tell you that inflation is 3% right now, that's an aggregate. Overall, if you zoom out and you go back to January of 2020, the aggregate inflation rate since January of 2020 is 22.38%. Trueflation.com slash dashboard. I've been following this since the beginning of the pandemic, and they have been spot on. They have the UK in here. They have the US in here, and they source it from industry directly. They're not going by the CPI number. They do include the CPI numbers in their calculation, but they have been spot on.
And the aggregate inflation rate is 22.38% since January of 2020. What is happening, and why their premise in this interview is wrong, is the rate of inflation is slowing. The increase is slowing. It's not going down. The rate is increasing, is slowing. So your purchasing power is getting diminished at a slower rate, but it is still being diminished. And we're calling this a big win, right? CBS is framing this as some big win for the Fed when their entire intention, which was to get you laid off, never even materialized, but yet inflation still came down. So now we're going to play this little game and figure out why that is while still patting Jerome on the back. Observe may have just rescued the economy from inflation without throwing millions out of work.
When Americans were suffering through the highest inflation in 40 years, Powell's Fed raised interest rates 11 times to cool the economy. Economists expected a recession, but now inflation is tumbling while employment is near a 50-year high. All right. So employment is near a 50 year high. This is going to be a this is, I would say, a cornerstone of this piece. It is a fundamental premise of this piece. That is only technically true if you look at part time work. And if you look at people that are historically working more jobs, we have more people working three jobs than ever in the history of this country right now since we've been collecting this data, I should say.
We also have had a destruction of full-time work. Part-time jobs don't have medical benefits. They're often grueling types of jobs. And nobody is feeling great having to work two or three jobs. Nobody feels great doing that. So the idea that jobs are booming is kind of a false premise. Also, it's an extremely uncomfortable thing for most people to say, but it is factually true. Almost 80% or somewhere around there, I do not remember the exact numbers, so I apologize, But a extremely disproportionately large amount of this part-time work is going to non-Native American – I don't even know if they're citizens.
I mention that. I mention that because it means that if we have people coming into the country at a high rate and they're getting jobs, then you're still going to have a contingent of people that are feeling like they're out of the workplace. And the reason why they might feel like that is because unemployment stops counting them very quickly. So they're not really counted as unemployed anymore. I know people that haven't had a job since 2008. It's been the recession never left for them. So this these job gains, this 50 number high is multiple jobs worked by people doing part time work at each one of those jobs.
And they're doing that to keep up with the rate inflation. And yet what the federal government and also the Federal Reserve, who is not a federal agency, like to shine a light on is just the overall number. And the media is happy to parrot that. All right. So you can see, even in the first 30 seconds, while this is some of CBS's best work in, I would say, the last two, three years, we still have monumental premise problems. Economists expected a recession, but now inflation is tumbling while employment is near a 50-year high. Thursday, we met Powell for a rare interview to talk about interest rates, remaining dangers, and the one question that's on everyone's mind.
The story will continue in a moment. I will point out as well that this 50-year high of employment has been revised downward every month but one, I believe, in the last year. So they put out the headline numbers of employment. And then a few days or weeks later or right before the next drop, they revise the previous drop downward. And they've done that for essentially 11 months. But we never hear about that. We only talk about like that big headline number. Is inflation dead? I wouldn't go quite so far as that. What I can say is that inflation has come down really over the past year and fairly sharply over the past six months. We're making good progress.
The job is not done, and we're very much committed to making sure that we fully restore price stability for the benefit of the public. But inflation has been falling steadily for 11 months. You've avoided a recession. Why not cut the rates now? I would point out, we have not necessarily avoided a recession. Historically, the yield curve inverts, which has happened. A period of time goes by. The market thinks the recession's coming because the yield curve inverted. They kind of give up on that idea. They become bullish again and think this time we've licked it. We have the soft landing this time. And friends, if you can find it, it's harder with Google these days, but you can find headlines in 2007 in the same kind of language. You know, they nailed it.
We're going to be fine. Things are picking back up. Let's go. Meanwhile, the fundamentals that showed us there were problems were there, but everybody was talking like we had licked it and that soft landings were coming. The term soft landing wasn't created for this particular situation. It is a term of art that has been used for a long time and historically has been wrong. Now, there is always the chance this time is different, especially with the level of manipulation that we now see from the federal government in the financial market. So it is possible it gets avoided this time.
I simply am pointing out, historically, before the recession hits, we think we've licked it. The market turns around and we start talking very bullish. Oh, we've got it, boys. Good job, everybody. We finally beat the recession this time. No recession. All things straight on. Let's go. And then a couple of months later, things crash. In March, we do have that term, that bank term lending program, the funding program, program, BTFP, I think it's called. And that program that dries up in March, and that's a nice source of liquidity for these banks. I think we're going to see some regional banks have problems in March.
How far does that go? Well, J-PAL will get to that. But these kinds of things, they're not certain. And March is not that far away. We could see economic troubles in just a few weeks. We're not necessarily outside the window of a recession. But inflation has been been falling steadily for 11 months, you've avoided a recession. Why not cut the rates now? Well, we have a strong economy. Growth is going on at a solid pace. The labor market is strong, 3.7% unemployment. With the economy strong like that, we feel like we can approach the question of when to begin to reduce interest rates carefully.
And we want to see more evidence that inflation is moving sustainably down to 2%. We have some confidence in that. Our confidence is rising. We just want some more confidence before we take that very important step of beginning to cut interest rates. Two interesting assumptions in just this little bit of dialogue. Number one, the assumption that rates must come down. We have now entered a period of time where our economy only properly functions with very cheap money. That hasn't historically been the case, except for since 2008. There's always been. I mean, go look at the interest rate was in the 80s.
Throughout the 80s, it was significantly higher. I think when I was a teenager, I remember my parents had about like a 7%, 8% interest rate on their loan. And then later, as things went on, they were able to refinance into a much lower rate, I think, during like probably the junior administration. And what I remember thinking back is, you know, the interest rates were always five, six, seven percent when I was a kid. And now we just automatically have this discussion around, well, when are they coming down again? I mean, they're like five and a half percent. When are they coming down again?
And then the second assumption that's baked into this conversation is that we must have some inflation and we must have a target interest rate of at least something because the Fed has to have something to work with. If we have another emergency and the interest rate is zero, well, they can't lower that. And if it's at five and a half, they can't raise it because it'll break everything. They've clearly brought us right to the edge as far as interest rates can go. So they want to lower their rate to somewhere where they can still have some impact because this is really the only lever they have. So that's why their target is 2%.
It's not for your financial betterment. So that way they still have some leverage here in case there's an emergency. They can go up or down. But they know they can't keep it at 5.5. They have to acknowledge that. So the conversation starts with win rates, not if rates, but when rates go down. Inflation has fallen from just over 9% to about 3%, near the Fed's ultimate goal of 2%. That's going, of course, by the core inflation rate, which is a bullshit, bogus number, but it's one that everybody gets to work off of, and it's a lot better than 13% or something that it might actually be.
If you're looking at food, it could be as much as 20%. If you're looking at the cumulative rate since like I like to do, since 2020 when things started going crazy, it's 22%, almost 22.5%. Why is your target rate 2%? Interest rates always include an estimate of future inflation. If that estimate is 2%, that means you'll have 2% more that you can cut in your in-interest rates. The central bank will have more ammunition, more power to fight a downturn if rates are a little bit higher. Are you committed to getting all the way to 2.0 before you cut the rates? See, what they're doing here, and it's very confusing, is they are confusing and mixing the interest rate that the Fed sets and inflation.
They're calling them the same thing. They are two separate things. And I want to back this up because it's very odd because J-PAL himself is doing it. Scott Pelley is doing it. And J-PAL are both, or maybe it's the way they edited this. They're intermixing the interest rate, the price at which they set money, and inflation. Why is your target rate 2%? Interest rates will always include an estimate of future inflation. If that estimate is 2%, that means you'll have 2% more that you can cut in your interest rates. The central bank will have more ammunition, more power to fight a downturn if rates are a little bit higher.
Are you committed to getting all the way to 2.0 before you cut the rates? No, no, that's not what we say at all. No. No, we're committed to returning inflation to 2% over time. I've said that we wouldn't wait to get to 2% to cut rates. The thing that they're kind of just assuming here is they have any control over inflation. It takes some Houthis in the Red Sea to impact the shipping, which then impacts the cost of goods, which impacts inflation. It takes some pissed off Saudis to raise the cost of oil to then raise the cost of our goods. It could take an environmental disaster. It could take some banks collapsing outside his control.
They don't control inflation. They control the interest rate. They can increase the interest rate and try to devastate the economy and induce micro-recessions all over the place, which reduce demand, which then has the ultimate effect of lowering inflation because there's less people buying goods. That's all they can do. But they jawbone is what they call it. But they jawbone as if this guy in a suit, the 70-year-old man in a suit, has the ability to turn a knob, and that knob controls how much you're paying for food and gasoline in your housing.
It's sort of a silly premise, yet it also is true to a degree because the market, being the stock market in this case, sort of hangs on every word this man says. And so in a way, what he says does manifest into reality. So even though he actually has no control, he can just jawbone about it because there's a bunch of rich fools on Wall Street that then go and take his words into some sort of – It's like they're getting words from Jesus on the hill, and they all have their own interpretation of J-PAL's scripture, and then they go implement the good word in their investments, depending on how they interpret the scripture of J-PAL.
We live in a bonkers time where a couple of old men determine how much money costs, and then a bunch of rich idiots go manipulate the market to turn it into reality. No, no, that's not what we say at all. Oh, I say it. No. We're committed to returning inflation to 2% over time. I've said that we wouldn't wait to get to 2% to cut rates. We met Powell in the Federal Reserve boardroom where this committee meets every six weeks or so to set the so-called federal funds interest rate, which influences most loans. Last week, Powell announced the rate would stay at its 23-year high, about 5.5 percent, unchanged for six months.
You disappointed a lot of people on Wednesday. That would be Wall Street, right? Even though, which I've watched every Fed meeting for the last two years when he comes out and does his little announcement, he's been saying higher for longer rates, higher for longer rates, higher for longer rates at every single meeting. Then wall street hears he's going to cut at the next meeting and they go hedge based on that and then when he doesn't deliver those cuts they all get sad and their wild thing is and this is this is the state this tells you everything dear listener, The market performs poorly when the jobs report is good.
Wall Street goes down when the middle class has jobs. Why is that? Why is that? Because they know J-POW is still looking at those jobs reports. And they know that J-POW feels like he can keep interest rates higher for longer as long as you have work, even if you have to work three jobs. That means those wall street idiots don't get their cheap money they don't get to ape into every little ai tech stock they can't ape into every little bio investment and go fund another covid they don't get to have fun they don't get to feel rich not until the money is cheap again, and they want you out of work so that way they get to have cheap money because they don't need you for Wall Street to do well.
So that's why the stock market goes down when the jobs report number is high. And that's the fine little line that Jay Powell is walking here and their little board of people who determine the price of money. I can't overstate how important it is to restore price stability, by which I mean inflation is low and predictable and people don't have to think about it in their daily lives. That's where we were for 20 years. We want to get back to that. Moving too soon would set off inflation again. You could, or you could just halt the progress. I think more likely, if you move too soon, you'd see inflation settling out somewhere well above our 2% target.
And what is the danger of moving too late? If you move too late, then you might, policy would be too tight, and that could easily weigh on economic activity and on the labor market. So there you go right there. If we delay too long in lowering the rates, the economy suffers because it is absolutely hooked and dependent on cheap money, not on producing goods that sell well, but on cheap money. Maybe a recession. Right, and we have to balance those two risks. There is no easy, simple, obvious path. Was the Fed too slow to recognize inflation in 2021? So in hindsight, it would have been better to have tightened policy earlier.
We thought that the economy was so dynamic that it would fix itself fairly quickly. And we thought that inflation would go away fairly quickly. Isn't it fascinating that the central management team often says the only thing that's really going to solve this is if we manage this harder. We need to be more clear about this. We need to set these rates. We're going to be job-boning about this message. And we need a CBDC so that way we can manage this economy even harder. But then when he's asked why didn't you catch this when it was kicking off, his answer is, well, we have such a great free market.
It's so dynamic. We don't want to interfere with the free market. Well, which one is it, Jay Powell? We thought that the economy was so dynamic that it would fix itself fairly quickly. And we thought that inflation would go away fairly quickly without an intervention by us. And so in the fourth quarter of 21, it became clear that inflation was not transitory in the sense that I mentioned. And we pivoted and started tightening. And as I said, it's essential that we did that. It was critical that we did that. And that's part of the story why inflation is coming down now.
A pet theory of mine is that Jerome Powell is trying to unbury his reputation and this is his performance to do such because he was caught being a political actor towards the end of the Trump administration and at the beginning of the Biden administration when he parroted party lines. That inflation was transitory, that it was only going to be temporary. That was during Trump. And then Biden came in and he said, well, inflation is transitory because of COVID, which is exactly what the Biden administration was saying. And then after COVID wrapped up, inflation isn't transitory, but it's because of Putin's war.
Now, the Fed doesn't use the raw, crude political language that the Biden administration spokeshole does. You're not You're not going to hear Jerome Powell probably ever, well, actually, that's not true, but he's not going to often say Putin's price hike. He may once or twice utter it, but the Fed will use language that's much more sophisticated. You know, they might say due to constraints caused by conflicts in the Middle East and in the Ukraine region, we believe that will cause the price of goods like grain and commodities like grain, I should say, to go up in price, which will have a sustained impact on the cost of goods in the states, adding inflationary pressures, right?
That's how Jerome Powell will blame Putin. And it is technically true. Like there is absolutely an inflationary pressure for more war. Especially if it's an area that produces goods like grain, that's going to cause an inflationary pressure. That's why, that's why good leadership tries to stay out of war or corrupt leadership uses war to make money. You see, it can be used both ways and that's just fantastic. We wondered about an interest rate cut in the next committee meeting in March. I think it's not likely that this committee will reach that level of confidence in time for the the March meeting, which is in seven weeks.
The next committee vote then would be in May. How would you characterize the consensus around this table for rate cuts? Is everyone on board? Almost all. Almost all of the 19 participants who sit around this table believe that it will be appropriate in their most likely case for us to cut the federal funds rate this year. Cuts in the federal funds rate would likely be a quarter, maybe half a percentage point at a time, as long as inflation data remain good. We just want to see more good data along those lines. It doesn't need to be better than what we've seen, or even as good. It just needs to be good.
And so we do expect to see that. So what he's saying is the standard is very low, and that you're probably going to see, if everything goes as planned. The rates start to go down in June. They'll vote in May. He'll announce it. rate starts to go down around in June. That's the plan. Assuming we don't have some sort of massive regional bank collapse in March, I would think. Now, when they lower it, they only have to just lower it. They don't have to lower it by a lot. They just have to lower it. The moment they lower it, they are signaling to the market that they are going to be lowering for a while.
That's all it will take you mark my words write it down the day the federal reserve announces they are lowering rates the stock market and bitcoin will rally it will be a boom, they're just looking for the signal that it's going to begin that and and cbs knows that that That is the context around this conversation. Back in 2021, little seemed good. Inflation ignited after pandemic disruptions and when the federal government spent $5 trillion to keep the economy afloat. So you see there, those are actually both federal policies, right? COVID didn't lock you in your house.
COVID didn't shut down your work. COVID didn't keep Walmart open, but closed the mom-and-pop hardware store in my neighborhood. That was local, official, and governmental policy. Back in 2021, little seemed good. Inflation ignited after pandemic disruptions and when the federal government spent $5 trillion to keep the economy afloat. Those were both governmental policy decisions. Many in Congress questioned Powell's rapid rate increases and predicted disaster. And I hope you'll reconsider that as you drive this, before you drive this economy off a cliff. See, there's good old Liz, where she, this is, she's so good at this.
She nails this role and she fools so many of you. She is pretending like she is advocating for the people. Lower those rates. This economy is going to go off a cliff. Lower those rates so average people can get mortgages again. And I hope you'll reconsider that as you drive this, before you drive this economy off a cliff. She read and berated him during her entire time. I watched this entire exchange. What she's advocating for would be for Jay Powell to lower the rates. And this was months ago, actually. So this would have been even a more dramatic time to do it. Months ago, probably because she's thinking of the election, she was advocating for Jay Powell to lower the rates. If Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve lowered the rates because a Democrat senator petitioned them to, they would lose all credibility, first of all.
Second of all, if they lowered rates, the market would rally. If the market rallies while inflation is around 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 percent, whatever the real inflation rate is, and the Federal Reserve knows there's a real inflation rate. If the market rallied, inflation would skyrocket again because people would start getting rich again and people would start buying again. But the trucking industry is devastated. The shipping industry is screwed. They have a 30% longer route right now because of the situation in the Red Sea bringing goods to the United States and other places in the world.
If you were to strain that system right now, inflation would skyrocket. And they know it. So they could. And this was, again, this is six, seven months ago when she asked this question. I can't remember the date now. So what she's advocating for is a policy that would have made inflation turn around and start shooting up like crazy, which destroys generational wealth for the middle class. Absolutely devastates their savings, melts it away at a compounding rate, which they barely understand. This just completely seeps away all purchasing power. hour, destroys family wealth, destroys businesses, makes it impossible for us to get by, makes every single thing you do every day cost more. I feel it.
Everything's more expensive. My car insurance just went up 20 percent and I have a perfect record for the last like five, six, seven, eight years. But insurance is a is a reflection of the cost in the entire market for repairs, for cost of goods, for health. and insurance goes up after they get all the regulator approvals to reflect the actual cost. So whatever your insurance went up by is probably a pretty good capture of what inflation is in your area. And man, am I feeling it. I just had two car payments roll off and I thought, oh God, finally a little bit of relief after two years of just feeling like I'm barely keeping water.
Oh, two car payments going to roll off. That's great. That's so awesome. No, no, know, the insurance went up. And so now I'm essentially, I'm just at the same level now. And everybody's feeling that. Could you imagine if Elizabeth Warren got what she wanted six, seven, nine months ago? The rich would have had their assets pumped. I already quoted you the stats at the beginning of the show. They would have had their bags absolutely pumped and the middle class would be even more eviscerated than they are now. They would be eviscerated.
But yet she can sit there with a smile and advocate for these policies and pretend like she's doing it for the people. It is absolute evil wrapped in sheep's clothing. And I hope you'll reconsider that as you drive this, before you drive this economy off a cliff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. But strangely, when rates went up, the economy added more than 5 million jobs. Powell told us that's because of the odd dynamics of the pandemic. Car sales, for example. There was a semiconductor shortage because so many people were buying goods that involved a lot of semiconductors.
So while demand for cars was spiking because people didn't want to ride public transportation, for example, and they're moving to the suburbs, while that's happening, you can't get semiconductors, you can't make cars. So there's a shortage. So what happened is inflation just spiked. But as the semiconductor supply came back, prices, the inflation has moderated a great deal. So it really these unique features of the pandemic did reverse in a way that brought inflation down. I hate to drill this point home, but it absolutely matters that you understand this point. They were not pandemic factors or situations. What was the term you used here?
Unique features of the pandemic. Ah, you see, that's the kind of speak I'm talking about, the kind of language he uses. The unique features of the pandemic include the government putting their boot on the market. I've got to be 100% honest with you. I'm not like some absolute free capitalism market guy. I never really have been. But what I see here, and I have to acknowledge it if I'm going to be intellectually honest with myself, I see a case study in what happens when the government manipulates a market in multiple different ways.
When they kind of go all in on managing a market. This is what we got. And everything's completely dysfunctional now. The airline industry is completely dysfunctional. The medical industry is completely dysfunctional. Transportation is completely dysfunctional. Local government's completely dysfunctional. Inflation's out of control. Everyone's feeling tight and angry. At least on the West Coast. That's what we got. And it just seems to me like we have a case study in what happens when a government tries to overmanage an economy and we do it at a massive scale. And it's kind of what he's saying here, but instead he calls it the unique features of the pandemic.
But the unique features of the pandemic was how the humans reacted to the flu. That was the unique feature of the pandemic. COVID is a virus. It didn't shut the economy down. How we responded for better or for worse. Oh, and I know I'm talking about money over lives, but this is the consequence. consequence, and now all of our lives are demonstrably worse. Unless you have so much money it doesn't affect you. And if that's the case, please boost in a nice, big, generous boost, because some of us feel it. July came back. Prices, the inflation has moderated a great deal. So it really, these unique features of the pandemic did reverse in a way that brought inflation down. on.
Jerome Powell turns 71 today. After a career in investment banking, he was appointed to the Fed by Barack Obama, made chairman by Donald Trump, and retained by Joe Biden. Powell often travels to listen to the country, and we met him at Spelman College in Atlanta, where the talk was of higher prices. Inflation is one thing, prices are another. And I wonder if there is any reason to believe that people will see the prices of things decline. So the prices of some things will decline, others will go up, but we don't expect to see a decline in the overall price level. That doesn't tend to happen in economies except in very negative circumstances.
I was was talking with somebody yesterday and they're like, yeah, yeah, I think prices will come back down. And I just thought, oh, you sweet summer child. Oh, no, no, no, no. Your only option is to just pay more now. They're not going to come back down. Now, that's. A very broad statement. J-PAL is correct. There are some things that can come down in prices. If you think about the basic necessities, things like, you know, bread and milk and eggs, prices are substantially higher than they were before the pandemic. And so we think that's a big reason why people have been relatively dissatisfied with what is otherwise a pretty good economy.
But those prices will not soften short of something like a recession. Things that are affected by commodity prices, like, for example, gasoline prices, have come way down. Some food prices that incorporate the price of commodities, grains and things like that, those can come down. But the overall price level doesn't come down. The Federal Reserve was empowered in the Great Depression to regulate the economy by controlling the supply of money and setting interest rates. It also regulates commercial banks for safety, Something still challenged by the effects of the pandemic.
The value of commercial office buildings all across the country is dropping as people work from home. Those buildings support the balance sheets of banks all across the country. What is the likelihood of another real estate-led banking crisis? I don't think that's likely. We looked at the larger banks' balance sheets, and it appears to be a manageable problem. There's some smaller and regional banks that have concentrated exposures in these areas that are challenged. And, you know, we're working with them. So here's what he's saying, and I think this is dark and concerning.
He's saying that small banks, your local little banks, could very well collapse. But that the big banks are so big that they can absorb some of that. He is completely comfortable with just there being three or four banks in the United States. One of the unique characteristics of the United States is how many little regional banks we have. Like that's not a thing in Canada. As far as I understand, it's not a thing in most Western countries. And that adds a competitive layer. You know, that's why here in the Washington state, some people prefer credit unions like BECU over, say, Bank of America, because they have room to compete there.
It's very, it's often very beneficial for small businesses because you can know somebody in the town who runs the bank and maybe you don't have a established business yet, but you have an established reputation. They can work with you. There's more of a personal interaction there, more optionality. And, you know, when you, when you go to a bigger bank, like a JP Morgan or a Bank of America, you're just a number. That's fine for big business and the rich, but it doesn't work for the little people. And the chairman is totally fine with small banks collapsing and getting rolled into the big banks. I don't think that's likely. We looked at the larger banks' balance sheets, and it appears to be a manageable problem.
There's some smaller and regional banks that have concentrated exposures in these areas that are challenged. And, you know, we're working with them. You believe it's a manageable problem. I think it appears to be. We're not going to see bank failures across the country as we did in 2008. I don't think there's much risk of a repeat of 2008. Certainly, there will be some banks that have to be closed or merged out of existence because of this. That'll be smaller banks, I suspect, for the most part. Yeah, who cares about small banks, right? Who cares? But his definition of a small bank is a lot bigger than my definition and probably your definition.
He considers things like the 16th largest bank in the Western economies or in the States to be a small bank, right? Anything under like the big five or ten banks, which have trillions, he considers to be a small bank. Just last year, there was a panic at the 16th largest bank. A Federal Reserve report blamed bank mismanagement, but also inadequate supervision by the Fed itself. You seem confident in the banks, and yet the Silicon Valley Bank, second largest failure in U.S. history. Did the Fed miss that? that. So, yes, we did. And we forthrightly saw that we needed to do better.
Yeah, I need to manage more. It's why it's an indictment that the Fed missed that is because what caused that bank to fail was the Fed raising interest rates and bonds being not such a great investment when you need to cash out. They bought what was supposed to be one of the safest assets you can buy, and they got screwed because the Fed raised rates at a historically high increase rate, I guess. That's why Silicon Valley Bank failed. They had some risky bets in there and they were probably, you know, doing other shady things. I have a sense just based on the people I know that banked there.
But what really screwed them was how fast the Fed raised rates. So shouldn't the Fed have caught that? Shouldn't they kind of understand that? Very dynamic? So it's surprising that they missed it. But clearly, if you just manage it more, it'll be fine. And we forthrightly saw that we needed to do better. So we've spent a lot of time working on ways to make supervision more effective and also to adapt regulation to a more – to a modern context in which a bank run can happen so much faster than it could have even 20 years ago. What does he mean when he says that the Federal Reserve has taken action to adapt regulation when they're not supposed to be involved with that at all?
What does that mean? It was over. That's a fundamental problem. These banks are not architected around information moving that fast. That one teeny tiny little throwaway line is a ginormous problem that they cannot solve for. 19 old men and women sitting in a dark room cannot move at the speed of Twitter and DMs. They just simply cannot manage that. And people can organize bank runs faster than they can respond to them. That's the fundamental problem they got to solve. And there's only so much they can do. But somehow, somehow this supposedly policy neutral non-federal agency is going to influence regulation to solve a problem of information moving at the speed of light.
Apt regulation to a more, to a modern context in which a bank run can happen so much faster than it could have even 20 years ago. Another economic hangover after the pandemic is a sharp increase in the national debt. 30 years from now, it is projected to be $144 trillion, or $1 million per household. How do you assess the national debt? We mostly try very hard not to comment on fiscal policy and instruct Congress on how to do their job when actually they have oversight over us. But is the national debt a danger to the economy, in your view? In the long run, the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
The U.S. federal government's on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. I have the sense this worries you very much. Over the long run, of course it does. You know, we're effectively we're borrowing from future generations. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability. And sooner is better than later. If you're not familiar with how the Federal Reserve Chairman typically speaks, I wouldn't be surprised. I would invite you to try to recall the last time you've even heard of a Federal Chairman Reserve, the Federal Chairman's name, or heard him in an interview.
Jay Powell's out there all the time talking about this stuff, isn't he? Isn't that interesting? And if you if you think about what that means, it means it's becoming more and more of a political position. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability. Now, while that sounds like a very reasonable sort of middle of the road thing to say. It is extremely unusual for a chairman to even make anything close to this kind of policy commentary, at least in public. And if you follow the right financial people on Mastodon and on Twitter and all these places, they're just falling all over themselves in shock that the chairman is taking such a strong stance and making such a strong condemnation about the direction of the economy.
That's how Wall Street interprets this. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability. And sooner is better than later. What would you say is the single most important factor for the future of American prosperity? With your permission, I'll name two things. One is, I think we need to just remember that we have this dynamic, innovative, flexible, adaptable. Maybe bubble-driven, you could argue. Economy. More so than other countries. countries. And this is the big reason why our economy has come through so well. The other thing I'll point to for the United States is really since World War II, the United States has been the indispensable nation supporting and defending democracy, security arrangements, economic arrangements.
We've been the leading voice on that. And it's clear that the world wants that. And I would want the United States to know, people in the United States to know that this has benefited our country enormously. It's benefits our economy so much to have this role. And I just I hope we hope that continues. I believe he's talking about the reserve currency status of the U.S. Dollar, although he doesn't come directly say it because it's it's godlike status shall not be actually named directly. But that's what he's saying is, look, we got since World War Two, we got a real good deal going here.
And if we become insolvent or if we have any kind of sovereign debt crisis or if we just become politically toxic. They will look for a better product than the U.S. dollar. This is such a grave warning because it would alter all of our ways of life. I'm going to recommend you two books this episode. I do not recommend books very often. If you would like to just have a view into what a world would be like without the U.S. currency being the reserve status of the world, I invite you to look into, I believe it's called The Mandibles. It's a book that pictures a world where inflation is kind of left running hot policymakers continue to rot and the u.s dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world and it paints a very accurate picture of what life would be like that's the mandibles the second book i'm going to to recommend is Broken Money by Lynn Alden. Very good book.
And I think it is existentially important that you understand the contents of that book. You will make different choices in your daily life if you read that book. I want you to understand it will change your understanding of what's going on. And then, after you read that book, re-listen to this episode. Episode 379. Two books. I very much implore you to read them. The Mandibles and Broken Money. Let's wrap up. We just have a couple of more minutes. Well, actually, not even a couple of minutes. We just have one minute left here with Jay Powell. Let's wrap it all up. It's our economy.
So much to have this role. And I just, I hope we, I hope that continues. Jerome Powell has about two years in his current term as chairman. He suggested to us the likely time for the first interest rate cut would be the middle of the year, a few months before the election. Your decisions inevitably are going to have a bearing on this year's election. And I wonder to what degree does politics determine your timing? We do not consider politics in our decisions. We never do and we never will. oil, it's not easy to get the economics of this right in the first place.
These are complicated, risk balancing decisions. If we try to incorporate a whole other set of factors in politics into those decisions, it could only lead to worse economic outcomes. So we simply don't do that. And we're not going to do it. We haven't done it in the past. And we're not going to do it now. There are people watching this interview who are skeptical about that. You know, I would just say this. Integrity is priceless. And at the end, that's all you have. And we plan on keeping ours. There you have it. I think there's a lot there. Let's take a break and process that. On the other side, I'll share some of my thoughts.
We'll read some boosts, talk a little bit more to show stuff, and then wrap it up. So stand by. It is Sippin' by Daddy Nat, and it is a value for value song. If you boost during the song, 90% of your boost goes to the artist. See you on the other side. Bye. Music. Been with me, thought I'd make my peace but there's still a piece of me that's bittersweet, where your sense with me makes me start to think if it makes me happy for another week, I'ma need a drink. Music. Kill me kill me kill me, kill me kill me kill me, A lot of good songs by Daddy Nat. You can find these songs on sites like LNBeats, or you can even search for them on the Podcast Index.
If you want to see some of the top songs, you can go to podcastindex.top. And if you find a song you like, send it to me, because I'm always looking for music to play on the shows. So I'd love to hear them. I have spent the last 686 weeks, since there was an episode during the break, deep diving into how all of this works with the Federal Reserve, the economy, just the federal debt. It's such a huge topic, it could easily be its own show. But I really spent the last two years deep diving, and the Bitcoin dad was a fantastic guide because he understood stuff that I couldn't put together and could explain it in a way that helped me understand it.
And through that, I now understand why the Bitcoiners have the phrase, fix the money, fix the world. Because a lot of what we see going on really has more to do about the economic incentives behind it than almost anything else that they're actually telling you is the reason. And what I learned is that so many things that people contribute to wild planned conspiracy theories are really just a bunch of folks working towards their incentives, like a collective of bees, all working to get that honey. And they don't individually have to even orchestrate. They just all work together to get that honey. And when you understand the macroeconomic situation, a little bit like broken money will explain it to you, and also the book, The Bitcoin Standard, let's throw a third one in there, why not?
You start to see what's really going on. You can kind of see it in that interview. There's a lot more context to everything. I'm going to put a couple of links, not a lot this week, but just a couple of links in the notes. The Yellen or Talkin is a thick one. We do break that down on the Bitcoin Dad Pod. But if you want a mind blower, if you can get through it, the Yellen or Talkin article is quite the reader. And then I also am going to direct you to the Trueflation dashboard this week. It's a doozy, but I think it holds up. I'll vouch for it because I've been watching it since they launched.
And I initially didn't say anything because I was very skeptical. But having kept my eye on it, I think I could endorse it. So that's the Truflation dashboard. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. So you have an idea of what's kind of – you can break it down. I think it's way better than any other numbers you're going to get out there. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. I've got a lot of people asking me, Chris, what's podcasting 2.0? What are boosts? And I have to tell you, my instinct is to help every single one of you and explain it.
But I'm two years into this now, and I'm kind of like, go figure it out yourself, man. Like, this is some serious shit going down. And you got to take the initiative on things. You got to take the initiative on a lot of things, including keeping media decentralized and keeping ways of funding it that don't involve PayPal, Stripe or JP Morgan. Right. Like you got to understand that we're getting into a situation here now where you need to learn how to have private communications. You need to learn how to self host certain things if you care about certain types of confidentiality or metadata.
All of this, unfortunately, isn't coming on you to figure out. I try to give you the kind of the best kind of starting points I can. So in the show notes and at the top of the unfiltered website, I have fountain.fm and strike the strike app linked. I encourage you to go to new podcast apps or just podcast apps dot com and take a look at some of those apps. They're all in various states of development, some doing really well, some coming along. It's like the early days of Linux. There are several different distros, but they all kind of get you. They all follow the same standard, which is Podcasting 2.0.
Podcasting 2.0 is an addition to the RSS namespaces. Open source, all done in the public, and they are things that define how to do chapters in a podcast, how to do transcripts in a podcast. If you want to have something like Boost, how do you do that? How do you describe where that goes? That's all in RSS, and that's all in these namespaces. Another feature that's really fantastic that I'm going to use soon for this show, how do you do a live stream in a podcast app? How would you do that? We've never really even attempted. We've always sent people to these commercial platforms like Google, but if I did this show on YouTube, I'd get flagged every effing episode.
I can tell you from experience. I could stand up a Peertube instance, but that's a lot to manage and very expensive storage-wise. I can stream to Twitch, but I have the same problem. Amazon owns that. I can go to Rumble, but inevitably they'll have problems too. Why have we always sent people outside these podcast apps? Because we haven't had a universal standard way to do it. In podcasting 2.0, there's the live item tag. Okay. This is a very easy way just via RSS and plain text to describe where live stream's at, the metadata information, when it's going to be live, if it is live, or if it's ended.
All can be substantiated and described in the RSS feed in clear text using open source standard agreed upon. What we call namespaces, but they're just the words we use. So it's live item or transcript tag, right? that they're just simple tags that we're all agreeing upon in an RSS feed. That's all it is, but then implemented inside the podcasting apps and implemented by the podcasters. So this show, in a podcasting 2.0 application that you can find at podcastapps.com, this show has copious chapters, copious chapters generated by AI. It has transcripts, so you can search based on what has been said in the show.
You can jump around based on what is said in the show. It has transcripts. It has the boost support so you can support this show through a decentralized open source mechanism, and it has live item support and it has fast notification support for when new episodes come out you get it you get notified within about 90 seconds this and a lot more a lot more like the ability to play music and then have the boost during the music go to the artist instead of me so we can redirect the boost to the artist that kind of stuff it's all part of the standard, The splits are all part of the standard, so you can send part of this boost to different people.
Part of your boost goes to the Podverse app, or it goes to the index to help support them. All of this is just text in an RSS feed. You just need the developers to read those tags. And that's what the new podcast apps do. And by doing that, they have created a whole new ecosystem of shows that can be sustained directly by the audience that don't need advertising. So you have value for value music as a category, value for value audio books are being worked on right now, and podcasting has been going for about two years. When you boost a show, you're saying that you got value from that show.
You're saying, I got something out of this. It was valuable for me to have this show exist or the information I got out of it or got me to think about something, and so you're sending value back. The reason why we use the boost is because that's SAT-based. SATs can be sent over the Lightning Network for ridiculously cheap. You can send fractions of a penny if you want. You can't do that with any payment system because there's 15 middlemen, well, 13, taking a cut. You can't do that. The Lightning Network is all open source, peer-to-peer based, super cheap.
So you can move small amounts of money, large amounts of money with very small fees. Those stats come into my node. I own that. I self-host that. I don't have to ask for that money from PayPal. When you boost me, it immediately goes to a system that I self-host. I can choose to cash out immediately or I can choose to hold on to that and cash out at a future point. It gives me optionality. It's a really slick system because there's no company in between you and me. There's no advertiser involved. There's no Stripe involved. There's no PayPal involved. And that's also part of the podcasting 2-0-0 standard.
So, okay, I wanted to get to that because I made the arrogant assumption that everybody that listens to this show must listen to the JB shows. And so you've heard me talking about this for two years now, and you're probably exhausted hearing me talk about it. So I just, I went in thinking everybody knew what I was talking about. What I've very pleasantly discovered is a lot of you don't. You just listen to this show, which means there's a whole other audience over here. And I find that delightful. But I come at you after years of being asked to explain myself. So you could, I apologize if I got some speed, some heat and some stink behind it.
You know what I mean? You know, like after you explain yourself, you just get exhausted. Like, okay, here we go again. But it's not intentional. It's just that it was my fault for assuming wrong. I do want to get to some of the boost. I didn't get my standard report because I just wanted to sit down and do this. So I'm just going to do them as they came in this week. Thank you, everybody, who did boost into the Unfilter program. I really do appreciate it. I can't even explain to you how much it means to me because it's, well, it's like a signal that there's real people out there and that what I'm doing is reaching them.
And they actually got value. And as a creator who's been doing this for a long time, that's just such. Such a good feeling and a validating feeling it makes you want to keep going we got uh serpius tom came in with 4444 sats and asked if i've considered adding unfiltered to the no agenda live stream rotation might be some good cross audience outreach and they're all value for value shows uh he gave me the contact too it looks like sir bemrose you know um i would absolutely be down I am so used to people not wanting to acknowledge Unfilter that I didn't even consider somebody might be interested in playing it.
It just didn't cross my mind. I would be totally down for that. Bitcoin Lizards here with 100,000 sats. You generous bastard. That made my day when I saw that coming. He says, I was very happy to see a new episode on Unfilter in my feed. I think you returned just in time. Welcome back Chris. Well, I'm very glad I was still in your feed. There's so much going on. There is so much going on that I really have to pick and choose what I even talk about. The topic I chose this week, I think, is just so fundamental from a broader picture to understand what's really going on, especially in an election year.
Right. That's the other context about everything we just talked about with J-PAL. All of this is in the election year. And man, does that matter so much. So, oh, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot. lot. I'm going to try not to burn myself out, but, and also I don't want to burn you guys out and exhaust you. So I'm kind of watching that too, to see kind of what the response is on the boost, kind of what the downloads are, and then, you know, balance that with, of course, all my other stuff I have to do, but I'm feeling it, man. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard. I really appreciate that.
I got 2000 stats from Ben. He said he's so glad that unfilter is back for the US election season. Well, thanks, man. Thank you for boosting in. Thought Criminal came in with a The row of sticks, 1,101 sats. Just a little boost to keep Truly Independent Media alive long enough for others to find it and do their part. Thank you. I appreciate that fountain boost, too, because it has been helping us show up on the charts. Adversarial Banana comes in with 20,000 sats. Okay, all right, all right. Just welcome back, Chris. Two episodes in as many days is a hell of a pace to keep up. Here are some motivational sats to keep the show running.
Your analysis and perspective were sorely missed. Well, thank you. Thank you. I know, my poor wife, she had to hear all of it, you know? She had to hear all of it. I tell you what, she's probably gonna be grateful that I'm doing this again. Renegade EMXV comes in with 200,000 sats. Oh, oh, there's coffee in that nebula. Renegade says your show is absolutely required in these times. When I started listening years ago, your voice of reason was the biggest reason I moved from one side of the political spectrum to the middle and started seeing the bigger picture. I've been consuming 20 to 40 hours a week of political commentary and podcasts from all sides for the last few years. And this show is still among the best, if not the best content.
Let me know if there's anything I can do to make it easier to keep this show going. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on a realistic co-host, I suppose. You know, I think Mike, my co-host on Coder Radio, would be so good, but I really don't want to... This sounds like such a line from Superman now that I think about it, but like, you know how when Superman reveals his identity to Lois Lane, then she's like constantly in trouble all the time? I feel like that's what I would be doing with this show and another JB co-host. Like lois lane constantly getting kidnapped constantly under attack um i don't know you know i just you don't want to do that to some i don't maybe i should maybe it shouldn't be i don't maybe i should just do it myself i i don't know i'd love to know what you think renegade i really appreciate that boost that's a validating stuff right there it's real value and it's it's validating and uh it's one of the reasons i'm right here in this chair right now open source accountant welcome back on filter for 1500 sats thank you very much open source accountant nice Nice to hear from you.
Podhome. Our platform home comes in with 5,000 sats. This is a great episode. I'm really enjoying the show. Incredible production quality. Well, thank you, sir. If you believe it, do it live to tape. Podhome.fm, y'all. I'm going to give them a little plug. If you've got a podcast and you want to add these podcasting 2.0 features like transcripts and chapters, they have the AI stuff baked in. I just got a little something there. You upload your file. And when you upload your file, they'll do some audio processing if you like. They'll do the transcriptions. transcriptions. I'll even recommend titles and description for you.
And they're working on live item support right now. Once they get that hammered in there, you'll see some live on filters too. I think, I can't remember. I don't think we got these in because again, I'm just going off the live list here, but I think this is a fresh boost from Sir Sean McCune of the Allegheny Valley. I know I mispronounced that, didn't I? But 10,000 sats, that's a hot boost. Coming in hot with the boost. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. S. Giggity came in with 5,000 sats. So pumped to have Unfiltered back. And yes, it prompted me to learn Fountain. You did it.
You took the initiative. You did it. Now, these are like distros from a couple of years ago. You may find something happens and you switch another one. You like that for a bit and you switch back. I'm on Fountain right now since the 1.0 release. I think it's great. They're really nailing it there. The discoverability, once you get into the home feed and all it takes, it took me about three weeks of just being like, I'm just going to use it because I want these features. But then once I got into the home feed and I started following people and the clips and stuff, I discovered like six new podcasts.
And I just check the search page from time to time because they'll highlight the shows that are getting good boosts. And that's a real genuine signal of the stuff that people think is content. And so like the, check out the value for value music shows when you get on Fountain. The neat thing is. If there's a song you like in Fountain and a couple of the other apps, you can just go get that song and add it to your library. So you could list out the individual songs like I play. There's a spot. There's like a hamburger menu. And you can save those songs to your own local library so that you don't need links or anything. It's so cool.
And just wait till audiobooks come along. It's going to be great. Thank you, sir, for the boost. We got a row of ducks. That's 2,222 sats. That's – Jittering Blender says, I didn't even know this show existed. It's amazing. Reminds me of no agenda. Oh, well, thank you. I'll take that as an absolute compliment. It says, I never considered a Cold War with the EU until this episode. It was a well-reasoned argument. Well, thank you. I got 25,000 sats too from Anonymous saying welcome back. And that's all I have on my list for this episode. If I missed you, that's my bad. I was going live off the list, but I will try to roll it up in the next episode.
I think I got everybody though. So thank you for boosting into the show. I don't have totals and all of that, but I appreciate it. That's really what matters at the end of the day is I felt like some value was returned to the show and I'd love to see that continued. There's a whole lot to get into with that stuff. So if you're new to it, make it easy on yourself. Fountain FM and Strike. It's available in like 40 countries. And outside of that, we do have a Bitcoin questions and answers chat room in the Jupiter Broadcasting Matrix room. And there's people there that are going to help you get started. it.
I know it's weird. I'm not asking you to invest in Bitcoin. I'm asking you to buy some sats and send them this way. And then I'll either cash them out or I'll save them. I want the optionality. That's essentially it. And then, you know, I think it's, I know it's weird and it's new, but, uh, I think it's something really special because when I look at what's out there, as far as mainstream media goes, I think get ready because when section, what is it? Section Section 230, when that finally gets killed, which it probably will in a year or so, every platform is going to be mainstream media simply because companies are so risk averse.
They're so risk averse that they're going to have to preemptively be careful about what people post. They're going to have to be advertiser friendly to survive. And that means people can continue to use advertiser boycotts to bend even the biggest companies to their whims. And I don't see much out there other than podcasting that even has any potential to withstand this. And the only way podcasting can is if we decentralize the distribution, which is what the podcast index is about, and pod ping, getting outside of Apple and Spotify and those centralized directories. So we have to centralize distribution.
That's a big part of podcasting 2.0. And we have to decentralize value. Because if we have the same choke points that Twitter does and Facebook has and CNN has, we're just as vulnerable. That's the problem with Patreon. That's the problem with PayPal. Is it makes us just as beholden to the same institutions that the mainstream media is. And ultimately that leverage will be applied. And it has to start getting built out today before that leverage is being applied at scale. Because if we wait until that point and then we all are trying to understand this all at once, it's never going to be successful.
We are the sovereign individuals that have to lay this groundwork. And I can attest it has gotten so much better in the last two years. And it only will continue that way with user adoption. But it is the only way that I have seen in the last 20 years, that's not an exaggeration, of how to keep podcasting decentralized and independent. And I know it's a lot. It's a big initiative. But what I'm talking about here is bigger than in the show. It's podcasting in general, but it also absolutely impacts the show. It's, it's a hell of a thing, you guys. It's a hell of a thing.
And maybe it's one of the reasons I'm back. You know, it's something I'm pretty passionate about. And I think you guys get it. The sharing of information is probably one of the best benefits the internet brought us, but it can also be used against us either by accident or by intention. So having places where we can have reasonable conversations that aren't loaded with rhetoric that's meant to trigger you, that give us all a chance to consider it, even if you don't agree with me, I just don't see how we're supposed to operate a republic or a democracy any other way. How are we supposed to have informed voters any other way? Because all of this, that was CBS's best work in the last three years.
And it was full of problems. It took us an hour to get through that entire interview because it was so loaded with problems. And that's their best work in the last three years. You understand the scope of the problem here? They're gaslighting all of us through these mechanisms. And podcasting, it's like the antidote. It's not going to be YouTube. And YouTube's the only video distribution system with scale. Right? It's not going to be something on Netflix. And it's definitely not going to be on CBS. BS. The revolution will be in the RSS feed, but only if we keep it independent. That's, that's it.
I hope, I hope this comes across as concerned and motivated and not angry. I can't really tell because I have been explaining this for so long that I've really reached kind of that point where I'm, I'm becoming radicalized on this issue. Um, cause I just have tolerance for nothing else. I suppose. I'd love your feedback either way. You can also email the show unfilter at protonmail.com, but the boosts, the boosts are the way to get ahold of me. It's the way to ask questions and get feedback into the show. Thank you so much for listening to episode 379 of the Unfilter program.
And I sure hope I'll see you right back here soon. Remember, I also would love to get your music suggestions, things you think would fit great in the show. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Music.
Another economic hangover after the pandemic is a sharp increase in the national debt. Thirty years from now, it is projected to be $144 trillion, or $1 million per household. Music. Hello, friend. Welcome in to 379. We gather together a little early this week because on Sunday, 60 Minutes released their big, long interview with Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. And this is a whopper of a piece. And in fact, I have to say, as far as CBS goes, this might be some of their best work in years. And I'm not being sarcastic. I genuinely mean this might be some of their best work in years.
It actually asks a couple of tough questions. It raises a couple of good points. But it's not perfect. There's still quite a bit of doublespeak in here. There is some false premises that we just operate from. And there's some inferences that if you don't understand the full context around what they're saying could just go right over your head and not seem that bad. But when you appreciate the fuller context, well, it means a lot more. So we're going to do something kind of special. And I'd love to get your feedback as we go throughout this.
So continue to boost in as we're listening to this so we can do a follow-up episode. I'd love to just do sort of laying the primer right here and getting the primer down, and then we'll kind of do a full paint with everybody's thoughts after I've collected, because this is an extremely complex topic. And it impacts you if you're in the States, definitely. And, man, it has been these last two years. But it also can dramatically impact you outside the States, because the dollar is king, and Jay Powell and his crew are the gang that set the price of your money.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, may have just rescued the economy from inflation without throwing millions out of work. When Americans were suffering through the highest inflation in 40 years, Powell's Fed raised interest rates 11 times to cool the economy. Economists expected a recession. But now, inflation is tumbling while employment is near a 50-year high. All right. Let's start with the premise right here. So we're in. We're 30 seconds in. Unfortunately, the premise is flawed. Let's start kind of at the very beginning. There's two in here that are wrong.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, may have just rescued the economy from inflation without throwing millions out of work. So the narrative for two years was the only way to bring down inflation would be to raise unemployment. The idea being that if more people are unemployed, that would destroy demand for goods. If we destroyed demand for goods, we would take pressure off of the supply chain. If we take pressure off the supply chain, inflation goes down. You'll recall inflation really kicked off because of the lockdowns the way we kind of uh news speak around that now is we say covid covid related issues and you know the covid slowdown or the covid lockdowns but that was actually government policy government policy instituted lockdowns which destroyed the economy and affected the supply chain greatly along with the vax mandates dates, specifically with the truckers.
Those policies destroy the supply chain. So J-PAL, since he doesn't create policy, he doesn't create law, he's not responsible. They're not even a federal agency. All he can do is control the interest rate. And so if he wants to destroy demand, he can raise the interest rate. Raising the interest rate makes businesses have tighter budgets because money isn't as free. They can't get cheap loans. Before interest rates were raised, a loan was free money. It was better than free money because you could get a loan at an interest rate that was lower than inflation.
So if the real world economy inflation, if the real economy inflation was around two or 3%, this is like before COVID, and you could get a loan around, around the low, almost zero, you are getting money for better than free. So businesses could expand like crazy. They could hire like crazy. VCs could invest in every little stupid idea, and that business never even had to earn a profit. And we saw this just metastasize over the last 13 years, really since 2008, when quantitative easing became the norm. Quantitative easing is really impactful at the asset level. So when they print money, it was what people, it was what we, the citizens call it, that goes into assets, right?
It goes to the banks and the banks buy assets. They buy real estate. They buy stocks. That's why the stock market and real estate went up like crazy over the last few years. But regular folk, they don't have access to that. The regular folk don't have the money to go buy assets. In fact, the top 10% of U.S. Households own 65% of all financial assets that get affected by the Fed pumping. I'm going to say it again. The top 10% of U.S. households own 65% of the financial assets that get impacted when the Fed pumps. The top 10% has around 65% of all financial assets. You understand what I'm saying? The top 10%.
65% of all financial assets. That's stocks, that's real estate, that's things that go up in value when money is created. Your car, your house goes up, and that's the only thing most of us have is our house. But your car and those things, most of those things lose money over time, and they lose money even faster when money prints. Food gets more expensive, right? All these things kind of that we use on day-to-day are negatively impacted, with the exception if you have real estate, which is the most common form of investment for most of us.
But outside of that, and that's getting harder and harder for especially newer generations to get access to. Outside of that, the average folk don't have much. In fact, the bottom 90% holds 92% of all the debt and only 35% of the assets. 90% of the bottom, that's us, holds 92% of the debt. But we only have 35% of the assets. This is a highly unequal distribution, and the reason why I bring this up is because when the Fed prints, which is not technically what they're doing, but when we have the money printer go burrs, we like to say, that money goes into assets. It's called the Cantillion effect.
You can look this up. It's not the focus of this episode, but it's called the Cantillion effect, and I would invite you to look it up because it explains why about 10% are doing fantastic and the rest of us are kind of different to grades of doing not so well. Well, so the idea that Jerome Powell saved us all from inflation is bogus on the premise, because from the very beginning, he said we had to get to around a 4% unemployment rate in order for inflation to go down. He was saying that for two years. That turned out to be completely untrue. But also, the concept that inflation has gone down, well, it doesn't really work like that.
Inflation is a cumulative thing, and I want you to understand this. If they tell you that inflation is 3% right now, that's an aggregate. Overall, if you zoom out and you go back to January of 2020, the aggregate inflation rate since January of 2020 is 22.38%. Trueflation.com slash dashboard. I've been following this since the beginning of the pandemic, and they have been spot on. They have the UK in here. They have the US in here, and they source it from industry directly. They're not going by the CPI number. They do include the CPI numbers in their calculation, but they have been spot on.
And the aggregate inflation rate is 22.38% since January of 2020. What is happening, and why their premise in this interview is wrong, is the rate of inflation is slowing. The increase is slowing. It's not going down. The rate is increasing, is slowing. So your purchasing power is getting diminished at a slower rate, but it is still being diminished. And we're calling this a big win, right? CBS is framing this as some big win for the Fed when their entire intention, which was to get you laid off, never even materialized, but yet inflation still came down. So now we're going to play this little game and figure out why that is while still patting Jerome on the back. Observe may have just rescued the economy from inflation without throwing millions out of work.
When Americans were suffering through the highest inflation in 40 years, Powell's Fed raised interest rates 11 times to cool the economy. Economists expected a recession, but now inflation is tumbling while employment is near a 50-year high. All right. So employment is near a 50 year high. This is going to be a this is, I would say, a cornerstone of this piece. It is a fundamental premise of this piece. That is only technically true if you look at part time work. And if you look at people that are historically working more jobs, we have more people working three jobs than ever in the history of this country right now since we've been collecting this data, I should say.
We also have had a destruction of full-time work. Part-time jobs don't have medical benefits. They're often grueling types of jobs. And nobody is feeling great having to work two or three jobs. Nobody feels great doing that. So the idea that jobs are booming is kind of a false premise. Also, it's an extremely uncomfortable thing for most people to say, but it is factually true. Almost 80% or somewhere around there, I do not remember the exact numbers, so I apologize, But a extremely disproportionately large amount of this part-time work is going to non-Native American – I don't even know if they're citizens.
I mention that. I mention that because it means that if we have people coming into the country at a high rate and they're getting jobs, then you're still going to have a contingent of people that are feeling like they're out of the workplace. And the reason why they might feel like that is because unemployment stops counting them very quickly. So they're not really counted as unemployed anymore. I know people that haven't had a job since 2008. It's been the recession never left for them. So this these job gains, this 50 number high is multiple jobs worked by people doing part time work at each one of those jobs.
And they're doing that to keep up with the rate inflation. And yet what the federal government and also the Federal Reserve, who is not a federal agency, like to shine a light on is just the overall number. And the media is happy to parrot that. All right. So you can see, even in the first 30 seconds, while this is some of CBS's best work in, I would say, the last two, three years, we still have monumental premise problems. Economists expected a recession, but now inflation is tumbling while employment is near a 50-year high. Thursday, we met Powell for a rare interview to talk about interest rates, remaining dangers, and the one question that's on everyone's mind.
The story will continue in a moment. I will point out as well that this 50-year high of employment has been revised downward every month but one, I believe, in the last year. So they put out the headline numbers of employment. And then a few days or weeks later or right before the next drop, they revise the previous drop downward. And they've done that for essentially 11 months. But we never hear about that. We only talk about like that big headline number. Is inflation dead? I wouldn't go quite so far as that. What I can say is that inflation has come down really over the past year and fairly sharply over the past six months. We're making good progress.
The job is not done, and we're very much committed to making sure that we fully restore price stability for the benefit of the public. But inflation has been falling steadily for 11 months. You've avoided a recession. Why not cut the rates now? I would point out, we have not necessarily avoided a recession. Historically, the yield curve inverts, which has happened. A period of time goes by. The market thinks the recession's coming because the yield curve inverted. They kind of give up on that idea. They become bullish again and think this time we've licked it. We have the soft landing this time. And friends, if you can find it, it's harder with Google these days, but you can find headlines in 2007 in the same kind of language. You know, they nailed it.
We're going to be fine. Things are picking back up. Let's go. Meanwhile, the fundamentals that showed us there were problems were there, but everybody was talking like we had licked it and that soft landings were coming. The term soft landing wasn't created for this particular situation. It is a term of art that has been used for a long time and historically has been wrong. Now, there is always the chance this time is different, especially with the level of manipulation that we now see from the federal government in the financial market. So it is possible it gets avoided this time.
I simply am pointing out, historically, before the recession hits, we think we've licked it. The market turns around and we start talking very bullish. Oh, we've got it, boys. Good job, everybody. We finally beat the recession this time. No recession. All things straight on. Let's go. And then a couple of months later, things crash. In March, we do have that term, that bank term lending program, the funding program, program, BTFP, I think it's called. And that program that dries up in March, and that's a nice source of liquidity for these banks. I think we're going to see some regional banks have problems in March.
How far does that go? Well, J-PAL will get to that. But these kinds of things, they're not certain. And March is not that far away. We could see economic troubles in just a few weeks. We're not necessarily outside the window of a recession. But inflation has been been falling steadily for 11 months, you've avoided a recession. Why not cut the rates now? Well, we have a strong economy. Growth is going on at a solid pace. The labor market is strong, 3.7% unemployment. With the economy strong like that, we feel like we can approach the question of when to begin to reduce interest rates carefully.
And we want to see more evidence that inflation is moving sustainably down to 2%. We have some confidence in that. Our confidence is rising. We just want some more confidence before we take that very important step of beginning to cut interest rates. Two interesting assumptions in just this little bit of dialogue. Number one, the assumption that rates must come down. We have now entered a period of time where our economy only properly functions with very cheap money. That hasn't historically been the case, except for since 2008. There's always been. I mean, go look at the interest rate was in the 80s.
Throughout the 80s, it was significantly higher. I think when I was a teenager, I remember my parents had about like a 7%, 8% interest rate on their loan. And then later, as things went on, they were able to refinance into a much lower rate, I think, during like probably the junior administration. And what I remember thinking back is, you know, the interest rates were always five, six, seven percent when I was a kid. And now we just automatically have this discussion around, well, when are they coming down again? I mean, they're like five and a half percent. When are they coming down again?
And then the second assumption that's baked into this conversation is that we must have some inflation and we must have a target interest rate of at least something because the Fed has to have something to work with. If we have another emergency and the interest rate is zero, well, they can't lower that. And if it's at five and a half, they can't raise it because it'll break everything. They've clearly brought us right to the edge as far as interest rates can go. So they want to lower their rate to somewhere where they can still have some impact because this is really the only lever they have. So that's why their target is 2%.
It's not for your financial betterment. So that way they still have some leverage here in case there's an emergency. They can go up or down. But they know they can't keep it at 5.5. They have to acknowledge that. So the conversation starts with win rates, not if rates, but when rates go down. Inflation has fallen from just over 9% to about 3%, near the Fed's ultimate goal of 2%. That's going, of course, by the core inflation rate, which is a bullshit, bogus number, but it's one that everybody gets to work off of, and it's a lot better than 13% or something that it might actually be.
If you're looking at food, it could be as much as 20%. If you're looking at the cumulative rate since like I like to do, since 2020 when things started going crazy, it's 22%, almost 22.5%. Why is your target rate 2%? Interest rates always include an estimate of future inflation. If that estimate is 2%, that means you'll have 2% more that you can cut in your in-interest rates. The central bank will have more ammunition, more power to fight a downturn if rates are a little bit higher. Are you committed to getting all the way to 2.0 before you cut the rates? See, what they're doing here, and it's very confusing, is they are confusing and mixing the interest rate that the Fed sets and inflation.
They're calling them the same thing. They are two separate things. And I want to back this up because it's very odd because J-PAL himself is doing it. Scott Pelley is doing it. And J-PAL are both, or maybe it's the way they edited this. They're intermixing the interest rate, the price at which they set money, and inflation. Why is your target rate 2%? Interest rates will always include an estimate of future inflation. If that estimate is 2%, that means you'll have 2% more that you can cut in your interest rates. The central bank will have more ammunition, more power to fight a downturn if rates are a little bit higher.
Are you committed to getting all the way to 2.0 before you cut the rates? No, no, that's not what we say at all. No. No, we're committed to returning inflation to 2% over time. I've said that we wouldn't wait to get to 2% to cut rates. The thing that they're kind of just assuming here is they have any control over inflation. It takes some Houthis in the Red Sea to impact the shipping, which then impacts the cost of goods, which impacts inflation. It takes some pissed off Saudis to raise the cost of oil to then raise the cost of our goods. It could take an environmental disaster. It could take some banks collapsing outside his control.
They don't control inflation. They control the interest rate. They can increase the interest rate and try to devastate the economy and induce micro-recessions all over the place, which reduce demand, which then has the ultimate effect of lowering inflation because there's less people buying goods. That's all they can do. But they jawbone is what they call it. But they jawbone as if this guy in a suit, the 70-year-old man in a suit, has the ability to turn a knob, and that knob controls how much you're paying for food and gasoline in your housing.
It's sort of a silly premise, yet it also is true to a degree because the market, being the stock market in this case, sort of hangs on every word this man says. And so in a way, what he says does manifest into reality. So even though he actually has no control, he can just jawbone about it because there's a bunch of rich fools on Wall Street that then go and take his words into some sort of – It's like they're getting words from Jesus on the hill, and they all have their own interpretation of J-PAL's scripture, and then they go implement the good word in their investments, depending on how they interpret the scripture of J-PAL.
We live in a bonkers time where a couple of old men determine how much money costs, and then a bunch of rich idiots go manipulate the market to turn it into reality. No, no, that's not what we say at all. Oh, I say it. No. We're committed to returning inflation to 2% over time. I've said that we wouldn't wait to get to 2% to cut rates. We met Powell in the Federal Reserve boardroom where this committee meets every six weeks or so to set the so-called federal funds interest rate, which influences most loans. Last week, Powell announced the rate would stay at its 23-year high, about 5.5 percent, unchanged for six months.
You disappointed a lot of people on Wednesday. That would be Wall Street, right? Even though, which I've watched every Fed meeting for the last two years when he comes out and does his little announcement, he's been saying higher for longer rates, higher for longer rates, higher for longer rates at every single meeting. Then wall street hears he's going to cut at the next meeting and they go hedge based on that and then when he doesn't deliver those cuts they all get sad and their wild thing is and this is this is the state this tells you everything dear listener, The market performs poorly when the jobs report is good.
Wall Street goes down when the middle class has jobs. Why is that? Why is that? Because they know J-POW is still looking at those jobs reports. And they know that J-POW feels like he can keep interest rates higher for longer as long as you have work, even if you have to work three jobs. That means those wall street idiots don't get their cheap money they don't get to ape into every little ai tech stock they can't ape into every little bio investment and go fund another covid they don't get to have fun they don't get to feel rich not until the money is cheap again, and they want you out of work so that way they get to have cheap money because they don't need you for Wall Street to do well.
So that's why the stock market goes down when the jobs report number is high. And that's the fine little line that Jay Powell is walking here and their little board of people who determine the price of money. I can't overstate how important it is to restore price stability, by which I mean inflation is low and predictable and people don't have to think about it in their daily lives. That's where we were for 20 years. We want to get back to that. Moving too soon would set off inflation again. You could, or you could just halt the progress. I think more likely, if you move too soon, you'd see inflation settling out somewhere well above our 2% target.
And what is the danger of moving too late? If you move too late, then you might, policy would be too tight, and that could easily weigh on economic activity and on the labor market. So there you go right there. If we delay too long in lowering the rates, the economy suffers because it is absolutely hooked and dependent on cheap money, not on producing goods that sell well, but on cheap money. Maybe a recession. Right, and we have to balance those two risks. There is no easy, simple, obvious path. Was the Fed too slow to recognize inflation in 2021? So in hindsight, it would have been better to have tightened policy earlier.
We thought that the economy was so dynamic that it would fix itself fairly quickly. And we thought that inflation would go away fairly quickly. Isn't it fascinating that the central management team often says the only thing that's really going to solve this is if we manage this harder. We need to be more clear about this. We need to set these rates. We're going to be job-boning about this message. And we need a CBDC so that way we can manage this economy even harder. But then when he's asked why didn't you catch this when it was kicking off, his answer is, well, we have such a great free market.
It's so dynamic. We don't want to interfere with the free market. Well, which one is it, Jay Powell? We thought that the economy was so dynamic that it would fix itself fairly quickly. And we thought that inflation would go away fairly quickly without an intervention by us. And so in the fourth quarter of 21, it became clear that inflation was not transitory in the sense that I mentioned. And we pivoted and started tightening. And as I said, it's essential that we did that. It was critical that we did that. And that's part of the story why inflation is coming down now.
A pet theory of mine is that Jerome Powell is trying to unbury his reputation and this is his performance to do such because he was caught being a political actor towards the end of the Trump administration and at the beginning of the Biden administration when he parroted party lines. That inflation was transitory, that it was only going to be temporary. That was during Trump. And then Biden came in and he said, well, inflation is transitory because of COVID, which is exactly what the Biden administration was saying. And then after COVID wrapped up, inflation isn't transitory, but it's because of Putin's war.
Now, the Fed doesn't use the raw, crude political language that the Biden administration spokeshole does. You're not You're not going to hear Jerome Powell probably ever, well, actually, that's not true, but he's not going to often say Putin's price hike. He may once or twice utter it, but the Fed will use language that's much more sophisticated. You know, they might say due to constraints caused by conflicts in the Middle East and in the Ukraine region, we believe that will cause the price of goods like grain and commodities like grain, I should say, to go up in price, which will have a sustained impact on the cost of goods in the states, adding inflationary pressures, right?
That's how Jerome Powell will blame Putin. And it is technically true. Like there is absolutely an inflationary pressure for more war. Especially if it's an area that produces goods like grain, that's going to cause an inflationary pressure. That's why, that's why good leadership tries to stay out of war or corrupt leadership uses war to make money. You see, it can be used both ways and that's just fantastic. We wondered about an interest rate cut in the next committee meeting in March. I think it's not likely that this committee will reach that level of confidence in time for the the March meeting, which is in seven weeks.
The next committee vote then would be in May. How would you characterize the consensus around this table for rate cuts? Is everyone on board? Almost all. Almost all of the 19 participants who sit around this table believe that it will be appropriate in their most likely case for us to cut the federal funds rate this year. Cuts in the federal funds rate would likely be a quarter, maybe half a percentage point at a time, as long as inflation data remain good. We just want to see more good data along those lines. It doesn't need to be better than what we've seen, or even as good. It just needs to be good.
And so we do expect to see that. So what he's saying is the standard is very low, and that you're probably going to see, if everything goes as planned. The rates start to go down in June. They'll vote in May. He'll announce it. rate starts to go down around in June. That's the plan. Assuming we don't have some sort of massive regional bank collapse in March, I would think. Now, when they lower it, they only have to just lower it. They don't have to lower it by a lot. They just have to lower it. The moment they lower it, they are signaling to the market that they are going to be lowering for a while.
That's all it will take you mark my words write it down the day the federal reserve announces they are lowering rates the stock market and bitcoin will rally it will be a boom, they're just looking for the signal that it's going to begin that and and cbs knows that that That is the context around this conversation. Back in 2021, little seemed good. Inflation ignited after pandemic disruptions and when the federal government spent $5 trillion to keep the economy afloat. So you see there, those are actually both federal policies, right? COVID didn't lock you in your house.
COVID didn't shut down your work. COVID didn't keep Walmart open, but closed the mom-and-pop hardware store in my neighborhood. That was local, official, and governmental policy. Back in 2021, little seemed good. Inflation ignited after pandemic disruptions and when the federal government spent $5 trillion to keep the economy afloat. Those were both governmental policy decisions. Many in Congress questioned Powell's rapid rate increases and predicted disaster. And I hope you'll reconsider that as you drive this, before you drive this economy off a cliff. See, there's good old Liz, where she, this is, she's so good at this.
She nails this role and she fools so many of you. She is pretending like she is advocating for the people. Lower those rates. This economy is going to go off a cliff. Lower those rates so average people can get mortgages again. And I hope you'll reconsider that as you drive this, before you drive this economy off a cliff. She read and berated him during her entire time. I watched this entire exchange. What she's advocating for would be for Jay Powell to lower the rates. And this was months ago, actually. So this would have been even a more dramatic time to do it. Months ago, probably because she's thinking of the election, she was advocating for Jay Powell to lower the rates. If Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve lowered the rates because a Democrat senator petitioned them to, they would lose all credibility, first of all.
Second of all, if they lowered rates, the market would rally. If the market rallies while inflation is around 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 percent, whatever the real inflation rate is, and the Federal Reserve knows there's a real inflation rate. If the market rallied, inflation would skyrocket again because people would start getting rich again and people would start buying again. But the trucking industry is devastated. The shipping industry is screwed. They have a 30% longer route right now because of the situation in the Red Sea bringing goods to the United States and other places in the world.
If you were to strain that system right now, inflation would skyrocket. And they know it. So they could. And this was, again, this is six, seven months ago when she asked this question. I can't remember the date now. So what she's advocating for is a policy that would have made inflation turn around and start shooting up like crazy, which destroys generational wealth for the middle class. Absolutely devastates their savings, melts it away at a compounding rate, which they barely understand. This just completely seeps away all purchasing power. hour, destroys family wealth, destroys businesses, makes it impossible for us to get by, makes every single thing you do every day cost more. I feel it.
Everything's more expensive. My car insurance just went up 20 percent and I have a perfect record for the last like five, six, seven, eight years. But insurance is a is a reflection of the cost in the entire market for repairs, for cost of goods, for health. and insurance goes up after they get all the regulator approvals to reflect the actual cost. So whatever your insurance went up by is probably a pretty good capture of what inflation is in your area. And man, am I feeling it. I just had two car payments roll off and I thought, oh God, finally a little bit of relief after two years of just feeling like I'm barely keeping water.
Oh, two car payments going to roll off. That's great. That's so awesome. No, no, know, the insurance went up. And so now I'm essentially, I'm just at the same level now. And everybody's feeling that. Could you imagine if Elizabeth Warren got what she wanted six, seven, nine months ago? The rich would have had their assets pumped. I already quoted you the stats at the beginning of the show. They would have had their bags absolutely pumped and the middle class would be even more eviscerated than they are now. They would be eviscerated.
But yet she can sit there with a smile and advocate for these policies and pretend like she's doing it for the people. It is absolute evil wrapped in sheep's clothing. And I hope you'll reconsider that as you drive this, before you drive this economy off a cliff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. But strangely, when rates went up, the economy added more than 5 million jobs. Powell told us that's because of the odd dynamics of the pandemic. Car sales, for example. There was a semiconductor shortage because so many people were buying goods that involved a lot of semiconductors.
So while demand for cars was spiking because people didn't want to ride public transportation, for example, and they're moving to the suburbs, while that's happening, you can't get semiconductors, you can't make cars. So there's a shortage. So what happened is inflation just spiked. But as the semiconductor supply came back, prices, the inflation has moderated a great deal. So it really these unique features of the pandemic did reverse in a way that brought inflation down. I hate to drill this point home, but it absolutely matters that you understand this point. They were not pandemic factors or situations. What was the term you used here?
Unique features of the pandemic. Ah, you see, that's the kind of speak I'm talking about, the kind of language he uses. The unique features of the pandemic include the government putting their boot on the market. I've got to be 100% honest with you. I'm not like some absolute free capitalism market guy. I never really have been. But what I see here, and I have to acknowledge it if I'm going to be intellectually honest with myself, I see a case study in what happens when the government manipulates a market in multiple different ways.
When they kind of go all in on managing a market. This is what we got. And everything's completely dysfunctional now. The airline industry is completely dysfunctional. The medical industry is completely dysfunctional. Transportation is completely dysfunctional. Local government's completely dysfunctional. Inflation's out of control. Everyone's feeling tight and angry. At least on the West Coast. That's what we got. And it just seems to me like we have a case study in what happens when a government tries to overmanage an economy and we do it at a massive scale. And it's kind of what he's saying here, but instead he calls it the unique features of the pandemic.
But the unique features of the pandemic was how the humans reacted to the flu. That was the unique feature of the pandemic. COVID is a virus. It didn't shut the economy down. How we responded for better or for worse. Oh, and I know I'm talking about money over lives, but this is the consequence. consequence, and now all of our lives are demonstrably worse. Unless you have so much money it doesn't affect you. And if that's the case, please boost in a nice, big, generous boost, because some of us feel it. July came back. Prices, the inflation has moderated a great deal. So it really, these unique features of the pandemic did reverse in a way that brought inflation down. on.
Jerome Powell turns 71 today. After a career in investment banking, he was appointed to the Fed by Barack Obama, made chairman by Donald Trump, and retained by Joe Biden. Powell often travels to listen to the country, and we met him at Spelman College in Atlanta, where the talk was of higher prices. Inflation is one thing, prices are another. And I wonder if there is any reason to believe that people will see the prices of things decline. So the prices of some things will decline, others will go up, but we don't expect to see a decline in the overall price level. That doesn't tend to happen in economies except in very negative circumstances.
I was was talking with somebody yesterday and they're like, yeah, yeah, I think prices will come back down. And I just thought, oh, you sweet summer child. Oh, no, no, no, no. Your only option is to just pay more now. They're not going to come back down. Now, that's. A very broad statement. J-PAL is correct. There are some things that can come down in prices. If you think about the basic necessities, things like, you know, bread and milk and eggs, prices are substantially higher than they were before the pandemic. And so we think that's a big reason why people have been relatively dissatisfied with what is otherwise a pretty good economy.
But those prices will not soften short of something like a recession. Things that are affected by commodity prices, like, for example, gasoline prices, have come way down. Some food prices that incorporate the price of commodities, grains and things like that, those can come down. But the overall price level doesn't come down. The Federal Reserve was empowered in the Great Depression to regulate the economy by controlling the supply of money and setting interest rates. It also regulates commercial banks for safety, Something still challenged by the effects of the pandemic.
The value of commercial office buildings all across the country is dropping as people work from home. Those buildings support the balance sheets of banks all across the country. What is the likelihood of another real estate-led banking crisis? I don't think that's likely. We looked at the larger banks' balance sheets, and it appears to be a manageable problem. There's some smaller and regional banks that have concentrated exposures in these areas that are challenged. And, you know, we're working with them. So here's what he's saying, and I think this is dark and concerning.
He's saying that small banks, your local little banks, could very well collapse. But that the big banks are so big that they can absorb some of that. He is completely comfortable with just there being three or four banks in the United States. One of the unique characteristics of the United States is how many little regional banks we have. Like that's not a thing in Canada. As far as I understand, it's not a thing in most Western countries. And that adds a competitive layer. You know, that's why here in the Washington state, some people prefer credit unions like BECU over, say, Bank of America, because they have room to compete there.
It's very, it's often very beneficial for small businesses because you can know somebody in the town who runs the bank and maybe you don't have a established business yet, but you have an established reputation. They can work with you. There's more of a personal interaction there, more optionality. And, you know, when you, when you go to a bigger bank, like a JP Morgan or a Bank of America, you're just a number. That's fine for big business and the rich, but it doesn't work for the little people. And the chairman is totally fine with small banks collapsing and getting rolled into the big banks. I don't think that's likely. We looked at the larger banks' balance sheets, and it appears to be a manageable problem.
There's some smaller and regional banks that have concentrated exposures in these areas that are challenged. And, you know, we're working with them. You believe it's a manageable problem. I think it appears to be. We're not going to see bank failures across the country as we did in 2008. I don't think there's much risk of a repeat of 2008. Certainly, there will be some banks that have to be closed or merged out of existence because of this. That'll be smaller banks, I suspect, for the most part. Yeah, who cares about small banks, right? Who cares? But his definition of a small bank is a lot bigger than my definition and probably your definition.
He considers things like the 16th largest bank in the Western economies or in the States to be a small bank, right? Anything under like the big five or ten banks, which have trillions, he considers to be a small bank. Just last year, there was a panic at the 16th largest bank. A Federal Reserve report blamed bank mismanagement, but also inadequate supervision by the Fed itself. You seem confident in the banks, and yet the Silicon Valley Bank, second largest failure in U.S. history. Did the Fed miss that? that. So, yes, we did. And we forthrightly saw that we needed to do better.
Yeah, I need to manage more. It's why it's an indictment that the Fed missed that is because what caused that bank to fail was the Fed raising interest rates and bonds being not such a great investment when you need to cash out. They bought what was supposed to be one of the safest assets you can buy, and they got screwed because the Fed raised rates at a historically high increase rate, I guess. That's why Silicon Valley Bank failed. They had some risky bets in there and they were probably, you know, doing other shady things. I have a sense just based on the people I know that banked there.
But what really screwed them was how fast the Fed raised rates. So shouldn't the Fed have caught that? Shouldn't they kind of understand that? Very dynamic? So it's surprising that they missed it. But clearly, if you just manage it more, it'll be fine. And we forthrightly saw that we needed to do better. So we've spent a lot of time working on ways to make supervision more effective and also to adapt regulation to a more – to a modern context in which a bank run can happen so much faster than it could have even 20 years ago. What does he mean when he says that the Federal Reserve has taken action to adapt regulation when they're not supposed to be involved with that at all?
What does that mean? It was over. That's a fundamental problem. These banks are not architected around information moving that fast. That one teeny tiny little throwaway line is a ginormous problem that they cannot solve for. 19 old men and women sitting in a dark room cannot move at the speed of Twitter and DMs. They just simply cannot manage that. And people can organize bank runs faster than they can respond to them. That's the fundamental problem they got to solve. And there's only so much they can do. But somehow, somehow this supposedly policy neutral non-federal agency is going to influence regulation to solve a problem of information moving at the speed of light.
Apt regulation to a more, to a modern context in which a bank run can happen so much faster than it could have even 20 years ago. Another economic hangover after the pandemic is a sharp increase in the national debt. 30 years from now, it is projected to be $144 trillion, or $1 million per household. How do you assess the national debt? We mostly try very hard not to comment on fiscal policy and instruct Congress on how to do their job when actually they have oversight over us. But is the national debt a danger to the economy, in your view? In the long run, the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
The U.S. federal government's on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. I have the sense this worries you very much. Over the long run, of course it does. You know, we're effectively we're borrowing from future generations. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability. And sooner is better than later. If you're not familiar with how the Federal Reserve Chairman typically speaks, I wouldn't be surprised. I would invite you to try to recall the last time you've even heard of a Federal Chairman Reserve, the Federal Chairman's name, or heard him in an interview.
Jay Powell's out there all the time talking about this stuff, isn't he? Isn't that interesting? And if you if you think about what that means, it means it's becoming more and more of a political position. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability. Now, while that sounds like a very reasonable sort of middle of the road thing to say. It is extremely unusual for a chairman to even make anything close to this kind of policy commentary, at least in public. And if you follow the right financial people on Mastodon and on Twitter and all these places, they're just falling all over themselves in shock that the chairman is taking such a strong stance and making such a strong condemnation about the direction of the economy.
That's how Wall Street interprets this. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability. And sooner is better than later. What would you say is the single most important factor for the future of American prosperity? With your permission, I'll name two things. One is, I think we need to just remember that we have this dynamic, innovative, flexible, adaptable. Maybe bubble-driven, you could argue. Economy. More so than other countries. countries. And this is the big reason why our economy has come through so well. The other thing I'll point to for the United States is really since World War II, the United States has been the indispensable nation supporting and defending democracy, security arrangements, economic arrangements.
We've been the leading voice on that. And it's clear that the world wants that. And I would want the United States to know, people in the United States to know that this has benefited our country enormously. It's benefits our economy so much to have this role. And I just I hope we hope that continues. I believe he's talking about the reserve currency status of the U.S. Dollar, although he doesn't come directly say it because it's it's godlike status shall not be actually named directly. But that's what he's saying is, look, we got since World War Two, we got a real good deal going here.
And if we become insolvent or if we have any kind of sovereign debt crisis or if we just become politically toxic. They will look for a better product than the U.S. dollar. This is such a grave warning because it would alter all of our ways of life. I'm going to recommend you two books this episode. I do not recommend books very often. If you would like to just have a view into what a world would be like without the U.S. currency being the reserve status of the world, I invite you to look into, I believe it's called The Mandibles. It's a book that pictures a world where inflation is kind of left running hot policymakers continue to rot and the u.s dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world and it paints a very accurate picture of what life would be like that's the mandibles the second book i'm going to to recommend is Broken Money by Lynn Alden. Very good book.
And I think it is existentially important that you understand the contents of that book. You will make different choices in your daily life if you read that book. I want you to understand it will change your understanding of what's going on. And then, after you read that book, re-listen to this episode. Episode 379. Two books. I very much implore you to read them. The Mandibles and Broken Money. Let's wrap up. We just have a couple of more minutes. Well, actually, not even a couple of minutes. We just have one minute left here with Jay Powell. Let's wrap it all up. It's our economy.
So much to have this role. And I just, I hope we, I hope that continues. Jerome Powell has about two years in his current term as chairman. He suggested to us the likely time for the first interest rate cut would be the middle of the year, a few months before the election. Your decisions inevitably are going to have a bearing on this year's election. And I wonder to what degree does politics determine your timing? We do not consider politics in our decisions. We never do and we never will. oil, it's not easy to get the economics of this right in the first place.
These are complicated, risk balancing decisions. If we try to incorporate a whole other set of factors in politics into those decisions, it could only lead to worse economic outcomes. So we simply don't do that. And we're not going to do it. We haven't done it in the past. And we're not going to do it now. There are people watching this interview who are skeptical about that. You know, I would just say this. Integrity is priceless. And at the end, that's all you have. And we plan on keeping ours. There you have it. I think there's a lot there. Let's take a break and process that. On the other side, I'll share some of my thoughts.
We'll read some boosts, talk a little bit more to show stuff, and then wrap it up. So stand by. It is Sippin' by Daddy Nat, and it is a value for value song. If you boost during the song, 90% of your boost goes to the artist. See you on the other side. Bye. Music. Been with me, thought I'd make my peace but there's still a piece of me that's bittersweet, where your sense with me makes me start to think if it makes me happy for another week, I'ma need a drink. Music. Kill me kill me kill me, kill me kill me kill me, A lot of good songs by Daddy Nat. You can find these songs on sites like LNBeats, or you can even search for them on the Podcast Index.
If you want to see some of the top songs, you can go to podcastindex.top. And if you find a song you like, send it to me, because I'm always looking for music to play on the shows. So I'd love to hear them. I have spent the last 686 weeks, since there was an episode during the break, deep diving into how all of this works with the Federal Reserve, the economy, just the federal debt. It's such a huge topic, it could easily be its own show. But I really spent the last two years deep diving, and the Bitcoin dad was a fantastic guide because he understood stuff that I couldn't put together and could explain it in a way that helped me understand it.
And through that, I now understand why the Bitcoiners have the phrase, fix the money, fix the world. Because a lot of what we see going on really has more to do about the economic incentives behind it than almost anything else that they're actually telling you is the reason. And what I learned is that so many things that people contribute to wild planned conspiracy theories are really just a bunch of folks working towards their incentives, like a collective of bees, all working to get that honey. And they don't individually have to even orchestrate. They just all work together to get that honey. And when you understand the macroeconomic situation, a little bit like broken money will explain it to you, and also the book, The Bitcoin Standard, let's throw a third one in there, why not?
You start to see what's really going on. You can kind of see it in that interview. There's a lot more context to everything. I'm going to put a couple of links, not a lot this week, but just a couple of links in the notes. The Yellen or Talkin is a thick one. We do break that down on the Bitcoin Dad Pod. But if you want a mind blower, if you can get through it, the Yellen or Talkin article is quite the reader. And then I also am going to direct you to the Trueflation dashboard this week. It's a doozy, but I think it holds up. I'll vouch for it because I've been watching it since they launched.
And I initially didn't say anything because I was very skeptical. But having kept my eye on it, I think I could endorse it. So that's the Truflation dashboard. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. So you have an idea of what's kind of – you can break it down. I think it's way better than any other numbers you're going to get out there. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. I've got a lot of people asking me, Chris, what's podcasting 2.0? What are boosts? And I have to tell you, my instinct is to help every single one of you and explain it.
But I'm two years into this now, and I'm kind of like, go figure it out yourself, man. Like, this is some serious shit going down. And you got to take the initiative on things. You got to take the initiative on a lot of things, including keeping media decentralized and keeping ways of funding it that don't involve PayPal, Stripe or JP Morgan. Right. Like you got to understand that we're getting into a situation here now where you need to learn how to have private communications. You need to learn how to self host certain things if you care about certain types of confidentiality or metadata.
All of this, unfortunately, isn't coming on you to figure out. I try to give you the kind of the best kind of starting points I can. So in the show notes and at the top of the unfiltered website, I have fountain.fm and strike the strike app linked. I encourage you to go to new podcast apps or just podcast apps dot com and take a look at some of those apps. They're all in various states of development, some doing really well, some coming along. It's like the early days of Linux. There are several different distros, but they all kind of get you. They all follow the same standard, which is Podcasting 2.0.
Podcasting 2.0 is an addition to the RSS namespaces. Open source, all done in the public, and they are things that define how to do chapters in a podcast, how to do transcripts in a podcast. If you want to have something like Boost, how do you do that? How do you describe where that goes? That's all in RSS, and that's all in these namespaces. Another feature that's really fantastic that I'm going to use soon for this show, how do you do a live stream in a podcast app? How would you do that? We've never really even attempted. We've always sent people to these commercial platforms like Google, but if I did this show on YouTube, I'd get flagged every effing episode.
I can tell you from experience. I could stand up a Peertube instance, but that's a lot to manage and very expensive storage-wise. I can stream to Twitch, but I have the same problem. Amazon owns that. I can go to Rumble, but inevitably they'll have problems too. Why have we always sent people outside these podcast apps? Because we haven't had a universal standard way to do it. In podcasting 2.0, there's the live item tag. Okay. This is a very easy way just via RSS and plain text to describe where live stream's at, the metadata information, when it's going to be live, if it is live, or if it's ended.
All can be substantiated and described in the RSS feed in clear text using open source standard agreed upon. What we call namespaces, but they're just the words we use. So it's live item or transcript tag, right? that they're just simple tags that we're all agreeing upon in an RSS feed. That's all it is, but then implemented inside the podcasting apps and implemented by the podcasters. So this show, in a podcasting 2.0 application that you can find at podcastapps.com, this show has copious chapters, copious chapters generated by AI. It has transcripts, so you can search based on what has been said in the show.
You can jump around based on what is said in the show. It has transcripts. It has the boost support so you can support this show through a decentralized open source mechanism, and it has live item support and it has fast notification support for when new episodes come out you get it you get notified within about 90 seconds this and a lot more a lot more like the ability to play music and then have the boost during the music go to the artist instead of me so we can redirect the boost to the artist that kind of stuff it's all part of the standard, The splits are all part of the standard, so you can send part of this boost to different people.
Part of your boost goes to the Podverse app, or it goes to the index to help support them. All of this is just text in an RSS feed. You just need the developers to read those tags. And that's what the new podcast apps do. And by doing that, they have created a whole new ecosystem of shows that can be sustained directly by the audience that don't need advertising. So you have value for value music as a category, value for value audio books are being worked on right now, and podcasting has been going for about two years. When you boost a show, you're saying that you got value from that show.
You're saying, I got something out of this. It was valuable for me to have this show exist or the information I got out of it or got me to think about something, and so you're sending value back. The reason why we use the boost is because that's SAT-based. SATs can be sent over the Lightning Network for ridiculously cheap. You can send fractions of a penny if you want. You can't do that with any payment system because there's 15 middlemen, well, 13, taking a cut. You can't do that. The Lightning Network is all open source, peer-to-peer based, super cheap.
So you can move small amounts of money, large amounts of money with very small fees. Those stats come into my node. I own that. I self-host that. I don't have to ask for that money from PayPal. When you boost me, it immediately goes to a system that I self-host. I can choose to cash out immediately or I can choose to hold on to that and cash out at a future point. It gives me optionality. It's a really slick system because there's no company in between you and me. There's no advertiser involved. There's no Stripe involved. There's no PayPal involved. And that's also part of the podcasting 2-0-0 standard.
So, okay, I wanted to get to that because I made the arrogant assumption that everybody that listens to this show must listen to the JB shows. And so you've heard me talking about this for two years now, and you're probably exhausted hearing me talk about it. So I just, I went in thinking everybody knew what I was talking about. What I've very pleasantly discovered is a lot of you don't. You just listen to this show, which means there's a whole other audience over here. And I find that delightful. But I come at you after years of being asked to explain myself. So you could, I apologize if I got some speed, some heat and some stink behind it.
You know what I mean? You know, like after you explain yourself, you just get exhausted. Like, okay, here we go again. But it's not intentional. It's just that it was my fault for assuming wrong. I do want to get to some of the boost. I didn't get my standard report because I just wanted to sit down and do this. So I'm just going to do them as they came in this week. Thank you, everybody, who did boost into the Unfilter program. I really do appreciate it. I can't even explain to you how much it means to me because it's, well, it's like a signal that there's real people out there and that what I'm doing is reaching them.
And they actually got value. And as a creator who's been doing this for a long time, that's just such. Such a good feeling and a validating feeling it makes you want to keep going we got uh serpius tom came in with 4444 sats and asked if i've considered adding unfiltered to the no agenda live stream rotation might be some good cross audience outreach and they're all value for value shows uh he gave me the contact too it looks like sir bemrose you know um i would absolutely be down I am so used to people not wanting to acknowledge Unfilter that I didn't even consider somebody might be interested in playing it.
It just didn't cross my mind. I would be totally down for that. Bitcoin Lizards here with 100,000 sats. You generous bastard. That made my day when I saw that coming. He says, I was very happy to see a new episode on Unfilter in my feed. I think you returned just in time. Welcome back Chris. Well, I'm very glad I was still in your feed. There's so much going on. There is so much going on that I really have to pick and choose what I even talk about. The topic I chose this week, I think, is just so fundamental from a broader picture to understand what's really going on, especially in an election year.
Right. That's the other context about everything we just talked about with J-PAL. All of this is in the election year. And man, does that matter so much. So, oh, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot. lot. I'm going to try not to burn myself out, but, and also I don't want to burn you guys out and exhaust you. So I'm kind of watching that too, to see kind of what the response is on the boost, kind of what the downloads are, and then, you know, balance that with, of course, all my other stuff I have to do, but I'm feeling it, man. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard. I really appreciate that.
I got 2000 stats from Ben. He said he's so glad that unfilter is back for the US election season. Well, thanks, man. Thank you for boosting in. Thought Criminal came in with a The row of sticks, 1,101 sats. Just a little boost to keep Truly Independent Media alive long enough for others to find it and do their part. Thank you. I appreciate that fountain boost, too, because it has been helping us show up on the charts. Adversarial Banana comes in with 20,000 sats. Okay, all right, all right. Just welcome back, Chris. Two episodes in as many days is a hell of a pace to keep up. Here are some motivational sats to keep the show running.
Your analysis and perspective were sorely missed. Well, thank you. Thank you. I know, my poor wife, she had to hear all of it, you know? She had to hear all of it. I tell you what, she's probably gonna be grateful that I'm doing this again. Renegade EMXV comes in with 200,000 sats. Oh, oh, there's coffee in that nebula. Renegade says your show is absolutely required in these times. When I started listening years ago, your voice of reason was the biggest reason I moved from one side of the political spectrum to the middle and started seeing the bigger picture. I've been consuming 20 to 40 hours a week of political commentary and podcasts from all sides for the last few years. And this show is still among the best, if not the best content.
Let me know if there's anything I can do to make it easier to keep this show going. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on a realistic co-host, I suppose. You know, I think Mike, my co-host on Coder Radio, would be so good, but I really don't want to... This sounds like such a line from Superman now that I think about it, but like, you know how when Superman reveals his identity to Lois Lane, then she's like constantly in trouble all the time? I feel like that's what I would be doing with this show and another JB co-host. Like lois lane constantly getting kidnapped constantly under attack um i don't know you know i just you don't want to do that to some i don't maybe i should maybe it shouldn't be i don't maybe i should just do it myself i i don't know i'd love to know what you think renegade i really appreciate that boost that's a validating stuff right there it's real value and it's it's validating and uh it's one of the reasons i'm right here in this chair right now open source accountant welcome back on filter for 1500 sats thank you very much open source accountant nice Nice to hear from you.
Podhome. Our platform home comes in with 5,000 sats. This is a great episode. I'm really enjoying the show. Incredible production quality. Well, thank you, sir. If you believe it, do it live to tape. Podhome.fm, y'all. I'm going to give them a little plug. If you've got a podcast and you want to add these podcasting 2.0 features like transcripts and chapters, they have the AI stuff baked in. I just got a little something there. You upload your file. And when you upload your file, they'll do some audio processing if you like. They'll do the transcriptions. transcriptions. I'll even recommend titles and description for you.
And they're working on live item support right now. Once they get that hammered in there, you'll see some live on filters too. I think, I can't remember. I don't think we got these in because again, I'm just going off the live list here, but I think this is a fresh boost from Sir Sean McCune of the Allegheny Valley. I know I mispronounced that, didn't I? But 10,000 sats, that's a hot boost. Coming in hot with the boost. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. S. Giggity came in with 5,000 sats. So pumped to have Unfiltered back. And yes, it prompted me to learn Fountain. You did it.
You took the initiative. You did it. Now, these are like distros from a couple of years ago. You may find something happens and you switch another one. You like that for a bit and you switch back. I'm on Fountain right now since the 1.0 release. I think it's great. They're really nailing it there. The discoverability, once you get into the home feed and all it takes, it took me about three weeks of just being like, I'm just going to use it because I want these features. But then once I got into the home feed and I started following people and the clips and stuff, I discovered like six new podcasts.
And I just check the search page from time to time because they'll highlight the shows that are getting good boosts. And that's a real genuine signal of the stuff that people think is content. And so like the, check out the value for value music shows when you get on Fountain. The neat thing is. If there's a song you like in Fountain and a couple of the other apps, you can just go get that song and add it to your library. So you could list out the individual songs like I play. There's a spot. There's like a hamburger menu. And you can save those songs to your own local library so that you don't need links or anything. It's so cool.
And just wait till audiobooks come along. It's going to be great. Thank you, sir, for the boost. We got a row of ducks. That's 2,222 sats. That's – Jittering Blender says, I didn't even know this show existed. It's amazing. Reminds me of no agenda. Oh, well, thank you. I'll take that as an absolute compliment. It says, I never considered a Cold War with the EU until this episode. It was a well-reasoned argument. Well, thank you. I got 25,000 sats too from Anonymous saying welcome back. And that's all I have on my list for this episode. If I missed you, that's my bad. I was going live off the list, but I will try to roll it up in the next episode.
I think I got everybody though. So thank you for boosting into the show. I don't have totals and all of that, but I appreciate it. That's really what matters at the end of the day is I felt like some value was returned to the show and I'd love to see that continued. There's a whole lot to get into with that stuff. So if you're new to it, make it easy on yourself. Fountain FM and Strike. It's available in like 40 countries. And outside of that, we do have a Bitcoin questions and answers chat room in the Jupiter Broadcasting Matrix room. And there's people there that are going to help you get started. it.
I know it's weird. I'm not asking you to invest in Bitcoin. I'm asking you to buy some sats and send them this way. And then I'll either cash them out or I'll save them. I want the optionality. That's essentially it. And then, you know, I think it's, I know it's weird and it's new, but, uh, I think it's something really special because when I look at what's out there, as far as mainstream media goes, I think get ready because when section, what is it? Section Section 230, when that finally gets killed, which it probably will in a year or so, every platform is going to be mainstream media simply because companies are so risk averse.
They're so risk averse that they're going to have to preemptively be careful about what people post. They're going to have to be advertiser friendly to survive. And that means people can continue to use advertiser boycotts to bend even the biggest companies to their whims. And I don't see much out there other than podcasting that even has any potential to withstand this. And the only way podcasting can is if we decentralize the distribution, which is what the podcast index is about, and pod ping, getting outside of Apple and Spotify and those centralized directories. So we have to centralize distribution.
That's a big part of podcasting 2.0. And we have to decentralize value. Because if we have the same choke points that Twitter does and Facebook has and CNN has, we're just as vulnerable. That's the problem with Patreon. That's the problem with PayPal. Is it makes us just as beholden to the same institutions that the mainstream media is. And ultimately that leverage will be applied. And it has to start getting built out today before that leverage is being applied at scale. Because if we wait until that point and then we all are trying to understand this all at once, it's never going to be successful.
We are the sovereign individuals that have to lay this groundwork. And I can attest it has gotten so much better in the last two years. And it only will continue that way with user adoption. But it is the only way that I have seen in the last 20 years, that's not an exaggeration, of how to keep podcasting decentralized and independent. And I know it's a lot. It's a big initiative. But what I'm talking about here is bigger than in the show. It's podcasting in general, but it also absolutely impacts the show. It's, it's a hell of a thing, you guys. It's a hell of a thing.
And maybe it's one of the reasons I'm back. You know, it's something I'm pretty passionate about. And I think you guys get it. The sharing of information is probably one of the best benefits the internet brought us, but it can also be used against us either by accident or by intention. So having places where we can have reasonable conversations that aren't loaded with rhetoric that's meant to trigger you, that give us all a chance to consider it, even if you don't agree with me, I just don't see how we're supposed to operate a republic or a democracy any other way. How are we supposed to have informed voters any other way? Because all of this, that was CBS's best work in the last three years.
And it was full of problems. It took us an hour to get through that entire interview because it was so loaded with problems. And that's their best work in the last three years. You understand the scope of the problem here? They're gaslighting all of us through these mechanisms. And podcasting, it's like the antidote. It's not going to be YouTube. And YouTube's the only video distribution system with scale. Right? It's not going to be something on Netflix. And it's definitely not going to be on CBS. BS. The revolution will be in the RSS feed, but only if we keep it independent. That's, that's it.
I hope, I hope this comes across as concerned and motivated and not angry. I can't really tell because I have been explaining this for so long that I've really reached kind of that point where I'm, I'm becoming radicalized on this issue. Um, cause I just have tolerance for nothing else. I suppose. I'd love your feedback either way. You can also email the show unfilter at protonmail.com, but the boosts, the boosts are the way to get ahold of me. It's the way to ask questions and get feedback into the show. Thank you so much for listening to episode 379 of the Unfilter program.
And I sure hope I'll see you right back here soon. Remember, I also would love to get your music suggestions, things you think would fit great in the show. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Music.
Economic Hangover: National Debt Soaring
CBS's 60 Minutes Interview with Jerome Powell
Employment Statistics and Multiple Job Holders
Inflation trends and commitment to price stability
Assumptions on rate cuts and the Fed's target rate
Commitment to inflation target and the Fed's control
Wall Street and the Middle Class Job Connection
Consensus on Rate Cuts and Market Rally Potential
Elizabeth Warren's Policy and its Potential Consequences
Overmanagement of Economy Leads to Consequences
The Challenge of Banks in the Digital Age
Factors for Future American Prosperity
Books to Read: The Mandibles and Broken Money
Reflecting on the Discussion
Podcasting 2.0: Boosts, Live Streams, and Standardization
Boosting the Unfilter Program and Appreciating the Support
A Fundamental Topic in Election Year
Decentralizing distribution and value in podcasting
