3 Megatrends Every Investor Needs to Know: Demographics, Wealth Inequality, & the End of Labor (with Jeff Park)

**Jeff Park** (0:00)
The value of labor is reaching zero because I think technology as a whole is deflationary. I think that's the punchline. If technology works the way that is allowing for productivity growth that resets the jump to universality in ways that is unimaginable, it's really deflationary. And so you should expect a lot of things to maybe go down in price. What's happening though is that's not what we're seeing in actual price because we live also in a credit world, where credit inflation and credit creation is a big driver of our growth model.

**David Hoffman** (0:39)
Bankless Station, I'm here joined with Jeff Park. Jeff, we've had on the podcast once before a pretty good macro mind that is very well versed in crypto and Bitcoin. Jeff, welcome back to the podcast.

**Jeff Park** (0:49)
Yes, happy to be here. And man, how much the time has changed since then.

**David Hoffman** (0:53)
Yeah, different era, different era. But nonetheless, the macro conversations are always kind of the same. And I think, Jeff, you wrote an article that is of the spirit of a lot of questions that me and probably most people have, which is like, what the hell is going on in the market? It seems the market is at peak uncertainty. And like AI, the fog of war of AI is so thick, just AI itself prevents us from being able to see into the future.
Meanwhile, we have like an unprecedented conflict in the Middle East. We have unprecedented levels of debt. We always have unprecedented levels of debt, but that always, that numbers always goes up. And so this, these compounding things just make me feel so uncertain. And I think you wrote an article that if I'm understanding it correctly, it was in pursuit of certainty. Maybe you can talk about just like how you feel about being a macro investor or an investor in these like macro times. And we can go into some of the details of your article. But just like talk to me, talk to me about the times.

**Jeff Park** (1:52)
Yeah, no, I love it. Great setup and I agree with you completely. The fog of war is everywhere. I mean, the fog of war is present in the lens of AI and the great amount of anxiety that the population is experiencing as to what it means for them. The fog of war, as you mentioned, is also physical. And Iran in terms of day by day, the tickers of how things seem to move with a lot of sporadic price action based on uncertain news flow, which cannot be actually trusted on both sides.
And there's a lot of fog of war in public policy. And all of these things create a lot of uncertainties for people to live their daily lives. And as you mentioned, I was more inspired by these times of difficulties to seek truth by trying to anchor what you at least know for sure. Because for me personally, it gives me great peace when I can at least underwrite the things I know with certainty and reorient my entire investing mindset based on the ramifications of what I do know.
And what I do know to be irrefutable, to be playing out in a direction that is irreversible. And then if you rebuild your foundational thesis about macro from that point on, I think people find clarity and optimism of the will to then seek pursuit of truth in that mindset too. So that is indeed the genesis of my article, and I'm excited to get into it with you.

**David Hoffman** (3:05)
Yeah, the idea of just if we can name things that we feel are certain, or at least likely enough that we can call them certain for all intents and purposes, then I think what you're doing is just like, okay, let's do what we can to remove variables from the equation, to make the equation just easier to reason about, easier to think about. And so in your article, you have three of these things, certain truths, three certain truths. One, demographic headwinds, the inverted pyramid of the population of not just the baby boomers here domestically, but I think that's representative of the globe at large. The second one that we're going to get into is wealth concentration, approaching unprecedented critical levels, and then third, the value of labor, consistently approaching devaluing versus capital. But then when you bring AI into the equation, it's going to get even crazier. So let's just start with the first one, certain truth number one, global demographic headwinds. Talk to me about what this means for macro investors. Talk to me about what this means for the economy broadly. Kick us off here with the start of this conversation.