The Future Of Cities, Currency, Collapse, and Bitcoin | Bitcoin Simply

Dante Cook (0:00)

Paris is burning, and it's because the citizens are crying out for help, justice and answers from its government. And this is coming to a city near you. Decades of bailouts, money printing and shipping jobs overseas. Now you have a hollowed out middle class, and cities are just magnets for elites with 3 million dollar homes, while everyone else lives in public housing, with nothing in between. And this is why nobody trusts the institutions. This is why you see Paris on fire. And the bad part about it is, AI is about to hit the knowledge jobs propping up these cities today. This set up looks like the Nifty Fifty in 69 Today we're going to explore the future of cities, currencies and collapse. Bitcoin is the exit. This is Dante Cook with Bitcoin Simply. Let's go.

What's happening in France isn't an isolated situation. It's coming to a city near you. It's just math and economics. How did we get here? Decades of poor economic policy. In the 80s, everybody began outsourcing all of their precious manufacturing jobs for the middle class to China. And beginning in 2008, there was no natural consequences for the markets. Just bailouts for the banks and the elite. Over the last 40 years, there's been monetary policy which has benefited people who hold assets, as interest rates have gone down from 18% to zero. The Fed began buying assets and holding assets on their balance sheet, printing money, which has caused inflation for the everyday working American and people across the globe. And this is what the Fed chair Kevin Warsh has to say about the whole thing.

Kevin Warsh (1:37)

Ultimately, what matters to the central bank, what's most important about what we do, it's not the printing press. It's a powerful tool. It's neat. If you guys had one, you'd love it.

But the power really comes from our institutional credibility.

Dante Cook (1:52)

The problem with this whole notion is that people don't trust the institutions anymore. The only thing that you have left is credibility in a printing press. And this is why the trust in institutions is at an all time low.

Not only are they opaque, they make decisions behind closed doors, backed by corruption, money being lent to them by corporations. They no longer serve us and the people who elected them in the first place. And this is what's leading to the catastrophe that's coming to a city near you. Marc Andreessen is, sure, a technocrat, but he's a pretty knowledgeable guy. And what he says about the future of cities is a future that I believe.

SPEAKER_3 (2:28)

There's actually a French writer, geographer, who has, I think, the best analysis on this. And he's written a great book on it called Twilight of the Elites. And what he basically observes is if you look at all the Western countries, through this process of deindustrialization and financialization, and technology, knowledge work becoming preeminent at the high end of the economy, you sort of have this pattern where basically, like in an agricultural economy or in a manufacturing economy, you kind of have to spread everything out throughout the country, because like natural resources really matter, and energy really matters, and physical infrastructure matters, and access to trains and all these things, really rivers and water and so forth really matters. But if you're going to replant the commanding heights of your economy on knowledge work, then what you're going to do is you're going to slam basically all economic growth into the cities, which is what Silicon Valley has done. So you're going to all the software developers in one place. And you want them, you know, they're going to, the good news is they're going to eat at high-end restaurants and they're going to employ a lot of nannies. But like fundamentally, they're going to be sitting in conference rooms, you know, designing software together. And you want that to happen in a single concentrated place. And so what happens is basically this, the cities become a magnet for basically two kinds of people. One is sort of the upper class, which is to say kind of the highly educated elite and the knowledge of professions who make enough money where they can afford to buy, you know, $3 million houses.

And then you've basically got the, so you've got basically like super expensive homes, and then you've got public housing, so-called public housing, right? Council of States in the UK or Section 8, 8H, or whatever it is housing here, where you've got basically public housing. And so, and then the public housing is, basically, it's people who are very low paid, kind of on the low end of the service economy.