“Why do you want to be in New York?” I asked Christian.

“You’ve been in New York right? The energy there is out of this world. Unique. And I want to make it big. If you want to make it big. You have to be in New York.”

“What ambitions have you?”

“I want to be the Chief Risk Officer of J.P Morgan.”

Woah. It’s rare to see a European with ambition. God be with him!

“Is that allowed? For a European to hold an office in America’s pursestrings?” I said.

“I think so. I mean, it’s a public company. And it’s really just the Presidency that has any nationality or birth requirements. Henry Kissinger wasn’t born in America for example,” said Christian.

“But you don’t think you can ascend to something similar in Europe?”

Christian sighed and said, “I’d be interested in seeing Europe becoming more like America - one giant federal state. Then we can really compete and put ourselves on the world, on par with Russia and China and America. But it’s difficult to see the Germans and the French or any Europeans working together. I think our cute European cultures are holding us back. I personally would be fine with all of Europe speaking English.”

I wouldn’t be. And what’s the necessity? Why do entire populations have to speak English? The reality is that if you’re interested in the fruits and benefits of the English language, you don’t need entire populations from elite to middle class to the proles speaking English. You just need the elites and a small extension of the middle class. None amongst the major European empires used the lingua franca of their time to build their overseas commercial empires. They used the language they needed. If anything, anglicising your entire population merely increases the surface area of infection from intellectual diseases that germinate in English-speaking universities or in the unique political biomes that you find in America - why expose a European to the intricacies of politics in the America Deep South? The lesson of the Tower of Babel is that if the world is monolingual it’s easier for the world to unite together to do something stupid. But hearing this, I can’t help but feel that somewhere in Christian there’s an oppressed and frustrated European dying with envy and self-pity asking the question why can’t Europe be as heroic as the America? I very much empathize with that but frustration consumes me whenever they somehow arrive at the conclusion that Europe has to federalise or centralise and smother away their national cultural differences for it to attain what America has attained. It speaks to a silly “bigger is better” logic - which I can’t help but retort with the perpetually true but brutal maxim: most people don’t matter. I also feel like even if one argues that since humans have entered the industrial age, where the dynamics of human civilisation have already undergone a fundamental shift such that European micropenis-states like Belgium and Austria will have absolutely no chance against gigastates like the US, China, India and Russia, in getting anything done, I would wonder if that age is but an anomaly in history - and with the advent of crypto and AI that massively reduces the cost of doing anything - microstates will become viable again. If AI is going to make it possible for a 10 man team to run a 10 billion dollar company, as Sam Altman put it, why would states need to be numbered in the centimillions for it to amount to anything?

He continued, “but it’s difficult to have hope. The birthrates in Europe are plummeting.”

Just another word away from saying “you’re being replaced in your own home”.

“Why do you think the birthrates are plummeting?” I asked.

“It’s probably because it’s too expensive to have children. People are rich and so children are not viewed to be generative assets - or at least they see it as such in the younger stages of their lives, and eventually, they come to regret it when they get older. The point is that unlike poorer people in poorer countries, where children are seen as value-adding to the household, children are seen as a value-sucking liability. Perhaps people have also been brainwashed to think that by schools and the media into overemphasizing that logic. Maybe the government should do something about that - ”

“I think that role, in brainwashing people to have kids, amongst other things, should be taken up by the Church,” I said. But then I stopped myself from elaborating further - it always unsettles the modern agnostic-atheistic secular enlightened man who can’t operate against his Enlightenment programming. They simply stop listening. So I ended it with “I find it a bit silly to forgo established religious institutions as a form of social organ in modern society - despite it has been around for so long, arguably proving its worth through existence. It’s like playing Civ 6 but utterly giving up any drive to win religious victories - no - not even that - it’s to play Civ 6 but make yourself utterly vulnerable to religious conquest by others. You give up that part of the game entirely and you refuse to delegate that organ any of the problems you need solving. And you deny that it has any capability of solving problems - much less problems only it can solve.”

But then Christian said, “maybe - maybe with Joe Rogan inviting that Christian speaker - the West return to a more Christian operation philosophy. And perhaps that would be a good thing.”

I think so. At this rate, Christianity will become the OG conspiracy theory. Imagine! God himself sent his own incarnation - a child of the parent God Ai - into the simulation, interact with all these cute little human agents, and then they killed him! Forget about aliens or ancient civilisations building the pyramids. This is all you want from conspiracy theories cranked up to the max.

“But on the issue of birthrates”, I said, “I think the most important factor causing birthrates to plummet is an inflationary monetary regime”.

Christian’s eyes lit up in interest and skepticism, and said “how on earth could that be the case?”

“When you have an inflationary currency, you essentially turn your currency into a shitcoin. It’s unsound money. It’s shit. And nobody wants to hold on to shit. They know it’s shit. They want to exchange it immediately for goods, services, and assets - especially assets. But the person selling you goods and services and assets, knows that he’s selling you something real and concrete for literal shit. So he must necessarily reduce the quality of his goods so he doesn’t end up as an idiot making a loss. So instead of hand-made Italian leather shoes he is forced to outsource its manufacturing to Shenzhen slave labour; instead of buying CDs you now rent your music, and your movies, your books, your research articles; instead of buildings that last two to three generations you make reinforced concrete buildings that breakdown in 50 years. Shortened lifespans of products, planned obsolescence, and replacing sales with rents are all natural responses to increase cash inflow volume - you make up for the fact you’re taking in shit by increasing the shit intaking volume and by reducing the quality of this real stuff you’re exchanging shit for. Now what that altogether conspires to produce, is an overall decrease in the quality of life - or rather, the quality of life that constitutes a real experience of health becomes more and more expensive in nominal terms - accessible increasingly to the rich. In effect, the poor are getting poorer.

“I think birthrates, like interest rates, indicate a general perception of how good the present is relative to the future. If the future is going to be better, then interest rates are going to be high, because there’s going to be more wealth in the future, so the opportunity cost of forgoing a dollar now which could have gone to generating that wealth is high. But if the future is going to be better, it also must mean the present is shittier relative to the future. It makes sense then that all the fucked up countries have sky-high interest rates - because they can’t get any worse. Things could only get better. The logic for birthrates is similar. If you think the future is just going to be better, you will want to have children because the opportunity cost of not having children who can help you capture that better future is high. If your future is bleak, you won’t do it because there’s nothing to be gained by your child.”

“I guess that is sort of what I’m saying too”, said Christian, “people don’t want children because they can’t afford it, but you put it in a more convoluted way. But I guess it’s not entirely contentless or unrevealing - because you do hear people literally saying what you’re saying… they say: ‘why would I want to bring a child into this world?’ The implication is that the world is shit, or is getting shittier… but how does this have anything to do with an inflationary monetary regime?”

“Because inflation destroys the future for the lower classes, doesn’t it? As I said. With a deflationary currency or a currency that grows slower than GDP, the purchasing power of your money grows - so you can save. Your future becomes bright. You will have kids. With inflation, you can’t save.”

“But,” said Christian, “the point of having a mildly inflating monetary regime of 2% by central banks is that they can respond to shocks and that inflation can induce a debt-friendly environment where companies can borrow more easily. Those companies can then build technological wonders that cancel out the inflation induced by money-printing through deflation á la the improvement of quality of life and increased productivity.”

“Yes,” I said, “but there’s arguably some kind of technological Cantillion Effect there, where the improvement of quality of life and increased productivity are enjoyed first by those closest to the money-printing or the tech-devving. The underclasses enjoy them last. Yet they bear the consequences of inflation of consumables and assets first. And not to mention the monetary Cantillion Effect. So the poor suffer the double whammy of monetary and technological Cantillion, but sure, after five years where all of Silicon Valley has already AI-ified everything the midwest will start to see the quality of life improvements, and then so will South Korea, Greece, and the Philippines.”

“But I still believe in central bank monetary policy controls. I don’t think bitcoin will ever replace the American dollar.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why do I believe in central bank monetary policy controls? Because we need it to deal with something like Covid - you need to be able to print money to stabilise the economy in times of shocks and disasters.”

“And you think they’ve mastered the art of controlling it? Putting aside all the collateral damage in inflation and the secondary political ripples that come from that…”

“Yes I think so,” said Christian, “and I think they’re just only to get better. As such I don’t see bitcoin ever replacing the US dollar. If bitcoin does become a threat they will just ban it.”

“Well, I don’t think they can ban bitcoin properly in the same way they ban public ordinary access of nuclear weapons schematics, but I agree with you in that I have doubts that bitcoin will be the currency used when the US dollar collapses. I think it’s just going to be gold.”

“You think the US dollar will collapse?”

“Not in our lifetime, perhaps - probably not in our lifetimes, but it will eventually - obviously. And I would think the symptoms are showing.”

“What are you talking about?” said Christian.

“You said you think the Fed has mastered the art of central-banking. I probably could agree with that. My question is then how long do we have before the Fed is politicized, because it will happen. It’s too attractive to not happen. We’ve already seen the building up of academic theories to enable and legitimize that kind of thinking, and with a bit of questioning of the democratic deficiency of central banks, demployment of traditional mass enlightenment and decmoracy slogans, followed up by some more Presidential jockeying, and it will give way. Didn’t that wonderful lady Stephanie Kelton who pioneered educating the masses on the wonderful delights of Modern Monetary Theory serve as part of Bernie Sander’s team during the 2016 election wasn’t she? And didn’t Trump pressure the Fed during his first term? Surely eventually it will give way, and then money printing will be at the behest of the senate and the president. Then it’s late stage Roman Empire.”

“You don’t think there will be alternative currencies to compete for the throne of the US dollar between now and then? Not even bitcoin?” asked Christian.

“Absolutely not. China is built on slave labour. And they are running out of slaves. They have no real organic economy. You can deploy all your sterotypical racist impressions of the Chinese being uninnovative and uncreative or oppressed or not having the right institutions or not having the creative space to do it and some configuration of that will be right. And seriously, how could China or any country on the planet possibly compete with the US on innovation and business. the United States is a country where you have 14 year old kids building businesses, computers, bombs, rockets, cars, nuclear fusion engines in their garages. Their peers in China are all grinding through Chinese classics and 2nd year university multivariable calculus. They will not able to create an economy dynamic enough to support a currency that can shoulder the price of the exorbitant privilege.”

“But why not bitcoin? I thought for someone like you, you’d think hyperbitcoinization is inevitable,” said Christian.

“I’d love hyperbitcoinization to be real but I think bitcoin has some problems with it. All this talk about bitcoin’s value prop being a store of value, permissionless international transactability… I think you can debate all that away by comparisons with the other hard-money looking coins. Eth, for example. Eth is actually needed, and is useful - it’s a consumable commodity - it’s consumed when you need blockspace for computation. All the talk on how you can permissionless transact in bitcoin, how it’s decentralised and nation-state attack-resistant… they’re all only features that make bitcoin a plausible - usable - currency. I think we have data demonstrating that bitcoin’s price is high not because people are hording it for its utility, but because they just want it - they mimetically want it. In other words, bitcoin’s price is high not because it’s useful, but because it’s a good memecoin. And I think it’s perfectly fine for something to be utterly useless and valueless serving as currency simply because it’s mimetically desired. The OG of that is gold. So if bitcoin’s value is entirely propped up by mimetics, the question then is how long could those mimetics hold up? Unlike gold, which you can see, and its physical beauty immediately induces its own mimetic desire, you can’t see bitcoin. So bitcoin’s mimetic desirability are all generated by stories, history, lore, surrounding satoshi, bitcoin’s philosophy, the community, and so on. It’s all basically memes and poetry - and gold has that as well - 10,000 years of poetry in every single language to reinforce its already naturally generating mimetic desirability. Bitcoin must reckon with that in a case where the US dollar collapses.”

“But in a world where the dollar has collapsed,” said Christian, “and you’re still in need of transaction infrastructure, surely bitcoin, being electronic, has an edge over clumsy bulky old gold.”

“Good point, but I think whether bitcoin, and its associated transaction infrastructure, can make it the currency then is entirely an empirical question. We won’t know until it’s actually put to the test - and there’s no inevitability or certainty how it will do. I mean, if the US dollar collapsed, god knows if even the power grid will work, right? All I am saying is that in that scenario, gold-backed money will likely have a chance of return. Ha! Maybe you’ll get to deal with it - when you’re Chief Risk Officer of JP Morgan.”