🛡 Surviving Tomorrow

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.

Jeff Bezos controls Amazon. And Whole Foods. And The Washington Post. And IMDB, Zappos, Souq, Blue Origin, Kiva Systems, Alexa, DPReview, Fabric.com, Woot, Goodreads, Twitch, Audible, Elemental, Quidsi, Annapurna Labels, Accept, Living Social, Twilio, HomeGrocer, Bill Me Later, eZiba, BankBazaar, Kozmo, Ionic, Songza, and Wine.com. Plus he has VC stakes in Lookout, Juno, Grail, Workday, Vessel, Domo, Fundbox, Stack Overflow, Everfi, Remitly, Rethink Robotics, General Fusion, MakerBot, Unity Biotech, General Assembly, Business Insider, Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter. And he’s working on acquiring MGM. Plus he owns at least eight mansions and 100,000+ acres, a bunch of penis-shaped rockets, and a $500,000,000 hyper-yacht.

Bernard Arnault controls LVMH, which has swallowed more than seventy of its competitors, including Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Dom Pérignon, Loius Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Loro Piana, Princess Yachts, Bulgari, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns massive chunks of nearly fifty companies including Apple, Amazon, Amex, Bank of America, Chevron, Kraft, Mastercard, Sirius, Visa, Wells Fargo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, GM, Merck, T-Mobile, GEICO, and Coca-Cola, which itself has eaten more than 400 competing drink companies.

Blackrock, which owns a piece of 5,480 companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, JP Morgan, Paypal, Home Depot, Disney, Exxon, Pfizer, Pepsi, AT&T, Nike, Walmart, McDonald’s, Costco, and Netflix, just bought Reese Witherspoon’s media company for $900 million, adding to its $9 trillion Smaug-like horde.

It makes you wonder when monopolists will stop growing larger and larger.

And then one day it occurs to you…

They will not stop until they are stopped.

The facts

There are now 2,755 billionaires on the planet, not including “royalty” and dictators.

In the year 2000, they controlled less than $1 trillion.

Today, they control more than $13.1 trillion.

13.5X in a generation.

And they’ve grown their wealth by $5.5 trillion during the pandemic so far.

The world’s richest eight men now own more than the bottom 4 billion.

On the flip side, there’s never been so many people experiencing suffering and deprivation in human history:

* Systemic inequality pushed 200+ million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020.

* 690 million people go to bed hungry every night (and the number is rising by 16 million per year.)

* 5.5 million people are moving into slums per month.

* 2.3 million children die from malnutritionment every year.

Clearly, there is no limit to the depth of poverty and deprivation to which our global society will allow humans to fall — never forget that millions of children are still trafficked for rape annually and that nine million people die from starvation each year — yet somehow elite individuals are allowed to amass unlimited plenty in a world of deprivation?

It begs the question: Is it moral and right for us to allow individuals to hoard extreme wealth in the face of overwhelming widespread poverty, documented democratic subversion, and environmental catastrophe?

If humanity saw itself as the global family that it truly is, it would be morally impossible to not limit the amount that one family member could control while another suffered and died.

“Earned” wealth

It is impossible for an individual to legitimately earn a billion dollars.

If someone earned $100 per hour — more than enough for anyone to live in luxurious comfort — in order to truly earn a billion dollars, they’d have to work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for five thousand years.

So how is a billion dollars actually amassed?

By skimming a profit off the backs of untold others:

* off the workers they employ

* off the suppliers they squeeze

* off the carcasses of the competitors they destroy with monopoly

* off the planet they unsustainably extract from

* off the governments from which they gain subsidies and advantages

* off the stable societies they sell to while evading taxation

* off the democracies whose rules they change at will

* off the shareholders they dupe

How is the ability to skim achieved? Through unfair advantage and privilege.

It is impossible to “work hard, save, and invest” your way to a billion dollars.

Let’s be crystal clear: billionaires don’t “create jobs.” They extract value — time, talent, creativity, effort — from others at an industrial scale.

Decentralize everything

Here’s a short thought experiment.

Which is better: 2,755 billionaires and their $13.1 trillion, each monopolizing roughly one industry apiece and subverting democracy, or 131,000 centa-millionaires in competition?

How about 1,310,000 deca-millionaires?

Or 13,100,000 millionaires?

13.1 million millionaires would do far more for the economy in terms of spending, hiring, diffusing power, avoiding democratic destruction, increasing competition, and sparking innovation.

Are there truly enough benefits to the global population to merit supporting the costs of maintaining billionaires? Surely not. No rational person can make the argument that 2,755 billionaires are globally preferable to having 13.1 million more millionaires, or 131 million more workers each controlling a $100K stake in the businesses wherein they constitute all of the wealth-creation.

“But those poor billionaires are just rich on paper!”

Sychophants for the ultra-elite are quick to cry out that most billionaires don’t actually have $1,000,000,000+ sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-style vault. Their wealth is usually tied up in shares of the companies they almost always undemocratically control.

But these people don’t understand how billionaires work.

Billionaires borrow colossal amounts of cheap debt against those paper shares, and let inflation devalue that debt over time.

So you and I — the real taxpayers in society — end up footing the bill as the money-printing machine devalues our actual-earned money.

We need a more equitable pre-distribution of ownership, wealth, and opportunity.

Mathematical doom

I believe — as do most of the working masses and the desperate poor — that it is morally wrong and utterly inhumane to be a billionaire whilst millions starve and billions suffer.

Full stop.

To paraphrase the Bible: “The poor will always be among us because the rich will always be above us.”

The world and planet can’t afford to support billionaires anymore.

Corporatism is a gross inefficiency and major source of economic inequality; it is anti-democracy; it is ecological unsustainability.

We should replace it with an economy of sole proprietors, partnerships, cooperatives, not-for-profits, and for-benefits — all the wealth to all the workers — massively diverse, all competing and cooperating and innovating within a body of economic law that enforces ecological sustainability (as defined by biology) and economic fairness (as defined by real democracy.)

If we don’t, we’re mathematically doomed.

Charting our trajectory to zero

When will billionaires stop amassing more wealth?

The answer is clear:

They won’t.

Our total global wealth is currently $431 trillion.

In the past twenty years, billionaires have grown their wealth by 13.5X, to $13.1 trillion, far outpacing the poor and total growth in global wealth.

At their current pace, billionaires will control $176 trillion in twenty years and $2.3 quadrillion in forty.

You read that right: If we do not stop them, billionaires will control the entire globe’s resources within our lifetime.

From there, it’s simply a game of thrones to determine which few families will survive.

In the winner-take-all economy, elites will not stop until they are stopped.

Why can’t voter-shoppers fathom this fact?

Th…

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.

I’m your host, Jared A. Brock, and today we’re going to discuss why the average house will cost $10 million within 50 years.

But first, a personal update: I have a son! His name is Concord Thoreau Brock. Concord means “peace,” and Thoreau means “strength.” Concord is our favorite revolutionary town in America — home to the Alcotts (of Little Women fame), Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Hawthornes, and Henry David Thoreau, the father of environmentalism and philosopher whose pacifist writings inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Michelle was in labor for a brutal 38 hours, 11 of which were spent at a pub. (It’s a long and extremely British story.) She saw 28 medical personnel over 5 wards and 3 shift changes, and I recorded over 400 60+ second contractions recorded. In the end, we had one 8.0 pound baby boy, the first male of eleven grandbabies in the family, and the first boy born to our church in twelve years! We are now accepting offers for a pre-arranged marriage. I’m feeling extremely grateful for this gorgeous little gift, and absolutely astounded by the physical strength and spiritual fortitude of Michelle to endure the whole glorious ordeal. 

But I’m greatly troubled by the world Concord will grow up in. If we keep in our insane trajectory…

* He’ll have to compete with robots for work.

* He’ll have to navigate totalitarian social credit systems and surveillance currencies.

* He’ll face resource shortages, extreme weather events, species collapses, and massive societal strains caused by climate change refugees.

* He’ll witness the complete privatization of public services in the hands of the corporatocracy, and the cessation of the charade of democracy as the world descends into corporate oligarchy.

Of course, his Daddy and many others are doing their best to fight against all of these corruptions and injustices, but there simply aren’t enough leaders who understand the challenges that predator elites pose to human life and widespread flourishing.

In that sense, having a child amidst this corrupt corporatocracy is part of our act of resistance. It’s our declaration of hope against chance.

One of Concord’s biggest challenges will be affordable shelter. 

House prices are currently at an all-time high, but we are not in a real estate bubble — we’re in a pricing paradigm shift.

The old paradigm: A house’s price is the maximum amount that an area’s average local buyer can afford to mortgage over 25–40 years. But because wages have flatlined and purchasing parity is the same as in 1978, the only rational explanation for this current price explosion is a giant debt bubble… right?

Wrong.

The new paradigm: A house’s value is now the maximum amount of annual rental income that can be extracted from it by a global investor, multiplied by maximal institutional leverage.

It’s the biggest paradigm shift in the history of human shelter, and it’s the reason why the vast majority will never own a house in the future.

Because our family homes are just future hedge fund investments.

In 50 years, the average house will cost $10+ million.

Most people think that’s impossible, but I’ll show you the exact math on how it’s going to play out.

Sure, there might be more real estate price crashes, but they’ll just be bigger versions of 2008 — buying opportunities for the hyper-elites. Even with temporary price drops, expect overall prices to continue hard up-and-to-the-right for nine major reasons.

1. Population is growing

Our global family currently contains almost 7.9 billion, headed to 10.5 billion within fifty years. That’s a 33% increase in the number of people who need to be housed. While this doesn’t mean house prices will automatically increase by 33%, population growth does create more demand, which will certainly increase prices significantly.

2. People are moving to cities

The overall population will “only” rise by 33%, but look at the stats on where everyone is moving: Cities. 4 billion people currently live in urban areas, but that number is set to jump to 7 billion within 30 years and will hit 8 billion in fifty. So essentially housing demand where most people live will double. What will the average house cost when twice as many people are bidding on it?

3. More people are living alone

My grandma was raised in a farmhouse with a mom, dad, and a half-dozen siblings. My father-in-law was one of nine kids. Today, both of those homes probably contain less than four people. In major urban centers like New York, it’s less than 2.4 people per unit and falling. As more people live alone, we’ll need far more housing units. When there’s more demand without adequate supply, prices increase.

4. Multiple house ownership

Looking at you, small-time landlords and non-resident Airbnb hosts. More than 23 million American landlords own more than one house. That might seem like a lot, but what it actually means is that 115 million Americans don’t get to own a home because a wealth-extractor owns two.

“Airbnb-type models altered the market irreversibly by proving on a large scale that short term rentals were more lucrative than stable long-term residents.” — Valerie Kittell

5. Housing construction isn’t keeping up

Not even close. The US housing supply has been underbuilt for over a decade, and we’re building just six houses for every ten new households.

Now add the fact that…

6. Building costs are soaring amidst material shortages

Lumber, paint, concrete, glass, labor, land… all rising faster than average wages. We live on a finite planet with limited resources, and those resources are becoming more expensive to extract. Accordingly, constructing new houses will continue to cost more and more.

7. Real inflation is soaring

It’s almost certainly 10+% per year. And real estate always tracks with inflation. These days, in fact, shelter prices are outpacing inflation; in Canada, real estate prices are up 40% since last year. Asset inflation in America is over 30% this year across the stock market and real estate market.

Even without any of the other price-rise factors on this list, if rampant real estate inflation averages 7.5% for the next fifty years, inflation alone will send the average house price over $10 million.

8. The monopolists are here

When you allow speculation and investment in residential real estate, you end up where every other capitalist sector ends up — with a handful of monopolists owning all the assets in the industry.

If you study history, you see this happen with steel (Carnegie), railroads (Vanderbilt), oil (Rockefeller), banking (JP Morgan), online retail (Jeff Bezos), luxury goods (Bernard Arnault), web search (Google+Youtube’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin), and so on.

Monopolists will not stop until they are stopped.

Obviously, up until this point in history, real estate has been a far harder market to corner because of the high upfront investment costs, but that’s changed since the invention of…

9. Outrageous leverage

“A privileged class of investors are allowed to utilize the Fed and private banking system to print nearly infinite quantities of money via leverage, and use that money to out-bid first-time homebuyers who had to work for years to earn their money.” — Throop Von

This is where things get truly ugly. Once monopolies form, they utilize the power of financialization to drop an economic atomic bomb on their competition.

Let’s say a condo is for sale right now.

* A first-time buyer can afford maybe $1,200/month, so they’re able to bid up to $250,000.

* A landlord can squeeze $1,250/month in rent from a long-term tenant. If they’re expecting half their revenue to go to costs and want a 2.5% ROI. plus appreciation, they’re willing to pay up to $300,000.

* A non-resident Airbnb host can fetch $2,500/month in nightly rent, double the lo…

Non-wealth-backed, debt-based, government-printed paper money is the greatest scam of all time.

America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, is owned by private banks including Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs; predatory corporations who actually pay some of their bankers to go work for the Fed. Additionally, the major banks sponsor political candidates and lobby them hard once they’re in Congress, leading to a dangerous political situation called regulatory capture. It’s the same in most countries — essentially, rabid foxes now rule our global henhouse.

Because America is bank-captured, the richest people in history get to monopolize legal tender and pillage your wealth whenever they please. And they do. If you haven’t noticed, they’re absolutely out of control right now, having printing 80% of all American M1 money stock in existence in the past 18 months alone:

All this debt-based money printing has created a tidal wave of negative consequences in our lives, and we haven’t even felt the effects of the past two years of crazy printing yet:

* They’ve dangerously inflated house prices.

* They’ve wildly inflated stock prices.

* They’ve put the world $300 trillion in debt.

* They’ve devalued our purchasing power by debasing our legal tender. Not only does this straight-up steal money from everyone holding cash, but it discourages savings — making people less antifragile and more dependent on the state while creating an instant-gratification culture instead of one that plans for tomorrow.

* They’ve locked us in an unsustainable debt+interest death spiral that requires all of us to compete against each other, and by pure mathematical necessity, heartbreakingly bankrupts more than 3,000 families per day for thirty years straight.

* They use their money power to set the agenda for the whole nation, spending on unending wars, toppling foreign governments, extracting wealth from poorer nations and sacrifice from their own citizens, stealing trillions of hours of human life. In total, this crime against humanity has pillaged several quadrillion dollars in real wealth from active societal contributors.

Let’s not mince words: The corporate-controlled central banking money-printing scam is the biggest sin and crime in human history.

Challenger money

Given the utterly corrupt state of modern money, you can see why smart people who actually care about the sustainable long-term wellbeing of humanity started looking for a solution.

One such person was Satoshi Nakamoto.

We don’t know if Satoshi is a man, woman, group, or an AI, and we don’t know if he/she/they/it is even still alive.

Satoshi invented a new form of digital currency that could be sent peer-to-peer, even anonymously. The system can be trusted because all transactions are automatically verified by its decentralized network and recorded in a blockchain, which is essentially a giant decentralized cryptographic spreadsheet.

On January 9th, 2009, Bitcoin was born.

And then greed set in

Our total global wealth is currently valued at around USD$400 trillion.

There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins.

In early 2017, savvy speculators did the math.

If Bitcoin eventually became the global currency, each Bitcoin would be worth twenty million bucks.

That’s when things went crazy.

People started buying and hoarding coins.

As supply constricted, the coin price rose.

More people saw what was happening and jumped on board, bidding coin prices higher and higher and higher.

Other people wanted to get in on the goldrush, and started making their own inferior versions of Bitcoin. Today, there are over 12,000 cryptocurrencies on the market.

Then the pandemic hit and corrupt elites sent the money-printer into overdrive. As house and stock prices ballooned outrageously high, people like Michael Saylor realized they needed to get rid of their rapidly-devaluing $USD, but couldn’t rationally buy wildly overpriced assets either.

So they turned to Bitcoin as a speculative asset, further jacking the price, attracting more speculators in search of a quick buck in hard times. As greed and FOMO set in — and all those government stimulus checks arrived — prices soared even higher.

Today, Bitcoins that cost a few cents worth of electricity are now “worth” around $50,000. The total Bitcoin market cap now hovers around $1 trillion.

So… should we invest?

As my newsletter disclaimer makes crystal clear, nothing I write is financial, legal, or tax advice. Blah blah blah, you’re an adult, do what you want to do.

But I don’t think anyone should invest in Bitcoin for four major reasons:

First:

* It has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it.

* It is not a productive asset. It isn’t a factory that produces an item. It’s not a field that produces a crop. It’s not a firm that offers a service.

* It has zero underlying value. It’s not backed by land or commodities or any other form of real useable wealth.

Bitcoin is just a bunch of computer files.

Its value is derived solely from the trust that people place in it — namely, that the price will continue to rise indefinitely and that there will always be new investors to buy out the old ones. On that standard of belief, the evidence is crystal clear (and don’t trust any online bitboy who tells you otherwise): 

Bitcoin is currently being treated like a Ponzi scheme.

So if your motivation for buying Bitcoin is to buy and hoard it until the price goes up, this is deeply unethical, because someone will eventually get hurt. Currency is meant to be spent, given, or invested in producing real wealth for the world. Not hoarded.

Second: Speculating in Bitcoin is a massive risk right now. Just remember what you’re actually doing when you decide to “invest” in crypto: You’re betting against the established powers. A bet on crypto is a bet against centralized violence-backed money. It’s a noble act, but an extremely risky investment strategy.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that many governments will make crypto illegal once they introduce their own totalitarian surveillance coins. (See last week’s Panopticoin episode for more.)

Third: We shouldn’t seek to passively skim profits off the backs of others without contributing anything of real value to the world.

I have a friend who owns 36 full Bitcoins. He fully expects them to be worth $10 million apiece within a decade or two. But has he contributed $360 million in value to the world? Not at all. All he did was buy a few thousand dollars worth of digital files and waited for other people’s greed and fear to pad his bank account. Shouldn’t we want to use our money to make a real contribution?

Four: When (not if) the next recession comes — when house prices plummet, the stock market crashes, and millions lose their jobs — people will need to pull money out of assets in order to fund fiat liabilities like mortgage payments and daily expenses. What’s the most liquid asset most people have? Crypto. When millions of crypto holders desperately need fiat cash to stay afloat, expect them to reluctantly pull tens of billions from the exchanges and sink prices, if not crash questionable coins like Tether and house-of-cards operations like the DeFi and NFT markets. Wouldn’t it just be better to be generous to the poor instead of gambling in an online casino?

All told, it seems to me that investing in Bitcoin is an extremely unwise and likely unethical thing to do.

That said, it doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

After much research and deep introspection, I have come to the conclusion that if the only two realistic options are an unfortunately hyper-individualist libertarian currency called Bitcoin versus the dystopian nightmare that is totalitarian surveillance currency, the inevitable decision for rational people is to side with the former. Humanity stands a better chance of achieving widest-spread well-being when we the people create our own money.

So what should we do with crypto?

Satoshi N…

Hello friends, welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about navigating life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, now available for free on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube!

I’m your host, Jared A. Brock, and today we’re going to discuss one of the most dangerous pieces of technology that has ever been invented.

But first, I wanted to let you know that I’m running a giveaway! One lucky winner will get a free copy of a book called The Bitcoin Standard, which is a great introduction to cryptocurrency, plus I’m going to send the winner $100 in free Bitcoin to spend. If you’d like to enter for free, click here.

Okay, let’s dig in:

“The more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.” — Jeremy Bentham

At some point between 1785 and 1786, while visiting his dictator-serving brother in Russia, the now-stuffed utilitarian social engineer Jeremy Bentham started asking himself a series of questions that two centuries later are about to yield disastrous consequences for your freedom, privacy, and personal autonomy:

* What if there was a way to design a prison that would allow one person to oversee the activities of thousands of inmates?

* What if the watcher couldn’t be seen by the inmates, and therefore not even need be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched?

* What if the surveilled inmates were coerced into working in their cells in order to stay alive?

* What if the prison was named after Panoptes, a mythical Greek giant who possessed a hundred eyes?

The result was the Panopticon.

The Panopticon prison design was devilishly brilliant. The inmate cells lined the outer circular wall, with a surveillance tower in the center. The watcher could see all cells at all times and even speak to the inmates through a network of “conversation tubes,” but the inmates could never see the watcher.

Bentham declared his invention was a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”

Only a dozen or so Panopticons were ever constructed — Fidel Castro was once imprisoned in one — but unfortunately, it created an insidious panopticon paradigm that lasts to this very day.

Because a panopticon is no longer just a physical building; ultimately, it’s a system of totalitarian control.

Panopticon Power

Patrick Henry said, “give me liberty or give me death,” and he wasn’t being hyperbolic.

He understood that humans without freedom are just inmates in a panopticon prison — without free will, we’re just dead people walking.

Panopticons derive their ultimate power by creating a state of conscious visibility, assuring automatic obedience through coercive and anonymous power.

Under the panopticon eye, people wither and die.

Panopticon Today

We already live in a panopticon.

Anyone who owns a smartphone is being surveilled at all times.

Every word spoken… Every sentence typed…Every photo and video taken…Every item purchased…Every relational connection forged…Every movement made…

All tracked.

The only difference between today and Bentham’s poor prisoners is that:

a.) most people aren’t punished for wrongthink, wrongspeak, and wrongaction, and

b.) most people aren’t conscious they’re being watched.

Yet.

Panopticon Tomorrow

“All data is credit data, we just don’t know how to use it yet.” — Douglas Merrill, Google

Nearly all the other pieces necessary for a modern panopticon society are already in place:

* CCTV

* Facial recognition

* Voice recognition

* Digital fingerprinting

* IoT surveillance (via your fridge, car, etc.)

* DNA banking

* GPS tracking

* Credit scoring

* Non-anonymized consumer data harvesting

* Biometric under-the-skin tracking

* Heart rate and body heat monitoring

We’ve literally never been more surveilled at any point in human history.

Social cooling

Panopticon culture is already changing our behavior and policing our free speech.

We’re becoming more risk-averse.

We’re self-censoring constantly.

There’s even a term for it: Social cooling.

Have you ever not said something because you thought it would hurt your reputation? Have you ever avoided posting something online for fear of reprisal at work? Have you ever hesitated to click on a link, watch a video on Youtube, or buy a book on Amazon for fear it might be tracked and come back to bite you in the future?

That’s social cooling.

When we let elite-controlled algorithms change our behavior in any way, we become less human.

And now there’s a piece of technology coming on the market that will make everything monumentally worse:

Digital surveillance currencies.

Panopticoin

Panopticoin: A digital currency that allows totalitarians to surveil and completely control the economic activity of their subjects.

Imagine a world in which all money is digitally controlled and monitored by corporate-corrupted national governments.

Yes, we already have digital $USD, but this is something else.

Imagine a government-issued cryptocurrency — a digital file created from nothing by the most dangerous power-seeking sociopaths on the planet — that can be completely controlled.

* They can create it at will — inflating prices, crushing purchasing power, draining wealth from productive workers to those closest to the money printer.

* They can surveil every transaction — knowing exactly how you spend, where you spend, and who you know.

* They can destroy it at will — if you fall out-of-bounds of the powers that be, they can delete your money, impoverishing or bankrupting you instantly.

* They can exclude you from the global economy — in fact, economic exclusion is an eventuality predicted in the Bible nearly 2,000 years ago.

In a hyper-monetized global economy, there is nothing more dangerous than a surveillance currency that can be tracked, traced, devalued, or deleted at will.

Sure, countries are letting bitboys have their Ponzi-like casino fun with cryptocurrencies for now, but the whole cryptoverse experiment allows them to silently watch and learn.

When governments launch their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) — as some have already done — expect them to fully ban cryptocurrency and pair their CBDCs with Orwellian social credit systems and under-the-skin surveillance.

Believe in a better tomorrow

At the end of the day, it all comes down to what we believe.

I believe the United Nations should enshrine into international law the illegality of social credit systems and surveillance currencies as an egregious invasion of the human right to privacy.

I believe in the old-fashioned notion that everyone is legally innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of their homo sapien peers.

I believe that conformity culture is anti-cultural.

I believe in a future without mass surveillance.

I believe in the right to make mistakes.

I believe in the right to be unperfect.

I believe in the right to be human.

In conclusion

We don’t need to live in a panopticoin world.

In fact, we can go in the exact opposite direction, toward a coinified future where there are thousands of non-coercive trust-based currencies, all non-surveilled and even completely private.

To get there, we need to do two major things:

1. We need to vote out of office every single sociopathic corporate-captured politician who’s ever taken a single dollar in dark money. We must absolutely resist digital surveillance currencies.

Maybe that means you need to run for office.

2. Instead of hoarding cryptocurrency and hoping for a price spike like it’s a Ponzi scheme, we need to buy, spend, and give coins as far and wide as possible.

(To put my digital money where my mouth is, I’m giving away $100 in free Bitcoin right now.)

If we can revolutionize the new global economy before the surveillance coins get to market, we have a far better chance of securing our future economic freedom.

Otherwise, the panopticoin is coming.

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.

Today we’re going to discuss the silent and growing pandemic of pornography addiction. So buckle up!

Several years ago, my wife and I traveled to ten countries to make a documentary about human trafficking, followed by a 150-city LIVE tour and TV broadcasts in fourteen countries. During our film trip, we met former traffickers, formerly enslaved children, politicians, undercover pimp busters, all sorts.

Two strange things kept popping up:

* Cops told us they often find video camera equipment when they raid brothels.

* Formerly prostituted women told us that men often came into their brothels with cell phones, showed them porn clips, and said they wanted to replicate certain acts.

As people who cared a lot about preventing human trafficking, we knew we needed to go upstream and make a documentary about pornography addiction.

So we did.

We traveled all over America to interview some of the nation’s top porn stars and former porn stars, neuroscientists, pro-porn industry advocates, former sex offenders, addiction therapists, politicians, elite researchers, child addicts, and more.

The result was Over 18: A Documentary About Pornography.

First exposure

I first saw porn when I was ten years old.

I was babysitting for a couple in our church. The kid was asleep, it was stormy outside, and I was watching the NBA All-Star game. Lightning must’ve hit a cable box somewhere because suddenly I was watching the Playboy Channel — and they didn’t have the Playboy Channel.

I turned it off and rushed to the front door to make sure no one was around. Coast clear, I returned and put on the TV, watching with fascination and confusion. About ten minutes later, it popped back to the All-Star game. I didn’t see porn again until I moved out of home and got my own computer, but by then, I had the tools to protect myself from addiction.

The simple science

According to the neuroscientists we interviewed for our documentary, the science behind porn addiction is pretty basic. You aren’t technically getting addicted to porn or food or gambling, it’s the dopamine that your brain’s after.

When you watch porn, you get a nice little ~200% dopamine spike to your nucleus accumbens, your brain’s reward center. It’s roughly equivalent to a shot of morphine. It feels really nice.

But here’s the problem: the neuroscientists explained that the cerebral cortex — that forward-thinking, future-planning, self-defending bit of brain mush — doesn’t fully develop in boys until their early to mid-twenties.

The average boy first sees porn at age eleven, but his cerebral cortex won’t fully form for another ten or more years, meaning he has no way to protect himself from addiction for more than a decade.

So what do we do?

We stuff a smartphone in a kid’s pocket and tell them not to look at porn. It’s worse than giving them a pack of cigarettes and telling them not to smoke.

Porn today

Porn has always existed, but the commercial porn industry is just… wait for it… 69 years old.

The first legal piece of porn in America was the inaugural issue of Playboy back in December 1953. It contained a few topless pinups.

Today’s average porn scene involves multiple men pounding a woman orally, vaginally, and anally before ejaculating on her face.

And 93% of boys and 62% of girls see this before age eighteen.

Not only is it illegal to show porn to children, but it’s deeply harmful:

* The majority of porn scenes depict physical, verbal, or sexual aggression or violence toward women, desensitizing viewers to violence and normalizing subservient behavior.

* Some children take it offline. We’ve met a number of parents and have heard countless stories of children assaulting other children.

* Tens of millions of children have started sending and requesting sexts from their classmates, pressuring others while inadvertently creating and distributing child pornography.

* Sexual templating imprints attractions on young brains that can be hard to shake. The top number-specified porn search is age 13 — and when boys are imprinting their brains to sexualized images of children, some will continue to seek out those visuals when they’re over the age of eighteen. (On a personal note, I’ve now met three men who’ve served jail time for past child porn offenses; all are now living in victory and recovery. But what of the victimized children?)

* When your brain is trained to love pixels on a screen, it can lead to serious offline challenges, including porn-induced erectile dysfunction — there are literally tens of thousands of young men who’ve lost the ability to perform with a real-world partner because their brains only activate an erection or orgasm to screen-based images.

I’ve never seen porn on a cell phone… because I don’t own a cell phone. But if my parents had foolishly given me a smartphone at age ten or thirteen, there’s no way I wouldn’t be addicted to porn today. Pornography is wildly addictive, and the draw is understandably strong for all of us. What will the future look like if we continue to allow porn addiction to secretly rule our societies?

Where we go from here

While the DSM-5 doesn’t yet officially consider porn addiction or sex addiction as true disorders — but it’s a bit like the economist who’s so deep into the data that they forget about money and how it affects people in real life. The millions of children and teens who are experiencing overwhelming cravings know the reality of porn’s true power. Our best guess is that unbiased scientific research in the nascent field of addiction will almost certainly confirm the truth in the years ahead.

In the meantime, there are three necessary components to ridding our society of the blight of commercialized screen-based pornography:

Age verification

First things first: We need meaningful age verification. Even the porn stars we interviewed agreed that clicking the “Are you over 18?” button isn’t enough. You can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes or drive a car without real age verification, so why should children be allowed to addict themselves to hardcore sexual violence?

No, this isn’t a violation of free speech. But this doesn’t have to be a privacy-violating nightmare where the government suddenly knows who all’s looking at what.

Interestingly, Mindgeek — the shadowy offshore monopoly that rules the world of pornography — has already invented a technology to safely and securely verify adults without compromising privacy. Every nation needs to mandate meaningful age verification immediately if we care at all for our children’s mental health and long-term sexual wellbeing.

Education

Current addicts, parents, and children deserve to know what they’re up against. Porn, sexting, age verification, and addiction prevention should be a part of school curricula, regularly addressed in order to protect our children from a world of pain and regret.

Cultural transformation

What kind of a world do we want to live in?

Clearly, homo sapiens are not adapted for screen technology and shouldn’t center life around it, nor are we any match for the addiction algorithms that rule the Internet, or the buzzy dopamine hit that porn provides.

Do we really want to raise a generation with such a low view of sex and humanity? Aren’t we more than just sexual objects?

Eventually, society will wake up to the realization that the pornography industry is just another capitalist trick, a way of commodifying the human body and hijacking our nervous systems for a quick profit.

We’ll also realize that pornography is deeply harmful to civil society and our children. Instead of being active and embodied people who enjoy a real, physical offline sexuality, we’re becoming passive voyeurs — spectators in our own life stories.

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I’ve been avoiding publishing any articles on vaccines because it’s an absurdly contentious subject that wins you no friends and makes you quite a few enemies.

It’s an issue plagued with political ideologies, conflicts of interests, bad faith arguments, issue conflation, terrible research, and appallingly stupid false dichotomies.

But alas, my inbox has been flooded with good folks asking me my perspective, so hopefully, I can lay it all out in one post and never have to discuss it again.

Lucky me.

Let’s start at the beginning

“A very good place to start.” — Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music

There are a lot of people out there who think vaccines are “inherently dangerous because there is no long-term safety data.”

These people have never read a history book.

Let’s go back in time…

The year is 1774. Smallpox is ravaging the world. Sore throats, headaches, and difficulty breathing are the nice symptoms. Instead, disfiguring rashes cover most infected people’s faces, feet, throat, and lungs with pus-filled pustules. A third of adults infected will die. Eight in ten infants will die. At least 400,000 people will die per year for decades, and survivors will be marred with blindness and lifelong scars, driving some to suicide.

Here’s what that looks like in real life:

People tried everything to halt smallpox outbreaks — hot rooms, cold rooms, avoiding melons, wearing the color red, drinking twelve beers per day. None of it worked, of course, but there was one genuine cure — an ancient practice from Africa called “variolation” an early form of inoculation. (We even know the name of the African slave who brought the life-saving practice to North America.)

Variolation is pretty horrific by today’s standards: People who take pus from someone suffering from smallpox and scratch it into the skin of healthy folks. During the American Civil War, people would take the dried scabs of smallpox survivors, grind them into powder, then sniff it up the nose or drink it in tea.

Variolation worked… ish. People would usually get a mild case of smallpox and survive, thanks to their well-prepped immune systems. Some people still got full-blown smallpox and died, but variolation increased your chances of survival.

Over in rural England, one class of person seemed completely immune to smallpox: milkmaids. The women occasionally suffered from a cattle disease called cowpox, but they usually survived with little scarring. In 1774, as a smallpox epidemic once again swept his nation, farmer Benjamin Jesty decided to scratch some cow pus into his family’s skin.

None of them got smallpox.

The science is simple: The cowpox pus — vaccinia — could create antibodies and genetic memory that would trigger the human body to create immunity against life-threatening pathogens.

Ben Jesty renovated his garden cottage into a “Temple of Vaccinia” and invited locals to visit after church for their life-saving doses. For his generosity, he was labeled inhuman, “hooted at, reviled, and pelted whenever he attended markets in the neighborhood,” with some neighbors even worrying he’d turn them into horned beasts.

Because of a lack of widespread and effective vaccination, 300 million people died in the 20th century from smallpox alone.

A resounding success

We now have nearly 250 years of data and it all says the same thing: Vaccination decreases your chances of getting and dying from deadly pathogens.

* We no longer have regular rolling rounds of smallpox, whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio, hib, cholera, and other deadly diseases that have killed tens of millions of people across time.

* Since 1962 alone, 4.5 billion virus cases have been averted thanks to modern vaccinations.

* Tetanus mortality has been reduced by 96% since 1988.

* 17.1 million lives have been saved from measles since 2000.

* Smallpox has been completely eradicated.

To be anti-vaccination is the same as saying you’re anti-medicine.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the world understands that vaccination is medicine. 9 out of 10 people in the world think that vaccinating children is important.

But there’s a small but vociferously vocal minority — typically white, right-leaning, poorly-educated Westerners who are addicted to social media and have never lost a child to a life-threatening pathogen — who would rather risk their family’s life and safety than give them this particular form of medicine.

They have their reasons, but none of them are Socratically sound:

Therapeutics aren’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy

Some of our more earthy brothers and hippie sisters think we should stop playing God and just let nature do its thing, building our immune systems naturally.

Which is exactly what vaccines do.

Innoculation comes from the Middle English word “inoculaten,” which means “grafting a plant part to another plant.” When we get a vaccine, we’re essentially grafting some of the enemy pathogens into our immune system, but in a way that teaches our body to do the miraculous work of defending itself when the real pathogen shows up.

Most football coaches don’t let their teams go onto the field until they’ve analyzed the competition for weaknesses. Most militaries don’t send their soldiers into battle until they know their enemy’s setup. I hate to use computer terms for something as gloriously biological as a homo sapiens, but human bodies are old hardware in need of constant software updates.

Some people think our updates should only come from therapeutics and not inoculations.

They’re forgetting Brock’s Rule: Avoid false dichotomies.

When given two bad options, choose neither.When given two good options, choose both.

Don’t fall prey to the false dichotomy that it’s one or the other, therapeutics versus vaccinations.

Clearly, governments should have instituted a two-year ban on fast food, high fructose corn syrup, added sugars, processed foods, and everything non-organic, then sent everyone to the woods and beaches for exercise and sunlight while scientists worked on a vaccine.

And if you’re so inclined, go ahead and take therapeutics — eat all the essential oils and Ivermectin and vitamins to try to build a killer immune system, and also get the vaccine… which is just another natural immune booster. And we know for certain that the vaccine boosts our immunity response to Covid-19: Over a vaccine test group of nearly 28,000 participants — half vaccinated, half placebo — the unvaccinated group had sixteen times as many Covid-19 cases.

If our rationale for therapeutics is truly to boost our natural immunity, then vaccines are the #1 weapon in our arsenal for doing so. The Cambridge dictionary defines a therapeutic as anything “tending to make a person healthier.” Vaccinations are therapeutic.

Big Pharma profits aren’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy

Big Pharma is awful.

Life-saving medicine shouldn’t be a money-making industry.

There should be zero for-profit vaccines.

Pfizer and the other drug cartels are making billions off Covid, and it’s not right.

I wonder how many more anti-vaxxers would take vaccine therapy if it was owned and administered by democratic governments, not-for-profits, and charities. Imagine how many more people would get vaccinated if the Red Cross did the deed at their local church.

But alas, here we are.

The question we need to ask, just like Cicero and the ancient Romans: Cui bono? Who profits?

Clearly, Big Pharma is reaping a waterfall of cash from their vaccine. That’s a huge issue we must address.

But it doesn’t mean vaccines are any less effective.

What’s interesting is that many anti-vaxxers are happy to take all sorts of other purchased products — literally anything under the sun, including anti-malarial hydroxychloroqu…

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Athens wasn’t a democracy.

Women couldn’t vote.

Slaves couldn’t vote.

Metoikoi (permanent residents) couldn’t vote.

Only male citizens over the age of twenty.

10–20%, max 30% of the population, by most estimates.

It was a step in the right direction away from one-man tyranny and the ignoble “nobility”, but it certainly wasn’t democracy.

America isn’t a democracy.

It wasn’t a democracy when it considered blacks to be three-fifths of a white.

It wasn’t a democracy when it didn’t let the female half vote.

It’s not a democracy with all this ongoing voter disenfranchisement. (Looking at you, Georgia.)

It’s not a democracy while the electoral college exists.

It’s not a democracy when corporations are considered people.

It’s not a democracy while folks like Jeff Bezos can set new lobbying records by flooding Congress with money and muscle.

Or when one person (Mitch McConnell) can block all legislation he doesn’t like for several years.

Ironically, we’re nearing a situation where fewer men will rule America than in ancient Athens.

Democracy is too precious a thing to entrust to politicians.

They’re easily purchased with campaign donations, board seats, and stock options when they retire.

Americans call it lobbying. Other countries call it bribery.

While some versions are certainly better than others, in any form of so-called representational government —electoral college, first-past-the-post, proportional, ranked ballots, liquid — people lose their voice.

We need direct democracy.

One voice, one vote.

Kids included; with their vote delegated to their legal guardian until they reach voting age.

A rule of (all) the people by (all) the people for (all) the people.

With a strong judiciary to protect the individual and a swift administration comprised of real experts to execute the will of the people.

“But knowing all the issues is hard!”

No, it’s not. Especially if kids are well-educated. Especially if false news media are held accountable. Especially if we focus on the most important issues and sideline all the private-interest distractions.

And we can make it easier by having one Democracy Day each quarter where everyone gets a day off to learn about the issues and then votes via blockchain technology from the comfort of their own homes.

Call it an investment in the survival of our species.

Sure, it’s slightly more complicated, but who cares? Teslas are better than Model Ts.

We’ve never tried democracy because it terrifies the hyper-elites.

It also terrifies us commoners.

Humans are highly risk-averse.We hate change.We especially hate the unknown.

But as our population explodes, the environment collapses, and the economy consolidates into a few dozen grasping hands, we’re heading for a world of utter chaos or total tyranny if we go back to a system that’s already failed.

We tried fascism. It killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others.

We tried communism. It killed 38 million Chinese.

We tried socialism. It killed 67 million Russians.

We tried dictatorship. Queen Elizabeth II lives in a castle once occupied by a war criminal who murdered 57,000 people during his reign.

We tried “free” market capitalism. It enslaved 17 million Africans, collapsed the planet, and is currently driving one million people per day into slums.

When you put elites in charge of education, they cripple education. Our kids don’t learn history. Now pair that with a deep and rightful distaste for corporatocracy masquerading as democracy, and it’s no wonder nearly 50% of Millennials and Gen Z take a favorable view of socialism.

They’ve never had a voice.

And if we’re not careful, they never will.

I say we give real democracy a shot.

It’s certainly a better option than anything else we’ve ever tried.

Dear founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, board members Angela Ahrendts, Ken Chenault, Belinda Johnson, Jeff Jordan, Alfred Lin, and Ann Mather, and all investors, hosts, and guests;

I write to you today in the hope that you will radically re-structure your company before it starts a class war in which you will almost certainly lose the lion's share of your wealth, your moral conscience, your place in history as innovators instead of oppressors, and you and your family’s physical safety.

Brian, Joe, Nathan; you started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn’t afford to make rent on your San Francisco apartment, so you bought some air mattresses and served breakfast to your guests. Brilliant.

But things of changed since then. Now you control an $80 billion company that has devoured millions of housing units, evicted countless families, and turned their homes into full-time clerkless hotels, with a promise in your IPO documents to fight democracies in court for as long as you can afford to do so.

To be clear, renting out spare rooms, attics, basements, and backyards in owner-occupied properties isn’t the problem. It’s when an investor outbids a family for a second property and turns it into a full-time Airbnb. Or worse, when a holiday rental company does so. Or worse, when a highly-leveraged hedge fund buys a swath of holiday rental companies. Or worse, when a sovereign wealth fund buys a portfolio of hedge funds. It’s why the average house will cost $10+ million within 50 years.

Picture the future and do the math. Your company’s mandate is to grow exponentially forever. If new housing construction doesn’t keep up — and it hasn’t for more than a decade — it’s mathematically impossible that your company won’t take hundreds of millions of houses away from real families in the decades ahead. Do you think this will end well for you?

As it stands, you have set your company on a path that can only lead to ruin — for millions of houseless families, and eventually, your leadership team and your investors.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

1. Start with transparency

As far as we’re aware, only 8% of Airbnb hosts are renting a room in a single house, and that number is falling fast. How many million houses has Airbnb taken off the market so far, and how many more are being stolen each month?

It’s only fair that the commons knows what we're up against. If you want to build real public trust, your company needs to allow independent auditors to track how many of your hosts are actually owners who rent rooms in houses they occupy full-time, versus how many investors have taken a housing unit off the market and turned it into an unregulated clerkless hotel.

2. Ensure all your hosts are owner-occupiers only

You must revert to your original model. When an owner occupies a house, they take care of it. They know their neighbors. They keep the noise down. They shop locally. They keep the local schools open by sending their kids. They set down roots.

Absentee landlords kill communities. They don’t have roots. They don’t care about noise or safety or cleanliness. They don’t care about schools. They don’t care about neighbors. All they care about is extracting wealth.

Worst of all, the huge proliferation of holiday investors is skyrocketing house prices beyond all affordable values. This means that the real societal contributors — productive workers — have to relocate to less desirable locations further away from their places of work. This is already robbing millions of people of billions of hours of life due to extra commuting, and the environmental toll of all that pollution is yours to bear.

All of this could be ameliorated by ensuring that every single one of your hosts is only renting out space in a housing unit that they own and live in full-time.

3. Limit the number of rental nights to 14/year

Obviously, high year-round commercial availability removes a house from the residential market. The average American gets two weeks of vacation per year. As such, it seems reasonable to limit the number of rental nights to the number of vacation days of the average owner-occupier. Many cities have already started to put such a limit in place, but if your company truly cares about the commons, you’ll pre-empt them all by ensuring your hosts are good citizens first, and hosts seconds.

In a word, there must be no more full-time Airbnbs in residential homes.

4. Stop suing democracies

I realize that part of your business plan includes building a war chest to fight 100,000+ cities in court. But is this really how you want to make your money? By fighting democracy? How will your children and grandchildren look at you when they learn the truth of your actions? Is this how you want history to remember you?

Airbnb’s fight-the-public-forever model is going to cost you a ton of money, and it’s going to cost the commons even more. But do you expect us to just roll over and die? When millions of us don’t have a place to live, what will you expect us to do instead?

5. Stop bribing Congress

Let’s face it, the rest of the world calls corporate lobbying what it actually is: bribing. Why do you have 13 lobbying firms in Congress? Why did you hire a PR firm to meet with Scottish delegates on 28 occasions? Why did you fund more than 400 fake grassroots organizations?

Instead of bribing corporate-captured puppet politicians to make laws that oppress the commons, why not build a company that doesn’t require the overthrow of democracy instead?

6. Start building clerkless hotels

Clearly, there is a huge market for your business.

* People don’t love the hassle of hotel check-ins and check-outs.

* They like paying online.

* They like having kitchens.

* They like having unique and interesting spaces.

If you build it, they will come.

Seriously — as more people start to travel regularly, there’s likely a market for more than a billion Airbnb hotel units globally. Airbnb could earn (actually earn) a real profit by revolutionizing the hotel industry.

You’ve been bleeding investor cash for nearly a decade, so why not make a profit for a change?

7. Start an Airbnbank

Now, of course, the sheer brilliance of extraction economy companies is that you take a massive cut of the profits without shouldering any of the risks and costs, shunting all those pesky expenses onto the backs of your army of hosts.

So why not continue to pass the buck by giving your hosts an opportunity to invest in full-time commercially-zoned vacation space?

Start a bank, give hosts mortgages, and allow them to buy units in Airbnb towers in properly zoned commercial areas. This would allow hosts to skim passive profits off tourists, allow you to make your hefty Airbnb fee, and earn interest like a fat cat Wall Street banker.

You could also control maintenance and cleaning and security on these buildings, extracting further fees from your hosts. You could also rent ground-level space to restaurants, fitness centers, food shops, pubs, barbershops, and spas. Heck, you could even save a few floors for office share space and destroy WeWork for good. Best of all, you’d never have to take another residential unit away from a family ever again.

Because even one house taken off the residential market to be used as a holiday house is one too many.

Like it or not, your company is now the tip of the spear in a movement that is rapidly commodifying global residential real estate. You’re leading the charge in turning a human necessity into a tradeable commodity. Access to affordable shelter is a universal human right, and you’re devastating real people.

A word of warning

Now obviously, your full-time job is simply to boost Airbnb’s stock price, so I don’t expect you’ll heed any of these suggestions; in which case, all that’s left to say is: Enjoy it while it lasts. Because they're coming for you, and when they do, there will be blood. You thought Occupy Wall Street had a big turnout? Wait until hundreds of millions of evicted renters smash your em…