Living Your Truth

tl;dr: If you believe in something, you have to take a public stand for it. Even-and especially- if it makes you uncomfortable.

Every time I heard someone say, “you need to live your truth,” I dismissed it as touchy feely, psychobabble mumbo-jumbo. (Yes, those exact words)

It felt very subjective.

Truth, I surmised, wasn’t subjective. Either it was heads or it was tails.

It wasn’t both.

We weren’t talking about quantum superposition here.

Or were we?

Truth is More Subjective than I Realized

It was my brother, Barak, who helped me realize recently that I was wrong about that.

As we headed into week 2 of corona lockdown (it’s March 27th as I write this), I was tracking the discussions leading up to the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill.

And I was really struggling with it. Really struggling.

First of all, I had no idea how congress could put together a 1,000 page bill covering $2.2 trillion in spending over the course of a few days while dealing with coronavirus.

But I could suspend my belief on that one.

The second one, which caused me greater disbelief was how come no one bothered to ask, “well, where is this money actually coming from?”

“How will we pay for this?”

If there’s such limited economic activity…no one is going to bars, movies, restaurants, few people are flying, there are no events or concerts, where is the actual value creation?

Sure, we’re all buying from Amazon and Netflix, etc., but the “real” economy is pretty much a ghost town.

Yet, here comes this huge amount of cash that the country is going to spend on a scarce amount of physical resources.

We may be told, “there’s plenty of food in the system,” but that doesn’t mean it’s going to get to the right places. It doesn’t mean that countries or even states won’t start hoarding it. Some already have started.

Yet, the news reports (at least those that I see) just talk about “oh, here’s the money that we’re sending to people to help them” but there’s literally zero discussion about what it means for us long-term.

There’s an entire blog post that I could write about the death of American capitalism as I understood it, but that’s for another day. Plus Nicholas Nassem Taleb already wrote it better than I ever could- Corporate Socialism: The Government is Bailing Out Investors & Managers Not You

Long-term Money Creation

I don’t have a Ph.D in economics, but I have studied a fair amount of it.

Whether that matters or not, I don’t know, but I kept looking at this and asking myself “what does it all mean?”

On Monday, March 22nd, I found myself in a bit of a funk.

I was looking at all of this money getting created and I thought about Michael Burry.

Burry, you may recall, is one of the protagonists of the Big Short and bet against the US housing market in 2008. Back in September 2019, he identified the current market bubble as well.

There are some powerful scenes when Burry sees the flaws in the market, but very few others do.

I can imagine that it was very, very lonely for him. I can imagine that it was stressful.

But his truth was that the housing market was a house of cards.

My truth, that day, was that the amount of money being created out of thin air by the government and the Federal Reserve was also a house of cards.

And it depressed me because it’s the Bigger Short.

I don’t want an economic collapse. It doesn’t give me joy. I don’t want to be right. I really want to be wrong.

I am just not sure that I am wrong.

I often say that my sojourn into crypto has made me appreciate 3 things.

First, blockchain–because it’s a wicked cool technology.

Second, Bitcoin, because I think Satoshi will ultimately be recognized as one of the great innovators of all time, up there with Newton, Galileo, Gutenberg, and Edison.

Third, because it has forced me to explore the world of money and finance.

Fear and Vulnerability

After all of that work and research, I looked at the numbers from the government, the markets, and more and I thought, “I can’t just sit here and not do anything.”

But I was still a bit scared.

It’s one thing for blog readers, who have signed up for this, to get daily doses of “here’s why crypto is better.”

It’s another thing to go out there and post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Medium and publicly take a stand saying “you should really take a look at this NOW.”

As one friend said to me a while back, “you’re staking your career and your reputation on this.”

That’s true. For me, there’s always the little voice in the back of my head that says, “Jer, you’re human…what if you are WRONG?”

It’s the feeling of the little kid who looks stupid in front of his friends at school and feels embarrassment and shame.

“What if you are not as smart as you think you are?”

“What if they laugh at you?”

But then I thought about all of the platitudes that I’ve read over the years. All the Thoreau and Angelou quotes and the Godin posts.

So I wrote a long post and shared it with a few people in draft form. After they all signed off on it, I was ready to publish.

I felt the nerves, but in a moment of Brene Brown leaning in to vulnerability, I just put it out there on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Medium.

My tombstone may say, “the idiot who told us to buy Bitcoin,” but at least I will die knowing that I lived my truth.