What are your favorite negative character arcs? A negative character arc is one where the protagonist gets worse over time rather than better. They might or might not turn for the better in the end, but the majority of the time is spent on a negative descent. A well-done example would be Frodo. The ring wears him down through the course of the story. An example that should have been good but wasn’t executed as well as it should have been, would be Anakin in the Star Wars prequel.

GM. Chapter 13 of Broken Money is called "Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown". It focuses on the US trade deficit and why it arises structurally. In short, since the USD is the global reserve currency (for reserve assets, international contracts, FX trading pairs, and cross-border funding), there is tremendous automatic demand for USD in the world compared to other fiat currencies. To supply the world with that ever-growing need for USD to service all sorts of needs, the United States runs structural trade deficits with the rest of the world. That's how the USD spills out to the rest of the world for them to use. And the mechanism for that is that the overvalued USD boosts Americans' import power, reduces Americans' low-margin export competiveness, and basically forces open that trade deficit. That trade deficit is the cost of maintaining the benefits USD system as currently structured. The fatal flaw is that those who bear the cost (e.g. industrialists in the Rust Belt) are not the same as those to gain the benefits (e.g. Wall Street and Washington DC folks). And those costs and benefits accumulate over decades, resulting in rising populism and pushback, which is now front and center. The challenge that the administration faces is that they have identified a real problem, but are tackling the surface issues rather than the underlying structural issues. Anyway, I uploaded that chapter 13 on my website for free reading: https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/broken-money-chapter-13.pdf

Taiwanese folk metal.

Today I found out that Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy, and Paris the psychotic assassin from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, are the same actress. That's it. That's the note.

My fireside with Anthony Scaramucci and Peter Diamondis on bitcoin at the Abundance 360 Summit is now available here. Notably, this was largely toward a non-bitcoin audience, a very tech-focused audience. Much of it will be basic for people here but it was tailored to that group.

Vimeo

Bitcoin & Broken Money

Anthony Scaramucci Founder, SkyBridge Capital Lyn Alden General Partner, Ego Death Capital Fireside: Bitcoin & Broken Money

The fact that bond yields are UP today is the most noteworthy thing, imo.

Currently listening while I work:

A lot of people, including some really well known ones, cite the figure that the U.S. has to roll $9 trillion in debt over the next 12 months, as though it’s a disaster. Sometimes they assume the average interest rate is spread over the full Treasury debt duration evenly, including from years ago. But in reality, most of what is maturing is short-term debt, which will have similar interest rates as it had over the past couple years, and mostly the same holders will refinance it. Only a minority is longer-term debt, meaning lower-rate bonds will mature and get refinanced by higher-rate bonds. Not a giant deal. I’m first in line to talk about debts, deficits, and interest expense becoming a problem. I even have probably the best-known single meme about it. So, zooming out, yes it’s a major deal. But most of the time when people cite the gross refinancing numbers over the next 12 months, it’s a flag that they’re unfamiliar with the subject, and getting caught up in alarmism.

I remember back when Israel went into Gaza, and markets took a hit, bitcoin was down notably and many tradfi macro folks who I otherwise respect for good market analysis were like “Why is bitcoin down today? I thought it’s a safe haven, lol.” Similarly, today when bitcoin is up amid market turmoil, the bitcoin bulls celebrate it. I’d be cautious about all one-day moves. If you over-emphasize them, you risk looking like someone with a memory of a goldfish, or otherwise operating with selection bias. However, a point I have made in the past, and will repeat today, is that there are different types of risk-off events. A risk-off event that hurts liquidity is likely to hurt bitcoin. A risk-off event that demands more liquidity, or that is unrelated to liquidity (eg tariffs attacking corporate margins), is more likely to benefit or at least kind of spare Bitcoin. Focusing on Bitcoin as a risk on or risk off asset is first level thinking. People who understand it deeply and self custody it tend to view it as risk off period, for good reason. But not always in terms of price. In terms of price, whether it functions as a risk on/off asset varies based on what type of risk on/off catalyst it was. This catalyst risks hitting margins, not liquidity, and thus so far the reaction makes sense. But it still pays to be careful not to celebrate one-day moves too much. Cautiously bullish.

A lot of market participants expect capitulation from Trump, but imo the more likely outcome is little/no capitulation, at least for a while, but instead attempts at shifting the blame of the costs and some mild verbal capitulations to calm market a bit. Like it's the Fed's fault for not cutting rates, and things like that. Rebalancing decades of imbalanced trade policy does not happen without pain. The issue is that the administration marketed it as being relatively painless, as any politicians would. And many voters bought into it. So it's not to an easy problem, and it's a noble goal, but there was a mismatch between what was promised and what is possible, as is often the case. Some interesting semi-capitulation points to watch: will Bessent maintain the high rate of Tbill issuance for liquidity that he criticized Yellen for? Will Trump shake out his inner circle and use several of them as scapegoats?

When collaborative content creators are on Nostr, it’s easier to give them feedback. The smaller audience aspect of it here is ironically a feature because I can be more blunt, while sharing it elsewhere. Tomorrow I’m going to pin this interview to my Twitter/X profile for a month, due to title changes made from Nostr feedback here. Sure, I could give feedback via email or DM, but if you’ve seen my emails and DMs, and the sheer amount of stuff there, you’d see why I suck on those fronts and am not very responsive aside from close contacts. I have a couple favorite summaries of my Broken Money content that I point people to if they don’t want to read a 500 page finance book. -One was a key Princeton talk I gave last year. It set a new video record for the Princeton Economics channel by an order of magnitude. Their top video ever by an order of magnitude. The power of bitcoiners. -The other is a Broken Money visual explainer video that I commissioned for five figures because, as the Joker would say, “it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.” That got even more views at 300k and counting, plus like a million more on Twitter. -This interview with Max, published today, might be the best new place I’ll point people to for a Broken Money summary. It’s the third one, and among the top. Like, I’m going to send people to it before sending them to the visual explainer I commissioned for five figures. I’m happy to disrupt myself once something better emerges. Full send. Thanks to Nostr. View quoted note →

A year ago at the Madeira conference, I filmed an in-person interview. It was published today, and I think it's the best interview I did in 2024. It's documentary style, and so editing compressed it in a good way. This interview, focused on evergreen content, walks through the Broken Money thesis in 50 minutes, whereas the full Broken Money audiobook is over 17 hours. An exploration of monetary technology on history, and how it impacts us today socially, economically, and politically. As is usual for my interviews that appear on YouTube, I don't love the title. It mentions a "$13 trillion time bomb", which in the context of the interview referred to Brown University's estimate for what the War on Terror will have cost by 2050, with interest expense. But the content was key. My most locked-in interview of 2024.

Whenever you start something with a statistically low chance of success, whether it's starting a business or writing a book or landing some dream job, it starts with unironically going through this filter:

Had an interesting interaction with a cashier today. This young man in his 20s was ringing people up. His voice and mannerisms were basically like Napoleon Dynamite. In front of me, the customer said “thank you, have a good day” and he said back “that would be impossible, but you have a good day ma’am.” I was only half paying attention so I assumed I misheard. He then rang my products up as I focused on packing my bags. I pay and say basically “thanks, have a good day”. He says, “that would be impossible ma’am, but you have a good day.” I paused, hearing the repeated statement. He started scanning the next customer’s items. Part of me wanted to ask why it’s impossible to have a nice day. It’s so specific. But doing so would interrupt his focus on the next customer. I took my bags, walked out, and looked back a couple times. In hindsight, I wish I’d asked. That would be more important than risking the next customer’s checkout time by a couple minutes. Next time I’m at the supermarket, I’m going to do a scan of the cashiers to see if he’s among them.

“You can just do things” is one of my favorite meme phrases that I see out there. Back around my senior year of high school, I consciously decided to shift to that mindset. I went from kind of operating within rules, and trying to leave a light touch around me, to being more assertive and creative about what I want to do. It was kind of a quiet “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me” vibe shift. At the time I think the terminology I filtered it through was Sagan’s pale blue dot. Like, everything that has ever been done is on this crazy little ball spinning through space. So it’s okay to just do things, to take chances, to think outside of the box. Because the box itself is already actually kind of crazy. And then in the mid-2010s, like around 2016, I did kind of a checkup on how I’m doing, and felt that while I had used that strategy well, I wasn’t thinking big enough. I had primarily used that strategy to climb up the ranks in the engineering world, with the goal of making things better for myself and my colleagues/division; I would just do things and be the person who pushed to say “yes” a lot and it had worked out really well. But for my next phase, I felt I needed to “just do things” outside of an organizational structure as well. So I started my namesake website. I previously had a small anon website on stock investing which I was able to sell to some publisher and that gave me experience, but this one would be different. It would have my face on it. Any sort of content creator starts by being a little crazy. It starts with the improbable concept that you could create written or audio or visual content that thousands or millions of people will actually want to see and get value out of, in the sea of endless content that already exists. But it starts somewhere. With just doing things. My view was that I would do my best, leverage the experience that I had, and give it my honest shot. Never looked back since. It’s been a wild journey.