If you look at our past as people, the one thing that causes our downfall is human greed. It is something that plagued the Roman Empire and now is affecting you. Every bankruptcy starts slowly at first, but then it happens suddenly. Our economy is like that but we will survive and we will thrive. Join Halle Eavelyn as she shares her thoughts on whether or not investing in crypto is safe right now. Learn how women can start to lead the way toward sharing and not greed. Believe in the Goddess of Crypto today!
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Greed Past, Present & Future
Welcome to another episode. I have had so many wonderful people on that I haven’t had a chance to do any episodes of my own. I’m excited to get a chance to talk to you about all of the things that have been happening in the crypto world. If you were a long-time subscriber and by a long time, I mean we have had over 30 episodes, if you’ve been subscribing most of the year, you may recall back early on in these episodes that I mentioned a dear friend.
My friend was a guy that I had known since I was a little kid. We met when we were about 9 or 10 years old. He is very high up in banking, specifically in wealth advisement and wealth investment. He had taken me to task for being as he put it unconscionably open to scams and all the bad things that he was seeing with crypto. He believes that crypto is a complete ripoff. Everything from Bitcoin down to Shia Inu and everything in between is horrible and should be avoided at all costs.
He has known me my whole life. He’s like, “As a good person, how can you do this? How can you talk this way to people when it’s obvious that it’s a Ponzi scheme and a scam and should never be allowed to go forward? It needs to be deeply regulated and should be avoided at all costs in the meantime.” That was an eye-opening conversation for me. I don’t even know if he knows this but at the time, it hurt me deeply because of our strong and lengthy friendship and the fact that may very well be the only argument we have ever had.
It’s not like we see each other all the time. We have been Facebook friends. I saw him years ago in person but it is that I know if I needed something, I could call and he would support me. The reverse is true as well. This was uncomfortable. Here’s a guy that’s considered top of the game in the financial market. Here is little old me who doesn’t know or understand very much about the financial world.
I have not gone to school for this. I have not studied this stuff. I have had my lumps when I tried to get into stock investing or when I rode the real estate market al but then I rode it back down and things like that. I’ve been the victim of a Ponzi scheme. I’ve said all of these things in my episodes. I’ve shared all of this history. New readers are like, “Why am I reading this?”
The truth is that because I’ve had my ups and my downs, I’ve discovered it isn’t brain surgery. I can see what is coming with the future of money. That has been very obvious to me for the last several years. It is not okay for me to hide my head and say, “I didn’t go to school for this. I don’t have the 30-year career that my friend who’s the VP at one of the big companies has.” He lives, breathes and eats this life and has a ton of money.
I have just now through a completely different channel, through the sacred divine feminine and this download about the show come to this world. As I’ve shown up, it’s at a time when we are teetering on the precipice of a great financial tsunami, which I talk about all the time. I spoke at Women Web3 Miami. There’s a lot of crazy fluctuating stuff that happens at these crypto events.
The talk I was supposed to give didn’t end up happening. I ended up on this panel with three other women and a guy talking about women in Web3, women in crypto and women of color. Talk about underrepresented in crypto but it was fascinating. One of the women was from Argentina. Go back to my episode on the value of money in different countries where I talked about seeing these huge disparities.
She’s from one of those countries. She was saying that Argentina has dealt with a complete collapse of its financial system every ten years. She said, “If you put your US dollars in the bank, the bank says, ‘These will be safe.’ When you go to take your money back, it’s being given to you in devalued pesos because the currency has collapsed again or they’re not giving it back to you at all.”
We have an expression in crypto, “Bitcoin fixes this.” No kidding, it does because one Bitcoin is one Bitcoin, whether that Bitcoin is worth $10,000, $70,000 or $0.68. A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin. If somebody believes that it has that value, it will transfer. That is very important to remember because there are a lot of outside agencies and things like the Federal Reserve saying, “This thing has this much value.” Remember, the Federal Reserve is neither federal and it does not belong to the government, nor is its reserve. It does not hold anything in reserve. It sets these rates.
One, Bitcoin is one Bitcoin. Whether that Bitcoin is worth $10,000 or 68 cents, it's still a Bitcoin. Click To TweetThere has been a lot of history in the United States of having a very strong dollar. The dollar is strong but you sit on stage with somebody who says, “Yes, but Argentina. Yes, but Ecuador.” You realize this is happening in a lot of different countries, Greece, for example. Lebanon is in a situation where its currency has been devalued by 95%. I’ve known Lebanese people my whole life. I used to date a wealthy Lebanese man when I was in college. He was a little too sophisticated for me but I remember the real estate holdings and the family legacy from generations.
I can presume all of that is gone because of this thing. I’ve talked in past episodes about the book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which has won so many awards and which is so beautifully written but it is the story of a family’s rise to wealth that was eradicated in one single afternoon by the Nazis who were like, “Please sign here and walk away from 100% of everything that you own,” which was everything. They owned enough money that they loaned their money to the government.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Money Is All Relative
You look at that and you’re like, “How did this happen?” The answer is they walked away with their lives. The government said, “All of this money is in exchange for how we will not put you in the concentration camps. We will let you leave.” They did because which part is priceless, all their accumulation of wealth or their lives? Money is always relative. It’s relative because as we talk about regularly, it’s the greatest story ever told. We have a belief in money. Therefore, money exists as the medium of exchange.
If we had a belief in furs, beads, tulip bulbs or gold, then that would become the medium of exchange. In my circles in crypto and especially with people who know what they’re talking about in the crypto space, I consider people who are like Bitcoin maxis or in other words, people who accumulate Bitcoin and don’t believe in any other form of crypto hardcore about what’s going on with the financial future. Everybody sees these imminent collapses.
I read a very long thread on Twitter. A guy is paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway. The phrase or the exchange is one guy says to another guy, “How did you go bankrupt?” The man says, “Slowly at first and then suddenly.” He paraphrased that with the stock market and said, “How did the stock market crash happen? Slowly at first and then suddenly.” What we’re looking at is about the time when there’s going to be a big stock market crash, which will then precede a recession, which will last somewhere between 1 to 2 years.
I always say, “Do your research. This is no financial advice.” I’m still saying that but what I am saying also is it’s gotten to the point where it’s pretty obvious that we are on the brink of a very large recession. Is it something we will recover from? I don’t think that we are going to be like Lebanon. The world’s currency is considered the most valuable. The top is the pound and the dollar but it’s all relative.
Human Greed: Money is always relative because people have a belief in money, so therefore it exists as the medium of exchange.
Remember, all fiat and all government-issued currencies are backed by nothing. There are noises that other currencies will be the rupee, for example, in India. They’re saying that will be backed by gold but nothing is backed by anything. There is not enough gold in the world to back US currency. They would have to devalue it. When you have inflation of the kind that we have had because we have printed so much currency, we would have to devalue it a lot to get it back to the old way.
I was reading a book about Queen Caroline. Queen Caroline was the queen of George IV. This was during the Regency period of the British Empire in the early 1800s. It lasted a very short regency. It was a short period. Think Jane Austen. During the period when there was this coronation going on, they were talking about how much everything cost. For example, they mentioned a suit or the costume that a duke would wear to the coronation as costing £800.
I thought, “That’s a lot of money.” You start to think about things costing a few shillings. It said that the pound had been devalued by something 500 times less valuable. This book was written in the mid-’90s. It was only 170 years earlier. That’s a big deal. How do we have those kinds of expenses for a costume costing £800 but then that was worth 500 times what the pound is worth now?
Think about that in terms of devaluing the currency. We look at stuff like that. It all to me comes back to the way that we as a world or Western culture value and do not value the commodities, the staples and the niceties of our world. We have this belief, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” This is going to be a two-part piece. We will talk about the difference between men and women when it comes to greed in the second installment but in this part, I want to talk about the way that the world looks at things.
People have this belief that he who dies with the most toys wins. Click To TweetBitcoin was created by the people for the people. It is designed so that the unbanked person in Africa is able to get the same attention because of the Bitcoin that he has on his phone as I can get in America or a Canadian guy on Wall Street or in the stock market in London can get. Why is it that we look at these things so differently in our world or our culture? I believe it is because we do not value the basic rights that each should have as humans.
You look at the amount of money that, for example, Jeff Bezos has. He was famously quoted as saying, “It’s hard to find good places to give money to,” while his ex-wife has given away another $2 billion. She gives away a lot of the money that she got in the divorce. It’s because as one human being, she’s not looking for the next mega yacht. At one point, they had to disassemble a bridge to get Bezos’s yacht through in Europe because it was so big. You look at what’s more important here.
You could have fed a small country for a year on what it took to dismantle the bridge so that Bezos’s yacht could get through. He couldn’t rent another yacht on the other side of the bridge, leave his yacht on that side of the bridge, go to wherever he was going in the Netherlands and then come back to his yacht afterward. He couldn’t take his helicopter off his yacht and fly the helicopter. There were a lot of ways to solve that without taking the bridge out but that’s the thing. You’re talking about an echelon of belief about money when it has nothing to do with what we would consider our current reality.
I have often thought that one of the things that Amazon should do is pay for all of the afterschool and preschool programs in the United States. Why do I think that? It’s almost a rounding error to how much Amazon makes and the goodwill that you would get when pretty much every person who has more than an extra $50 a year is buying something from Amazon with it.
When you look at that and see that all Americans are pretty much using Amazon and then most people in the world as well who can get to the computer and process a transaction like that, they’re all using Amazon. There’s so much money being made. Why not give back in a global way? When Amazon first came out, I remember thinking what an incredibly innovative and unusual entrepreneur Bezos was but 30 years later, we can look and see he’s like every other guy. He’s acquiring as much wealth as he can personally.
The Effects Of Human Greed
There was a funny meme that I saw that said, “When monkeys collect all the bananas for themselves, refuse to share with other monkeys and hoard all of the bananas, we do a science experiment on them. When a guy does it, we put him on the cover of Time Magazine and say what a captain of the industry he is.” I thought about that and how wrong that is. When we look at the monkeys, we can see how wrong it is but when we look at the man, we can’t.
When it comes to our greed as a culture and a historical timeline and throughline with the way that we have handled our money, we can see that great greed is always the thing that eventually leads to a great downfall. Pride goes before a fall and all of that but when you trace the history, for example, of the Roman Empire, which was over 1,000 years, you can look to the roots of that downfall from where they began to devalue their currency and where the gold began to be mixed in with silver and then copper. There was less gold. That was the beginning of the end for the empire but it took a long time, slowly and then suddenly. We are on the verge of suddenly beginning to happen.
If you look at history, you will always see that great greed always leads to a great downfall. Click To TweetLet’s talk about current events and the fact that my friend from childhood would love for me to be eating crow as he points out to me how right he was about crypto and how wrong I was. To be honest with you, he is a good guy. He did no such thing. He has not shown me up, he has not called me and he has not pointed out on every episode how wrong I am, to his great credit.
However, at this moment in history with Sam Bankman-Fried having spectacularly tanked his company and having had so much bankruptcy go on lately with exchanges, Gemini is probably the next one on the way down, which is founded by the Winklevoss twins. The Winklevoss twins have a book written about them called Bitcoin Billionaires. They were the first people who saw the value of Bitcoin to the point where they did so much accumulating that when Bitcoin went up, they became billionaires.
What’s going to be happening to their fund? What’s going to be happening to the way that we believe in their business acumen, having had the incredible prescience to say, “We don’t want our Facebook money in the form of money. We want it in the form of Facebook stock.” Facebook went through the roof, became billionaires over that, put their money into Bitcoin and became billionaires again. Those are two guys who look like they know how to bet on a winning horse, yet all of a sudden, they may lose their company, fund and exchange. It looks like bad news.
You want to talk about your mindset being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sam Bankman-Fried said, “I would like to give away my $30 billion fortune.” Supposedly, he’s got $100,000 in the bank. That may seem like a lot to some of us but not to somebody who had $30 billion. I’m assuming everybody knows all about the scandal that has been going on. He was considered the next Warren Buffett. We’re not quite sure whether he’s on the run from the police because no arrest orders were issued but that seems to be imminent. If it isn’t, then the system is even more broken than we had thought.
The point of all of this is that there are becoming enormous structures that are based on money. There’s no longer the concept of too big to fail, “Is $30 billion too big to fail?” It did spectacularly. What is going to happen? When it came to what was going on behind the scenes, at first, it looked like, “That poor guy.” It has come out that all these illegal transactions were going on backdoors that were built in. The left hand was sending money to the right hand but the right hand was saying, “Look over here to the left hand,” so people didn’t know what was happening.
Human Greed: There are so many enormous structures these days that are based on money. There is no longer that concept of being too big to fail.
I’m using extremely general layman’s making-stuff-up analogy terms because I don’t want to get into the specifics of the transactions. People have written plenty about that. That’s not the point of this. The point is that it’s the emperor’s new clothes, yet everybody from the Shark Tank guy, Mr. Wonderful and most of the major players in the crypto space all said that his company was amazing. They started calling Bankman-Fried Bankman-Fraud. I thought that was very funny.
He was the second-largest donor to the Democratic party and the Biden campaign. All Democrats get stained with, “What did you know?” In another year, it would have been to the Republican party. It has been hard to tell who is more corrupt and how much more corruption we can handle. His company was the fifth company to go bankrupt. Huge exchanges are going down.
How do you tell who’s right? How can I look my friend or this high-level finance guy with fiat in the eye and say, “I still believe in crypto. There’s still going to be a huge upside to this market. This is where millionaires and billionaires will be made?” I believe that the Goddess of Crypto knew what she was doing when she knocked me off my bike that day and said, “This is the financial tsunami that’s coming.”
My friend still believes in fiat currency and that it is the only way to go and that crypto is the wrong thing to do. Why am I here telling you the exact reverse? It’s because of the fall of Rome. Slowly at first and then suddenly, we are getting to that tipping point of suddenly but we’re not there yet. I believe it’s going to happen in my lifetime.
I believe it’s going to happen over the next 10 to 20 years. If I’m wrong, it’s going to happen in the lifetime of your children but it’s coming because as a people, a population or individual persons accepted culturally, we are all about living inside of a world where there is as much greed as possible and as much grabbing of more than enough resources for each person as possible and not distributing those bananas among the other monkeys saying, “I’m going to keep all the bananas.”
We’re smart enough to see that’s not the fair thing to do when it comes to a tribe of chimpanzees but when it comes to a tribe of humans, we seem incapable of seeing the path that we are on in this regard. Therefore, eventually, we will be like Argentina, Ecuador, Lebanon or any of the countries where this has happened in. That is the trajectory that we are on. The last point that I want to make here is the Dalai Lama said, “The world will be saved by the Western woman.” That means you and me.
Steering The Ship Away From Greed
I believe that we are being charged with getting the ship back on track, writing it and steering it in a different direction where greed is not the thing that we are all moving through and toward more rather that we begin to share our resources among us. The holidays are coming up. What are you doing to share your resources? What are you doing to make different choices with your money this holiday season?
Human Greed: The world will be saved by the western woman. Women are being charged to get the ship back on track, away from greed and towards sharing.
During the 2021 holiday, I made some donations through my business because I put aside part of my profit to do charitable donations. I waited until there was all the triple matching and everything. I spent a few hundred dollars on several different charitable organizations. I love animals. I donate to the Humane Society, Charity Water, Unstoppable Foundation, Underground Railroad and Feeding South Florida. I love all those organizations. I gave each of them what I considered a pretty small donation under $1,000 in each case.
There were personal phone calls made to me from most of those organizations because of the amount that I had donated. They were so grateful. The triple matching or the double matching for different organizations was huge. That told me how little you have to do to make what looks to them like a big difference. That was very empowering for me to realize that we say, “I have so little to give. I’m giving this little bit,” when we are giving so much.
I was making my other donations throughout the year a little bit at a time but monthly because they like that when you do it monthly. I didn’t notice but the minute my donation hit over $500, it was like, “That’s a big deal.” Be aware of what kind of change you can make in those lives, especially in a year when we’re talking about a recession and when people are talking about tightening their belts because you can be the person that is making that difference.
If you’re a woman and you’re reading this, then you too are being called as the Dalai Lama said to be one of those Western women who will change and save the world. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. I’m looking forward to having you share this with your wives, your daughters, your girlfriends, your moms, your besties and everybody so that every woman in the world will know that there is a financial tsunami coming. We can learn to surf and ride the waves. I’ll see you next time.