The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast #25 — Jeff Vandroux: A Post-Capitalist Future, Distributism & Bitcoin Muscle

Link to the video: https://youtu.be/ikuNgO_m16U

Cedric Youngelman: Jeff Vandroux! Attorney, CPA, bodybuilder, coder, maintainer of BTCPay-Python library, populist, Jeff has been featured in Bloomberg, Bitcoin Magazine, and CoinDesk. He’s appeared on many notable podcasts and is the author of notable Medium post A Post-Capital Future, Localism, Subsidiarity, and Other Topics: Reflections on Tales from the Crypt #126, and Charity, Welfare, and Usury: The Capitalist Paradox. Jeff welcome to the show, it’s great to have you on!

Jeff Vandroux [00:55]: Thanks for having me man! I really appreciate it!

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah! Let’s get into the first thing, I’m just kinda curious: what is the maintainer of the BTCPay-Python library do and what does that even mean? I hear Python and I think snakes. I know it’s coding and you’re uploading the programs but that’s all I know.

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah it’s a very small library that interacts with the BTCPay API. So the short story is if you are trying to build, say, an e-commerce site or something like that and you’re building it in Python and you want to accept BTCPay for payments, you can make use of this library as sort of a layer that can help you communicate with your BTCPay server and automatic everything through the shopping cart and all that sort of stuff. And it would also help you track your payments, things like that. That part of BTCPay is a huge project! The Python library is just a little tiny, teeny piece of it. Not a ton of code involved in it. It just helps you, like I said, interact with BTCPay server if you’ve got a Python-based application that you’re running. Python’s a programming language.

Cedric Youngelman: Sure! What drives you or motivates you to take on this project or spearhead it? Put your time and energy into it?

Jeff Vandroux: I just kind of did it for the hell of it! So I didn’t design the library, I picked up maintaining it and added a few things to it, because it didn’t have a current maintainer at the time. So I went to school a very long time ago for computer science, actually before Python was even a language that was really in use. So I had some level of background in it from undergrad, but I never had a job as a software engineer or anything like that. I didn’t end up even finishing the computer science program at school. But, when I got more into Bitcoin one of the first things I did a couple years ago is I took Justin Moon’s bootcamp that he was giving at that time which was taught in Python. It was a Bitcoin-related Python coding bootcamp called BUIDL Bootcamp. I took it and one of the the things I started playing around with once I got back into coding was BTCPay — which is not a Python-based project in general—it’s written in C#. But I actually just looked to see if there was any way that I could help or contribute, and one of the things I did was I ended up taking over maintaining that library, because I built a Python-based plug-in for it that helped it communicate with QuickBooks. So I was making use of the Python library, and then at that point Nicholas asked me if I’d be interested in taking over the maintaining the Python library. So I did! It’s a small project, doesn’t require a big brain to do it, which made it perfect for me! So that’s how I got involved in it!

Cedric Youngelman [04:07]: I think you’ve got a big brain! You’ve got some big brained ideas! And we’re gonna get into them momentarily. The next thing I want to talk about — so you said you went to school for computer science in undergrad. Somewhere you picked up your JD and your CPA. So I’m assuming you went to law school and just picked up your CPA after that?

Jeff Vandroux: No not quite! So I went to night school. I worked full-time undergrad and law school. So I didn’t really take school all that seriously, particularly undergrad. I was just working. Back in those days you could still make a pretty good living without a college degree, so I did I worked as a salesman. I did the computer science thing — I excelled at it, but I was like, Well, I can keep doing this computer science major while I’m working, and it actually requires a decent amount of work, and there’s no girls in computer science classes. Or, like I speak Spanish pretty well, so I could just major in Spanish instead, and those classes are essentially all female, and the classes aren’t that difficult! So I was like, Oh! This is like a no-brainer decision! I’ll just finish my degree in Spanish, so I did! That’s why I got my undergraduate degree in Spanish. Then when I graduated I was like, Well, at this point I knew I didn’t want to be a salesman forever, but I didn’t really know what else I wanted to do. I don’t know if any of you guys have done commissioned sales before, but it really grinds on you after a while! You’re dealing with the public all day in kind of a high pressure situation. You’re spending your entire day all day making people buy stuff. Persuading people to buy stuff. I didn’t want to do that, so I just started looking for a profession where I thought I’d be pretty well set. Something that required licensure so that I didn’t earn a decent living that anybody could just get involved in it. And I bounced around a few different ideas. I was always kind of technical minded, so I thought maybe getting involved on the tax side might work out for me in that way, and in my little town there just happened to be a guy that happened to be both an attorney and a CPA, and I realized that that made you more unique in the marketplace, it allowed you to do more interesting stuff if you had both as opposed to just being a CPA or something like that. So I went to law school, which I also did at night. Now keep in mind at this point I’d never taken an accounting class before — I had still never taken an accounting class in college. I had a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and that was about it! So what I did was I went to — well the first thing I did was I taught myself accounting from a CPA exam prep book, and then I took the CPA exam and passed it. So at that point you still can’t be a CPA though, because to be a CPA at least at that time in my state, you had to have a bachelor’s degree, you had to have at least 150 credits, which I didn’t have because you need 120 for a bachelor’s degree which I didn’t have yet. At least 30 of your credits had to be in accounting, and you had to work under the supervision of a CPA for at least a year like a full-time job. So what I did was — CPA exam into obtaining a full-time job at a small accounting firm where I didn’t get paid very much but they were great to take me on and teach me. I don’t think they even realized that my degree wasn’t in accounting, because on my resume I just put that I had a bachelor’s degree and I passed the CPA exam — and passing the CPA exam is kind of all that matters. So I got that job and I worked there while I went to law school at night. They were flexible and allowed me to not have to work crazy hours or anything like that so I could commute to law school at night. So I did that for a year and I had the experience requirement and now I had the 150 credits because my law school credits counted, they were still credits. But I didn’t have the 30 credits in accounting. In New Jersey we have a university called Thomas Edison state college that will give you credit for your life experience, so I went to Thomas Edison state college and said, Hey, I had passed all four parts of this CPA exam on my first try, and I’ve been working in public accounting for a year — will you guys give me 30 accounting credits based on that experience? And they said yes! Predominantly based on the strength of having passed the CPA exam. So I had to pay for those credits, of course, but I didn’t have to actually take classes or tests for them. I had to provide proof of everything, proof that I passed the CPA exam, proof that I’d been working in public accounting for a year, and they gave me 30 credits for accounting on a pass/fail basis, but they were still college credits. And they weren’t from the institution where I had my bachelor’s degree but that didn’t matter. At that point I had all of the requirements I needed to pass my state’s licensing requirements, so I did! Around that same time, I also finished law school and took the bar exam and passed that. Bar exam much, much easier than the CPA exam — not even close! CPA exam, much much much harder! At least in my state. Yeah CPA is really four different exams. You take it in four parts, it has some much bigger breadth of knowledge. Bar exam is two days. You just sit down, two days, you’re down with it. At that point, I was licensed in both! I knew that I wanted to do my own thing, so I opened up my own firm right away as soon as both of my licensures were finalized. In the beginning, Bitcoin didn’t exist back then, so I didn’t have any focus obviously at all with regard to Bitcoin. I just had a tax firm. I did tax returns, I did tax planning work, I did a lot of estate planning work back then too. In those days the estate tax threshold was only a million dollars, so a lot of people were paying federal state tax so they needed fancier estate plans because they needed to be really tax-driven. That’s not really the case anymore, estate planning is not really as tax-driven because for a married couple today, the federal state tax threshold is almost $23 million dollars. So the type of work that I used to do pretty much disappeared over the years! It just wasn’t a thing that people needed anymore, for regulatory reasons. Around that same time I started to get involved with Bitcoin! Bought Bitcoin myself and I was like, Well, wouldn’t it be really cool if I could buy Bitcoin for myself in a tax-advantaged way through a retirement account. So I came up with the structure — now I refer to it as The KeyKeeper IRA structure — then, it didn’t even have a name. For myself, predominantly! I was like, well this is for me! And I offered it to clients as a thing around that time but nobody cared. Most people had never heard of Bitcoin, the people that had heard of Bitcoin were like, if you talked to them about taxes they thought you were a Fed. Funny story about that, I wrote an article for CoinDesk a million years ago back when it was — CoinDesk didn’t even have professional journalists back then, they would accept open submissions. And it was about tax consequences of Bitcoin. Real, real basic stuff. This was back when you could just have open comments under articles. All the comments were like, Don’t listen to this guy! He’s a Fed! He’s out to get us! That was the environment back then. So nobody really cared for several years. For the first couple of years I probably did none of these for clients. And then I was doing one or two a year. Stuff like that, for just various oddballs. Then 2017 happened, right? With the bull rally in 2017 all of a sudden there was interest in this! Bitcoin, of course, and then a lot of it was shitcoiners too, because the structure — I mean I market it for Bitcoin because that’s all I care about but it works for all those shitcoins as well. There was a lot of interest in it and it started to become a bigger and bigger part of my practice! Even when the rally ended in 2017 it didn’t just die off as an a practice area for me. It just has grown over time to now it’s like three-quarters of what I do!

Cedric Youngelman [13:35]: Yeah! You’re very multi-faceted! And so the first thing I do want to get into is the KeyKeeper IRA. I don’t know if you’ve connected the dots but I’m a client. I think it’s fabulous! I think it’s actually taken a very different turn in 2020 with the COVID Care Act. So maybe can you elaborate on what is KeyKeeper IRA? How can people use it? I think this is a fabulous tool right now that not enough people have awareness of!

Jeff Vandroux [14:06]: Sure! I appreciate that! So a lot of people out there have like a 401(k) from a former employer or maybe they already have money in an IRA, and they kind of feel like they’re locked into brokerage assets like stocks, bonds, mutual funds.

Cedric Youngelman: GBTC, whatever.

Jeff Vandroux: Right! Even GBTC, exactly!

Cedric Youngelman: They want exposure to Bitcoin in their 401(k)! Or anything else!

Jeff Vandroux: In their retirement accounts, right? So the idea behind it is, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use those tax-advantaged funds to hold Bitcoin and to hold the Bitcoin directly such that you could hold your own keys? And that’s advantageous for two reasons: (1) if you’re doing it in a way that you’re holding your own keys, you’re sticking with the ethos of Not your keys, not your Bitcoin, and (2) if you buy GBTC, first of all, you have to be an accredited investor, and even if you are an accredited investor and you’re able to buy GBTC to a regular brokerage IRA, the fees are colossal. There’s like a 2% annual assets under management fee that goes to the fund manager. It’s just — it’s huge. So you’d rather not have that giant fee eating up your returns! So the largest obstacle to being able to have this Bitcoin and hold your own keys within the auspices of a retirement account is that, under federal law, to qualify as an IRA, there has to be a third party custodian. And that third party custodian has to basically be a bank, a trust company, or this other category called a licensed non-bank custodian that gets special IRS approval. So how do we get around that? To get around that I adapted a structure that had been used for several years before this for real estate investing through an IRA. Basically the way we get around it is: we set up this custodial account for you with an appropriate financial institution, but the only asset actually owned by your IRA is either a limited liability company or a trust. The structure works both ways regardless of whether you use an LLC or a trust as that entity, but it’s a state-to-state issue. Some states impose ridiculous requirements on LLCs like California does, so we use a trust in those states instead. The idea is the same. So this entity is the only asset owned by your IRA. You don’t own the entity, it’s owned by your IRA. However, you are the manager of the entity, in the case of an LLC, or the trustee of the entity in the case of a trust, which gives you the sole control over its assets. So any money that flows into your IRA is then immediately invested into this entity, and once it’s in the entity you have control over it. So that requires — there’s a lot of regulatory stuff about what has to be in the entity’s operating agreement, etc. to make that work, but we handle that all for you, and then we help you get an account open on an exchange under the name and tax ID of the entity. It’s very important — it can’t be under your own name or social security number. You can use that account to then go ahead and buy your Bitcoin and you don’t have to store it on the exchange, you can transfer it off the exchange and custody it yourself as the manager of that LLC or as trustee of that trust. You have to keep it very segregated, you can’t mix it with your other non-tax advantaged Bitcoin. And that’s basically, in a nutshell, how the structure works. That’s how it works for most people who are not self-employed. If you’re a self-employed person and you own your own business, if you don’t have any full-time employees, we can actually have it such that your company 401(k), believe it or not, can hold Bitcoin, and you can hold your own keys yourself. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way if you’re self-employed and you have full-time employees. Then, the 401(k) structure isn’t available to you. You’re stuck with the IRA structure. But that’s what I more or less spend all my time doing all day.

Cedric Youngelman [18:34]: Awesome! I think it’s a great service for Bitcoiners, and I think it’s a great service for anybody! I’m a client and I’m not gonna diss any other companies, but I will say that I did my own research — everyone should do their own — and I found that Jeff’s KeyKeeper IRA was the best service available on cost and service. And he walks you through the whole process.

Jeff Vandroux: I appreciate that! To touch on that for a brief second: our cost structure is a lot different from anybody else who does this. Most of the other players that allow Bitcoin IRA exposure, they don’t charge an upfront fee like I do, but they also charge recurring fees that are significantly higher, oftentimes they’re expressed as a percentage of the value of the Bitcoin.

Cedric Youngelman: Yes. Think about how that scales.

Jeff Vandroux: Exactly! Right. With our structure, you pay me once to set up the legal structure, and that’s it! You don’t pay me again. At that point you can buy and sell Bitcoin as much as you want. This entity has its own exchange account that has nothing to do with me! It’s on a regular, normal exchange so that you can buy and sell as much as you want. You’re good to go! You’re fully compliant with the IRS.

Cedric Youngelman [19:54]: I’ll add that I even transferred some 401(k) money into ROTH to incur taxes now so I’ll never incur taxes again on my self-managed owned Bitcoin within my retirement plan again. I think that’s a really powerful tool. Your service helps more people achieve sovereignty and independence. And get ownership over their own stuff!

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah! I appreciate that! And that’s a good point you made there about the ROTH thing. I mean you can do this as a traditional IRA or a ROTH IRA, however probably 70–80% of the ones that I do are ROTH.

Cedric Youngelman: Right now in this current environment, taxes are low, if you can incur taxes now — this is not financial advice , do your own research, this is a philosophy show—but you know, this could really help you manage your tax affairs and gain sovereignty. And Jeff will walk you through it! I want to get into a couple other topics, because you just bring a lot to the table. Before we get into what I think is really juicy, I just want to touch on bodybuilding. You’re a bodybuilder, and you’re very public about it — that’s why I’m bringing it up — it’s on your profile. I wonder how much of that is because of low time preference for you? And it kind of forces you to regulate or stay in a low time preference mentality? And I’ve heard you speak on it on shows that you compete on it every other year, and there’s a lot of dietary aspects to that to I just wanted to touch on that a bit. And final note: I’ve never been a weight-lifter or anything, but I’m recognizing that I’ve gotta start. My back is fucked up, and I need to take care of it!

Jeff Vandroux [21:52]: The dietary stuff is the big difference between being a competitive bodybuilder, and the guy who lifts and looks good at the beach but doesn’t compete. The dietary stuff is the difference. I’ll give you an example: when you’re dieting down to get on stage for a show — and you’ll see how this ties into what I’m talking about with self-discipline — you’re not dieting down to a healthy level of body fat, you’re dieting down to a level of body fat that is absolutely not sustainable! It’s not gonna hurt you to maintain that level of body fat in the short term, but that’s why I generally compete like every other year. When I say every other year I might do a few shows that year, try to keep them close to each other time-wise.

Cedric Youngelman [22:41]: Right so you can get in that box where you’re in this unhealthy, non-sustainable mode.

Jeff Vandroux: Right, and you feel horrible! You feel horrible, you have no energy — the other point I should make is I compete in drug-tested natural bodybuilding too, it’s a little bit different. Not saying there isn’t a lot of self-discipline with enhanced bodybuilding—enhanced is what we call non-drug tested bodybuilding — there is! It’s a different type of bodybuilding. It’s a different sport. But yeah, you feel terrible, and you’re just not nearly as strong. You lose significant strength in getting ready for a show. I’ll give you an idea: I am 190 pounds sitting here right now, and I have a six pack — it’s not the most razor sharp six pack but if I took my shirt off you’d definitely see all six of my abs and I would look great at the beach, right? That’s at 190 pounds, I’m 5'11". If I was gonna compete, I’d probably be competing at about 170, maybe the low 170s, and I would have to start losing close to 20 pounds to get on stage right now. That would take me probably about 4–5 months to get ready, because you can’t lose that too quick — you’ll lose all your muscle. So think about what an unhealthily lean level that is. Like, if I’m already — what by normal stands would already be considered lean — and I’d have to drop another almost 20 pounds to get on stage. It’s brutal! Which is why it’s mostly a self-discipline sport. Well it’s genetic ability, right? A lot of stuff that I can’t control. I have very, very long limbs, that’s horrible for bodybuilding, because my biceps and my quads just never look as impressive because they’re stretched over a longer distance. I have extremely long limbs considering I’m only 5'11" — I’m not 6'8" or something like that. But if you wanna get out there and put out your best package on stage it’s a self-discipline issue, it’s being able to lose all that weight and spend 4–5 months in a diet losing weight. When I say in a diet, I’m dieting I’m not eating junk, I’m monitoring what I’m eating all year round. It’s just the sheer volume of what you’re eating gets so low. I mean by the time I got on stage this most recent time, I was almost down to a thousand calories a day. And you’re not doing that low of a caloric intake the whole time, you’re ratcheting it down slowly over time, but it’s very difficult. And the reason why — to get to your point — it’s all just self-discipline. And I guess that probably on some level is a function of time-preference: being able to delay that gratification or have that level of self-discipline, to put that level of work in.

Cedric Youngelman [25:41]: Which is more rewarding to you? Affecting the self-discipline over time or competing? I guess they go hand-in-hand because the discipline leads to what you’re gonna get in the competition, but I’m asking like, Do you care about the competition, or is it the journey of the discipline to get to the competition?

Jeff Vandroux: Oh no, I care about the competition! I’m not even — I’ve never won a show. The highest I’ve even finished in a show is second, so I’m not —

Cedric Youngelman: You did get a special award for a certain class, I think!

Jeff Vandroux: For being old!

Cedric Youngelman: Well that counts for something! You mentioned enhanced, and you’re bodybuilding in a natural way. Would you have an opinion on the enhanced process? When I was going to high school, there were a lot of kids in my high school, my peers — I played soccer, basketball — but like football team, lacrosse team, wrestling team, it was just like, a bunch of weightlifters trying to get girls. There were just steroids everywhere! When I got to college, it was a cosmetic thing. My opinion is, you’re above 18 — I don’t care! And I’ll go further, I’ll look at someone like Barry Bonds, I’m kind of psyched he did steroids, because there were other guys doing steroids, doing things that were kinda maybe better on paper, but I’m like, I wanna see the greatest ever take this medicine and do what he can do! If he wants to take the risk and the consequences of his actions for high time preference results!

Jeff Vandroux [27:26]: I’ll do a CYA thing here real quick: I’d advise everyone listening not to break any laws and to always check with your doctor, okay? That said, I don’t really have a problem with enhanced bodybuilding at all, and steroids in general, too. To be honest, based on the research and the data that we have, if you do a moderate amount of steroids in a smart way, you’re gonna look awesome! If you work as hard as me and you do a moderate amount of steroids in a smart way and we have equal genetics, let’s say, you’re gonna look 1,000x better than me! And you’re probably gonna be fine! It’s probably not gonna affect your longevity or your overall health. The issue is, and I don’t have a problem with these guys doing it, you can’t do a moderate amount of steroids in a smart way and compete in enhanced bodybuilding. It’s just not how it works! You have to take the drugs to a much more extreme level that probably is gonna have damage to your health. There’s ways to mitigate that. There are guys out there that competed in bodybuilding and do live long lives, because even under the auspices of being more extreme, they still did it the smartest way they could, and they also were probably better genetically suited with the drugs — that’s another part that no one talks about. But for me, I never went enhanced because — I wanted to be able to compete, and I didn’t want to have to do the drugs in such an extreme way. And if you don’t do it in an extreme way and you try and compete, you’re just gonna look terrible compared to guys that do! You’re just not gonna be able to compete. So for me, natural was a no-brainer for that reason. But I definitely don’t have a problem with people — if you just are like recreationally lifting and you don’t want to compete, and you want to do steroids, I would say, Just be smart about it, get your blood work done, do it in consultation with a doctor. I don’t really see anything wrong with that at all! The only time it would really bother me, is if you’re doing steroids and you’re trying to sneak into one of our shows and compete with us! You have your own shows for that! Let us have our thing, let us compete — that’s our thing. But other than that, I certainly don’t have — I have unnamed friends that do steroids. I’d never try to talk them out of it or anything.

Cedric Youngelman [29:58]: Before we get into the real juicy stuff with the post-capitalism future, how did you come to Bitcoin?

Jeff Vandroux: From gold! Like most gold guys.

Cedric Youngelman: So: a post-capitalist future. I really wanted to dig into a lot of these ideas. I find myself just being riveted by your posts. I don’t have a lot of commentary in terms of agreement or disagreement — I’m just nodding my head! So I guess it’s agreement! I’m just enthralled with this discussion that you’re bringing into the table. Just to kick off, though, you mention that each generation improves its lot as compared to the one before, but an economic system can only last as long as that’s happening. So how to you frame up — you talk a lot about the 20th century and what happened there, but you use a lot of terminology like neo-liberal, globalist-capitalist, social democracy, market socialism, socialism. So if you could level-set a bit, so that we can get into some of these topics and what these words mean to you before we go further? Because it’s really important to the conversation, and I think you have a really good handle on what these terms mean, at least how you’re gonna conversate about them. And framing them up, because I think they get tossed around — no pun intended — liberally.

Jeff Vandroux [31:45]: Yeah they do! And part of the issue is different people can define them differently. So for instance to a Marxist, the type of economic system that I talk about, they would still consider that capitalist. But a distributist wouldn’t. So I’ll just talk about the way that I define these terms, so that we could at least be consistent. Sometimes maybe I’ll even draw some distinctions on how other people may define them. Capitalism to me is basically a market-based economy, more or less. And a market-based economy where competition is held to the inherently good, and where you do not want to interfere with the market itself. Like what Mises would call a hampered market. I’m not including that within the definition of capitalism for purposes of what I’m talking about. So, we’re in right now what I would still consider a capitalist society and Libertarians would balk at that because they’ll say, Oh! Well there’s all these government regulations, there’s all these things that affect the market! But the reason I still consider that capitalistic is because there are usually regulatory structures and other structures that are just prop up the market system itself from collapsing. They’re in fact not designed to hampered the market, they’re designed to keep it going at least for the benefit of the people that have the largest amount of market power, okay? That’s how I would define a capitalist system. A socialist system to me is one that’s based on socialized production. Meaning that you don’t have private ownership of the means of production in the ways that we’re used to. The workers aren’t in control of the means of production and that could be through — there are a zillion different flavors of socialism, right — you could have libertarian socialists where there’s not a state that’s really mediating that versus a Marxist-Leninist where there is a very centralized state that’s mediating that. I won’t get into all those distinctions right now. But those were the two competing schools of thought more or less throughout the 20th century and even into the 21st. The 20th century specifically was defined by the conflict between capitalist and socialist production. There were other economic systems that were posited during that period that never really got too much traction. Social democracy to me — which really did take off in the latter half of the 20th century — was more or less an attempt to prop up the capitalist system through transfers. The workers don’t really have power in most social democratic systems that we see today. They’re just thrown tax transfer payments and stuff like that just to keep the system going, to prevent them from starving, creating trouble, revolting, things of that nature. And if you take that out far enough, social democracy and things like that, what will start happening is — and this is what I think we’re seeing right now — we’re seeing a system where over time what happens is capital always seems to centralize. That seems to be the natural thing — if you have a market, eventually someone’s gonna win in that market. And when they win and they put their competitors out of business, their accumulation of capital is going to accelerate. We’ve seen this many times throughout history. And once capital fully accelerates to the point where we just say — say you have a small oligarchy of players that own all the capital in a given market — that’s when you end up at something that Hillaire Belloc would have called the servile state. And in the servile state you have a small oligarchy that controls all the means of production, and they actually voluntarily throw benefits — they could be government benefits or private benefits, that distinction is useless for reasons we can talk about —

Cedric Youngelman: I find this insight to be amazing here!

Jeff Vandroux: Thank you! So they’re gonna throw benefits down to the people that are not part of that oligopoly. And why do they do that? They do that because they have to do that! Because what would happen otherwise is — it would be in your benefit — if you’re part of that surviving oligopoly, you still have to sell things to people! Because if you’re not selling things to people, the whole thing comes to a grinding halt! You need people to have enough income that they can buy your stuff. So you’re at least going to throw them enough benefits so that they’re able to feed themselves, show up to work, and buy stuff. You need people to do that! You can’t avoid the necessity of people doing that. So you will throw them enough scraps to be able to do so. And that’s where we’re seeing proposals like — the UBI is real popular nowadays. The UBI is not a socialist proposal, it’s quite the opposite! Whether you like it or not, the UBI is an uber-capitalist, hyper-capitalist proposal, to the point where —

Cedric Youngelman [37:50]: Does that mean there’s a billionaire behind Andrew Yang? Did Andrew Yang come up with this on his own and billionaires are like, Yeah! It’s a great idea! Or they’re like, Why don’t we need an Andrew Yang to come out on the other team and present this case that we want? Because I feel that what you’re getting at is a very underhanded sly trick by the owners, because the recipients of social democracy do not think that they’re aligned with the capitalists! That’s what I’m getting from what you’re writing about. That this is like back-handed! And no one’s connecting that dot — I shouldn’t say no one, you’re building on some other work, obviously — but I think that you’re at the forefront of really, in my Twitter world, of getting that message out!

Jeff Vandroux [38:38]: Belloc referred to the servile state as the point where this is accelerated so far that this oligopoly was in total control, funneling benefits down to the lower classes who were essentially servile to them, because they were fully dependent on these benefits. And that was the endgame of all this—which is where unfortunately I think we may be heading.

Cedric Youngelman [39:05]: I think we’re there! I think we’re there!

Jeff Vandroux: Or maybe we’re already there.

Cedric Youngelman: Or gradually, then suddenly, but this is another gradually, then suddenly! It’s happening very quickly! Amazon is doing their own healthcare — which in a lot of ways is great! It’s in many ways better than the healthcare they were giving out. Which is to your point, like they’re giving things to people that they want and they need. But it’s gonna take away from their motivation, incentive, or ability to get ahead.

Jeff Vandroux [39:32]: Right it takes away from their power and agency.

Cedric Youngelman: Right! Even though it feels like you’re getting agency.

Jeff Vandroux: Correct. So there’s two groups of people you mentioned that you don’t think people are connecting these dots. Mainstream politics, not so much — you’re definitely right. There are people that are connecting these dots in different ways. And the first group are — so when you say Marxist, that’s a weird term —

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah you gotta define that. I was traveling with my friend on a train once, and he was one of the smartest people that I know. He’s not alive anymore today, but like super smart. He turned to me, he was 24 years old, he was like, Dude, Karl Marx says you got more in common — because we were talking about commuting to New York City and being in the rat race — and he was like, Dude you got more in common with your co-worker than your boss to your boss’s boss! I was like, well that makes Marxism sound great! But I don’t know what Marxism is, if you want to lay it out.

Jeff Vandroux [40:27]: So it’s a great question! The reason it gets so conflated nowadays is people that are typically calling themselves Marxist on the Internet and television are doing what I refer to as CIA Marxism. The reason for that is because it’s — and I’m not a Marxist, right! So let me be clear about that — but, the type of Marxism that’s taught in the university system in the United States really isn’t based on Marx’s ideas, it’s more based on ideas that came later during the mid to late 20th century that claimed to be intellectual successors to Marx. And those ideas — the reason I call it CIA Marxism: this is just true! I don’t know what else to say! People say it’s a conspiracy theory but this is well documented — were funded by the CIA. The CIA, the Frankfurt school, was one of the main progenitors of these ideas, which is where like Critical Race Theory all springs from that stuff too. All this stuff like Wokism—

Cedric Youngelman: Huh! From the CIA?

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah those ideas, Herbert Marcuse, all that stuff started in the mid to late 20th century. And those guys were CIA funded. The idea behind it was that it would move leftist energy away from socializing the means of production, and towards all these other ancillary issues. And that has become the dominant flavor of Marxism in the West that’s taught in universities, etc. And that’s what people generally believe when they say, Hey I’m a Marxist. If you go back and actually read Marx’s work, what’s interesting about it is a couple things: (1) it has really nothing to do with any of that stuff. Marx’s work is not even really about socialism. Marx’s work is about capitalism. It’s a description and a critique of capitalism is essentially what it is. It specifically really goes into the contradictions inherent within capitalism.

Cedric Youngelman [42:42]: So does that make a Marxist anti-capitalism?

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah Marxism is anti-capitalist. It certainly is an anti-capitalist ideology. If you just want to say the pure, orthodox Marxism—from Marx and Engel’s writings — it doesn’t really offer a solution to capitalism!

Cedric Youngelman: It just critiques?

Jeff Vandroux: It critiques it and it exposes contradictions.

Cedric Youngelman: Is that fair? I mean capitalism is maybe not perfect. I don’t think that you think that capitalism is perfect. I think we both agree that it’s done a lot for the world in the 20th century, but I think what you’re getting at is that it’s run its course. The word you use is ourosboros — it eats itself.

Jeff Vandroux [43:34]: Right. It eats itself.

Cedric Youngelman: So in that regard maybe Marx was right, or had some interesting points.

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah so his critiques of capitalism were actually very interesting. The point I was trying to make is, he also died while he was still writing so we don’t really know what he would have come up with if he had lived longer. His point was more so that — and I disagree with him on this point — that socialism, meaning a socialized means of production, was essentially inevitable due to all of these inherent contradictions within capitalism that he described. Some of which line up with the contradictions that I mentioned in my writing. Others of which don’t. I don’t agree with him that that made socialism inevitable because I think that the servile state is an alternative that the holders of capital would obviously strongly prefer and I do think is workable, unfortunately! I would wish it weren’t workable but I do think that that is a workable system. So I don’t think he’s right about that, but his critiques of capitalism are very interesting. And you’re right, if you actually went back and read Das Kapital or you read The Communist Manifesto or any of his other writings, it really wouldn’t line up with what people that are ranting and raving on the Internet about being Marxist are talking about today. So the point where this whole conversation started was: there are really two groups of people that are pointing out what you just said, that a lot of these things like the UBI are really in full alignment with the largest holders of capital. The first group is the anti-capitalist right, which is a growing faction of people at least on the Internet and the intelligentsia. And they might not even necessarily always call themselves anti-capitalist, they’re just not free market people.

Cedric Youngelman: And they’re on the right? Anti-capitalists on the right?

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah, and that can take on many different flavors. On some level I’m probably part of that philosophically and ideologically. Because I am conservative. And (1) that’s just a group of people — and they may not even all fully consider themselves anti-capitalist, but they’re people that say, Hey if we want to have what we consider from a right-wing perspective to be a beneficial society, a free and unfettered market is not a way that we can do that. And there’s a lot of different schools of thought. If you want to really dig into that world, American Affairs is a fantastic quarterly publication that I would put in that category. And they have a very broad breadth of thought, people that consider themselves anti-capitalist versus capitalist reformist, those things probably in practice aren’t really all that different. And they even have some socialist writers sometimes. But American Affairs is a right-wing publication. But definitely not a free markets publication! That is not American Affairs’ perspective. And that’s been around for a few years and it’s been growing like crazy. A lot of good intellectual energy behind it. So that’s one group of people that you’ll see making that exact same connection that you’re making. And that’s starting to bleed over into mainstream politics just a tiny teensy teensy teensy little bit. You will hear Josh Hawley for instance say a watered down version of things that you might read in American Affairs. You’ll see Tom Cotton say a very watered down version of things you might see in American Affairs. So they’re not really there, but you can see where this is going. The (2) other group of people are the people that still stick to the old religion Marxism. I don’t want to get into terminology fights because a lot of them will quibble with what I’m about to say. A lot of those people are now referring to themselves as post-leftists to distinguish themselves from the mainstream left. Some people don’t like that term. Some of them prefer to be called left populists. Those are the two groups of people that you really see doing that. If you want to get a good flavor of some of that thought — and again it’s a very broad area of thought, not all of them are going to agree, many of them would even disagree with the way I’m categorizing them — you want to read something like The Bellows, which is an online publication which is really great, really fantastic! What’s Left is a really great podcast that’s of that general genre. My friends — who I was actually just livestreaming with before I came onto this podcast — the Good Ol Boys kind of do a fusion. I don’t know if they would describe it this way but they do a fusion of those two camps that I talked about. People that are on the right and the people that are in that post-left area, they straddle those two and do a synthesis of those two. For listeners that want to get a better idea of that school of thought that’s out there and developing, those are some resources that you can look at.

Cedric Youngelman [49:16]: I know you’ve touched on this in your writing but I’m curious: how does inflation and the Cantillion effect influence your thoughts? And what do you think would happen with capitalism today if we didn’t have inflation, if we were on a hard money system?

Jeff Vandroux: So one of my controversial thoughts is that you actually can’t have a hard money system long term in capitalism! Because once capital is concentrated enough in a few enough hands that are powerful enough, they’re gonna use some mechanism to control the money supply. Why wouldn’t you? If anyone has the power to do that, you’d be crazy not to do it! It’s in your own interest to do so. So I actually don’t think those two things are compatible over a long enough time frame.

Cedric Youngelman [50:04]: Yeah. Can you walk us through your other article Charity, Welfare, and Usury: The Capitalist Paradox. I do agree with you that we’re in the usury era. What was the charity era, the welfare era, and the usury era—that I think and agree that we’re in now?

Jeff Vandroux: In early capitalism — when I say early capitalism I’m talking post-industrial revolution up until before the New Deal — you had a competitive market. Distributists, which Belloc and Chesterton are probably most famous, have this concept called the capitalist paradox. It basically means when you have this free market going on — and I’m not adapting this to the modern day, they wrote over a hundred years ago — the way you would apply the capitalist paradox to more modern ideas and even in their times was: if you’ve got this competitive market, your goal is to be the last one standing. You’re constantly competing. And the way you want to do that is by cutting costs. If you can offer an equivalent good or service and you can offer it cheaper, you’re gonna win. So what’s the easiest way to cut your costs? It’s just to pay your employees less! It’s like a no-brainer. Typically in a market you wanna pay your employees as low as possible while still getting them to show up to work and do their job appropriately, right? So what’s the problem with that? If everybody keeps cutting their employees’ pay to try to compete with each other, eventually you’re gonna get to the point where the employee class or the working class, they’re just subsisting. They’re able to like feed themselves and clothe themselves and get to work, and that’s about it. They’re not gonna be able to buy your stuff! And that’s a problem, because if capital is concentrated such that let’s say only five people have it, well those five people only need so many shoes, no matter how luxurious their lifestyle might be. But if that capital is spread across five million people, they’re gonna buy a lot more shoes! So the paradox is that by trying to get ahead you end up impoverishing all of your customers and they can’t buy your stuff anymore. That’s in a nutshell a very simplified version of the capitalist paradox. So the system — and when I say the system that can be a governmental system or a non-governmental system, it doesn’t really matter because in a capitalist society a governmental system is gonna be run by the larger holders of capital so they can collude privately or they can collude publicly via government, the government is just a collusion mechanism — they are gonna have to find a way to funnel stuff back to the working classes so that they can keep buying things. The initial way that that was done early on was through charity. You were a really rich guy, a Carnegie or a Rockefeller, you would have all these charitable endeavors. And these charitable endeavors that were meant to help the poor, what they were really doing was just sort of recirculating capital back downwards to keep the system going. You had to find a way to constantly recirculate that capital downwards. And that charity stuff lasted for a while, but the problem was there’s not a formal mechanism to make sure that all my other rich friends are giving as much to charity as I am. That can work for a while but eventually that’s going to break down. It’s not sufficient anymore to recycle that capital back down to the working classes. So what we did next was the mid-century era which was the New Deal in the United States and other similar social democracy programs in Europe. What they did was they actually implemented formalized systems through the government. Systems like social security — which I’m not even opposed to social security — but that was the point of it. That was the motivation behind it. Just welfare! Stuff like food stamps, general welfare payments, all that stuff really took off in the mid-20th century. That was the idea behind it. That was the mechanism to recycle that down. And that worked really well for a while, particularly because during that era you had two things going on. You had that welfare system, but you also actually had systems to gain workers more power like unionization that also came about in that era. But what happened after: the power systems for workers broke down first, and then eventually the welfare re-circulation systems broke down. There was welfare reform in the 90s, a lot of those benefits started to get cut! At the same time, you had off-shoring going on so people’s wages went down even further. So that welfare system remained in place to some extent but it wasn’t cutting it anymore. Not enough capital was getting re-circulated down. So what happened in the phase that started from the 90s to the phase we’re still in today, and that’s the usury system where you just lend it to them! These people are basically living on a borrowed lifestyle, right? We’re a debt-based society! So that’s another way you can funnel capital back down to them and then they are able to then use that. They’re not obviously using it as capital, investing it. They’re just using it to spend to live or on consumable items. So that’s the other way to do it. And the usury system is really advantageous to them because they get to charge interest, right? So not only do they make money on selling you stuff, but they make money on the fact that they gave you money to buy it to begin with! So money is being made at all angles there when you’re dealing with a usury system. [57:13] And I should point out here that usury—I’m using Hillaire Belloc’s definition of the term. Usury nowadays we define as charging an amount of interest that’s so high that it’s unethical or illegal. But that’s not what it meant in the distributist tradition. It essentially meant any loan that was for a consumable asset. So a mortgage would not have necessarily —

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah I believe a 30-year mortgage should be illegal.

Jeff Vandroux: Well okay. So I was gonna use that as an example that wasn’t necessarily — not everyone would consider it usury.

Cedric Youngelman: I do! I think it’s usury! And it plays a big part into our economy, and to how people view their homes, and we can get into like how Germany treats homes. But I do think a 30-year mortgage whether it works for you or not — I’m not saying I don’t have one — I just do think it’s a form of usury.

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah and it can be depending on the terms. I’ll give you a more clear-cut example. If you took out an equipment loan to buy a machine for your business, that loan would not be usury. Because you’re using it for productive purpose. However, credit card debt that you use to buy food, no matter how low the interest is, that’s still considered usury under this school of thought — that that should be illegal, that sort of lending should be against the law.

Cedric Youngelman: And your home is consumption. It’s not an investment! I mean it shouldn’t be seen as an investment. You live there, you’re consuming that asset.

Jeff Vandroux: I fundamentally agree with the idea that you should view your home as a place to live and not as a financial investment. I do fundamentally agree with you there.

Cedric Youngelman: And only because of low interest rates and 30-year mortgages and money printing has it been an investment! And a salvation for many Americans!

Jeff Vandroux: I agree. It’s because it’s just something that’s not dollars.

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah. And I just don’t think that should be the way we should be building our economy. I think it’s a form of rent-seeking and it prices young people out of a very usable consumable asset that they should be able to afford. I think college debt is the same way and I think you’ve touched upon it in your writing.

Jeff Vandroux [59:30]: Yeah. College debt is a very good example.

Cedric Youngelman: I mean, what banker would give an 18-year old $200,000 to go find out what he’s gonna pay it back with in four years? You know, go try asking a bank to help you start a business when you’re 18 years old with no experience, no clients, no revenue, no contracts.

Jeff Vandroux: And that’s a distortion just caused by the federal guarantees to student loans, obviously.

Cedric Youngelman: So it’s like, I read your writing and I’m blown away, I love it! And I want to know, one, we haven’t touched a lot about what is a populist?

Jeff Vandroux: You could define that a million different ways.

Cedric Youngelman: Well how do you define it? You call yourself one! It’s considered probably a dirty word! I don’t know many people running around saying I’m a populist!

Jeff Vandroux: It just means that you view the point of governance to be fundamentally for the people. Meaning that—it’s rhetorical in a lot of ways. It could be just the way that you speak, is that the whole point of what we’re doing is for the people, but not for any abstraction. In other words, we’re not running a government to increase GDP or based on some ideological concern like, We just view a free market as inherently good because it’s inherently good and that’s how we run our government. A populist, you’d look at what really is benefiting actually the people regardless of your ideological concerns. That is your primary concern I think when you’re a populist! To me, and there are left populists and right populists and all different sorts of populism, but to me it implies a national worker state. Meaning a government based in nationalism which should not be a dirty word. Nationalism doesn’t have to be racist, it doesn’t have to be anything like that. The point of the government should be essentially to represent the workers in all forms. Which also includes — this is where I’m not a Marxist — self-employed people who work! Self-employed typically do work in their business. They are also workers. They’re a different class of workers than employees are. They have different concerns, they take different risks, etc.

Cedric Youngelman: How do you frame up the difference between, or the goals of sovereignty versus populism? Thinking about others versus taking care of yourself?

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah that’s a great point. There’s a duality there where in your personal life it makes sense to be a libertarian because you’re gonna have the best life if you look at the world through the lens of, Everything’s on me, I gotta do the best I can. When I fail it’s my fault. That sort of thinking is gonna get you far in life on a personal level. It also is an insane way to run a government! In that you’re just gonna have a situation where you’re gonna have a few winners that come out dominating everyone else. And that is self-contradictory but I don’t have any answer to that contradiction. It sorta is what it is.

Cedric Youngelman: How do you frame up distributism if we’re gonna define it? I’ll let you know what I’ve gathered from it because I listen to you on other podcasts and I ran home and I told my wife about it. And the way I frame it up is, We’re gonna distribute economic ownership — maybe not property ownership — throughout the population. And I use the example of Amazon. Amazon gets so big! So once it achieves a certain size — I don’t know how we determine that size —but you’re like, Okay, we need to have 20% of the employees represented on the board of directors. In that scenario and I’m paraphrasing you, now we’re not gonna have 2-day delivery because I’m not gonna piss and shit in my pants, I’m not gonna wear diapers as an employee, so we’re gonna be on a 4-day delivery. Everyone’s not gonna get what they want, or the most supreme service, but we’re gonna balance by not having people wearing diapers in a factory or old people commuting to the best jobs around the country to work in Amazon factories — whatever it is! How do I build it out more than that?

Jeff Vandroux [1:04:37]: Yeah, sure! So, distributism is primarily just an ideal. Meaning, saying that you respect private property so that’s where it makes it a little bit different from a communist for instance. You very much respect private property, but you wanna use the legal system to corral the market such that private property remains very widely distributed. And that capital itself maintains wide distribution, which a free market’s not gonna provide that. So you need a system in place to hamper the market, essentially so that such a thing can happen! And distributists throughout the hundred-year history of it have had a lot of different ideas about the best the way to do that. So it’s hard to say, Oh this is a distributist policy over versus this isn’t. I can tell you the ones that I think are good ideas, but many people that call themselves distributists would disagree very much with my ideas, because it’s moreso an ideal that’s never been fully implemented. So from my perspective, what might that look like in the real world? I’m gonna answer that first into things you could actually do within the next 30 years that are marginally realistic, and then we could talk about pie in the sky stuff, right? Those are two different aspects that we can look at. When we’re talking about this, first of all it’s important to understand the concept of subsidiarity which is different from pure decentralization. Subsidiarity means power is exercised at the lowest level in which it can be effectively exercised. Not the lowest level altogether! Because if you fully decentralize things, what usually ends up happening is the strongest guy in this little decentralized world will essentially end up dominating everybody else and you’ll end right up back in a centralized system! A free market is decentralized at the beginning, and that’s what happens! Subsidiarity says, You push just enough power up the different levels of government such that everybody is still getting a piece. That’s the idea behind this system. Everybody gets a little piece of what’s going on, and it’s in everybody’s interest to keep that higher level of authority running such that everybody’s still getting their piece, and no one can dominate that higher level of government. That’s easier said than done! But I’ll give you some examples of things that would move a little bit closer to a distributist ideal but are still somewhat realistic. Number one would be, as you said — first of all tax and regulatory policy that favors non-public small family businesses over large publically traded businesses. And that’s just a value judgment. So if you’re a libertarian and you’re hearing that, that sounds insane! No, I’m actually saying the legal system should discriminate against businesses that are held that way, and in favor of the smaller ones even if they are less efficient, to a degree that’s acceptable. There are some businesses like a utility company can’t necessarily operate that way. But your tax and regulatory structure in fact benefits directly those types of businesses. When you’re talking about larger businesses that really can’t operate that way — let me give concrete examples. Restaurants would be a good example of that! There is no benefit to having a Chili’s on every corner versus family restaurants in every town. There just isn’t, that’s stupid! On the other end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t necessarily want a different cell phone company in every town. That would be difficult, just the nature of that industry. So when you’re talking about those industries that don’t lend themselves to that, those industries just have to be very regulated, and there’s a variety of different ways that you can do that. You mentioned one where those industries are gonna have to give their workers seats on the board. Because that is a form of distributed control, even if it’s not — ideally you would want companies like that to be co-ops. That’s the ideal. Co-ops are essentially a business where the workers own it. It’s not socialism because there’s still a market in play. We don’t all in a society own AT&T, but AT&T’s employees own AT&T, T-Mobile’s employees own T-Mobile, but it’s still run like a corporation. They elect a board of directors and there’s still a president. And this is a business model that does exist! Mondragon is an industrial cooperative, a very large one in Spain, that operates that way: their employees own the business. That doesn’t mean everyone gets paid the same. The janitor doesn’t get paid the same as the CEO does. But there are ways to make that work. That’s the ideal, but it would be really hard to transition to that system right away, or anytime in the near future. In the meantime, what Germans call the co-determination system because they do this in their country, is a step in the right direction, is the best that we could do right now. And that system says: once your company is over a certain size — and that’s an arbitrary line — your employees are gonna elect a board of directors. You’re not gonna operate solely for your shareholders anymore. Your employees are gonna have a seat at this table, they’re gonna have actual agency over their jobs and what they do everyday. That’s a baby-step in that direction when we can’t get to that co-op level. Something that I’ve been sold on too is a move more towards corporatist government, corporatist in the tripartite tradition. And if you wanna learn more about that American Affairs maybe two issues ago, Michael Lind wrote an article about tripartite corporatism. It’s ironic that I’m citing him because he’s not a distributist, he actually likes very centralized businesses. But tripartite corporatism is not limited to that sort of a system. A tripartite corporatist system is one where — right now administrative agencies that set regulations for our business environment are just staffed by career bureaucrats. That’s how it works. In a corporatist system, it wouldn’t work that way! Let’s say the division of the agency that is controlling wireless telecommunication — instead of being staffed by bureaucrats what would happen is the government would legally sanction and recognize a union that represented all of the telecommunications workers. The workers actually would not be required to join the union. If they don’t want to pay dues — France does this by the way, it’s not a pie in the sky thing — they don’t have to join the union. If they don’t want to pay dues, they don’t get to vote. The union allows elections but they don’t have to join! [1:13:06] This union is sanctioned by the government, and then the employers would have their own industry association also sanctioned by the government. And then consumers in that particular industry would also have an organization sanctioned by the government. I’m describing it a little bit differently than Lind does, but it’s the same general idea as Lind envisions this. And those three entities, all who have competing interests, would sit down at the table and hammer out the regulatory structure that is best for the three of them! Instead of the bureaucrat that is detached from the consequences of his actions, right? So the union is obviously incentivized to hammer out the best deal for the employees. The employers association is incentivized to hammer out the best deal in the regulatory environment for the employer. Now if you had just those two, they might agree to screw consumers, right? So that’s the third leg of the stool here in terms of who are actually coming up with the regulatory environments for these businesses. And they hammer out a regulatory environment that works for all three of them! And it’s an everybody gets a piece system. It’s actually fundamentally a patronage system! Where everybody’s just looking out for their own interests and using the government to patronize themselves. But because you have competing interests that are opposed to one another, everybody’s competing to make sure they still get their piece. Everybody gets a piece! That’s the overarching thing here.

Cedric Youngelman: So where do you think we’re going in 2021?

Jeff Vandroux: Right now certainly not in that direction, right? If things get better, they’re gonna get worse first, and I’m not saying things will get better. Right now we’re moving more and more towards that servile state system. I think UBI proposals are gonna get a lot more serious. It’s not gonna be a pie in the sky Andrew Yang thing anymore. I don’t know if we’ll see it yet actually enacted as a policy but that’s a thing you’re gonna see a lot more people talk about. I’m very opposed to the UBI. It basically strips everyone of their power and agency. It also just — human nature is such that people need a purpose in life. They need to work, they need to do something! That doesn’t mean they need to work a brutally hard job, but they need to have a reason to get up in the morning. UBI is just not good. I think you’re gonna start to see the UBI and other sorts of policies that might be designed to accomplish UBI-type goals. I think that’s where we’re headed in the short to medium term.

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah man. This has been so awesome! I really appreciate just kind of grokking everything you’ve been throwing out there! I wanna hear more from you everywhere, I think you just need to be out there more. Any parting words, and let everyone know where we can find you?

Jeff Vandroux: Yeah the easiest way to find me is on Twitter. If you’re interested in the IRA or 401(k) product that we talked about, you can go to https://keykeeperira.com/bitcoin/. And you can check out all that info!

Cedric Youngelman: That’s awesome bro! This has been so dope! I really appreciate it Jeff!

Jeff Vandroux: No problem man. I really appreciate you having me on. This has been a great conversation!

Cedric Youngelman: This has been great.