What is up, you guys? I have been going through some old footage of my time in Tanzania with the Hadza from earlier this year. And I am reminded of one simple fact. And that simple fact is that the organs of an animal are absolutely the most treasured part of that animal. Whether we're talking about the heart, the liver, the spleen, the pancreas, the testicles, the brain, these were the organs. These were the foods that the Hadza...
absolutely treasured. They treated them like gold. They were shared among the tribe, but the lion's share of these organs went to the hunters that were successful in the kill, and they were distributed and savored among all. There was one point when I was with the Hadza and one of the tribe members was holding a liver of a goat that we had killed and he just placed it so gingerly.
onto a pile of rocks before they cooked it and distributed among the tribe. It was really interesting to behold. Now, you all probably know that I love organs. That is why I built hardened soil, because for many of you, getting organs...
is difficult in terms of quality or simply obtaining them because you don't have them in your normal grocery store. While we make it hardened soil are grass-fed, grass-finished, regeneratively raised, freeze-dried, desiccated organs from New Zealand, the best on the planet.
I want to share with you guys two reviews, and then we'll get into the podcast. I started my keto carnivore journey on October the 1st, 2021, and in the first week of my new lifestyle, along with taking six capsules of Firestarter each morning. I lost seven pounds. Along with the seven pounds, I feel much more energized and clear-minded. I also have zero cravings for junk. Highly recommend. That is from Hannah H., who titles the review, love it in awe.
caps. Firestarter is our high stearic acid tallow from suet in a capsule. This is a review for beef organs from Michelle M. My daughter and I started taking the supplement a few weeks ago and right away we both noticed an increase in energy, not like you get from caffeine.
but just a steady energy throughout the day. We were able to get things done instead of napping in the afternoon. We aren't dragging through the day like before and we are sleeping great too. We are very thankful for this product. This is the kind of stuff that makes me very proud. I'm very excited to do this work. So check us out at heartandsoil.co, that's .co, to reclaim your birthright to radical health. And if you need more organs, which all of us do in your life.
My guest on this week's podcast is Saifede Namos. He is an incredible individual. He's the author of the bestselling book, The Bitcoin Standard, The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. This book is a groundbreaking study of the economics of Bitcoin. If any of you have been following Bitcoin or last few weeks, you know that it has gone gangbusters back over $60,000 for one Bitcoin. The Bitcoin standard was a pioneering...
work in exploring Bitcoin's value proposition as the hardest money ever discovered and the only working alternative to national central banks for international payments. We talk about all of this in the podcast. Saifuddin is a PhD. He holds a PhD in sustainable development. Interestingly, he can comment on energy use, as we do in this podcast, from Columbia University, where his doctoral thesis studied the economics of biofuels and alternative energy sources.
Incidentally, in his thesis, he discovered that the economics of biofuels and alternative energy sources don't make a lot of sense for humans. I've been talking about climate change a lot, guys. There's a deep rabbit hole. We get into it a little bit in this podcast as well. He also holds a master's in science.
in development management from the London School of Economics and a bachelor's of engineering from the American University of Beirut. His website is safedean.com, S-A-I-F-E-D-A-E-D-E-A-N, S-A-F. S A I F E D E A N.com. And if you do not know about cryptocurrency, if you don't know what Bitcoin is, this is the podcast for you. I firmly believe that in the next few years. Those who are able to invest in Bitcoin will secure financial sovereignty and financial independence. And those who are not,
will sort of be left by the wayside looking at a consistently devalued American fiat dollar currency that is subject to much inflation. Why does this have anything to do with nutrition? Because if you can't hold onto your money, if central banks are devaluing your money, we are printing trillions of dollars a year now, I believe. The majority, I think it's like 30, 20 to 30% of the dollars in circulation right now are printed in the last 18 months. It's crazy.
You can't buy food. You can't do any of these things. These are all central tenets of being a healthy, sovereign human. I also believe that many of the concepts involved in Bitcoin, personal sovereignty, independence, truth, open honesty. the slogan of the Bitcoin community, which is don't trust verify are all deeply connected with our ethos as people who are looking to remember where we have come from as humans and trying to understand how we best navigate.
this changing time, this changing landscape in our lives. This is a super important podcast, guys. Listen to it. Let us know if you have questions. You can email us, radicalhealth at heartandsoil.co. And as we have... released this podcast, Heart and Soil now accepts Bitcoin. So as a pledge, as a statement of belief in the quality, in the really the uniqueness.
of this form of currency and the way that it will change the lives of billions of people, we wanted to accept Bitcoin hard and soil and we now do. When you go to the checkout page, you can select paying with BTC pay server. So that is our vote. for a sovereign, sound, hard money system that is open to all. So enjoy this podcast with Safedine. If you enjoy this podcast in general, please leave me a review at Apple Podcasts.
That one really moves the needle. Leave us a review everywhere you can, anywhere you can, but everyone who leaves a review at Apple Podcasts will be considered for a free signed copy of my book, which is given away every month. I also want to say this podcast is a source of...
cost-free information. It is a labor of love for me, and I appreciate the sponsors who make this podcast possible. I want to start this week with blueblocks, B-L-U-B-L-O-X.com. They make, in my opinion, demonstrably the best, highest quality blue blocking glasses out there.
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We should democratize this. Make it open to the people. If you want to get your blood work checked, get it checked. You go to a doctor and you say, I want to get my testosterone. Maybe they say, you don't need your testosterone checked. You're fine.
or you say, I want to get my CRP checked, or I want to get my CBC or Chem 7 or lipids checked. Maybe they don't want to do it for you. So this is what's awesome, but let's get checked and the democratization of blood work. Check them out. TryLGC, T-R-Y-L-G-C.com. front slash Paul or CarnivoreMD. Let me know which one works. Shout out to White Oak Pastures as well. WhiteOakPastures.com. Sixth generation family farm. Will and Jenny Harris are amazing people.
Grass feeding, grass finishing, rotational grazing, the best meat that I've had in a very long time. You can use the code CarnivoreMD there for 10% off your order. Jenny is so cool. that I called her last year and said, hey, Jenny, can we do corn and soy free eggs? She said, I will make it happen. They also have corn and soy free chickens. Excuse me. They might have corn and soy free eggs, but they definitely have corn and soy free chickens.
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the chief cowgirl, not really, but you got the idea, at El Campo on the podcast before to discuss her ideas, and they believe in what we believe in. So as you know, meat is threatened. We need to protect this, and we need to feed our families well. you must vote with your dollars. You are either voting for multinational corporations that are monocropping and not doing well for the environment and the soil, or you are voting for small, local, semi-local regenerative farms that...
are part of the solution. So check out the sponsors of this podcast. On to the podcast with Safedine Amos. Enjoy this one, guys. This is a good one. It's a game changer for sure. Stay radical. Safedine, thanks for coming on the podcast, my friend. I'm excited about this one. Thank you for having me, Paul. It's a pleasure.
are so many questions that i have for you and i think that my audience is probably a collection of people some people are very familiar with bitcoin some people have probably never heard of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies so i thought we would start basic and then get into more and more sophisticated questions i myself am still a cryptocurrency neophyte but i've definitely been orange-pilled and i think it's a fascinating space and i'm just so excited to
get you on the podcast and try to draw some connections because this podcast is called Fundamental Health. Traditionally, I've spoken about nutrition and food and autoimmune disease and illness. And I definitely think that. As we move into the next few years of our lives, understanding currencies and economics.
will benefit all of us in massive, massive ways. So let's just start with the most basic and probably one of the most interesting questions. From your perspective, Saifedean, what is money? And why do we need this? Why is it valuable? I follow the Austrian school understanding of money, which thinks of money as being a medium of exchange. You understand things by their functions. So money functions as a medium of exchange, and it is the natural solution to the problem of barter.
as individuals we are going to want to exchange things with one another in a very primitive economy if you're living with 100 people in a small tribe and all you do is you know hunt all day you have a few goods
um and all you these are the only goods that you have and you have a few people that you know very well that you're going to spend the rest of your life within a few hundred yards away from or a few kilometers or whatever but you know you're very familiar with those people you're going to be interacting with them you're going to be marrying into them all of your life is going to be around them and you only have a few goods in that kind of setting you don't really
You can exchange things directly. You hunt rabbits and I hunt fish and I give you some of my fish. You give me some of your rabbits. All I own is rabbits and fish and maybe a couple of... items of clothing or whatever so we don't really have a very complex economy we can exchange things directly now as the scope of our society grows
in terms of the numbers of the people that we interact with whether it's because we start interacting with other tribes or because our tribe continues to grow we start being able to specialize in the production of more economic goods and so we get more things you know now you have clothes and you have weapons and you have all kinds of different sophisticated things and you have more people specialized in producing more things and now
people have a problem of coincidence of once in that you have fish that you you're very good at catching fish but you'd like to buy a sword say from somebody but the swordsmith doesn't want your fish he doesn't like fish he wants to eat rabbits so what you need to do in that case you know the natural solution for this is to
use a medium of exchange where you buy the rabbits from the rabbit hunter you know you give the rabbit hunter your fish he gives you the rabbits and then you go and you exchange them for the sword now you've in that situation you use rabbits as a medium of exchanges the natural solution to the problem of the person you want to sell to doesn't want the thing you want you buy the thing that they want and you give it to them and you take the thing that you want from them but over time
Naturally, some things are going to do this job better than others. So rabbits are going to be one option. Fish is another option. Swords are another option. And salt might be an option. And over time, we can understand just through the economic logic and the nature of the supply and the demand of different forms of money, we can see which ones would work well and which ones would work badly. And we can understand why.
ended up with gold being the dominant form of money all over the world by the end of the 19th century and in the bitcoin standard in my book i argue that that is because gold has the uh regularly lowest rate of supply growth or um you know every year we're only adding a small amount of gold to the stock pot of gold that we have and that's because uh gold doesn't ruin so all of our previous uh production of gold
in the past is piling up and so new production this year is always a small fraction so gold is always the least inflationary metal and that's why it ended up being uh the metal that is money so over time Gold just naturally wins as money because people who use it as money are going to become wealthier than people who use rabbits or other things that are not suitable because, you know, you can breed rabbits very quickly. And so if you store your wealth in rabbits.
you know people can make a lot more rabbits and devalue your existing rabbits plus of course you know rabbits have all kinds of other problems but you know with other metals you know it was natural that copper iron and eventually silver would also lose out to gold because these metals are easier to inflate you can make more and more of the supply so in my mind what ends up being the most important characteristic for money over time is its saleability over time it's the ability of the money
to hold on to its value into the future so that if you want to buy the money today so that you can spend it in the future the money that holds on to its value best is the money that's more likely to win out in a free market and of course the other factor is the money that you can move across space
uh without significant loss of value so um you know rabbits are complicated to move to the next town if you wanted to uh move uh and you know if you wanted to use a base metal like silver like copper even silver or iron you need large quantities to store an amount of wealth uh that you could store in a small quantity of gold so gold has better saleability across space across time ends up being the natural choice of money over history because it stores value and i think that's really
uh the the um that's really the characteristic that matters in money how much it stores and loses value across space and time or saleability so this has to do with a stock to flow ratio of any particular form of money right Yeah, so the stock to flow is basically the inverse of the supply growth rate. So the supply growth rate is how much the supply grows every year. The stock to flow ratio is the ratio of the existing stockpiles of a specific metal or market commodity.
to the annual production so it's the inverse of it so gold has always had an annual uh stock to flow ratio around 50 or 60 70 something like that you know it always grows at around 1.5 per year um so that's uh that's really i argue that's what matters the most in what ends up being money it's the thing that has the highest stock to flow And historically, things like seashells, like you said, rabbits, maybe arrowheads, these have all been used as money. But as you make the point in your book.
the hardest money ever wins. So what is the idea of hard money or sound money? We've sort of already talked about it, but let's make sure everybody understands that. So the concept of hard money refers to the hardness of increasing the supply. How hard is it for people to make more of this? And so you can measure this by looking at the rate of annual supply growth. So the stock flow is the way that I like to express it.
if you look at the supply growth it's it's a number say like one or two percent but if you take it as the inverse then it ends up being a number like 50 or 60 or 20 so that gives you a better intuitive understanding of the magnitudes involved so So hardness is how hard it is to increase the supply.
and you you see that this matters because you could get a big increase in demand if something begins to get used as money people will want to acquire it and buy it and hold more of it and then when they start holding more of it the price goes up and so that incentive the producers to make more so for things that have a low stock to flow ratio
because they are consumed you know for consumer goods things that you buy in order to consume and then consuming them ruins them and um alters their original form think oil for instance or copper you know that stuff gets used and it rusts and you know oil is burned so therefore people don't have large stockpiles of oil and copper nobody keeps large
quantities of oil and copper some people do obviously um for their needs but if you added up all these stockpiles of oil and copper that exist in the world they'll be somewhere in the range of annual production maybe a little bit less maybe a little bit more but it won't be 10 times larger than annual production. We don't have 10 years.
production of oil sitting in oil storage or copper because these things are moved around so if there is a spike in the price of oil or the price of of copper the quantity that's on the market is pretty small the price can rise very quickly, but then mining production can increase the supply very quickly. And so that brings the price crashing down again. So that's why I think, you know, gold ends up winning out.
um the hardness of the money is a distinct concept from soundness although they're related sound money refers to the idea of money that wins its place in the market place and wins its place as a money in the market because people choose to use it out of their own free will so sound money is not particularly about gold um by definition it happens to be conflated by gold conflated with gold because for the majority
of human history uh people just chose gold freely the market would choose gold as money and so um i argue that you know the market left to their own people will choose the hardest money so the sound money will be the hard money And the hardest money will be the money that retains its value the most or resists inflation in the best way. So before I'm a physician, I think about medicine. Just explain inflation to us.
briefly, because I think this is a term people are going to hear more and more in the next few years. And it's going to affect all of our lives massively. And you kind of mentioned that term, but I think inflation and deflation, let's just make sure everyone understands those terms.
yeah so the term inflation can be used in two ways in economics and um you know depends on who you ask uh so one way to we could refer to price inflation which refers to prices rising and that's the more common usage of the term uh i think the more correct usage of the term is an increase in the supply of money
Now, those two are, of course, related, but it matters in language what you're referring to. So in order to be clear, I prefer to make a distinction and refer to price inflation or supply inflation. often just used interchangeably, and it's hard to keep track at all times. So effectively, when you increase the supply of money.
It's just basic economics that you're increasing the supply and therefore the demand that exists for this commodity is going to be distributed over a larger quantity. And so the price of each unit or the market value of each unit is likely to decline, all else being equal.
of course so inflation um is it's a huge huge huge problem uh it's you wouldn't get the impression that it is a huge problem if you've gone to university and studied economics it's mentioned as this kind of you know economic phenomena that just happens um because you know
life happens and prices just go up because prices go up and it's just the job of the central bank to make sure that they don't go up too much but of course there's no reason for prices to go up it makes no sense whatsoever we have a world in which we're always producing more of everything and things are constantly getting cheaper in real terms even today even though you know prices are rising and there is some degree of price inflation if you actually measure
prices in terms of human time in terms of human labor you'll see that everything is getting cheaper so over the last 40 years 40 years you know there's data on this um look up the simon index and it's it measures the prices of things over the last 40 years we have more of everything today than we did 40 years ago we have more houses more cars more copper more zinc more gold more oil we have more of everything so
it doesn't make sense that if we have more of everything that uh the prices will continue to rise we have more of everything per person as well you know not just more in uh general so prices and prices do drop in terms of human time so um you know look at whatever job compare the salary today to 40 years ago and you'll see that
in real terms in terms of your wages you're able to buy more of uh the basic commodities that you would desire so why is everything always getting more expensive well the answer is things aren't getting more expensive it's the money that is getting cheaper so the reason prices go up is not because things are getting scarcer it's because money is getting more abundant and so people are unable to save and that's really the main issue
So, you know, if you've gone to university and studied economics, this isn't presented as a major issue. Inflation is under control. It's always around 2%, 3%.
and you know one to three percent is where it's always roughly been for the past 40 years or so and it's not a major issue it's a price well worth paying because it allows the economy to move forward and this is this is basic common sense knowledge among most economists now among economists of the austrian school which is kind of the heretics there of economics to whom i proudly belong
um you know the kind of people who believe crazy things just like in nutrition the sort of people who believe that you don't have to eat six to ten servings of grains every day to be healthy um it's very similar the dynamic among the austrian economists the um You know, the issue...
is there is no need for the inflation to happen in the first place there is no need for the money supply to be increased and i think this is one very big and fundamental difference between mainstream economists and austrian economists which is that austrian economists understand that you just don't need the money supply to increase you can run any economy on any quantity of any money as long as you can divide it into smaller pieces and so you could run the entire u.s economy on
10 trillion dollars or one trillion dollars or uh one billion dollars or even one dollar as long as you keep dividing it up into smaller and smaller units and so you know if we had 10 times the money supply that we have today we could run same economy but everything would be worth roughly 10 times more um so or if we had a tenth of the money supply that we have today we could still run the same economy but everything would be worth a tenth of what it's worth today in terms of
dollar prices but in real terms it'll be the same so you know your salary right now let's say your salary is a thousand dollars a month and your food costs you eight hundred dollars a month in a world in which we had a tenth as much money your salary would be a hundred dollars and your food would cost you eighty dollars in all else being equal so there's no magic requirement for your salary to be a thousand and your food to be 800 and the total money supply to be x billion
or trillion dollars, any number and any money supply can work. And my favorite example of this is Turkey.
uh in 2001 i think they they have an incredible history of inflation turkey one of the countries that had the highest amount of inflation in the 20th century so in 2000 they wanted to make a new start and so they introduced a new currency which is the new turkish lira and the exchange rate between the two was one million to one and so instead of you know your house costing uh 500 billion dollars uh and and just people having to deal with a lot of zeros they knocked six zeros out of the uh
exchange rate. And so we went from $1 buys you one and a half million Turkish Liras to $1 buys you one and a half new Turkish Liras.
and guess what you know did the turkish economy shrink by a million to a millionth of its size overnight did turkish people lose uh you know where they reduced to millions of millionth of their wealth before no life continued everything was the same just got rid of six zeros so the quantity of money doesn't matter that's the austrian contention and so if the quantity of money doesn't matter you can run an economy with a fixed supply money
and all that will happen is that as more people enter the economy as more goods are being produced the price of money rises and that's a good thing the value of money increases that means people who hold money witness their purchasing power increase over time and people of course are extremely scared of this idea by their macroeconomics textbook which you know scares them into thinking that saving is bad and uh if you if the money appreciates in value then everybody would save
then if everybody saves then you know nobody spends any money and then if nobody spends any money then we all starve and die and we get uh the economy crashing down of course it's an extremely childish and um ignorant of economics it's it's genuinely ignorant of economics this kind of understanding because you know people don't spend their money because uh they
People don't have to spend money because they just want to. They spend money because they have to, because they need to survive. So I don't care how much more my money is going to be worth next year. I still need to eat today. I still need a house today. I still need clothes today. So if now it's of course true, if you're inflating the money supply, so the money supply is constantly increasing, then the value of my money is expected to decline more.
i'm more likely to spend money i'll be spending more and more so if i expect my 100 to be worth 90 next year i'm more likely to go buy a pair of pants that i don't really need because i know that next year that pair of pants is in real terms is you know now i can buy it with that 100
don't really need it but next year if i needed it i wanted to buy it it's going to cost 120 and i won't be able to afford it so i don't want to hold on to my hundred bucks and i'll buy frivolous stuff that i don't really need so yes they're right in that it increases consumption but it increases frivolous
consumption and they're right in that it will reduce consumption but they're completely clueless when they say that it's going to reduce consumption to a point where the economy comes crashing down because that's insane people still need to eat and people will still spend because you know also people die people want to experience life you you know
People don't just want to stack money until they die and die with a high score. It's not a video game where you're just stacking money. You want money because you want to experience things. And the clock is ticking and we could all die. We want to experience things and a hard money allows us to defer our desire for experiencing things because it allows us to provide for the future. When I think that my $100 will buy me a better pair of jeans next year.
or that this pair of jeans will be worth 90 next year. then I'm more likely not to buy it now, more likely to save it and keep it until next year, which means people will end up having more savings. People will be more financially independent because, you know, they got savings that they can count on and that are constantly appreciating. That's kind of the flip side of it.
Maybe you could just take us through the history of currency in the United States real quickly. And we can talk about the gold standard and then how we went off the gold standard and bring us up to the current day. And then we can transition into cryptocurrencies and how these kind of fit in. But I think it's fascinating. And I see so. many parallels in what you're saying with medicine, because there's just like you're saying, there's this mainstream macroeconomic.
paradigm that says inflation is normal, it happens all the time, and you must spend money. The sign of a healthy economy is people spending money. This is the whole idea of a stimulus check. And borrowing. Yes. Borrow money at debt. Yeah. And we're going to give people.
a magic 600 and that's not going to have any consequence and we've sort of already hinted at the fact that it'll have big consequences and we'll get to that we're going to give people a magic 600 which they'll spend frivolously because we're just giving it to them they're going to buy an iphone or video games
food or whatever they're going to spend money on. And that's the sign of a healthy economy is the flow of money as opposed to something completely differently. But in mainstream medical school, and of course there are heretical...
paradigms within medicine as well. We just tell people, oh, your illness is just the result of your genetics and you can't do anything about it. And the only thing you can do is take these pharmaceutical drugs. Aren't you so happy and grateful to us that we've developed these pharmaceutical drugs?
pharmaceutical companies are truly godsend and Pfizer and AstraZeneca and J&J and Merck. These are really the children of the gods in giving us these magical molecules because you were broken from the beginning and there's no way that... you could ever actually correct your disease. And of course, you and I both know this is wildly flawed and very important to consider. So I think that...
As I started learning about this cryptocurrency idea and really just money in general, as I was trying to under cryptocurrencies, I saw so many parallels. And I thought, wow, there is this real, just like with medicine, there is this propaganda.
that tells people you cannot be healthy, therefore you should take our medications. And with money and these cryptocurrency ideas or just economics in general, I was thinking, I never even thought about my money. I just put my money in a bank account or I gave it to a financial planner.
grew it a certain amount per year. And I patted myself on the back and said, look at my money growing. And I never thought like, oh man, oh shit, there's inflation. So Let's talk about what the US dollar is and maybe how it's changed over the last few hundred years and then we'll get into Bitcoin.
yeah i mean as a little disclaimer i'm not a u.s historian and you know there's a lot of u.s history out there so we're not gonna be able to cover a lot of it but i'll give some broad strokes uh historically you know money was uh there were some earlier forms of money like seashells that were being used in the us and so you know the expression shelling out comes from the fact that in many parts of the us people use shell seashells as money
of course that got um that got demonetized as more and more uh gold and silver started making its way here and gold and silver were the money of uh the free market and the dollar's name comes from the taylor coin i think uh which was a silver coin and specific amount of silver and then uh so the s was um
And the US was on a gold standard in the 19th century. There were periods in which it was on a bimetallic standard. So there was gold and silver being used as money. And the drama of gold and silver was a long-running... issue in the 19th century but by the end of the 19th century it was resolved in the favor of gold and there was only really gold left as money and um it was
It was working great in some ways, but it wasn't perfect. If you ask me, the reason it wasn't perfect was because banks had some degree of monopoly that allowed them to engage in fractional reserve lending, which meant occasional banking. crises that created bank panics and depositors losing their money and banks going under and banks requiring bailouts And of course, banks calling for public help and public subsidies.
and so these were happening quite frequently now i think you know in a healthy free market what would have happened is that the way this would have been corrected is that people who engage in this would have just gone out of business and everybody else would have learned the lesson and then no more fractional reserve banking but if you've got some degree of monopoly you can keep getting away with um doing bad things as you can see like with um say government
dietary advised bodies which you know can continue to tell you to eat your six to ten portions of industrial uh sludge every day um and never go out of business and so What they did instead was that they instituted a central bank, which in principle sounds like a good idea. If there's a bank that's in trouble, the central bank will step in and save them and prevent the depositors from losing their money.
but of course it's actually a bad idea because what this ends up doing is that the uh depositors are going to actually um I mean, the fact that the banks have a safety net of a central bank now just means that they can engage in fractional reserve lending more and more. But historically, it was a two-way tango between banks and governments. So they both... um benefited from this arrangement at the expense of everybody else governments managed to get banks to
by their debt, by their government bonds, and therefore allow them to engage in excessive spending and getting into war. And that was the big one in 1914.
And by giving them some degree of monopoly, governments would allow banks to engage in fractional reserve banking and credit expansion, which essentially means issuing more money than... you have on hand and so basically printing money so it was a you know the it was a great arrangement for both of them where you know you let us get away with printing money and we let you get away with printing money
and it's uh you know the first disastrous consequence of this of course was world war one and a very important point about world war one is that you know if you read the history books it's not quite clear what the war was about like it wasn't this massive
um you know global conflict of the world being split into two camps over some ideological or racial or whatever lines it was just a fight in the balkans that kept on snowballing and roped in everybody in the world like one big giant royal rumble and the reason I think you could point to the direct reasons of why Austria did this and why Germany did that and why Britain entered. But ultimately, the important point is that what allowed the war to...
The war's causes are not unique. We've had wars before. But what turned this into a global conflict that lasted for four years... of absolute carnage was the fact that governments could continue to print money because they went off the gold standard in 1914 so before that in the 18th and 19th century when the king wanted to fight a war
he needed a big stack of gold to to pay to soldiers before they go to battle and to equip them and to buy them the weapons and so once battle started to go badly for him or once his coins started to run out then he was in trouble and he had to go and collect taxes from his people and ask the people you know please give me money so i can fight a war which
you know in order to do that you better have a very good excuse for why you want to fight the war and uh you know getting a new castle for my cousins is not a very good excuse that's likely to get people to support it so wars before that were quite limited by the fact that nobody could print gold but then in 1914
The restraint on the government was relaxed enormously because governments could now, instead of just printing money in order to, instead of having to tax people for the money, they could just print the money first. and take the purchasing power from people's pockets without having to actually knock on their door and tell them, give me their gold. So you would have your paper money at home.
and its purchasing power would be getting drained by the printer in the central bank that is used to finance the war and by the time the price inflation showed up you know you had a million scapegoats that you could blame for the inflation it's usually you know a mixture of bankers and ethnic minorities and foreign powers and so on so then you you throw the blame on them and since then really we've we've really been in
in the century of inflation the last century has been the century of total inflation and total war and it's just governments uh printing money and it's it's it's it's a very uh powerful failure mode And it's very hard to break out of because the money printer sets the rules for everything in society. You know, the money printer, if you have a money printer in your basement and you can just take it out and print unlimited amounts of money, you can remake society.
You can remake education, you can remake nutrition, you can remake everything. And you can remake the understanding of the money printer itself to make people want it. desired and you know you don't have to be um you you know you we don't have to posit anything extraordinary to see this we see it all over the world in all cultures in all countries governments have a vested interest in the money printer
doing its job. And they will always be much more sympathetic to the stories that promote this rather than being against it. So we were on a gold standard in the United States until 1971, right? And then we really went to what we can call fiat. And maybe we can define that term. But I just think that's a really fascinating thing that until 1971, there was some connection between gold and our money.
and then it went away right yeah i arguably the the us went off the gold standard in 1914 um it went back to the gold standard in no sorry the us went off the gold standard in 1917 actually and then went back on in 1921 or 22.
and stayed on it until 1934 and that's when they went off the gold standard and that's when most countries went off the gold standard in 1934 they instituted something called the gold exchange standard instead where basically the central banks trade gold with one another but the populations had to use the paper money and so
They had much more leeway for inflation in that arrangement. I discuss this in detail in my next book, The Fiat Standard. But that, of course, was unworkable because they were getting into more and more inflation.
But the other governments were, you know, other governments were ending up holding the bags essentially of inflating currency and they weren't happy about it. And so... in 1971 they removed the redemption of gold as an option for foreign central banks the us removed it and so well there's a missing point here which is in 1946 the world went on a dollar gold standard where the world's central banks were using dollars
to trade amongst themselves but the dollars were redeemable in gold and that was the new global monetary system and the us um you know had a massive advantage in that situation because they could print money But they were restricted by the fact that foreign central banks could redeem their dollars for gold. And when they started actually doing it in the late 60s, Nixon just went and said, oops, sorry, guys.
screw you guys i'm going home as eric kartman says it and it's just basically said nope no more gold and at that time you know an ounce of gold was 35 today it's like 1800 or something like that so Where are we today with U.S. dollars? Like, what is a U.S. dollar? And is it really true that the Federal Reserve, that the U.S. Treasury can just...
print as many US dollars as they want. Do we really just have this sort of fairy dust unicorn fart currency today that's propped up by hopes and dreams? I mean, what is the US dollar in 2021? What are we really dealing with? Well, I mean, the good news is it's not exactly unicorn farts. It's not exactly Zimbabwe level. It's not exactly in Lebanon. It's not reached the point where you've got an actual physical printer with enormous quantities.
physical paper being churned out at increasing rates um the process of how it works since 1971 you know once the redemption of gold was removed i i discussed this in detail i studied the fiat system in in my fiat standard book which is the forthcoming one you can sign up for the kickstarter
on my website and um get the first draft of the book now and then get the final draft by christmas so in the bitcoin standard i study bitcoin and explain how bitcoin works in the fiat standard i do the same thing for fiat imagining that fiat is a software implementation and i'm trying to explain it to the user um of how it works and to be fair it's not it's not a system where we've got um you know printers going on and paper money it's not the majority of fiat money is not
paper the majority of fiat money is digital so um less than 10 of the dollars that exist are in physical form so the dollar is predominantly a digital currency uh just like bitcoin um
So the way that dollars are created, again, it's also not entirely capricious. It's not like, you know, well, this current... um the last couple of years with the way that things have been going with challenges a little bit in terms of you know all these handouts that are happening but usually it's not so capricious as if it's you know a president could just press a button and uh five trillion dollar materialize.
But yeah, we're getting there. But the regular way in which the fiat system is supposed to function is that money printing happens when lending happens. I think this is really the key point. And it's a point that doesn't get emphasized enough.
my fiat standard i the entire book is a um it starts from that premise and then looks at what are the implications of this and tries to analyze the implications for society at large and then the implications for the rise of bitcoin and how bitcoin can fix this And so whenever you take out a loan, if you go now and you get a house loan, the bank is not going to take a million dollars from somebody else's account and give them to you so that you can go buy a house.
The bank is going to make those million dollars out of scratch. They're going to have a bunch of reserve. They're going to have other depository money and other... assets on their balance sheet backing that but the new dollars are created at that point because you've taken out a loan and the flip side of this is that when you pay off the loan the dollars are
effectively destroyed or if you default on the loan the dollars are effectively destroyed so the money supply is reduced so they give you a checking account with that money in your account and that money they just made so money is constantly being made made and created by the banking system in the fiat world And, you know, it's not exactly a system where we have a bunch of people that are just printing money and enslaving everybody else. It's a little bit more complex than that, in that...
The people who are borrowing are the ones who are benefiting from the money printing effectively at the expense of the people who are saving. And so the natural outcome is that, you know, you're constantly punishing savers and rewarding borrowers.
and so savers uh you know nobody saves anymore people don't keep money and everybody wants to borrow and basically the winning move in the fiat system you know the way to use the fiat software correctly is to try and get into as much debt as you can that's that's the way you win because every time you get into debt your bank is printing money so you're giving a banker um an excuse to print a whole bunch of money so
um they're gonna share some of the spoils with you and that's why you know buying your house on credit makes a lot more sense than buying it uh with cash so nobody buys houses with cash anymore almost Right, right. Okay. So where does, where do, let's just talk about Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin? How does it fit in? Because when I learned about this, I was thinking, oh shit, like.
all of this money that I have sitting in the bank, you know, the money that I have sitting in the bank is devaluing every year. And I've heard all sorts of different numbers. I mean, Michael Saylor, who's a Bitcoin advocate, a Bitcoin maximalist would say. 10, 15% devaluation on the money in my bank account every year.
which is pretty scary because I look at that and I think, well, maybe I invested it with a financial planner and I'm getting eight or 10% return and looking at my portfolio and going, huh, I'm doing pretty good. I'm getting 8% return on my fiat US dollars. But if Michael Saylor is right, and this inflation is really to this degree with U.S. dollar, I'm actually losing money. Even if I'm making 10%, I'm down 5%. The purchasing power of my money is going down. And so you think.
Wait a minute. And this is the question that I've heard you ask. Michael Saylor asks, how do you store value? So how does Bitcoin fit into this equation? Yeah, well, before I get into Bitcoin, I think the key insight that Saylor brought on this, which I think is absolutely brilliant, is that he told us... you know you should stop thinking about inflation as one number there's no one number of inflation inflation is a vector that is
spread out over all kinds of different goods. And so inflation is different for different goods. So what you're really concerned about is the things that you want to buy. And so if you want to buy a house in a nice neighborhood in New York or in Miami,
you know look at what has happened to the prices of those houses over the last 20 years and you'll get the rate of inflation that is more relevant for you you know you if you're making say seven percent with your financial planner every year but those houses are going up at ten percent
you're getting shafted by inflation um and this this this is really i think the the an excellent entry to bring us into the um relationship between uh the the the hard money and the fiat food the fiat money and fiat food which i like to talk about a lot which is that The best way for you to avoid inflation is to stop eating expensive, highly inflationary goods like meat and healthy food.
and eat industrial junk like if you live on a diet of industrial waste then there's no inflation you know if you eat a barrel of twinkies every day that's gonna be 99 cents a day and these kinds of industrial things you know they they can be ramped up and their production can be ramped up their margins are so high
that and the there's an enormous ability to scale their production because everything is industrial and you're not really linked to the natural world because there's very little actual nutrients coming in from the natural world so you can ramp up production of that poison and keep it cheap and as long as you know you're eating that stuff then there's no inflation so you know i think you know michael saylor puts it really well there's no inflation if you want to live like a poor person
you know for poor people there's not much inflation um well obviously it's not it's not true that they suffer from inflation the most but as long as you buy the poorest things then inflation doesn't affect you as badly uh where it is a real problem is if
trying to have nice things you know if you want to eat a ribeye inflation is a problem if you want to live in a nice neighborhood inflation is a problem if you want to go to a good university inflation is a massive problem these are the things where it manifests so um now of course the the cpi is a bunch of government uh statistics which is um you can read about the story of how they managed it in the 1970s when inflation was very high the way that they
kept the cpi in check was to basically take out the things that were going up at very high prices and always make up some story oh no well you know oil it's because of the uh 1973 war and so we're just not going to count it as part of
you know, we're not going to count energy costs as part of your living costs, just energy, you know, just the most important thing in your life, along with food, which they also took out. And they took out a lot of food items out of this because, you know, they're too sensitive to whatever. So they keep taking the expenses.
of stuff out and so you keep the cheap um things that don't matter that don't get affected much and then you get a relatively low level of inflation but of course people can see this you know people are constantly complaining about the fact that their paycheck buys less that their savings are not working and that the quality of
is disintegrating and so um you know a very important way in which they managed this was that in the 1970s they promoted the u.s government promoted the consumption of industrial waste as a replacement for food And, you know, diet advice.
came to reflect this reality you know um eggs were high in cholesterol and beef was gonna give you uh high cholesterol and heart disease and um colon cancer or whatever all that pseudoscience uh is it's not entirely innocent and it's not only to promote the consumption of the industrial sludge made by agribusiness it's also to cover up the inflation that the government is doing so i think that's a very important connection between the two
uh now just want to clarify for people cpi is consumer price index yes yeah consumer price index is cpi and what you're talking about is they're kind of manipulating it so sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you but i when i first came across it i was like what is cpi but go ahead Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, and it's a metric that can be very easily gained because it's entirely dependent on what you put in the basket that you choose.
um don't expect it to show a lot of uh high inflation because you know it's made by people who wanted not to so um this is just one aspect of the problem of inflation you know the the theft of the inflation is just one aspect of it and in my um two books the bitcoin standard and the fiat standard i discuss in depth many of the other facets of the problem like um
you know the the economic uh miscalculation it creates in all these business cycles and recessions and the fact that we have these recessions is to a large extent a product of um inflation as well um it only happens because of inflation And one other factor which I find to be very important is the increase in people's time preference or how much people think about the present versus the future.
And when you have hard money, when you can save for the future, when you know that, you know, if you earn a gold coin and you just keep that gold coin safe under your mattress.
uh then you know that you know whenever you want to use it it's going to be worth more and you don't have to think about it that offers you a lot of certainty about the future it offers you a lot of um uh it relieves a lot of your uncertainty about what the future can bring and that therefore allows you to start thinking more of the future in all of your decisions on the other hand when you don't have that and i saw this uh up close in in in lebanon when you know when the currency was collapsing
people's attention in life shifts to the day-to-day more and more in everything you know in your business relations in your family relations in uh and the way you think about your health and the way you think about your social life and everything you become much more present oriented because
future is far more hazy it's uncertain you don't know how to provide for the future whatever money you have today you don't have a reliable way of sending to the future so all of these are some of the many problems associated with fiat money and Bitcoin fixes them all.
and the reason bitcoin fixes them all is because bitcoin is the technological solution to the problem of inflation we've spent the last 100 years having a political problem of inflation and we've had all good economists try and convince the world and inform the world that no all the stupid propaganda that you getting from your government financed university professors about inflation being good is bad inflation is bad
we need to stop inflation we need to go back on a gold standard we need to have a hard money we need to not have the government decide what is money we need to not have the government mess with the money supply It's a very hard ask to explain all of this to people. And it's a very hard ask, particularly when the solution is political. So getting you to understand all of those things is one thing.
and then getting you to mobilize politically in order to vote people into power that are going to turn off the money printer is many hundreds of orders of magnitude more difficult particularly because you are inherently fundamentally inevitably forever disadvantaged in the game of politics by the fact that you don't want to use the printing press
So it's a game that's rigged in favor of the printing press. It's not so much that people abuse the printing press in as much as it is that the printing press... The money printers, you know, they abuse society because that's it. Once you have a position of power where somebody gets to have a printer, nobody controls the printer. The printer is just going to control everyone and it's going to just go wild because whoever...
runs the printer hardest can buy the most votes in the election. And so it's a political process that's only going to lead in one way. more inflation, more inflationary spending. So you see, politically, you don't ever see any kind of realistic political force that is actually... talking about reducing money printing. You know, even people like to think maybe, well, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, you know, these were anti-inflationary. It's not true.
it was relocating the money printing from certain interest groups to other interest groups so instead of money going to labor unions and welfare a lot more money was going to military contractors and other you know republican and conservative friendly uh interest but money printing doesn't slow down it's just constantly uh happening so bitcoin is a technological solution for this you don't have to
fix your political system and your monetary system in order for you to be able to save for the future anymore you have the solution on your own computer you just download a bunch of software you run the program on your computer you've got your own bitcoins you can save money in them and the supply cannot be increased this is really the most important point about bitcoin is that nobody can increase the supply of bitcoin the supply of bitcoin is fixed and it follows
perfectly predictable schedule which has followed for the last 12 years and will continue to follow for the rest of its existence which nobody can alter so um it's a system that is ideal for anybody who wants to save and doesn't want to lose value over time so How would you explain what Bitcoin actually is to someone who has no experience in the financial realm and is not very computer savvy? Like, how would you explain?
bitcoin to my 70 year old mother or to me for instance you know like because people always i think they want to know i think that one of the hesitations people have in investing in bitcoin is i don't even know what i'm buying And as you've talked about, and as I've heard Michael Saylor talk about, like Bitcoin is not meant to be a speculation tool. It's not meant to be something just get rich quick. It's a long-term store of value, but what the heck is it?
like how would you explain that to somebody at like a really simple basic level yeah i mean i guess i i would just say it's money it's you know we've got several forms of money you have just like there's a euro and the dollar and all these different currencies and particularly for your grandma she'll think of gold as well it'll be easy to explain gold as money for her perhaps for younger people that might sound weird um so but we do have dollars and euros and yens and so on and we have gold
and now we have another form of money which is a money that is done on the exists in cyberspace and that exists on the internet that nobody can control and um ultimately you know you can you can get into i think honestly the the honest answer is that you know the technical aspect of bitcoin is not something that can be explained in a few minutes you're gonna
to need to just go on the internet and spend a lot of time reading about it and there's no alternative for it and there's no easy shortcut for it and that's fine but you know you don't know you also don't really know how your fridge works or how your laptop works or how your car works but you can still use them. So I think, you know,
What I try to communicate to people is the usability aspect. So what is the fridge? It's the thing that keeps your food cold. How does it work? Well, if you want to know how it works, go online, read about how fridges work. But if you want your current meal not to go bad, put it here.
get it out tomorrow and you'll see that it's still uh edible so what bitcoin does as a form of money is that it can't be inflated the supply can't be increased and so over time it holds on to its value very very well and so It's a new form of money in that regard because we're used to money losing its value over time. This is a money that gains value over time. And so it's, yeah, that's how I would explain it.
And the more technical side is all of these things with blockchain technology, which is very technical. And I think of as a ledger. There are lots of good videos on the internet that sort of begin to explain blockchain technology, but it is sort of technical computing.
And I like your analogy. We don't necessarily have to understand how a refrigerator works in terms of Freon, this, and electrical circuits here, but... I think that maybe let's get into some of the criticisms of Bitcoin and answer some of the things that people levy against Bitcoin, because that may help people understand. that it's actually substantial or at least make the case for one side or the other. So I think people see gold and they think, oh, it's a gold coin.
Again, like what use does gold have for most of us other than being an agreed upon medium of exchange? And so. we i guess you could maybe use gold to make something but how many of us are actually using gold to make anything in our lives maybe it's used in circuits and whatnot but We don't necessarily use platinum or silicone as a money. So this idea of money is like, it's kind of just like you said, the agreed upon sound currency that is the hardest.
meaning the least inflationary. And as you said, there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoins ever minted. All of them will be minted by 2140. Maybe I could just ask you, what is the stock to flow ratio of Bitcoin right now and how much is coming on the market every year as people are mining it? And we don't necessarily have to get into mining during this podcast. but that is how new Bitcoins are quote created. So what's the stock to flow ratio of Bitcoin right now?
Right now, it's around 50 for this year. So the annual growth rate for Bitcoin this year is around 2%, a little less than 2%. So we've got about 18.7 million Bitcoins that have already been produced in the first 12 years.
years and over the next 100 years or so we're going to have the next 2.3 million bitcoins produced so we're almost at 90 we've almost had 90 of the bitcoins produced 88 or so of the bitcoins have already been produced so there was much faster production earlier because the rate of production declines over time so um um yeah so the right now you know bitcoin is about to overtake gold in terms of the stock to flow so gold stock to flows probably around 58 60.
gold bitcoins is in the low 50s so it might happen in the next year or two or three but it'll definitely happen by 2025 because then bitcoin's stock to flow is going to double because the new supply The new production drops by half every four years. So we had one drop last year.
and that's you know we went from a growth rate of around four percent to two percent and then we're going to have another drop next in three years down to one percent and that's when bitcoin is going to become the hardest money ever uh it'll have the lowest supply growth rate so i think this is really what i'd like to focus on um you know if you want to explain the idea of it you can you you know the the way to understand is that
there's no way of making more of it the supply grows at the lowest rate and it's just going to continue to decline and no matter how many people want to buy in there's no mechanism for making more So that's why in its first full 10 years of trading, you know, since from 2000, from January 1st, 2011 until December 31st, 2020, in those 10 years.
bitcoin averaged 200 per year growth on average so as an average for two for 10 years so it went from under uh ascent to over 60 by the end of that year it was at around thirty thousand dollars
So it's gone up something like 3 billion percent during the first 10 years, which is an astonishing number. And it's not something that is a freak. It's something that's a... direct consequence of the fact that it is scarce so that's one aspect of it and then the second aspect is that it is money that can be sent across the world in a purely technological manner so it's not
um every other form of money if you wanted to send it to somebody who is not in the same room as you you have to go through somebody else you know you had to go through a manual process where you give it to somebody and then that person does it or you're going through a
uh you know a platform that um automates this process but is controlled by somebody else which could kick you out but bitcoin turns this into a um into a technological process like pressing a button you know just like um you know just like working with any kind of machine where you know you you
you click the microwave it turns on and it runs you click the washing machine and it works and similarly you know you click your magic bitcoin machine and it sends the bitcoins halfway around the world in well it doesn't have it doesn't really send them it's just The Bitcoins don't really move. The Bitcoins are in the clouds and in the computers of everybody on the network. But it transfers the title of ownership from an address you control.
to an address that is controlled by somebody in the other part of the other end of the world. And it does that. without having to resort to any political institutions, without having to use any existing banking infrastructure. So it's a much faster way of moving money because you don't want to compare it with your consumer payments. You don't want to compare it with your Visa MasterCard payment.
with the final settlement payments that happen between banks and between central banks. And in that regard, these take much longer. because banks need to clear it with one another and it has to go through central banks and so on. But this is final money that can be sent halfway around the world in a couple of hours. And so... There are so many interesting rabbit holes to go down, but let's talk a little bit.
um about the threats to bitcoin and answer some of these questions for people because i think when i started thinking about bitcoin or if i tell my mom about bitcoin or if somebody's reading about cryptocurrencies let's just talk about bitcoin specifically in this podcast
they'll see all these headlines and they'll get scared and they'll say, you know what, why doesn't the US government just regulated out of existence who's to say that the us government or multinational corporations or the international monetary fund like won't just make the movement or the use of Bitcoin illegal. And we can talk about all of this. And these are, I guess these are known as what is, what are called FUDs.
which is a term that I'd never heard before. So this is fear, uncertainty, and disbelief, right? So there's, I want to make sure we talk about the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Okay. So this is, I want to talk about the energy FUD.
But it's really kind of like a psyop term, I guess, that they're spreading this misinformation. But let's make sure that we unpack this for people. Like, who's to say that Bitcoin is not just going to evaporate tomorrow, that Biden is not going to say, you know what, there was just...
this ransomware scare at this meatpacking company. And the US government is going to say, you know what? Bitcoin is illegal. Who's to say that they're not just going to make it completely illegal? I'm just playing devil's advocate so that people can understand this.
I mean, to be perfectly honest, when I first heard about Bitcoin, I imagined this was what was going to happen. And I was quite surprised in 2013 when Bitcoin started to gain prominence, particularly because it was involved in a few illegal things.
um i i expected you know this was it now the hammer is gonna come down and uh i'm gonna be glad that i haven't gotten into bitcoin because you know now it's gonna be like being a terrorist if you're into bitcoin and surprisingly enough and you know looking back now i think one interesting story is um
this was there was the story of the silk road website which you may have heard of um and that was maybe one of the first stories that brought bitcoin into a public consciousness it was a big story when the website was busted and a lot of people heard about bitcoin from it now in my mind i thought you know this was going to lead to the government crackdown on it the crackdown never came and instead what ended up happening was bitcoin did about a 10x rise
over the next four or five months or something like that and later on a few years later i remember the investigator who was handling that case she was talking about it about the case and she said something along the lines of
well i'm not sure if she was referring to this case or some other case but she said something along the lines of initially when i first started looking into this my initial reaction was that yeah we should ban this this is bad because it's used by bad guys and it's used by criminals and then we quickly realize no that's just not going to work and we can also benefit from using this in order to track down criminals
and so this is this was actually a big surprise for me but it's really been about eight years of this exact scenario repeating when all when bitcoin comes to the attention of many different kinds of authorities so if you'd asked me in 2012 2013 i would have expected that bitcoin would have was gonna have a much harder uh coming eight years you know by 2021 i thought it's going to be an underground dark web currency more or less
i would did not expect that we'd have you know billion dollar wall street uh banks lining up to offer bitcoin products to their customers I thought it was going to be a much harder road. But over and over and over again, regulators at the SEC, at the CFTC, at many government bodies, come at it and don't.
strike it with that hammer and i think that's extremely curious and i think there's a couple of reasons for it number one it's that uh bitcoin is basically built to resist government uh control it's built to be decentralized and decentralization is not just you know a fancy hippie word where you know just we want to get rid of the banks man it's it's it's uh it's an actual engineering uh
imperative in this particular application in Bitcoin and Bitcoin is really the only decentralized digital currency because the way Bitcoin functions is that it needs to be made so that it doesn't have a single point of failure so is no point of attack so that when the government's natural instinct to ban it kicks in the person who wants to do the ban realizes that they're they're stepping into something like trying to eat a whale a living whale this is just you know you can try
um but it's you can't just eat a whale while it's alive so more you know it's it ends up looking extremely difficult to pull off because there's no central point of failure and ultimately what bitcoin needs in order to operate is
it needs a network of people who can use devices that connect with one another and agree every 10 minutes you know that's what the software does it gets all these computers to agree every 10 minutes on changing the ledger so every 10 minutes we add another two three thousand transactions and so um you know all you need is a bunch of computers to send and receive about one megabyte every 10 minutes all over the world and then you do that and the network continues to live so
Think about how difficult that is. There are literally billions of devices around the world that can do Bitcoin. And the infrastructure that Bitcoin relies on is... so ubiquitous and it's not even there's no fixed set of infrastructure any computers can make the network and if you destroy all the computers in the network today you know
10 minutes from now a whole bunch of new computers can come and can continue doing the network so you don't need any actual device um for the network to continue to operate so it's extremely hard to attack it from the one hand and then from the other hand there's this other aspect of it which is that if you're um if you start understanding what bitcoin is to the point where you think you want to ban it well you also understand how powerful bitcoin is and you want in
And that's, I think, that's what has been the most fascinating aspect of this, because you would expect all these figures of authority would want to fight it, and instead... so many of them are embracing it they're buying it themselves their kids are buying it the kids keep telling them about it and then they buy it and it just continues to happen over and over again and the way that i think about it is
And the way that I explain it is that I think of it as a technology and people who think that it's going to be banned.
are thinking of it more like a product more like a company it's as if you know somebody's setting up an international bank you know if you and i were to go and set up an international bank that goes around central banks and just you know here's our own money and here's our own currency and you can deal with us they wouldn't let us do it there are so many uh trip wires in the laws and the regulations that prevent you and i from setting something like that up
but this is not a bank there's nobody to throw in jail there's nobody to be held liable for doing this thing it's a spontaneously emergent phenomenon from all over the world where tens of thousands of people or millions of people are all using these machines that get into contact with each other every 10 minutes and arrive at it so it's um
It's extremely hard to kill and there's a very strong incentive for keeping it alive. And as a technology, I think the way to think about it is that as a technology, people quickly start thinking of it from the perspective of...
Oh, this is something I want on my side. I don't want it to be with my enemies. I think most people think like that. And... to be perfectly honest among bitcoiners we think that you know the smarter people are the ones who think like that and the less smart people are the ones who um are just so fixated on this
modern sophistry of modern education which is essentially you know government propaganda and it will problematize anything that is against government propaganda that they can't see things in terms of their own self-interest they still think in terms of the stupid mental models implanted in their head by their universities but yeah that's how i see it so i i don't think they're going to ban it
Didn't this kind of happen in India? I've heard you talk about this, that India was thinking about banning it. And then India maybe woke up and said, hey, this is a very powerful thing. If we ban Bitcoin, we're essentially putting ourselves back in time. We're going to create. collapse of our own economy. I think a lot of these countries are sort of realizing if we ban this technology, it could potentially destroy our country or put our country decades into the past.
absolutely i i think this is what people are beginning to realize now um and and i mentioned this in my book i i have a a sentence in my book that became quite viral and people are always tweeting it on twitter which is you can't isolate yourself from the consequences of people holding money that is harder than yours
and that's we see this happening over history many many times in west africa west africans used uh glass beads as money because they were very hard to make in west africa they didn't have the technology for making them and so when europeans came to West Africa and saw that these people had
glass beads is money they went back to europe and they would fill entire boats with little glass beads take them to west africa and use them to buy things and as a result they ended up essentially buying everything in west africa to the point where people started selling them other people that's why these glass beads came to be known as slave beads because they were used to buy slaves because you you make the if you make the money of a society the entire society is yours
Even the people themselves, you can end up buying them. That's really the dangerous thing about it. And that's, I think, the point that I think smart people get about Bitcoin, which is...
It doesn't matter what you think, whether this is good or bad or nice or ugly or whether it should be faster or slower. It's immaterial. This is gunpowder. If you don't have it... it's going to be used against you you know you can't just say and that that's why they don't ban it i think you know if you had a military that said oh you know imagine we had a military that ran on swords and sticks
and then gunpowder is invented in the country next to us what do you do do you ban gunpowder and say we're not going to do it because if you have gunpowder you can shoot our military soldiers and we're not going to allow something that shoots our military soldiers Is that what you're going to do? No, because you know what's going to happen then. There's going to be military soldiers on your land that will have gunpowder, and they will have the upper hand.
but they won't be yours you know if you don't have the gunpowder it's going to be used against you and so we we saw this also with silver in particular with india and china who stayed on the silver standard into the 19th into the 20th century
and silver continued to lose value through that time and the countries became massively impoverished and that's and and foreigners had a massive advantage you know if you were a european you had gold as money and so if you were a european trading with india or traveling to india
every year you go there you can buy more stuff and so you don't want to end up holding the chump change you don't want to end up holding the money that is losing value or other people are holding the money that is gaining value because It's very dangerous. Can we talk about the energy FUD? And I use that term, you know, again, from the perspective of the devil's advocate. You and I both know there are so many criticisms against...
what I believe is the best food on the planet. Maybe we could call it the hardest food on the planet, you know, animal foods, animal meat and organs. And, and one of the FUDs against animal foods has been that they are somehow bad for the environment and that they're polluting the environment or methane and all these things. And I've done many podcasts most recently with Robbie Sansom and many others kind of talking about this, how this is just fake.
talk about the energy FUD with Bitcoin, because this came out recently. You had a couple of great podcast episodes, Elon Musk, the Fiat Rockefeller, and then you had another one, will electric cars save the planet? Maybe we could just summarize some of your thoughts. around this. I've also heard Michael Saylor say, Bitcoin uses energy, but it's a small amount of energy and it's the best use of energy humans have ever devised in the history of human, you know, it has the potential to improve.
billions of lives. It's the best use of energy we've ever thought of. Why do we care if it uses energy? But you have some amazing thoughts on this. So let's talk about the energy fund, because I know people listening to this are going to say, well, I heard on the news that They're going to say, well, I heard on the news that it's using all this energy and it's polluting the planet. So let's talk about this a little bit. I lost your audio. Oh, yeah. So I think the...
The fundamental problem with the energy FUD or the people who hate Bitcoin for the energy is that it is an incoherent Luddite, you know, technological, an enemy of technology, enemy of progress. enemy of humanity view. It's fundamentally not an engineering debate, it's a moral debate. And the debate is about this question. is it good for human beings to consume energy and consume power is it a good thing for them to do this and
If you want to argue that Bitcoin is a waste, well, then you have a lot of explaining to do. You probably watch TV. You probably have a washing machine. Why should you get to use a washing machine? Washing machines spend...
an enormous amount of electricity why not wash things with your own hands you know your hands would work just fine why do you need a car why do you need an airplane you can just cross the atlantic with a kayak you don't need an airplane why do you need a car you can just walk everywhere.
um you can you know why do you need a house that's made out of steel and modern um you know steel requires a lot of energy to make you know the steel doesn't grow on trees you have to make giant furnaces get really really hot with a lot of coal in order be able to make steel bars and all kinds of important modern industrial products without which you would very likely have a very very very low chance of surviving
um the next year you know our lives are so dependent on the fruits of using high amounts of energy and so in this regard my my defense of bitcoin which i'm um i think is just human progress is constantly about taking tasks from being done menially by hand with human judgment and making them get carried out with the reliability of
um power and energy and electricity in particular the most advanced and uh the most useful form of energy because it is regulated and it's just you know optimized for delivering steady amounts of energy right when you want them where you want them so our lives are impossible to live without high amounts of energy consumption and that's a good thing in fact if you look at the quality of life for people across the world by any reasonable measure whether it's life expectancy income
productivity, infant mortality, all measures, all of the things that nobody would contend are good or bad. Nobody would contend are bad things. All the things that everybody wants. Nobody wants to live in a place where... majority of kids die before the age of five but all of these things are very heavily correlated with energy usage the reason that some societies have a lot of their kids die before five years and a lot some societies don't is strongly linked to the fact that
The societies that don't have the ability to use enormous amounts of energy. They use it in order to build structures and houses that withstand the winter and protect people from the diseases that kill them in the winter. They use it to build sewage, sanitation, electricity. electricity, medical equipment, hospitals, all of that stuff requires modern technology. They use it for sanitation and they use it for washing machines, running hot and cold water.
all of that stuff it needs more energy and it's it's it's a testament to just how delusional and brainwashed most people are that they think you know we can just live in a world where we don't consume this much energy or we need to improve our world by consuming less energy or that people think that you know we can get rid of hydrocarbon fuel that we could just we're going to transition away from oil coal and gas
And it's ridiculous. And for me, people who think like that are not serious adults that you can have a serious conversation with because for me, it's on the same level as the child who... wants to go to Disneyland, but doesn't want to get into the car that's taking them to Disneyland.
because they just want to be in disneyland and they don't understand you know as a child they can't understand the idea that no the alternative to getting in the car is not getting into disneyland you know we're not taking you to the car so that we take you away from disneyland we're taking it from the car to the car so that we can take it to disneyland
so the alternative to getting into the car is that you're gonna have to walk for three days to get to disneyland so that's the alternative you don't have to get into the car but if you want to go to disneyland your choices are walk three days or get into the car It's hard to communicate that sometimes to, you know, a child who's on a lot of sugar and wants to go to Disneyland.
And that's exactly what it's like to try and communicate with people who think, you know, we're going to get rid of energy sources. We're going to get rid of electricity or we need to reduce electricity or we need to reduce our consumption of hydrocarbons. It's ridiculous fiction because.
all of these people are able to do this today this very moment you know they can walk away from all the things in their life that are being produced by that stuff and guess what they don't they still get on twitter and get on zoom and get on the internet to complain about all those things
But they've never tried building a microchip without using hydrocarbons. And I wish them luck with that. Try and build a microchip out of sticks and stones and see how that works out for you. But really, until you've built it...
All of your noises that you make complaining about how other people building energy are just, in my mind, you lifting a big sign and saying, I am an idiot, basically. I'm a hypocrite and an idiot because I think... that you know i get to decide for the entire planet what uses of energy are legitimate and watch are not so you know um gaming devices waste an enormous they don't waste they consume an enormous amount of energy washing machines refrigerators
uh airplanes flights jacuzzis all of these things are things that people take for granted who live in modern society you know ventilators modern medical equipment all of that stuff requires energy There are only two ways in which we can decide who gets to spend how much energy. Either everybody decides for themselves.
or one person decides for everybody else. Those are the only two models. You can continue to make this sound more sophisticated than it is, but all that you're saying is, I want to be the one who decides for you what to do. I want to be your slave.
master this is ultimately what it comes down to so it's a use of energy that it does require a lot of energy bitcoin does consume large amounts of energy because it is worth it how do we know that it is worth it find you look at all the people that are using bitcoin they're paying for it willingly people want to use bitcoin and they're using it because it constitutes something useful for them you know
the all of this electricity nobody is being spent willingly so how is bitcoin consuming all of this electricity because people are paying for it people are producing it people who have power plants are hooking up miners to it how do they
do that you know why are they doing that for the very same reason that your washing machine consumes electricity you bought the washing machine you put it in your house you connected it to the power socket and you paid the utility company and it paid you the electricity who on the face of the earth is in any position to tell you no.
Don't do this with your washing machine. Wash it with your hands. Bitcoin is the same. And just because it's more energy consumption than washing machine doesn't change that. It's not up to you to decide what is.
valuable and what isn't valuable the people who are paying for it are the ones deciding so all the people that are constantly complaining about bitcoin spending too much energy it's it's it's a deeply um childish and idiotic perspective on how the world works because it just assumes it assumes that, you know, everybody has to justify to everybody else.
uh what uh what they do with their energy and that's not how the world works and that can't be how the world works unless we have a world of slaves and slave masters if you want to live in a world of equals if you believe that you are an equal to other human beings and i obviously a lot of the people that are concerned about this don't believe that they believe they are better than others because they are that they do better virtue signaling but if you believe that human
beings need to live together in a society in which they don't enslave one another then the only right mix of energy is whatever people decide to do so if i want to spend my money on mining digital coins because i think that's worthwhile you know that's what i want to do so you can be mature about it and try and understand
Why is it that those people are spending all that money? That's the interesting question. But of course, the lazy and childish thing is to just, you know, stomp your feet in the ground and say, I don't like this, and therefore it should be banned. It's a fascinating conversation. And I've heard this statistic, correct me if I'm wrong, I've heard that Bitcoin uses 0.1%.
of the world's energy. So that's a significant amount, but it's 0.1%. And they compared it to transportation, which I think was more, but, you know. maybe even the same order of magnitude. So it's, Bitcoin is using energy, but what are we doing with Bitcoin? We're giving people this hard money that is able to be used all over the world, that is deflationary, that is, I mean, as both you and Michael Saylor have said. that has the potential
change the lives of billions of people for the better. Like this is the best use of energy I've ever heard of. And when it comes to the type of fuel that we use to make that energy, this is a fascinating rabbit hole that we'll have to do a part two on. I just want. In the interest of time, because we're wrapping up for both of us, I've heard you say something amazing about electric cars, which is that they are external combustion engines. And I thought this is so...
So amazing. I would encourage all of the listeners to listen to Safety Needs podcast, specifically the episode about will electric cars save the planet because... If you have an electric car and you believe that you are somehow doing something that is called better for the environment, do the math and understand that in order to make that electricity.
you had to burn coal to make the electricity. So it's an external combustion engine. Just because there's not carbon dioxide coming out of the tailpipe of that car doesn't mean that that car doesn't have a carbon footprint. And then we go another level deeper.
which is very fascinating and triggers so many people. And I don't understand why. And we have to even ask the question about carbon dioxide in the environment. And that is a question for another podcast. But as I've said on all of my previous podcasts and everything I've done,
We all need to be willing to at least ask these questions. And I think the question there, which is a very compelling and interesting question is, yes, the amount of carbon dioxide in the environment is increasing in parts per million. What are the major contributors? And is that real?
the cause of climate change. And we have to be willing to ask those questions without people labeling us climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, you know, grandma killers. We have to be able to have these conversations or we're all just... propagating the same propaganda. And I think that, look, no one wants their city to be polluted. We're not advocating for
Smoke stacks burning coal, giving people coal lung, right? There are cleaner ways to burn hydrocarbons and there are more dirty ways to burn hydrocarbons. And there are all sorts of renewable ways to make energy to mine Bitcoin. And as you've noted.
renewables have some problems with bitcoin if the supply fluctuates you know certainly we will use renewables a lot of the bitcoin mining as i understand in china is based on hydroelectric power here in costa rica the majority of the power is hydroelectric el salvador just made bitcoin
legal tender and the the government there is looking at using volcanic energy to mine bitcoin bitcoiners are certainly thinking about this because of the cost of kilowatt hours for miners it seems to bitcoin seems to incentivize lower costs to elect electricity for miners, which is actually pushing people toward renewables. How sustainable those are, this is the way we should be thinking in the future. But I just think that, as you said, like...
What we spend our energy on is the question that is defining the human race. And I can't think of a better way to spend this energy. I just want to show this screenshot real quick because this was particularly frustrating for me. So this is Elizabeth Warren. Tweeting, Bitcoin requires so much computing activity that it eats up more energy than entire countries. One of the easiest and least disruptive things we can do to fight the hashtag climate crisis.
is to crack down on environmentally wasteful cryptocurrencies. And thank God for Jack Dorsey. He said, quote, useless complicated math problems, which is what... Elizabeth Warren calls Bitcoin. She says, it's just the miners are people just solving useless, complicated math problems. And Jack tweeted, at Senator Warren, if you believe Bitcoin doesn't ultimately shift power from banks and corporations, the ones that...
Elizabeth Warren actually fights back to the people globally. You're right. These useless. math problems are not important. If instead you want to help us decentralize that power, math is critical. So I thought this was really an interesting exchange and it just goes to show that these
People in power in the U.S. government don't understand how important these, quote, useless math problems, the cryptography that underlies Bitcoin actually are. And they're still in this energy fud. They're thinking Bitcoin is wasting energy. It's causing climate change. And you're thinking, oh my God, this is the most important thing that's going to happen in our generation. And these people just misunderstand how valuable this use of energy is. Yeah, absolutely. And it's all based on these.
sort of questions and it was super frustrating for me and then i'll let you comment on this that elon was tweeting recently about bitcoin using too much energy and it's like man He doesn't even know what he's talking about. And it sends everybody into a spiral. And the whole thing is super frustrating. But I think that at the bottom of it is just this idea like. it's not that it's bad as humans to use energy, it's what we use that energy on and the notion that
The notion that the climate crisis is being driven by cows or Bitcoin are questions that we really need to examine carefully, because I think that's a load of hogwash. And I think that it's in both of those cases. And there's a lot of parallels here.
In both of those cases, you know, meat, for instance, meat and organs. This is the best food on the planet for humans. And when you raise these animals properly, we know you can have a carbon negative system if you're even worried about carbon. And with Bitcoin. We can incentivize renewables. We can make the kilowatt hours cheaper for miners. And then we think about what does Bitcoin actually do? It has so many of these incredible.
properties, it's so valuable. Why would we ever want to stop it? So anyway, I was just super frustrated about this. And I'm hoping that maybe Jack can continue to talk some sense into Senator Warren. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the follow up to the question on Bitcoin and the answer to Elizabeth Warren is. You ask yourself, why is Bitcoin worth it? Why are all these people all over the world spending so much money on mining all these coins?
and there are very good reasons for it you know i used to live in lebanon i watched the currency get destroyed and if i hadn't had bitcoin I would have been ruined. And so it's absolutely insane that people who've lived in Venezuela and in Lebanon and in Turkey and in Argentina and in all these countries that are constantly witnessing inflation.
many millions of people in all of these places and all over the world have been rescued have had their lives saved financially by bitcoin and their lives saved literally by bitcoin as well because they got out of war zones because they had money that they had from bitcoin or something like that so we've literally had millions of people have their
lives radically transformed by Bitcoin. Ask them if they think it's worth burning a bunch of oil or a bunch of coal for it. And of course, the vast majority of Bitcoin energy does not come from oil and coal. But that's another debate. As you said,
The key thing about Bitcoin mining is that it can buy electricity anywhere it is available. So it'll never buy electricity that has other demand because you can make much more money selling electricity to people than selling it to Bitcoin. Because with Bitcoin...
network is highly competitive and the only people that manage to make a profit in mining bitcoin are the people who sell it with the lowest cost of electricity so bitcoin can mine electricity anywhere in the world that's why it doesn't compete with our energy supply it takes away energy
from waste locations that would have been wasted otherwise. So on the one hand, we are taking waste energy that has roughly... price of about two cents per kilowatt hour something like that and we're using it in order to give all these people this thing but also more more specifically we want to say what it's doing
It's taking away inflation from people's lives. Inflation is eating up about 10% of the world's money supply every year. The value of the world's money supply by 10%. That's $90 trillion of money every year. So we're losing something like $9 trillion a year. Or something in the range of 2.5% of world wealth is being lost to inflation every year. And that's primarily going to poor people. That's what Bitcoin fixes. 2.5% of the world's wealth as a tax. We can just...
Stop that if everybody has access to Bitcoin. Is that not worth it? 2.5% of the world's wealth for one... thousandth of the world's electricity and it's probably going to go up much more than a thousandth of the world's electricity but it'll still be worth it as long as people are willing to pay for it so that's that's what it replaces
and um you're absolutely spot on on the climate question and i think the the the real the the um you know obviously whether it's with bitcoin or with meat and i'm a carnivore myself as you know with bitcoin and with meat The people who bring these up are people whose mind are made up for ideological reasons. They want their fiat fake money, and they want their fiat fake food, and they hate people who have good money and good food, and they want to stop it.
They bring up this idiotic pretext, not because it's true or because it makes sense. The notion that... cow farts are going to destroy the planet is without doubt one of the dumbest things i've heard in my entire life without question it was the dumbest thing i'd heard in my entire life until the lockdowns of last year uh but it's it's it's you know this is a planet that has had so many living things go through it and you'd think you know whatever conception you have of cosmology
of the planet of life whether there is a god or whether it's just nature the notion that this entire planet is going to become uninhabitable because cows are farting because one organism is farting is just laughable And the question for me, the question that we need to ask, we need to just redefine the terms of this debate. What are the costs of us emitting more carbon and what are the costs of us not emitting more carbon?
because we only hear the hysterics talk about oh well more carbon dioxide is going to lead to the oceans flooding everywhere and we're going to have the oceans boil and um temperatures going to rise and sea levels are going to rise and there are a million apocalypses which you know none of them materialized sea levels are exactly where they were 100 years ago and temperatures are varying in
something well within the normal range of variation that we've always had so where exactly is the risk and you know these people need to start making falsifiable predictions they've been freaking out for 20 years now at least and the freaking out about this has been mainstream for 20 years now And in those 20 years, it's just an endless series of threats.
um of things that are going to destroy us but there's never a testable prediction if you had an actual scientific if this was science and instead of just you know um witchcraft if this was science you'd have testable statements you'd have somebody in 2000 come up with a statement saying if carbon dioxide goes up by that much you know the result is going to be this and that more hurricanes more sea level
we don't see any of that we don't see anything tested but it's all models and projections into the future so there's nothing testable because there's no way of actually expressing what the cost benefit really is because on the one hand we have all these massive imaginary threats of you know apocalyptic and biblical horrors are going to visit us but nobody talks about the threats on the other side you know what's actually going to happen when
uh what's what's going to happen if we reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90 well what's going to happen is that you know think about it and reducing it by 90 for people who live in the us it means getting to the quality of life that people in places like niger and the central african republic have that's what it means to reduce your carbon emissions by 90 percent
People like to think that they have some alternatives where they can just get all of the nice things that we have today without emitting that carbon. We don't. Build those alternatives.
and put them up for people to adopt them willingly if you can until you do the notion that we need to commit economic suicide as a species and go back to the standard of living that will allow the earth that will basically not allow us to have seven billion people on earth maybe billions need to die in order to reduce carbon dioxide it's just not a cost that i think is is justifiable particularly given you know all of the horrors that we see on the other side so
It's clearly ideological. It's not in any way scientific. And it's, I know that even the end of this conversation is going to trigger people. So just be assured I will do future podcasts. I'll get an environmental expert on here. We'll keep talking about this question, but I think that just like a COVID vaccine, just like. vaccines in general. Climate change needs to be something that we are allowed to talk about without people getting triggered and losing their mind and blackballing us.
calling whatever side of the issue you're on. I'm still learning about it. I don't understand it all fully myself, but I think it's a fascinating question that we have to ask as humans. And okay, let's start with the first idea, like we talked about. Let's incentivize renewables. Bitcoin clearly does that.
Let's use all the renewables we can. And then as a planet, let's come together and ask, what is the best for the other 7 billion people on the planet in terms of currencies? Is this a good use of energy? Maybe this is a good use of hydrocarbons.
If you really believe that electric cars are going to save the planet, you're deluding yourself. So I know you have to go. We'll have to do a part two. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You mentioned your website earlier, but I want to make sure people know where that is. Yes, Saifedean.com. S-A-I-F-E-D-E-A-N.com. I offer courses in Austrian economics and you can subscribe and you'll get weekly chapters from my forthcoming two books. And one of them...
The fiat standard is almost done now. You can sign up to the Kickstarter. Safedine.com slash Kickstarter. And... You'll be able to get the first draft of the book and then get the final book delivered to you by Christmas time. Yeah, you can listen also to my podcast, The Bitcoin Standard Podcast. And my first book is The Bitcoin Standard, which has achieved some degree of popularity in Bitcoin circles.
Well, it's achieved popularity in general because it's an amazing book. So and, you know, I'm really proud to say that at Heart and Soil, my company, we're going to accept Bitcoin probably by the time this podcast comes out. We're going to accept Bitcoin. I own Bitcoin. I am a Bitcoiner. I've been orange-pilled. Like I said in the beginning, I really believe that this is a movement that is bigger than just getting rich. It's like supporting something that is bigger than both of us.
Hopefully I'll get you back on for part two, but thank you so much. No, I got to get you on my seminar podcast. Yeah. We'll talk organs at that time. We'll do both. All right. Thank you, brother. Take care.