In the 14th century, if you refuse to use gunpowder because
you liked your bows and arrows, you didn't just lose the
argument, you lost your Kingdom and probably your life on the
battlefield. Is Bitcoin the gunpowder of our
time? In episode 250 of Bitcoin for
Millennials, I'm joined by Save Dinamoose, someone who taught me
that my lens of logically looking at the world is
basically what the Austrian School of Economics have been
talking about for ages. It's the only framework that
explains the world we're seeing, yet the smartest PhDs and Nobel
laureates remain completely blind to it.
By the end of our conversation, you'll understand what happens
to a society when the credit we've lived on for a century
evaporates and we're forced into a reality where only proof of
actual work will create value. And what happens to our world
after that? If you are enjoying my content,
it would mean a lot to me if you could subscribe to the channel
and like my video to support my journey.
Thanks for your support. Now let's dive in to this
episode. Safe Tina Moose Welcome to
episode 250 of Bitcoin for Millennials.
Thank you for having me, Brian. I'm super happy you're here.
We finally, finally made it took took some time, but yeah, I have
I have a lot of questions for you.
So let's see how far how far we can we can get.
I wanted to start with the gunpowder analogy because that
is something that on, on my journey was something you, you
taught me and I think is a very, very relevant analogy, right.
So you've compared Bitcoin adoption to the invention of
gunpowder, Like if you don't use it, you become irrelevant.
And probably that in battle too. So why is Bitcoin a, a forced
adoption rather than a voluntary one, especially for, for nation
states, probably for, for people that might be a bit different.
But you know, in this context, we we talk about countries.
No, I think. It's the same for individuals
and countries and it's it's it's just the force of economic
reality. The fundamental idea ultimately
remains that all the other forms of money are going to be made at
a higher percentage growth rate. They're going to be making more
dollars EUR. Whatever it is, there will
always be more and more of it being made at a higher rate than
Bitcoin. Bitcoins supply growth rate is
only about .8% now and it's going to continue to down.
So we're going to be witnessing this kind of devaluation of all
other forms of money compared to Bitcoin.
And in the long run it, it might not sound obvious initially, but
and people might have trouble thinking about the small
differences in percentages. So what Bitcoin is a .8%, the
dollar is seven, 8%. That's not a big difference, but
it is a very, very big difference because that's seven,
8%, you double the supply in about 10 years or so, whereas at
.8% going down to .4% in every and having every four years,
you're going to be adding something like 3-4 percent
supply in 10 years. So that on its own is just a
just over 10 years. It shows you the stark picture,
you add you 11 form of money and then you add the other one,
another 3-4 percent. Now do it another 10 years, you
double the other one. So that's 4X in 20 years and
still maybe less than 10%, probably 5% in the case of
Bitcoin, something like that. So the the brutal reality of
supply and demand just means that the value stored in the
money that is increasing at a faster rate is going to be
devalued at a faster rate and is going to lose value over the
harder money. And then it becomes a question
of whether you are smart enough to understand this and benefit
from it, or if you're not, then you are just going to be the
victim of it. You're going to work hard to
save in the form of money that is losing value.
And you won't understand why life keeps getting more and more
expensive for you. You will be programmed to lash
out and blame all kinds of different things.
You know, COVID and the previous president, not this president
always, you know, it's never the one who's in power, who's the
responsible. It's always the other one.
It's the foreigners. It's this it's that you'll be
manipulated into thinking about other all other kind of reasons
for your predicament. But ultimately your predicament
is that you chose crappy money and you spend all of your life
working for money. And if you don't give a little
tiny bit of critical thinking about what you're using as
money, then you are like a farmer who harvests everything
and then leaves it at on the street at the end of the day and
then doesn't bother or secure it and then it just goes away.
So if you've farmed for the whole year, you worked hard, you
harvested, and then you didn't care what happened to the
harvest and somebody came and stole your harvest, have you
really worked hard? No, the none of that work is
going to count unless you can figure out how to keep it.
And I think it's the same thing with money.
Ultimately you just have to figure out how to save the money
and keep the money. Otherwise, doesn't matter how
hard you work, how much money you earned, you're always going
to be destroyed by inflation. And you might not see it in the
short run, but in the long run, it will catch up with you.
And most people don't like hearing this.
I think it's a, this is one of those things that upsets people
who are not Bitcoiners and makes sense to Bitcoiners.
And then there it's the small number of the no coiners that
are ready to make the jump. When they hear this, it can
flick a switch in their brain and then they switch from being
no coiner to Bitcoin and they get it.
But for the majority of people who don't, who just hear this,
they don't get it. But I think it's a really
powerful way of thinking about it because for most people, we
are born in the generation that has, you know, people who are
alive today, nobody has ever had this much choice in their life
about things to do. You get to choose a million
different kinds of shoes, clothes, cars and so on.
So we used thinking of things as being consumer choices and
ultimately, you know, you, you get to make superficial choices.
You choose Apple or PC or whatever.
You choose Pepsi or Coca-Cola. But people don't think.
Too much about what they're actually choosing.
They don't think about the things that are really driving
them. But this is But Bitcoin is just
a very stark slap in the face that says it doesn't matter what
you think. Doesn't matter if you like, if
you if you like it to be Apple or you like it to be Windows or
you like Coca-Cola or you like Burger King.
You have to eat this. You know, that's why I also like
to say it's it's not the fancy cute toy that you want.
It's the bitter medicine you need.
And the doctor doesn't sit and ask you what flavor of medicine
you like. You just shut up and take the
medicine. What do you think is like one,
let's call it glitch in the matrix that, that you've seen
people wake up to, to the Fiat lie?
Like what? What is the main thing that we
should tell more people basically, because we can also
not really blame people that they are, you know, that their
judgement is, is, is clouded because especially in the
Western world, you know, at least for me, it always worked,
right? So there wasn't really a reason
for me to actually start poking these holes.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's increasingly working less and
less and people are becoming more aware of its shortfalls and
limitations. But I would say I think the
most, the most promising path to send somebody on to in order to
get them to the rabbit hole is to just I think to ask the
question of why should the money supply increase?
Why are all these banks and central banks and economists and
presidents and of congressmen and parliamentarians and
military generals all over the world, why do they all have very
strong opinions about what needs to happen with the rate of
increase in the money supply? We need to print more money for
this. We shouldn't print for that.
We should raise the interest rates so that we've slowed down
the creation of money, or we should lower the interest rates
or should we, so that we should increase the speed of the
creation of money. And it's just taken for granted
that the money supply has to increase.
Nobody ever stops to ask, well, why?
Why should it actually increase? And I think that is the most
powerful question to ask. And I remember for me
personally, it was maybe almost 20 years ago, 18 years ago, when
I first came across this question and started asking it
to myself. And then came across the answer
of the Austrians, which is the only reason they increase the
money supplies, because they want to rob you.
And this is not something that you would want in a money that
is not made to rob you. And then everything makes sense.
And I think this is this is. The best way to go down the
rabbit hole of Bitcoin and the best way to go down the rabbit
hole of Austrian economics. Because for most people,
economics is just this extremely obscure, weird, esoteric thing
that doesn't make any sense. They go to university and
they're taught things that make no sense and they're told to
apply certain formulas, plug in a bunch of numbers, get the
right answer, and you graduate. And then they leave and they
don't quite understand what is it that I learned?
And they don't understand what it's supposed to be the
intellectual basis on which all of these answers are being
arrived at. And they just ignore it.
And then they keep having all of these questions about economics
throughout their lives. But this is really the key
question that you want to send them down because you could go
down all kinds of rabbit holes that might not necessarily bring
you to the right place. So, you know, a lot of people go
down the rabbit hole thinking about inequality.
But why is there inequality? And let's look at the data and
the measurement and what happened when Reagan came in and
then what happened when Bush came in or whatever.
And you can get lost in all of the Fiat nonsense around that
question or you could get into any kind of other things.
But I think this one. And then, you know, of course,
you could find your way to important ideas.
Goodbye going through any question.
But I think the specifically. The one on the money supply.
Points you to something that is fundamentally nonsensical.
About the modern world and something that is not questioned
and then it. Offers you the explanation for
it, and it offers you the explanation for why it is done
in the real world. In the real world, what is the
what the real explanation? Is and the explanation that is
essentially the one that is the propaganda version.
And then it all makes sense and it all fits in your mind that it
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is why people become kind of obsessed, a little bit of
Austrian economics because wow, wait.
There are all these old dead people who have been thinking
about these questions for hundreds of years in ways that
actually make sense. So I can actually read somebody
talk about money and economics in a way that doesn't just make
me fall asleep or think I'm crazy or think I'm stupid and it
can actually make sense. Because, you know, when you're
reading Fiat economics, there's no payoff at the end.
You know, you read Keynes or you read any of these kind of major
economists. And you read all of their work
and you need. Their ideology, and then you
come to understand what they think of the world, but you
don't understand the world. Do you understand a bunch of
ideology that they give you, but it doesn't help you understand
the world? The point of studying.
Keynesian economics is just believing in the Keynesian
story, but it doesn't help you understand how the world
actually works. So this then helps you
understand how the world. Actually works.
You're not reading it to be able to show off and say that I can
understand Keynes, I read Keynes or I read this guy or that guy.
You're reading it because it helps you understand the world.
And then that sends you down the Austrian rabbit hole.
But then the other hand, perhaps even more significant rabbit
hole that it might send you down, it's Bitcoin.
Because when you think, OK, well, then what would happen if
we did have a fixed supply? Money?
Yeah, it would be like Bitcoin. It would go up forever.
It would just have what we call number go up technology.
And that's not a bad thing. Bitcoiners get richer by using
Bitcoin as money, fiaters get poorer by using Fiat as money.
And that's how it's going to play out.
So once you understand this, there's once you see it, there's
no unseeing it that you'll never be able to look at Fiat in the
same way and you'll never be able to look at Bitcoin in the
same way. And I think you switch from
thinking of your life as being measured in terms of dollars.
You know, I want to earn this much dollars.
I want to have this much dollars in the bank account.
I want to own this many dollars worth of things.
And then you switch to started to calculate it in terms of
Bitcoin because ultimately your dollars are just hot potatoes
that you're trying to get rid of to make more dollars so that you
could then exchange those dollars into Bitcoin because
the. Bitcoins you could keep.
And you know that they were going to hold on to their value
because there's no central bank that's printing the bitcoins.
There is no one who's increasing the supply.
It comes with built in Keynesian resistance as Keynes proof so.
I love that. Yeah, Now I, I think this is,
this is an absolutely fantastic answer because I think, you
know, the, the, the, the Keynesian thinking fundamentally
I think is built on distrust of other humans and, and ingenuity.
And you know, they kind of say like, well, because of said
policy, right, XYZ inflation, 2%, the random number, right, we
are incentivizing people to produce.
But like you just illustrated, if you flip it around, if the
reward actually becomes something that you would want to
acquire, that's when you are motivated to actually produce in
a a meaningful way, I would say. And so I think this is kind of
how it also flips your, your worldview where you also, I
think feel in this Bitcoin standard, you know, I, I think
there's also why Bitcoin is hope, like it gives you
motivation toward the future instead of higher anxiety toward
the, the future, right? Which eventually, and I think
that's more the philosophical or spiritual part would actually
make you appreciate today even even more, right?
Because you are focused on the future and building and having
a, a hopeful outlook. And yeah, I, I talked to people
that have like double masters in economics and they say, well, I
calculated all these during my study, but we never discussed
anything philosophically about money, right.
And I think that is also the issue with people that don't
have a double masters in economics.
Like how? How?
Could they actually figure it out?
Right. So it's, it's just a really hard
and and difficult narrative that has been put a bonus.
But we also see that with very smart people, right, PhDs, Nobel
laureates, right? They also struggle a lot with
Bitcoin. Today.
I saw a clip of Steve Keane, who's an economist.
I, I didn't know him, but he apparently predicted the the
2008 crash and, and he was now predicting Bitcoin will hit zero
over, you know, excessive energy use.
When we have to curb energy use, you know, Bitcoin is the first
thing to go. Like even the fact that people
think it's good in 2026 that you even need to talk about curbing
the energy use, right usage, right?
For me, that's more a signal of how bad everything is going.
But but anyway, do you think this is an intellectual failure?
Are they dishonest? Are they not smart enough?
Is this kind of like some cost fallacy coming from this, you
know, Fiat institutional system? Like like why is it so difficult
for them? I think it's because Bitcoin is
really smashing all the idols of Fiat and it has to smash them
all at the same time because they are all connected to the
Fiat grid. If you want, just like, you
know, a power grid, everything in Fiat world is fine.
That is financed by Fiat. That is because of government
money printing has to essentially be based on the
prolonging of the life of Fiat. So it's everything that runs on
Fiat has to be pro Fiat. And Bitcoin is such a vortex of
everything wrong with Fiat uniting together against Bitcoin
because Bitcoin a defunds everything, so it threatens the
entire grid. So everybody can sort of
understand why this is going to put them out of a job.
And a lot of these people have jobs that, you know, are
financed by fake Fiat money. They're fake Fiat jobs, but they
think that they are on the best that they can do in their life.
And, you know, they may be right.
So pushing papers and getting fake paper money for a fake job
seems to be a. Successful business model in
today's world. So a lot of these people aren't
happy when you come and tell them that we're building a money
that allows those of us who like to be productive to opt out of
financing parasites like you. You actually have to do the
work. Yeah, you're going to have to
like work. Work like all the.
Rest of us. We're going to get rid of Fiat
privilege. So they don't like it.
But then of course, I think it's in this particular example, the
energy hysteria is, you know, one, one of these other.
Factors where Bitcoin triggers fiaters because I think the
reason there is an energy hysteria in the 1st place and I
discussed this in the Fiat standard.
The reason people care so much about carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere supposedly somehow ending human civilization or the
reason they care about how much oil and gas that we're
consuming. The reason the hysterically have
worried about running out of all those things for 60 years.
And you know, we used to worry that we were going to run out.
Then we realized, no, actually we're not going to run out.
We just have too much of it. And that's going to mean that
we're going to end up living in a world of pollution and dirt
and destruction because we have too much of it.
But the constant thing is always that we have to worry about it.
Well, in the Fiat standard, I make the case.
And I believe. It's, it's, it's a strong case
when I'm biased, of course, I make the case for why this
actually is a product of inflation, because there's, it's
I, I don't think it's a coincidence that in the 1970s
when inflation really took off, that that was when all of this
environmental hysteria was really.
It really exploded and became a serious thing.
You know, people didn't really worry so much about it before
the 1970s. But why did it happen in the
1970s? Well, the major driver for it
was that prices of things were rising.
And so naturally people assumed the price of oil and nickel and
copper and the uranium is going up.
That must mean that we're running out of those things.
So there you be. Have the roots of the hysteria
in the 1st place. But then I think it's a much
more adaptive story, like with everything with Fiat, you know
Fiat because it's the lifeblood of the system.
It then shapes the system in a way that is optimized for
acquiring more Fiat. So the environmental hysteria
caused by Fiat then gets captured by Fiat money and
turned into another way of propagandizing people to ignore
the inflation that is robbing them and destroying their
livelihood. And so the reason that
everything is more expensive is because we're running out.
It's because oil is bad. It's because oil is going to
destroy the environment. This is not sustainable.
So we need to reduce your oil consumption.
And we need you to switch to forms of energy that are
essentially pre civilized, pre industrialized, that are
dependent on the weather, you know, wind and solar and that
are unreliable and that leave you at the mercy of nature.
And they are. A lot less reliable, but they're
also cheaper in a sense that they.
Are. Not that they do not require
constant fuel input and therefore the that they are
less. Likely to make you notice the
inflation you have to fill up your gas tank in the car every
week, but you don't have to refill your windmill.
Now the windmill is nowhere near as good as having, you know,
twenty 20th century hydrocarbon power that's available on 24/7,
but it makes the inflation look better, so.
Trying to get you. To reduce your consumption of
hydrocarbons is a way to hide the inflation.
And I think This is why people are so heavily propagandized
against energy consumption because, you know, all the
energy is going to destroy the planet.
So, you know, stay poor so that we can you can be a good person.
This entire idea that consuming energy is bad.
You know, people think that all these celebrities who consume a
lot of energy, that it's a bad thing.
They shame them for them. Of course, you know, when those
celebrities are out there shaming others for staying warm
in the winter, then yeah, we should shame them for getting on
their yachts or whatever. But there's nothing wrong with
consuming a lot of energy. It's a good thing this is how we
stay. We survived the winter.
And if you want the world to have more energy, you want us to
be consuming and producing more. You want Jeff Bezos to even have
a bigger boat Because if he's investing and buying a bigger
boat, he's. Spending so much money on the
boat industry, that's generating more and more boats, producing
more and more energy, causing energy to become more plentiful,
more. Capital intensive and therefore
cheaper and more widely available for the world.
We're not going to be able to have people in poverty who don't
have electricity. They're not going to get
electricity without the rest of the world also increasing its
energy consumption. That's the healthy way of
thinking. About it.
But Fiat has turned people to thinking of energy consumption
as a bad thing, and it's all about how we try to reduce it
and we need to reduce and we need to make less and less and
less of it. And it's just a completely
incoherent. Idea because you know, nobody
goes around saying my favorite example washing machines.
Nobody goes around saying hey, you know what the washing
machine is not going to take off.
I don't think it to succeed as a technology because it consumes a
lot more energy than just washing with your hand.
You know, just go and wash with your hands and it's cheaper and
easier and you don't have to buy a big giant machine that takes
up a lot of electricity. And yet basically nobody in the
world would say no to having a washing machine.
Absolutely nobody who can have a washing machine, I think,
chooses to go without one because nobody wants to wash
their own clothes with their hands because it's too much too
time intensive. So ultimately with technology
gets adopted because it saves human time.
And the reason it does that almost always is through
increasing the utilization of energy.
For the more ways we find of using energy, the more
productive we become and that's a good thing and that's
technological progress and it has always been.
And it's an absolute shame that for the past 50-60 years been
demonized this idea and we're reducing our energy consumption
and the Fiat standard. I argue that this is.
Reversed a trend of. Continuous growth in per capita
energy consumption that has essentially stagnated for the
past 50 years or so across the globe.
And that for me is one of the major problems that we have in
the world. We're getting poorer effectively
because we can't afford energy, because we can't afford capital,
because all of our capital being destroyed by inflation.
Yeah. Isn't this also because the, the
kind of like the result of, you know, in the beginning, in the
beginning of the introduction of Fiat money?
Let's take 7/19/71 in in, you know, in, in this context, it is
actually a very brilliant idea, right?
If you can just create a potential productivity out of
nothing and you can start spending that in a country, you
can actually, you know, grow and and build a country at at least
in the beginning when you're introducing it, right?
But over time, the maintaining as you're alluding to, right,
like keeps demanding more obscurity, more layers on top
right, more, more distractions to point people towards another
cause of you know what whatever is going downhill in order to
not understand the kind of like fundamental origin of it.
And I think, you know, this goes, this goes so deep that
even the, the, the people that are closer to the money printer,
right? In, in finance, for example,
with, with ESG, right? It's something that BlackRock
came up with and they, they shared that all over the world.
Now they're saying ESG is dead. But for example, the biggest
pension fund in my country is still full on into all the ESG
stuff, right? So even in those, even in those
layers, there, there is a, I would say, well, not
misunderstanding, but there it's like a like a ideological battle
or, or philosophical battle going on where not everyone
actually understands what they are participating in.
So I'd say even at those levels, they are part of a scam that has
a certain narrative, but they even even they don't understand
that they are subject to yeah, this obfuscation or or
abstraction, right. And I and I think it goes you
you talked about diamonds being shit coins, right?
A similar example of something that essentially organized has
essentially controlled narrative, right, and turns out
to to be a a scam. And maybe just a fun question
for you. Do do you think you need to take
a little red pill before you can take the orange pill?
Like you need to accept that apparently this is going on,
right? That that there is a certain way
of how the system works that is being kept away from you on on
purpose? Like you have to accept that
people lie to you before you can even imagine.
What a solution? Could be, yeah, I think there's,
there's definitely an element of truth to that.
And I would say there is another way of looking at it is that you
have to take the orange pill in order to take a red pill.
In other words, unless you understand the money issue, then
everything else doesn't quite make sense.
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Unless you understand that there is a, there's a essentially a
back door to the global economic system.
There's a back door to everybody's economic system.
Where just like if there's a back door into your computer, I
could get into your computer and see any information I want and
run it in a certain way and manipulate it in a way that
surprises you because you're expecting your computer to do
something and then something else comes out.
It's not going to make sense unless you understand that your
computer has a back door. Unless your computer has a back
door. You're sitting there and you're
not sure, and you're wondering if there's something wrong with
the guy who sold you the computer or if the maintenance
guy is messing with you and you're not quite sure.
But then you realize, OK, there's a back door.
And this thing is being essentially weaponized against
me. It's robbing me.
It's taking my information, it's manipulating me in certain ways.
And essentially, I mean, you see those lies in every field of
life. And I think the Fiat pill
understanding the problem of Fiat is a is is.
Essential for mental health? Because the more you see those
things, the more it. Frustrates you because you go
around, you think, you know, we live in a world in which you
need to work and then you reap the reward and.
Theft is wrong. People shouldn't take things
from others. People shouldn't violate the
property of others. And then you notice that all of
the institutions that are supposed to be there to enforce
this are in fact enforcing the exact opposite of of it in terms
of theft. And it doesn't make sense.
And you know, you could discover this in terms of money.
You could discover it in in the sense of the theft of inflation.
You could discover it in terms of all the lies that you see in
all these bullshit fields of. Science and academia and media
and propaganda. So a lot of.
You know, climate science is essentially a stupid
pseudoscience in modern universities.
Macroeconomics is a stupid pseudoscience.
Modern nutrition science is just a recipe to get you sick and
profitable for pharmaceutical companies and junk food
companies. And, you know, discovering one
of those things and you see these people on the Internet who
fall down one of these particular rabbit holes.
And it can be pretty. Disconcerting.
And it can be confusing and it can be destructive to a person.
Imagine, you know, you're a nutrition PhD, and then in your
last few years in your nutrition PhD, you realize you're just out
there telling people how to eat, to be sick, and that if you
wanted them to be healthy, you would tell them the exact
opposite of what's your job. It requires you to tell them.
That can break a person to find that out.
And it breaks them with the more they think.
About it how is this this thing still alive?
How is the system still functioning and understanding
how money works? You start seeing it everywhere
and still start. Being capable of accepting that,
yeah, this thing is a big giant lie, OK, nutrition is a lie.
So what else? The climate is a lie.
Makes sense. I mean, it's the same university
that publishes all the nutrition garbage.
Clearly their climate garbage is not going to be much different.
And so you're much more capable of accepting these days because
you can. See the mechanism and you
realize that ultimately. In a free market where you don't
have that Fiat back door success for any idea or any business or
any avenue of human endeavor, success in that Ave. in anything
is going to be dependent on meeting the needs of others,
being able to help others in value.
So if you're going to set up a restaurant, it's only going to
succeed if you're able to feed others.
And if you're going to set up a bank, it's only going to succeed
if it feeds others. And if you're going to set up a.
University, it's only going to succeed if it can help people
increase their knowledge in ways that are beneficial to them,
that they value, that they're willing to pay for, that they're
willing to tell their friends and family to go and pay for as
well. So in that world, you have to
be. Tethered to reality, the
nutrition department has to tell people how to actually stop
being fat and sick. And if you don't do that, you go
out of business. But in the Fiat world, you
don't. And that's really the powerful
idea of Fiat, because the success of a particular
nutrition. Department for instance, in any
particular. University is almost entirely
removed from the success of their teachings at helping the
patients and clients achieve the results that they want.
So if you want to work. On.
On nutrition, your job is not to go out there and help people.
Your job is to secure funding. And because Fiat is what funds
the university of Fiat is what funds academia.
So Fiat is not doing that for free.
There are certain. Things that you need to do, you
need to be loyal to the Fiat regime.
Essentially you need to repeat the Fiat regime propaganda in
order to get the Fiat funding. And so that's.
Why nutrition departments can continue.
For 70 years to tell people to eat.
Garbage and it just continues. And when somebody points out,
hey, look, you're feeding them garbage, they're getting fat,
they're getting sick. Then you either have to double
down on the recommendations of let's feed them more garbage,
let's feed them garbage harder, or, you know, make some
inconsequential to the tiny detail of maybe put some garnish
on the garbage. You, you, you get to keep your
job. But if you're trying to do
something drastic, say no, actually what we're doing is
wrong and we should stop feeding them garbage.
Or you're going to lose the Fiat funding and then you're going to
be ostracized and you're going to be called a crank and you're
going to be called a crazy conspiracy theorist and you're
going. To lose your job and you're
going to lose your. Wife and family and you're going
to end up on the street and you're going to end up homeless
and it's going to drive you mad because how is it that all these
people don't understand that? It's very obvious that what I'm
telling them is true and they don't get it.
But they can't get and you need to stop trying.
To argue with this wall of. People who aren't paid to think,
people are paid to just repeat their propaganda.
So I think these things are just, this is really, I think
the most powerful thing about Bitcoin because it it helps you
understand all of those things in concert, you see.
Why? OK, they're lying about the
wars. They're lying about history.
They're lying about what's happening today.
They're lying about what happened yesterday.
They're going to lie about what's going to happen.
Tomorrow they're lying about the food, they're lying about the
electricity, they're lying about everything there is.
There are certain interests that benefit from each one of these
lies. And then once they get their
claws on to the Fiat printer and they can direct it in the ways
that they want to finance the institutions that they want,
that they can just build this narrative that they want to last
for as long as the currency lasts and as long as we have a
dollar, we're going to have. All of the Fiat world.
The bullshit. Bitcoin was or, or well, the
what is money question was really for me the opening for
the rest of the rabbit hole. Because if this isn't true and
everything is downstream from the money, right?
If all the incentives change or or possibly can change because
of the quality of the money, then basically everything coming
from the money can also be corrupted, right?
And it's, it's just very hard to distinguish what is real,
whatever real is, right, and and what is fake and what is good
and, and what is bad. And I think that is what makes
this time also so strange is that at the towards the end of
this Fiat Mani regime, it's just getting crazier and more
chaotic, right? And there's just more fog and
it's just more and more difficult for more and more
people to actually find this. Yeah.
What I think is, is, is the light in the darkness, which is
Bitcoin, right? But then along the way, we have
people even like Christine Lagarde of the ECB talking about
Bitcoin, which I think is a huge signal.
And I wanted to ask you how you judge that when you see people
in those places talk about Bitcoin.
Because if it's irrelevant and stupid and a random Tulip Ponzi,
whatever bubble, why would you even waste the breath on
Bitcoin? So what do you think when these
types of people in these positions talk about Bitcoin?
What kind of signal is that? I think it signals that they're
essentially irrelevant. I think that's the most
important thing to take from anything that they say, because
nothing they say can affect Bitcoin in a real sense.
The Bitcoin protocol isn't going to find the next proof of work
solution faster because Lagarde said something and it's not
going to be able to, you know, clear my transaction without a
transaction fee because she said something and it's not going to
allow me to double spend anything because she or somebody
like her said anything. So for me, the most powerful
thing about it, and this is one of the things that really made
me switch my thinking on Bitcoin when I went from being a skeptic
it to being a Bitcoiner is just. That it continues to operate.
There's something so powerful about the fact that it's a piece
of software that's generating a new.
Block every 10 minutes and anybody in the world can see
that. You can just go and see that
every 10 minutes. Approximately there's a new
block coming out. And then on the other hand, you
have Fiat world where it's, you know, stupid people get on
podiums and say things and then things happen.
You know, Trump gets on and says we're going to destroy their
electricity and then people lose electricity.
And that is a different world. It's, you know, government with
Fiat has destroyed people's understanding of how the world
actually functions and turned it into just thinking that there
has to be some big daddy who gets on a podium at some point
and says something and then we listen and then the world
changes. And so, you know, people listen
to politician speeches, which I think is just an insane thing to
do. It's, it's, it's almost as crazy
as having a heroin addict. You're just ruining your brain
for a quick fix of. Dopamine.
I've accept that dopamine from heroin.
It presumes likely a lot better. Than what you get from listening
to a politician. But ultimately the key thing is
that nothing that they say can actually change anything in the
Bitcoin world. And so Bitcoin continues to
operate even as all of these people go through all kinds of
silly misunderstandings and silly statements about what
Bitcoin is. They say that Bitcoin is for
criminals. Doesn't matter TikTok next
block. Then they change their mind and
say, well, actually, maybe it can be useful for people who are
in dysfunctional currencies. What is this going to do?
Doesn't matter TikTok next block and number go up number keeps
going up block number keeps going up and these people can
make whatever noises that they want and it's I think it's
beautiful because it it's it's beautiful because first of all.
It allows you as a. Bitcoiner not to care because if
you weren't the Bitcoin, if you didn't have Bitcoin, you have to
care about what Christine Lagarde says and you have to
care about what Jay Powell says and what Trump says and what all
these people say because your entire portfolio depends on
them. If the Trump decides to put
tariffs, then your savings are wiped out.
You might have to dry, delay retirement.
So you need to follow that stuff.
But with Bitcoin, you don't really have to care about what
they say. You just buy your Bitcoin and
then these people become like a circus that is irrelevant to
your life. You know, if you go and watch
it, it's not going to affect you in any way as you're just
wasting time and money on watching it.
So that's the best thing about it that that you're protected.
But I think also the secondary order of it is that you start
understanding that there are things that.
Should not be up for people on Podia to decide.
And there needs to be a, a, a deeper understanding that more
and more of the world needs to be outside the control of these
lunatics so that it doesn't matter which kind of lunatic we
we get. It doesn't matter which
blackmailed demented paedophile is in charge.
They can't destroy the money. That's the thing I I wouldn't
care about whether it's the red or the blue demented paedophile
who's in charge, as long as they don't have a money printer.
The amount of damage that they can do is massively, massively
restricted. And so Bitcoin is restoring
this. And it's, you know, of course it
helps that in the late stages of Fiat, you know, they are not
sending their best, you know, But at least in the 1960s,
nineteen 50s, at the early stages of the degeneration of
civilization, at least the presidents looked presidential
and they could string together a few sentences without sounding
like complete morons. Now they don't.
The guy before this one was sniffing children on stage and
nobody said anything about it. And he didn't even know his own
name at the end of his term. And this new guy is complete
freaking lunatic who thinks Israeli ways of doing more are
just normal. He just thinks it's normal to
just go around and mass murder people and destroy their
electricity and you're stuck with just continuously degrading
quality of people. In fact, I mean, this is not
even just not even subjective judgment.
You look at the level of writing involved in presidential
speeches and you see that basically we're down to 1/4
grader whereas. 100 or 150 years ago, the US president would have
been writing something at at the level of what would be
considered a graduate student today.
Now we're at a retarded 4th grader, a retarded, violent 4th
grader who thinks it's normal to be telling people that he's
going to be destroying all of their infrastructure.
So, yeah. So I think it's, it's great that
Bitcoin offers people the chance to just out of listening to
these lunatics. And it's a small step.
That continues to increase with every other person, and these
people are just going to lose their.
Power and their grip over people's minds.
I think it's an end. That's an encouraging thing.
Yeah, you just made me realize that, you know, belief in Fiat
money is based on words and belief in Bitcoin is based on
work, right? So if you want to align with
with words that more than not eventually are shown to be
empty, right? Or do you want to align with
with with work? And that's why I think it's
also, yeah, a spiritual thing is like, do I want to be the actor
or do I want to be the subject, right?
Like, do I want to watch this speech of, you know, random,
another president XYZ telling me, you know, everything is fine
and I shouldn't worry? Or am I going to take upon this
work of life basically upon myself and try to to make
something of it, right. And I, I think that that comes
back so many times that that Bitcoin is really this mirror to
all this nonsense, right? Like there's this absolute
transparency, there's the proof of work and, and Bitcoin is
basically everything that Fiat money is, is, is not.
And the cool thing is that, yeah, it, it's being shown more
and more and more. But I do want to say like, it is
quite slow or at least maybe maybe for us, right?
Like in some way we figured this out or we think we we figured
this out. But in, in my opinion, it's
going slower than I thought before, or maybe that I would
have wanted to before. Because, you know, it's becoming
more and more obvious that there's only one ending for, for
Fiat. And I, I just wanted to know,
like, how is that for you? Like did did your vision change
since, you know, riding the Bitcoin standard or, you know,
starting to publicly share, you know, all your thoughts?
Let's say, I think it's like 778 years ago, right?
Like retail interest is less, there's more adoption as a
financial asset rather than money, you know, like, do we
need more time? What what are your thoughts
around this? And and maybe also, yeah, how,
how did they change for you over over this time period?
Well, I think in my case, I was already pretty much a Bitcoin
maximalist before, before Bitcoin was a thing.
In other words, I, you know, I was already into Austrian
economics, I was already a gold bug.
I already believed in hard money and I already understood some of
the problems of Fiat and the ways in which it ruins the
world. So.
In 2010, 2009, 2010, 2011 when I had.
Not heard of Bitcoin or I may have heard in Bitcoin, Bitcoin
in passing, but I didn't think much of Bitcoin during those
days. If you had been one of my
friends, you know, we would have been spending a lot of time
talking. I would have been wasting a lot
of your time talking to you about the problems of Fiat, that
now Fiat destroys everything and inflation and the gold standard.
This is what I practiced on all of my friends during that
period. And then, you know, they all
started thinking I'm weird and stopped talking to me and then I
had nothing but Bitcoin. So I ended up going into Bitcoin
having. Already had a pretty good idea
about this. So when I first heard about
Bitcoin, I think for most people they think OK, this is a new
money, new payment network, new way of doing things.
And then when they start looking into it they come across the
economic significance of it. Well, it's fixed in supply,
which means you go down this entire rabbit hole and you
understand inflation. And then you start realizing
your food is poisoned and everything you're taught is a
lie and your world is different and you join a cult and you
shave your head and you get ripped and you start lifting and
you get a lot of sun and you fix your life financially and you
save in Bitcoin and you are born again.
It's a hero's journey. In my case, it was a little bit
different because I was already brainwashed as part of the cult
from my Austrian and gold times. And when I'd heard about
Bitcoin, I immediately made the association of all of these
ideas that yeah, well, if we had the digital hard money, that
would be awesome. But obviously it's not going to
work because, you know, I'm an econ PhD, so I know.
I could pass. Judgment on things without
having to read them. You know, you have that kind of
confidence that only a PhD can give you that I don't actually
need to read about Bitcoin to understand and explain to people
why it won't work, right? Because I have PhD.
So for years you just go around thinking, well, you know, it
would be neat. If this thing was the digital
way of having gold, the governments couldn't stop, but
obviously they're going to stop it and it's going to die, and so
I'm not going to waste my time reading about it.
And then eventually you know it. Keeps not dying and it keeps
rising and it keeps getting bigger and keeps all these
bitcoins continue to just succeed with their Bitcoin that
they're happy about it. And at some.
Point You need to shut up and eat some humble pie and.
Actually start looking into the thing and then when I started
looking into to it, I realized OK, this thing might actually.
Survive. And then that was the moment
because, OK, well, now we can actually do those things.
We don't have to keep waiting on that little turtle of gold.
To keep hopefully maybe one day performing a miracle and
becoming money again. Now we have a digital.
Thing that can that can fix this problem because it rises in
value so it gives people a very big incentive to buy more and
more of it, which isn't really the case with gold because it's
already very big already very distributed there's not much
room for its growth in terms of market value so practically it.
If we actually allow this, all these technological advancements
to really have the productivity gains that you know, every
technological advancement has has given us right towards the
future, especially with with AI. What, what does well in a
deflationary world where money gains value and purchasing power
over time, are there even people that want to be a debtor
basically? Like do do loans disappear as,
as we know them? Like how, how is growth fueled
in a world that looks like that is, you know, now, especially
with this, with these technological advancements that
are very deflationary, How, how do you think through that or how
do you explain that to to someone?
Well. I think I have maybe one of my
most controversial ideas is this idea that as money gets.
Harder. Interest rates decline and so a
terminally hard money or if strictly scarce money strictly
fixed in supply is eventually going to result in the
elimination of interest rates. And so we'd have lending done at
0% interest between people who trust each other, but businesses
would be financed by equity. This is the claim that I would
claim. And I, you know, I've written
about this and I've spoken about it and published in separate
places. And I think my idea is I'm first
of all, this isn't saying, you know, this is something that
should. Happen.
And I'm not saying that the government's in a Bitcoin
standard need to ban credit in any way.
I'm saying that the force of economic incentives that exists
to shape interest rates is likely going to cause interest
rates to disappear. And I say this as an.
Austrian, which is, you know, it's heretic to say this as a
mainstream economist, but it's also heretic to say this as an
Austrian because what distinguishes or money, one of
the many distinguishes, many, many distinctions of the
Austrian school is that it offers the best explanation of
interest, the economic and the explanation for why we have
interest rates. And so to use that explanation,
what what I do is that I use the Austrian explanation for
interest to explain why interest would actually go away.
So it is quite heretic from the Austrian perspective.
But in brief, the Austrian idea is that interest rates are a
reflection of time preference. So time preference.
Is the degree to which people discount the future so if.
You have a high time preference, then you discount the future a
lot, so therefore you don't think about the future.
So you spend all of your money. So that means you have little
capital available for lending, and that means you're likely to
want to borrow. Both of these things cause
interest rates to rise. So if people's interest rates,
if people's time preferences rise, then you would expect
interest rates would also rise. People will discount the future
heavily. And so if you want to
incentivize me to save for the future, you need to pay me a
higher interest rate and that then causes interest rates to
rise. So if we have the opposite
process, which is time preference declines, then you
get people saving more. That means capital becomes more
abundant. That means the cost of capital
declines. And so when we have economic
prosperity, when we have peace, when we have economic growth,
when we have stability for decades and centuries, what
happens is that interest rates decline.
That's good. That's means that we are saving
so much. Capital is abundant.
Entrepreneurs are able to find financing at relatively low
costs. And the low cost of financing
means that businesses have a better chance of succeeding and
remaining sustainable. So you want this to happen.
And the Austrian explanation, I believe, is very correct.
And it's a strong argument in favor of interest lending and a
strong argument against prohibition of interest state
lending. Because in a sense, what it's
saying is that if the government says you cannot lend that
interest, it's essentially like trying to mandate time
preference, but you cannot mandate people's time
preference. And when you ban them from
borrowing and lending, you're only going to exacerbate the
problems. Because if I have a time
preference that is very high and requires me to get money right
now, I am better off to get the money now because I might need
it. You know, I, I need to borrow to
make rent. If I don't make the payment by
the end of this month, I get kicked out.
So it's worth it for me to pay 5% extra next month, let's say,
in order to not get kicked out. So in a sense, it's a little bit
like a price gouging. I think of interest rates as
like price gouging. If there's a natural disaster,
things become more expensive. People who have scarce resources
will charge more for them. Now you might say.
Well, you would say and. You know, the Super, the the,
the trains and the OR the boats or the the roads are locked into
the town. So we have a limited amount of
water and bread and things for the next week or so until we get
supplies. So people who have those things
are going to want to hoard them and people who don't have those
things are going to want to pay a lot for them.
So the price is going to go up. Now, is that a good thing or a
bad thing? Well, I mean, it's a bad thing
compared to not to being able to buy it cheaply, but it's a good
thing compared to not being able to buy it.
Because if you try to keep the price fixed, then the first
people to get into the supermarket are going to hoard
all the quantities and then they're going to leave everybody
else without it. So but then when the price
rises, more people have the chance to access it.
And I think the more important idea is also when the price is
rising, there is a strong incentive for people to bring in
more resources. So anybody who's got a car that
can find its way to the town that doesn't have the disaster
can go and get things and sell them at the higher price.
If you're not paying him a higher price, it's not going to
make sense for him to go and get it.
So the higher prices are the solution to the high prices
because they offer a bounty to all producers to make more and
more. And in a sense, you could say
the same thing about interest rates.
Interest rates are the solution to interest rates in that high
interest rates encourage people to save more, which then brings
in more capital on the market, which brings the price of
savings down. But then what happens if we take
this and extend it further to its logical conclusion.
Now I well, one of the main ideas that posit in the Bitcoin
standard and I think one of the things that made it popular with
a lot of people is to try and draw the link between the
hardness of money and the time preference.
And the key idea is and I think this is something.
Most bitcoiners will attest to as soon as you're able.
To start saving in Bitcoin, your time preference drops.
You start thinking more and more about the future, so you're
more. Likely to save because now your
savings can actually turn into increased economic valuation in
the future. You're more likely to think of
the long term in all kinds of different manners, not just in
financial ways. So what happens now if we have?
The process of capital accumulation, hard money and
lowering time preference continuing to go on for decades
and centuries. Which was what was happening
historically. If you look historically at
interest rates, you see that they've largely been on a
journey of decline, interrupted. With a lot of disasters and when
there's a big war, when there's an earthquake, when there's a
plague, interest rates spike up because it's a disaster.
People need money very desperately.
The price of money goes. Up a lot, but overall the As
humanity progresses, as we accumulate more capital, as we
become more civilized, as we become more educated and more
capable of thinking of the future, we start accumulating
more capital. We lower the price of capital,
interest rates decline. So by the beginning of the 20th
century, interest rates were at their.
Lowest level in history at around 2 1/2% at the Bank of
England, which was the lowest interest rate in the world.
And then we took a civilizational detour away from
civilization to the value of Fiat barbarism over the last 100
and 1012 years. And that caused interest rates
to rise. But imagine if we'd continued,
and this is the topic of my last book, the Gold standard.
Imagine if we continued on the journey of hard money on the
gold standard for another 112 years.
Where would we be today? Interest rates were already at 2
1/2 percent. Imagine more capital
accumulation, more and more wealth, more productivity,
people becoming more affluent, people able to think about the
future more and more and more. That only means.
More capital accumulation and lower interest rates.
Eventually you get to the. Point where the interest rate
that you could get on borrowing is equal to the.
Is below the cost of storage. So if you have your money and
you just keep it and you store it, you might have to pay
something like 1% on that money. So at a certain point.
The interest rate that you would pay that you would receive on
lending can. At 0% it becomes attractive.
You are willing to accept a 0% nominal interest rate because
getting 0% nominal interest rate is better than paying 1% on
storing the money. Particularly when you keep in
mind that 0% nominal interest rate is actually positive in
real terms because this is hard money that is appreciating.
And that was an initial starting assumption of this mental model.
So if the money's appreciating interest rates are declining,
eventually interest rates at 0% becomes the inevitable the the,
the market clearing price. We have so much abundance of
capital and people are happy to just give you their capital if
you're trustworthy and willing to bring it.
Back in a year because you save them on the cost of storing
capital. And then when you want to
actually invest, if you have a business where you're not just
taking the capital because you're my friend and you have an
emergency and I'm going to help you out, you're actually going
to put it into an investment. Well, in this case, I want a
share, I want to be part of the business.
So I will just. Get the equity.
And here, you know that a lot of people.
Sorry. Can you hear this?
There's a sign in the back. Yeah.
But it's OK, It's OK. Yeah, this is the Iranian
missiles flying overhead. Oh wow.
Yeah, but it's OK. It happens every day.
At this point, I think the interceptors are all gone.
So low risk that they would intercept them and fall on us.
They're just going to keep flying to their intended target.
But anyways. So I would say so.
So then the financing happens through equity.
That was the last thing I said about.
I'll just continue and say and. I think the key thing that
people miss is that they assume that they look at a business and
they see that the business was financed by credit and they
think that if credit did not exist, then that business
couldn't have been financed, therefore credit.
That's good. This is, this is an example of
not thinking in an economic way because you're not thinking of
the opportunity cost. You're thinking that this credit
is just materialized and that it has created more capital goods.
But in reality, a bank issuing credit is not creating more
capital goods. And so the capital, the actual
physical goods that we need in order to produce consumer goods,
the labor that we need to put into it, these are resources
that can't be increased by just generating credit by saying,
hey, let me borrow money from you.
That doesn't mean that now we've got more workers in our country.
So therefore I can build my business and you can build your
business if you can build the business with your money.
And I can't build it because I don't have the money and I don't
have the workers and the machines that you need for your
business. Now, if I borrow money from a
bank, that doesn't magically mean that you and I can both now
have all the machines and the workers that we need.
The number of machines and the workers are still the same.
So ultimately I think this is like the biggest trick in in
economics and in Fiat world. This all of Keynesian thinking
and all of Fiat thinking comes from this illusion that if you
just issue more credit, if you issue more claims on money, if
you increase the supply of money, you can increase the
number of things for rich money stands for.
It's exactly as stupid as saying if we just print more tickets,
we can increase the capacity of the stadium.
No, the stadium fits 50,000 people and it has 50,000
tickets. Printing more tickets is not
going to increase the capacity. And so this is the thing that I
would say this is an argument against Fiat and it's also the
argument against credit in general.
Well, it's not necessarily the argument against credit.
It's the argument against the argument against equity as a
mode of financing in that it doesn't matter if it's equity or
credit. At the end of the day, the
number of resources that we have is fixed and they can either go
to my restaurant or your restaurant.
And if we have more resources, we can finance both.
But if we don't, then we just need to a way of allocating
these resources and equity can do that job and it's a safer way
of doing it. It's a more reliable way, It's
more financially robust and it's less likely to result in
negative outcomes. And it doesn't, I mean, I guess
the key thing is that it does not pretend to be creating more
capital and therefore it's not going to lead to the
consequences of delusion. In a Fiat money world, we think
we can solve everything by just creating more units of the
money. Whereas, you know, in the in the
example you gave, stuff is just going to happen.
People are just going to do things.
Some people were prepared, some, some weren't right.
Some people by luck still have their car, others, others don't.
And that is just the hardness of the reality at a certain point.
And I feel that with Fiat money there is a way to fake that or
fake solve certain problems that in the long run are are never
solved. So I hope that makes it that.
That would be my layman reflection.
Absolutely. And I think you know that you
can take it to the extreme. The the Fiat mentality, I
believe, is what leads us to a place where the concept of what
is a woman has become such a controversial thing because
everything is paid. You can pay to become a man,
basically. You can pay exactly.
You. Can just pass it by Fiat.
So if if government can decide what is science and if
government says this is right science, this is bad science,
this is good medicine, this is bad medicine.
If government can just, you know, pass a law that says, hey,
we can all stay home and therefore the disease will go
away. If government can essentially
enforce everything by Fiat, people get in this into their
idea that all you need to do in order to make something happen
is just convince the right people in the right position to
issue the right call. And then it happens.
So you get your doctor and to perform a certain surgery, and
then you go to a a government office, and then the government
office changes your thing on your passport.
You go from F to M or M to F or whatever, and that's it.
You know, you've become the new thing.
And it's just, it's, it's a mentality where everything is
subject to our desires. That the world is not something
that we get to. We, we, it's insanity because we
don't accept that there are things in the world that are
outside of our control, that we need to be accepted and lived
with rather than changed. So you can't pass a law that
says the sun needs to rise from the West.
There are no democratic processes that will ever pass
this. And I think people would be a
lot happier if they realize that so much more of the world is
like that. They need to just accept it.
And I think the thing that Bitcoin is doing is that it's
taking away the power of people in authority to be able to
decree those things by Fiat and put people out of their, you
know, just create a new reality that people can just pass by
law. And this is this is what Fiat
ends because we're making those people go bankrupt so they can't
continue to just shape reality as they want.
And it's giving the people who hold on to reality financial
rewards for doing so. This was really the bad thing,
because in the Fiat world, if you go along with the insanity,
you get rich. And then this has been setting
up generations of humans to be raised contrary to human nature
for centuries in millennia, which is you need to believe in
lies in order to succeed. You need to cheat, you need to
lie, you need to bear false witness.
When they tell you this is 1 + 1 equals to three, you have to go
and say yes, 1 + 1 equals to three.
That's how you get the degree. That's how you get the job.
That's how you get the promotion.
That's how you get the money. So we've had this drilled into
us, this kind of delusion of Fiat, the idea that you can just
make everything into whatever you want by just passing a law.
You know, you can bring democracy to Iran.
Just press a few buttons and then things blow up.
And then we bring democracy to Iran.
We can bring female liberation to Afghanistan.
We can do all kinds of things. We can shape the entire world as
we want it. And we we do it because we have
this insane thing called a money printer that is just a back door
into all of reality, a back door to all of the all of the
economics of how the world works.
Yeah. Well, as long as people believe
that it has value, right. I mean, I think there's 99 or
11, I think it's nine countries in Africa that's still used as a
Central African franc that that, that France produces, right?
And they they still believe that that is the money in in some
way. And they're also partially
probably probably forced, right? But I think that is kind of like
an outlandish example. Whereas just in the Western
world, I think what people just need to realize that it's, it's
basically exactly the same. But you're steered towards that
point of believing that, you know, this is the organically
the best form of money that we ended up with.
And therefore, you know, don't, don't ask questions, please.
You know, like I, I, I think that is what also opened my
eyes, just hearing people from Lebanon OR whatever, just
realizing that that's the exact same money system.
But I'm lucky for now to have grown up in a Western country,
you know, and I never really had to experience what these people
have experienced. But fundamentally it's it's
basically the same. Yeah, you just.
Got a different chamber in the Russian roulette gun but if.
You're taking more spins every day, don't worry.
Let's talk about the Netherlands introducing my country attacks
on unrealized gains, right, a 36% tax.
And actually today I saw a inflation calculator from a big
Dutch bank that's calculated with I think 4.5% inflation that
in 20 forty €200,000 would have lost 46% of of of its value.
It's interesting that this is just, you know, on the on the
public website of a big bank. So people need to mitigate this
loss of purchasing power so they are forced to invest, IE take
more risk, right? Create more anxiety towards this
future, have an even even higher time preference.
And if they succeed, they're now proposing to tax that with with
46%. How do you look or how do you
view these types of topics that are now actually discussed that
have horrible president by the way where they have been
attempted before? Is is this kind of like the
final boss of Fiat desperation or or how do you think about it?
Yeah, it's difficult to tell. I mean, it's the numbers that
just keep going up and you know, the, the, the they talk about
unrealized capital gains as well.
And it's just it, it, it's fantastic.
And I mean, this is this is a historical trend that has been
noted by many historians. The old Arab historian Ibn
Saldun, I think, wrote about this hundreds of years ago, 800
years ago. I think he lived, I can't
remember the exact date. But anyways, he wrote many years
ago about how when a state is young and healthy and vigorous
in the early stages of its rise, the government is only taking a
small fraction of taxes and it allows people to be free, and
therefore people have a lot of money and that causes growth.
And you know, he, he, he. Referred to it in terms of
cycles. Eventually the generations that
get born into wealth lose the hardness.
The asabi as he called it, and the I mean.
The work ethic, you could argue is, is, is a part of it so that
these generations then are born with a lower work ethic.
So then they start spending things down and the government
becomes more and more used to the idea that it is responsible
for others. So it starts charging more and
more. So it's the, the, it's, it's the
inevitable cycle of States and civilizations rising and
falling. And then it's repeated in many
civilizations and the studies and the historians that are
written about. It have also done the same also
done so from many many civilizations that Anthony
Gibbons wrote about this and the the British general who was in
charge of the Jordanian army. He also wrote a great book on
this. So I think this is sadly.
What we're seeing in Europe and it's, it's striking how bad it
is. And I, you know, I, I'm a person
who really loves European like, you know, most people get
obsessed with East Asia or they go to Japan.
And I, I like Europe. I've always been a big fan of
Europe. I love traveling to Europe and
I'm very grateful for all the amazing things that Europe has
given us. And it really saddens me to see
Europe like this because it's you can see the you, you, you
can see the economic suffocation because salaries are low,
productivity is low, taxes are very high, regulations are very
high. And it is.
It's it's it seems almost deliberate at certain.
Points And I think, you know, you look at how US foreign
policy has been acting up in the last couple of years.
I think you start seeing yeah, this is quite deliberate.
I think there is a deep animosity in the US against
Europe and. It's, I think it's helping shape
these policies. It's helping shape all of the
kind of. Policies that are, I would say,
destructive to Europe, you know, the energy policies, the
destruction of Nord Stream, the crazy immigration policies that
they have, the softness on crime, you know, importing
people from all over the world and the releasing and not having
proper criminal accountability. All of that suggests something
really perverse taking place. And it is really sad.
And there's, you know, I don't have any political solutions to
offer on this. I think the only thing that can
be said is just an individual solution.
The only thing that you can do is sort yourself out to figure
out how to try and reduce your tax burden as much as you can,
set up businesses abroad or set a presidency abroad and try and
slug it out. It's a tough time.
It's terrible. But you know, I guess
consolation is could be a lot worse than a lot of other worst
places in the world. So maybe and and you know, it's
it was a lot worse for your ancestors as well.
A lot of the Europeans in the past had a lot of worst
situations deal with then high tax rates.
So count your blessings that raise up your sleeves and get
to. Work for sure, yeah, I I also
think that, you know, obviously this is called Bitcoin from LED
else I think I think Bitcoin is the prime tool for millennials
at least to attempt to to escape what is the end, the inevitable
end of the of the Fiat path, right.
And I, I think that without Bitcoin, I would be less hopeful
about the future. But I do want to ask you like
what, what do you think is the biggest threat or risk to
Bitcoin that you see today? Well, I wrote this in the
Bitcoin standard and I elaborated on it in the Fiat
standard and I would say it probably still is the biggest
risk. I I still don't think it's a
real big risk, but it is the biggest.
Just because the biggest doesn't mean it's big.
So the And this is the idea that governments go back on a gold
standard. I think the most serious threat
to Bitcoin would be monetary responsibility.
And gold already has what is it now?
Something like a $30 trillion market cap, $25 trillion market
cap, something in that range. So it's already more than 10
times larger than Bitcoin in terms of liquidity and money.
Is a network good? It's a good whose value is
proportional to the number of people who use it and to the
number of people who are able to transact with you in it.
So if the more liquid a money is, the more useful it is.
That's why everybody wants to go to the winner.
That's why money is a winner take home market and that's why
it's very difficult for 2nd place to replace the 1st place.
So if the world goes on a gold standard in the next month or
so, and all of the world's governments now peg their
currencies to gold, or, you know, either you peg it to gold
or you go to a hyperinflation. In that world, everybody has
access. To money that doesn't have an
inflation or a very low inflation and in that world a
lot of the problems that governments are creating for
people would go away because it becomes much harder for them to
centrally plan their economies and micromanage your life if
they don't have their money printer available so with with
that you know a lot of the incentives for using Bitcoin
goes away you don't need to escape inflation and then
because you can just hold gold and your government isn't such a
horrible police state because it doesn't have a money printer
anymore and so they let you get on with your life most of the
time we go back to a modern model of government similar to
Western Europe in the 1890s I think that would be the most
significant risk to Bitcoin because it would reduce interest
in Bitcoin and it would reduce the desire for people to get
into it and it would likely 'cause people to just lose
interest in it over time having said that I still think that
would not kill Bitcoin because even if it does cause say A1234
year bear market in Bitcoin where the price crashes can
happen has happened before but. I think ultimately the limited
supply of Bitcoin means that it's just going to go back to
going up and then people are going to want to hold more of
it. And then the more they hold it,
the more it goes up. It's just better money and it's
going to win. So it's going to keep
appreciating eventually to overtake gold is what I believe.
But you know, they the more that governments mess up with their
monetary policies and with their control over their citizens, the
faster this would happen. Likely because more and more
people will go to Bitcoin and fewer people will go to gold
because gold will still not be usable as money.
And that's it's main impediment because government ban you from
using it as money. So if they let you use gold.
If they make gold, become the money and gold already.
Has a massive. First mover advantage in
liquidity that I think could set Bitcoin back significantly, but
the highly unlikely to happen. I agree.
All right, three very short questions to wrap up.
This can be all right answers. What is the one thing about the
next 10 years that is very obvious to you, but you think
sounds insane to other people? Bitcoin can't think of anything
else. I mean, a lot of, I believe in a
lot of insane things in this world.
A lot of people think I'm crazy over all kinds of things.
But I think the one that is the most important and most
consequential of them all is going to be Bitcoin.
All right. And when do we see you on Joe
Rogan? I did not tell him did.
He ever call like you're ready? I I assume you're ready?
No, but I train every day all. Right, last one, and I ask
everyone the last one. What is a core belief that you
will never let go of? Never is a big word.
I've, you know, changed my mind a lot of things over the years.
A core belief. I mean, I wouldn't say a belief
that I would never let go of because I belief is I, I would
say a value is something that I would not want to ever let go of
and beliefs because, you know, if tomorrow the sun starts to
rise from the West, I'm going to have to change my belief about
it. I don't think it'll happen.
But you know, I, I believe things because they're true.
So I find it hard to make a case for something that I know for
sure will always be true, because who knows?
But with values, I think you know my value.
My my fundamental moral value in life is the idea of non
aggression, Non aggression principle from Marty Rothbard
and the anarchists and libertarians and Austrians.
And it just. Means that you do not initiate
violence against individuals who are not initiating violence
against you you do not take the property of individuals without
their consent you do not touch the body or property of a person
without their consent. I think this is something that
I've believed and held and valued for a very long time.
And I genuinely and honestly believe that it has made my life
a lot better. It's, it's, it's difficult to
explain this to people who don't agree with it because they don't
see how this kind of mentality can be very destructive for you.
If you think that you are, that you have the legitimacy to abuse
other people, to take things from other people because of
whatever stories you tell yourself, I think it makes you a
far worse person for yourself, for your own goals.
And having the maturity and the intelligence and the morality to
be able to just completely disavow the concept of violating
the property in the body of others makes you so much more
sane, so much more capable of understanding the world, so much
better at acting to impose the world in the way that you want,
rather than essentially fantasizing about violence as a
way of solving things. Thank you for sharing that and
thank you so much for your generosity and your time and
celebrating this episode with me.
I thought it was very interesting.
So thanks a lot and we'll stay in touch and and all the best.
Thank you. Thank you, Sir.
Take care. Bye, bye.
You too. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
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