Speaker 1: While many people today think they're not into economics and
Speaker 1: money and listening to all that, what few don't realize,
Speaker 1: at least in the beginning, is that economics is at
Speaker 1: the foundation of everything in our lives, and it permeates
Speaker 1: every area of our life, including science and health and
Speaker 1: politics and every other area. And so understanding the basics
Speaker 1: of economics is the key to unlocking understanding of all
Speaker 1: those other subjects. And today I am joined by a
Speaker 1: good friend, someone I've been excited to talk to you
Speaker 1: and bring to you for a long time, author of
Speaker 1: one of the books that I think is very instrumental
Speaker 1: and everyone should read. UM. And we dig into economics.
Speaker 1: We talk about how it's that foundation for the rest
Speaker 1: of everything, UM. What is at the root of that UM,
Speaker 1: the two different camps of economics, and how all they're
Speaker 1: at odds with each other, How one of those camps
Speaker 1: has really driven all the policy of the developed world
Speaker 1: and kind of politics where we're at today, the problems
Speaker 1: that it's created, UM, how to solve it, what's at
Speaker 1: the root of that problem, and how we can solve
Speaker 1: that problem? UM, and and so much more. UM. I
Speaker 1: am excited to have this interview with you today. UM,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed it as I did. So let's
Speaker 1: quead just jump in everyone today. I'm joined by Safety
Speaker 1: and he is a pH d in economics. He's an
Speaker 1: independent scholar, and he's a teacher on his own website,
Speaker 1: Safety and dot com. He's also the author of the
Speaker 1: Bitcoin Standard and the newcoming book, the FIATS Standard, which
Speaker 1: I think everyone is pretty excited to read. I know
Speaker 1: I am, I've read quite a bit of it released.
Speaker 1: But anyway, Safety and thanks so much for joining me today.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me Mark. It's a
Speaker 1: pleasure to be chatting to you. Yeah, that's great. I'm
Speaker 1: glad we're able to finally get this together. UM. I've
Speaker 1: been a big fan, uh ever since you kind of
Speaker 1: you kind of popped up on the scene several years ago.
Speaker 1: A big fan of your books. I've I've recommended them NonStop.
Speaker 1: But what I really like is is the take that
Speaker 1: you have almost not everything that seems to be counterculture today,
Speaker 1: but you always are able to tie it back to economics.
Speaker 1: You use, you have such a good understanding of that.
Speaker 1: I have so much I want to dig in today,
Speaker 1: but just real quick, why don't you just kind of
Speaker 1: give us a background on on on who you are,
Speaker 1: what you're doing right now. So I used to be
Speaker 1: the university professor at the Lebanese American University when I
Speaker 1: wrote the bitcoin standard, UM, and then UM that went well,
Speaker 1: and UM, my working bitcoin became quite popular, and I
Speaker 1: decided that I could make a lot more impact by
Speaker 1: being independent and producing my own research, publishing it on
Speaker 1: my website, publishing my books and selling them to my readers,
Speaker 1: and teaching economics on my website. So I teach. I've
Speaker 1: got four economics courses that are available on my website
Speaker 1: that you can take, and you can join the website
Speaker 1: as a member and study the courses which are recorded,
Speaker 1: and then you can join the two live seminars that
Speaker 1: we have every week. And it's, um, it's it's my
Speaker 1: kind of twenty first century take on the university model.
Speaker 1: And you know, I started this in and then the
Speaker 1: rest of the worlds university has joined me and now
Speaker 1: they're all teaching over zoom anyway, So UM, it's kind
Speaker 1: of uh, it's kind of inevitable because of the economics involved.
Speaker 1: I mean sure that the university model of going and
Speaker 1: hanging out with a bunch of twenty year olds is
Speaker 1: obviously a lot of fun, but the economics of it
Speaker 1: in terms of education, when you have the alternative of
Speaker 1: essentially learning for free or close to free online, it's
Speaker 1: just too compelling. And it's not like if you learned
Speaker 1: online you can't socialize. You know, you can still go out,
Speaker 1: you don't have to stay stuck in your house. You're
Speaker 1: just gonna be learning much more efficiently. And then you
Speaker 1: can socialize and invest and network and do all of
Speaker 1: those things with all the time and money that you save,
Speaker 1: and you can do them a lot better. So, um,
Speaker 1: this is where this is where I am. And I've also, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, since leaving my university job, I've written the
Speaker 1: FIAT Standard, which I'm finishing up next week sending off
Speaker 1: to the printers. You can pre order it from my
Speaker 1: website safe at dean dot com. And I'm also writing
Speaker 1: a textbook on economics Principles of Economics in the Austring
Speaker 1: School Tradition, which will be out early next year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that. I love a lovely idea of disrupting
Speaker 1: all legacy institutions and including the education system. And it's
Speaker 1: you know, over the last twenty years, technology has changed
Speaker 1: so much that it's like these all these institutions have
Speaker 1: to be disrupted. UM. Education is a big one, do
Speaker 1: you think, UM back you know, changing that model, as
Speaker 1: you say, like are your classes they're like prerecorded, right,
Speaker 1: so then people can go through them whenever they want
Speaker 1: UM and then you have the discussion that you add
Speaker 1: on UM as opposed to the old model where like
Speaker 1: a professor has to be in the classroom giving the
Speaker 1: same talk day after day, year after year after year. Right. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean the first time that I recorded them, it
Speaker 1: was being offered live, so there were students who could
Speaker 1: join the zoom call and that we could have some
Speaker 1: discussion with it. But from then on, yeah, you just
Speaker 1: recorded once and then I mean the things scales uh
Speaker 1: enormously that way, because it's the same lecture if you're
Speaker 1: going to be giving it to somebody else and it's
Speaker 1: UM you know, there's no need for me and the
Speaker 1: student to be live online at the same time in
Speaker 1: order for him to get it. So they can just
Speaker 1: get the recording and then they can join the discussion
Speaker 1: with me or with other members of the website. UM uhh.
Speaker 1: And you know that that's the interesting part and there's
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of extra productivity that you can get
Speaker 1: by just keeping the conventional lecture part recorded. Hey guys,
Speaker 1: let me just interrupt this interview real quick, just to
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Speaker 1: that debt for anything that you want, including to live
Speaker 1: off of to leverage up and buy more or roll
Speaker 1: it into another asset. UM you can do something like
Speaker 1: I've done recently, like sell some real estate put that
Speaker 1: money into bitcoin. Now as that bitcoin price has risen,
Speaker 1: I'm able to borrow against it and go back and
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Speaker 1: fine out. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I
Speaker 1: I have a daughter who's starting to think about college
Speaker 1: at this point, and I'm not really a big fan
Speaker 1: of that. I secretly don't not not so secretly, I
Speaker 1: don't really even want it to go at all. Um
Speaker 1: and now because I don't love education, I do, it's just, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, that model, especially with with the way universities
Speaker 1: are today, it's pretty scary to send a kid into
Speaker 1: that type of a system. UM take away their creativity
Speaker 1: and brainwash them. At the same time, you know, but
Speaker 1: being able to like learn a specific subject like you wanna,
Speaker 1: like you offer, UM lets people kind of come in
Speaker 1: specialize get the information they need without having to take
Speaker 1: on all the extra stuff. So it's awesome. I love it. Yeah. So, UM,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about today. So you know your
Speaker 1: your PhD in economics teach economics. Um, you teach really,
Speaker 1: I guess you would Austrian economics, which is a big
Speaker 1: difference from what most people would learn in economics in colleges,
Speaker 1: which is typically more of the Kensian type of economics. Um.
Speaker 1: Do you want to just kind of talk about the
Speaker 1: difference of kind of traditional college economics versus what you
Speaker 1: teach and how how that works. Um. I think the
Speaker 1: difference is that since the nineteen thirties, really, um, since
Speaker 1: essentially central banks came on the scene after World War
Speaker 1: One and then they started playing a massively more significant
Speaker 1: role in the management of their economies. After the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: the job of an economist went from being somebody who
Speaker 1: studies economic reality and tries to explain it into being
Speaker 1: somebody who advises policy makers on how to fix economics.
Speaker 1: And so the approach is entirely different, Whereas, whereas Australian
Speaker 1: economists think about the world as it is, mainstream economists
Speaker 1: are much more in their mind practical in the sense
Speaker 1: that they're looking for solutions. They're trying to make unemployment
Speaker 1: go away, They're trying to um, you know, remove the
Speaker 1: economic problems that they see and poverty or so on,
Speaker 1: and so it's much more of an activist mindset. Where
Speaker 1: are we need to approach the economic problems from the
Speaker 1: perspective of how can the government fix them? Essentially? Um
Speaker 1: that's I think the difference in the approach in terms
Speaker 1: of methodology. The primary difference is that the Austrian school
Speaker 1: thinks of economics as being human action, as being what
Speaker 1: individuals do you know, It's that there are human beings
Speaker 1: and they are constantly in a state of economizing because
Speaker 1: we live in a world of scarcity. We live in
Speaker 1: a world in which the amount of things that we
Speaker 1: want is much larger than the amount of things that
Speaker 1: are available, because it's much easier to want things than
Speaker 1: to make things, and so it's easy for us to
Speaker 1: want a lot of things, um, but we can't have
Speaker 1: them all, and so we're constantly economizing. Primarily with our time.
Speaker 1: We're thinking about how can we spend our time productively
Speaker 1: and what is the best use of our time and
Speaker 1: how we can make the most of it, and you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about all the different uses. So Australa economics starts
Speaker 1: from the lens of let's just look at individuals and
Speaker 1: how they act and try and understand the economic phenomena
Speaker 1: that we see around us. And I find that to
Speaker 1: be an extremely powerful tool for understanding reality, as opposed
Speaker 1: to the kynes In perspective, which is an aggregate perspective,
Speaker 1: which looks at economics from the perspective of what should
Speaker 1: the policymaker do, and therefore it analyzes the economy in
Speaker 1: terms of a bunch of aggregates. It looks at people
Speaker 1: as essentially cattle on a flarm and you're managing them
Speaker 1: in a way that maximizes their output. And it's um,
Speaker 1: you know, there's not much room for the individual freedom
Speaker 1: or the individual decision making. It's a lot about, you know,
Speaker 1: what the policymaker and the central planners think is the
Speaker 1: best thing to do. So I don't, and I think
Speaker 1: there are enormous differences, and I think in terms of
Speaker 1: methodology UH. You know, the Austrian school starts from the
Speaker 1: premise that value is subjective, and since value is subjective,
Speaker 1: all economic action depends on human subjective valuations, and there
Speaker 1: or you can see how consequently whatever is best is
Speaker 1: whatever the individual values best for themselves. Whereas from the
Speaker 1: mainstream perspective that you learn at university, value and economic
Speaker 1: valuation is something that is computed by equations and by economists,
Speaker 1: and therefore, if you can calculate value, and if you
Speaker 1: can aggregate it across people, then you can make economic
Speaker 1: relationships that UM. Then then you can study the economic
Speaker 1: relationship between different factors in the economy, and then central
Speaker 1: planners can tweak these intervene in a way that allows
Speaker 1: um that brings about the desired outcomes that the central
Speaker 1: planners want. So it's an entirely different approach of UH.
Speaker 1: For economics. It's almost like the difference between astrology and astronomy,
Speaker 1: and that you know, nominally to the two fields discussed
Speaker 1: the stars, but it's completely different discussion that's taking place.
Speaker 1: And of course, the mainstream perspective has been dominant in
Speaker 1: universities in the U S and all over the world
Speaker 1: over the last eighty years or so ninety years, because
Speaker 1: that's what governments want. You know, governments are in charge
Speaker 1: of education thanks to central banking, I think, thanks to
Speaker 1: Fiat money and you know, spoiler alert. My next book,
Speaker 1: The Fiat Standard, can be summarized as everything I don't
Speaker 1: like is caused by Fiat and fixed by bitcoin, and
Speaker 1: I make more volit and education is one of those things.
Speaker 1: I have a whole chapter on education, and I think, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the ability of government to print money
Speaker 1: has allowed government to um what sounds like a very
Speaker 1: noble goal, which is, let's just have the government give
Speaker 1: everybody the education that they want, to make education more affordable,
Speaker 1: use education and the scientific method in the service of
Speaker 1: public policy. It all sounds very noble, and it's actually
Speaker 1: quite compelling until you get to grad school and then
Speaker 1: you start really asking hard questions about how this thing works.
Speaker 1: Then you read the Austrians and you realize, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not how the world works. All the actually taking
Speaker 1: place here is that you're ending up with a bunch
Speaker 1: of people in charge of other people's lives and causing
Speaker 1: a lot of problems for them, and then society turns
Speaker 1: into a war of all against all because whoever controls
Speaker 1: the printing press can essentially dictate reality for everybody. You
Speaker 1: can dictate what gets taught at university, can dictate what
Speaker 1: foods get produced, what people can eat, what they should eat,
Speaker 1: what is legal, what is illegal. A lot of power
Speaker 1: comes along with the printing press, and in education this
Speaker 1: has led to UM I believe that the corruption of
Speaker 1: education in the twentieth century where if you look at
Speaker 1: universities today, you know they're free from market competition. They're
Speaker 1: free from the discipline that the market would give you,
Speaker 1: the market will force you to have in order to
Speaker 1: continue to operate, and so free from that discipline, they
Speaker 1: have expanded and grown as bureaucracies and they serve the
Speaker 1: interests of their funders. And that's, you know, just basic
Speaker 1: human incentives. You pay the piper. You know, whoever pays
Speaker 1: the piper calls the tune. And the universities are not
Speaker 1: paid by their students, even though the students pay a
Speaker 1: lot of money. UM it's primarily through government agencies, both
Speaker 1: through facilitating loans for the students and approving loans for students,
Speaker 1: which is entually means that the real players the government
Speaker 1: as well as financing research and financing universities and financing professors,
Speaker 1: which is an enormous amount of money. So ultimately, universities
Speaker 1: end up serving the cause of the bureaucrats that fund
Speaker 1: them rather than the students that go there. And over time,
Speaker 1: you see what has happened. You know, the teaching experience
Speaker 1: has degraded. The number of students getting to learn directly
Speaker 1: from a professor is declining, the number of students in
Speaker 1: the classrooms declining. The number of professors has stayed roughly
Speaker 1: the same. But what has increased massively at universities is
Speaker 1: the number of administrators, the vice president for this and that,
Speaker 1: and the vice president for all kinds of different buzz words.
Speaker 1: And it comes with political baggage, and it comes with
Speaker 1: ideological baggage, and of course, you know, the the main
Speaker 1: driving ideology behind all of this is more government spending,
Speaker 1: because it's government spending that's financing all those things, and
Speaker 1: government wants to hear that the government is the solution
Speaker 1: to everything, and that's the way to succeed in academia.
Speaker 1: So um, I I'm you know, extremely critical of the
Speaker 1: state of where academia is, and I don't really recommend
Speaker 1: people go into universities because I think whatever it is
Speaker 1: that you want to learn, whatever field you want, you know,
Speaker 1: with the exception obviously of some technical fields, UM say medicine,
Speaker 1: UM and and specific types of engineering. But even with these,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of them is a lot of
Speaker 1: the engineering stuff is beginning to become more of a
Speaker 1: learner on the job kind of situation. So for for
Speaker 1: some fields, obviously this doesn't apply. But the vast for
Speaker 1: the vast majority of things that you could learn in
Speaker 1: the university, you could learn them equally well online. You
Speaker 1: can find online lectures, you can find the syllabi of courses,
Speaker 1: you can find all the readings online. You can get
Speaker 1: all of the education that you could get at the
Speaker 1: best university for um less than one percent of the
Speaker 1: price online. Yeah, you just don't get that. You just
Speaker 1: don't get that little piece of paper that that degree
Speaker 1: which um following economic principles, I mean scarcity. So every
Speaker 1: single person has a degree. How valuable is that degree? Right?
Speaker 1: So I think it's taken some of that value away anyway, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's UM, it's and I think the entire value of
Speaker 1: credentialism is dropping because um, you know, credentials had a
Speaker 1: lot more value before the Internet, when it was very
Speaker 1: hard to know who knows what. And being able to
Speaker 1: go to university and spent four years, say at a
Speaker 1: physics department or at an engineering department, and come out
Speaker 1: of that university with a paper that says that you
Speaker 1: know you've done a good job, carried a lot of
Speaker 1: signal for an employer. You were obviously much more employable
Speaker 1: than somebody they pick up from the street because you
Speaker 1: had a lot of skills and the discipline required to
Speaker 1: maintain yourself, to keep yourself on the program and pass.
Speaker 1: But now with the Internet, you can see essentially everybody's
Speaker 1: background online through the work that they do, and so
Speaker 1: people can just do work and demonstrate that they can
Speaker 1: do the work online and it's very easy to determine
Speaker 1: who can do the work. And then you don't really
Speaker 1: need the credentials anymore. The credentials the proof of steak,
Speaker 1: and then we have proof of work, right like I
Speaker 1: staked my money, I did my time, I have proof
Speaker 1: of steak, but over here is my proof of the
Speaker 1: work that I've done. Um. The interesting take on that,
Speaker 1: So you you kind of you set this foundation and
Speaker 1: then you layered a whole bunch of stuff on there.
Speaker 1: I peel all that back, and I go back down
Speaker 1: to the layer. It seems like what I'm hearing is
Speaker 1: the difference of the two systems really comes down to
Speaker 1: maybe almost a difference in worldview. Where one group of
Speaker 1: people believe like the world happens it's this uh, you know,
Speaker 1: giant organic complex system versus maybe the Kinsians over here
Speaker 1: believe they can control everything, almost like this godlike complex, where, um,
Speaker 1: the economy is a machine that I could build and
Speaker 1: I can manage, versus organic organic organism made of billions
Speaker 1: of people that have constantly changing once needs and desires,
Speaker 1: and so rather than you're trying to learn and maneuver
Speaker 1: navigate it, we want to play god and control it.
Speaker 1: Would that be a way to kind of sum that
Speaker 1: up absolutely? If you read kanes Um, one of the
Speaker 1: common things that you hear about Kings is that you know,
Speaker 1: Kines has been misinterpreted by his followers, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the followers did bad things, and his ideas were
Speaker 1: better than this. It's absolute nonsense. I think the most
Speaker 1: damning indictment that you could say of Kines is that
Speaker 1: he was a true Keynsian and I think that's also
Speaker 1: the most damning indictment of Keynesians as well to say
Speaker 1: that Kings, because he was a truly despicable person if
Speaker 1: you look at him as an individually, you know, he um.
Speaker 1: His idea of entertainment was trafficking in child sex slaves.
Speaker 1: He traveled Mediterranean to do this. So he had a
Speaker 1: very very sociopathic bent to him, and he was he
Speaker 1: despised normal people, and he believed they needed his control
Speaker 1: and his supervision in order for them to be able
Speaker 1: to live their lives. And you know, if you read
Speaker 1: his conceptions of economics, it very much flows from that
Speaker 1: kind of mentality. And he Um. You know, he in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, the German translation of his stupid book,
Speaker 1: The General Theory was published, And you know what kind
Speaker 1: of political system existed in Germany in nineteen thirty six
Speaker 1: was the Nazi editarian system. And in his um in
Speaker 1: the he wrote a ForWord for the German edition, and
Speaker 1: in the German edition he said, um, the the kind
Speaker 1: of economic ideas that I'm proposing here are better suited
Speaker 1: for an economy like the German economy. So it was
Speaker 1: a big fan of the German centrally planned economy. He
Speaker 1: was a big fan of the Bolsheviks. He wanted to
Speaker 1: implement ideas like this in Britain, and to a very
Speaker 1: large degree he succeeded in um bringing about powerful uh
Speaker 1: central government and a powerful central bank. And he was
Speaker 1: involved very early on. In my exbooked the Fiat Standard,
Speaker 1: I look at the point at which the Bank of
Speaker 1: England went off the gold standard, and Canes was very
Speaker 1: much in the background at that time. He was in
Speaker 1: the Treasury. He wasn't very public about his role, but
Speaker 1: there was a point I mentioned this in the Fiat Standard,
Speaker 1: which is not It's not a very well known story.
Speaker 1: It was only revealed a few years ago, three years ago.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifteen or fourteen, the the Treasury issued a
Speaker 1: bunch of bonds in order to finance the war, and
Speaker 1: they were less than one third subscribe The British people
Speaker 1: didn't believe that fighting a war and the continent was
Speaker 1: worth buying bonds for that. They got around the third
Speaker 1: of the money that they got. And then what the
Speaker 1: British Treasury and and the Central Bank did was that
Speaker 1: they got a couple of the employees of the Central
Speaker 1: Bank to buy the rest of the bond issue under
Speaker 1: their own name, so the central bank gave them the money,
Speaker 1: and then they bought two thirds of the war bonds
Speaker 1: under their own names. And then the press publicized at
Speaker 1: the Financial Times, ever, the faithful mouthpiece of central banks
Speaker 1: publicized announced that, you know, the war loan, the war
Speaker 1: bond issue was highly successful and fully subscribing, We're going
Speaker 1: to issue more and everything is going great. And Keynes
Speaker 1: was involved from the start with this, and so there
Speaker 1: was an there was definitely, you know, all through his
Speaker 1: life you see this element of I know, I understand,
Speaker 1: I'm smart, you are all idiots, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: do whatever I need to do in order to make
Speaker 1: this work. And so from that moment, you know, that's
Speaker 1: when England went off the gold standard, and that's when
Speaker 1: the world went off the gold standard, because England what
Speaker 1: the world's central bank at that time, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: the British bound has collapsed. Since then, the British Empire
Speaker 1: has collapsed, and world leadership moved to the US, and
Speaker 1: the US also suffered from all of the problems from
Speaker 1: this inflationary mess. And it's it's just been an entire
Speaker 1: an entire century of totalitarian governments all over the world
Speaker 1: being financed by this crazy um bastard animal money in
Speaker 1: central banks and it's been devastating. Thankfully it's going to fix.
Speaker 1: Is this? It seems like when I've kind of gone
Speaker 1: through the history of this, which I have many times, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in Britain they left the gold standard temporarily
Speaker 1: for the war, and then it seems like when they
Speaker 1: went try to go back to the gold standard, which
Speaker 1: kind of caused the collapse. Keinges told Winston Churchill like, hey,
Speaker 1: you've doubled the money supply, you need to double the
Speaker 1: price of gold. Um. And he didn't, And Winston Churchill said,
Speaker 1: now let's just go back to the same price which
Speaker 1: caused that deflation to happen. Um. Is that what happened?
Speaker 1: And did it? I mean to me, it seemed like
Speaker 1: maybe that was one little piece of rational thought that
Speaker 1: that that that Kings maybe had at that time, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't really about debasement. He was worried about the
Speaker 1: debatement that did cause the collapse. Well, I'm not entirely
Speaker 1: sure what he was m calling for at that point.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously the correct course course of action was
Speaker 1: to not engage in the inflation in the first place.
Speaker 1: Now I have the inflation had taken place. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to just recognize the reality and say, well, this
Speaker 1: is what has happened, and let's devalue the currency again.
Speaker 1: Let's devalue the currency formally, so that we moved to
Speaker 1: a new exchange rate with gold, and then everything gets
Speaker 1: sorted up. But they tried to square the circle effectively
Speaker 1: of keeping the interest, keeping the exchange rate high, and
Speaker 1: keeping prices low, and so the result was that there
Speaker 1: was just massive economic problems. You know, people were unemployed
Speaker 1: and prices were rising, and you have shortages, and the
Speaker 1: economy was falling apart. But I doubt that Kan's wanted
Speaker 1: to go back on gold at a higher price, because
Speaker 1: what he wanted to do was to get rid of
Speaker 1: the gold standard. He didn't want any fixed exchange rate
Speaker 1: between the pounder and the gold stand and that's what
Speaker 1: he got. In the nineteen thirties. The idea was, we
Speaker 1: just go off gold and then we can just print
Speaker 1: all the money that we want and then it's not
Speaker 1: an issue. Whenever we have a war, we print money.
Speaker 1: Whenever we have any economic problems, we print money. And
Speaker 1: then this is where the hocus focus of mainstream Kings
Speaker 1: and economics comes in. Where um, and really, if you
Speaker 1: if you really study it closely and then you think
Speaker 1: about it, it's it's very obvious, particularly if you studied
Speaker 1: scientific subjects, and if you studied how scientific theories come about,
Speaker 1: it's very obvious. This is just a stupid after the
Speaker 1: fact story that somebody made up in order to come
Speaker 1: up with the conclusion that they want. The conclusion they
Speaker 1: wanted was let's print more money that will fix things,
Speaker 1: because you know, they had the printers and they needed
Speaker 1: an excuse to print money. And so the whole thing
Speaker 1: is just in an elaborate post talk rationalization for why actually,
Speaker 1: you know, no, printing money is very good and it's
Speaker 1: gonna work well, and so there's all these stupid graphs
Speaker 1: and equations and um nonsense. Essentially that uh um, you know,
Speaker 1: you you analyze the world in terms of aggregates, and
Speaker 1: then you decide that you you know, Kings just posits
Speaker 1: how those accregates relate with one another. And then he
Speaker 1: assumes that if you just get spending up, then everything
Speaker 1: in the everything else in the economy gets fixed. And
Speaker 1: so how do you get spending up. You print money,
Speaker 1: and so you ignore all the consequences of printing money,
Speaker 1: and then you attribute all these magical um um results
Speaker 1: to it, and then you come up with the theory
Speaker 1: that says, oh, guess what, printing money fixes our problems. Right.
Speaker 1: It's so it's such a transparence, Cam. It's like, if
Speaker 1: you fall for it, I worry about you. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: I think, Um, you know, they won't. They don't want
Speaker 1: to give the power of the money printer, and so
Speaker 1: they'll use all the power at their disposed to continue
Speaker 1: to convince us that they need to have the money printer,
Speaker 1: and so, um, you know everyone's been duped, you know,
Speaker 1: Henry for it's a hundred years ago. If the people
Speaker 1: knew how the banking system worked, would be a revolution
Speaker 1: before morning. So of course they don't. They don't tell
Speaker 1: us that. It seems like Keynes was involved on both
Speaker 1: sides of that, Like as you just said, right, his
Speaker 1: book was written in Nazi Germany. He liked that he
Speaker 1: was consulting the Britain, British government also the United States
Speaker 1: from and he was instrumental in the Breton Woods Agreement.
Speaker 1: And during that Breton Woods Agreement, you know, he kind
Speaker 1: of came up with like that Bankoor system, which was
Speaker 1: it seemed like his idea was maybe to your point,
Speaker 1: get rid of the gold standard and then have like
Speaker 1: that neutral reserve asset that like maybe never came to
Speaker 1: fruition um. And now we see today like the I
Speaker 1: m F calling for a Breton Woods to moment um,
Speaker 1: and we hear talk of this like I m F
Speaker 1: like an SDR basket, which maybe they have thoughts of
Speaker 1: like having a trying trying to do his original idea,
Speaker 1: which is have that neutral reserve asset. What do you
Speaker 1: think about that? Yeah, I think it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: non start. It's a non starter as an idea. It's unworkable,
Speaker 1: and I think it's unworkable on many levels. The first
Speaker 1: is the political level, which is why it didn't work
Speaker 1: in the Breton Woods agreement, because we had this essentially,
Speaker 1: you know, this British aristocrat who had never worked the
Speaker 1: real job in their life was just all has been
Speaker 1: out there living in his world of fantasy and pontificating
Speaker 1: about how the world should work. You had this delusional
Speaker 1: muppet turn up at the meeting of the world leaders
Speaker 1: and saying, hey, uh, we're gonna get rid of gold,
Speaker 1: We're gonna get rid of all of your money, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna issue this new paper token that me and
Speaker 1: my buddies at Cambridge have come up with. And essentially
Speaker 1: I am going to be on a committee of a
Speaker 1: bunch of my friends who are going to decide how
Speaker 1: much money everybody else in the world has had. You
Speaker 1: can obviously see where the problems happened with that. Well,
Speaker 1: the first problem is that you run up against the
Speaker 1: United States, which has just won the war, has the
Speaker 1: majority of the world's gold, and has the world's most
Speaker 1: powerful military, and why would they give you the power
Speaker 1: to print all of that money. So obviously the U
Speaker 1: has said, no thanks, We're just gonna build this around
Speaker 1: our own money which we can print, which you know,
Speaker 1: we control. And so the the program that the result
Speaker 1: of the Breton Words Agreement was the program of Harry
Speaker 1: Dexter White, who was an American um communist, self confessed communist.
Speaker 1: And you know, some people say he was a Soviet spy,
Speaker 1: and he was investigated for being a Soviet spin and
Speaker 1: he killed himself during the investigation. But I think it's
Speaker 1: more accurate not to say that he's a Soviet spine
Speaker 1: inasmuch as he is just a local, homegrown American communist.
Speaker 1: And these people were quite influential at that time in
Speaker 1: the US, and it was their communist idea to just
Speaker 1: turn the US into the world's central bank, and that
Speaker 1: was the idea that UM succeeded. So I think it's
Speaker 1: extremely naive to imagine that we could have monetary policy
Speaker 1: handed to a group of experts. It's naive to pretend
Speaker 1: that you are a neutral expert that can just take
Speaker 1: over something like monetary policy and run it like you're
Speaker 1: running a machine when it's obviously something political. And it's
Speaker 1: not just political. It's you know, you're allocating economic resources.
Speaker 1: If you'd side to print money in order to give
Speaker 1: this government money so that it can find a war,
Speaker 1: whereas you don't give the other government money so that
Speaker 1: it doesn't fight the war, then you know you're picking
Speaker 1: the winner of the war. So it's an enhance the
Speaker 1: political question, and it's not something that can be UM
Speaker 1: just wished away. That's the first issue. And the second
Speaker 1: economic reason why this is unworkable in my mind is
Speaker 1: that you can't just come up with this thing called
Speaker 1: bank or and tell the world, Hey, you know, all
Speaker 1: of your money doesn't work anymore. All of the things
Speaker 1: that you value, all of your gold, your dollars, your wants,
Speaker 1: and your euros, all of that is zero. Now don't
Speaker 1: use it, turn it in and will give you bankers instead.
Speaker 1: Like it's, um, you cannot really do that. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's never happened. You know, people use the term fiat money,
Speaker 1: and there is truth to the term fiat money, but
Speaker 1: there's never been a real fiat currency. This has never
Speaker 1: happened that somebody just went and said, hey, I've printed
Speaker 1: a billion um of my coin and um, you know,
Speaker 1: here you go accepted. This is the value and this
Speaker 1: this is the price of it. This has just never happened.
Speaker 1: Anybody who's ever issued a currency has had to back
Speaker 1: it by something in order for it to gain a
Speaker 1: value on the market. So what you do is effectively
Speaker 1: you create a market in your currency with the other currency.
Speaker 1: So what most countries do they do is they do
Speaker 1: that with gold with the dollars. Before it used to
Speaker 1: be done with gold. So you gather a bunch of gold.
Speaker 1: If you have a bunch of gold, you can issue
Speaker 1: paper backed by that gold and make it redeemable in
Speaker 1: the gold, and then people will use your paper because
Speaker 1: they know they can get it redeemed in gold. Similarly,
Speaker 1: today they do the same thing with dollars. You go
Speaker 1: to your central bank, you can exchange your local shit
Speaker 1: coin for dollars. But um so, the not the notion
Speaker 1: that we can just get the entire planet to agree
Speaker 1: to dump their currencies and to give value to something
Speaker 1: is nonsensical. I think what's more likely to happen. I
Speaker 1: think there will be some element of something like this
Speaker 1: happening is that we're going to who basically replaced national
Speaker 1: currencies by a an international central bank digital currency. But
Speaker 1: more likely I think, well, I think you know this
Speaker 1: is already happening nationally. But I think more significantly is that,
Speaker 1: excuse me, the reserve asset backing those central bank digital
Speaker 1: currencies is going to be something like a central bankers
Speaker 1: digital currency which is used amongst the banks themselves, So
Speaker 1: something like the I m F S S the rs
Speaker 1: right now. But what's going to happen is that, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, the I m F SDRs are essentially backed
Speaker 1: by U S dollars because the I m F has
Speaker 1: a credit line from the Federal Reserve. So I think
Speaker 1: what would be likely to happen is essentially national governments
Speaker 1: turned in their currencies and it transformed their currencies into
Speaker 1: this international central bank currency, and then that currency is
Speaker 1: managed by UM. I mean, I guess this is really
Speaker 1: the interesting question that we're going to be seeing play out. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, if we still lived in a world that
Speaker 1: was dominated by the US, then I could see this
Speaker 1: being just more modern way of running the dollar system,
Speaker 1: where in the US just says all right, instead of
Speaker 1: having paper dollars and running it on the Swift network
Speaker 1: and using the federal reserves payment settlement system, we're going
Speaker 1: to introduce those new cryptographic based settlement systems and everything
Speaker 1: is going to be centralized, with the US in the middle.
Speaker 1: The US and CHARGE essentially formalizing and making the breton
Speaker 1: Wood system more efficient without gold backing. This is how
Speaker 1: I would imagine, you know, if this kind of technology
Speaker 1: was available UM twenty or thirty years ago, I think
Speaker 1: this is the direction that we would have gone in.
Speaker 1: But now things are much more interesting because China is UM.
Speaker 1: Primarily because of China but also to a lesser extent, Europe,
Speaker 1: they're not going to be crazy excited about joining a
Speaker 1: new dollar system, and so more likely what the going
Speaker 1: to be pushing for is some kind of either a
Speaker 1: multilateral system in which UM and the base layer money
Speaker 1: is jointly run by the US and China and maybe Europe,
Speaker 1: maybe some few other smaller economies here and there, UM
Speaker 1: getting like votes on a monetary policy board. But I
Speaker 1: think we're more likely to see monetary competition, with the
Speaker 1: Chinese essentially attempting to bring about their own national currency
Speaker 1: to make it into the global reserve currency, because it
Speaker 1: doesn't really make sense to have a global reserve currency
Speaker 1: run by two governments, particularly governments that are essentially rival
Speaker 1: for the position of world leadership. Now, given the way
Speaker 1: that things have unfolded over the last couple of years
Speaker 1: in the world economy with UM, with the way that
Speaker 1: you know, international cooperation has taken place around the coronavirus crisis,
Speaker 1: and the way that basically everybody marched to the tune
Speaker 1: of the World World Health Organization in the World Economic Forum,
Speaker 1: you can see this kind of thing being implemented in
Speaker 1: UM natural currencies as well. You could see perhaps UM
Speaker 1: we'll get something like this, and I think UM one
Speaker 1: hypothesis I have is that, you know, as inflation begins
Speaker 1: to pick up, the central bank dogs little currency narrative
Speaker 1: is going to be marketed as the solution for the
Speaker 1: inflation problem. And so, oh, you know, your dollars and
Speaker 1: euros and yends and yu wants are the valuing not
Speaker 1: because of your government spending and printing a lot of money, obviously,
Speaker 1: because that's crazy conspiracy theory talk. You know, obviously supply
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with demand, right, No, that's not it.
Speaker 1: Your currency is tanking in price because it's physical and
Speaker 1: it's um ancient twentieth century technology, and Bitcoin is rising
Speaker 1: in price because it's digital and it's advanced twenty first
Speaker 1: century technology. So we're going to copy bitcoins technology and
Speaker 1: use cryptography in order to prevent the value of your
Speaker 1: national currency from declining. So I can see this kind
Speaker 1: of pitch being given and people being given their new
Speaker 1: digital currencies, which are going to, you know, do the
Speaker 1: old Latin American trick where you just rename your currency
Speaker 1: and take off a bunch of zero. So I remember
Speaker 1: in Brazil they had the Cruizero, and then they had
Speaker 1: the Novo Cruisero, the new Crusado, and then they had
Speaker 1: the Cruisado and the Novo Cruisado. I think it was
Speaker 1: the other way around. The Cruisadoes came first, but yeah,
Speaker 1: and then they went to the real and now the
Speaker 1: real is beginning to fall apart. And I'm sure soon
Speaker 1: as soon they'll introduce the novo reale UM so it'll
Speaker 1: be like the new dollar or the digital dollar or
Speaker 1: something like that. And uh, people will think, all right, well,
Speaker 1: now this will fix the inflation problem because this will
Speaker 1: copy the digital technology that will protect us from this
Speaker 1: crazy inflation bug that we suffer from. Um. But I again,
Speaker 1: I don't see that as being a sustainable solution because
Speaker 1: I think you'll get you know, the US is no
Speaker 1: is not nothing. There's an enormous amount of trade that
Speaker 1: is based around the U S. So you're still gonna
Speaker 1: have the Chinese in the U S and the Europeans
Speaker 1: trying to make their currencies be the world currency. But
Speaker 1: they would all, um, you know, they would all like
Speaker 1: it if they were the ones who have produced the
Speaker 1: global reserve currency. But they can all live with it
Speaker 1: if the global deserve currency was one that was not
Speaker 1: issued by either of the other two, and therefore they
Speaker 1: could all tolerate something like bitcoin. Hey, sorry to interrupt
Speaker 1: this video just one more time. I'm not running Google ads,
Speaker 1: so it's actually way less interruption than I normally would
Speaker 1: have on a video. UM, and that's because it's sponsored
Speaker 1: by block five UM. They are opening up the world
Speaker 1: of bitcoin and financial products offering to pay you interest
Speaker 1: on your bitcoin. Um better than own in a rental
Speaker 1: property that you have to manage and control and have
Speaker 1: the risks. You can just earn interest on it, or
Speaker 1: you can leverage against it. Now, I plan to hold
Speaker 1: my bitcoin forever and literally never sell my bitcoin. So
Speaker 1: how do you do that? Well, if I need money,
Speaker 1: I don't want to sell that bitcoin. I'm gonna pay
Speaker 1: tax on it, all right, I'm gonna end up with
Speaker 1: less and I don't have the bitcoin anymore. So a
Speaker 1: better way to do it is to borrow against the bitcoin.
Speaker 1: So I've put all my money into bitcoin. If I
Speaker 1: want to buy a car, or I want to buy
Speaker 1: a house, I can borrow against it at very very
Speaker 1: low competitive rates. Get my house, get my car, whatever
Speaker 1: that may be, and get to keep the bitcoin. I've
Speaker 1: done a whole video on this. You can find it.
Speaker 1: I'll link it down in the description below how to
Speaker 1: retire off a bitcoin without paying taxes, and you can
Speaker 1: do that with block fight services. I'll link to the
Speaker 1: video down below. I'm also going to put a link
Speaker 1: to block Fight. If you choose to click on that
Speaker 1: link to check them out. You can earn up to
Speaker 1: two fifty dollars in free bitcoin just for using that link.
Speaker 1: And that's it. Let's go ahead and get back to
Speaker 1: the interview. Yeah, that's where it seems like, um, you know,
Speaker 1: like you said, right, they used to hold gold in
Speaker 1: their reserve, so you know there'd be whatever percentage of
Speaker 1: their currency would be in gold reserves, and then they
Speaker 1: swapped out the gold four dollars um. But if they
Speaker 1: used an I m F SDR back to kind of
Speaker 1: what you said, like all value beings subject. So if
Speaker 1: everybody agrees that an I m F SDR basket has
Speaker 1: value and it's a neutral asset um, then I guess
Speaker 1: they could agree it has value um temporarily and so
Speaker 1: swap out the dollars for the SDR as reserves, and
Speaker 1: then everybody's in that basket based off their GDP proportions,
Speaker 1: so they all kind of have a vote. It seems
Speaker 1: like they might be able to try to get get
Speaker 1: that to work temporarily. Ultimately it fails because of the scarcity. Right,
Speaker 1: they can print unlimited amounts of SDRs, and I think
Speaker 1: that the day it's backed by it's not backed by
Speaker 1: any real capital, right, It's just it's just worthless paper.
Speaker 1: So I think maybe they get a little mileage out
Speaker 1: of it, but ultimately it ends up failing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it ultimately ends up being an advertisement for a bitcoin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So um, you know all this kinds and stuff. It
Speaker 1: seems like it seems like we know the future because
Speaker 1: ultimately it fails, right, I mean, you can't just create
Speaker 1: value out of nothing, and you can't control uh. And
Speaker 1: the more value create out of nothing, the more you
Speaker 1: just continue to store markets. So print, you know, you
Speaker 1: mess up the signal, you get short ridges, and you
Speaker 1: get surpluses, and you get malinvestment, etcetera, and eventually it fails.
Speaker 1: It seems to have I guess on one hand, you
Speaker 1: look at it and go, well, we're maybe fifty years
Speaker 1: into this experiment, you know, since nineteen seventy one, and
Speaker 1: look how bad and how fast things have gotten in
Speaker 1: fifty years. But on the other hand, it's like man
Speaker 1: how long can they keep this game going for? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is um, this is kind of the motivation
Speaker 1: of my book, which is, you know, this thing has
Speaker 1: been around for fifty years, and just because it doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense, it doesn't mean it can't work. And it's
Speaker 1: been working, and it's been written off for fifty years.
Speaker 1: You know, people have been predicting a collapse of the
Speaker 1: dollar for fifty years and longer, and yet it's just
Speaker 1: along and people continue to use it. So um. You know,
Speaker 1: in my book, I try to explain why that is,
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, the reason is ultimately that
Speaker 1: what FIAT offers is the ability to send money quickly
Speaker 1: across space, across nations, across national borders. So gold is
Speaker 1: better because it holds onto its value into the future,
Speaker 1: better because nobody can print gold, and it's always going
Speaker 1: to have a low inflation rate because of reasons I
Speaker 1: discuss in detail and Bitcoin standard. So gold has best
Speaker 1: salability across time. It's the best way of saving value
Speaker 1: into the future, or at least traditionally it was UM,
Speaker 1: but FIAT has much better saalability across space. Sending gold
Speaker 1: across space involves a significant loss in the value of it,
Speaker 1: it's gonna it's gonna lose about point five percent or
Speaker 1: one percent of its value when you ship it halfway
Speaker 1: around the world when you think about the cost of
Speaker 1: shipping plus insurance. So that's really ultimately why I think
Speaker 1: FIAT succeeds and continues to operate, because it has terrible
Speaker 1: salability across time. You can't really hold on to it
Speaker 1: across time. It continues to lose its value. But we
Speaker 1: live in a world where everybody is interconnected with the
Speaker 1: rest of the planet, and you need to trade with
Speaker 1: the rest of the planet. And even if you don't
Speaker 1: trade personally with people on the rest of the planet,
Speaker 1: everybody you buy your stuff from does trade with people
Speaker 1: from the rest of the planet. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people that think, you know, trading with other
Speaker 1: countries is a bad thing because it makes us dependent
Speaker 1: on them. It doesn't. Trading with other countries makes you
Speaker 1: less dependent on any one country. The more countries you
Speaker 1: trade with, the less dependent you are on other countries,
Speaker 1: and less dependents you are on your own natural environment
Speaker 1: not screwing you over. So you're able to live a
Speaker 1: much better, more comfortable life because you can always trade
Speaker 1: with others, and so it provides you with um a
Speaker 1: lot of insurance. But of course the main benefit is
Speaker 1: that it's the division of labor. And the larger the
Speaker 1: circles with which we trade, the more each producer can specialize,
Speaker 1: and the more people they can sellt So you specialize
Speaker 1: in making something smaller and smaller. You know, we have
Speaker 1: some really highly paid people who are specialized in building
Speaker 1: one tiny little part of your car or your laptop,
Speaker 1: and they spend their entire life working on, you know,
Speaker 1: making the car wind shield work. Well, there are people
Speaker 1: in car factories that are just doing this every day.
Speaker 1: The specialized is something very tiny, and the only way
Speaker 1: that they can specialize in this and get so good
Speaker 1: at it and make such good cars is because they're
Speaker 1: able to sell their cars all over the world. And
Speaker 1: so this is what drives the specialization. And without it,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't be able to have any of the nice
Speaker 1: things that we have today. We can't have computers if
Speaker 1: we try to live as a you know, and maybe
Speaker 1: the US might be able to pull off computers on
Speaker 1: its own, it's got three forty million people, but I
Speaker 1: think the vast majority of the world would not be
Speaker 1: able to produce anything advanced uh within its own borders.
Speaker 1: And that's just the way that a market economy works,
Speaker 1: because at every step in the way of the production
Speaker 1: of your computer or your car, the only way that
Speaker 1: it gets produced is that someone is making the decision
Speaker 1: had every step along the way, and not just someone,
Speaker 1: you know, several people like the guy who's making the
Speaker 1: tires and the guy who's designing the windshield. They're making
Speaker 1: economic decisions along the way to always look for the
Speaker 1: best supplier at the best price. So we are highly
Speaker 1: intertwined in this global system of trade, and we need it,
Speaker 1: and we need it very badly, and therefore, um we
Speaker 1: have to trade with the rest of the world, and
Speaker 1: so we need the money that can cross borders. And
Speaker 1: governments simply prevent you from using any other money other
Speaker 1: than their's. They won't license banks that use currencies other
Speaker 1: than theirs, and that just means that you have to
Speaker 1: deal with their currencies, and that just means that people
Speaker 1: continue to take it um But you know, governments continues
Speaker 1: to inflate the money supplying people have no choice but
Speaker 1: to continue to use it. But I think bitcoin obviously
Speaker 1: changes this because you can trade bitcoin internationally without the
Speaker 1: permission of your government. Yeah. Yeah, what's interesting about that
Speaker 1: whole thing obviously with the specialization is UM. You know,
Speaker 1: for progress, the more people we have that are looking
Speaker 1: at problems from different angles and coming up with different
Speaker 1: solutions and trying different things, the more progress we ultimately have.
Speaker 1: And so to your point, a small little country only
Speaker 1: has so many people, and so they're gonna be very
Speaker 1: limited in what they can do. And the more people
Speaker 1: we can get into that global uh picture. And so
Speaker 1: you know, you and I were talking kind of before
Speaker 1: we started recording, and uh, you know, half the world
Speaker 1: is basically kind of excluded or left out of that
Speaker 1: entire UM system, right, I mean half the world doesn't
Speaker 1: have any money, half the world have don't even have internet, UM,
Speaker 1: and so they're kind of left out of that and
Speaker 1: they haven't really had that way. And so UM by
Speaker 1: being able to give them a global money that's one
Speaker 1: can't be inflated away, but two can be used anywhere.
Speaker 1: UM speeds that up. We saw that, you know, going
Speaker 1: from the Dark Age to the Renaissance Age, when you
Speaker 1: had like a good standard coin that could be used
Speaker 1: kind of or recognized globally, how fast things developed and
Speaker 1: so I think we'll see the same thing again, right,
Speaker 1: having a new global money that can be recognized and saleable.
Speaker 1: As you said, across space. I think there's as bad
Speaker 1: as things are, as scary as things are, I see
Speaker 1: massive hope on the other side. Yeah, I think, um,
Speaker 1: bitcoin really is responsible for maybe of that hope. I
Speaker 1: think if bitcoin didn't exist, i'd be extremely hop to
Speaker 1: us about the world at this point. I'd be in
Speaker 1: a very bad place because, um, it's it's the crack
Speaker 1: in the wall, it's the it's it's the place where
Speaker 1: all of the prison that they're building just unravels. It's
Speaker 1: that they're locking up the entire planet essentially and forcing
Speaker 1: everybody to be dealing in this giant corporatest economic system
Speaker 1: where everything is under the control of the government and
Speaker 1: all of our lives are lived um to the benefit
Speaker 1: of the governments that are in charge of us. And
Speaker 1: bitcoin just allows you to have a free market, and
Speaker 1: it allows you to access a free market anywhere you
Speaker 1: are in the world. Anybody can access it from anywhere.
Speaker 1: And I think it's a it's it's um Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is hope. As Michael Salers says, bitcoin is hope. Yeah, so, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we've we've often thrown around things like bitcoin
Speaker 1: fixes this, or fix the money, fixed the world or whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, all those types of things. And I think, really,
Speaker 1: when when you know, you started out talking about how
Speaker 1: it's really comes down own to that money printer, and
Speaker 1: then the money printer allows them to then influence the
Speaker 1: food or the culture, or the the energy that we
Speaker 1: have or whatever it may be, and to kind of
Speaker 1: control those things. And so then, um, if you believe
Speaker 1: that individuals are better off creating their own destiny and
Speaker 1: making own decisions, then we want to remove that control.
Speaker 1: And the way to do that in is ultimately take
Speaker 1: that money printer away, I guess at the base of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think a century of a century of Fiat
Speaker 1: money shows us that the political solution is just in
Speaker 1: fun impossible. It can't be done because it's it's just
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's unhappable in the way that it
Speaker 1: is set up because the people in charge of running
Speaker 1: the government are the ones that are in charge of
Speaker 1: the money printer. And so there's no conceivable scenario in
Speaker 1: which you can win the fight for the money printer
Speaker 1: if you're not using the money printer. So the money
Speaker 1: printer is always going to be controlled by people who
Speaker 1: want to use it because they can win control with it.
Speaker 1: You know, the person who wants to win an election
Speaker 1: by telling people, I'm not going to build all of
Speaker 1: the stupid things that you want. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: fight all the unnecessary wars that you want. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to build all the children's hospitals that you think
Speaker 1: you want, what you don't really need. They're just boon
Speaker 1: doggles for people, all of these emotionally attractive things under
Speaker 1: a field system. Basically, it's a it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: an impossible strategy. And in a sense like you can
Speaker 1: you can hate on politicians for this um but at
Speaker 1: some level you have to kind of come to terms
Speaker 1: with reality, which is in a sense, yeah, when you
Speaker 1: have a magic money printer that can print money out
Speaker 1: on the band, poverty is a choice. You know, if
Speaker 1: you are poor in the US today, you're poor because
Speaker 1: the government didn't print enough money for you. That's there's
Speaker 1: no running around that fact. You know. The reason Lehman
Speaker 1: Brothers went out of businesses because the government didn't print
Speaker 1: money for them. That's in Goldman, Saxon, Morgan Stanley are
Speaker 1: still in business as because the government printed money. So poverty, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, Leaving Brothers is out of business. You or
Speaker 1: somebody you've seen on the street, they're poor because jr.
Speaker 1: Own power doesn't care about them. There's no arguing with that.
Speaker 1: You know, your own power could make them rich. They
Speaker 1: could just tell them you get a million dollars a month.
Speaker 1: It won't even be noticed on the federal reserve. You know,
Speaker 1: a million dollars a month is nothing. And um, so
Speaker 1: obviously you know the politicians that are going to be
Speaker 1: in charge are gonna be the ones that are going
Speaker 1: to promised to take control of the printer and use
Speaker 1: it for all kinds of uh popular things. So I
Speaker 1: can't see a political solution for it. And I think
Speaker 1: this is just and and a beautiful example that's going
Speaker 1: to be taught for centuries about in engineering schools about
Speaker 1: how engineers can um solve everything. And in this case,
Speaker 1: in my mind, it's almost like, you know, we're a
Speaker 1: we're a frontier town and we have a problem of
Speaker 1: theirs attacking the community and killing our children, eating our
Speaker 1: food and eating our cows. And it's like an engineer
Speaker 1: has managed to figure out this magic technology that just
Speaker 1: repels bears and now we never have to suffer from that,
Speaker 1: and it's it's I think that metaphor is also very
Speaker 1: powerful because that's exactly what the government really is in
Speaker 1: that you can, up until bitcoin came about, people who
Speaker 1: believed in hard money and sound money and free markets,
Speaker 1: you had no choice but to try and think of
Speaker 1: the solution through the political perspective, Like we have these
Speaker 1: politicians that are doing things this way. We got to
Speaker 1: elect the better politicians. We've gotta raise awareness, we've got
Speaker 1: to make people figure things out, and then we'll be
Speaker 1: able to get it. In my mind, that's as practical
Speaker 1: at this point as um thinking you're going to negotiate
Speaker 1: with the bears so that they don't eat kids. Like
Speaker 1: we just sit down with the bears explained to them, Hey,
Speaker 1: you know, we're building this town and we like our kids,
Speaker 1: and we don't want our kids to be your dinner,
Speaker 1: So could you please stop ease now watching our children,
Speaker 1: and good luck convincing bears about that. So you know,
Speaker 1: the right engineer doesn't sit there and try and convince
Speaker 1: the bear because he realizes the bears are not something
Speaker 1: you can reason with. The smart engineer figures out a
Speaker 1: technical solution that makes the cooperation of the bears irrelevant.
Speaker 1: You know, you build a fence, or you have a
Speaker 1: watch tower or something, whatever it is. You put technology
Speaker 1: that repels them, that issues sounds that makes a bear
Speaker 1: scared and makes them go away, But you find a solution,
Speaker 1: and it's a solution that doesn't require the bears to cooperate.
Speaker 1: And I think this is what bitcoin is. It's just
Speaker 1: gonna be there. They can't stop it. It's going to
Speaker 1: continue to grow and they're either going to join it
Speaker 1: or they're going to have fun staying poor. And it's
Speaker 1: you know, either they joined and they start doing the
Speaker 1: bad things that they're doing because they start understanding opportunity
Speaker 1: costs and they start understanding how expensive it is for
Speaker 1: them to be wasting their lives in doing stupid bullshit
Speaker 1: that they're doing, and how much better off they could
Speaker 1: be if they were just talking sounds or you just uh,
Speaker 1: you know, people move away from the money pent their
Speaker 1: money and they use the harder money and then that
Speaker 1: makes the money pent the money powerless basically, so either way,
Speaker 1: the bears are not going to hit your children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that. That's a good analogy. UM, if we uh,
Speaker 1: if we if we look into the future. UM, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to try to tie you down to a
Speaker 1: price on bitcoin, But what do you think about this
Speaker 1: transition process? Like fiat ends uh sound money wins? Um.
Speaker 1: I think we both believe that. But I mean, do
Speaker 1: you think this is something that we really start to
Speaker 1: see escalate over the next several years, like by the
Speaker 1: end of the decade. If we look at like like escort,
Speaker 1: like an escort, which we typically used to look at
Speaker 1: adoption of technology, maybe we look at like, you know,
Speaker 1: the first ten percent, and then that's the amount of
Speaker 1: time it takes to go from ten to we could
Speaker 1: argue were past ten percent now, I mean, what do
Speaker 1: you think about this transition as far as time frame
Speaker 1: future casting? You think but into the decade, in the
Speaker 1: next couple of years, we really start see this happening.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to tell. I don't think it's um,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's gonna be uh as quick as
Speaker 1: the end of the decade. I think the limit on
Speaker 1: bitcoin scaling this is I think, um, some something I
Speaker 1: disagree with on most people. Most people think of bitcoin
Speaker 1: scaling as being a technical problem of getting this many
Speaker 1: transactions to be operated. And for me, the technical aspect
Speaker 1: of bitcoin is, um, I'm not gonna say it's solved,
Speaker 1: but I think it's it's a tractable, easy problem, and
Speaker 1: it can be solved tomorrow if the economic scaling works,
Speaker 1: which is what I want to get to in a minute.
Speaker 1: In other words, you could you could have the entire
Speaker 1: world economy running on bitcoin tomorrow if the US just simply,
Speaker 1: if the US government tomorrow says the dollar is redeemable
Speaker 1: for bitcoin. You know, we've got a million coins in
Speaker 1: our stash and you can buy a dollar at say,
Speaker 1: you can buy a bitcoin from US at a million dollars,
Speaker 1: and we're redeeming the bitcoin in dollars. Once you've done that,
Speaker 1: all of your transactions everything you know, your PayPal, your venmore,
Speaker 1: you're checking account, um, your credit cards, all of that
Speaker 1: stuff is now denominated in bitcoin effectively. So um, the
Speaker 1: issue of moving the technical aspect of payments I find
Speaker 1: to be not the real challenge. That's not the real
Speaker 1: mountain to climb. The real economic scaling issue is the
Speaker 1: transition of people's cash balances from being fiat based into
Speaker 1: being bitcoin based. And that's just something that's going to
Speaker 1: take a lot of time, just because it's an enormously
Speaker 1: complicated process, and it's a process that takes a lot
Speaker 1: of time for people to first learn what's going on,
Speaker 1: understand how bitcoin works, being able to take care of
Speaker 1: their own bitcoins and managing them, and then making the
Speaker 1: economic decision to switch over, but then waiting until they're
Speaker 1: able to make the complete switch, which can't be done
Speaker 1: overnight for the vast majority of people. So and and
Speaker 1: and you know, it's not about being rich or poor,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. You have a job, or you have
Speaker 1: a business, you have your you live now in a
Speaker 1: world in which your receipts, all everything you pay, everything
Speaker 1: you receive is denominated in dollars. And so you have
Speaker 1: obligations to pay people in dollar and you have assets
Speaker 1: of other people that are supposed to be paying you
Speaker 1: in dollars. And that's going to continue to be the case.
Speaker 1: So there's a small marginal of you being able to
Speaker 1: take your money out of the dollar and put it
Speaker 1: in it into bitcoin. You can't do it with all
Speaker 1: of your money. Um, you know, obviously, if you were
Speaker 1: rich and you just had a bunch of money in
Speaker 1: the bank and you didn't have much business, then yeah,
Speaker 1: you can say convert that money into bitcoin, and then
Speaker 1: you keep one percent for data expenses, and then you
Speaker 1: sell some of that bitcoin. But for the vast majority
Speaker 1: of people, they have income and they have expanded chair,
Speaker 1: and they have a cash balance that's essentially constantly being
Speaker 1: added to uh, constantly having more payments attitude, and constantly
Speaker 1: there's payments going out from it. So you're limited how
Speaker 1: much you can transition into bitcoin from that. And I
Speaker 1: think we're seeing that transition happened gradually, and the thing
Speaker 1: that's obviously driving it is the fact that bitcoins prices
Speaker 1: continuously going up. So what happens is people by one
Speaker 1: percent of their work net worth in portfolio or portfolio
Speaker 1: in bitcoin. Over time that becomes two percent, five percent,
Speaker 1: ten percent, keeps to increase, and they keep adding up
Speaker 1: more to it. But then you know, at some point
Speaker 1: in the future, without them um ever risking the solvency
Speaker 1: of their business, at some point in the future, they're
Speaker 1: able to wrap at a point where they have as
Speaker 1: big enough stash of bitcoin that it's bigger than the
Speaker 1: majority of the of their dollars. So that's that that
Speaker 1: can't be done at once. We can just click a
Speaker 1: button and have the entire planet upgrade. Well well, I
Speaker 1: mean the US government could, but I wouldn't count on
Speaker 1: that because, as was saying earlier, you know, we're not
Speaker 1: going to count on the cooperation of the bears. So
Speaker 1: in order for it to happen as a spontaneous market
Speaker 1: process is going to take time. It's going to take
Speaker 1: time for business to upgrade, and it's gonna take time
Speaker 1: for the bitcoin to grow as part of their balance sheets.
Speaker 1: And as bitcoin grows as a part of their balance sheets,
Speaker 1: then it becomes more likely for people to find trading
Speaker 1: opportunities in bitcoin. And so what's going to happen, you
Speaker 1: know right now? It's you know, the vast majority of
Speaker 1: people don't get paid in bitcoining, They don't make payments
Speaker 1: in bitcoin, because somewhere around one percent of global cash
Speaker 1: balances are in bitcoin, maybe less than one percent, so
Speaker 1: it's only one percent. So the odds of you coming
Speaker 1: across somebody who wants to buy something from you and
Speaker 1: is willing to give up some of their bitcoin is
Speaker 1: one percent, but likely even lower, And so it doesn't
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense to base your business around bitcoin entirely,
Speaker 1: and so you continue to accept fiat. But over time,
Speaker 1: as the price of bitcoin goes up, and as people
Speaker 1: can fiction of bitcoin go up, and as the process
Speaker 1: of bitcoin education increases and the understanding of bitcoin increases,
Speaker 1: you're gonna see those one percent uh in everybody's portfolio
Speaker 1: begin to rise up more and more. You can see
Speaker 1: more and more trading opportunities emerge, and then you're going
Speaker 1: to see more and more of a bitcoin based economy image.
Speaker 1: But I think it's gonna be a while, and I
Speaker 1: don't think it's um you know, I don't think I think,
Speaker 1: you know, people who criticize bitcoin on technical grounds missed
Speaker 1: the point. Like lightning is already there, it works, I
Speaker 1: use it, I accept lightning payments on my website. You
Speaker 1: can payment with lightning, and my customers use it, and
Speaker 1: I've never had a problem with it. It's there, and
Speaker 1: it works, and it is going to grow, and so
Speaker 1: it's but the limit on its growth is not the
Speaker 1: technical aspect. It's not the fact that it can't handle
Speaker 1: enough transactions. Can already handle enough transactions with the whole planet.
Speaker 1: The limit is how much liquidity people have in bitcoint
Speaker 1: and it's just not that much compared to all the
Speaker 1: other currencies. But you know, let's give you the short
Speaker 1: answer your question. I'm gonna say fifteen years. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it depends on what you consider that outcome
Speaker 1: is in fifteen years. But to your point, um, you know,
Speaker 1: in modern times, in the last hundred years or a a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty years, um, gold was a reserve asset,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't used on a day to day transaction,
Speaker 1: and so my savings went right, Okay, you're right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean so you know in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, I mean, gold was my reserve asset,
Speaker 1: but I was using fiat to spend at all paper
Speaker 1: gold certificates or whatever they were at the time. I
Speaker 1: think in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, UM, gold was
Speaker 1: you know, you were using gold back nay, so it
Speaker 1: was just second layer of gold scaling solutions. You know,
Speaker 1: paper money was just receipts for gold, so it was
Speaker 1: still gold. Yeah. Um. And I I put this thesis
Speaker 1: together that I've been talking about, and it's like three
Speaker 1: revolutionary cycles converging, and so obviously we can see the
Speaker 1: financial market every about eighty years is ready to be reset.
Speaker 1: They're calling for a reset of it. But then we
Speaker 1: have the technological revolution every fifty years the technological revolution,
Speaker 1: and then there's every two years is a political, social,
Speaker 1: cultural revolution. Um. And they're all could urging right now
Speaker 1: in the next couple of years. UM. And so it
Speaker 1: seems like every two or fo years the world rejects
Speaker 1: globalism or centralization, it moves to decentralization. Two or fifty
Speaker 1: years ago was the American French Revolution, and years before
Speaker 1: that was the Protestant Reformation. UM. So I think while
Speaker 1: everybody's looking for a centralized answer, will it will the
Speaker 1: dollar remain and will it be the yuan? Will it
Speaker 1: be an SDR? I think the futures decentralized. Where you
Speaker 1: and I use a bitcoin standard, some people still use
Speaker 1: the dollar, some people use gold, and it's more of
Speaker 1: a decentralized answer than that power power from on high
Speaker 1: gives this decree Okay, this is the new UH standard
Speaker 1: or whatever. But um, yeah, and I think what massive
Speaker 1: changes decades. So we'll see how that plays out. It's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I agree with you. UM. All right, last
Speaker 1: question I'd like to ask, since UH you're a you're
Speaker 1: an educator. I've read your books. I highly recommend him, UM,
Speaker 1: and I value your opinion. I'm curious, Um, if you
Speaker 1: were to make your own amount rushmore like the United
Speaker 1: States we have amount rushmore for presidents, who would you
Speaker 1: put up on there? Um that may we were the
Speaker 1: most influential for you. Mm hmmm, Um, definitely I put
Speaker 1: moderin Rothbard, Ludvig one ms M. Hard to choose between
Speaker 1: those two, so not I'm gonna choose to have these two.
Speaker 1: And mm hmm I could add hands Harmon Hopper as well.
Speaker 1: I think those three would be there that I need
Speaker 1: for before I'll add Ferdinand Lips. I've only read one
Speaker 1: book of his. He's only written one book. I think
Speaker 1: the book is called gold Wars, and it was highly
Speaker 1: influential on the bitcoin standard. The bitcoin standard was essentially
Speaker 1: to a very large extent. I think it was what
Speaker 1: Ferdinand Lips would have written if he was fifty years younger. Um.
Speaker 1: He died in two thousand, I think or in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, and he was a Swiss banker who worked
Speaker 1: in Switzerland in banking and UM he wrote a book
Speaker 1: on gold has money in the history of gold, and
Speaker 1: he understood the significance of hard money for civilization. He
Speaker 1: understood it very well and wrote about it very eloquently
Speaker 1: in that book, and it was enormously influential for me.
Speaker 1: So I would probably say these four Yeah, Mises hop
Speaker 1: rough part and Furtherland lips nice, alright, good. I know
Speaker 1: I caught you off guard with that one, but but
Speaker 1: it was but I was good to hear that. Um
Speaker 1: cool with that. We're gonna wrap it up. I know
Speaker 1: you have that book. If you had Standard coming out
Speaker 1: really quickly, you were running a kickstarter. Is that still
Speaker 1: running or is that over? Yes, it's still running. You
Speaker 1: can you can go to my website safetan dot com
Speaker 1: slash Kickstarter or safety dot com slash t f S
Speaker 1: and Fiat Standard and you can pre order the book
Speaker 1: right now. It will be delivered in December, but you
Speaker 1: can get the draft of the book, the almost complete
Speaker 1: the draft still gonna be some editing done. But if
Speaker 1: you order now, you'll get the draft so you can
Speaker 1: read it now in digital format, and then in December
Speaker 1: you'll get the physical book, the digital book and the
Speaker 1: audiobook and you can get a signed copy of it. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you can get a signed copy, and essentially the
Speaker 1: signed copies my way of Um. You know, people like
Speaker 1: donate to universities that they like. I'm sort of cutting
Speaker 1: out the middleman, and you know, if you want to
Speaker 1: support me working on these books, it takes a lot
Speaker 1: of time to write these books and I don't and
Speaker 1: I'm publishing. I'm self publishing them. UM. So instead of
Speaker 1: going to publishing house and taking an advance, I'm getting
Speaker 1: the advance essentially from my readers. So if you buy
Speaker 1: a signed copy, you get a signed copy and you
Speaker 1: get listed in the book as one of the supporters
Speaker 1: of the book. So please do that. Yep, I got
Speaker 1: a signed copy of the Bitcoin Standard. I'm definitely getting
Speaker 1: a copy of the signed copy of the FED standard.
Speaker 1: So I'm in. I'm gonna put the link down below
Speaker 1: for everybody. I recommend that you go do that. Um
Speaker 1: and with that, we'll go ahead and sign it off.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Safety, thank you so much, Mark. Pleasure
Speaker 1: to take care all right,