#128 Saifedean Ammous - How Bitcoin Disincentivizes Violence and Defunds the Israeli Land-Theft Machine - Ben Wehrman Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Israeli lobbying groups can have free reign to do whatever they want. And the impact has been

(00:04):
absolutely devastating for America. And for I would say for the Middle East, in general, I think
it's been terrible for the people of the Middle East, the natives, but it's also been terrible for,
you know, the Israeli people who live in this, because it's a blank check to the worst elements
in Israeli society. And it's just making these people have all the power in the world to be able

(00:28):
to do whatever they want and therefore creating more and more enmity and creating more and more
blowback and creating more and more conflict. And that's why, you know, here we are 78 years after
the establishment of the Zionist land theft regime, it's still having to drag all of its
young people into endless wars and conflicts because it's got a blank check from the US to

(00:52):
keep paying for those things. So might as well just take people and put them into the meat grinder
because we want to take the West Bank.
We want to take Gaza.
We want more land.
All of the messianic idea of let's take the land
because the Torah said so is insane.
It's completely insane.
And any person who thinks this is any legitimacy
to this stuff is essentially incompatible

(01:13):
with human civilization.
All right.
Hello, friends.
Thank you so much for coming by for another episode
of the Ben Wurman podcast.
I appreciate you stopping by.
we have an extremely special guest today this gentleman has been responsible for so many of
the hours of my life being lost down different rabbit holes from bitcoin to the carnivore diet

(01:37):
and more recently the whole israel palestine situation and we'll get into all of these things
i don't know how we're even going to figure out what to talk about there's too many things too but
seyfedina moose it is a huge pleasure to have you here sir thank you for coming
Thank you so much for inviting me, Ben.
So like I said, I have mentioned you and your books definitely more than any other person out there during the podcast so far.

(02:01):
So it's difficult to know where to start, but I think we'll just do what we normally do, which is your backstory.
And we love getting a good foundation for who we're talking to here.
So we could start all the way back to you were born in Palestine and sort of tie the dots up to becoming a Bitcoin author.
I think that's a really interesting journey.
Anyone here that is not your average life story.

(02:22):
So give us a rundown.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I look back and think,
just how did all of this happen?
And the short answer is that it was a very, very long process.
I've been on this earth for 44 years.
So a lot has happened.
So I don't know how much time do we have today,
but I'll try and keep it brief.

(02:42):
So, yeah, as you said, I was born in Palestine,
but when I was very young, we moved to Saudi Arabia.
And I lived there until I was about six or so.
Then we moved to Brazil, you know, natural progression from Saudi Arabia, go to Rio de Janeiro.
So I spent two years there.
My dad is a surgeon, and there he went to train in plastic surgery under what was then the world's pioneer and world leader in plastic surgery.

(03:10):
His name was Pitangui, a Brazilian surgeon.
So then after that, we went back to Palestine.
We lived in Palestine until I finished high school.
And then I went to university. I was at an American Quaker school in Palestine, probably, I think, the oldest missionary school in the Middle East.
It's called the Friends School. So I've always had a soft spot for Quakers because of that.

(03:33):
And then I went to the American University of Beirut, also a missionary school, a missionary university where I studied engineering.
And then I did a master's in the London School of Economics in Development.
And then I did my PhD at Columbia University in Sustainable Development.

(03:53):
And after completing that, I moved to Lebanon, back to Lebanon, where I was a university professor for nine and a half years at the Lebanese American University.
During which time, well, during my Columbia years, as I was doing my PhD, it was, you know, standard mainstream stuff.
and I struggled to make any sense of it.

(04:14):
But then toward the end, around 2007, 2008,
as I was struggling to make sense of what I was going through,
I came across, I think the entry of the rabbit hole may have been Karl Popper.
I read Karl Popper. That led me to Hayek.
I started reading Hayek. Hayek blew my mind.

(04:37):
And then that led me to Mises and Rothbard.
and that just completely radicalized me.
What year was this, just for a timeline?
2007 to 2009, really.
That was my last two years during my PhD.
And it was happening during the time of the financial crisis,
which gave it extra impetus because you get online or get on TV

(04:59):
and all of these Keynesian economists are in unison saying,
yep, we have no choice but to print trillions of dollars
and hand them to these bankers because otherwise,
Otherwise, you won't be able to have bread on the shelves next week.
So we have no choice but to give all of these bankers trillions of dollars and thank us for it.
And everybody, you know, all of these economists are just nodding.

(05:21):
You know, Bernanke or John Paulson would go on TV and say, yeah, we need $3,000 quadrillion for a bunch of Wall Street banks.
And then all the economists would be like, yeah, well, you see, they're right.
without the $3,000 quadrillion for Wall Street banks, we would all be in bread lines that have

(05:42):
no bread and everything would fall apart. All the farms would stop working. All the food would
stop working. All of those farmers and people who eat their food, they have no way of ever
communicating or getting their goods across unless Goldman Sachs bankers make trillions of
dollars every day. So, um, so that was, you know, uh, that was a huge wake up call,

(06:06):
but also came at the time when I was beginning to read the Austrians. And then I found Mises
daughter work sometime, I think in 2008 or so. Yeah. 2008. And, um, you know, made it more
difficult for me to finish my PhD. Cause at that time, you know, I was thinking of this in terms
of, Oh, wow. Wait until my committee reads all about this. They're going to be so excited because

(06:27):
This is really interesting stuff that is going to help us figure out how to stay away from all of these methodologically suspect economic ideas.
And, you know, that turned out to be very naive and innocent because modern universities, people don't really have.

(06:51):
How do I put this?
There isn't really much in terms of intellectual work going on.
It's just basically write whatever you need to write in order to get published, in order to get a job.
And nobody is interested in having actual real debates on intellectual questions.

(07:11):
So it created a whole bunch of problems for me, delayed my graduation.
I had to rewrite a lot of my thesis.
But then eventually I did get the PhD.
and then I moved to Lebanon where I was teaching economics and at that point you know I became
pretty radicalized as a gold bug and I thought I was going to be in Lebanon maybe for a year or two

(07:33):
while I figure out what I want to do because probably academia is not for me and the initial
plan of what I wanted to do this was what I was focusing most my time on in 2010 11 and 12
was to basically build a gold-based Bitcoin.
In retrospect, I kind of came to the conclusion

(08:00):
that the way to fix this mess is for people to have gold.
And the way to have gold is to build an app
where people are able to move gold around.
And the way to do that would be to have the gold stored
in cold storage effectively in Switzerland.
And then when people send us money, we buy gold,

(08:21):
and then they have the gold in Switzerland,
and then we can move it around between network members
where the gold doesn't move.
But on your app, you see that your gold has moved.
So it's kind of like Bitcoin,
but instead of having magical imaginary coins in the sky,
you have real physical gold bars in a Swiss vault.

(08:43):
but sadly spent a lot of time and money on this in 2011 12 and 13 when i knew about bitcoin i'd
heard vaguely about bitcoin and i was uh shamed to say it but i was very very peter schiff at that
time i was basically every single stupid argument you've heard peter schiff make today i used to

(09:08):
make at that time and i used to think you know well the bitcoin thing is interesting it's nice
But clearly, it's not going to work. And I had this exact, really, really dangerous thing that I seen so many people when it comes to Bitcoin, which is it's maybe the most expensive mistake of my life, which is, yeah, I know why Bitcoin won't work.
So therefore, I'm not going to be wasting my time getting into learning about the details of it.

(09:33):
And that was the phase from Bitcoin under a dollar to Bitcoin over a thousand, basically, where I was just sitting there and thinking, yeah, well, it's not going to work.
so eventually i around 2013 is when i started to
realize i'm i'm an idiot and maybe i should be paying attention to this stuff in particular it

(10:00):
was in 2013 two things i think well three things first of all the price kept going up and so i
remember in 2011 thinking to myself huh this is a cool idea and i remember reading an article i
I think it was a Wired magazine that wrote an article about Bitcoin when it hit $1 or maybe SlashDot.
No, I think SlashDot was earlier.
But anyways, I remember reading an article saying one Bitcoin hit $1.

(10:21):
And I remember saying in 2011, I was going to New York for a summer job.
And I thought to myself, yeah, I'm going to buy 100 Bitcoin for $100.
And then I went to New York, obviously spent hundreds of dollars on all kinds of stupid nonsense that I don't even remember.
And didn't buy the 100 Bitcoin because by the time I got to New York, it was like $8 or something like that.
So I thought, well, clearly it's too expensive now and it's going to crash.

(10:43):
And then the government is going to ban it.
And then they're going to throw everybody in Guantanamo Bay.
So if this thing does survive, it'll happen after the government throws everybody involved in Guantanamo Bay.
And then it survives.
And then maybe I'll buy when it's back under a penny.
So very typical behavior.

(11:04):
Very typical.
It's just today.
My friends call me.
Yeah, okay, fine.
Maybe I'll buy.
But now it's 100.
I'll buy when it's back over, when it's back under 20,000.
Or I'll buy when it's back under 50,000.
Typical, typical no-coiner behavior textbook.
And the sad reality is you end up buying after a couple of digits have been added to the price So instead of buying when it goes under a dollar I ended up buying with well two three digits added to the price

(11:36):
So then, yeah, so 2013, first the price keeps going up,
and eventually you just start questioning your assumption
because in my mind there's no way that it could have gone up
to about $1,000 in 2013.
And so clearly something is wrong about it.
The other thing was there was – I read an article, I think it was Forbes magazine in 2013, talking about the massive hash rate on Bitcoin.

(12:03):
And before then, of course, being an idiot, I had never considered actually looking into detail.
And I hadn't even heard about Bitcoin mining being this industry.
I remember hearing about mining in the early days.
I remember even trying to download the software and mine on my computer at some point.
But it didn't work because at that point, mining had shifted to like GPUs and I had a crappy old laptop that couldn't handle the software and fell apart.

(12:28):
So then when in 2013, when I realized that, oh, wow, people are actually building mining facilities, they're actually buying machines and plugging them in in order to make Bitcoin, which for me awakened something which is, well, if because before that in my mind was, well, obviously one day when this becomes valuable.
they're going to find a way to make more of it. It's not gold. It's digital. The people behind it

(12:53):
are going to get together and say, hey, let's make more Bitcoin. But then when I found out that
actually people are putting in serious capital investment to building machines and setting up
facilities and connecting them to electricity in order to make Bitcoin, that means this isn't
cheap, easy money. That means there may be a way in which the 21 million thing actually might stick.

(13:16):
And then the third thing was the Silk Road, because when the Silk Road happened, it was, in my mind, that was the scenario of how Bitcoin dies.
Some criminal activity is associated to Bitcoin, and then everybody related to Bitcoin is going to be considered complicit in that.
And then they're going to throw a bunch of people in Guantanamo Bay, and then everybody else is going to get rid of their coins, and the price is going to die.

(13:40):
so this happened in early 2013 when Ross Albright was arrested and so in my mind that was the moment
when I thought okay now it's going to crash now it's going to die and instead it just kept going
up so around 2013 is when I started recovering from no coin or derangement syndrome and started

(14:02):
thinking more critically about it and started reading it but still unfortunately you know 2013
14, 15, I still hadn't really spent a lot of time trying to understand it and focus on it. I was,
you know, memes and Twitter and putting in some pocket change into it, thinking that,
you know, this is too risky. This is too crazy. Who knows what's going to happen?

(14:25):
But at least I got off zero, but unfortunately I didn't make it very far away from zero
during those years. And then I got married in 2014 and had to spend money on all kinds of
things like, you know, weddings and wedding rings and honeymoons.
And then I had a child and then I had to spend all kinds of things on children and stuff.

(14:46):
So then only after my daughter was born in 2016,
and then I started thinking more seriously about needing to be more productive
and do things more than just my day job at university.
And that's when I started thinking more seriously about Bitcoin,
started reading more and more and more about it and researching it.

(15:06):
And in 2017, I decided to write a book about it.
And then it was published in 2018.
What was there to read that you were digging into?
Because there's so many resources, books, podcasts, everything out there now that people have just no more excuses to not study Bitcoin and learn about it.
But I'm assuming it was quite a few just random sketchy forums online that you had to dig through it.

(15:31):
Where were you researching it from?
Yeah, random sketchy forums online is one major one.
Andreas Antonopoulos' videos were pretty big at that point.
And there was that book written by a bunch of computer scientists, I think, at Yale.
I forget the exact name of the book.
Cryptocurrency Technology.
That was a – I forget the name.

(15:53):
But there was a book that was, I think, 2014 or so that explained the technical aspect in a way that was pretty useful, which helped me.
But yeah, there weren't a lot of resources, which is why it was very easy to believe silly things because it was just – there was a lot of uninformed people online making very bold predictions about it.

(16:19):
And it was difficult to tell apart the signal from the noise.
But with time, more and more content started to come around.
Oh, yeah. And of course, well, I should mention perhaps the most important resource I came across at that time was the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Pierre Rochard and Michael Goldstein. And it was truly mind-blowing because very few people had thought about Bitcoin. Well, maybe not few.

(16:47):
At the beginning, a lot of people had, you know, among the small number of people who had been working in Bitcoin or related to Bitcoin, they'd thought about the idea of the fixed supply money and how significant that is.
But nobody quite formulated what we today know as toxic Bitcoin maximalism in its purest raw freebase form, quite like Michael Goldstein and Pierre Richard around that period.

(17:17):
So 2012, 13, 14, they wrote a bunch of blog posts, basically everything you need to know about Bitcoin.
It's just very brief.
and they had another guy who was working with them at that time, Daniel Kravitz.
He termed the coin hyper-Bitcoinization, which was very powerful as an idea at that time

(17:39):
because it really drove the point home that this isn't just going to be a side project for nerds.
This is going to be serious business.
So that really helped me begin to form it.
I came across it, I think, in 2015 or so, or 14.
I can't remember when exactly I came across it, but around that time.

(18:00):
And that really helped me start to see things from the perspective of Bitcoin as hard money and the impact that Bitcoin can have on the world.
and you know i'd already i i'd already most people i would say they come into bitcoin
thinking about it say from a computer science perspective in the early days or more recently

(18:21):
from a gains perspective for me i think i was one of the few people who had come at it from
the austrian perspective where the most interesting thing for me from day one was the fact that this
is a money supply that's fixed that the supply doesn't grow so i already knew how much of a big
deal that would be before I ever heard about Bitcoin. I was a gold bug and I had a lot of the

(18:43):
ideas that you read about in the Bitcoin standard were already formulated in my mind before Bitcoin
came about. So whereas I would say for most people, it's a question of, oh, wow, you know,
this is cool. This is interesting. Blockchain technology, cryptography, all of these are really
cool things or maybe complicated things. But, you know, they come at it from this perspective and then

(19:07):
they come across the idea that wow a money that first of all inflation is a big problem and not
having inflation is a solution and that's why bitcoin is such a big deal that usually comes
later for me it was the other way around it was i understood that this would be a big deal but
being a deranged no-coiner i hadn't spent the time trying to understand why it could actually work

(19:34):
so i thought wow wouldn't that be great if we had something like bitcoin but obviously it's not
going to work and obviously i'm too smart to waste my time trying to learn how it actually works
because i obviously i'm so smart that i know that it won't work and now i'm going to work on this
19th century monetary technology and try and integrate it with an app because i am smart so

(19:58):
So, but then by 2014 and 15, these kind of ideas began to take root.
But also 2014, 15 was a brutal bear market, the most brutal bear market in Bitcoin history.
If you think 2022 was bad, 2022 was really just one year of downward price action.

(20:19):
So November 21 to about December 22, it was a decline from 69 to 15,000.
but uh afterward it flattened out and it kept going up well back then it was a decline from
about a thousand two hundred down to 150 so almost 90 and it dragged on for about two years

(20:41):
so from november 2013 until around i think yeah the bottom was probably around november 2015 if
i'm not mistaken but something in that range so it was very brutal 2014 and 15 i'm astonished at
the fact that I stuck around because I think a lot of people sold, gave up.

(21:02):
And sadly for me, you know, I didn't pay enough attention during that time.
And I didn't stack a lot because all you could hear was Bitcoin's dead, Bitcoin died,
Bitcoin failed, Bitcoin is not going to work.
And, you know, we didn't have Bitcoin Twitter out there putting hair on our chest and telling
is to tell the no-coiners to have fun staying poor and keep hodling.

(21:25):
So it was a pretty brutal time
during which I didn't really pay enough attention during Bitcoin.
I was trying to get my own job in order.
But then things started to turn around in 2016
when Bitcoin started to go up and I had a child.
So I started to think more seriously about what I need to do with my life.

(21:47):
And then in 2017, I started to work on the Bitcoin standard.
Amazing. One of the staples of this podcast is that we never get tired of asking the most simple questions because you never know who's listening. So I want to hear it straight from you. What is Bitcoin? How do you explain this to people?
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer software that operates a payment network that runs with its own inflation-resistant currency and allows you to transfer money to anyone else on the network anywhere in the world without having to go through any trusted third party and without having to go through any political institutions.

(22:29):
that for me is bitcoin in a nutshell and then i would go through a more detailed explanation of
what we mean by a peer-to-peer network what we mean by open source software that's another one
that i would add to it i think it's important so what do we mean by open source software we mean by
peer network and then i say you know the fact that it permissionless and doesn have a trusted third party is why it is effectively the fastest form of money in the world that allows you to have final settlement of financial assets in the fastest period of time

(23:05):
And secondly, and the most important thing about Bitcoin is the fact that the currency supply is
fixed means that it won't increase in supply unpredictably. And that means that it kills
inflation and that makes it the hardest money ever and then i get into describing why hard
money is such a big deal and what the implications are yeah and i think that's a good opportunity to

(23:31):
inject what the problem is that we're actually trying to solve here because i think that
we look around the social media landscape and our friends and family at the gatherings and
people talking about what the problem is it's always some political fight left versus right
or capitalism bad, rich people bad.
At least that's all I hear from the Northwest
where I'm from in Seattle.

(23:52):
It's very left blue over there.
I think you and I would agree,
largely because I got this from reading your book,
is that central banking is a real problem here.
I know you really talk about central banking
being the biggest problem on earth.
So could you flesh that out a little bit?
What is, like most people,
I think if you just talk to them on the street
and ask them, hey, explain central banking, what is it?

(24:15):
People won't even know where to start.
So how do you start explaining the problem that Bitcoin fixes?
Yeah, I think most people have very little idea about what central banks are and what they do.
They think they're just government institutions, like the DMVs, Department of Education, the police department, the fire department.

(24:35):
It's just public servants out there trying to do their best.
and if you're going to have some kind of libertarian leanings,
you may be a little bit skeptical of the efficiency of using the central bank for this,
but never, well, not never, but I think for most people,
it's never too critical of what the central bank actually is and what it really does.

(25:04):
But as far as I'm concerned, and I say this repeatedly,
and I don't think it's hyperbolic at all,
It really is the biggest problem in the world, and it is at the root of the vast majority of the world's problems.
I think there is no such thing as an economic problem that isn't related to inflation.
All of the things that people think of as economic problems are consequences of inflation.

(25:26):
Unemployment is caused by inflation.
Prices rising is caused by inflation, because by inflation, I mean an increase in the money supply.
That's the correct definition.
So prices rise, jobs get destroyed, business cycles happen, financial crises happen, governments go bankrupt, currencies collapse.
All of those things, you think of them as different things and you grow up if you're getting educated or miseducated under a Keynesian system.

(25:53):
You treat those things as if they're natural disasters.
It's like you are an emergency worker and you're being taught about how to deal with earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes and so on.
So one day you wake up and there's an earthquake.
Why did it happen?
It doesn't matter.

(26:14):
Let's pull people out of the rubble.
That's what you need to learn.
So this is the approach that people generally have to economic ideas.
Oh, no, unemployment went up.
Oh, no, there's a fiscal crisis.
Oh, no, the government is unable to pay off its debt.
Oh, no, the government has defaulted.
These things just happen.
And the really pernicious thing is that the way that we fix those things, because people aren't taught about the causes of those things.

(26:40):
They don't see that they're all caused by inflation.
And they think that, all right, well, oh, no, that's bad.
So clearly we need to have somebody in charge to fix it, just like the fire department.
and the way that we have that person fix it is to just give them tons of money
or have them print a ton of money,
which, of course, is going to lay the groundwork for the next crisis and financial disaster.

(27:00):
So putting all of this together really gives you, I think,
a much better understanding of how the world works
and why inflation is at the root of those problems.
And I guess if I were to summarize it, as I explained in the fiat standard,
I'd say the big picture summary of what the problem is with central banking and inflation is central banking makes money and banking a monopoly.

(27:25):
So you cannot compete with your government's central bank and its banks.
You can't decide to open a bank tomorrow that runs on gold, for instance, because you won't get licensed by the Federal Reserve.
of the Federal Reserve only licenses fraudulent banks that use fake fiat inflationary money.

(27:48):
Because if it licenses one bank that isn't fraudulent, that just offers people normal
banking services where you just hold people's money and don't create money out of thin air
and don't devalue their money, it would drive all the other banks out of business.
In fact, a few years ago, there was a bank that wanted to do nothing, but it was called

(28:09):
the narrow bank, which in economics, narrow banking refers to the idea of just basically
running a safety deposit box for people. You take money from people, you put it in a box,
you hire armed guards to make sure that nobody takes the money from those boxes.
And then when people want to take that money out, you give it to them. And in this case,
they were taking their reserves, putting them at the central bank, getting the, that was their

(28:34):
business plan. They were going to put the reserves in the central bank and then pass on the central
banking interest rate to their depositors and make a spread. That was it, which is a dream.
If you could have something like this, just so much of the US capital markets would go to something
like this because vast majority of people don't want to gamble with their savings. And if you're

(28:56):
able to get the Federal Reserve's interest rate without having to go through a lot of risks,
I think it's attractive for a big chunk of people's portfolios,
not all of people's portfolios.
You're still going to want to, say, have some stocks.
You're still going to maybe want to do private equity.

(29:16):
There will be parts of your portfolio that you won't do,
but there will be parts of your portfolio
where you would want to just have wealth preservation.
So they didn't license that bank,
and Caitlin Long has also been trying to get something similar.
I was going to mention her. That's exactly what I was going to say.
Yeah. And again, she's not having an easy time trying to get that.

(29:39):
And the reason for this is not because those banks would be dangerous to the depositors.
It's because they would be dangerous to all the other banks.
Why would you put your money in these fraudulent institutions like JP Morgan or Citibank,
who are holding on to a tiny fraction of the money that you give them and who could collapse at any time?

(29:59):
When you could just go to the Federal Reserve, which is a lot safer than going through those banks.
So then if you did that, everybody would take out a lot of their wealth from other financial institutions and financial instruments and just put them in that kind of bank.
So you can't be having that.

(30:20):
So you have to have a monopoly that prevents people from using responsible money so that everybody is forced to be using the inflationary money so that they can be robbed from inflation.
So that's the kind of big picture understanding of what the monopoly is.

(30:42):
And then the problems I would say, as I was describing the fiat standard, you can see there are two aspects to the problem.
On the one hand, the first aspect of it is the fact that because the government and the central bank are able to devalue the currency, they're constantly robbing the people of wealth, which is terrible for people because it's making them poorer and poorer and taking away their wealth and compromising their ability to provide for the future, compromising their ability to save for the future.

(31:08):
On the other hand, the second part of the problem is that wealth being constantly stolen from people and being given to the government gives the government an enormous amount of power and control over society because it's constantly taking away your saved monetary energy and therefore constantly making you poorer and constantly making itself richer.

(31:35):
So this is why in the 20th century, as I explained in the fiat standard and the Bitcoin standard, we just have a long-term process of decline in savings, decline in financial security, decline in people's ability to think for the long term, increase in economic uncertainty on the one hand for individuals, and then on the other hand, an increase in state power.
And you can't understand that without reference to the money printer. The money printer is just a constant tax on normal, productive people doing moral things and a constant subsidy to people in government who are not doing, I would say, moral things because they're relying on taxation, which in my opinion is immoral, and inflation, which is also immoral.

(32:19):
So you're taxing the productive to finance the unproductive, but it's done at a scale of decades across the entire planet.
And that, for me, is at the root of the vast majority of the world's problems because this makes war a lot more affordable.
This makes all kinds of government programs a lot more affordable.

(32:41):
this turns politics into an as men can use to call it an auction on stolen goods where if you
and a bunch of people can get together and vote on stealing stuff then you can steal it and you
can steal it very easily because the government has a lot of money because it can print money so
it can finance uh well first of all it can steal for you through inflation and secondly it can steal

(33:04):
through you for you through inflation financing jackbooted thugs who go around and steal for you
And so all kinds of barbaric and uncivilized behavior become very sustainable and profitable in a modern society because of the money printer.
And I don't think it would be workable otherwise without a money printer.

(33:27):
So this is really why Bitcoin is so important because it brings you the possibility of being able to save in something that can't be devalued.
And so therefore, you get to keep your wealth and the people who rely on stealing your wealth don't get to keep it instead.
Yeah, and circling back to the timeline we laid out of the teen years, 2013 or so, that was when I was freshly going into my fiat university right there in 2013, 2014 to go straight to that econ 101 class for those easy credits where they were teaching me exactly that.

(34:03):
You've got to have 2% inflation.
It's good for you.
It's amazing. Safe and effective. It's so crazy how this is just so stapled in everyone's mind that
it normal to have this random inflation number Most people don even think of it but the people that do think about it and read the economics magazines they just hear this number and they say okay that works And one of the preliminary things

(34:31):
that people must believe in order to fall for that is that deflation is a very scary, bad thing.
So could you explain maybe what deflation is? It's obviously the opposite of inflation by name.
What is this idea of deflation and how could a deflationary currency like Bitcoin actually
change people's lives? Yeah, well, so the term deflation may not be entirely accurate in the

(34:57):
case of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is inflationary in the sense that the supply is increasing and the supply
never goes down. Deflation, I think the correct terminology for it is the correct terminology
definition of deflation is a decline in the money supply. Now, the Keynesians call inflation an
increase in prices and deflation a decrease in prices. I don't think that's accurate.

(35:19):
But, you know, language is all about convention.
So for me, the Keynesians have succeeded in destroying the usefulness of the I word.
It's just better not to use the word inflation, which is why if you go through my books, you'll see that I don't use that term often.
But I usually try and distinguish between an increase in the money supply and an increase in prices, because otherwise you're just stuck arguing about this terminology.

(35:44):
So putting aside the term deflation, the key thing about Bitcoin is that the supply doesn't increase beyond what has been scheduled.
And that there's a fixed supply.
So the supply growth rate is constantly declining.
Currently, we're already at 19.7, I think, million Bitcoin.
So there's only 1.3 million Bitcoin to be mined over the next century or so.

(36:05):
So the importance of this cannot be overstated.
This is truly, for me, the most important technological development of the 21st century and possibly many centuries to come even.
I don't think people quite understand just how enormous it's going to be.
And the reason for that is the current monetary system, the way it works, is built on the lie that you need to increase the money supply in order for the economy to function.

(36:35):
It's such an elementary lie, and I think it's a great IQ test.
There are people who get it immediately, and there are people who don't get it.
And if you're one of the people who don't get it, I regret to inform you that the stuff between your ear isn't high grade.
Let's just put it that way.
You may have fun staying poor, allegedly.

(36:58):
Yes, allegedly.
And the key idea is this.
the money itself is not a good. It's not an economic good whose quantity matters
to your satisfaction. Mises calls it a sui generis good. It's a good like no other,
where the quantity of the good itself doesn't matter. What matters is the purchasing power

(37:21):
of that good. And so therefore, you don't care if you're getting $5 or 50 yens or 5,000 euros.
its quantity itself doesn't matter to the satisfaction that you get from it. So you don't
care if you're using, if you're getting $5 or 50 Japanese yen or 500 euros, the number of units that

(37:44):
you're getting doesn't really matter. What matters to you is the purchasing power. So if I told you
would you rather have $5 or 50 yen, you're going to say $5, even though 50 is larger than five.
Why? Because it's not like apples. It's not like homes. It's not like Lamborghinis. It's not
something where the more you have of a good, the better it is. It's about the purchasing power.
And so $5 have more purchasing power than 50 yen. So you prefer the $5 over the 50 yen.

(38:09):
So what matters in money is its purchasing power, is its ability to be exchanged for other goods,
which does not require the quantity of it to be increased because you can just increase
the purchasing power of it. And this is such a powerful idea. And if you get it, you get money.

(38:30):
And the most important implication of this is that any supply of money is enough, as long as it's
physically manageable. You know, you can't run a global economy on one gold coin, because
how do you break it down so that 8 billion people can have it? But you well, you could if you have

(38:51):
financial assets backed by that one coin. The one coin would be worth $50 trillion if that was the
only gold coin we had, and then there would be financial instruments backed by it. But ultimately,
you don't need to increase the supply of money. This is the key point. You don't need to increase
the supply of money as the economy grows. And if you get this, congratulations to your mother for
bringing you to this world. If you don't get this, my condolences to your mother for bringing you

(39:14):
into this world. If you think the world needs to make more money because we want to trade more,
you are not going to make it. It's exactly as idiotic as saying, we need to expand the inch
in order for me to get taller. No, we don't. The inch is the thing that we use to measure your
height. And as you get taller, you just are measured with more inches. So it's very similar

(39:37):
with money. If you had a fixed supply money, what would happen over time is that the value of the
money would go up. So the biggest lie of modern economics is to convince you that the value of
money going up would be bad and that the best way to fix it is to devalue your money, bring the value
of money down. And the way to do that is to increase the supply of money. That's because

(40:00):
modern economics is just propaganda for theft. It's just propaganda for theft through inflation.
So everything you've learned at your university over the last century, I regret to inform you,
has basically been inflationary propaganda.
All of these Nobel Prize winning economists,
the vast majority of textbooks that you've learned,
all of the people that get wheeled out on propaganda rags

(40:23):
like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal
and CNN and all that stuff and Harvard University
and all of these elite institutions,
they are not some geniuses who managed to figure out
great insights about economics.
They're just actors who repeat the same stupid lines about, we need more money printing to fix

(40:44):
things. And then when that causes a catastrophe, then guess what? We need more money printing in
order to fix it even more. So this is what it ultimately comes down to. The fiat economists
and fiat economics in general is one giant gaslighting operation to convince you that
we need to increase the supply of money. And if we don't do it, everything would be bad.

(41:05):
And the main and dumbest argument they have is, well, if the prices of things go up, then people are not going to be consuming.
Why would you want to consume today if you can expect that your money is going to rise in value?
And so you won't spend your money today because you expect that you can get more from it next year.

(41:26):
And then because you don't spend your money, that puts people out of work.
so your local restaurants and nightclubs they'd all go out of business if people stopped spending
because they expect that their money would buy them more next year and then that puts people out
of work and then those people have no work and so then they can't spend and then that puts other

(41:47):
businesses out of work and then the people in those businesses can no longer spend and then
that goes round and round and then affects everybody and now you your own business gets
affected because people aren't spending. And that should teach you for being so selfish as to save
for the future instead of just spending everything that you have today like a monkey. And that's

(42:10):
essentially what Keynesian economics comes down to. We need you to always be spending. We need you
to always be losing purchasing power to incentivize you to spend. Because if you don't spend, then the
economy falls apart. And there are no words in the English language to describe how utterly moronic
this is. The basic idea is people don't consume because their money is losing value. People consume

(42:38):
because they need to consume, because they want to consume, because life is finite. One day you're
going to die and you want to get to experience those things. And so if you're hungry today and
you really want to eat and you have the money that can buy you the food, you're not going to be,
There are no humans that are as stupid as the Keynesians pretend to be in their textbooks who are going to think, nope, I'm going to not eat today because if I wait another year, I'll be able to get a cheaper meal.

(43:08):
So why would I eat today when I could just wait for a year and then my steak will be 3% cheaper next year?
And so then you don't eat and then the steak guy goes out of business.
This is exactly how they think, which is completely idiotic.
In reality, if you don't eat today or for the whole week, you're going to starve and die.
And so you're going to eat.

(43:28):
You're going to spend.
Your choice is not between a steak today and a steak next year that is 3% cheaper.
You're not going to make it to next year and to be able to get the 3% cheaper steak if you don't eat today, you're going to die.
You're going to starve from now until next year.
So your choice is buy the steak today or starve.
That's the real choice.
and nobody, nobody is as stupid as the Keynesians

(43:53):
in order to be able to think,
nope, I'd rather starve so that I can spend more,
so that I can spend less next year.
It's just completely insane.
People are nowhere near as idiotic
as the Keynesians pretend they are.
So you also want to buy a house
and you don't care if it's going to get cheaper
10 years from now, you need the house now.

(44:14):
You don't want to be homeless for 10 years
so that you could then eventually get to save 20% on your house,
you're going to buy the house.
You need clothes.
So what do we see now?
What has changed?
But you're still going to be spending money on the essentials that you need.
But I think there is some kernel of truth in their idiotic idea,

(44:37):
which is that you're less likely to spend stupid money on stupid things that you don't need.
Yeah.
So you will buy housing, shelter, you will buy the essential things that matter to you.
But are you going to be buying another piece of plastic junk that you don't need, that's going to fall apart very quickly, when you can expect that the money would appreciate over the next year or so, then allowing you to buy a much better piece of plastic junk that you don't really need?

(45:07):
Yeah.
In fact, you'll see that a lot of the conspicuous, unnecessary consumption that people engage in would go down if you replace the money with a harder money.
Because a lot of that consumption is motivated by the idea that what am I going to do with this money?

(45:27):
If I keep the money, it's going to lose its value.
So do I, in a world in which money is losing value, it makes sense to buy the cheap plastic junk that you don't need today.
Because if you wait one more year, you won't even be able to afford it.
It's going to become more expensive.
So better get it now.
Better buy things as early as possible.
Better hoard stuff.
Better accumulate more and more things rather than accumulate money because money loses value more.

(45:51):
So buy all kinds of cheap plastic crap.
and that's a successful strategy in the fiat world. In a hard money world, it's a lot more
similar to what the world was like in the 19th century. Less frivolous spending, less conspicuous
consumption, consumption focused on essential and necessary things, and more savings. And that's

(46:13):
where we really get to piss off the Keynesians. People would be able to save if the money was hard.
And of course, this is a nightmare. If you're a kind of parasite who lives off of robbing
people's wealth, then them being able to save in a form of money that resists inflation makes
things very, very hard for you. It's very difficult. So that's why there's an enormous

(46:37):
amount of stupid propaganda against savings, trying to present savings as if they are this
sociopathic act, as Keynes described it. You know, when you save...
They're so selfish and they're not investing in the stock market. How dare they?
Yeah, you should be out there buying stupid crap that you don't need in order to put people into work so that they'd have jobs producing stupid crap that nobody needs and investing in companies that you don't understand so that they would have money to invest in all kinds of things.

(47:08):
That's much better than saving, according to the Keynesians, because when you save, the money is just sitting there and doing nothing.
And that's also very, very dumb.
Money sitting there doing nothing is exactly what money is supposed to do.
Money, when it sits there doing nothing, it's holding a value and transferring it across time.
That's an enormously valuable good. In fact, that is the world's most valuable good as measured by

(47:33):
total addressable market. There's arguably about $300 trillion of money in the world where people
are just holding something whose sole purpose is to hold value into the future. That's much larger
than any other market of any good.
Nothing even comes close.
So all of the NASDAQ is about $50 trillion.

(47:56):
All of the S&P 500 is about $50 trillion.
So all of the products produced by all of these 600 companies in NASDAQ and S&P
are about $100 trillion in capitalization in terms of market demand.
And yet the demand for just money, as I define it today,
money is physical cash, checking accounts, saving accounts, and government bonds and gold.

(48:22):
The demand for that is about $200 to $300 trillion. So the notion that money just sitting there is
this useless thing is ridiculous. Why do people want $300 trillion of something that is useless?
It's the Keynesians that are useless. It's not money sitting there that's useless.
So money sitting there is extremely valuable.

(48:44):
It gives you optionality.
It allows you to transfer wealth into the future.
It gives you liquidity so that you can get in and out of your position quickly.
And you can benefit from opportunities that you could take advantage of.
So clearly, there is an enormous demand for money.
And clearly, being able to move money into the future, move economic value into the future,

(49:05):
is extremely valuable for you if you have a time horizon for making decisions
that is longer than a goldfish, you want to have something that can allow you to transfer money into
your future if you care about your future. And I guess one of the key points that I communicate in
my book, and perhaps maybe my original contribution to Austrian economics, is to explicitly tie

(49:31):
people's time preference or people's valuation of the future as opposed to the present,
people's future orientation as a function of the hardness of money. I think this is a very
compelling thing that as the easier the money is, the less good the money is at holding on to its

(49:51):
value, the more the money loses value over time, the less people are going to be thinking about
the long-term future and the more their thinking processes are going to fixate around the present.
On the other hand, the harder the money is, the better the money is holding on at value into the
future, the more reliable it can provide for your future self, the more it drives you to think about

(50:14):
your future self. If you've lived in a world in which for the last hundred years, for as long as
anybody in your family remembers, you've always had a form of money that is always holding onto
its value well or appreciating slightly. You are a lot more likely to think about your life in 10
years from now because you know how to save for 10 years from now. Your parents have done it. They

(50:35):
taught you how to do it. Your grandparents and their parents did it as well. And if you save for
the future, you put money aside for the future, then the future comes around and you're better
off. So constantly you're improving your life because you're saving and the value of the savings
is going up and that's making you better off. And so you're constantly lowering your time

(50:56):
preference. In other words, increasing your valuation of the future, increasing your focus
on the future, becoming more of a future-oriented person. And this is not just important in an
economic sense. It is very important in an economic sense because the more of a future-oriented
person you are, the more you save and the more that you behave in a way that is future-oriented

(51:17):
in your economic activity. But it's even very important beyond your economic activity because
your orientation toward the future and the present, how much you discount the future compared to the
present is, I would argue, the most important metric in your life, the thing that is going to
determine your outcomes in life more important than pretty much anything else. Time preference is

(51:40):
really, I think, one of the most important concepts in economics. When I used to teach
Keynesian economics at university level, there was the usual garbage in the textbook that I would go
over. But every class, every semester, I'd make sure there's at least half a lecture dedicated to
talking about time preference. I'd always tell the kids, look, your stupid textbook doesn't talk

(52:01):
about this, but this is the most important thing you're going to get from economics. So for the
next half an hour or hour or whatever, we're going to be talking about this. It's not going to be on
the exam. It doesn't matter, but it's going to be the most important thing you can learn from me
after buy Bitcoin, of course, which some of them did do and they benefited enormously. But I'd sit
them down and explain them the concept of time preference. And I'd tell them that this is what

(52:25):
matters. I think there's an enormous amount of data about how future orientation is a huge
predictor of success. People who are able to think in the long term are much more likely to achieve
what they want to do in the long term. And the opposite, of course, is true. And this makes a lot
of sense. I mean, I just urge you to think about it yourself in your own life. It's very easy to

(52:46):
demonstrate this to yourself without having to perform sophisticated academic experiments.
just stop thinking about the future for five years and then see where you end up in five years
you know you spend all your savings today behave in a high time preference manner with all of your

(53:06):
relationships so instead of behaving in a way that maximizes your long-term friendship with people
instead of behaving in a way that maximizes their happiness and yours in the long term
try and maximize the benefits you get from the friendship now how's that going to make you
behave. If you discount your friendship with a guy from five years from now, you're much more
likely to cheat them. You're much more likely to steal from them. You're much more likely to

(53:30):
assault them, abuse them, do all kinds of horrible things toward them. And that's just how it really
is. When the money is losing value, all kinds of horrible behavior is incentivized because people
don't care about consequences. And that's why society falls apart under hyperinflation. It's
not just that people lose their wealth, even more pressing than that, you know, people can lose

(53:53):
wealth, it's catastrophic, but you can recover from that. It's like if you got robbed, and you
lost your money. I mean, it's disastrous, but you can continue with your life, and you can rebuild.
But if your life isn't, but if the money is failing at holding value for the future,
then you are in deep trouble because now it's very difficult for you to be able to

(54:19):
provide for the future. So then what do you do? You can't provide for the future. You can't think
about the future. So why would you want to do long-term behavior that is conducive for the
long-term of your well-being? Why would you want to get into a family? How do you provide for a
family in 10 years, 15 years when you don't have an easy way of providing for yourself in 10, 15

(54:41):
years. You become much more likely to commit crime because you discount the possibility of
going to jail because that's a future thing. The present is I want nice stuff now. And so I'm going
to go and commit a crime to get the nice stuff. And yes, there's a chance that I get caught,
but that's in the future. And that's really what high time preference behavior is. And really,

(55:04):
human civilization is the process of our time preference declining. As our time preference
declines, we become more civilized, become more moral. We think about the long-term consequences
of things. We save more. We accumulate more capital. It increases our productivity,
improves our standard of living, and allows us to save even more and accumulate more capital,

(55:24):
lowering our time preference further, allowing us to think more and more about the future,
lowering interest rates. When we save a lot, that makes more capital abundant. It brings the price
down and incentivizes more and more long-term investment. It is saving that leads to investment,
and it's absolutely criminal how the Keynesians have convinced the world that saving competes

(55:46):
with investment. You have to first save. Every single cent that has ever been invested
has to have first been saved, and by saved, I mean not consumed. First, you have to not buy
the consumption good and save the money. And then you have to deploy the money in an investment.

(56:07):
Even if that time period was one second from the time that you got the money
until the time you deployed it in an investment, you saved it. First of all, you didn't consume it.
So only through saving do we have investment. You have to first save. And so something that
causes people to save more is going to cause them to invest more. The more we save, the more capital

(56:28):
we have available, the more of that capital we can deploy into investment. That's how the process
of civilization works. We delay the gratification, we delay the consumption, we refuse to consume the
resources that we have, and therefore we have the resources to invest, we have the resources to put
them into productive use, and that then causes the increase in productivity, the increase in living

(56:49):
standards, and the increase in incomes, and gets into a virtuous cycle where the more we invest,
The more productive we are, the better off we are, the more we're able to think about the long term and the more we are able to provide for ourselves in the long term.
The better behaved we are, the more moral we are, the more cooperative we are, the more peaceful we are.

(57:12):
We realize that the long benefits of cooperation and peace outweigh the short gains of conflict and aggression and theft and so on So this is the process of civilization And then inflation is the exact opposite Inflation is the destruction of civilization because the exact
opposite happens. You start realizing that your wealth that you're saving is not available, is not

(57:37):
holding on to the value that you put into it. And so you become less likely to save. When you're
less likely to save your consuming and you're engaged in high time preference, fast consumption.
And that causes you to think more and more about the short term. And then that is reflected on all
manner of behavior. And so you literally tear apart, well, not literally, but you tear apart

(58:02):
the fabric of civilization. You tear apart the ability of people to have the incentive to behave
in a way that is conducive toward long-term civilization. So why would I want to, you know,
invest in maintaining a good relationship with my neighbors when I'm hungry today and I lost my

(58:23):
savings and I feel robbed and they have nice stuff. And if I take it, then I'll be a lot happier.
And who cares about what that's going to do to the rest of my life when I'm living next to people
who know that I am a thief, you know? So you get more of these conflicts, you get more of
the immoral behavior degenerate behavior all kinds of behavior that doesn't
lend itself to good long-term outcomes and all of that becomes more and more of a problem

(58:50):
and so that for me is why you know the subtitle of my second book the fiat standard is
the debt slavery alternative to human civilization hard money gold had set us on a path of increasing
productivity, increasing standard of livings, lower time preference, lower interest rates,
increased future provision, and more civilization for thousands of years, interrupted by periods of

(59:15):
inflation destroying this. And the last century has been one horrible, horrible interlude of
inflation that has been undermining the very, very foundation of human civilization, in my opinion.
yeah one of the things i want to point out too is you talk about that
neighbor's analogy which i think is so good where

(59:38):
the arithmetic of doing a bad thing and stealing from somebody changes when you're being stolen from
every day through inflation and you get put in a more desperate state and this analogy of
the increasing incentivization to do bad things in your society is very scalable and it can go

(01:00:00):
all the way up to the nation state level where we have full-scale war going on everywhere all the
time and i'd love to hear your take on this because you're there's a clip from your book
that i took that i shared around quite a bit just explaining how you talked about the history of war
and how in the past war would stop pretty quickly because one of the sides was run out of money.

(01:00:24):
But now that we have infinite money printers everywhere, it changes this dynamic where we have infinity wars starting up and they just never end.
So could you maybe give a little bit of color on that, why people need to understand this, how fiat money causes this crazy amount of war?
Yeah, this is a very, very, very important idea.
and I discussed it in my book.

(01:00:47):
It was pretty controversial when I first made it
and I think a lot of basically propagandized NPCs,
a great tell of a propagandized NPC
is to laugh and lash out at a new idea
before even considering it.
And so a lot of idiots laughed at this.
Ha ha, people think Bitcoin is going to end war.

(01:01:10):
And yet the more of an idiot you are,
the more you are likely to not believe this.
But I think there is no question that there's something very, very true there.
If you look at war before the fiat standard,
yes, of course, war happens and people are people

(01:01:30):
and human beings have all kinds of horrible things that they do to each other
and they've always done it.
But if you look at what human civilization was achieving
during the periods before fiat money.
Particularly if you look at Europe,
European war was becoming more and more civilized

(01:01:53):
and the norms of war were being developed
where civilians stayed out of war
and wars were being fought between professional armies.
So professional armies would get together
and they would fight in a battlefield.
And the reason for that was that it was extremely dangerous and expensive to attack civilians.

(01:02:15):
And it was extremely dangerous for your political success, but more importantly, financially, because you needed the golden goose of the civilians working to pay you taxes so that you could fight a war.
Because you don't have a money printer.
You can't just print money.
and so um the the war by the 18th and 19th century first of all you look at the data from 15th to the

(01:02:41):
19th century see that the intensity of war or the percentage of people that were dying in wars was
going down fewer and fewer people were dying as a percentage of the world population because wars
were becoming more and more civilized because the kings who were spendthrift when it came to war
generally didn't do well.

(01:03:02):
If you were a king and you didn't care and you just went all out
and you attacked all of your neighbors and you tried to conquer them,
that wasn't going to really work out very well.
It may have worked out at a time of very primitive human civilizations
and tribes where wealth consisted of things that were very basic,
land and cattle, and didn't involve heavy capital goods

(01:03:27):
and an extensive capital production structure.
But as the world's economic production
becomes more sophisticated,
as we use more capital,
this becomes destructive.
It's pointless to go and attack
and pillage and destroy a town
because you're going to be destroying their capital.
And then that's a huge waste.

(01:03:49):
You're better off fighting the military
that controls that town
in a battlefield, away from all the expensive capital, away from the homes, away from the
civilians. And so then you gain political control of that place and then you tax them.
So that's a much more civilized way of doing the good old rape and pillage and murder thing that we

(01:04:12):
as human beings have been doing forever. We have, as a civilization, begun to reduce the amount of
unnecessary violence that we engage in, aggressive violence, I should say, and try and limit the
damage that comes down, that happens from conflicts. And I think the key to that is the fact that the

(01:04:34):
kings could not print money. I remember there was a quote I came across once, I think it was Frederick
the Great in Germany, may have been Frederick the Second, but I think it was Frederick the Great.
And he said, somebody had sent him a note requesting all kinds of money for all kinds of
things. And he said, basically, he said, I cannot meet your request, because I cannot shit money.

(01:04:54):
And that was it. And I remember seeing that quote. And I remember tweeting it at that point that
saying fiat fixes this. That's what fiat fixes. You had a king of giant empire at that time.
And he just understood that he can't shit money. He can't just satisfy all the demands of all the
people he wants. He has to run a budget like everybody else. Money is gold. You can't shit

(01:05:18):
gold. You can't just print it. You can't make it out of nowhere. And so you have to manage your
money. And so the best way to manage your money is to be very prudent about it. Don't go around
destroying people's capital. Don't destroy your own people's capital in order to finance war.
you want to be as peaceful as possible and you want to maintain your wealth as much as you can

(01:05:43):
so that you can use it effectively in a defensive manner. That's the key thing.
If you live in a world in which you can't just print money out of thin air,
you want to try and maintain your wealth as much as you can so that in case of a real actual attack
of your neighbor coming and attacking you, trying to kill you, you have enough wealth to do it.
And then your neighbor has an incentive to do that as well. So what does that do? It gives your

(01:06:05):
government and their government the incentive to be peaceful, to find peaceful solutions, to avoid
robbing each other. And that's very good for civilization. That allows both of your countries
to thrive and prosper and accumulate more and more capital over time. But then fiat fixes this.
Fiat fixes the inability of kings and democratic leaders and presidents and parliaments,

(01:06:30):
fixes their inability to shit money. It allows them to shit money quite truly, really. This is
what happens. Now governments can just say yes to everything. You can just print money.
Now war becomes very different because now under the gold standard, you fought a war for as long
as you had physical gold. And then when you ran out of gold, that's it. You couldn't pay your

(01:06:53):
soldiers. You were done. So that makes you a lot more conservative and that makes you a lot less
spendthrift. And that's necessarily going to be the case, whether people consciously understand it
or not. Kings and governments that are very aggressive are just going to blow away their
capital and wealth and fight a lot of wars and eventually get destroyed. Whereas people who are

(01:07:18):
able to understand the process of peaceful productivity, who are able to be civilized,
were able to arrive at peaceful resolution, they will accumulate capital. So under the gold standard,
we had this economic evolutionary process that rewarded peaceful, civilized behavior,
that rewarded more and more cooperation between people and punished aggression, punished war.

(01:07:44):
And then with fiat money, we get the opposite because with fiat money now, your government
doesn't need to, it's no longer restrained by the quantity of gold it has. It's restrained by
the value of all of the money held by all of the people using its currency. So it's very different.
Back then, you had a big pot of gold in the government's treasury, and you had to manage that

(01:08:08):
pot of gold not to run out. Now, the pot of gold is everybody's wealth, because everybody's using
your shitty currency, which is paper money or credit. And the supply of that currency is very
easy to increase. So as long as people have purchasing power stored in your money, you can
rob them by printing more of that money without having to go and take their wealth. Under the

(01:08:32):
gold standard, if you wanted to go fight a war and you ran out of money, you had to send your troops
to go put guns to people's heads and search them for their gold to try and collect their gold.
that made you very politically unpopular. And basically, it meant another war at home.
People don want to give their money because the king wants to conquer some faraway land so that he can rape and pillage and steal things So no screw you I keeping my wealth And now you got

(01:08:57):
to have a military confront your local population, which is just not very sustainable when your
military is already being broke and trying to fight a foreign war. Well, with fiat, you don't
have to send them jackbooted thugs to people's homes to take their money. You just print from
the money and then you take them. So now the limit on your war effort has expanded significantly.

(01:09:19):
Instead of the wealth held by the government, the limit in your war effort now is the wealth held
by everybody using the government's money. And so that just allows them to run wild with war.
And that's exactly why all of the belligerents in World War I suspended the gold standard in 1914.
When they got into World War I, everybody suspended the gold standard and everybody got into printing money.

(01:09:43):
And that's what allowed World War I to continue.
Even though you look at the history of World War I, there isn't a single country that had anything substantial enough to gain from that war that would justify the efforts.
Britain had absolutely nothing to gain.
Well, I mean, not absolutely, but I mean, they wanted to destroy the Germans and limit German imperial ambition, which is ridiculous.

(01:10:07):
They destroyed the British Empire in order to, what, you know, get Namibia from the Germans or whatever.
Sounds like a very, very, very stupid trade.
And the Germans really didn't have anything to gain from the war.
They were – there was no reason for them to be fighting the Russians.
The Russians probably – you know, this is something I'm discussing in detail in my next book, The Gold Standard, which is going to be a lot about – a lot of it is going to be about World War I.

(01:10:34):
The Russians may have been the ones that had the actual objective from the war.
They wanted to get Constantinople.
They wanted to destroy the Ottoman Empire so that they would have Constantinople
because it would allow them to have access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean,
which would mean the ability to have a navy that was active all year round

(01:10:56):
because the Baltic froze in the winter,
so they couldn't get their boats out of the Baltic in the winter.
But if they could control the Black Sea and Constantinople and the entrance to the Mediterranean, then they have a warm water port, which was open all year round, and that would allow their empire to expand.
And also they had a lot of religious importance to Constantinople as Russia is the Orthodox Christian power, and Constantinople was the center of Orthodox Byzantine Christianity.

(01:11:28):
And so Russia views itself as the continuation of that.
And in Russian, they call Konstantinopel, the word for it is Tsargrad.
It's the city of the Tsar.
So they'd always wanted to take it.
So maybe the Russian government at that time was the only one that really had a concrete goal to get out of the war.
But pretty much everybody else was just fighting because they could.

(01:11:48):
And the people had no reason to be fighting.
But then once the money printer was broken into, it never stopped.
We just continue to have endless conflicts between governments printing more and more and more money.
And that's why the 20th century was so deadly.
As Ron Paul puts it, it's no coincidence that the century of total war was also the century of central banking.

(01:12:14):
Yeah, and that's definitely one of the things that I've been learning as I have gone down the rabbit holes of these different wars over history is that they truly are just banker wars.
and these countries and armies are just puppets that they're using.
And it's really wild as far as you dig into it.
And wars have become so fiat that there are so many situations now

(01:12:37):
where you can't even call it a war,
but more of just an infinite death ray machine is fueled by the money printer.
And I think that's kind of a good transition.
You probably know where I'm getting at here.
One of the other topics you've been talking a lot about,
and I have just more recently been digging into is the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And this to me is something that, like so many of these other rabbit holes,

(01:13:01):
I mean, I'll give you the full story.
So you definitely played a huge part in me looking further into this
because I remember you posted, you've posted this many times,
but you said the United States is an Israeli puppet state.
And I just thought that sounds crazy.
Like the USA is so big.
We have all this money, all these people.
There's no way that this little country over in the Middle East is actually controlling us.

(01:13:21):
But the more you go down that rabbit hole, it puts a lot of meat on the bone of the bankers really controlling all these different wars.
And the most recent one being this one we see in the Middle East right now.
So I would love your take on how you would consider this Israel-Palestine conflict.
I don't even know if you'd call it conflict, war, genocide.

(01:13:44):
I'm leaning more toward genocide the more I learn about it.
how would you clarify this as a result of fiat?
And maybe just add some description of how you would describe what the situation really is on the larger geopolitical scale.
Yeah. So that's a great question.
And it's a question that is very layered because you can answer it on many, many levels.

(01:14:04):
So the most obvious one that you see today is quite simply Israel as this genocidal ethnostate that's going around mass murdering people
because they have the wrong religion, would not be able to do any of this garbage if it weren't for
the money printer. Quite simply, just over the last year or so, over the last two years or so,
since October 7, Israel's received, I would say, probably at least $40 billion from the United

(01:14:29):
States government. And that's a serious amount of money. And more important, perhaps, than the money
itself is the military technology and the equipment and ammunition that they have gotten.
I mean, the amount of ammunition that they've used over Gaza is completely mind-blowing.
People talk about Dresden.
People talk about the bombings of Dresden.
It's been two years of Dresden every day, basically.

(01:14:53):
It dwarfs everything.
Like, when you look at the amount of tonnage of bombs that have been dropped,
like, all the atomic bombs we were told about were being so bad and crazy and terrible.
This is way bigger.
Yeah, we've had about 10 Hiroshima's just in this tiny little area of less than 400 square kilometers with 2 million people there basically being shot at like fish in a barrel.

(01:15:18):
And, you know, this is not something that a country of 10 million people like Israel could maintain on its own.
It needs to be relying on the money printer.
It is fundamentally Israel is a parasitic entity.
And of course, this is not something that you'll hear from the vast majority of morality and humanity-free subhuman trash that is out there constantly defending Israel.

(01:15:42):
You know, Israel is this brave, plucky underdog fighting against these heavily armed savages that want to destroy civilization.
No, Israel is a parasitic entity relying entirely on theft of the entire planet through the U.S. dollar in order to survive.
And Israel has always been that.

(01:16:05):
So the very simplest answer is if there was no money printer and American people had to pay taxes that went to Israel, things would be very different.
And it wouldn't just be different for Israel.
It would be different for all kinds of government spending.
In a world in which you don't have a money printer, you need to get the money for everything from people first before you go and spend it.
So you want to go fight a war in Iraq because America doesn't like – because Israel doesn't like Saddam or you want to fight a war in Iran.

(01:16:30):
Americans have to put up the money first.
So imagine – and remember the war in Iraq.
When the Israeli agents in the U.S. government, people like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and that trash, remember when they were selling the Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz in particular, he went into Congress and he said, I think this war would cost maybe something in the range of $1 billion, but it will more than pay for itself in terms of the dividends.

(01:16:58):
It's astonishing.
And the fact that this guy was not held accountable for this is really why the world is so wrong.
This, he said this in congressional testimony, and the war ended up costing the U.S. conservatively probably $5 trillion.
He was off by 5,000-fold.
And, of course, the bill is still coming in.

(01:17:20):
You know, a lot of the veterans are still needing the help right now.
So it's an eternal bill that just keeps increasing.
But he's able to do that because the government is going to print money and they're going to go to war.
and then the impact of the inflation is going to be felt through the inflation that we had in the
years in those years and then the financial crisis that came in 2008 of course your keynesian uh

(01:17:46):
fed lapdog economists are not going to say that but it was the inflation of the iraq war that
brought about the financial crisis of 2008 it brought about the inflation and the valuation
of the dollar and of course none of the people who sold the war had to pay a dime for it and
they're still out there making money from speeches and they're still out there influencing the current

(01:18:07):
administration. That wouldn't fly in a world of hard money. In a world of hard money, Paul Wolfowitz
wants to mobilize American troops. He needs to get the money first. And so the U.S. government needs
to go to the people and say, hey, we need to go and bring democracy to Iraq and that's going to
cost a couple of trillion dollars. So we're going to need everybody to chip in a few thousand dollars

(01:18:31):
or whatever it is.
And Americans are just going to say, no, I'd rather have a car.
I'd rather have a house.
I'd rather have a nice vacation or whatever.
I'm not going to be paying for bringing democracy to Iraq, quite simply.
But when you're sold the fiction that there is no bill, that it is all free because of
the money printer, then people don't see that they're paying for it.

(01:18:54):
People are propagandized like morons into thinking that you can just kill people for
free.
and um you on an operational level you can mobilize the troops by just printing the money
without actually taking money from anyone and then people will just see that in the devaluation of
their currency and then like morons they're going to complain about inflation and they're going to

(01:19:16):
ask for the government to impose more taxes on the rich or whatever in order to fix this
completely for ignoring the fact that you can't just mobilize an entire army to go invade a country
halfway around the world without actual economic resources. So if you don't know where they're
paying for all of that, then you are paying for all of that. And I wish you all the poverty in

(01:19:38):
the world as a reward for being complicit in this crime and for being dumb enough to believe that
you have no role to play in financing it. So this is, and then when you look at the, so, you know,
taking it to another layer. You look at the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East over the last

(01:19:59):
few decades. If you have any familiarity with it, and if you're able to think critically beyond
moronic propaganda, it's very obvious all of U.S. foreign policy has only one purpose, which is
Israel. All of this talk about, oh, we're in the Middle East because of oil. Anybody who says that
is a completely delusional idiot Oil is one of the most abundant things in the crust of the earth It all over the planet Nobody has a monopoly on oil If the entirety of the Middle East were to burn down in a nuclear war tomorrow

(01:20:30):
we could still get oil from everywhere else in the world.
There are so many oil fields everywhere.
And the U.S. doesn't need oil from the Middle East.
But also, I think even more importantly,
is that it doesn't matter who's in power in the Middle East,
whether Al-Qaeda takes over all of the Middle East
or whether Israel takes over all of the Middle East
or the British go back
or India takes over all of the Middle East

(01:20:50):
and all of the Middle East oil fields.
No matter who it is, no matter who's in charge,
if it's Vijay Modi or Netanyahu
or Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein
in charge of all of the Middle East oil,
what are they going to do with it?
What are they going to do with it?
They're just going to pump it out of the ground
and then put it in tanks and tell the Americans,
nah, nah, nah, you can't have it?

(01:21:11):
No, they're going to sell it on the market.
and it's a global liquid market where anybody can buy and sell,
and it's impossible to stop somebody from getting oil.
And again, going back to 1970s, a lot of stupid propaganda about the fact that
there was an inflation crisis in the 70s because of the oil embargo.
It's complete nonsense.
It was inflation.
It was because of monetary policy.

(01:21:31):
It was because of going off the gold standard in the 1970s.
So we see that the foreign policy of the U.S. for the past few decades has been,
particularly the Middle East, has cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, maybe a couple of dozen
trillion dollars, you could argue, when you throw in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen,

(01:21:54):
Syria, all kinds of horrible things, and then all of the money that goes to Israel.
All of that, I think, is primarily about Israel. And all of that is because the U.S. is essentially
an Israeli puppet state. The only way to make it in politics in the U.S. is to be an Israeli
traitor, essentially a traitor of your country for Israel. That's why, you know, 1967, Israel

(01:22:18):
attacked the U.S. military in a false flag. They sent out jets and torpedo boats and attacked the
USS Liberty, aiming to sink it for hours. It had clearly visible U.S. flags. They communicated to
the Israelis. We even have recordings from the Israeli pilots telling their command center,

(01:22:41):
why do you want me to hit this thing? It's got a giant American flag on it. And the command center
said, go ahead and hit it. Your job is not to ask questions, just do it. And they did it. And they
attacked it. And they were going to sink the boat. And the point from sinking the boat was
that it would have made, that they were going to implicate Egypt in it. And then that would have

(01:23:02):
brought in the U.S. into the war against Egypt. And the U.S. may have nuked Egypt. The U.S. may have
killed millions of people in Egypt because that was a flagrant act of war. Fortunately,
they weren't able to sink the boat and they had to disappear when another boat started coming close
and some survivors lived to tell the tale. And it's very clear that it was Israel that did it.

(01:23:26):
Now, not a single American politician will talk about this. And I think it's absolutely stunning. If you don't think that America is an Israeli puppet state, ask yourself this question. What is a war act? Attacking soldiers is a war act. That was a war act by Israel against the United States.

(01:23:50):
I don't think the U.S. has had a single legitimate war, at least since the World War II.
You could even argue further than that.
But definitely, I don't think anybody with half a brain cell can find a single war that the U.S. engaged in after World War II that was beneficial to the U.S., that was beneficial to the average American.
No question about it.
And none of them had any legitimate basis.

(01:24:13):
The U.S. had no business going to Vietnam.
It had no business going to Iraq, Afghanistan, all those things.
It was all completely illegitimate.
All of the reasons given were complete lies.
The one legitimate time where the U.S. could have legitimately gone to war was that time.
You had an actual government sending out its military to attack the U.S. military.

(01:24:33):
It's an act of war.
American politicians since 1967 universally never talk about this.
They don't commemorate it.
There's never been a congressman who's gone to the commemoration of the U.S.S. liberty incident.
there was a very very very quick um commission whenever you hear about investigation commission
that gets wrapped up very quickly then you know what's going on it's all being covered up and they

(01:24:55):
said oh well it was mistaken identity which is completely ridiculous completely unbelievable
and until today you know you don't see anybody offering any kind of coherent explanation for this
this is just one of those things that's memory hold and if you talk about it then you're a weird
conspiracy theorist, but there isn't a single coherent narrative. You won't find any of the
pro-Israel traitors in the U.S. willing to get on a proper debate stage and argue about what

(01:25:21):
happened there on the incident of the USS Liberty because it's completely indefensible. There's no
way that anybody with an IQ over 90 could fall for the garbage explanations. There's
eyewitness testimony, and there's countless amount of release documents from Israel itself.
It was a deliberate attack against the American military. There is no way anyone could possibly

(01:25:45):
be stupid enough to rationalize that, all of the evidence away, and try and pretend that this was
a mistake. You basically have to be an American politician to believe something so absurd.
So what this means in a very real sense is that the American political class will stand with the Israeli government against the American military.

(01:26:07):
This is, I think, the real importance of the USS Liberty.
Beyond just the fact that it was a false flag, it established the idea in the mind of the American military that your civilian leadership –
at the end of the day, the U.S. is a country where the military is controlled by the civilian leadership.
But the civilian leadership will not stand by the military if the military is attacked by Israel.

(01:26:31):
I think the implications of this are just absolutely staggering.
And it's a good thing most Americans are essentially drugged out on carbs and fentanyl because otherwise they wouldn't be able to handle this sort of thing.
So, you know, it's very, very obvious what went down there.
And since then, that was really the point, I think, at which the current political regime in the U.S. has been established.

(01:27:00):
Lyndon Johnson presidency and the USS Liberty basically set the tone.
And since then, the pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. have had a free reign to do whatever they want politically,
which was enormously important because before then,
John F. Kennedy was trying to register the Israeli lobby organizations

(01:27:22):
as foreign agents, which is what they are.
It's a foreign country.
But I'm not quite sure what happened to JFK since then.
But anyways, that thing kind of disappeared.
And then by, I don't know what happened, but some sort of accident,
they ended up with LBJ.
Jack Ruby's name may have been Jack Rubinstein, actually,
and they changed it later.
That's funny, huh?
But, you know, correlation is not causation.

(01:27:44):
But anyways, some sort of thing happened.
You know, who knows?
But LBJ came along and LBJ was the first Israeli president of America, the first Israeli puppet president of America, who just made it clear, you know, with the USS Liberty, basically, we are on the side of the Israeli government against the American military.

(01:28:05):
There's no question about it.
and also made it clear that Israeli lobbying groups can have free reign to do whatever they want.
So they lobby like they are local organizations, not like foreign organizations.
And the impact has been absolutely devastating for America and for, I would say, for the Middle East in general.
I think it's been terrible for the people of the Middle East, the natives, but it's also been terrible for the Israeli people who live in this

(01:28:33):
because it's, you know, yes, they're gaining more land and they're expanding, but it's a blank check
to the worst elements in Israeli society. And it's just making these people have all the power in the
world to be able to do whatever they want, and therefore creating more and more enmity and
creating more and more blowback and creating more and more conflict. And that's why, you know,

(01:28:56):
So here we are, 78 years after the establishment of the Zionist land theft regime, it's still having to drag all of its young people into endless wars and conflicts because it's got a blank check from the U.S. to keep paying for those things.
So might as well just take people and put them into the meat grinder because we want to take the West Bank.

(01:29:19):
We want to take Gaza.
We want more land.
All of the messianic idea of let's take the land because the Torah said so.
All of that stuff is insane.
Now, it's completely insane.
And any person who thinks this is any legitimacy to this stuff is essentially incompatible with human civilization.
If you think your holy book overrides actual property rights on the ground, if you think you can go to somebody and tell them,

(01:29:44):
you need to leave your house, I need to take your house, because I have this piece of paper where it
says that today I need to come and take your house because you're from the wrong race and religion,
you're basically incompatible with human civilization. The whole, you know, in my third
book, Principles of Economics, where I summarize economics from the Austrian perspective, basically

(01:30:06):
summarizing the work of Mises and Rothbard. In that book, I try and make the case based on the
work of Mises and Rothbard of why property rights are the foundation of everything in civilization.
The only reason we can have anything nice is because we accept property rights.
Ultimately, the protection of property rights is what gives us civilization. Only when we have
property rights can we plan for the future. Only then do we develop capital. Only then do we have

(01:30:30):
the stability to have peaceful relationships with one another. And only then can we as humans thrive.
And the notion that you can just override people's existing property rights because you've got an old religious document is a recipe for ending civilization.
Because, well, I'm just going to come up with another religious document that says, no, my God says this is mine.

(01:30:54):
And so then we're just back to being animals in the jungle fighting with each other.
I think there would have probably been a lot more peace, and there would have likely been a peaceful resolution of the conflict had the Israeli government not taken over the U.S. in the 1960s.
Had that not happened, the Israeli government and the Israeli people would have had to face a much more normal reality, wherein they have a budget to manage.

(01:31:24):
they, as you know, as we were saying earlier about 19th and 18th century war, if we had a hard money,
if they didn't have access to the US government's money printer, they have a budget to manage and
they have to try and reduce the amount of money that they spend on conflict. And therefore they
can't do very stupid and aggressive things because that invites more and more conflict. But if you've
got the world's money printer under your thumb, well then why would you do that? And so it sounds

(01:31:49):
absurd, but really, you know, after 9-11, the project, sorry, before 9-11,
the project for the new American century said that what we need is we need to take out all
these hostile forces in the Middle East that are hostile to Israel. Somehow that was sold to

(01:32:10):
Americans as being necessary for American interest. And, you know, this is where
equivalent to the Keynesians and the completely, utterly idiotic and vacuous nonsense that is taught
in mainstream universities on economics, exactly as idiotic and nonsensical is all of the

(01:32:30):
geopolitical stuff that gets taught, where generations of scholars have been
created to propagandize people to make them believe that somehow it is in the US interest.
Somehow it matters to the US whether Iraq is a democracy or a dictatorship or a monarchy or whether it's one country or 15 countries or any of that.

(01:32:52):
None of that actually matters to the US, not in any sense.
The US needs to protect its own borders and trade with whoever will trade with it.
And if they stayed out of Iraq's business, Iraq would be better off.
If they stayed out of everybody's business, everybody would learn to sort it out.
But of course, if you want to go and destroy other people's countries, you need an elaborate story.

(01:33:12):
And so we have all these idiotic, elaborate stories about, you know, we need to ensure American hegemony and we need to ensure the world is safe for democracy and we need to ensure that the world can do this and this and that.
It's all essentially Israeli propaganda.
And so the Israelis were very clear about the fact that we need to take out these seven countries.
Afghanistan, and these were countries that were hostile to Israel.

(01:33:33):
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
Those are the seven.
and indeed the u.s has taken out six of them only iran remains and guess what all of the
israeli traitors in the u.s government and in the israeli and the israeli government and its
employees in the u.s government from trump all the way down to your lowest level bootlicking

(01:33:56):
republican piece of shit who's out there posting about israel being his greatest ally what are they
all fixated on today iran bad iran bad iran bad they put their country right in the middle of
our of all of our military bases can you believe that they built the country thousands of years ago
and have been living in a place thousands of years ago precisely so that it would be right in the

(01:34:21):
middle of all our military bases that we have in iraq in afghanistan and in the caspian sea area
so obviously you can't have that that's a grave threat to u.s interest and your average american
politician is stupid enough to repeat this stuff and is integrity-free enough to go along and

(01:34:41):
continue to repeat this stuff. And that's why, you know, the top priority for Americans right now,
even though you walk in American cities and you see just endless encampments of homeless
fentanyl addicts, there aren't big American cities where your children can walk around freely at
night. And Americans think that this is just normal. Whereas, you know, in the civilized world,

(01:35:05):
It's completely normal for children to walk around safely.
It's, you know, you travel in China, in Japan, in the Middle East.
It's extremely common for cities to just be safe.
It's extremely common for there not to be dangerous, homeless drug addicts on the street out there harassing and abusing and assaulting people.
You'd think that might be a little bit more pressing than killing Iranians 6,000 miles away.

(01:35:32):
But nope, this is what your president and your Congress are constantly harping on about. And it's because they don't work for the American people. They work for Israel. So that's the second layer, if you want. There's the current aspect and then the foreign policy in general over the last 60 years.
But the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. And I think in particular, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is so intertwined with fiat because the entire genesis of the criminal enterprise that is the Israeli government was born out of the birth of fiat money during World War I.

(01:36:10):
and this is something that doesn't get discussed often and you know it's one of those things where
brainwashed NPCs will tell you ha ha ha you're just being uh crazy you're being ridiculous there's
no evidence correlation is not causation you know all of these um thought substitute uh
propaganda tools that um idiots deploy to protect themselves from believing uncomfortable truths

(01:36:33):
but in the first world war what happened was that um all these governments went off the gold standard
and in Britain in particular, they had a serious problem.
The war wasn't going well and they were broke
and they had engaged in so much inflation before the war
because the Bank of England was like the Fed today,
the center of the world economy.

(01:36:54):
And so it had a large margin of inflation
where it could create more liabilities
than the gold that it had on hand.
And it could be pretty confident that it won't lose the gold.
It won't have everybody show up
to try and redeem the gold at the same time,
particularly because its liabilities
were spread out all over the world.

(01:37:15):
So it would take a long time for banks in India
to send their pounds to England
and then withdraw their gold.
And then when the bank in India has gold, physical gold,
it's much more expensive for them to trade
with say a Chinese bank or a Iranian bank
or a French bank by sending the physical gold
versus just using the Bank of England's credit facilities.

(01:37:38):
So it made a lot of sense to keep your gold with the Bank of England.
And since it made sense to keep your gold to the Bank of England, it made sense for the Bank of England to print more.
So the Bank of England got into World War I already with only 39% of its pounds backed by gold.
So we already at a level where they had more pounds that were unbacked by gold than they had pounds backed by gold That was the situation in 1914 And then they suspended redeemability

(01:38:05):
and then they confiscated the gold. This is incredible that nobody talks about this.
They confiscated people's gold. It wasn't confiscation. They didn't go to people's homes
and take their gold, but they issued a directive where banks and post offices were no longer allowed
to make payment in gold. And they were telling people to make payment to those organizations in

(01:38:27):
gold. And so people ended up with paper money, and all the gold went into the banks and the central
banks. And I discussed this in detail in the fiat standards. It's an incredible episode,
which nobody talks about. Never. You'll never see it mentioned in the history books.
But they rounded up basically a lot of the gold in Britain, and then they had to ship it to the
U.S. to finance the war. So Britain, by 1915, was already in bad shape. And by 1916, it was worse.

(01:38:54):
And at that point, they desperately needed the U.S. to get into war. They needed the U.S. because
without the U.S. entering into war, things were going really badly for them. And for Britain,
I think probably the worst thing about World War I was the fact that Britain was involved.
because, A, first of all, it brought in all of these other countries from the empire

(01:39:16):
that came into the war and made it a world war rather than a European war.
If Britain hadn't gotten involved, it would have been a European land war.
French, Germans, Russians would have fought each other.
And as Neil Ferguson says, it's a really controversial thesis,
but I think he's absolutely spot on.
If Britain had stayed out, Germany would have likely won.
And then what would have happened?

(01:39:37):
Germany would have expanded its borders a little bit.
and what you would have ended up with, as Ferguson very provocatively puts it,
something quite similar to the European Union that you ended up with anyway by the end of the 20th century,
German political domination over Europe.
And that is something that Britain could have lived with a lot better
than it could have lived with the implications of what happened when it entered the war.

(01:40:00):
But beyond that, even more importantly is if Britain hadn't gotten into the war,
If Britain hadn't been ready to get into the war, the war would not have happened.
If you read the work of people like Albert J. Knock or Harry Elmer Barnes or Scott McMeekin or Pat Buchanan or Sean McMeekin or Scott McMeekin, he's written a great book called The Russian Origins of the World War.

(01:40:29):
and Patrick Buchanan, who's written a wonderful book on World War I and World War II,
but the World War I part is really...
And most people make this controversial because a lot of it is in World War II
and it's very controversial, but the World War I part is even more interesting for me
because the real problem was that the British and the French and the Russians

(01:40:52):
had had a secret alliance going for practically 10 years before the war
with the intention of confronting Germany.
They weren't happy about Germany.
Russia was worried about Germany
because Russia wanted the Balkans
and it wanted Istanbul.
And it had Austria and Germany
stopping it from expanding there.

(01:41:12):
And Britain was worried about Germany
building a navy and expanding an empire.
And France was worried about Germany
and wanted to regain Alsace-Lorraine from Germany.
So the three of them got together.
Now, if they had a formal alliance,
that form of alliance would have been formidable enough that Germany and Austria wouldn't have
picked a fight with it and would have likely given up on trying to take it on. And they would have

(01:41:36):
likely found an accommodation that wouldn't have evolved a lot of fighting. But the alliance was
secret and it was kept secret from the British cabinet and from the British parliament and from
the British people. And then when the war happened, the British entered the war. And I think that was
laid out as a trap deliberately in order to bring in the Germans.

(01:41:58):
But anyways, this is pretty controversial World War I history,
which I'm going to be getting into in my next book, The Gold Standard.
We love these controversial history stuff.
There is so much fiat history to undo.
This has been like the last five months of my rabbit hole diving
and just all these different historical events
that we were just beaten over the head with in school
are almost always completely opposite of what actually happened.

(01:42:22):
It's nuts.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then so the important part for our purposes to go back to Palestine and the US, and this is where it's really fascinating, is that by 1916, the British needed the Americans to get into the war and they worked very hard at it.
And eventually they managed to get it done by 1917. And the way that they managed to get it done was basically to it was a quid pro quo.

(01:42:49):
So the Zionist movement got the U.S. into the war in exchange for Palestine.
And that's why the British, as a repayment for getting the U.S. into the war, they issued the Balfour Declaration, which was to Lord Rothschild.
It was addressed to Lord Rothschild, which is pretty weird if you think about it.

(01:43:11):
Why would the US, why would Britain in 1917 at the height of World War I when things had been going terribly for them for three years, when the conflict was dragging on, when they were stretched financially, why would they be out there telling a British banker that they want to build a theme park summer home country for him and his buddies in the Middle East?

(01:43:34):
And the answer to that is that it was payment back for getting the US into war.
But you don't have to take my word for it.
You can go to the Rothschilds family archive, their own website.
Just go to the Rothschilds family, I think it's called the Rothschilds family archive.
Just Google it.
And they have a whole page on the Balfour Declaration.
And that's what they say.
They say that, you know, our family played a massive role in the Zionist movement because

(01:43:56):
the British wanted us to bring in the Americans into war.
And the Americans were brought into war based on the sympathy to the Zionist movement And I mean they put it in a nice way that America had sympathies to the Zionist movement but ultimately there was a lot of propaganda involved and there was a lot of again the money printer

(01:44:20):
because in 1914, the Federal Reserve was established.
And so what really allowed the U.S. to get into war
was the fact that the Federal Reserve was in place
because the Federal Reserve was capable of printing money
to give it to the government so that it could fight those wars.
Without the Federal Reserve, the U.S. couldn't have gotten into the war
as easily as it did.
It would have needed to raise bonds,
and it would have been a lot more tricky for them to get into war

(01:44:42):
without the Federal Reserve.
But they got into war, and I think, you know,
Now, the best American historians, they all understand.
They all say that the First World War was really the beginning of things going bad for the U.S. government, for the U.S. people.
That's when the U.S. government started to grow because the Federal Reserve and World War I happening around the same period, that was it.

(01:45:05):
That was the knockout blow for America.
It's just been downhill ever since.
even though there was a nice interlude after World War II. I think that pales in comparison
to what the U.S. would have been like if it had stayed out of World War I and if it didn't have
a central bank. And so because of this one thing, because of this deal, the U.S. essentially went
off the rails and has been going downhill ever since. And the Middle East went off the rails

(01:45:27):
because since then, all of the world's money printers have been fixated on one idea only.
We need to get the local population of this tiny little strip of land out or dead so that we can
move in people from all over the world because reasons. We need to move in people from Hungary
and Poland and Russia and Britain and France and Australia and Canada who have never been to that

(01:45:50):
part of the world and have no property in that part of the world or very little property in that
part of the world. We need to move them there so that they can take the property of the people who
have been living there for centuries. And that's just really for me why Israel is the most fiat
thing ever fiat israel is the most fiat entity ever it was created out of the genesis of fiat

(01:46:11):
and its survival has continuously relied on financing through fiat money whether during
the british period or during the u.s period and until today it runs entirely on fiat it's an
entirely fiat creation absolutely i couldn't agree more with all that so one last question

(01:46:32):
just regarding the current state of events, because I do think this is important for people
on both sides of the political aisle that are still locked into this debate, is the red team
and blue team that is perpetually ongoing. Donald Trump really talked about this anti-war stance he
was taking coming into this new administration. How is he doing so far with all this? What are

(01:46:55):
the numbers looking like with Israel? Because what I'm seeing is he's very happy to stop spending on
every country except for Israel. Is that what you're seeing?
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, yeah, I was pretty skeptical because, you know, he had four years
in office and that should have been a very good indicator of how the next four years would have

(01:47:16):
been unless you are a connoisseur of political hopium. So I had my hopes very, very, very low.
And, you know, I don't pay attention to American politics much and I don't particularly care.
I was pretty indifferent between him and Kamala Harris.
I don't think there was anything that would have been ultimately different.

(01:47:37):
And I think just yesterday, you look at the spending bill that came out.
It's pretty much Obama, Obamanomics, Bidenomics.
It's utterly, well, not utterly, but it's practically indistinguishable from the spending bills under the Democrats.
so i think yeah it's it's blue team red team and it's uh owning the libs and it's uh it's it's

(01:48:01):
idiotic childish and an utter stupid waste of time uh you're better off following baseball or soccer
because it's at least interesting and um it's honest and it's entertaining and uh you're
dealing you're you're looking at hard-working people really trying their best not
sociopathic mass murderers, doing horrible things all over the world.

(01:48:24):
You know, there was one brief moment where I was shocked when Trump initially got Netanyahu to stop
the war in Gaza, and he got a ceasefire, which I thought was a great thing. And I was,
I thought I would, I thought that would be a great thing, because it was completely unexpected.
And he did it in his first week in office, which seemed like it was going to set the tone for

(01:48:47):
things. In retrospect, you know, the way that then the deal unraveled, the way that Israel just one
day decided, no, you know what, we're not going to continue with this, and we're just going to
presume the war. And Trump just said, yeah, whatever, have at it, it's your war. Anyway,
it's not mine. Makes me think that it was far more likely that it was actually Israel that
needed the truce, but they didn't want to have the truce. They didn't want to have to ask for it,

(01:49:10):
and they didn't want it to have to appear like they wanted it. I think it was really just that
their military was overstretched and it needed a break. And so they presented it as if, well,
Trump has twisted our arm and so now we have to do it. But then they went back to fighting.
So I think that is a more likely explanation than Trump growing a spine and standing up for his

(01:49:36):
paymasters, basically. And since then, it's just been business as usual. Same old, same old.
Occasionally, he'll post a tweet saying something about not wanting to attack Iraq and not wanting war and so on.
But I frankly think the way that he's been acting with this whole entire idiotic terrorist episode, beyond just the fact that he's politically very much a Zionist and in the Zionist camp,

(01:50:09):
I think there just you know old age and insulin resistance are beginning to take their toll And I think we at a point where I don think he in the same kind of mental state where he was in 2016 I think this kind of you know the triumph of coming back into office after everything that he went through
and being able to win the election after that, I think it's just gone to his head. And I don't

(01:50:31):
think he is quite there. I think the- He looks terrible in the videos I've seen recently. He does
not look good yeah he's old he's old and he's fat and i mean people just think being fat is normal
being fat is an enormous enormous problem to your health at physical health and also to your mental
health and with time and i mean the grab the crap that he eats i mean he eats the worst kind of

(01:50:56):
garbage so i doubt that somebody at his age is um capable of being at that bad of shape and also
maintaining full mental health. And I think you look at the tariffs episode and just the erratic
way they went about it. 20%, 10%, 100%, 140%, three months off. Electronics, yes. This, no.

(01:51:19):
There is absolutely no way that you can... Exactly. It's a clown car. And there's no way that you can...
there's, I'll say this, any Republican who says this is smart, this is genius, would not have said
the same thing if it was Biden who was doing this. And in fact, these policies are much more likely

(01:51:40):
to be Biden policies than Trump policies. These are far more likely to have been passed by Pelosi
and Biden or Obama than Trump. And if last year you told any of the Trump supporters that
Biden's going to impose tariffs on all those countries based on the measure of the trade
deficit, which is such an idiotic thing to do.

(01:52:02):
He's going to impose all these tariffs on all of these countries based on this, and then
he's going to raise it on countries, and then he's going to bring it down, and he's going
to have a three-month pause, and then he's going to do this, and it's going to be to
de-industrialize.
You know, can you just imagine like the lib-owning industrial complex, all of these, you know,
midwit Republican influencers whose job is just to make fun of mentally ill leftist influencers.

(01:52:29):
You know, they would have had a freaking field day with this. They would have had so much fun
tearing down the Democrats for doing this. And over the last few months, it's all been,
yeah, no, actually tariffs are good because it's actually going to help us industrialize.
And then he removes the tariffs. Aha, see, there was the art of the deal. He managed to get us free
trade free trade is actually good tariffs are back on yep we're going to re-industrialize

(01:52:55):
we're going to bring back industry tariffs are off off to the deal free trade is good it's just
astonishing levels of uh npc conditioning six million d chess yeah always it's always there's
always there's always some kind of explanation for this and i think yeah it's grown to it's grown to

(01:53:15):
cult of personality status uh into a pretty dangerous level and you know all of this uh all
of this political game all of these political games they play are ultimately ultimately irrelevant
in the grand scheme of things here we are it's been now four months it's business as usual

(01:53:37):
they shut down usa id they've restored a lot of it so basically you know all of the talk that they
had about government efficiency, reducing government spending, Doge is going to cut $2 trillion.
It's ridiculous. And I think it's just, I've never seen, I think, a political promise
disintegrate as quickly as this Doge scam has. It's actually quite stunning because usually,

(01:54:06):
you know, politicians are always breaking promises, but they usually put in some kind of effort.
So it was only six months ago that Elon Musk was saying we can cut $2 trillion.
And then the last estimate they gave was something like $70 billion, which is a rounding error in the U.S. government budgets.
And it's nothing next to what they're adding on to the spending for defense.

(01:54:27):
So the Department of Defense has already gotten more than $150 billion more than what it had last year.
So the entire thing is a stupid circus is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, couldn't agree more.
And I will just add, if you don't think that it is a circus, then you are the show.
You're not the audience.
I just pulled up a tweet of yours here that I think sums this up quite well.

(01:54:51):
It says, the U.S. left's Russian election hysteria was dumb.
The right's China trade hysteria is dumber.
Neither country threatens the U.S.
Israel owns your leaders, killed U.S. soldiers in a false flag, and sends them to fight its wars,
costing you trillions for no benefit to you.
That's an enemy.
And I think that's a beautiful way of putting it and a good way to start wrapping things up here.

(01:55:12):
We're about two hours.
I have so many notes of threads I want to pull on safety.
We'll have to do another episode in the future.
Where can people go find your work, follow you, and dig deeper into these rabbit holes you're diving into?
I'm on my website, safeddean.com, where you can buy my books, take my online courses in Austrian economics and Bitcoin economics.

(01:55:33):
and you can also find my podcast,
the Bitcoin Standard Podcast,
everywhere where podcasts are.
And I'm also on Twitter,
at Seyfield Dean.
And what else am I doing these days?
Yeah, that's, I mean,
these are social media in general,
Instagram, LinkedIn,
these sort of things.
Nostra?

(01:55:54):
Yeah, Nostra.
When are you going to become
a crazy Nostra maximalist?
I know it's coming.
That's true.
I just have way too many
fundamentalist beliefs
and maximalists in my life
that I'm
out there. Understandable.
It'll happen soon though. I'm getting
deeper and deeper obsessed with Nostra. I really think
it's going to fix so much.

(01:56:16):
Safe and
moods, my man. It has been a
pleasure and an honor to speak with you today. I
really appreciate it. Likewise.
Thank you so much. Have a good day.

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#128 Saifedean Ammous - How Bitcoin Disincentivizes Violence and Defunds the Israeli Land-Theft Machine

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#128 Saifedean Ammous - How Bitcoin Disincentivizes Violence and Defunds the Israeli Land-Theft Machine