Saifedean Ammous The Bitcoin Standard: Don't F*ck with the Money

[Speaker 2] (0:00 - 1:03) Everyone, welcome back to the Here for the Truth podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti. I've got my co-host, Erasmus, back with me. I can see he's in his usual setting now. You're back from New Jersey, bro? Yes, I am. I'm back in California. Good to be back. Totally, man. Yeah, guys, another great episode. Today, we have Seyfriedin Amos joining us. I'll read his bio once he jumps on and you'll learn all about him. But today, we're diving deep into the nature of the inverted economy, into Austrian economics, led and founded by people like Mises Rothbard, some of these great masters of the past. We get into the nature of Bitcoin and the potential Bitcoin proposes as a solution in the push towards freedom and sovereignty and us to be able to thrive as human beings. In the later stages of this episode, we get Seyfriedin Amos' thoughts on the Palestinian-Israel conflict and how property rights enters that discussion there. Thanks for being here. We appreciate it. Enjoy this episode. [Speaker 3] (1:04 - 1:11) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Erasmus. [Speaker 2] (1:14 - 2:45) Okay. Today, we have another incredible guest with us. Seyfriedin Amos is an internationally best-selling economist and author. In 2018, he authored The Bitcoin Standard, The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the best-selling book on Bitcoin, published in 37 languages. In 2021, he published The Fiat Standard, available in 12 languages. And in May 2023, Seyfriedin published his latest book, Principles of Economics, a comprehensive textbook in economics in the Austrian school tradition. Seyfriedin teaches courses on the economics of Bitcoin and economics in the Austrian school tradition. On his online learning platform, seyfriedin.com, he also hosts The Bitcoin Standard podcast. He was a professor of economics at the Lebanese American University. He holds a PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University, a master's in development management from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor in mechanical engineering from the American University of Beirut. Seyfriedin, thanks for being here for The Truth. Thank you for having me. Absolute pleasure. One way we always like to kick this off with first-time guests is we want to get a little bit deep into your personal hero's journey. So what were some of the major, I guess, catalyzing and transformative moments along the path that, I guess, led you down the path you've been down? Maybe even, were you always drawn towards the field of economics? How did that come about? But yeah, what are some of the major things that come up in terms of you being who you are today and doing what you do? [Speaker 1] (2:49 - 3:00) That's a difficult question to answer. It's really just a very long story, 43 years of one thing after another leading to where I am now. [Speaker 2] (3:01 - 3:02) 1980. 1980, brother. [Speaker 1] (3:03 - 6:32) Yes, yes. So it's not very easy for me to pick out one specific thing. I mean, I grew up in Palestine in Ramallah. My father's a doctor. I was always supposed to be a doctor because obviously that's what doctors want. But I messed up. I failed. I disappointed my father, I guess, and I went to engineering school instead. But for some reason, I was just, during university years, I took an economics course and I was just very interested in economics during my university studies. So then I pursued it in my master's and in my PhD. And I just, towards the end of my PhD, I really became obsessed with the topic, in particular, monetary economics. And I would say it was in 2008, 2007, 2008, that the global financial crisis was happening, that the subject really drew me in. And then I came across what is known as the Austrian School of Economics, which is a completely different way of looking at economics from what I was being taught at university. And that really opened my eyes and made me realize, yeah, this is something that's very interesting. And I became quite obsessed with it. And then I went on to a job where I was teaching economics at university. And then I came across Bitcoin and it was everything that I had thought about economics applied in software. Initially, I was very skeptical. I didn't think it could work to the point where, like most people, I just think that my ignorance of it is an argument against it. And then you immediately form a preconceived notion about why it can't work. And then you don't bother looking to it because you already know that it's not going to work, which is why closed mindedness can be a very expensive mistake. But I took a closer look, eventually, as it continued to refuse to go away, I took a closer look. And it became something that has just assumed me for quite a while where I just keep reading more about it, learning more about it. And then I started writing about it. And then I wrote the Bitcoin Standard and I became convinced this was what I need to be doing. I found an enormous number of readers who liked my book. My book became pretty popular, been translated to about 37 languages. And so it was the combination of everything together. It was I'd been teaching economics for almost 10 years. And then I decided I was just going to do that, but on the internet. And so all the skills that I learned from communicating the ideas of economics to a classroom of students served me very well to figure out how to communicate these ideas to a broader audience, a global audience. And then all of the studying that I'd done through all those years of economics and alternative economics that is different from what we taught at university was really ideal for understanding the economics of Bitcoin, because it applies in the face of everything that's conventional. So these things just fit in together. And then I also happen to think that Bitcoin is the biggest solution to the world's biggest problems. And I take pleasure in explaining that. And that's where I am, where I am in life. [Speaker 2] (6:32 - 7:09) Well, I think we'll get into you explaining all about Bitcoin, but I want to go back a little bit, because I'm curious. I think this is what many people face. They go through the academic system. And then this goes for many different industries where they're taught how things are, and then they come out of it. And their curiosity leads them down a path where they realize, huh, maybe things aren't as I was taught in academia. How was that process for you coming to certain realizations based on what you learned and how did that impact conversations maybe you had with fellow associates or people in school, family members? I'm just curious that whole process, how that was for you. [Speaker 1] (7:11 - 10:19) Yeah, it was very intense. It's not a fun thing to go through if you're at a university graduate program, and everybody is just going by the book, following through on the curriculum. And essentially, it's a really competitive environment in which everybody's trying to do their best. And if you're trying to question what's going on, I mean, it's a little bit like a professional soccer player trying to question the rules of the football game while it's taking place. You're not going to convince the referee to change the rules of the game for you. He can't change the rules of the game for you. And I think that's a useful metaphor, because most people, during something as stressful as graduate study, they have their head down, and they're just trying to score the next goal in front of them, follow the game plan. They're not in a position to sit and ask deeper questions about, I'm sorry, why are we playing the way that we're playing? And why is this game structured this way? So it's not very easy. And I think that is a big problem in modern academia because of aspects that I discuss in my books. The fact that government funding finances academia makes it, in my opinion, pretty immune to reality because it can teach whatever absurd things that people want to hear. And these things don't face the test of the market. They don't have to succeed on the market. They don't have to make people better off in order for these ideas to continue to propagate. There's no cost to failure, effectively. So bad ideas can continue in this kind of setting because they are not financed by the value of the success that they provide to the people who learn them on the market. So universities don't really have strong incentive to be very productive in the real world. Their real money comes from government incentives and from government financing, which means they need to... You pay the piper, you call the tune. And so they need to call the tune, they need to sing the tune of the people who pay them. And that's, in my opinion, why universities have moved away from free inquiry and instead switched to a system of essentially indoctrination and top-down information. So it's really not conducive. And it has resulted in what I believe is just a corruption of many, many fields of inquiry. In other words, I mean, in my opinion, economics, what is top mainstream economics is essentially bogus. Mainstream climate science is bogus. Mainstream nutrition science is complete nonsense. It's criminal. It's causing so much problems for the world. All of these things make me think that there's a serious problem with the way that education is run and the way that education functions. [Speaker 2] (10:21 - 11:01) Yeah. I mean, for me, I would say mainstream education is incredibly demoralizing. I mean, even particularly growing up, I had no interest in the economics that I was taught, business, commerce. But then coming out of that and looking into the Austrian school and your books, et cetera, I find it incredibly empowering, incredibly interesting, incredibly like it resonates on such a deep level. So it's almost like the education system that's there is not intended to inspire. So I know this is a very deep topic, but on a general level, what are some of the major fallacies of the way economics is taught in mainstream academia? And how does the Austrian school, so to speak, fly in the face of that? Yeah. [Speaker 1] (11:03 - 16:06) So I guess we could discuss this from the methodological point of view, but that might be a little too boring. Let's think of it in terms of what it actually means for your day-to-day life. I think that's probably more relevant to most listeners. One of the most important ways in which they differ is the different conception of money. And government economics starts from the premise that it is the government that creates money, the government that gives us money. And the question in front of us as a society collectively is how do we manage and how do we run that money? And that is a great way to paper over the question of, hang on, why should the government even be involved in the provision of money? The Austrian school of economics is the only school of economics that rejects the idea that money is a product of government, that money is something that governments can provide. Instead, the Austrian school presents an explanation for why money is a product of the market. Money comes along from the market. People will naturally deal with one another and trade with one another. And naturally, they're going to have a problem when trading with one another, which is that what we call the coincidence of wants problem, which is that I want what you have, but you don't want what I have. And so therefore, I need to sell what I have to somebody who has something that you have and then get that thing and give it to you. Sorry, sell it to somebody who has something that you want and then get that thing and give it to you. And then I'll be able to give you something of value and you can give me the thing that I want. So naturally, we're going to have to use something that is a medium of exchange, something that we use only to exchange. So I buy that thing, not because I want to own it, because I want to consume it, because it's useful for me. I just buy it so I can give it to you. That is effectively what becomes money, because eventually, people try all kinds of things, but naturally on a market, some things are going to do this job better than others. And so these things will become more and more money like. And then eventually, the thing that does these things best eventually wins out because people start accumulating more and more of it. And then the more people want to trade with it, then the more it makes sense for other people to trade in it. And so the more people use it, because it does its job better, it effectively dominates. It's like a network effect. And the thing that holds onto its value best eventually ends up naturally becoming the best money and the money that everybody uses. And it's because people can recognize that this thing is good at holding onto its value. But even if they don't recognize it, it's just going to happen anyway, because this thing is going to be good at holding onto its value. And so the people who hold it are going to do better than the people who don't. And so over time, it's going to result in more and more people being able to maintain wealth, if they're on this, and more and more lost wealth for people who are on something else, using any other form of money. And so that leads us to one thing becoming money. And that is something that is at the heart of how the Austrian school understands economics. And once you understand this, once you understand that you don't need the government to provide money, well, the question is then why do they? That is a very, very deep rabbit hole. Once you ask that question, you realize, oh, wow, we live in a messed up world. I mean, it's a little bit, I mean, there's the moment when you find out that Santa Claus is not real. And then there's the moment that you find out about the sex and procreation and how you were made. And then there's the moment when you find out about why your government is handling your money. I think those are the three stages of growing up. Those are the three milestones of life. One at around age seven, one at around age 14, and then, you know, childhood, puberty, and then really adulthood comes along when you understand how money works. So figuring out why they do it, and then figuring out what are the consequences of them doing it and what would the world look like if they didn't do it? I mean, how much better would life be if we didn't have our entire monetary system optimized for people to rob us? I mean, just imagine how much better life would be, both in the fact that we would all have a lot more wealth accumulated over time, and because we would all have, and because they, basically governments, wouldn't have this endless fountain of money to finance every stupid idea, every criminal idea that they come up with, and think about all the suffering that that causes around the world. So, yeah, I would say this is really why Austria exists as kind of a big deal. [Speaker 2] (16:08 - 16:11) Yeah. I mean, it's almost like a stranglehold on civilization, right? [Speaker 1] (16:13 - 21:42) Absolutely. I really do think of it this way. And that's one of the main important themes in my second book, The Fiat Standard, and it is also the kind of final chapter of my third book, Principles of Economics, which is, in general, a book about economics. And in this book, I explain economics from scratch, from the Austrian perspective, and I explain why economics is not just about memorizing numbers or trying to figure out how to make money on the stock market or any of those things. Economics is about understanding how humans behave with one another, and how humans act, and how we build a society for one another, and how civilization emerges because of our ability to economize and because of our desire to economize. And so, because we realize that we are infinitely more productive if we work together, we learn to work together, we learn to become civilized, we learn to live with each other, and we develop the institution that allows us to do this, which is property rights. So, we accept each other's property rights, we accept that everybody gets to keep their property rights, and then we're able to cooperate, and we're able to work together, and we're able to make things happen that we would never be able to make if we were working individually. I mean, try and go and live out in the wilderness for a year and see if you can make it. You will most likely not survive. I think the chances of you surviving are less than not. We need to live as a society, and this is true today, and it's been true for all of human history. We need to live as a society in order to thrive because the division of labor, our ability to accept each other's property rights, allows us to divide labor between ourselves, to trade with each other freely, and that increases our productivity enormously. Imagine a community of one person. What is possible for you to produce if you wake up every morning and work all day? What are you going to be producing if it's just you? You're barely able to produce your food and shelter, and you might fail at that and starve and die or die in the cold. But on the other hand, if you're in a society of a million people, you can focus on one tiny little thing, and the rest of the people will each work on one tiny other little thing, and then you can all trade with one another, and then you'll be so much more productive because you're focused on one thing and because you spend your life working on it, and everybody else is so much more productive. So trading with others becomes far more productive for you, and it's true at a scale of two people or a million people or eight billion people for the whole planet. So that's why if you want to be productive today, you have to be engaged in the division of labor, and you have to be in the global market trading with people from all over the world, which we all do. If you're buying anything today, it's produced through a very sophisticated supply chain spread out all over the world. And that's really what our human civilization is. And it all rests on the premise of respecting property rights. And what fiat money does is undermine that because it's built on the idea that government gets to take from all of our money, it gets to from all of our wealth, and it gets to spend it as it wants. We don't get to keep our money and spend it as we want. And then it takes from us the ability to save for the future. It takes from us the ability to provide for our future. So it makes us reliant on government, and it gives government the ability to spend and do whatever it wants. So it completely unbalances society in favor of collectivism at the expense of the individual, and in favor of an entity that can violate rights. I mean, they are there in principle to protect your rights, but they do that by taking 80% of your paycheck or something like that, if you think about all the taxes that you're paying. So that's a really good extortion racket that they've got there. They tell you, here, we are here to protect your wealth, but we're going to take 80% of it. That sounds to me like you're essentially a slave who's getting a little bit of spare change to go and play with at the end of your day. And that's effectively what it is. That's what fiat money allows them to do. It allows them to make all the wealth on their territory subject to their approval. Effectively, everybody becomes a slave. And then since we can't save, we have to keep borrowing in order to finance major expenses, because our money is crappy. It doesn't hold value. So over time, it's difficult for us to save. And so we're constantly getting in debt. Everybody's getting in debt. Everybody's always getting in debt. And the more you get in debt, the cheaper things effectively become for you. So there's a huge incentive to get in debt, because not getting in debt is also very expensive, because you're always suffering from inflation if you're not in debt. Whereas if you're in debt, you're at least ameliorating the effects of inflation on your wallet, because you are long debt effectively. So you're short the national currency. And if the national currency is devalued, then the value of your debt goes down. So that's why everybody's got to be in debt at all times, which ends up making you effectively a debt slave. [Speaker 2] (21:42 - 21:46) Well, you know the system's inverted when you have to be at a loss to attempt to win. [Speaker 1] (21:48 - 22:31) That's a very profound observation. Yes, absolutely. It makes no sense. And that's why I say it in the fiat standard. It's a monetary system where everybody's looking to accumulate a negative balance. The success there is to accumulate the highest possible negative balance. If you look at the richest people in the world, they're the biggest borrowers in the world. They take out the biggest loans. And that works out for them because they get into very high amounts of debt, but they acquire very sizable assets. And so the winning move is to get a negative balance to be in a lot of debt. And that means effectively financial security is not available for anybody. Nobody can be really financially secure because you're always going to be in debt. [Speaker 2] (22:32 - 22:33) Mm-hmm. [Speaker 1] (22:34 - 22:59) I mean, you're either going to witness your purchasing power eroded because of inflation, or in which case you're constantly losing your financial security, or you're going to be in debt, in which case you don't have financial security because you're two or three or four payments away from losing your collateral. Could be your house, your car, your business, your multi-billion dollar business even. [Speaker 2] (23:01 - 23:32) Yeah. Yeah. The way I see it is when the monetary system or the money is debased, what's really being debased is the value of our own life force, because ultimately money is simply the symbolic representation of life force exchange. So when we think about money being debased and inflation, all the rest of it, really what that's hampering with is one's vital energy on the most fundamental level, right? [Speaker 1] (23:34 - 27:41) Yeah, absolutely. It is effectively robbing us all because... And another way I like to think of it is in terms of time preference, in that when we have a money that... Or think of it this way, naturally, the thing that ends up being money is always the thing that holds onto its value best, as I was explaining a little bit earlier. And so therefore, that's chosen as money precisely because it allows you to store value into the future. So the better our money is, the better we can store value into the future because we're more likely to have the value that we store today in the future. And therefore, we're always going to be subject to the efficiency of the monetary technology that we use in understanding our own decisions. In other words, if we have a money that is expected to appreciate over time, then you have a fair sense of certainty about the future. And that allows you to start planning more about the future, so you become a more long-term oriented person. On the other hand, if you have money that is expected to lose value over time, then you don't have a reliable way for providing for your future. You don't have an easy way of giving yourself things to have in the future. So the future is hazy. The future is more uncertain. And how do you counter that? What do you do? Well, you react to that by becoming a lot more present-oriented. And so this, I believe, has been enormously impactful for us as a society, as individuals, because we are moving more and more toward thinking about the present rather than the long-term. And I think you see this everywhere. You see it in the way that people behave financially, but also in everything, in culture, in music. You see that people just do things very quickly. People- Instant gratification culture. Yeah. Exactly. Everybody talks about instant gratification culture, but I believe the only way to understand that is that it is a product of the fact that our money is being devalued. And so that's effectively reversing the process of civilization. All throughout human history, we're accumulating more capital, and we are becoming better at storing wealth in our hard money. And we're constantly finding harder and harder money, so we're becoming able to provide for the future with more efficiency. So we're becoming more and more cognizant of the future. So we think more about the future. So we accumulate more capital, and that makes us more productive. If you have more machines, you're able to produce more. So we become more productive. We become more future-oriented when our money is constantly improving. And the last century has been the opposite process. Our money is constantly declining, and we're returning back effectively. We're de-civilizing. We're becoming animals again, almost, because we're losing the ability to think about the future, and we're going back. And I think this is, I think, a very, very profound criticism of the way that the monetary system works. And I think if you look at even artists, like if you read the work of Jack Barzun, who's a cultural critic, he died about 10 or 15 years ago. He was almost 100 years old. He talks, he's got an incredible book called From Dawn to Decadence that discusses the history of Western civilization. And he says the 20th century was a century of decadence. He doesn't get into money. He doesn't get into monetary economics. He doesn't include this monetary explanation. But he clearly says that the decline started around World War I, which is exactly the same time that we went off the gold standard and moved to fiat money. And I don't think it's a coincidence. I think this is really the explanation, because at every level, you've switched people's operating system from something that was long-term focused to something that is short-term focused. [Speaker 2] (27:42 - 28:00) So when we become more present oriented and less future oriented, the quality reduces as well. So when we look around and we see horrific art, culture, music, movies, et cetera, this is also a product of us becoming less future oriented. Is that right? [Speaker 1] (28:02 - 29:06) I think so. I think these things are highly related. I mean, in the Bitcoin standard, I use the example, which has gone pretty viral. People keep tweeting it about it all the time. We're posting it on various social media. It was hard money that financed the Brandenburg concertos. And it was easy money that financed artists' twerks. I don't think that's entirely coincidental. You think about art on the gold standard, it was very different from the kind of thing that we think of as art today. In fact, just yesterday, I saw some of these crazy climate activist people had thrown, I think, soup or something on the Mona Lisa. And somebody asked a very good question on Twitter. Why is it they don't do this stuff to modern art pieces? It's really interesting. Yeah, why would nobody, I mean, there's modern art pieces in these museums that go for 100 or $200 million or something like that. You'd think they'd be out there trying to splatter those things, but they don't. Why not? [Speaker 2] (29:07 - 29:16) The soup being spread on the Mona Lisa is what modern art is, like largely just that. They could take a picture of that and call it modern art. [Speaker 1] (29:16 - 31:02) Exactly. And I mean, you could take a piece of modern art and you throw some soup on it and you wouldn't be able to tell if it was a vandal or if it was part of the artwork. There's absolutely nothing different about it. In fact, and I also mentioned this in the Bitcoin standard, this has happened to several modern artists that janitors in museums would throw away their installations because it's garbage. They're going around, they're cleaning and this artist came and made a big mess and he thinks of it as his masterpiece. But in the after hours, the janitor comes in and just throws it all in the garbage because it is garbage and it looks like garbage. I mean, people think that this is just a matter of taste, but it's not just a matter of taste. I mean, the Sistine Chapel was not just something that required somebody to sit there and haughtily splatter some paint. I mean, Michelangelo spent four years hanging from the ceiling to make the Sistine Chapel. He wrote a poem about how awful it was for him and the health conditions that it caused him because for four years he was hanging from the ceiling, barely able to eat so that he could finish the thing. It takes a lot of work. It's very difficult and it took him, of course, a lifetime of work to be able to get to the point where he could hang from that ceiling and do this. And most modern artists don't do that. They just figure out a way of doing something shocking in a few minutes and that's it. And it's all about finding inspiration to do something shocking that can shock people rather than sitting your ass down and learning how to get really good at something over 20 years and then getting actually good at it. [Speaker 2] (31:03 - 31:21) Yeah, there's no value for mastery in that sense. Yeah, no, for sure. And I kind of want to talk about that too because so many people, I think if you ask them, they'd think we're living through such innovative times. But can you talk about the correlation between innovation and historically speaking and sound money? [Speaker 1] (31:22 - 35:17) Yeah, I think so. We see technology is advancing and technology does continuously advance generally. We're constantly finding new things because technology is easy to build on because ideas are difficult to destroy. So you can destroy a wheel, but it's very difficult to destroy the actual idea of a wheel because people can just keep making more and more wheels. So it only takes inventing the wheel once to never be able to get rid of the wheel because people will just continue to find more ways of building on it. And then they'll devise new things that can add onto the wheel, a chariot, and then a car, and then a train, and then an airplane, and then all kinds of different things that will be made possible because of all these technologies that build up on each other. So of course, technology today is more advanced than any time before. We continue to make it better every day by inventing new things. However, if you think about the most important inventions that we think of as 20th century inventions, because for the vast majority of the world, they only materialized in the 20th century, but really they came about in the 19th century. Most of the most important inventions of the 20th century were really 19th century inventions, the telegraph, the car, the airplane, the subway, the elevator, so many interventions in medicine, so many products that came to us from industrialization, essentially. It was in the 17th and 18th century that we creased automation and industrialization. And then once we developed the engines, then it was off to the races, taking the engines and using them to make everything better. And that was what happened in the 19th century. And of course, we kept on building up on that since then. But I think the most important inventions came in the 19th century. And I also found an academic quantitative work that finds that if you look at the number of important inventions, it has a list of the 6,000 something most important inventions in history. And it looks at the dates at which they came about, and it compares them to the population to get the ratio of inventions per capita. And you find that the most innovative area was the 19th century, late 19th century. And it's been downhill since then. And I think there's truth to that. I think when you look at how people were actually innovating, when you think about the Wright brothers, the Wright brothers weren't some massive government research program, and they weren't the university research lab. They were two bicycle shop owners. And they used to go and try and make an airplane on their spare time. They'd take equipment from their bike shop and use it to build an airplane. And that's how they managed to figure out how to fly. That's how we invented flight as humans. It was a couple of guys in their spare time. Now, why did they have spare time? Because they weren't debt slaves like all of us today. Back then, you could be a bike shop owner from North Carolina, and you'd have savings because you work every day. You fix people's bikes. They pay you in gold and silver coins. You keep those gold, silver coins, and their value appreciates. And so you have savings. You have spare time. You have freedom. You can dedicate your energy to the things that you want. And you have the mental clarity to work on the things that you want to do. You're not a debt slave that has to work all day, every day towards paying off your debt because your money is crappy and you're never able to save. I think we'd have a lot more inventions today if we had more people who were financially secure because their money works. [Speaker 2] (35:18 - 36:27) And they'd have more time, and they could be more productive. We can't think beyond ourselves. Our capacity to think greater is totally dependent on the amount of time that we have to actually think. But if we're all stuck in survival, constantly just trying to keep the motion going, trying to keep our heads above water, of course, we're not going to get the crazy inventions and the innovation and the magnificent art that we've seen in the past. People are struggling to breathe, metaphorically speaking. Yeah. I actually compared this to... We were talking about art before. I trained as an actor for 10 years. And I think about what it was like 60 years ago to be an actor in New York City. Rents weren't as high. You weren't just having to work six days a week to provide and pay your bills. You had more time to explore and be imaginative. And I look at that even in terms of some of the quality of acting that you see today versus some time in the past. So that's just something that popped in my head that relates to what we've been talking about. For sure. All right, man. So talk to us about Bitcoin and why this is the draw for you and why this is potentially the solution out of this. [Speaker 1] (36:29 - 39:21) Well, the reason for that is that Bitcoin is the hardest money that has ever been invented. So it's the hardest money to produce. So remember, I was saying that money is basically a technology for transferring value to the future. And whatever ends up getting chosen as money is whatever is the best at doing this job, whatever is the best at holding on to value into the future. And the thing that that was historically in... At any point in time, whatever is the hardest to make ends up being chosen as money. And in a global economy, which is what we became by the end of the 19th century, when the whole world was trading with one another because of modern technology, allowing us to travel everywhere and to move stuff around everywhere. Because of that, we transformed into a world that was all on the gold standard because gold was the hardest money. It's the hardest money to make. And so now Bitcoin comes along and it's money that is harder than gold. Its supply growth rate is currently similar to gold's. It's around 1.8%, which is generally what gold does. And this is the unique thing about gold. It's because we don't consume gold, we're constantly stacking more gold and it's being added onto the stockpiles of the existing gold supply. And that leads to modern new production of gold always being a tiny fraction of the existing stockpiles, whereas all other metals, we're always consuming them. And so that's why gold only grows at around 1.8% per year. And Bitcoin started off with a very fast, very high percentage growth rate, but then that percentage continued to drop over and over time. Now it's at 1.8%. Starting this year in two months or three months time in April, it's going to drop by half. Every four years, it drops by half. And in April, it's going to drop from about 1.8% to around 0.9%. And so that's going to make Bitcoin really the hardest money in the world. In other words, the hardest money to create more of. And I think that's really what humanity needs. I mean, this is exactly what we need as a human race. We need a form of money that nobody can make. Everybody has to earn. That's it. If you want money, you need to work. And the way to get it is to work for people so that they give you money and to do useful things for them, sell them things that they want. You can't just print the money, which is the way to make money in the current fiat system, because there's a massive amount of inflation. Every year in the best currencies in the world, think the US dollar, the Euro, the Swiss franc, with these best currencies, the supply increases every year by about 7%, 8%, 10% or something like that. [Speaker 3] (39:22 - 39:25) Now, a short break from the episode. [Speaker 2] (39:25 - 40:24) We have an awesome February lined up in our community, Friends of the Truth. The great Simon Esler, who's joined us twice previously for two very popular episodes. He produced an awesome film, the documentary called Cut, where he dives deep into this whole transgenderism push, which we see all around us. Simon's a great guy. Can't wait for that members-only podcast. Plus, two community calls, nervous system call, a GNM call, an astrology call. We're covering it all inside Friends of the Truth. If you're down to connect the awesome community, get in touch with us personally and connect with us and just hang out with awesome people. Find a true tribe, find a true home that gets you, that shares your values, where you can be real and vulnerable. That's our intention with this community, to create a safe space where people can be themselves and pursue the things that they're interested in and talk about them with others who are also on the same page. Friendsofthetruth.co to learn more about that and sign up or hit the link in the show notes. [Speaker 3] (40:25 - 40:26) Back to the episode. [Speaker 1] (40:27 - 41:55) That's for the better cases, best cases of the national currencies. In the worst cases, it can go up 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, maybe even a hundred percent supply per year. For the majority of the people who live in the world, they live in countries that have terrible currencies whose supply doubles every few years. If you take the overall global average, it's 14% for the whole planet. The average fiat user over the last 60 years has witnessed the supply growth rate of about 14% per year, which means that you double the quantity in about five years. The money doubles every five years on average, which is incredible. I mean, you're constantly witnessing the value of your wealth dissipate and decline over time. For most people, they don't have an alternative. You could think that, all right, you could buy gold, but gold doesn't really function as money because it's very expensive to move it around. We live in a global economy where you're buying things all over the world and there is no gold based banking system because government ban it because they want to keep their stupid Ponzi going. You have to deal with their Ponzi and you have to get robbed. Your only way of using modern money is to get in on your government's local Ponzi. That's just not good. Bitcoin offers us way out of this. [Speaker 2] (41:56 - 42:00) When you say hardest money, do you mean the scarcest money? Is that interrelated? [Speaker 1] (42:02 - 44:16) It's the one whose supply increases at the lowest supply growth rate. Okay, cool. Why does Bitcoin have value? Because people choose to value it. That's the same reason that anything anywhere has value. Why does anything has value? It's because people subjectively see value in it. Value is something that's subjective. The best example of this is think about oil. There was a time in which oil had negative value. You needed to pump oil out of the ground. If you had a piece of land you wanted to build or you wanted to grow crops on it, you would pay people to come and pump the oil off the ground for you so that you could use the land. Then people realized, oh no, well actually, this oil thing is quite useful. You could burn it and then you can do magical things with the machines that burn it. Then oil goes to having a positive value. It's entirely subjective and people decide it. In this case, I think in the case of Bitcoin, it's a form of money because it has a payment network that allows you to send money all over the world. It allows you to do that without having to resort to any financial institutions that are under the supervision of your government. To use that network, you need to hold the Bitcoin currency. Therefore, people begin to value it. Then it has another important attribute, which is the one that I mentioned earlier, which is that its supply grows at a very small and decreasing growth rate. Its supplies cap is only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoins. We continue to make more Bitcoin, but at an increasing rate and eventually it stops. The production stops and falls to zero. Currently, the world is at, we already have about 19 and a half million Bitcoins in circulation. There's only another one and a half million Bitcoin that are going to be produced in the next 100 years or so. It's capped and that means if you hold a little bit of that Bitcoin, then you would expect its values to go up over time. [Speaker 2] (44:16 - 44:36) Yeah. For example, I'm just going to play devil's advocate a little bit. We're saying pre-World War I, there was a gold standard. Payment of fiat money was backed by gold. I guess the question from some people is like, what's Bitcoin backed by? [Speaker 1] (44:36 - 45:51) Well, Bitcoin's not backed by anything. What is gold backed by? Gold is not backed by anything. Backing in the case of money is just a specific concept that refers to a form of money that is redeemable or well, I should say a form of financial instrument that is redeemable for money. In other words, when the dollar was backed by gold, you could take a set amount of dollars to a bank and they'd give you a set amount of gold in exchange. That was what it meant. It's redeemable for it. Fiat money, government money today is not really backed by anything. You can't exchange the dollar for anything except other goods and services. It doesn't say anything on the dollar bill that says, this dollar is redeemable for this many grams of gold or ounces of gold or whatever. The dollar isn't backed by anything. Gold isn't backed by anything. Tomatoes aren't backed by anything. Computers aren't backed by anything. We value things because we see value in them. Bitcoin is also not backed by anything, but people value it for its own sake. [Speaker 2] (45:52 - 46:20) Because of its own properties as a use of money, right? Exactly. What do you think is the best entry point for people in terms of learning about Bitcoin? Because I think a lot of people get overwhelmed by the technological aspects of it and they're just like, well, I don't even know where to go. I don't know where to start. I mean, besides reading your book, is it just something that you have to do? Because in order to challenge something that's already been going on, you have to put the time and the effort and the work to learn something new. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. [Speaker 1] (46:20 - 48:09) I mean, I got to say there are no easy shortcuts. There's no very quick way of understanding how all this stuff works. I think there's no alternative to putting in the work, really. You need to figure it out. You need to just sit down and understand it. I mean, obviously I'm biased here, but I think my book is a great place to start. And the reason for that is that I think the first step should be the why. And my book is there to explain the why. So my book is not going to teach you how to use Bitcoin. It's not going to explain to you how to buy Bitcoin, how to hold it, all of these things, all of the how of Bitcoin is not included in my book. But I think you're not going to understand the how, or you're going to mess up the how if you don't understand the why. You need to understand the purpose at the beginning. So just starting from the starting point of why am I doing this and understanding the importance and the consequence of it is why I would recommend my book as a starting point. And that's really how I think of it. So my book explains why Bitcoin is the best money that we've ever had as a humanity, and what are the implications of having this. And then that will get you curious into thinking about the how of Bitcoin. And then the how, it's not easy. I'm not going to tell you that there's a 15-minute YouTube video that'll just explain that. You need to sit down, read books, read blog posts, watch your YouTube videos, consider all kinds of different options and alternatives for how to do things. But driving a car isn't easy, but you learn how to do it. [Speaker 2] (48:10 - 48:17) Yeah, totally. So why does Bitcoin stand alone versus the rest of the crypto world? [Speaker 1] (48:20 - 51:57) The difference between Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrencies is that Bitcoin is the only one that is truly decentralized. The rest of them claim to be decentralized, but I don't believe that that makes any sense because ultimately decentralization is not something that you can just download as a software. It's not an app you install. It's not a code you run. It's not a cloak that you wear. You can copy the code, but you can't copy the decentralization that Bitcoin has, which is a product of its unique journey and evolution. And a key point in that is that it was the first one. Because it was the first one, it was able to grow in a way in which nobody was able to control it because everybody who was interested in this stuff was working on it. And specifically, the historical coincidence around Bitcoin is that the guy who did it disappeared. He was there as an anonymous person for the first couple of years, and then he disappeared and nobody knows who he is. And so because of that, there's never been an admin for Bitcoin. There is no central authority. There's never been the guy behind Bitcoin. This guy's just disappeared. Nobody knows who he is. And I think this is an essential ingredient to the success of the currency because it's operating without anyone being in charge. There's no customer service. There's no CEO. There's nobody in charge, and yet it works. So when you have that in the first one that gets made, well, then it becomes very difficult to make another one that's also decentralized for the simple reason that anybody who's looking for something that's actually decentralized, that doesn't have anyone in charge, is going to go for the one that's already working as decentralized because they're going to know that there's no way that they can improve on it in that sense of decentralization. So you already have a network that has a million people on it, and you're thinking of making something on your own. Well, you're starting with one person. They're starting with a million. So obviously, they're much more decentralized. So who's going to start their own network? Not the people that are prioritizing decentralization. And that's why effectively of all the other currencies, the only ones that you've ever heard of, there's more than 25,000 other currencies at this point, the only ones that you have ever heard of are the ones that have a centralized team in charge that has been promoting them and pushing them and helping people use them and mining them and coding them and telling the world about them. And that group of people is in charge of it. And we've seen this happen several times with all of these digital currencies. It's very trivial for them to change the consensus rules and change any of the parameters of the network. So the second biggest currency after Bitcoin, they've changed the supply schedule, how much production is going to take place. They've already changed it several times, and they're likely going to change it again. And that effectively means there's a political group of people that are there that are in charge of it. And I mean, it doesn't really matter how they arrive at the decisions that they arrive at, what matters is that these decisions can be taken. But you do not have something like this when it comes to Bitcoin. There's no group of people that can get together and decide to change the rules of Bitcoin. [Speaker 2] (51:57 - 52:16) Yeah. And what is it that, for example, has locked in the 21 million scarcity of Bitcoin? Is that simply a code that's been implemented by Satoshi that can't be messed with? Or like, is it 100% impossible that there can be more than 21 million Bitcoin in circulation? Do we know that for a fact yet? [Speaker 1] (52:18 - 53:39) I mean, ultimately, the answer is that you get to run the Bitcoin code that you want on your own machine. So as long as you want a Bitcoin with 21 million, you could have a Bitcoin with 21 million. And the first group of people to get into Bitcoin, the ones that really got into Bitcoin early, and by early, I mean pretty much anybody who's gotten into Bitcoin by now, one of the main draws for Bitcoin was the fact that it had a fixed money supply. So the majority of the coins and the majority of the network are held by people who are attracted to this idea of money that nobody can inflate. So it's pretty inconceivable that all of these people are going to decide, nah, you know what? We're going to change it. And we want to make it inflationary. We want to make more of it. And even if a majority of them did want to change it, there's no conceivable way for them to affect such a change really effectively because it's just, the cat is out of the bag. There are tens of thousands of computers around the world that run this software. And it gets harder every single day to herd all of these cats in the same place. Got you. [Speaker 2] (53:40 - 53:59) And so as Bitcoin adoption increases, how does this in turn affect the government monetary system that we now see? What's the degradation that you see occurring in the handover that may take place as Bitcoin adoption becomes more popular? [Speaker 1] (54:01 - 55:15) I think the way that it works is that Bitcoin is just going to grow as an alternative to the fiat monetary system, the government monetary system. And the people who use it are going to benefit at the expense, well, they're going to benefit not necessarily at the expense of the others, but they're going to benefit from the fact that they have a better technology. It's like cars and horses, computers and typewriters. It's just a much more productive way of doing the job of money. And so over time, you're just going to witness the fiat-based economy continue to impoverish people and the Bitcoin-based economy continue to benefit the people that take part in it. And this is a very powerful dynamic where you have a very large majority of people that are in the fiat system that are constantly witnessing their money getting debased. And then you have a small minority of people that are witnessing their wealth appreciate because their money is not getting debased. So how it plays out is anybody's guess, but how you should play this, I think is very obvious. [Speaker 2] (55:15 - 55:35) Yeah, totally. And I guess ultimately, in a free market with two competing products, but one that seems to do the job much more efficiently, we may get to a point where we see most people move across to the Bitcoin network. If the rules of the free market operate as they should. [Speaker 1] (55:36 - 56:11) Yeah. And I mean, in a sense, the rules of economics are more powerful than the rules of man as history always shows. Governments always try and break the rules of economics. They always fail. They always think, all right, we're just going to pass a law and then that's going to make the price of this thing drop. And it doesn't work that way. It never works that way. You don't get to tell markets what to do. Markets tell you what to do. That's just the way it is. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (56:12 - 56:24) The debasement of money goes back to Roman times. Is that right? When they used to deplete it of the silver and replace it with copper and simply reduce the inherent value of the material value of the coin itself. [Speaker 1] (56:26 - 58:33) Yes. In fact, I mean, this is a very important part of the collapse of the Roman Empire. It's the debasement of the currency. And when the debasement started, the collapse started. It's the same thing that you see today, except today, they generate more digital money in your bank account. But over there, they would put more fake metals into your precious metals. And people would then watch the price of everything go up. And they'd wonder, why is the price of everything going up? And the answer is, it's not. It's just the value of your coins is declining because your king took 5% of your coins, everybody's coins, because he rounded them all up and told you, oh, we're going to make sure that nobody's messing with the coinage by making a new kind of guaranteed coin. Well, he rounds up all your coins, and then he puts in 5% extra nickel in the coin instead of silver. And that gives him 5% extra silver coins. So he takes that 5% extra, and he gives you your coins back. And you put in a coin, and you got a coin back, so you think nothing has changed. But he's got 5% more coins that he's now out there spending. And so now then you go to the butcher, and the price of your meat is up 5%, 10%, 2%, whatever, the price of your wine, the price of your clothes, the price of your shoes, everything's going up, and you wonder why. And this has been the case forever. I mean, really, humanity thrives when we manage to have honest money, because people are able to just not worry about this. And then the rest of the time, people are just in a complete mess. They're like driving blindfolded in their life, because their money is broken, and everything doesn't make sense. And life is just hitting them in the face every morning, because they're constantly getting robbed, and they don't understand that they're getting robbed, and they're propagandized to want more robbery. [Speaker 2] (58:35 - 58:55) You think it's only a matter of time before people understand the why of Bitcoin and start adopting it, that then those people that, I guess, that would be considered major players and control a lot of the assets, that because the market will decide sooner or later, they're going to have to turn to Bitcoin as well. [Speaker 1] (58:57 - 1:00:05) I think, ultimately, with Bitcoin, I have long said this, Bitcoin is not going to be adopted like the iPhone or like a new app, because it's cool, because people want it. It's not going to spread like WhatsApp or TikTok. Bitcoin is going to be adopted, because it's going to offer an enormous advantage for its users over its non-users, in a way similar to how gunpowder is just going to make you so much more powerful than people who don't have gunpowder. And that's going to mean that everybody's going to have gunpowder. And that's how I think of it. So I don't think Bitcoin needs to win the hearts and minds. Bitcoin doesn't need to have a nice user interface. Bitcoin doesn't need to convince you. You're going to find yourself needing Bitcoin, because if you're not using Bitcoin, you're using a crappier money. And the people who have Bitcoin are using an infinitely superior money to yours. And that's going to be bad news for you. You're going to witness yourself constantly getting poorer and poorer as they get constantly richer. [Speaker 2] (1:00:06 - 1:00:34) Yeah. Okay. You have a quote in your book, Principles of Economics. You say, if the Earth's volume was that of an Olympic swimming pool, all the world's minds would be roughly the size of half a cup. Now, that's quite a profound statement, particularly when we see so many people have this illusion of scarcity of resources. So my question to you is, why is that, I guess, propagandized towards us? And what does that mean for how we relate to how we consume? [Speaker 1] (1:00:37 - 1:01:25) Yeah, I think the point I'm trying to make in that chapter where I discuss this is that the real scarcity in the world is the scarcity of our time. We don't have infinite time on Earth, but we have effectively an infinity of everything else, as long as we dedicate more time to it. So if we put our time into producing something, we're going to make more of it. And we're going to keep making more and more and more of it, that ultimately, there is no limit that is physical on how much we can make of it. The limit really is how much time we can dedicate to it. The real limit on all of the resources is that all of these things require time to produce. That's ultimately what it comes down to. Yeah, gotcha. [Speaker 2] (1:01:26 - 1:01:40) You know, fascinating to think about, like, how much we all grew up with, like, the scarcity of, like, fossil fuels and oil and all the rest of it. And, you know, massive degradating effects of mining and et cetera, when it doesn't seem to be the case. [Speaker 1] (1:01:41 - 1:02:10) Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's something that obviously intuitively makes a lot of sense. And you have to really think very deeply about economics and how people economize in order to really get that idea out of your head. But the Earth is enormous, and we've barely scratched the surface of it. And so, the limit on how much we can have of all of those things continues to just be how much time can we dedicate toward producing them? [Speaker 2] (1:02:11 - 1:02:16) Yeah, how much energy do we have? How much effort are we willing to put towards that? Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:02:16 - 1:02:17) Exactly. [Speaker 2] (1:02:18 - 1:02:50) All right, I want to jump into a little bit into the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. Obviously, this is a long, deep issue. There's not that much time remaining, so we won't go too deep into it. But just generally speaking, we're seeing a lot of the argument that because Israel is the capitalistic society, most libertarians and conservative people tend to be on the side of Israel. And this is very much so just the argument of civilization versus barbarism, so to speak. How do you view the situation, I guess? And what are your thoughts on all that? [Speaker 1] (1:02:51 - 1:13:06) Yeah, this is a common argument among fans of Ayn Rand, and people call themselves objectivists. And I think it is pretty ridiculous as an argument. I think there are a lot of problems with Ayn Rand and the way that her philosophy is discussed. And I'd say Palestine is the best way to understand the difference between the Randians and proper intellectual libertarians, which are the Austrians, in my opinion, so people like Mises, Rothbard. I think Palestine is an excellent litmus test in this regard. For the Randians, they have this conception that you see a very sort of selfish focus on the roots of capitalism, and this almost consumerist attachment to them. It's almost like how people like their sports team, or how kids like their favorite kind of ice cream. Well, not just kids, but it's your favorite ice cream, your favorite TV show, your favorite, all of these things where you become attached to them. And in a sense, this is how you see the Randians think about capitalism. And this is the difference between Randians, in a sense, and Austrians, because the Austrians focus on the underpinnings of what makes capitalism possible. And that intellectual rigorous analysis makes you arrive at the importance of property rights. If you have property rights, you can have civilization. If you don't have property rights, you can't have anything nice. Society falls apart if we don't have property rights. For the Randians, I believe, and I think Palestine is a great illustration of this, it's really the deification of the consequences that we get from capitalism. And the consequences that we get for capitalism are good. They're great. But this is why they become a lot less intellectually rigorous, and they move from the kind of intellectual rigor of the Austrians that prioritizes and focuses on property rights to the, you could say, you know, from the Randians, it's a lot tied into self-actualization, selfishness, looking into, focusing on self-satisfaction, self-indulgence even, which, you know, say what you want about it. Obviously, there's a lot of merit and value in self-actualization, and I think this is a useful thing for many people to undergo as a process in their life. Yet, with all is said and done, that's still a pretty myopic and selfish view of the world compared to the more intellectually rigorous viewpoint of understanding the property rights foundation of that. And so, that is why the Austrians focus on property rights. And so, people like Murray Rothbard, and people like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, people like me, when looking at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, understand that there is a problem here, which is the violation of the property rights of Palestinians. When the State of Israel was established, only about 6% of the privately owned land in Palestine was owned by Jews, and most of that was owned by the Jewish National Fund and by these organizations that became the Israel Land Authority. And so, today, the Israel Land Authority controls 93% of the land that is ruled by Israel. It's all controlled by this organization. There's a government bureaucracy. So, you don't hear the Iranians complain about this kind of bureaucracy. And I had a debate with Walter Bloch, who is an Austrian to an extent, but also he's a bit of an Iranian. And I think I had a debate with him about it, and it's pretty amazing. I mean, Walter Bloch, he calls himself Mr. Capitalism. He wants to privatize everything. He wants to privatize the roads and the seas, everything. And yet, he wouldn't agree to the privatization of land in Palestine. He thinks land in Palestine is fine being owned and operated and managed by a government bureaucracy that owns 93% of the land. And so, from the Austrian perspective, you focus on the property rights, you understand that you can't take the land of the Palestinians. So, the vast majority of land in Palestine was owned by Palestinians who were not Jewish from the state of Israel. It was established and it was confiscated. So, this is the original sin. And this is the sin that has not been resolved in any way because land continues to not be a free market. If you had a free market in land in Palestine and Israel today, then that would be the conflict over because then refugees could buy back their property. They could go back to their land. They at least have the rights to be able to do it. And then everybody would be able to live there and everybody would be able to own property. But as it exists, you can only live in there, you can only get property there by leasing it from the Israel Land Authority, which only leases it to Jews. And so, you could be a Palestinian who owned land in 1948, and that land has been in your family for 500 years. And you lost that land and now somebody could be an Australian or an American or a Frenchman or an Uzbek or an Ethiopian, and they get to go to Israel and they get to migrate there and they get subsidized housing and subsidized land from the Israel Land Authority and you don't just because you are from the wrong religion. So, from the perspective of an Austrian economist, this would obviously be the problem. This is the root cause of the problem. And you would understand why if you did something like this, there would be conflict and there would be violence, there would be bad things happening. But from the perspective of a Randian, I think, there's a childish and simplistic and selfish and a navel-gazing closed-mindedness that just, once it becomes emotionally attached to the idea of Israel because of stupid propaganda that they watched in the movies or on TV, then they're incapable of seeing the contradiction between what Israel is actually based upon, which is land theft and banning a free market in land and constantly stealing land from Palestinians in order to allocate it to people from all over the world who claim to be Jewish. You're willing to ignore that because you don't have a solid understanding of the foundations of capital society, and then you're willing to go with the superficial aspects of it. So, Israel has got a more open society that allows people more self-actualization. Well, okay, but that does not justify the theft and the theft is not something inconsequential. It is the root of the conflict. So, they ignore the root of the conflict. They accept the theft that is there. And that's what's really idiotic about what Rand says. She says, it's a fight between the civilized man and the barbarian. Well, what makes a man civilized? What makes civilization is acceptance of property rights. Well, who's refusing the property rights here? Who's rejecting the legitimacy of property rights in this case? It's the Israelis. It's the Zionist movement. It's the Israeli government specifically. I shouldn't say Israelis. Not all Israelis are like that, but it's the Zionist government. It's the Zionist project that just rejects property for people because of their religion. And of course, none of these people will tell you they want to implement a system like this in the US or in Australia. All of the big fans of Israel in the US and Australia, you ask them, well, why don't you want an American land authority that owns 93% of the land of America and allocates it only to people from the majority religious group of society? Why isn't it that we can't have an America where only Christians get to own land? Why do you support that system in Israel on stolen land, whereas you don't support it in America or Australia? I don't think they can have a decent answer to this. When I had this debate with Walter Block, he fell back on the position that, well, Jews lived in this land 2000 years ago, so therefore nobody else has valid property rights in this land. And so if you're a Palestinian, you don't have valid property rights. And I told him, well, before 1948, Jews could immigrate to Palestine and purchase property. And they did purchase a lot of property, but it wasn't a majority of the land. They purchased about 7%, 6% of the land. But these property titles were within a property rights system that these Israelis accepted as through the state of Israel was established. In other words, you didn't lose your property if you were Jewish, but you lost your property and the property rights system was considered invalid if weren't Jewish. And how do you justify this? How can you find a justification and rationalization for the idea that the property rights system was valid before 1948 if you were Jewish, but if you're not Jewish, then the property rights system is not valid? [Speaker 2] (1:13:08 - 1:13:33) Yeah. Thanks, man. I've heard the argument made that they actually purchased the majority of land and even in the occasions where they were given the swamp land because they were able to transform the swamp land even to like decent civilizations and build cities, et cetera. But in my personal research, I only got to 6% to 7% of the land purchased as well. So I don't know where the rest of that argument came from. [Speaker 1] (1:13:34 - 1:15:06) No, it's very true. It's only about 6% to 7%. There was a very meticulous survey of the land that was done in 1946. And they went over the entire properties as a record of every district. You can see it on a website called palestineremembered.com. I'm gonna share the link with you in a second. And you see that in every single district, the majority of the land was owned by Palestinians who were not Jewish. And this is, I mean, it's just, it's also extremely predictable because the majority of Jewish people in Palestine had arrived over the 10, 15 years preceding the establishment of Israel. So you go back 50 years, in 1900 or in 1910, the Jewish population of Palestine was about 3%, 5%, 10%, something like that. It was a tiny minority of the population. They didn't own a majority of the land. And you can't just buy a whole country in a few years. They had a lot of money and they had a lot of rich Europeans migrate and a lot of rich Europeans who were financing land purchases. But still, you can't just buy a whole country, but you buy a chunk. And then they kicked the majority of the people out. They had to eliminate, they had to kick out about 800,000 people in 1948. And that started before the 1948 war started. [Speaker 2] (1:15:06 - 1:15:44) Mm-hmm. Last question I have on the topic, I guess, is like, I've also heard the argument made that, I guess, the culture, the socio-political train of thought, the religious ideologies, et cetera, place such impositions on the Arab and Islamic population that Islamic societies have, in fact, actually never built anything really of value. And it's only when Christians and Judaic people came to the region that we saw flourishing civilizations, et cetera, et cetera. What are your thoughts on that, if any? [Speaker 1] (1:15:46 - 1:17:09) I don't think that's accurate. I think Islamic civilization has produced quite a bit of the civilization in advance. You think about the Abbasid civilization and the Umayyad civilization. I mean, these are states that succeeded and were sustainable for centuries and had an enormous amount of contribution to science. And they translated and built on the work of a lot of the ancient Greeks, essentially forming the bridge between ancient Greeks and modern European science. I mean, a lot of scientific and mathematical contributions, astronomy, come from Islamic civilization. I think this is incorrect. And as we watch in the West today, civilization is a very intricate thing, and it can fall apart. I think we're watching it fall apart in the West. So, it's tempting to just be dismissive of the ability of people to build civilization. But I think when you see one break in front of your eyes, it helps keep that in perspective, that it's a very difficult thing to do. Got you. [Speaker 2] (1:17:10 - 1:17:19) Saifedean, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it so much. I guess in closing, where would you like to direct our audience to in order to get deeper into your research, your work, what you offer, et cetera? [Speaker 1] (1:17:20 - 1:17:56) My website, saifedean.com, where I offer courses on the topics of my book and on economics. You can sign up and take my courses and join two weekly discussions every week. We do them at different time zones. So, sorry, yeah, two week discussions. We have the podcast and the seminars for the courses, and we do them at different time zones. So, people can join from all over the world, from Australia and everywhere. And yeah, there's also my podcast, The Bitcoin Standard Podcast, check that out. And my Twitter, at Saifedean, where I'm pretty active. Awesome. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:17:57 - 1:22:38) Thanks, man. Again, I highly encourage everyone to check out Saifedean's work. I'm personally about half way or three quarters of the way through his latest book, The Principles of Economics, and especially insightful and empowering read, I think really clarifying a lot of these subjects for us. So, thanks once again, man, and everyone else. Thank you for listening. Man, another great conversation. So glad Saif was able to join us. He was struggling a bit with a cough during that conversation. But I think we got through most of the questions we wanted to get through. Such an important topic, this whole concept of money, this whole concept of really understanding the nature of the economic world around us and how it's been inverted and how actually our own energy is being siphoned simply by the nature of this system that we live within. And I understand that much of the truth, freedom, community, many of them have a huge problem with Bitcoin due to their own, I guess, reasons that they've concluded. But in my personal research, where I currently stand, I tend to agree with Saif that this is the hardest, soundest money. And particularly just as a treasury asset, something to store your value, something to store whatever excess savings you might have. Because simply from what I've understood and from what I've, I guess, witnessed in my short experience with Bitcoin, is that it becomes incorruptible from the forces of the Federal Reserve, from just the blatant printing of money from these inflationary and deflationary cycles. But people need to experiment for themselves. And like Saif said, it's not easy. It's not easy getting your head around this. It's not easy understanding it. First, you got to get to the why, then the how is a whole another thing to go through. There's so many options in terms of buying it, storing it, the websites, privacy, etc, etc. But in my life, nothing that's been worthwhile has come easy, right? A lot of the greatest things and the most useful and valuable things require effort, require work, require responsibility. I think about German new medicine in this regard as well. It takes effort to understand and to get to the juice, which the masses aren't really going to get to, because there's that barrier of effort and of responsibility in the middle. Yeah. And like I brought up earlier in the conversation, what do you need to do? How do you challenge what you've been taught, what you believe, and go on this journey of exploration and go, hey, maybe there is another truth. Maybe what I learned isn't accurate. Obviously, we see that in many industries and many fields where the status quo or the mainstream viewpoint is super far off. So it does take the individual to have the mental fortitude, the emotional fortitude to go, fuck, I need to do some work. I need to study. I need to learn. I need to challenge. I need to question why I believe what I believe and then see what comes from there. Totally. And we're all on this journey together of trying to decondition psychologically and also materially from the way that this inverted system has impacted us, is impacting the way we grow, is impacting the natural progression of our consciousness and of our journey as human beings on Earth. And I think this is just another thing that we need to begin to wrap our heads around. We have to get to a point of survival. We have to get to a point of safety. Then we have to begin to actually learn how to thrive once we've survived. And I think, again, economically, this provides a solution in terms of learning how to thrive, in terms of buying yourself time. So then if you have time, you can think greater. When you think greater, you can create deeper. You can create things of real value, long-term goals, long-term sustainable options for you and your family's future. We can be the innovators. We can be the creators. We can bring back the greatness, which is being in a state of huge decline, as Saifuddin mentioned, since the tampering of the money system. And it's very interesting to think about. And this is a topic that excites me. I'm not sure if you can tell or not. And I want to continue to research and talk about. Anyway, that's all from me. If you want to connect with us personally and have these conversations directly with me, you're us, not whoever, we have our membership community, Friends of the Truth. We dive deep into all these things, plus health, freedom, GNM, nervous system, lots of laughs, lots of community calls, and the catching up with the people who get you. So friendsofthetruth.co. If you want to learn more about that, the link is also in the show notes. Take care, everyone.