TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #255: Green energy tradeoffs, real environmentalism, Bitcoin as a commodity, & Saudi Inc. with Dr. Ellen Wald

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Dr. Ellen Wald, author of Saudi, Inc., to discuss: - The unspoken tradeoffs of green energy - The Colonial Pipeline situation - Ransomeware - The ESG movement - Is bitcoin a commodity? - Saudi Inc. - much more Follow Ellen on Twitter Pick up Saudi, Inc. Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Lend at Hodl Hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin backed lending platform, that allows peer to peer lending and borrowing between users, globally, anonymously & on your own terms. Create you offers & set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator.

What's up, Freaks? It's your boy Marty Band here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. Yet another crossover podcast with the Gamcast Show. Wasn't going to do it for this one, but considering current events, the Mining Council and the push towards being more ESG-friendly in the mining space, I thought this episode is very important to cross-post considering the conversation, which is laden with ESG talk and the trade-offs that come with ESG, or the hidden trade-offs that aren't discussed during the ESG and carbon credit accounting scam. People like Elon Musk are literally raping the world, and they're trying to tell Bitcoin miners they need to do better. listen in freaks weird times i don't want to have to go slay sailor tell elon musk he's a hysterical hypocrite but

sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do this episode is brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking cash up cash up sell you stack sets send sets receive sets sell sets we're saying sats sats sats sats sats because sats are the standard you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin You don't have to buy a fraction of a Bitcoin. You can buy whole sats right now. One cuck buck will get you about, let's see here, Clark's Dashboard, 2,700 sats on the dot. One cuck buck, 2,700 sats.

That's a steal. What else can you do on the Cash App? Cash App can be your bank accounts. They're offering account numbers and rounding numbers. You can get your paychecks direct deposited into the app so that you can DCA in the sats. That's another thing you can do. You can buy daily, weekly, biweekly.

Set it and forget it. They have their boost program as well. It allows you to save money at Partner Merchants when shopping at Partner Merchants. And a bunch of other stuff, too. And they're helping out our good friends at the Owls Lacrosse. If you haven't downloaded the Cash App yet and you do so, make sure you use the code STACKINGSATS. That's S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. You're going to get $10.

$10 is going to go to our good friends at Owls Lacrosse. That's Owls Lacrosse. Woo! Woo! Woo! owls lacrosse this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at hodl hodl hodl hodl is here to bring you freaks uh a lending platform it's available to u.s freaks as well lend and hodl hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin back lending platform that allows peer-to-peer lending and

borrowing between users globally anonymously no kyc aml and on your own terms how is it available to u.s clients well it's non-custodial how is it non-custodial well they leverage bitcoin the native properties particularly the multi-sig properties when you put your funds in escrow in this multi-sig account you hold a key your counterparty holds key hodl hodl holds a third key in that two or three signature this is uh beautiful in many regards mostly because during the length of your loan you can be sure that your sats aren't being very hypothecated you can always have vision into the wallet that your funds are held in you'll need to sell your bitcoins get some liquidity by borrowing using your bitcoin as collateral don't need to entrust

anybody with your funds again you hold a key if there's some additional stable coins laying around in one of the wallets that you have and you want to get some yield on that you can enter the other side of this marketplace put them up to be lent out to other users looking to use bitcoins collateral for loans lend a hodl hodl offers one of the highest returns on the market for stable coins So create your own offers and set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com. That's L-E-N-D dot H-O-D-L, H-O-D-L dot com. Love the team over there. This trip was brought to you by our good friends at Compass Mining as well.

Compass Mining is here to simplify mining for the plebs, for the individuals. They want to make sure more individuals are mining. And the way they do that is they have their site. You go to their site. They have miners that they've ordered on the back end. you pick your mining model what you want to be hashing for you and then you pick your hosting facility again they've lined up hosting facilities with competitive power cost competitive electricity rates you buy your miner you pick your hosting facility compass takes that miner plugs it in

that hosting facility and starts streaming sats to a wallet of your choice it's a beautiful thing getting more individuals hashing it's the the ethos and the drive and why compass exists just got a big order for micro bt so they should have some west miners coming in again go to compass mining.io to check this out uh and if you want if you're interested in this we have a special link in the show notes if you use that link it helps the show um so think about doing that if you're interested last but not least this rip was brought to you by our good friends at brains brains brains is the team behind slush pool they offer the market brains os plus firmware which allows you to get more sats from your hash but we're here to talk today about the fact

that they have a new mining farm manager i'm going blind on this one i don't have the notes in front of me so let me know how i do daniel edward go eat an oyster anyway the mining farm manager is available to anybody running farms that are running brains os plus firmware this enables you to control your mining operation remotely from many devices it's a beautiful thing you can track everything it also uses strat and b2 so it sends messages to the pool encrypted messages to prevent man in the middle attacks and eavesdropping attacks so people aren't hijacking your hash make sure that you're getting all the hash that you think you are some people command in the middle attack

steel hash and mine on behalf of themselves using your hash you don't want that this encrypted data transfer via strat and v2 make sure that none of that eavesdropping or man in the middle attacks are happening it's free for all brains os plus firmware runners it will always be free for you guys now beyond that slush pool has an update coming too waiting on it go follow slush underscore pool to get this update when it comes out that's going to come with ultra flexible payout parameters that you can set it's going to come with dark theme so it's easy on your eyes it's going to come with a bunch of other stuff brains you want to check out the manager go to brains.com slash blog that's b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com slash blog and check out their brains os plus manager article

the launch article go to brains b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com double i don't forget the double i and check out everything they got going on the brit their os plus soft or excuse me firmware uh their their mining profitability tools their content brains teams doing incredible things ellen wald's doing incredible things very strong voice in the energy space a critical thinker and somebody who should be uh on more podcasts i believe and just more well known generally she's already pretty well known she's a she's a head honcho in the energy space go pick up her book saudi incredible book story behind saudi aramco and the the inner politics behind the saudi government very interesting insights enjoy freaks

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be.

welcome back to gamcast it's marty bent here sitting down with dr ellen wald we're talking about a lot of things how are you doing ellen i'm good i'm good thanks for having me thanks for coming on it's nice to know that you got a fellow uh mainline individual uh in focused on the energy industry and uh and putting out some very uh logical thoughts in an age where or logical consistency doesn't exist um it's uh it's a crazy world we're living in now it is absolutely crazy i think someone um someone commented so i um i've been thinking a lot i mean i spent a lot of time past couple years maybe five years five or so years thinking about saudi arabia

and energy and so um now i've been thinking a lot about um you know that the narrative has kind of moved from the crazy oil industry to this kind of green clean narrative and whatnot and so i've been thinking a lot a lot about that and i've been looking into um i think i was actually looking at that iea report that was just issued this week about how if we want to have net zero by 2050 we basically have to upend everything in the modern western lifestyle immediately and you know all sorts of things that i think are totally unrealistic but one of the interesting things that they had i think 60 recommendations one of those things happened to be about rare earths and minerals and that we don't have enough of these minerals and whatnot that we need

to support a kind of massive switch to say to batteries and solar panels and wind turbines that we would need to kind of convert all of this to to clean energy so where there aren't enough minerals and one of their recommendations is that we should look for more minerals because we we currently don't have enough so we should look for more okay fine but you know I was thinking about what what this involves and and what these mines look like and what it means to mine for lithium for these cobalt uh for example for all of these things and it's a very dirty and distressing process that also often involves slave and child labor um generally i don't think we use slave labor to you know drill for oil these days um and i was just thinking about

this and i was realizing that the more i learn about it the more distressing it is and and it's like these people who are calling for i mean i guess they call themselves environmentalists but but whatnot and and they they're talking about raping our planet and very literally like that's what these minds do um and and it's like the idea of now of buying an ev is kind of repulsive to me in a sense that like of knowing what goes into those batteries and and yeah hydrocarbons are dirty too but to say that these electric vehicles and these solar panels are clean technology is not true i think and i think perhaps getting a little bit more of i think someone commented i'm getting a bit more aggressive with my disgust and and i'd say that's that's a fair assessment

i'm starting to get more aggressive with it because somehow oil and natural gas are are reviled as these ugly dirty things and these batteries are clean yeah you know maybe it looks clean you drive the car and you don't see any exhaust but that doesn't mean it's actually clean and uh and yeah so i'm getting more aggressive with my disgust these days i think that's fair thank you ellen i'm getting more aggressive with my disgust as well uh it's again as i was discussing before we hit record bitcoin as an industry particularly the bitcoin mining industry gets picked on because uh it is an energy intensive process to to mine bitcoin to produce the hashes that allow miners to add the blocks to the bitcoin ledger um but a lot of the

the larping i would say coming from the people who who don't want us to mine bitcoin uh it comes from people pointing at like we need to be using green energy and bitcoin's using stranded natural gas and coal in china and they point to these green energy technologies and like you mentioned they only show the end product that doesn't have material exhaust or emissions that that you see as you're using these technologies however they completely masquerade and suppress the trade-offs and the process that comes to make that end product possible and it's just completely disingenuous conversation exactly and some someone is going to see that somewhere they're going to feel that we in our you know homes with our electric cars and our whatever

and our solar panels on our on our roofs may not see that but somebody else is seeing it and that to me is like the height of hubris it's like remember when it used to be about like save the children and save the people in africa and help and save the rainforest well now it's all about us and we're it's like we want to sacrifice them and their environment so that we can feel better about ourselves because we're driving an electric car instead you know there's a lot that we can do and a lot of money we can spend to make the hydrocarbons that we have cleaner we can have you know better mileage on our cars we can have better you know exhaust systems we can have lower emissions and our you know there are a lot of things that we can do that don't involve um you

know reaping the earth of rare minerals and destroying other people's environments yeah we're gonna have bitcoin miners show up and prevent fugitive methane emissions by zooming energy on site that's another option can we talk about what china just just came out with i mean that was that was huge they're basically saying like don't mind bitcoin this is nothing new they've said this literally dozens of times throughout bitcoin's existence um it's quote quote china fud is is nothing now we'll see if this one is some bite um but yeah it's like you catch 22 like all right china china my bands bitcoin mining those miners are just going to send their their operations outside of uh china's borders further distributing bitcoin hash

production and probably reducing risk for the network overall because a lot of the hash isn't within the borders of china and under control not under control but uh so so what do you think is worse for the environment is bitcoin mined in china because they have coal plants or aluminum produced in china because they use coal plants to fuel their aluminum smelters i mean is there is there really a difference no i don't think so that's the other thing like so there's there's so many logical inconsistencies with the quote-unquote environmentalist line of thinking uh let's go over some of them one and one i've been talking about a lot is like all right the shutdown of the indian point uh nuclear facility in new york like that's the nuclear is pretty clean energy generation

like these people so i guess take a step back let me phrase what i think i don't think these people care about the environment i think they care about control over other individuals i think they're communistic i think they're socialistic and i don't they point at bitcoin and pick on bitcoin for its energy consumption not because they they care about how much energy is being converted into electricity to mine bitcoin but they don't like the fact that bitcoin is a free market purely capitalistic driven monetary good that they cannot control and they want to stop that with any means possible oh i would completely agree with that in fact i think that that bitcoin is getting it's getting to the point now where governments are really looking at it and saying

how much of a threat is this to my sovereignty and my power and you can see the ones that are viewing it as more of a threat and ones that are viewing it as more as less of a threat i mean you can absolutely see this i think that it's you can see with the way now that the the the treasury secretary of the united states jannie ellen is speaking about this it's like it's like she'll say one thing she said i think she said that um she hinted at it during her her confirmation address that they want to address bitcoin and um you know then then they came out and said well it's often used for terrorism that was like a clue that you know more was coming and now they're saying if you use it for buying something i think over over ten thousand dollars you have to file

paperwork with the irs so yeah it's it's definitely i think that people are definitely coming to view it as a threat to power and control and and just like yeah just like these these so-called environmental regulations it's like this idea of greenhouse gases being the most important environmentalist cause beyond all other things has made it so that you can kind of claim this and use it as a way to either get money for your business or control people's lives and it's it's it's become this like it's it's ever-present it's like in everything you can you can make a claim that it's in anything and use it as an excuse for control um and i remember right when the lockdown started and they looked the lockdowns are great for the environment

you can see you know the mountains from delhi and you know they're they're so great for the environment and it was like well were they really all that great did they did they actually do anything to help the overall problem of greenhouse gas emissions they're like no we need more locked out i was like really well now you're showing us your your real what you tell us what you really think yeah and all the masks have just been discarded and polluted into the oceans and in the forests of the world it's all um again these people don't care about the environment or actually being logically consistent they want to control others and yeah and i mean in terms of bitcoin treasury secretary yellen uh i think she has a personal vendetta because she got

a thing she got like she was the subject of guerrilla bitcoin marketing campaign when she was fed chairman well that explains her her personal yeah somebody had a buy bitcoin sign as she was explaining why the fed cannot be audited and the juxtaposition recommending that you opt into a pure open source system that you can audit at any time uh next to her saying no you you need to trust us central banks but you can't audit us it's it's like a poetic thing and She has a vendetta, but she's going to lose. They're all going to lose at the end of the day because hopefully we're getting back to a society that respects and looks for objective truth. And Bitcoin, the ledger, brings objective truth to the world in one way.

And once you get dragged into that rabbit hole, you seek objective truth everywhere else. I'm not trying to spit at you, but... One of the interesting things recently was this ransomware attack. and how um so they demanded to be paid in like untraceable cryptocurrency and then of course in like irony of all ironies after they get paid it drops i mean some people say that was not an irony that you know someone was out there engineering that but um you know that's that's a risk okay you you get you know four million dollars or four and a half million dollars in in ransom and then And the well worth of that drops by 20 percent in the course of a few days.

Twenty five percent. Let's jump into the colonial pipeline. What we were emailing last week and you're in the midst of diving into the details of that. What what happened from your perspective? So it's so one of the interesting things is that that I learned about this and not being a cybersecurity expert or anything, But is that apparently lots of companies have insurance policies for these kinds of cybersecurity attacks. And apparently hackers go around and they find out what the cybersecurity policies are. And so they know how much people are covered for and they tend to attack and ask for like around that amount because it makes it much more likely to pay. if you're asked for like 10 million dollars no absolutely not like four and a half million dollars

not so much it's covered by our insurance policy and if you read there was an actually an interview with the ceo of colonial pipeline afterwards and he's like yeah i paid it i thought i was doing the right thing for my country basically now of course you paid it okay and they ended up getting some sort of decryptor tool that like didn't really work and wasn't good enough anyway so they paid the ransom and they didn't even get like what they needed so it's but it's kind of interesting that he still thinks this and one of the things that no one has answered yet is whether they were advised to do that by the Biden administration when President Biden was asked about it he said no comment he didn't say no he just said like i have no comment probably didn't know people

were talking about it he was like i had no idea yeah which you know i could have meant like he has no clue what's going on or it could have meant like he can't say yes but he can't he doesn't want to lie because they could prove him wrong so he just said no comment which means did the administration um advise them to pay it that would be an interesting policy considering that like the long-standing policy has always been you know like don't negotiate with terrorists don't give into don't don't pay ransoms and you know you do it with iran they just kidnap more people and hold them for ransom so it just encourages it um but then when they the national security advisor in cyber security was asked about it she basically said like no we have no you know that that's up

to the pipeline they want that's up to the private company if they want to pay it but apparently the ransom had already been paid by that point when she said that so it says to me like there's a lot of confusion out there that the government doesn't really have a policy what is this saying to companies all over the united states some of which are critical to u.s infrastructure i mean this is like a big deal and not like a big deal it is a big deal and it would seem like the time to develop some sort of clear strategy and protocols for dealing with this was you know like a year ago or five years ago not tomorrow so that's a bit disturbing that we don't have this this was something that i would have expected is already in place you need a national mandate get

all your critical infrastructure off of microsoft and on the wall and um and make sure you're you're secure so what actually happened with what got attacked the accounting system correct like nothing happened to the actual pipelines yeah it's not exactly clear but some sort of like their custom like it had to do with their customers uh and so they took the pipeline offline when the hack happened i think in order to both prevent other parts from being infected um but also and And, you know, I think that it was probably a good move because, excuse me, well, pipelines are hands down the absolute safest way to transport petroleum, transport hydrocarbons, transport, well, you wouldn't transport coal in a pipeline that would work. But any, you know, natural gas, petroleum, gasoline, jet fuel, all these things, it's the absolute safest way to transport them is in a pipeline. It is not safe to put them in trucks, to put them in rail cars, not, I mean, ships are pretty safe, but pipelines are really very, very safe. However, they're very, very safe because there are a lot of safety measures. And so if they at any time felt like any of their safety measures or their surveillance over the pipeline could be at risk, then I think that definitely warranted shutting it down.

Because the absolute worst thing would be for something to go wrong, for them to miss some sort of safety issue. I mean, you can have explosion, you know, you can have these things, even just a leak that, you know, could have caused environmental damage, I think, is not something that we are prepared to accept as a country. Like this is not the Soviet Union where, you know, you can like let a nuclear power plant melt down and kill a bunch of people just to avoid embarrassment. Like we Americans have different expectations for safety. And so the fact that they did shut it down and we did experience a disruption in normal life, I think, is that's an acceptable tradeoff to make sure that that safety precautions were maintained. And I do wish that when this had happened, they had talked a little bit more about how this was very, this is important for, for safety because it is a big pipeline and there are a lot of options and they need to make sure that it's running safely. The problem was when they did it, like they didn't, there was the, the, the outcome of the, the after effects were very poorly managed. so people first it shut down over the weekend and kind of nobody really knew about it because there were we weren't feeling any effects of it yet but as soon as kind of words started to get

out then panic buying started and it's it's understandable like i get it i live in florida when a hurricane comes you just want to make sure that like you're prepared that you have your water that you have your you know stuff that your car is full of gasoline in case you need to get in the car and leave but there's a hurricane coming like people didn't really it wasn't like they needed to get in their car and drive like 50 miles so i think that they could have done a better job alleviating the panic buying um and also there should have been plans in place to deal with with how to deal with a pipeline offline so it should have been like protocols like okay the pipeline's offline here's what we do step one step two step three we've got to get you know

trucks going to these places here are the places that need them most you know as opposed to kind of just like waiting around to see and so i feel like that's where they really drop the ball yeah and it's being used as i don't want to say an attack vector but an opportunity for the government the federal government to come and be like we need to nationalize pipeline infrastructure the oil and gas industry cannot be trusted it's uh they have a nationalized pipeline there would be no pipelines like i mean as it is it's so hard to get these things approved it's so hard to build them like we we really need it like you know it's it's not a joke and people don't understand that it really is the safest best way i mean look at remember in in canada they were using rail

cars to transport oil and there were terrible crashes and fires where people were killed but is that because it's the stuff is going to be transported it needs to be used we need to people think like oh turn off the pipeline and everyone will go and buy an ev and happily use it first of all that's not going to happen second of all if everybody went and bought an ev and plugged it into the grid we would collapse our entire power system like forget it it would be done so you can't you can't move ahead of the customers you just have to understand that like this is our infrastructure this is what we're working with there are ways to make it better there are ways like for all of our infrastructure issues and for all of our our you know dirty

whatever's the fact is that it's a global climate and every time china brings another cold power plant online like it literally doesn't matter for every every person in the united states drove an ev like it wouldn't matter because china keeps building coal power plants and they're building coal power plants to build green technology and non-green technology and everything else in the world they're in china because they have coal and it's cheaper for them to use their coal than it is to import natural gas to barn which only coal but they have slave labor too don't forget the slaves they can leverage that well um so like they live in a nonsensical world we're sending all these jobs over to china

everybody's like shutting down a very beneficial uh energy generation fact like power facilities here in the u.s saying we need to transition to green and we're sending jobs over to china where they're using coal to build this green technology and then we're buying it back it's like some fuck that poor mercantilism that makes no sense oh oh completely and then i was actually i was listening to a panel several months ago um and um there was this guy on the panel who owns like a solar rooftop solar um company they do rooftop solar installation in actually in pennsylvania it was had to do with like energy in pennsylvania and he's like look the chinese solar panels are still cheaper even with tariffs and you know i offer to people do they want the

american-made ones or do they want these chinese ones and he says almost everyone picks the chinese ones simply because they're cheaper even when they're offered an alternative which means that clearly either we need that like if we don't want to buy these things and if we don't want people to to buy them then like we need to put better financial incentives because the moral incentives you know when bush comes to show people are more concerned about the extra dollar than they are about the fact that they were made using enslaved muslims in china so clearly we just need a better financial like put more tariffs or make it illegal to sell things that are made using slave labor or prosecute people who i mean there are a whole lot of things that we could do if we really don't want

people using these things but i think clearly they don't care about the morality of it no people people care about the morality of their tweets more than the actual uh impact of the things that they use every day ah i'm getting frustrated is net zero carbon even possible is it advantageous i personally don't think it is i think that the idea of net zero is just is that they use this is a way to basically say it's okay to buy offsets which means that if you're john kerry and you fly around the country in your the world in your private jet as long as you bought lots of offsets well you know who's getting those offsets like tesla it's not like you're actually going out there and like planting a bunch of trees so it's it's all about the offsets it's all about the

money it's not you know and the money going to certain companies it's not about actually reducing it plus like john kerry's jet really doesn't matter like i said when china's building more and more coal plants yeah they plugged in like 280 last year literally yeah one and a half a day or not one and a half day one and a half yeah like it's and like does it is there even a climate emergency like these people have been screaming for decades that well they think that They think that all weather is part of the climate emergency. Like if there's a wildfire in California, it's a climate emergency. A wildfire in California is an emergency.

It's just a different kind of emergency than a climate emergency. And we also know how to prevent massive wildfires from starting by doing better fire mitigation. And we do that in Florida, actually. There are controlled burns in Florida all the time. yeah i mean we saw this last year two years ago whenever they had their crazy wildfires people like global warming global warming the farmers are coming out they're like no the government told us we couldn't do control burns like 10 years ago and the product of not being able to

control burn for a decade is these wildfires yeah and and people are like oh well the hurricanes are worse so are the hurricanes really worse so not historically necessarily but also okay they do more damage yeah they do more damage because we are growing economically and people build a lot of really expensive houses right in the path of hurricanes so obviously they're going to do more damage it's not because the hurricanes are necessarily worse it's just because we put more society and more wealth directly in their path and and we've known this i mean i studied that in college like i mean that was many years ago so you know it's not like we didn't know this but the this the data or it's not even a data it's like a statistic it's just manipulated to

show what they want it to show because there's a lot of money and a lot of power invested in these these things so you know it's always and you know and i live in a state that has a lot of hurricanes and they're constantly every time there's a hurricane they're like climate change climate change it's not everything is climate change i mean some things are climate change now we also know that the climate changes naturally not necessarily from man-made things um but i do think that it's been very interesting that they're switching the terminology from like climate crisis to climate emergency and i think that that was a very specific thing that's being done because they realized that after this like pandemic thing you can declare a health emergency

and so many people will just get in line and follow the rules and do what you want and the incredible consolidation of power because of the use of the word emergency and so now you see people transferring that over to climate and using a chocolate climate emergency and so that i think it is very the language that we use and are using to describe this is actually very important because it it kind of gives us a sense of you can see like where where things are going where the people who are kind of holding the strings want things to go it's about control they want to control you they don't care about the environment and so that's like one of the most disheartening things is seeing people in the oil and gas industry fall prey to this esg narrative and

cater to it and work within the false framing that's been put forth owning the framing themselves it's so much they're like the biggest they're like oh the the exxon is in favor of a carbon tax you know and they're like well look at this like so-called conservative proposal for a carbon tax okay here's what it does of course they're they're in favor of it because they're big business they get to be in control they get a lot that basically they were this this plan that these oil companies signed on to basically was like do a carbon tax and then epa will roll back a lot of the um you restrictions on you so of course they're going to sign up for it because like if they they get that in exchange plus this carbon tax plan basically it's a carbon dividend and in the plan they say

that you know they basically like the government will give money to people like a family of four will get x amount of money every year from this carbon dividend and they actually say in there that the dividend is really crucial to the plan because once you put in a benefit like that it's really really hard to get rid of it so once people start getting their checks you can't take it away and and that was basically like their nefarious thing and they said it outright like that's how they control you by giving money be giving you money so it's like and and you know you say like oh well the oil companies want this and they sign on to it yeah because there are benefits that they get from it doesn't mean that they believe it but they see a benefit in participating in this

kind of framework and this kind of discussion because there are benefits to it especially if you're a big business because you have the resources to deal with these things that little companies don't and so the more you can get these regulations in place the more that keeps out your competition a bunch of weak men and women driving us down or you could say they're a very smart bunch of people who are trying to make the most money for themselves and their shareholders how weak it's nefarious but yeah weak men of character can be very smart um but it's i mean it is literally dangerous though again going back to indian point you're going to shut that down let's talk about new york state new york state ban drilling the marcellus for it within their

borders they shut down this indian point power plant that was nuclear and to replace that energy generation they're building natural gas power plants that are going to import natural gas from out of state so i'm sure pennsylvania is very happy we are supply them with their natural gas needs yeah it's when i do you have faith we can or any hope that we can get like the conversation into a more logical framing and just be realistic about all this stuff like what do you think needs to happen to push back against this insanity i think people have to realize that their lifestyle is actually like that what these these these policies that people are having that that are being advocated are actually they're advocating for a bowling back of people's lifestyles once

they realize that they're not going to be able to turn on the lights whenever they want they're not going to be able to get in a car and go somewhere you know because they need to go to the store and get a jug of milk or they're not going to be able to go because their electricity use will be restricted because if you're going to get rid of the easiest cheapest best sources of of power generation and you're going to replace them with expensive intermittent ones then that means that your lifestyle like unless you're filthy filthy rich and you're willing to pay extra to have uninterrupted electricity, you're probably not going to have electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I mean, like, very, very seriously, I think that that's what's needed for

people to be like, Whoa, hold on, what exactly are we supporting here? Because they think and they've been told that we can do this without any change to our lifestyle. And people are basing that off of technologies that we don't have, and that we're not even particularly close to getting. and I don't want to say like yeah there could be some great discovery I believe in the ingenuity of the human race and that we will discover and invent new things but that's not a guarantee that it's going to happen in the next five years it might not happen for 50 years but and people but so I think when it comes to really affect people and they understand that they are not going to be able to live the kind of lifestyles to which they are accustomed that

that's when the pushback might happen but it's sad to think that we have to actually get to that point well we have to we have to fight the narrative on like i think we have to get on the narrative battlefield and just be like all right these policies literally hurt poor people like they they you're you're virtue signaling like you want to save the downtrodden and in third world countries this is going to make them worse off oh yeah and it's they're hiding the trade-off it's completely disingenuous they're liars without a doubt and it's but i don't think that they will understand until it affects them personally but when when the utility company says we're shutting off your air conditioner your electricity between you know this time and this

time and they're like what you mean it's going to be 90 degrees and my air conditioner is not i can't be it you know that's when people are going to push back and there are some people who i think there are some people who who understand or who who are all for that who think that our society is decadent that we shouldn't live this way those people are very very few yeah i mean but but we've seen examples we had rolling blackouts and brownouts in california in years past you had austin earlier this year uh it'll be interesting to see what happens in new york city with the the decommissioning of this nuclear power plant like oh yeah and that's really sad because i think that if we had a much bigger push towards nuclear right then um then we actually

could maybe meet some of these goals you know but the thing it does take a lot of time and money to build nuclear power plants and we need more of them and we're not building more than like like if if we want to have more nuclear power plants up and running in 2030 we need to be breaking ground on them like now or we need to really advance the technology that i think is actually really small modular reactors which are smaller which can be used to say power like an industrial park okay and are at the end are you know don't take as long to build and you know really could be a viable option instead of building a massive nuclear power plant to have more like localized power generation and i wish that we could talk about that more instead of just talking about

solar wind and batteries because that technology just isn't it's not going to provide us with the kind of power that we need so unless we decide that we don't want electricity we don't want to be able to get in a car and drive somewhere on demand you know maybe maybe people can only get like one car ride a week you know are we willing to have that as part of our lifestyle i don't think so no no and it doesn't like and again you're like wind and solar they focus on like low cost low cost low cost it's like i don't care about the low cost number one the lcoe metrics that they point at like it's really disingenuous and then number two it's not about the cost it's about like the reliability and actually being able to provide a populace with electricity um like the

lcoe stat that they've been throwing out like that it's now cheaper than that gas it's like the capacity of that is like something like 40% where NatGas is closer to 90 yeah it's like every time I see that I just ignore because it's like I know they're manipulating something to get that statistic

yeah I'm sorry I came in hot we've been under attack Elon's been attacking us Bitcoiners the hysterical environmentalists have been attacking us non-stop and starting to leak into the mainstream people like oh should we be like using another

cryptocurrency is there a green coin oh there's because it's all about the narrative it doesn't actually matter whether it is green or clean it's all about just constructing the narrative right yeah theory and that's how they launched they launched because they're going to transition the proof of stake which is a different consensus mechanism that isn't as energy intensive and they're going to give you a world computer and jerky off and it's going to be a great great future um how about like people on exercise bikes we could do that as well you know because then it's also good for your health yeah yeah yeah see can't do that you gotta lock them down um freak them out and make sure they're not gonna get and then stick them on the bike

but it's uh what are your thoughts on bitcoin um i mean i think it's i i'm not a bit quite like i don't i don't own any bitcoin i don't trade bitcoin um i think it's actually more like a commodity than a currency well so let's get into this so you wrote saudi inc a book about saudi ramco yeah sort of the geopolitics exist in the international oil market and it's a at transversal consulting you you consult on energy markets and geopolitics right and how energy affects geopolitics and i think uh i've had this discussion on this podcast with anash al haji particularly how bitcoin plays into the international oil trade where we have the petrodollar now where many countries they want to buy oil they have to convert their native currency into dollars and

then purchase that um and settle it that way where bitcoin as a global basically a global currency that can be used by anybody and accessed by anybody uh can provide a mechanism to settle these commodity trades these energy trades in the international market much more efficiently and much more fairly you you cut out the the bartering uh of currencies and the fx markets to to get your your will yeah well so i think so there's there's a lot to unpack there um you know venezuela actually tried to develop its own uh cryptocurrency called the petro but anything venezuela does has to be taken with a grain of salt i mean i i think it's it's really interesting and i actually wrote this was back in 2018 and i think bitcoin had like fallen like 40

percent and um and i was i was thinking it was like wow this is kind of mimicking the experience of commodities more than like a currency and um you know it's it's it's i felt like i don't know i kind of i actually wrote a piece where i argued i was like well here are the ways it's like a currency and here are the ways it's like a commodity and um it seems almost like it's intended to be the antidote of modern currencies it's like like cryptocurrencies are designed to avoid this central control and um we're much like commodities are controlled by their owners and rarely by a central government authority so like like the saudi kings don't control so much like like i don't know i thought it was i thought it was interesting um and and so i kind of see

cryptocurrencies as like between a currency and a commodity it's kind of like they're in some ways they act they're like commodities and some ways they're like they're like currencies um so i i find it very interesting um like you can't wear bitcoin as jewelry you can't power your car with it you can't eat it so maybe it is a bit more like a commodity like oil isn't worth anything until you do something like you like if you're trading oil and you mess up and somehow you end up having to like take delivery of like barrels of crude oil and this actually happened there's really interesting article that was written by a woman who now works in in hong kong for she's for bluebird but she wrote about i think it was called that time i tried to buy a barrel of oil

and like it's a problem sometimes with commodities traders they mess up and they end up like having to actually like take delivery of like pork rinds and but oil okay so but what do you do if you show up with barrel of oil at your door like you can't do it you can't even put it in your car because it to be refined first so so in a sense like like like it's out there it's stuff you can make money off of it but then you have to transfer it to something like i mean and now more people are accepting bitcoin as in exchange for goods though which i think is interesting you're going to tell me that you actually can wear bitcoin are you well this is this is bitcoin bitcoin i can hand this to you you have bitcoin okay i okay you could but i'm not like like gold okay it's a currency

you can like make it into an equity. Well, so that gold is a good example. Gold is a commodity that doubles as a currency, right? That's awesome. Yeah. A lot of people point to Bitcoin's volatility and they're like, oh, it can't be a viable currency. The exchange rate, power. Okay, but

currencies, it used to be, like there were times in like a currency of a struggling nation might likely lose 40% in a month. So that's not a that's just, that's not a abnormal thing. no but i also think it's a product of bitcoins basically where it is like in its life cycle

like it's so early literally have an alien technology and monetary good for the digital age that humanities is trying to price in real time it's like in the early stages of bitcoin's life i believe it's something that will last for centuries where we're as a society as a human race attempting to accurately price this this new monetary good and just the nature of that and the relative uh the relative market cap bitcoin has the small market cap it has compared to its competitors makes it very volatile it's easy to move the price with smaller amounts of trading than you would in typical currency markets however over time as more people adopt it as more people accept it as a currency

that should that volatility should trend downwards and actually over bitcoin's life it has trended down giving a picture now yeah no i think it's it's it's super interesting to watch you know but like i don't trade oil either and i watch oil so well that's where i don't have any like skin in the games yeah well that's so that's like another reason this podcast is this like i I mentioned it'll be interesting to see if Bitcoin, the settlement layer, the peer-to-peer network acts as a way to settle the purchase of oil and gas on the international markets, but also how it integrates into oil and gas operations. So the company I work for, Great American Mining, this podcast is, we go to upstream

of natural gas power grids and we go through the natural gas supply chain. we find where gas is being either wasted or underpriced and we say hey let's mine bitcoin with this and it's being flared um hey better than flaring it right yeah i mean think about that that's so this is oh these are the small steps we can make to become a more environmental environmentally conscious society as society set on conservationism we're just setting that gas on bitcoin as conservationism it is there you go there there's your there's your narrative well i've been running with this all week i may i'm investing a few narratives right now okay one is a boon to commerce conservationism uh and uh esg movement is pro-slavery um so

esg is pro-slavery um yeah that i i remember when i was looking into sorry looking into this esg that first of all someone like hit me with the term i was like what i've never heard of this no one in the last 12 months it's like a buzzword and yeah finance and um and then i was like wait okay so i was looking at these things like so this company can qualify as esg because it makes batteries which could be made with like child slave labor and you know africa it gets an esg rating because of the e but not because of the s like come on you know do you just like ignore the in favor of the e and someone was at someone on facebook was like wanted to know about like ethical investing and i remember right in turn i was like i was like you know go for it but just

realize that just because something gets the label of esg doesn't mean it's ethical because they will give companies an esg rating because they think they're good for the environment and just completely gloss over the fact that they can be using child slave labor so if you're really want to only invest in companies that you feel are are you know have good ethics and things like that you can't rely on the esg rating because it ignores certain things yeah in favor of others it's like again it's it's it's a whole investment uh mandate that's being thrust on literally like industries all every industry now it seems that is again it's based on logical inconsistencies and it's going to get to a point where you don't check the quote-unquote esg boxes you're not going to be

able to raise capital that's like oh yeah well i think it's kind of like a bubble actually because i think they're creating a bubble because they're pushing so much money into like they've created this esg thing now they're pushing all this money into these esg funds and they're over inflating the value of these companies simply because they've determined that they belong in this esg sub-genre and that sub-genre deserve is deserving of more money and you know what we all know what happens the bubbles other than if they're created by like the federal government they're gonna burst it's just a matter of time guess what enables this central bank the treasury working conjunction to print money to just throw it up with um this is this is another reason we need bitcoin

to to take away the the ability to manipulate the levers of the monetary system so that you can go misallocate this capital terribly like it has been misallocated for the last 50 years I feel like someone used to, when I was in grad school, so one of the parts of grad school in history is that you, at least where I was, you had to do oral exams that showed that you had like a grasp of like lots of different parts of history. The idea was to like, you know, you'd be able to like, you knew different historical arguments, you could teach these classes. So you had to do a lot reading in areas that weren't necessarily your like particular areas like i did 20th century history but i had american history but i had to do i had to read about colonial history and 19th

century and all that but when i did the 20th century i want to focus more on like economics and business and so one of the books i read i was really interested in the great depression and the gold standard so i read a whole book about the gold standard and like the transition away from it and what it meant and i feel like now with with central banks and bitcoin it's like we need i mean like there needs to be like an updated version of this because some people are like oh we have to go back to the gold standard i feel like that ship has sailed like a long time ago but maybe there's some other like iteration of it there's some like some other like some enterprising like country is going to come up with a new like type a new way of like like doing this

that could involve these Bitcoin things. It strikes me as like that was something that is very much in the past but there are still ideas that we can draw on from that as we kind of chart this new financial future.

I mean, Satoshi didn't outright say it but you compare Bitcoin to gold and Bitcoin is our only chance to get back to something, anything like a gold standard. A gold standard is completely neutered by Executive Order 6102 in 1933 where gold's

physical nature the fact that it's held up in these vaults controlled by government exactly but what about like a new I don't know I just I feel like things can be really I don't know they're evolving it'd be really interesting to

read like the book that's written about this except I want to wait like 50 years well the bitcoin standard you can go pick it up now by doctor yeah but you can't write the history of something as it's still evolving I think you gotta wait but i'm a historian so well the history of money so like what is a good money a good money is something that is relatively scarce divisible portable um like universally

recognized uh and bitcoin fits that bill uh and even better and it can't be neutered like the gold standard because i run the rules of bitcoin on my computer right here and i can i can guarantee invalidates and that nobody is producing more Bitcoins than I believe, than my node says should exist. Where in gold, it's in those vaults, they can have that gold and then they issue notes on it and they can issue orders of magnitude more nodes than the amount of gold they had in that vault. Bitcoin completely flips that on its head where anybody with $60 worth of hardware can validate that there's no Bitcoin being printed above what the protocol is distributed at any point in time

if they're taking custody of it. Yeah, it's going to be fun. We're transitioning into the digital age earnestly now. Things are getting hectic. It'll be very interesting to see if the climate hysterics are able to push us

towards these unreliable energy sources that make humanity worse off. I really hope it doesn't. There's a 30-year-old with a 15-month-old son I don't want him to grow up in a world where these people actually dictate policy and the way we grow our economy because it's going to make destroy our economy. It's a better way to put it. It's going to make us worse off.

Yeah. I mean, I have like thoughts about where I think things are going. And yet, you know, you never really know. like i have things that really worry me like this like this shift to the use of the word climate emergency is something i find very disturbing because i can like you can look at where people use the word emergency in the past and what that meant and what this is trying to mean but at the same time like we really have no idea like i mean like i remember you know you just have no clue like no one really knows where things are going so no that's that's at least we have to have

like hope well you gotta have hope and i think i think there's a silent majority out there that's just been sitting on the sidelines sitting on their sitting on their hands not saying anything and watching this insanity unfold i think like we have to get out there and encourage people like speak up yeah you know this oh yeah you know this is wrong say it like don't be afraid to be canceled by the woke mob yeah and the truth is that that's only online like people have to realize that like life is not twitter no that's what like you know exactly where i am right now this island like the whole last year uh with lockdowns and everything luckily this is small island off season less than 5 000 people and everybody's like yeah what the hell is going on here like

it's you talk to people in person they're calling bullshit oh yeah well it's i think that people have very very different experiences with this past year and a half based on where they lived so like i live in jacksonville and things were like very chill here like people were not crazy for the most part like there was like a very brief period where they were like safer at home and lots of businesses were closed but it was like two months and that was it six weeks maybe and um you know but i think that that that led to like having a very different experience from someone who say lives in new york city or minnesota or california and i think this is like we have to realize that this is a source of great division but that there are millions of

people who had millions and millions of very different experiences and that is going to drive them and their decisions and their thought processes and in the future yeah i agree it's um social media is a loud soapbox or a soapbox that uh gives a loud minority uh maybe undue influence over the conversation um and yeah it scares the hell out of people oh yeah he's talking about esg you got people uh throughout society afraid to to point at things they know are legitimately insane and say it unless they be canceled um are any bitcoins rated as esg not yet okay so you should try to get get get rated as esg like like contact that like bloomberg founding or whatever and see if you can like rate yourself and see what happens we need no we need

to reject esg reject it not take it over no like come on stage a stage a coup that's working within their framing we need to change the framing and say this is insane we at great america mining we could probably get esg certified today we'd reduce methane how hilarious would that be i mean it would be like the ultimate proof that their standard is meaningless i don't know it's a thought well i would actually argue that we do help the environment we are socially conscious because because bitcoin is uh what a monetary system for all controlled by nobody uh there you go and it ushers in a um its governance is is anybody can can uh actually contribute governance and say hey here's what i think the code should look like and

have discussion about it and it ushers in a sound monetary system in the digital age that It prevents over-consumption, which leads to the overuse of natural resources, if you will say. We hit all the boxes? Yeah. You check all the boxes. So, like, you know, you are ESG. You are the new face of ESG. ESG is what?

Like two years old? It's time for an ESG rebranding. Move over, Greta. We're taking over. Yeah. Ellen, we didn't get to talk about Saudi Inc. a bunch but people should read it it's a great book if you want to learn about saudi arabia um no really i mean people have told me it's a good story um it's more it's not like you're

out it's not a textbook it's a really good story but everything is true except kind of like the first opening story i like i i wrote that based on a bunch of different sources but anyway it's a story of how the Saudi kingdom emerged alongside of its oil industry. So sometimes I describe it as it's a story of Saudi Arabia through the eyes of its oil industry. And it discusses how the oil industry in Saudi Arabia started. It started as an American company, American men and their interactions with the Saudis. But it also discusses the vision that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud and the men that he put in charge kind of had for this oil industry and the way that they viewed it um and this vision that they had is really what allowed it to flourish whereas in other countries other

middle eastern countries that had a lot of oil like iraq or iran or you know other areas they didn't view their oil in the same way and they didn't basically they the saudis allowed the oil industry to kind of be independent, they recognize the value that the Americans brought, and they treated it like a business. And they actually they and so instead of viewing it as like an ideological thing, when other countries, they nationalize their resources, the Saudis said, look, we have this really good thing with the Americans here. Yes, it's our oil, we're paying them to run this industry. And we have so much that we can learn from them. And they actually like took saudis who had no education i mean like could not read they became educated and grew up to

become executives at this oil company and then eventually to run it and then the saudi government bought the company in a totally legal way so they operated within the normal confines of business and that enabled them to always maximize the amount of money that they could make it was always about making more money it wasn't about politics they kind of kept oil separate from their politics and that really enabled them to make so much more money and and so I argue that that's the way that they've always viewed the oil industry and that's one of the reasons that it was it became so successful and that Aramco became such a successful oil company in the Middle East now things are definitely changing and have changed and in the paperback version

of the book i have like an extra epilogue that kind of talks about some of the changes that have gone on since muhammad bin salman became important uh you know became the crown prince um because the book actually ends um like before the death of abdul it ends like in 2015 so um but yeah if you are interested in learning about like what the world was going on out there in the desert and why the saudis one of the reasons i wrote the book is because i heard i think it was farid zakaria said something like the saudis all they can do is they just drill holes in the ground and i was like no there is so much more they are they they're like the best at what they do the idea that they're just out there in the desert drilling holes in the ground

is you know it isn't at all and so I got kind of wrote the book in reaction that to show how even when they had nothing and they had no education and they you know they didn't have very much they were very shrewd in what they saw for the future and that they've always you know that they're actually very shrewd in in what they do and their vision and in bringing this to life so you can go find it in your bookstore amazon get it on audible um get a paperback get it from library i started listening to audible recently it's like great character building great storytelling and it's a fascinating part of humanity uh the oil industry in saudi and chinese russian if you do happen to read russian or chinese uh this is a global uh global podcast

there's people listening from all over um yeah well go pick up the book freaks yeah saudi inc uh and i mean yeah i love that you wrote it uh getting insulted on behalf of the saudis because it's not uh most people don't take offense on behalf of the saudis yeah it's that's true i also i met and in the process you know i i started it basically it's like for my dissertation research but in the process of like expanding it and everything i met so many incredible people in Saudi Arabia who have so much passion and want to do better for their people and and for their country and um you know to me like they're the ones who I I'm inspired by them it's not just like the princes and the guys at the top but it's it's the people who are working and and really

want better for their country and and some of those people have been persecuted by the government and and so i you know i just my heart breaks for them and it's terrible what has happened to them especially these people who really only wanted to build a better life for themselves and their country and helped their country another another case of a government fucking something up it's shocking exactly yeah alan i hope you have a lovely friday afternoon it's been a great conversation yeah i just completely just bombarded you as a witness after at the esg movement and you oh it was so much fun i love talking about this stuff well where can we find out more about you um well you can go to my website uh lnrwall.com uh or my company website which is

transversalconsulting.com uh and we do all sorts of things like you mentioned about oil market um and and now obviously other other issues other than oil and um you can also follow me on twitter where I am quite active, probably more active than I should be for my own good. I'm at Energized Economy. That's E-N-E-R-G-Z-D, economy. Follow, buy the book, check out the websites, learn. Speak up, speak up.

The world's going insane and we need more sane people to speak up. Ellen, thank you for joining us. Have a great weekend. See you guys.