TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #266: Complacency in the US, reworking public education, and changing the system from within w/ Blake Masters

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Blake Masters, COO of Thiel Capital - President of The Thiel Foundation - Running for US Senate in Arizona, to discuss: - Why leave the private sector for the Senate? - What policies are important to focus on? - Complacency in the US - The pitfalls of public education - Energy policy - Balkanization - Bitcoin Permanent Funds - much more Follow Blake on Twitter Support his run for the Senate 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 is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Blake Masters, individual running for Senate out of the state of Arizona. He's coming from the private sector. He's the COO of Teal Capital and the president of the Teal Foundation. We jump into a lot of philosophical conversations about the state of America and the best path forward, everything that's going on in the country from education border control

international geopolitics bitcoin energy policy we hit it all hope you guys enjoy it this rip was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking Cash App

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to lower quality ones the end result of this per chip tuning is more hash and thus more sats per watt of power consumed currently support devices are the ant minor s9 s9i s9j as well as the s17 s17 plus s17 pro t17 t17 plus and the ones that were just added the s17e and the t17e which we mentioned earlier working on what's minor firmware too uh and as well as the s19s from bitmain so be on the lookout for brains us plus firmware for these newer models uh moving forward stay tuned tm for more updates on the firmware and slash pool and check out insights dot brains.com i am s-i-g-h-t-s dot b-r-a-i-i-i-n-s.com go there you're going to check out content stats charts and mining profitability tools to stay on top of everything happening in

the mining industry freaks thank you for bearing with this read with uncle marnie who slept i think less than an hour last night i'm running on fumes freaks but this episode is going to jack you up really great rep enjoy you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the cryptage your boy marty bent here for an interview i'm very excited for i was just explaining to our guests then i i found his twitter account a few months ago and just been a huge fan of all the content he's putting out i'm sitting down with Blake Masters, COO of Thiel Capital, President of the Thiel Foundation, and a gentleman who's running for a Senate seat for the state of Arizona. Blake, how are you doing today? Great, Margie. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for coming on. Again, I'm very excited for this conversation because I think we're, at least what I can tell from your Twitter account and all the content I've done research on that you've put out, and I think we're very

align philosophically. And I think the message that you're putting out there needs to be spread far and wide, which is a message of American strength and getting back to being proud of being American and relying on the ideals that this country was founded on. And alongside that, pointing out the hypocrisy and the frankly evil policies of the ruling class uh today and and the fact that they may be leading us astray in wayward direction so maybe that's where we'll start your ceo field capital president of the field foundation why would you ever want to go into the public sector that seems like a that seems like a step down i know you you uh you probably have to have something wrong with you to want to run for

office today. Right. But, uh, hopefully in just the right way. Um, I think most politicians are frankly, just like sociopaths or they're just in for the power or something like that. Um, actually there's a whole lot that's miserable about running for office and being in public office. I don't even like Washington, DC, frankly. Uh, I like the neoclassical architecture, but not all the ugly modern glass stuff. So I'm doing it because I think it's important. I really do think we're losing the country. And I don't think that's too dramatic. You know, I have three little boys, seven, five and one years old. And I think they're on track to grow up in a country that works much less well than the one I grew up in, just, you know, not that

long ago, right in the late 80s, early 90s. And I think if we don't get a new class of leadership and young, smart, competent people who actually see the decline and understand that it's happening, understand what's driving it, and advocate for bold cultural and political change to fix it, I think we won't have a country in any meaningful sense in just 10 or 20 years. So I think that's bad. I think the United States is the best country that's ever existed, and it's this grand experiment.

can can human beings live in freedom and you know self-government and i think we're losing that it's horrible and i want to put an end to the decline i do as well and thank you for fighting this cause because it is a very important one and you mentioned something there like there's we've been sort of laid astray that the ruling class is is really not managing the state of the country very well at all uh so what would you pinpoint as some of the the areas that need to be fixed uh the quickest or have the most impact uh and are leading us down this path the most like obviously we've shipped a lot of jobs over to china uh the the immigration uh legal immigration crisis excuse me is um is still getting out of hand uh

And we have a technocracy that doesn't like to respect freedom of speech in the digital age. That's one of the favorite lines from your campaign video that you pinned on your Twitter. The Internet was sold as something that was going to liberate speech and communication, and it's turned into this siloed, walled garden, access to the web where these large corporations are able to decide who gets to say what, when, and how. right look i think all those threats that you just mentioned are huge and not only huge but existential right like you don't get to have a country if you spend uh five trillion dollars and decades sort of making war in the middle east and you know sending your troops there to die for wars that turn out not to make sense right like five trillion dollars in the last few decades Imagine what that money could have done here domestically. You also don't get to have a country if you don't have a border. And the crisis at the southern border really can't be overstated. I live in Tucson, Arizona, which is just about 100 miles north of our border with Mexico.

And I've seen it. I've seen it change. There's 10 cities here in Tucson, you know, hotel room, hotels full of illegal immigrants. The Biden administration has just invited people to come here illegally, which, of course, just empowers the cartels who functionally run the border right now. So we're at a run rate of more than two million illegal immigrants every year coming into this country. unsustainable. You also don't get to have a country that, you know, prints money willy-nilly in seemingly random and unlimited amounts. You know, our national debt's going to top 30 trillion here, and no sign of that slowing down, right? A trillion here, a trillion there, three trillion for this budget bill. Pretty soon, you know, you're talking a real impact, and I do worry about it, especially now that people have sort of stopped watching it, right? Now you have MMP

and sort of fancy pseudo-academic ways of saying we can just print forever. And I think, of course, anyone who listens to this podcast knows or deeply suspects that's not true. So look, and then you mentioned big tech, right? And we can talk a lot more about this. That's an existential threat. There is no more freedom of speech in this country if you cannot speak your mind on the internet this stuff is the new town square and if we allow just a handful of multinational corporations uh to control the flow of information in our society you don't have a free society anymore um it's it's it's just that simple so i almost think we can't just pick one or two policy areas to focus on. Um, it really is going to take a full scale, uh, program, a full scale agenda,

um, a reset in order to, to have a successful country in the coming decades. Um, it all interlocks, it all weaves together. Uh, and I, you know, I don't understand this, this idea that you can just focus on one or two things to fix and everything else will magically work. I think we're badly broken on multiple different fronts and it's going to take a full, full, full breath.

Agreed. Agreed. And it feels like a lot of the country, a lot of citizens of this country, I think we have to take some responsibility for this. There's been a complacency, if you will, that people are just happy with going about their jobs,

going to the bars on weekends and going about their lives and not really thinking about these types of things until they're forced to which i think the last 18 months specifically with what what's gone on with the economic lockdowns and the money printing and the increased censorship around the spread of quote-unquote misinformation about things going on in the world right now starting to wake people up like hey what the hell's going on here why are we not allowed to go to work why why can't we say these things and discuss certain topics on social media and it's um that complacency has put us in a bad spot and so like moving towards a world that respects freedom more is it's going to be a fight right because we we got so complacent that we've

created such large problems and obviously like you mentioned we focus mainly on the problem money printing on this podcast because i believe wholeheartedly that if you fix the money you fix the world. I think the mispricing and misallocation of capital that has run rampant throughout our economy that has allowed us to go waste trillions of dollars in the Middle East and created subsidies and markets here at home that probably otherwise shouldn't get those subsidies. One that we focus on here is the quote unquote renewable energy market as well. There's a lot of clawing back and fixing. So I like that you said that it's not one policy that you focus on. This is a terribly broken country that has a lot of problems that need to be identified and actively attempted to

reverse. And like you said in the beginning of this conversation, I'm a millennial, I'm 30 years old, and a lot of people my age don't think their life's going to get better over time. I think it's only going to get worse and that's just a terrible mental state to have a whole cohort of and demographic in across the country it's it's pretty depressing right and i think i think this is the first time that's ever happened in american history hard to know exactly how they were polling this you know 200 years ago or whatever but this really is the first generation i think millennials and Generation Z below them, who don't expect to be better off than their parents. In fact, they expect to be worse off than their parents. And what an indictment of our society

that that could become true. I think that's on track to become true. It's sort of literally the opposite of the American dream, right? We've been seeing this in basically every social or economic indicator uh that you can measure it's downward mobility it's stagnant wages you know wages upticked uh during the trump administration for the first time in decades but basically stagnant wages in the in the face of rising costs for everything that actually matters health care education housing um you know your big screen tv gets better and cheaper every year your iphone gets faster every year you know you have netflix and uh you can order whatever you want on postmates and marijuana you know bespoke marijuana strains delivered to your door or

whatever but this is all it's all a cope it's all a cope and and you mentioned earlier complacency and i do think complacency is a huge problem um and maybe it's one that's in some ways you know uh just the natural product of prosperity i remember daniel bell's book the cultural contradictions of capitalism which just talks about how capitalism is fantastic at generating wealth right which is great that's why we love it um doesn't have a whole lot to say uh itself about the values you know that that a society should have or like how you should spend that wealth or importantly how you shouldn't. And so if you get too wealthy in some sense, you get decadent, right? Ross Duther wrote this book about how our society has become too decadent. And I

think in normal times pre-COVID, you know, maybe the danger was people really got used to it and millennials learned to have low expectations, right? Like don't even bother wanting that house. You know, your parents may have bought a house when they were newly married, 24 year olds, but it's not in the cards for you because of globalization. So don't worry about it. And, you know, people just turn to amusements and sort of turn inward. It's about your finding your authentic self instead of no replicating yourself through having a family and children and, you know,

projecting existence out into the future. So I think all this stuff is bad, but let me agree with you that maybe the one silver lining of the COVID pandemic and all the crazy sort of lockdown response to it has been to wake people up you know there's this um micro version or i say acute version in school and education contexts where parents finally understood all the garbage and toxic crap that their kids were being taught because their kids are being taught for the last 18 months over zoom right in their living rooms so they could actually see this curriculum um and i think that's kind of inspired this backlash against the critical race theory and the 1619 history curriculum and all this stuff.

But I think more broadly than any acute backlash, people just realize now how often they're being lied to, how often the media elite and the ruling class or the establishment or whatever you want to call it, how often that narrative is just a sales pitch to keep people complacent. But people know there's something that's not right. Everybody intuits that things are really off. We were lied to about Afghanistan. We're being lied to six different ways from Sunday on vaccines, COVID health data, what's actually happening, or the importance of lockdowns. And so I don't think anyone's come and really articulated this or been the voice of the people on this issue of where to go from here. But I do think 60 or 70% of people in this country know it's on a very bad track and

they just really intuit for the first time they see behind the curtain a little bit, they intuit that things are really messed up. And I think our backs are against the wall. The question is, will we figure it out and, you know, navigate through these challenging times and find a way forward or is this is this grand experiment going to come to an end yeah i when you were just going to i couldn't think of the stop thinking of the phrase you'll own nothing and you'll be happy they said the in staying on the ruling class like that's the other odd thing about today's day and age it seems like they're actively just trying to put a spell on the world like hey globalization's happening you're going to love it don't worry don't worry keep keep watching netflix

keep ordering pot to your home you're not going to own a house you're going to live in a pod everything you're ever going to need is going to be 15 minutes away from from your pod and and you're you're going to have your biometrics hooked up to uh your your central bank digital currency wallet and we're going to have complete control over you and they're just actively selling this dystopian uh vision of the future with with a smile on their face and some people are falling for it hook line and sinker but others are like all right this is really crazy and scary uh we need to stop this but i guess the question is how do we need more strong leaders like yourself stepping up are we going to fix this via the traditional means via the political system

specifically here in the united states or do we need something like a bitcoin like a parallel system that we that we build out as as this decaying system dies and we just transition and opt out of of the decaying system to these parallel systems what is the best way forward are we able to actually well i guess yeah i mean let a let a thousand uh flowers bloom here i think it'd be a mistake to um put all our eggs in one basket so to speak obviously i am optimistic that we can work things out in the political realm. You know, it's why I'm running for office. I think it's an open question.

You know, I don't think it's automatically going to happen. You know, I mean, look, I have a tough primary race and then a tough general election race. And then say I get an office, I'm now a United States senator. Even then it's going to be hard, right? Like I know the stuff isn't exactly easy. I just think it really does matter. And our rulers, leaders, whatever you want to call them, elected officials, I think for the most part, don't have courage and don't have vision. And I think one thing to learn from President Trump, you know, say what you will, people have different judgments on how effective his administration was.

I think they did a lot of great things. He came along and he was willing to do things differently. Right. He was willing to say things that weren't allowed to say or weren't supposed to say. But 60 or 70 percent of people knew that they were true. And he showed that with courage and conviction, you really can bust up the establishment and do something new in politics. Of course, then the establishment wants to attack you like nothing you've ever seen before. And Trump was able to withstand that. But I do think he showed me that new things are possible in politics. I still think government's really important. Obviously, I think it's too powerful in most ways, but also incompetent. And so I'm interested in what can we do to have a smaller but more laser focused, more competent government like the one we used to have. Um, that said, you know, I'm, I'm open about, uh, the challenges and we may not be able

to fix everything through politics. It may take structural change. Like the internet was a technological development that really changed the way the world worked. And, um, that wasn't centrally planned, even if its origins were in, you know, defense research or whatever. And, uh, you know, Bitcoin is even more decentralized. was. And so, you know, to the extent people are, everyone's got to focus on, on one thing to work on. I'm focused on politics. Bitcoin devs are focused on Bitcoin and crypto people are building

out some alternative ecosystem. I think that stuff's important too. It may be that technologies like that, that ultimately are responsible for preserving, you know, freedom on this planet. But if folks like myself, you know, J.D. Vance, the Josh Hollies of the world, if we can't get it done in the political arena, I'm certainly grateful for innovators. And technology is important, right? Like I have a technology background. I run Teal Capital, a technology investment firm. For the longest time, I really did think that our only hope was to have technological development outpace, you know, sort of political decay. And, you know, if you get that ratio right, OK, maybe your government sucks, but, you know, people can can live longer, healthier, more prosperous and more free lives if we're developing technology. The problem is government so often retards and impedes technological development. Like, look at all the wrenches that they're trying to throw in the recent Senate bills into the crypto ecosystem, right?

Like, these people don't know what they're doing, but they're happy to stifle development or look at nuclear reactor technology, right? We know how to build clean, modern nuclear reactors, and there's sort of no regulatory pathway to actually allow a startup to do it. And so we have this, you know, these self-imposed energy crises. And so I think the political stuff matters a whole lot. One of my goals in politics is to sort of make an environment, an ecosystem that's safe for innovation. And in general, I think politicians are all too good at quashing it in advance. i think the infrastructure bill specifically reminded me actually what radicalized me in the first place which was a tarp bill and drove me to college i was a senior in high school when tarp was passed and went to college with a know your enemy mentality like how the hell did he get this bad um but the the thing that radically

radicalized me about tarp and similarly with this infrastructure bill was just like how much crap in a dire time or something that is marketed as a dire time in american history and we need everybody to come together it's just a bunch of people uh trying to get favors included in these bills and it's it's very infuriating understanding that that's the process but i don't want to dive too much into that i just want to make that comment i do want to dive into like if you had control over you get into the Senate and you're actively able

to push forward good ideas and policies. What are the first things that you do in an office? What are you trying to fix specifically first? What are your policy recommendations? Whether it be the way

we interact with other countries internationally, what we do economically here at home, and how we and how we basically facilitate the ongoing innovation in the tech sector here in the United States as well. Yeah, I think a day one thing to do is to authorize the completion of the border wall. I've been down there to see it.

I think the wall is really impressive. Walls, of course, are an ancient piece of technology. They really do work. And the border was under control December 2020, the tail end of the trump administration now it's sort of a disaster so um you know it's not that innovative it's just like finish the wall and double or triple the size of the border patrol force pay those guys better you know get them the technology they need so you know in some ways not that exotic right um but there's all these fires like that that we have to put out and then you

know then we can do the really interesting stuff like what um how can we change education in this country you know it's a cliche that it all goes back to education it all goes back to the schools it's also true and um i think you know so much of education in this country or so much of education has just become about schooling right and we have this whole model basically invented in the late 19th century to train Prussian military officers to conform to standards and to be super regimented and be an effective force. And that's just, I'm not sure it ever worked that well. It used to work better than it does right now. It's just failing millions and millions of students that we are not, we're not even curious about that model of education. And yet we still sort of do

it on autopilot so thinking about new and different ways um to do k through 12 that maybe you know most people don't go to college in this country and uh most people probably shouldn't go to college in this country the problem is we've built a whole society that sort of expects people to that teaches you that that's the only way you can have a successful future or that all the jobs that you know will pay well in the future require a four-year degree so you're sort of looked down on if you don't do it actually that's insane we could be uh teaching people how to actually interact in the world how to actually find something they're interested in and it suits them and develop skills and we should just be demanding a lot more from our young people and

empowering them to actually get out and do stuff and instead we sit them in a class you know for 10 hours a day. Lectures are mostly about left-wing politics. If they graduate, mostly they can't even read or write in any meaningful way relative to what their grandparents would have been able to do at the same level of schooling. So very interested in fixing education. I think most of that should be done at the sort of state and local level. But, you know, there's a lot that the federal government's involved in now and some of that should be pared back. There's a lot that it's going to continue to stay involved in and we should figure out how to how to do better so it's a broad answer but this idea that you have to go to college to succeed i think is insane and

i think it just i think it does such a disservice to young people it almost makes me sick yeah especially considering the amount of debt they go in to get the degrees and come out realizing that The return on that debt capital is not going to be high enough. And that debt is non-dischargeable. You can't get rid of it, even if you go bankrupt. And Bill Biden wrote that law. Yeah. Right?

It makes no sense. You'd never let a 19-year-old take out a $150,000 loan to buy a house with no down payment, even if he could show a sort of stable job. No bank would make that lending decision. But we let that same-aged kid take out even more money in some cases, again, with no down payment, non-dischargeable debt, so that he can go get a degree in English literature. You know, probably through those three years at school, actually become, like, less empowered, less effective as an individual. It's insanity. It's truly crazy.

and going even further or excuse me earlier uh in in an individual's education in the public schooling system here i think it it almost seems like they're actively trying to make people dumber like the uh what is they changed the math what is the the new math standard everybody's running with now common core where you literally created a system where parents can't help their kids with their homework because they're doing math in a completely different way than their parents learned and it almost seems like a concerted effort to dumb down uh the the individuals going through the public schooling system here in the united states it really does i never know if that's the intent or that's just the outcome and you know i've decided it doesn't really matter

no doesn't really matter like i care about results not intentions and it's just so pathetic but you got to remember the goal was never to do what's best for each individual child which of course if you focused on that's how you actually get a healthier you know family a healthier town a healthier state healthier country uh the goal was to sort of reduce everybody to some common denominator and then we've seen that that common denominator is just itself falling every year as we've lowered the standard yeah and talking about thinking how to best empower individual students like who better to know how to do that than parents right and so how do you give parents more autonomy and more power and decision making in this and that's why i think like school choice

is a very interesting policy and one that i i like a lot i've had cory d andrews from cato and the reason foundation on is he's a really big school choice advocate and i think that's just like a no-brainer if you're going to subsidize schooling and the public schooling system is failing why not give money directly to parents who can then make a decision on where is best to get their their children their children's education absolutely including including by the way uh homeschool you know uh i think that states should be passing laws that say yeah the money follows the student that's good but the money doesn't just follow the student to a charter school or to a private school that money or maybe that money subtracted you know uh of overhead

costs you don't have in a homeschool that should follow the student right back home like pay pay teach parents to teach their kids or maybe just return some of their tax money you know that's probably the right framing um i'm a big fan of homeschooling i know it's you know doubled in popularity since COVID. My wife and I homeschool our three boys and, you know, it just gives you control. And obviously you've got to take the kids out and, you know, expose them to different environments. But this idea that kids should all be gathered together in lockstep with people their exact same age and sort of sat down and lectured at for hours on end, it really doesn't make any sense. They could be out interacting with people who are making things or, you know,

going on trips, traveling, independent reading. There's so much that you do. I mean, if you think about kids too, they're always being educated. They're always learning, right? We just conflate in our society education with schooling. And I think very little of what people actually learn that is actually helpful to them comes from a classroom. So the right way to think about it is your whole childhood is in education. And then how do you get kids to interact, you know, with each other, but also with adults and with their environment in meaningful ways, because they're always learning from that.

And so in some sense, I think school, the modern formulation of it just lobotomizes them in advance, you know, allegedly for some greater good. yeah i know intent isn't as important as results but again it's like almost like the intent is evil like you have children who have so much energy and curiosity and you just stick them in a room a stuffy room frankly probably somebody's medicate them if they you know especially the young the young men out there um who are watching the clock because they know it just offends their very sense of being as an eight-year-old boy to be sitting down all day

to like you know learn about how dumb their country is um so they medicate them right that's well johnny's having trouble paying attention to my horrible uh pedagogy so here's some amphetamines take these pills and be okay it really is dark it really is dark and again we don't have to go down the intention versus it's just that effect route but we can just do so much better i like i know we can but it only starts if you get people who are sort of in positions of influence with political leaders cultural leaders if people say it out loud the emperor has no clothes here like the system is failing and if you raise one or two or three generations of kids on this model which has thrown standards out the window again

it's not even good at doing what it's it's not even good on its own terms and maybe those terms themselves are like really wrong but you raise one or two or three generations of americans like that and pretty soon those people are running the companies and in charge of government and that's the electorate and you know it's this it's it's this um decline in human capital that yeah we've almost just wished upon ourselves and that won't work it won't work unless we get people to uh to call that out and do something about it you end up at a spot where you can't engineer airplanes new cars innovative ways to extract it right and it and remember that that's like the um it's almost cliche but that's the the bit from uh atlas shrug right it's just like and all sorts

of criticism to that book although there's something genius in it but this idea that like it's hard to build the light bulb it's hard to electrify a whole country um it's much easier to keep that stuff running once it's already built but after a certain generation over generation decline pretty soon you can imagine a future in the united states where like we as the body politic don't even know how to run the systems that our ancestors built you know and like that sounds crazy it certainly seems sort of you know crazy when ayn rand wrote it and then you look at the california power grid like for all sorts of reasons they're unable to keep the lights on in nominally, you know, a more wealthier state. Really crazy.

The energy theme and the transition to unreliable quote unquote renewables is one of the scariest trends that's happening in markets and in this country, particularly in one of the most idiotic. if you just take a step back and try to look at energy how important it is and the the sources which they're trying to transition us to it's like all right can you not understand the concept of unreliability the fact that wind doesn't blow all the time the sun doesn't shine all the time and you're and you're phasing out very clean nuclear power for these unreliables and then you're wondering why you're having rolling blackouts and brownouts years after the decommissioning of those reliable energy sources it's it seems pretty straightforward and pretty simple of a

concept to understand but we have a this government wants to pass the the green new deal which is going to mandate that we that we transition to these unreliables it's extremely scary and frankly like insane that we would even go down this path having examples like germany trying to do this over the last two decades and the only the result of that is energy prices are like two to three x more expensive and uh their carbon output is like 10x as high because they're having to import a bunch of quote-unquote dirty energy sources from from other countries but the germans feel so good about the work they're doing for the environment you know and it's just because it's emotional it has nothing to do with actual real world

consequences they had nuclear right they had so much nuclear and they just decided i think for mostly ideological reasons you know they'll have other explanations but i think it's mostly ideological mostly emotional to just go the other way but literally going back to the past and then you said they're sure paying for it and it's it's a very anti-human policy and again if you look at at the results and look at the intent the intention may be very rosy hey we need to save the planet to save humans and save the poor the poor the most affected by climate change the climate emergency and then you look at the consequences of this transition on reliables and actually affects the poor the most because it increases electricity prices for them makes

electricity variable to an extent and that affects the poor the most the cheap energy is the emergence of cheap energy and abundant cheap energy correlates very tightly with human flourishing over the last 150 years to think that we can just phase out energy sources to quote unquote save the planet uh is ridiculous it's anti-human there's there's a huge anti-human movement in in the green energy space and then people don't realize it but they think they're helping the planet they're actually making considerably worse off i mean you have texas the energy capital of the u.s having rolling blackouts because rick perry sending out a path of subsidizing wind and solar production uh in favor of weatherizing their their natural gas

lines or or investing more heavily in nuclear it's we live in an insane world that's always my litmus test for people who um you know want to quote save humanity or save the planet i is do they support nuclear power you know it's like okay you're concerned about climate change that's that's makes sense you know i mean we should figure out like how much the how much the earth is worming um and we know are humans causing it and then what are the you know trade-offs is that all bad is that good in some ways and mostly bad or what's that look like and then what are the policies we could enact and what are the costs and benefits of those we could run through that calculus but i hear you you're concerned about climate um so clearly you're in favor of nuclear

power right and you know left-wingers heads just explode no no it's not safe and despite the fact that like you know of the the very notable handful of nuclear power disasters have actually been reasonably contained and uh besides that's like old reactor technology we know how to do it now in ways that are much cleaner and much safer small amounts of you know nuclear waste and then they want to say well we can't bury the nuclear waste because in 10 000 years you know our descendants may um dig it up and and we don't know how to communicate with them you know sort mechanical for Liebowitz style scenario. And it's like, at that point, that's so fanciful that it's, they,

they just for ideological reasons want to take the one thing that actually works super well off the table. And it's just depressing because I think of people in the 1950s and 1960s, you know, you have the development of the atomic bomb and they were used. That was sort of horrible and scary. And it's the new atomic age, but the promise of the atomic age was always you know to sort of de-weaponize it and and use that technology to harness all the energy that we have here on earth and like you could have expected energy too cheap to meter if you were growing up in the sort of you know space age um and instead

it's just gone the other way 60 years later we're you know still paying through the nose for energy and again i know we're in it we're in like a mass hysteria because if you look at the data literally the deaths per megawatt hour produced by nuclear as an energy source compared to all other sources i think is the lowest even compared to like wind and solar yeah it's abundant it'll never run out i mean i'm not a peak oil guy i think we have a lot of oil um you know there's the whole fracking revolution like i'm like we should use our natural resources And I look at oil and and gas, you know, the same way I look at sunlight and wind, frankly, and nuclear. It's like we have all this stuff, but you just have to be wise.

You have to let markets work. You have to use what you have. And and we don't do that. You know, we want to shut down oil pipelines again for ideological reasons. biden doesn't care how many people that throws out of work he doesn't care how that affects people you know paying higher prices at the pump um he just wants to subsidize solar and wind because that's that's where the partisan politics you know say that he's gotta spend his time and it's like okay well at least he could lump nuclear in too because that's sort of a clean you know tech that actually works and if you're going to subsidize anything maybe you should be doing that it's like no no couldn't possibly do that um that's dangerous and then they invent all these fake

reasons so it's it's energy it's here on earth we have the technical know-how to convert it right now it's like oil and gas work really well solar you know to the extent that it's not like crazy subsidized sure you want to put solar panels on your house great i think that's good as you said there's some reliability problems um but really we ought to get the get politicians to to not just do stupid stuff with oil and gas which they just love messing with because they fantasize about some clean future um that's the defense kind of keep the status quo going but then on offense long term we should just be pro-nuclear like it's just that simple and when it comes to oil and gas they go for i've been trying to think of how to phrase it the only way i can say is the nuclear

option pun intended is just like completely phasing it out instead of attempting to become more efficient with those sources like obviously there's already become so much more efficient like fracking is so much cleaner you know yeah then it just doesn't make sense and look i think oil and gas are going to be with us for a long time and they should be we have plentiful deposits the technology is getting better and better we have this stuff in the united states which is huge right environmentalists don't like it because they don't want to ever touch anything um but like we have these resources and we should use them we should use them wisely but like we should use them for our own human flourishing this is something that trump

understood and in his administration we got to net energy independence that is striking achievement there's also a national security component to that meanwhile then biden takes over right cancels our pipeline starts approving pipelines in russia and um now we're begging opec for oil it's like i i literally forgot the term opec during the whole trump administration right because it had become irrelevant basically more or less to a to a first approximation and now we're begging opec for more oil you know to alleviate our self-induced energy uh price spike really crazy stuff again it's insane and the free market is figuring out these problems so much better and again obviously i'm biased i work

for a company great american mining we go to oil and gas fields we go up to the well pad upstream we say hey don't flare your natural gas you're wasting that and then yeah there is methane leak could be bad for the environment like let's get as much value out of that gas as possible we'll buy it from you we're going to use it to power generators that then electrify our our bitcoin miners and that's like and that is just pure economic incentive for what we do we need to drive our cost of power production down as low as possible and this gas that nobody wants to use has no pipeline capacity to get to market is the the cheapest energy that we can find because they're willing to sell to us cheaply because they can't do anything else with it and that's just our need

to drive our cost down led us to this solution that allows producers to make more money to be more efficient with their operations and to pollute less we didn't need a government to tell us that we didn't need any subsidies to drive us there like the free market can figure this stuff out if it's just allowed to attempt to even do it and that's such a shame of the state of the country it's just turning on free markets and you mentioned mmt all this money printing like i would argue we don't even live in a free market because there's so much top-down attempts to dictate how these markets should work esg movement is another form of that in the capital markets and it you're not going to get good results when you're trying to micromanage a whole country of 330 million

people via capital flows whether it be from the government or like a movement like the esg movement my my opinion yeah i think that's right and some sometimes i think we live in sort of the the worst quadrant on the two by two matrix where we take the the all the downsides of a market-based approach and there's only one which is like there's there's the profit motive right people want to make money people are naturally greedy and i think that's fine and great that's just it's where we are um as a species until we have until we evolve out of it in six million years but um the the free market so beautifully harnesses right this is just classic adam Smith, we don't need to spend any time on it, but it harnesses people's self-interest

in really beautiful and productive ways. And if you have this system that's only quasi-private, where, especially in a consolidating industry, right, you see this in hospital systems, which are basically rackets at this point, you see this with like big social media companies, right, they're only nominally private. They're so intertwined with the government and with the regulatory scheme that you preserve the profit motive right so executives are still just trying to make a lot of money but you know the the losses are socialized the costs are socialized so much of the capital allocation

that goes on because it's interacting with these regulatory environments is is just messed up and so you you you know look at our health care system it's like we don't even get the efficiency of um sort of single-payer systems in europe i'm not saying we should go that way i don't think we should. But you sort of have nominally private companies that are just trying to extract rents from this collectivized system. And so we wind up paying like twice as much for, you know, no better outcomes than many of the European countries. It's truly the worst of all worlds. Now, I think we need to deregulate and get market pricing actually back into the health care system. um you know that's the only way you're ever going to control costs but it's it's just a shame and

then you know what free markets and capitalism they'll take the blame right they take they're already taking the blame in this country for the the wealth inequality which is only just exploding they're already taking the blame for the middle class you know being hollowed out it's like well this is just what happens in a capitalist globalizing economy and it's like no that's not true at all. That's not true at all. Our American decline was a policy choice. It's a policy choice to, you know, have lopsided trade agreements with other countries, whereby we ship our semiconductor industry to Southeast Asia. That's a policy choice and different policy choices could have kept that whole industry here in the United States. And that would have been

perfectly consistent with free market principles so it's frustrating but you know i the silver lining is it doesn't work all the over regulation all the bureaucracy you know the sort of fusion between state power and enormously concentrated corporate power ultimately it just doesn't work it's failing to produce a society that's you know prosperous for the average person it's failing to produce um i think a healthy culture and people see that and so i think we'll correct out of it and the question is just again to go back to earlier in our discussion the question is can we fix it with politics or is the system too broken um if the system's too broken can we fix it with technology you know blockchain decentralization um or will we get some just

crazy you know innovation in energy that uh that kind of makes all this moot i just ultimately i go back to the politics i think politics is so enmeshed in everything that uh the best way i know how to fix things is to try to dive in you know with a piece of machete and try to clear a bunch of brush away and like speaking of policy something i mentioned before we had recorded i want to discuss with you like how how much of how many of these problems could be solved by states asserting their rights and their autonomy from the federal government and just welcoming people to come into their borders and act in a way in which they deem would fix the problems of the world. Again, another theme of the last 18

months has been this reassertion of state rights and the jurisdictional arbitrage that has sort of bloomed in the united states as some states have decided not to lock down their citizens and allow them to make decisions for themselves as opposed to others which have gone in the complete opposite direction so americans now more than ever i believe have have very stark options and can use their feet and send their capital to a place where their values align more closely me personally I'm moving from New York state to Texas because I don't agree with what's going on in New York. And I decided, Hey, me and my family are not going to contribute our tax dollars to the state

that I think is doing evil things. I'm going to go to Texas where they're allowing us to be free and we can, we can, we can live the lives and live to the sort of values that, that we have. Totally. I think that I think that's an important trend. I also think I also think it's possible to overstate it or to think that that's going to solve all our problems. Ultimately, there's no running from the federal government. It you know, we can either go in and sort of fix it and pare it back and make it better at its core functions,

or it's just going to continue to grow and grow and get out of control. And, you know, ultimately, it's you know, it's like the death of a star. And then it'll just, it'll just get white hot and grow so big and it'll collapse on itself. And there's a lot that individual governors can do and individual states can do. And so I think, yeah, Texas has been this fantastic haven for people fleeing California. So it's Florida. Those are usually the two places that go. Certainly in Arizona, we're trying to attract, you know, people who who flee from these Democratic places that don't work. They're welcome here as long as they remember why they fled where they did. But, you know, there's only so much you can do. I think I think there's a lot more that states could do. And yet, ultimately, like as a governor, you're probably going to lack the power to defy a Leviathan federal government that's gotten too big. So I welcome all states who want to assert more state sovereignty.

I do think that's like a very real thing that we've lost, right, as it's become sort of one consolidated nation under one federal government that's probably too big, too strong, certainly too ham-handed. um i just don't want to be be naive or a lot of people here in arizona say like okay federal government is completely blowing it at the southern border so let's just you know why can't governor ducey you know build a build a new wall 15 feet back you know on on arizona land um and great idea in in theory anyway and i suspect that if he tried to do it which I don't think he will you know he'd immediately get tied up in litigation and federal courts would find that it's a federal immigration is a federal prerogative and he doesn't have the power to do it and you know then you're at this awkward decision point like

do you obey and fall in line or do you resist and with what means do you resist so I think the power dynamic is all out of whack but I actually don't think just saying like oh 10th Amendment is enough. And you've got to get people in Washington who actually understand this. Otherwise, we're never going to get the healthy dynamic between the states and the federal government back again. I've got an idea. I'm trying to meme this into existence. Bitcoin permanent funds. You have states that have a lot of energy resources that are untapped or being wasted. Tap into those energy resources, mine Bitcoin with them and roll the proceeds of those mining operation operations into a permanent fund

that over time gets to such a size that they can fund the operations within their state by themselves they can turn around to the federal government say hey thank you for offering up these funds but we don't need them is this a good idea does this make any sense that could be a great idea i love it like maybe maybe it's hard to do you know the one thing that I even I have this nagging feeling about it is I'm like, that sounds great. And could you actually imagine a state doing it, like actually pulling it off at the sort of level of technical competency? Or tell me if I'm wrong and if some state's doing this, but I feel like the decline in state capacity is such that you almost can't even seriously propose stuff like this because

everybody sort of knows there would be some review process and you'd get consultants involved and then you'd have to bid it out to, you know, all these different service providers and somehow it would just get eaten by the, by the machine of process. But if that's wrong and we could actually do it, I think that's the kind of bold thinking that we need. Uh, if we're going to have a good future, is any state doing anything like that? Or has any state converted part of its, uh, part of its balance sheet to Bitcoin? Not yet, but the conversations are happening. Um, focusing on smaller states small energy rich states uh is it's a great american mining i've been advising members of some states about about this idea and there are some states that are

receptive to it especially states that have been heavily affected by the the ban on new mineral leases on federal lands um they seem pretty pissed off that that got passed and pushed through and force them on a whim and seem to be open to doing things that are- I would love to see that happen, just the more self-sufficiency. And it's hard to do maybe without Bitcoin and without stuff like this, because just the way the tax receipts work, most taxes don't go to your town, they don't go to your state, they go to the federal government. If you're out here in Arizona, you send all this money to DC and then they send it back

with tons of conditions on it and obviously those conditions are mostly net negative mostly ham-handed mostly just not good um i would love to see more revenue actually going into the states of course the states aren't going to be able to raise taxes and and lower federal income taxes right it's hard that's a hard it's a one-way ratchet there um But if you can develop alternative ways of being very prosperous, then I think that's one way states can actually assert more sovereignty. That seems great to me. I'm going to keep pushing that idea. I think it seems like a great idea to me, too.

It would just be really cool to see a state adopting that model and using this digital cash system in the form of Bitcoin to help maintain sovereignty. work excuse me not even maintain but achieve sovereignty at some point in the future um it would be really cool and i think it makes sense and it's something that i'm going to keep pushing um blake i've taken an hour of your time you're extremely um busy individual uh so i'd like to wrap up and just get some final thoughts from you like well are you optimistic about the future obviously things seem pretty dire and there's there's a lot of uh things in this country particularly that are off kilter and we may be going down a bad path now, but are you confident that we could turn the ship around, right the ship and get on a path in which our children

could be optimistic about their futures? I am confident about that, but it's conditional. We have to do the work. I'm running for office. I think we can turn the ship around. I think it's also a ship that badly needs maintenance i think uh the rudder is not exactly super responsive you know we could develop this metaphor a whole lot more but i don't think i don't think the ship has sailed so to speak if if it had you know i wouldn't wouldn't be running i wouldn't be trying to to do this um that said i don't think it's going to happen by accident and it's not going to be easy and i think the odds you know in any sort of statistical sense i'm not sure it's helpful able to think of it that way, but they'd have to be against us. And so the question is, what do we

do? If you believe the future is going to take care of itself automatically, sort of paralyzing, you won't do anything. You won't have to. If you think the future is going to be definitely worse, you will spend no effort trying to make it better. You'll just hunker down and try to take care of yourself and your family. Um, I'm in the middle, which is where I think history is. And I think that's where everything interesting is. It, it really could break our way if we do the right stuff. And yet our back is up against the wall. I think every institution in our society is basically become corrupted with some kind of left-wing politics or just complacency and inertia and bureaucracy to be left ideological about it. And they're all rotting, rotting from within

and our state capacity is declining as the state itself sort of grows in power, we get to this place that looks a lot like anarcho-tyranny. Rules are selectively enforced, but it's basically lawless. And all of it seems bad. So I think with a smile on my face, I want to dive into the fray and see what I can do to reverse it. But I think we get a whole, I guess, by definition, an electoral majority but also just a cultural majority here uh the 60 or 70 percent of people in this country who i think are super commonsensical you know most americans are like really good people um and they know that something is badly broken and it's going to be hard to find our way out but just unprepared to say it's it's all lost the future is ours if we fight for it but

only if yeah that's the way i like to frame it as well as like the opportunity this stuff's so broken the opportunity to make it better is so large like it should be an exciting prospect for anybody who's driven to do good in the world there's a lot to fix and it's going to take a lot of effort but i do think i'm optimistic as well and i do agree that people need to to get off their ass and actually make it happen and that's why things like bitcoin make me extremely optimistic about the future because that is an example of people getting off their ass and saying all right we're going to build this because it's better and we need it and so this has been a great conversation like i'm very excited that you're running for office again i

think we need more young smart competent people like yourself in the federal government even if i loathe the federal government but um it is exciting to see some sensical people at least attempting to get in there so i i wish you uh the best of luck during your campaign and hoping that you are successful and get and get voted into the senate um and again just thank you for speaking common sense in the face of pure mass hysteria and insanity in this world it's like people like you individuals like you that give me hope that we can right the ship as well um and i think the the message that you're sending out is is getting picked up by people again the last 18 months people are really beginning to to understand that things are terribly broken and they need

brighter vision to be put in front of them. And I think you're providing that. So thank you. Well, thank you, Marty. It's a pleasure to chat with you today. And if I can close with just two ways that people can help. One, obviously, this is a Bitcoin-focused podcast. I've been into crypto for a long time, so I know my way around. But I'm interested in what you and your audience would think is interesting crypto policy, because we're going to be coming out with with the whole crypto policy. So if people can get in touch with me and just sort of let me know, what should I be reading? How should I be thinking about this stuff? I'm very open to suggestions and, and two and related, if anyone sort of, you know, thinks this is interesting or would

like a actually independent Senator, who's thinking about these kinds of questions we've been discussing, check out my website, blakemasters.com and people can get involved and help out uh there so thank you so much for having me today yeah thank you freaks if you can help out do help out um it's been a pleasure and again we got a big big battle in front of us to to right the ship and i think we can do it i think we can do it we just need to spread these ideas and this common sense and let's get to work so we'll end it on that let's go get it done let's get it done peace and love freaks Peek-a-boo!