TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #304: Bitcoin and Energy with Max Gagliardi

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Max Gagliardi, host of Talk.Energy, to discuss the state of Bitcoin and energy. Follow Max Gagliardi on Twitter Check out his podcast Talk.Energy Learn more about Ancova Digital Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

What is up for you? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this rip of TFTC. I sat down, sat back down with our good friend Max Gagliardi from the Talk Energy podcast and then COVA. We got into it in a good way, talking about energy policy

and the illogical nature of some of modern day energy policy throughout the world and how Bitcoin is getting integrated into the oil and gas industry. I think you guys are going to like it. This rip was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital.

We're right down the hall from here at the Bitcoin Commons in Austin, Texas on 6th and Congress. And right down the hall from where we're recording right now, they're building products that are going to help you

eliminate single points of failure in your custody model. Not only that, they're building financial products so that you can use your Bitcoin as collateral. They're building IRA products. They've got concierge service

that's going to onboard you, take you from zero to having a multi-sig volt setup with a thousand cuck bucks worth of sats. They're going to walk you through the process. If you tell them

the TFTC sent, you're going to get $50 off. The way it works is you're going to have multiple video conference calls. They're going to get you comfortable with multisig, which is one of Bitcoin's

native properties. They're going to get you comfortable with their Volt product, which implements a two or three multisig in which you hold two keys, Unchain holds one key.

So you always have control of your Bitcoin, but Unchain is there. If you're ever in a pinch, you need them to be the second in the two or three signature quorum. They're going to get you hardware wallets.

They're going to help you get them set up. They're going to do the whole shebang. Go check out everything they have going on at Unchained.com. Again, if you want to do the White Glove Concierge onboarding service, tell them that TFTC sent you. You're going to get $50 off that package. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at Brains. Brains.

Coming to you live from the Czech Republic. they're a team behind slush pool which is the oldest bitcoin mining pool in existence and they're the team behind BrainsOS plus firmware which helps you stack more sats with your hash if you have an ASIC that's compatible with BrainsOS plus and you're not using it

you're an idiot you're leaving sats on the table don't be an idiot download BrainsOS plus firmware if it's available hear what's miners coming soon but again not going to hold my breath Ed Evenson you liar

you said soon years ago I define two years as not soon okay they also have insights.brains.com again brains with two I's if you want to get a snapshot of everything that's going on in the mining world from a data

perspective you want to look at profitability cost of mine of bitcoin, hash rate difficulty, pool statistics boom insights.brains.com they're also going to be hosting a mining conference in the Czech Republic in Prague this summer in June the week of the 15th

whatever that week is I believe the conference is on the 16th I'm not going to be able to make it because I'm having a baby god damn procreation

gets in the way sometimes go check out everything they have going on at Brains Brains.com insights.brains.com I think it's the bitcoinminingconference.com

could be wrong go check out that website if it's not affiliated with Brains I say it to the wrong place sorry Brains it's what you pay for

is for it was also brought to you by our good friends at hodl hodl hodl hodl is here to leverage bitcoin's native multi-sig properties as well to bring you a lending platform lend.hodlhodl.com with no kyc no aml the way it works is you put your bitcoin in a two with free escrow wallet you hold one key your counterparty in the trade holds one key and hodl hodl holds the third key as an arbitrator beauty of this is you don't have control of the Bitcoin, you can't move it in and out of the wallet throughout the duration of your loan for obvious reasons. However, since you do have 1K, you have visibility in the wallet so that you know that your sats are not being rehypothecated. And they're going to be there at the end of the day

if you're paying your loan back, plus the interest associated with it. So you put your Bitcoin in this multi-sig escrow, you get stablecoin liquidity. In return, you're going to spend those stablecoins however you see fit. And again, as long as you're paying that back, plus the interest involved with the loan you're going to get your sats back at the end of the loan alternatively if you want to get yield on stable coins if you're a stable coin buyer girl excuse me i just burped again you're going to uh put your stable coins up to be lent out and you're going to get yield on that in the form of bitcoiners using it and then paying you back interest lend.huddlehuddle.com go check out the platform again no kyc no aml pure bitcoin stablecoin no fiat rails being touched there

stablecoins do go at risk but i would argue like less risky than your traditional banking last but not least this rip was brought to you by good friends at bitcoin 2022 it's going to be the biggest fucking conference ever not only bitcoin just in the world any conference calculator conference science conference football conference whatever like Bitcoin 2022

is going to be bigger than all of them it's in South Beach Miami April 6th to 9th it's a four day event the first day industry insiders

if you're like in the industry you want to be grinding you want to be meeting people that are doing things you're going to want to sign up for day one day two and three

are general conference days you're going to have your open source stage you're gonna have their mining stage you're gonna have ceos like michael saylor that that guy jack mallers president naiba kaylee president of el salvador is going to be there apparently he's got a big announcement here he's remodeling his kitchen he's gonna he's gonna have a slideshow that just walks through what he's thinking and then day four is going to be a The first ever Bitcoin Music Festival.

Logic's going to be there. Deadmau5 is going to be there. Run the Jewels is going to be there. I hear Neil Young showing up and Joni Smith as well. They're going to crawl out of their retirement homes and play a few songs. I don't think they understand the crowd

they're going to be playing in front of, but apparently they're going to show up. I kid, I kid. I hope. That would be cool if they showed up. Have a nice conversation like, Do you really think you have that much influence anywhere? Do you really think people

care? I like Harvest Moon. I like California Joni Mitchell. But I don't think you should have that influence. There's going to be a live rabbit hole recap there too. Matt and I are going to do it. I believe day three.

If you haven't bought tickets to the event yet, again, South Beach, Miami, April 69th. Biggest fucking conference ever. Not even Bitcoin ever. Dental conference. Insurance conference. Teachers conference.

Iron workers conference. This is bigger than all of them combined. Go to b.tc slash conference. Use the promo code TFTC and you're going to get 10% off your tickets. I believe tickets go up February 17th. Could be wrong. just know that ticket prices go up

at some date in the future from now so you want to get them sooner rather than later if you're going to go again use the code TFTC you'll get 10% off biggest fucking conference ever do you want to be a part of it I'm going to be there hope to see you there enjoy

okay 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. What's up? Conference life. How is it, sir? It's tiring, man. it's good that was good i saw a bunch of cool bitcoiners yesterday so that was good there was a lot of oil and gas people there as well there's a good amount there was uh there's a high interest level you know it's like i'm sitting here whatever at some table and i hear the guy next to me talking about some flared gas well or something he's like talking to one of his buddies on the

phone and i'm like yeah there's some oil and gas people uh is there foam on the oil gas industry yet do you think uh yeah there's definitely i mean there's either the complete deniers that are like this isn't happening and this is not real and then there's like the people that get it but don't get it but want to and then there's the people that really get it and they're trying to to make it happen how does this change oil and gas i think it like a fundamental level on the gas i mean i don't know about oil as much um but on the gas side it's just another way to monetize energy that's a i mean it's a high value and you know look it's it's a business where you've got commodities that are volatile and people are used to that right oil can go negative we didn't think

it could but it did gas can spike in prices but this can be another way to monetize a well and monetize energy and it's a completely different type of exposure um and it's like the highest value right now i mean and the value will change on hash price but today it's a really really high value um for natural gas i just think that like the time that it's going to take to really change things it's you know these companies a lot of them the big companies are a lot of older people at the top you know and the way you get to the top of the big companies you don't rock the boat you know you're not like an innovator you're just somebody that's like a administrator of a large oil company uh that's gonna be the small and mid-sized guys and then i think you'll it'll

be interesting to see if like midstream picks it up because it makes a lot of sense for midstream i mean they already control all the gas because it's like all dedicated to them so like there's instances where you know upstream guys can can drill and extract the gas and do it themselves but 90 something percent of gas is dedicated to a pipeline they you know their whole shtick is to squeeze value out of you so like i could see it toward the midstreams at some point or just like we're just going to keep a portion of your gas we're going to mine with it and then we're not going to pass that back just like they do with natural gas liquids or these other things right i think they get a bottle they get a hold of you by the wellhead and they exploit value charge you

fees maybe pass back a little bit of that value but um that that could be where it goes eventually i think right now the next however many years is going to be small entrepreneurial guys getting after it because we're already seeing it what do you think about like cash flows being able to subsidize mining because as a miner you don't want to sell your bitcoin you want to hold as much bitcoin as possible publicly traded miners are being very successful at being able to hold their Bitcoin because they have access to the capital that public markets provide. But I've always thought just intuitively, maybe my intuition's wrong in the oil and gas industry, that there's enough cash flow from natural gas and oil sales that you could subsidize a mining operation and

make it so you don't have to sell your Bitcoin. Is this a correct intuition? Am I onto something? 100%. Whether you have oil and gas or whether you want to do like hosting or whether you've got different ways you can bring in revenue streams like if you're a miner and so maybe it's you have oil that goes with the gas and you can sell that maybe it's just extra gas right like you buy into some wells and you've got this amount here that you can mine with and mining is obviously very capital intensive so you maybe you don't want to build out the full mine today you build out some of it sell the rest of the gas to market and hopefully you can use that revenue stream to offset any optics whether that's the power costs or whether that's just general operating costs

um and it makes a lot of sense uh it really does and like the vertical integration of it makes a lot of sense it's just owning the wells or owning the production however you want to do it there's a lot of different creative ways but having that you know because if you buy wells or buy production up front like that's your power cost you're basically buying it all today maybe you have generation costs but if you own that as well it's just maintenance so you've you know your month to month nut that you're having to solve for is really low so if there's a bear market prices drop you know you've got a lot of different levers if you got oil sales or gas sales you can that's going to bring some money in which is good since you already bought all that gas like yes there's

operating costs for a well but you know hopefully whatever that revenue can cover those plus some and then your month to month like if you're not paying for the power you're just maintaining a generator like i don't know what your cents per kilowatt hour is if you look at it just on a go forward basis but it's low um because you're kind of like you kind of have to amortize it all right If you buy all the gas up front and you buy the power gen, you spread that out and you say, well, my effective cent per kilowatt hour is this. But on a month-to-month basis, you're not really paying anything. Does that make sense? Yeah.

No, it makes sense. I mean, again, my intuition, my thesis, what I think is going to happen, I think it's going to get integrated in oil and gas throughout the stack. And then, and I think we're starting to see movement towards that in Russia, we're going to see oil be sold for sats. And when that happens, that's going to be crazy because you just have, I mean, oil, energy, basis of society. Yeah. The amount of buying pressure that would be induced by oil and gas companies demanding to be paid in Bitcoin. way off probably seems very risky to many operators right now but that's where we're headed and i think like you said the medium to small size guys are best positioned to

number one mine bitcoin and then i would argue number two at some point maybe not this year maybe not next year but within this decade begin demanding that if they're going to sell their molecules to market they get sats in return yeah i mean it makes sense especially like you're saying in these countries where uh they don't want to use the dollar it's another alternative right um rumors are swirling about russia right now right and it makes sense and like it gets back to this broader theme around can it be this kind of floor price for energy which sounds ridiculous or like you know bitcoin maybe not the floor price is not the right way to look at it but be a peg it's a price on energy that like everybody looks at it and says it's like yesterday talking

to uh like stronghold he's saying we could sell power to the grid he's like but why would we And same with like a PRTI. It's like, why would we, we've got this ability to mine Bitcoin similar to the demand response stuff in Texas. It's like, if it makes sense from an economic standpoint to monetize my energy in another way, I'll do that. But the base case for a lot of these guys that are getting smart is kind of, it's Bitcoin. It's like, this is my base case. Cause it's the highest value today. If that changes, I've got a lot of flexibility, especially if you're like a mobile miner modular, you can do different things. I mean, if you own a power plant, you're kind of kind of there um kind of anchored to that yeah if you've got you know uh windstone

or whatever you're you're anchored there um but if you're mobile and you can be opportunistic you know it's like uh you can always pick up your units and move them if you find a better spot um you can always if you are on grid you can always sell power back i mean i just think it's going to get to this point where it's like people run this scenario where they're like what's the value of this asset with bitcoin mining and that's already happening and i think that as that gets more widespread and it should because if you're a fiduciary of a company and you have the ability to sell your natural gas for 250 net of fees even if gas is four bucks you got to pay a bunch of fees you're paying two dollars and fifty you get two dollars fifty cents or you could get twenty

five dollars you need to be exploring the option to get twenty five dollars or whatever the number is now i don't even looked recently but whatever comes out to be on an mcf basis converted to bitcoin yeah well it's interesting i was talking to somebody in oil and gas last night i was looking for some advice about bitcoin mining and it's funny like the the as i've my experience of great american mining and um just speaking with a bunch of people in oil and gas throughout the last three years specifically like it's funny how everybody views project financing and the the decision to jump into this is dictated by irr and this came up last night in conversation with this person who was asking for advice about bitcoin mining like what's the irr of this it's like i don't

know it's going to be astronomical number one but like that's the wrong way to think of it you're thinking of an irr in dollar terms but really if you are in this it's going to be long term it's going to be an integral part of your business you don't really think about irr and like what is your dollar return and i i vehemently tried to convince this person like stop thinking in irr dollar terms and think about how many sats can you accumulate like just try to accumulate as many sats as possible that should be your goal you shouldn't even think about irr the rr is going to be like disgusting disgustingly massive because number one the dollar is inflating um and so like the about like inflation is going to increase the the price of these assets the underlying collateral

the assets or excuse me the underlying hard assets and then number two bitcoin's going to pump as well as demand for the utility of a peer-to-peer distributed cash as some increases and so you're going to have the the bitcoin purchasing power increase you're going to have inflation happening at the same time so yes ira is going to be massive but what you really should be thinking about is how many fucking sats are sitting on your balance sheet at the end of the day yeah i think there's a project that i heard recently it won't dox where it's at but it's an and gas project and it's one of the more ambitious ones that i've heard and it is private equity backed i believed and he was just like the guy that's kind of getting it going he's like we

can't hold like they're not going to let us hold anything like maybe like after we pay out the equipment some you know year and a half two years down the line we can hold you know bitcoin but he was just like they don't care they just want to see an irr they want to see you know return on capital and i'm kind of just like then don't mind like why are you mining then i mean like you can just go buy bitcoin if you're not going to hold it i mean like if the the benefit is that you're getting it and you get it for cheaper by mining it in theory if you're good and you have cheap energy and so it's like if you're not going to hold it then you're not going to get like run any scenario i mean if you got to pay taxes pay taxes maybe you can accelerate

depreciation and avoid that in year one or pay less in year one so maybe you got to sell some to pay that or if you have other income streams pay the taxes with that but any scenario like you're mining bitcoin in theory because you should believe in it like this like what it's going to do right if it's just a way to like hey i'm going to monetize the gas and get a little bit more money that's fine but it's a lot of risk and execution and there's just a lot involved with it and so if you're really not buying into bitcoin itself as the technology and the network and then i think it's a struggle for me to tell you that you should be mining i mean there's still reasons to do it because you can in theory make more money than selling the gas but i think holding

it and then if you look at the models like if you run a model on it you say i cash out every day all of it and then you run these different decks these different scenarios but if you run like an even slightly optimistic scenario where like bitcoin increases modestly in price over a five year period you're much better off holding it i mean the moic which is the return on invested capital the multiple and invested capital is much higher by holding it till the end or till some later period and so i don't know it's just if you're not going to hold it that's fine um some guys got to sell some portion of it to pay expenses but if you're not if you don't believe in bitcoin at all and you don't want to hold like a material amount of it then it's just hard for me

to recommend that you start mining i don't know and if you're out there and you're an oil gas and private equity and you're like what's the irr you're thinking wrong you're thinking you're thinking wrong it's going to be massively high but like you shouldn't even be thinking on return on invested capital yes you will have a massive return on invested capital but you should be thinking about how many fucking sats can i stack at the end of the day like there's 21 million bitcoin 2.1 quadrillion satoshis how many of those finite amount are you going to get you have access to the cheapest production of the electricity arguably that can get you these sats like are you going to take advantage of that or are you going to get left behind and so that's

Like in Houston, a few weeks ago now at this point at the Bitcoin meetup in Houston, I was leading the panel and that was the last question I asked. And this is a provocative question and one at that Digital Wildcatters event that we were at a couple months ago. Can't name any specifics of the people that were involved, but I posed that question too. Like who becomes who first? to oil and gas or other energy producers become Bitcoin miners or Bitcoin miners become oil and gas companies

and other types of energy companies? Like who becomes who first? It's going to come, it'll mix. It'll be a combination. You know, there's going to certainly be some Bitcoin miners that decide I want to be a vertically integrated oil and gas producer and they're going to get into the space.

And it'll probably be guys that are already in the space. They get into Bitcoin. I mean, it's kind of like what we're trying to do or what we are doing, um, to a smaller degree, you know, but like some of these oil and gas, some of these major natural gas producers, they have a ton of energy. I mean, if you really look at like the energy density and Matt gas, it's like, you know, what was it? There was one, I don't know, like Marcellus while it came along, like a monster, like 80 million a day. And that's like a hundred, you know, something megawatts. I don't even know the math. Maybe I'm making that

up, but it's a huge amount of megawatts now that declines. And it's a, that was a, you know, an outlier well but that just gives you the sense of like for a single project that maybe cost them 10 or 15 million dollars they can create 100 whatever megawatts you could probably choke that back and have it at like 40 or 20 or something flat you know and you could mine a lot with it it would be very cheap to do so compared to a lot of other energy sources and you completely control it you're not subject to the grid you're not subject to you know i mean yes maybe air permitting type stuff you got to work that out and you would be building like a basically a mini power plant but um it just makes a lot of sense for it to happen i think that the oil and gas guys part of it right

now has been the distraction of higher oil and gas prices or getting people more distracted i love it go get that oil go get that oil i'm gonna go get those sats right i mean like because people like you know when gas was cheap and oil was in the tank i mean everybody was kind of like hey this is the thing we can do right now but now that that's all come back people are uh i think more focused on it again i've seen groups that i thought were like oh man this is a pretty serious group mid-sized group they're going to get into this in a big way six months ago whatever eight months ago making all these plans and then commodity prices come roaring back and you talk to them they're like oh yeah it's kind of on the back burner now like we're not we're focused on

traditional stuff because why not both i that's what i'm saying i think it's a finite amount of capital that's the other thing is that like oil and gas producers today aren't really in spin mode they're kind of in like harvest mode they were in spin mode for like whatever 15 years or 10 years uh, proving out all the sacred, drilling it out. And then now they've gotten punished by wall street for spending too much money, taking out too much debt, right? Like all these investors are like, we're going to crush your stock price. I think it used to be oil and gas used to be double digit percentage of the S and P. I don't know the exact stat. It was high 10, 15% of the S and P. And it got as low as like in the low single digits, like 3% or 2% or something

in terms of market cap. Um, so they've been beaten down now. And I mean, really oil and gas is still pretty cheap on an inflation adjusted basis i mean to get back to where the peak was in whatever that was too uh late late part of last decade or the 2000s i think the inflation adjusted price of oil would have to be like 200 something dollars a barrel yeah i think i saw ellen wald tweeting about this maybe somebody um it would have to be quite a bit higher yeah which is like funny people like oh we're back at near a hundred dollar oil it's like yeah we've also had the dollars lost how much value in that time, right? A lot, a lot. That's like real estate prices up 30% year on year. Real estate's crazy. Everything's crazy. I mean, like, and that's the thing that sucks about

wages and you see it in real life. I mean, I remember even when I started in oil and gas in like 2010, uh, I didn't make like a huge salary or anything. And I remember kind of bitching to my boss or telling, talking to like my dad and I'm like, Hey, I'm only making this. And he's like, when I was in the seventies, I made that. Or I mean, it was like, they made $10,000 less or $15,000 less than I did. So he's like, I only made this when the seventies, I was like, that was the seventies. I'm like, this is like, I'm barely making more starting out in the industry than what you started out, you know, 25, 30 years ago. So wages are clearly not keeping up with the amount of inflation. It's not even close. No, no, not even close at all. And so what is your

short-term, medium-term, long-term view on commodities prices, specifically oil and gas? it's hard to say i hate predicting price but i talk about it a lot i think that natural gas interestingly the base case has been perpetual growth because of how good the rock is we just have so there's an ocean of gas in the northeast like literal ocean under the ground of natural gas hundreds of years at least maybe longer um haynesville which is like louisiana um kind of where henry hub and all the lng export is that's there's a ton of gas there as well uh and you've got a lot of like gas coming out of the permian like associated gas and so associated gas is just gas that comes when they drill oil so the northeast there's a lot of areas

where it's just gas wells or you know maybe there's some ngls haynesville is pretty much you know mostly dry gas uh just methane for people that don't know that the stuff you use to heat your home and what you would think of as natural gas and the base case has been kind of perpetual growth but what we've seen now like look in look at new england right like if price could drive supply, they wouldn't be importing natural gas on an LNG tanker from some foreign country and paying 10 times or 20 times what they could get just a few hundred miles away in the Marcellus Shale. But price doesn't always drive these things. It's politics. And so you've got material critical infrastructure projects that are getting blocked.

For example, out of the Northeast, I don't know when we're going to have another big major pipeline. These things take years to get built. They're billions of dollars. They take years to get built and they have to go through a bunch of like FERC these appointed these appointees

unelected bureaucrats in agencies like the federal energy whatever regulatory commission whatever FERC stands for probably made fun of

not knowing that but I think that's it but basically they're appointees and they can block or you know stonewall these projects

that are critical infrastructure projects Keystone Pipeline is another example it's a popular one not only block they're trying to decommission ones

that are already up was that one in Michigan they want to shut down yeah line 5 or 3 or something So, I mean, like back to the, how that affects price. It's like, look, in theory, we could just drill and drill and drill.

We've got all these great resources and it would be good for people here. Energy costs would be lower. Look what's happening in Europe. I mean, people are suffering and now they're talking about just subsidizing it. The government's going to give everybody STEMI checks because they did bad energy policy.

Now they want to write them stimulus checks. They're going to do a bad fiscal and monetary policy. Yeah. And so I think that for natural gas, I would have said historically that it's going to be low forever. the price, like sub $3 or sub $4. But I think the floor has gotten higher because of these infrastructure restrictions. So I hope to see kind of a sustained $3 to $4 gas price. I know

that's not good for Bitcoin mining, but it's, it makes the industry a little bit healthier. You can, uh, people can make operators can actually make a return, but it could go higher. I mean, like, look at, we're seeing this winter, you see these big spikes, like last winter, you saw these big spikes. What happened is we lost that cushion of, uh, associated gas. So you had all this oil drilling had a bunch of gas with it oil went negative that gas dropped way off and we got kind of complacent with that we're like oh we got all this extra gas it keeps prices low well we lost that because of covid and then we had this cold winter storm and prices went crazy this year everybody spooked uh front month prices have been high and so long story short is i think that the

floor is higher for nat gas going forward oil is a world you know market it's a world connected market gas is increasingly becoming it because of lng which is liquefied natural gas exports and imports you can move it around the world but oil is interesting it's like a game theory it's like a game theory around opec you know it's kind of like what are they the reality is these countries are taking a hit from covid and from all this stuff just like everybody else has they now feel like before the u.s was drill drill drill the capital markets were supporting all the drilling and so game theory said to them we want market share so uh we can crash the price and we gain market share and we can just flow more barrels and then now it's almost it's kind of like the

prisoner's dilemma or whatever and now it's like you look at the u.s and they're not afraid of us anymore because the esg propaganda stuff bunch of pussies yeah the esg propaganda stuff like it's not there's you know activist investors now and all these words so let's dive into this i mean last time we talked about this on air we were hammered at nape uh yeah in august of last year and we probably weren't as coherent as we could be but a lot has happened since then and now like from i mean i braille and i just tweeted earlier this morning like it seems like people are waking up to the fact that esg is a massive scam but like even at that digital wildcatters event again can't name specifics of who was saying what uh like people were like

in the natural in the oil and gas industry people are like trying to cater to these esg zealots and by selling gas with a certain type of esg rating at a premium it's all fucking bullshit by catering to these zealots that have led to policies which have made america less energy independent less energy secure uh you are as an industry some actors are leading us down a wrong path by catering to these zealots well it's never enough you know and it doesn't never enough it doesn't matter really right like it the the goalposts move all the time look at joe rogan i know i mean well and to me what you find is that the policies and things that they're pushing forward and i've talked to you about this in the past is that they don't not only are they not working they do like

the opposite right they hurt poor people well they hurt poor people because it makes prices higher and they're worse for the environment if you want to call climate you know i look at the environment is like four pillars it's like you got water air soil or whatever earth and you've got atmosphere and it's like if atmosphere is the only thing you care about which is how much co2 goes up but you're sacrificing water and land and air quality which you a lot of times have to because look at california it's like oh we don't want to produce oil here it's like well you're producing it in these other countries like the mike umbrose stuff yeah i was just about to say like let's like mike umbrose such a g when it comes to this stuff because he lives in california and he's like

goes crazy watching it happen. But it's like, they're trying to get rid of California oil, which is arguably the cleanest oil in the world. I mean, if you even, I don't even like using words like clean, but it's highly regulated and it's a good resource. Not that the highly regulation part is good, but they've got great resources. It used to be one of the largest, if not the largest at one point, uh, oil producing state it's fallen way off and they're doing all these policies to kill the industry, but then they're importing it from Ecuador and Saudi Arabia and Iraq. and it's like they're getting it's going on tankers where they're burning bunker fuel and shipping it across the ocean and like if you look at all the major oil spills they're

from tankers for the most part there's been a few from drilling rigs but most of the oil spills are from tankers and it's because they won't let it produce domestically in a pipeline in bakersville and then ship it over to uh the refineries no they want to import it from these countries and it's like iraq flares four times uh the gas that california produces in a year flares it and they're getting their oil from them. So it's not better for the environment. It's not safer. You've got the risk of oil spills and all these things.

It's just kind of this not in my backyard LARPing. It's not cheaper either. It's not cheaper either. Their gasoline prices are the highest in the country. So there's nothing, it's not even helping the climate or the environment. It's just worse for everything. It's helping people feel better about themselves.

They really shouldn't. You should feel worse about yourself if you're pushing these policies and you're somebody in the public who's cheering them on. Like you're making life worse for not only yourself, but poor people and the rest of America. And again, if you want to think critically, think logically and actually do some good,

like this is not the answer. This is actually the exact opposite. No, you want to produce as much energy as we can here because we can control it. And if you're concerned about the environment, then you should want to produce the barrels here where we can control it. Why would you want to produce it in the Middle East

where there's no governance there? you can't i mean they do whatever they want there's no so take it from like the esg crowd what do they care about they care about social stuff they care about the environment they don't care they care about control they don't care about any of that shit the people that are the people that are making the policy decisions i think do care about control but the average joe who just wants to do good for the world right he care about these things like you know the social let's just pick on the social issues it's like california is probably one of the most socially liberal places in the world yet they're importing their energy from places where lgbtq people are executed in

the middle east they have no rights women have no rights they don't care about the environment over there and they're like we'll just take our energy from them instead of producing it here we have like the most socially liberal policies in the world well then like you can get it's like their socially liberal policy has made california a complete shithole that's why people are coming to texas florida from california you look at san francisco peter mccormick was tweeting a couple days ago you can't even fucking park your car in the city of san francisco without getting broke into because the social order of these socially liberal states is fraying at the seams. I wouldn't even go right now. I went to San Francisco like 15 years ago and I had like

four or five or probably three or four homeless incidents. We had one where a guy came in the restaurant, like just walked in the front and was like yelling at people, harassing people. And they had to like take him out. We had multiple times at our hotel where they called and were like, everybody stay in their room. There's homeless people. They would break in and they would go steal food off of trays that were in the hallways this was like 15 years ago and then we had another guy like run up to us and like you know stop and like my dad was like i'm gonna have to fight this guy and then like ran off it was like multiple instances of it and that was and i've heard from everybody anecdotally that's gotten way worse since then yeah that was like

15 years ago 2019 we my wife and i landed for bitcoin 2019 the conference but before the conference we went to wine country for for a lovely weekend away love wine country however we needed to spend a night in san francisco before we left for wine country and literally landed at the airport at 10 get to our hotel at 10 30 we're valeting the car first thing my wife sees she gets out of the passenger seat like getting ready to walk into our hotel room and there's just some homeless dude jerking off on the fucking steps and we're just like welcome to san Francisco. Look at my dick. That's just like, I mean, it's not surprising. You know, you hear stories like this all the time, like shooting up drugs or whatever. It's like, I want to read

Schellenberger's new book. Michael, if you're out there, I've been DMing you. I'd love to have you on the podcast. Yeah. I tell you, he followed me on Twitter for like two seconds. It was like three memes later, he like unfollowed me. Yeah. I think I might be a bit uncouth for him. I was like, oh, sweet. I was like, Michael Schellenberger followed me. And then I posted like just a couple of things. And then like later that day, he was like, unfollowed. I was like, sorry, dude. But thank you for the work you're doing to push nuclear energy generation.

Insane energy policy in the state of California and beyond in the United States and San Francisco. I've read excerpts of it. It's a great book describing the complete devolution of that city. It's Apocalypse Never book is good. I thought it was more about climate change than it is. It's really just more about all these different initiatives that you feel like you're doing something good

and then it turns out that like you're not and he goes through like a bunch of different things that he was like passionate about he like wanted to drop out of high school and like go move to like the work for the farmers union in like south america or something i don't know maybe i'm butchering where he went but he like has been a passionate like social warrior or whatever and caring about these things environmental warrior progressive progressive until he got to the bottom of all these things and this is kind of how i feel around energy where i tried like a couple years ago to be like, Hey, I'm going to be open-minded about, you know, it's like, look, I don't want to be in the whip and buggy business. If like, there's really new tech, it's going to change

everything about energy. I want to be open-minded to it. I don't want to just be like, you know, shilling my, my industry. You don't want to be a Luddite. Right. I don't want to just be like shilling my industry because I love it, but not realizing that there's something new and better. So I've invested a ton of time into trying to understand all this new tech that's coming out. And ultimately what I found is that like a lot of just kind of false advertising around it. I mean, a lot of it's the government's top down. It's really not accomplishing a lot of the goals. I mean, I think it's like two times as expensive to lower a ton of CO2 from renewables than it is from nat gas. Like you could just use nat gas. Like, I mean, like we could like literally,

if that's really their goal, but then when you talk to people about it, like a guy yesterday at the conference, like got all mad at me about it. We were like in a group and we were talking and there was one guy that just was like, I could see he was like boiling over and he was like, that's false. He's like, natural gas is a, you know, it's a false hope. Like all this stuff, like it's gonna basically it was like going off and i'm like we can do it right now no new tech no new inventions if you really want to lower emissions we have the ability to do it and then if you really want to do it you could uh you could inject it into the ground after it's burned and the government could subsidize that if they wanted to it's still going to make people's taxes

still going to be inflationary right but it could work we don't have to invent anything new we could do it right now but that's not happening there's no straightforward stuff that doesn't work there's no political or social will to do it because people are fucking they've been misled like just wholeheartedly misled to believe things that aren't true and again like that's what we're trying to do at cathedra so we try to do here at this podcast what you do at talk energy your podcast go subscribe freaks uh is highlight like this stuff isn't true energy is good for humans ability to harness and leverage energy to bring us our modern society is a beautiful thing that should be celebrated. Instead, it's maligned. And again, it's a bunch of Malthusians who hate you. If you

listen to the Jesse Matchy episode yesterday, we go through it. The people really pushing these policies and these ideas onto the global populace are the Davos crowd who really don't care about the environment. They literally have throughout time, the last five, six decades, publicly stated that they think there should be less people on the planet. And one way to bring that about is to make energy security insecure. Regardless of what motivations are, it's what's happening.

So, I mean, we can say these people want this or they don't want this. Some people might get mad about that argument. It doesn't matter whether that's the, I mean, actions are what, you can look at the actions and you can see the outcomes. And one thing that I've really focused on lately

is energy poverty and understanding, you know, the other day, like i did like a thread in it and it like some got some engagement but basically the point of it was like look if we can't save the people we have now why are we so worried about a hundred or thousand years from now there's like two billion people that don't even have they don't have electricity have nothing and then there's another billion something people that have basically like you know very very little i mean they would be considered uh energy poverty look at the deaths per year i think it's like i had a guest on a couple weeks ago and he said it and i don't know

where he got the stat, but he basically said around 10 million people a year, energy poverty that die, which is more than COVID, climate, malaria, and AIDS combined. And that's happening right now. And it's every year. And it's like, we're not seeing movies made about that. You're not seeing protests. And it's like, we can't even save the people on the planet today. So why are we so worried about the people? And it's like, let's just save the people we have now. Let's get them cheap, affordable, abundant energy, lift them up out of poverty. And what we found is that in these developed worlds, when that happens, things get cleaner. Like for a while, when you start to industrialize it gets dirtier because you've got you industrialized but then at some point like

look around here like it's pretty clean there's not smog everywhere it's because we have we you create wealth and you take these poor nations you make them wealthy and then they can focus on uh you know in the thread i talked about like right now all these elites are like standing tippy-toed at the top of maslow's pyramid and they're looking up even higher than that they're basically being like look up higher than the pyramid we need to solve all these like existential things and it's like you guys need to look down you've got all these people at the literal bottom rung of the pyramid, they can't even look up above that. They're just trying to make, survive, like keep their families alive and like be able to cook. It's like, if you're cooking with wood in a wood

burning stove inside a tiny hut, you're breathing in like two packs of cigarettes a day. There was some study that shows that like families, like children and women are breathing in the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day. It's like, let's solve that stuff today. And then we'll figure it out. But I don't know, man. Yeah. It's a good point. Like those people with that lower, that are stuck at those lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they literally can't look up at these existential like woke critical race theory

social issues because they're literally looking down at the ground for firewood and drinkable water right like the people they don't

like ah it's so frustrating like the people in the slums that move by like they don't care about climate change like that's the thing like the other day

there was a prominent energy content guy I won't call him out but he was like saying that this is just this is what the world wants which is decarbonization and I was like

nah not really I was like the world doesn't actually I was like there's like a small segment of the world like the western elites that want this and i was like but do you think these people in like uh impoverished areas of africa or like i said like in india and these impoverished areas like they're not worried about climate change at all i'm not even thinking about it like they like to them they're just like what are you talking about we're trying to get food on

the table and survive so the world doesn't really want this and that's billions of people we're not talking like the people that really care about the climate stuff is in the hundreds of millions and there are seven if that if that and that's like i'm basically saying everybody in these developed worlds. So if you just included everybody in the developed world, you're talking hundreds of millions of people, but there are billions of people on the planet that need basic things to survive. And every unit of energy that we either make more expensive or take off the market, that makes it harder for them to pull themselves up. Because now like oil costs more or gas costs more or coal costs more. And it makes that even further away. It's the same with like

the printing of the money and asset prices going up. It's like every time asset price is going up, it makes somebody who has no assets it's even further away it's getting insurmountable to close the gap for people yeah yeah it's even the people who claim to want to decarbonize the world are fucking larpers because like today and somebody tweeted me like oh your climate your take on like energy like we need to like go to renewables number one what the fuck is a renewable how much carbon goes into a a coal a a coal panel as steve barber likes to call solar panels it's made out of coal right that is very hard to recycle and very dirty and very labor intensive on the front end uh how do you recycle the the wind turbines they're just they're filled with a bunch of

chemicals and we're just burying them in the ground that's not good they have a life cycle that is not that is very finite is not infinite uh and then i think number two like people like who are tweeting at me like oh your energy like oil and gas is bad like we should be like moving away from it it's like and then you see at the bottom like sent from twitter for iphone it's like that iphone's made of hydrocarbons you fucking idiot like you don't want to reduce your carbon your your carbon footprint at all you're larping throw out your iphone throw out your computer throw out your your clothes your jackets throw all that shit out because you're larping if you truly believe it put a leaf on your dick and go live in the woods because that's what you need

to do if you want to actually decarbonize the world. An easy hill to die on is the hill where you vehemently oppose people that don't practice what they preach. Like that to me is a very one that I'm passionate about. And it's easy for me to be like, if you're not doing the things that you're saying, which nobody is the environmental movement, it's not a grand conspiracy. And people will try to say this, that it's something like, you know, government subsidized conspiracy that we use fossil fuels. It's like, no, we use them because they make our lives better. Like you're using it because you made a choice as a consumer. Like to your point, you could go find products and clothes and things that are not made from fossil fuels. They're going to suck because like

we use the stuff that's made out of fossil fuels because it's awesome. Like it keeps us warm. It keeps us, you know, we're able to travel. We're able to do all these things. And you know, if you really think about energy transitions, this is another topic that I've dove into. It's like, there's some certain boxes that energy transitions check. Like they're typically highly deflationary. Like they create something that lifts consumers up. If it's something that's not doing that, then it's not really a transition. It's just like, I mean, renewables is like that. So the first energy transition was basically humans or our ancestors discovered fire. And that allowed us to do a lot less work. We could get more energy. And then it was like the classic, the

next one was like classic renewables, like a wind and, you know, basically using sails for ships and basic windmills and mill grain. And they would do like, uh, bellows for Smith's to make, you know, whatever iron works. And then it was, uh, you know, you had basically biomass and coal. I'm going to forget some of this, but essentially like it progressed into hydrocarbons and then it was starting to progress into nuclear. And I think like all of these had a similar theme where like it was making people's lives better and it was being deflationary. And then nuclear essentially has gotten stopped or, you know, mostly stopped. China's actually building a lot of nuclear. But I think that a real energy transition has got to be at the quantum level. It's going to

be through like efficiency stuff, which may be quantum computing someday, but like just more efficiency. And then it's going to be through nuclear because it's the most energy dense and it's the most realistic way to do it i think that the renewable stuff is just a it's going to be a failed experiment in my opinion because it just doesn't check enough boxes it doesn't get us there it makes it makes it's inflationary right yeah it's a step backwards it's more expensive less reliable it's fucking infuriatingly dumb like and it's more emissions than nuclear right like we have the ability we have the tech to like transition to a nuclear-based economy they can do even micro reactors there's all these interesting things that could be done there hasn't been the

investment in innovation in that space because no one wants to build one it's taking now decades to get one built in the u.s or a decade plus and people then people point to that and they're like oh it's not cost effective it's like it's not cost effective because we've regulated it to not be cost effective yeah and what is the regulatory body around nuclear in the united states they haven't okayed a nuclear project in something like 50 years right and it's like it's the same thing that happened with there's some other just ironic things it's the same reason why we can't mine for renewables here it's like it's so dirty to mine for renewables which are What do you mean by mining for renewables?

We can't get like the raw materials. We can't mine for like the minerals. The rare earth minerals. It's rare earth and it's like lithium for batteries and copper, even copper, like these basic things that we need. There's just not a lot of mining in the US. The US has like made it prohibitively regulatory

to be able to mine here. So this is why countries like China do it. And the irony is that it's like, look, to go green, we have to do something that we consider so dirty in the US. We won't even do it here. It's like, well, wait a second. And then it's like the other thing around energy independence with oil. People always say,

well, we're not energy independent. We still have to import all these barrels of oil. The reason why we import oil is because they won't let us build new refineries, can't permit a new refinery. So we've got older refineries that are teed up for a certain type of crude quality. And now we have to import barrels to be able to blend them to even refine things here. So people argue, see, we're not energy independent. We can't, it's like, we're not energy independent because they've regulated us to the point where we can't even build the right kind of refinery so a lot of these things come back to central planning and messing it up and if it were just the free markets um it'd be a different energy landscape completely

freaks we have the ability to bring about a abundant cheap energy to the masses here in the united states potentially the world just for some reason where like max just explained the central planners are preventing us from bringing that world to fruition like and people get mad at me like oh oil and gas i'm like i'm a nuclear maximalist too i want all the nuclear plants like that is arguably the cleanest energy like no no co2 output right like outside the construction of the reactors and the cement like that's the most co2 intensive part of the whole operation in a nuclear plant the waste is manageable too i mean they you know i think that where you do nuclear first as you do it in first world countries because we have more

you know you want to regulate the waste like the waste people could get it and make like a dirty bomb. Like you don't want like Iran getting, they're probably going to get a bomb anyways, but you don't want countries that would use the nuclear waste for a nefarious act to have it. So, you know, focus on the first world countries, which by the way, they're the ones emitting all the CO2 anyway. So it's like these third world countries give them access to natural gas, even coal. Coal has gotten a heck of a lot cleaner. I mean, from an emissions standpoint, it's way better than it was in like the sixties and seventies. So get these emerging economies access to cheap. And I hate using the word clean, but you know, I would consider natural gas clean,

get them access to that help lift them up and then for these developed countries get them nuclear reactors where they can responsibly get rid of the waste and we can get to these emissions goals we're not doing any of that not doing any of that we're trying to stop all those things from happening actually well then think of that like you said like iran with a with a bomb and shit like that but like again if we if we bring this cheap abundant energy to the masses like the the potential for conflict hot wars reduces because there's less things to fight over because people are economically comfortable they're they're they're not lashing out at an other to to get resources to provide for themselves like that's arguably what's going on with like

russia ukraine and europe right now and that whole debacle is europe has the no political will to actually leverage the natural resources they they have below their their content or content their countries whatever you want to say uh and and so they're dependent on russia now they're getting mad at russia because prices are going up and russia's playing hardball he's like yeah we got the gas like you got to meet us at the negotiating table and now people like we're going to go to war with russia because it's all over the energy their energy is a very strong component of it and don't fucking blame russia blame yourselves for being a bunch of fucking hypocrites and shutting down reliable energy generation over the last two decades particularly

in germany uh and and not having the will to actually bring cheap energy to your people that exist on your land like we live in a clown world yeah i mean i wouldn't say that i tweeted you know that the ukraine conflict was a failed energy policy and a bunch of people pointed out all the nuances around and how that's not really the case but it's certainly a factor in why in the way that it's being handled and that the way certainly countries like germany that rely on russia gas and Russia has been weaponizing it. I mean, they've been just, Putin's just been playing Europe so hard. It's like, oh, I am flowing gas. And then like, oh, we were going to give you guys more than like gases down the next month and prices are shooting up. And you know, it's like, he's

just messing with them. And so I'm not going to say the whole conflict is over that, but it's certainly a chip on his side of the table. That's allowing him to do a lot more things that he probably wouldn't be able to do otherwise, because I think countries like Germany would probably take a harder stance and be like, no, I don't do this. And they can't, or at least there's an element of that they can't because they're relying on Russia for energy. I mean, energy is like sovereignty in a lot of ways. If you look back, I mean, a lot of the wars and the things we've done have been around energy and people talk now about how the future, like if we really did go to this like renewable based thing, we'd be having, we'd be, the Middle East would be like Africa. We'd be

fighting over mines for like rare earth and all this stuff. There'd be like wars and it would shift the wars. It's like, why not just use the resources we have here? Europe has a lot of resources too. They've banned fracking in like almost all these countries. You can't even go exploit them um it's it's artificially creating scarcity and it's it's inflation i mean it drives inflation too i mean getting back to bitcoin i mean we talk about the money printer there's other ways to drive inflation and this whole like stranglehold on energy is highly inflationary and back to my point around transitions it shouldn't be if we're having a transition it should be the opposite it should be deflationary and i think that the point of it may be to be

inflationary because when things happen like look at like i mean the other day i was like first you have failed energy policy i was like and then i was like socialism right and i'm half joking but like look at europe right now it's like they're having to subsidize pay people's energy bills because they failed as leaders and so now they're having to basically socialize energy price it's just it's like and if that's the goal which is more centralized planning then maybe that is i don't know being like a conspiracy theorist but like maybe that is the goal hey hey we we embrace conspiracy theorists here tftc people men and women of power conspire to do things and to fuck over the common man. It's been proven throughout history. You can go read a history book and it's

pretty obvious that that shit happens. And we would be naive to think that it's not happening today. And again, going back to the Davos class, these people openly talk about hating the average man. You will own nothing and you will be happy. You own nothing and you will be happy. You're going to eat the bugs. You're going to stay in your pod. You're going to use this unreliable solar wind. You know what? You might go cold a few nights a year, but that's the sacrifice you have to make so that we can fly around in our private jets and tell you what to do like it's it's time to begin fighting back earnestly peacefully against this stuff and i hope that sensible conversations that try to lay out the nuance of the energy landscape can help with

that again like you said we have the ability to do this we just don't have the will energy transitions should be deflationary which a nuclear transition would certainly be and it was when it was being allowed to happen well you can see it already look at like france versus i mean france has more nuclear than germany and it's just like it directly correlates to lower uh energy costs and if you look at like the renewables everybody wants to point to like lcoe or whatever levelized cost of energy which is just a fake accounting way yeah just say fiat fucking right right and so it's like they can say solar is you know by far the cheapest energy source they'll show these graphs right where solar like plunges and now it's better than natural gas and all these things and

I'm like, yeah, like maybe when the sun's shining, like at the equator, you know, like, I mean, it's like, sure, it's probably pretty cheap then. But if you look at where they've been implemented across the board, Germany now, their energy prices are way higher and they're actually burning, they're actually emitting more CO2

than they did before they did all these renewables because they've had to rely on coal. They've had to import more gas. They've done other things that it's like, it gets back to this, like, it's almost the opposite of what people, these policies, they do like the opposite, essentially. Like as soon as like central planning comes in

and tries to not let the free market do it, like it's like the reverse effect happens it's not in my backyard they push pollution out i mean we can hit on china for being this biggest pollute polluter with coal well why are they the biggest polluters because they make everything we pushed all of our production to them and why do they make everything because we made it prohibitively expensive to make it here because of things like cap and trade in canada and these other things where it's like you can't you know it's too expensive to emit co2 or carbon so we just do it over there right and then we larp about how we've lowered our emissions like no you haven't you've just like shifted over to china exported them

you've exported your industry and your emissions to to china congrats congrats policymakers i hope and congrats to you environmentalists out there i hope you feel good about yourselves that's another thing like i saw a dude tweet i think his name was adam mckay or something like that i don't know who he is but he said like this tweet like trying to like make a pithy comment about the impending doom of within six or seven years we don't drastically change our carbon emissions. The world is going to fall, hit a tipping point where there's no turning back and the environment's going to completely collapse. And it's like, how could you believe this? Like people have been saying this for decades, for centuries almost. And it's not true. Like the

world is fine. The Maldives were supposed to be under the ocean a decade ago. They're building new airports for more people to come and enjoy the Maldives. Like these people using these fear-mongering tactics telling you that climate change is going to destroy the earth are not right. They have been terribly wrong for decades. Greta Thunberg, what did she, I think, believe it was four years ago, she said in 12 years, we're going to hit that tipping point where there's no turning back. What happens when we get to eight years from now? So we get to 2030 and nothing happens. Like, are we going to recalibrate? Are we going to look at the predictions these people made highlight that they've been terribly wrong. They did not come to fruition and then stop

listening to them. Like at what point do we stop listening to these Malthusians who have been terribly, terribly wrong for decades? And again, this is the frustrating part about this conversation because I am an environmentalist. I do want to be energy efficient. I do not want to pollute. I want to make sure that I leave the world a better place than I, than I entered it. And like, that is not mutually exclusive from using hydrocarbons and bringing cheap, abundant energy to the masses like that's the frustrating and really the genius part of the climate hysterics is they've if they've basically framed it where they say like using hydrocarbons and having and being an environmentalist are mutually exclusive which they're not

well and i mean like you know you can look at what i hate to say things like look at the science because that's such a thing that people say all the time to make an argument and i just i hate that term, but what I've tried to do is actually look at like these different reports, like these climate reports and these studies. And what I've found by reading them and some of them, like the IPCC is like 3000 pages for the actual physical sciences part of it. It's a lot of pages, but I've gone through like each one of the sections and looked at kind of, they have a summary in those and then they have a summary for policymakers in there and you can read it. And nowhere did I find at all them mentioning the word climate crisis. They didn't mention that. They didn't

mention the apocalypse. They don't mention the end of the world. They don't mention all of species dying. They talk about very specific, like this percentage statistical chance that we could see increased droughts in certain regions of the earth. This percentage statistical chance that we could see increased whatever fire risk or flood risk or whatever. It's all very like scientific and it lays out these different probabilities that these things could happen. And that's fine. Like CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I mean, sure. Like the planet is getting warmer. We can show at least recently it has, but let's talk about it in real terms or trade-offs. So, okay, if there's more drought, maybe there's a cost to that, right? What's that cost versus the

money that we're spending on the Paris Accord? It's like, we need to have a nuanced conversation about this stuff. It's not that I don't think that CO2 could make the planet warmer. It's just that when I hear the talking points, like on Twitter and in the mainstream media, it's that the apocalypse is happening. And people will comment on my Twitter. I'm like, show me the study that says that. And then they'll post some like, you know, activist speech from like a college or whatever. I'm like, no, that's an activist. Show me the study that quotes that. Well, this professor over here, well, that's a professor. That's not a peer reviewed. Like there's no, none of the official reports that they're using at the policy level are talking

about the end of the world. They're talking about very measured things that, okay, if it goes up this much, this will happen. So everything's nuanced and it's not that like we can't have an impact on the planet. We can, but the reality is we've been safer than climate than ever recently. The last hundred years, climate deaths have dropped like 98%. And that's primarily driven by fossil fuels and the ability to protect ourselves in buildings and having climate controlled and climate protected things like concrete, right? Like if you are on a island like Haiti and you live in a concrete house versus a stick built house and a hurricane hits, you're going to live in the concrete house. And in areas where we have modernized energy

and modernized structures that we need energy, like fossil fuels to make concrete, people live from climate. So it's just, it needs to be a nuanced discussion. And I'm not seeing anywhere in the literature where the apocalypse is being predicted. I don't see that anywhere. Again, these Malthusians, fear is one hell of a mechanism to leverage to make people do certain things, idiotic things, self-deprecating things like transitioning to less reliable and less energy dense energy sources like wind and solar. and and then again like like they again using fear like you mentioned wildfires drought the the the ungreening of the world or a few of them that they they lean at the bleaching of the coral reefs the coral reefs like you can go down wildfires uh australia a few years ago had those massive wildfires there was a climate change climate change climate change when you

dig in they the fucking australian government didn't allow farmers to do controlled burns for decade and so you had a decade of brush buildup that basically created tinder for those massive wildfires a policy that had the opposite effect this goes back to that theme policies they put in to do the opposite of what they're supposed to do yes number one coral reefs bleaching yes coral reefs ebb and flow they bleach but then they come back again like the great barrier reef again back in australia that professor who basically came out has been studying the great coral reef his whole fucking career they came out last year and was like hey guys like you're saying that the coral reef is dying, but it's actually

been thriving the last few years. Fired. Wrong think. Bad think. Out. What else can we go to? Drought. The un-greening of the world, number one, the world has become significantly more green over the last five decades.

Then you can do things like grazing roaming cattle. You can do things to bring more grassland to land masses. It's just like, again, And it's an inability or unwillingness to actually do these sensible policies or these sensible things.

I mean, they shouldn't even have to be implemented with policy. You just have roaming, grazing cattle that are doing regenerative greening across the land. But instead, like we do to the regulatory structure of the United States specifically, like we're forced for ranchers, a lot of ranchers are forced to raise their cattle in their way and process their cattle in a specific way too, that does not allow them to do that regenerative grazing. And again, the solutions are here. We can, we can, we can foster the environment in a very good way. We can pollute less. We can be as efficient as possible with

the energy that we're, that we're creating. Bitcoin mining helps that immensely. And we can all thrive. Like it's, it's possible, but again, it's an unwillingness at the, at the policy level. these these central planners are destroying the world in front of us and that's why i get so passionate people yell at me they call me uh anti-science they say i'm a climate change blah blah blah blah blah like just look at everything think critically do not take like look what happened last two years with the covid now they're all backtracking they all lie to you say trust the science trust us we're experts we're experts we're experts they're all fucking wrong they destroyed the global economy they increased depression rates increased addiction rates

increased deaths inflated away everybody's inflated away everybody's money and these are the same fucking people telling you that the world is going to end if you don't if you may if you don't make your worst life look your life worse off by using less energy these people are lying to you there are ways to be an environmentalist and to leave the world a better place than you came into it and we just need to begin acting and creating the will to leverage the sources, the resources that are available to us. It's time freaks. Yeah. The problem is that this, these fear-based narratives are so effective. Um, and they're so hard to, they're so hard to combat, you know, I mean, like I, I almost look at energy like I do. Um, it's like what I, I made

this analogy before I look up in the sky and you see all these stars and planets and you're overwhelmed by it. And you're like, I can't even wrap my head around, you know, black holes and all these things. And I, that's one, that's an extreme example of that feeling. I think people get that feeling when they look at energy, like they don't understand how their lights come on every day they look around they see all these wires and these things and they hear stuff like oh everything can be powered on solar or everything and they hear these really nice cookie cutter answers that are great sound bites and then when you couple those amazing sound bites with in great marketing with a bunch of fear this oh and by the way if you don't believe this the world's gonna

end and you're a racist and yeah and you're a denier the other day i said it i said if you're using the argument calling someone a denier i was like that's what people do when they argue about religion not science you don't call people deniers you call that like that's like a faith thing yeah like you deny the book of whatever like some religious type of argument like that doesn't seem like the right kind of argument repent for science for science should be like a critical questioning and having conversations but nobody's doing that and to be fair people just want to go to work they want to you know live their life and unfortunately they're bombarded with a bunch of uh bad info and that's why these conversations are important yeah these are

important this is a propaganda of another kind we're actually trying to propagandize good information not no we're not trying to scare you we're actually trying to paint a good picture of the future hey we can have beautiful things we can we can thrive in society that's that's the picture we're trying to paint here we're not trying to tell you that you're bad and you're destroying the world and that your children are going to fall into the ocean in the future i don't like moralizing anything really there's very few i mean obvious there's obvious bad things you can moralize but like certain types of crime but you know in terms of like consumer choices i put a moral framework around that oh you can't have you can have christmas lights but

you can't bitcoin mine well that's like that's the funny like i got into not arguments or anything like the bitcoin mining industry elizabeth warren's like i want comments from the top six mining companies in the united states and what they're doing and then like people in the bitcoin mining industry at the public level we're like oh here's what we're writing we're going to write to her i'm like this is what you tell elizabeth warren it's none of your fucking business i'll do whatever the fuck i want i'm paying for my electricity fuck off like i don't owe you shit i am buying this i'm buying this energy i'm turning into electricity i'm mining bitcoin with it this is a free fucking country she flies around on private jets get out of here you show us

elizabeth what your energy usage is yeah exactly i don't owe you shit shut the fuck up like it's just it's just it's she's it's all this larping grandstanding so then she can point to that and be like look i stuck it to the bitcoin mining industry it's just it's all backed by the bankers too right yeah that's the problem though um it's very difficult to have what the the issue is is that when you inject and she's a liar she said she was a fucking native american like why the fuck do we care i'm getting pissed off now like why do we care what elizabeth warren thinks i don't owe you shit elizabeth warren i will do whatever i want with the electricity i pay for no she's uh she's one of the worst it's hard to it's hard to listen to her and see her takes

they're terrible and it's about everything right it's about like anytime like food prices are up oh price gouging oil prices are up oh price rigging it's never the central planner's fault if you just let me if basically her message is if you just let me do all this all this messed up stuff wouldn't happen that's essentially what she's saying about everything every industry it's always comes back to we'll just give us the power i promise we don't screw it up it's like your track record is you are screwing it up yeah so like why would and like the other day i had this thought i think like maybe hike said it on one of our pods but it was like knowing what i know about how bad energy policy is and how just backwards it is and wrong and the amount that they

promoted in a wrong way you didn't start to think like what about everything else they're this wrong about this and this is something that i know about so i know they're wrong but i'm not a medical expert i'm not a you know whatever these other issues i'm not an expert on these i am like consider myself try to be an expert on energy and if i know they're that wrong about this and what else are they wrong about similar money i came from an economics background worked uh focusing on central banking and their policies found out it was terribly wrong. And the policies that they're thrusting on the masses are, are highly detrimental to quality of life and ability to, to save in the longterm. And then Bitcoin's like, all right. And then you see how they talk about

Bitcoin. You see how they talk about Bitcoin mining, just off base, off base, wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything they're saying is wrong about Bitcoin. They're incompetent. Wake up, get out, Get out. They have you under a spell. These people are fucking incompetent sociopaths. It's the way the system is set up to be. It's a soundbite. We're in a soundbite world.

Information like the rise of the sovereign individual and some of the themes in that book, like people are getting access to more ability to learn the right things. The problem is they're getting bombarded with a lot of bad stuff too. Yeah. So you got to find the signal.

The noise is very, drowns out the signal. You got to be, hopefully we're providing signal here. I hope so I think the energy content's been good like I had people come up to me at this conference and I rarely get this so I'm doing the podcast for a year but like thanking me and being like I learned stuff from it and I feel positive like I feel like it's making an impact and and I think people want to learn and they want to hear dissenting opinion so people that are

honest intellectually they want to hear dissenting opinions if you're only hearing opinions that agree with you then you're not learning anything you should be uncomfortable with some of the conversations that you're having agreed agreed you have to people are like oh you oil and gas show like i want to hear the the solar and wind turbine arguments i have heard them they're not convincing they're not only outcomes aren't convincing you look at i mean you can tell me on paper that this is the best source of energy but when you look at what it's doing look at texas is great i mean it's having big time problems bitcoin miners could help solve some of it but the problems in the first place are caused by all the intermittency yeah it's like that's the

problem. Well, let's get into this. I wanted to bring it up earlier when you mentioned demand response and ERCOT. It's a big meme now. Texas Bitcoin mining capital of the world. But Steve Barber had a good thread about this last week. Everybody and again,

I think we have the truth on our side as Bitcoiners, but there is a narrative nuance to be aware of. And I think there is the potential for Bitcoiners right now to be setting up for a bad narrative in the future is specifically around demand response. Like demand response in theory

works very well and it does make sense. You overbuild capacity on the grid so that miners can consume electricity. And then when peak demand hits and the grid, residential consumers leveraging the grid need more electricity, you turn off your miners. Then you sell that electricity back to the grid for a profit that's higher than you would get mining Bitcoin. That's an economic incentive and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a free market solution to an energy delivery problem and miners should make money for that. But the electricity generation should be sitting on top of reliable baseload energy and natural gas and nuclear, even coal. But like what's happening in Texas right now, even with the demand response program, like a lot of the capacity is

being built out to supply that excess capacity is wind and solar. And that's not, you can build out as much wind and solar capacity as you want but if the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine like it did like like what happened last february here in texas like you can have a thousand gigawatts whatever that equates to on like the next scale of capacity but that's not going to do shit for you so like if you're pushing demand response and you're pushing bitcoin miners helping out a grid make sure that the the baseload energy providing that electricity is reliable energy, is nuclear, natural gas, or even coal over wind and solar. You can supplement it with wind and solar, but that should not be the main energy sources that you're leveraging

for these demand response programs. It's like the capacity in the renewable space is kind of a ghost, right? Like you can show a huge capacity number, but if the wind is not blowing and the sun's not shining and you need it, it's non-dispatchable. Like that's great. You have like 700 megawatts of solar installed, but if it's a cloudy day and it's freezing outside, then that's just ghost capacity it's it's it's wasteful and then the other thing about it is that number one it's regressive because it causes the prices of energy to go up which we talked about earlier um number two it's like it doesn't solve these problems that we we need more energy that's reliable when we need it not just like this intermittent energy uh that can fail us uh at these different times

and so i don't know i could go on and on about it but the reality is it's happening and it seems to be this is what people want okay fine build more nat gas and coal or nuclear too because if not It's going to be a bad outcome for us. It just is. We're seeing it play out in Europe. I hope you guys like this conversation. Max has got to get too. Nape, I've got to do something in 10 minutes

and I've got to pee before that. So we got to wrap up. It was a quick rip. That was fun. I think it was dense. That was good. It was fun. Hey, we're peaceful environmentalists.

We're here to try to make the world better, freaks. That's right. Providing energy. That's what I've done. I mean, I'm not like out there turning the wrench, but I'm a cog in that wheel and I feel good morally about it. Good, you should.

I do. Where can we find out more about you? Website's talk.energy. You can subscribe to the YouTube, the Talk Energy podcast, or my Twitter is max underscore gagliardi, which is another good way. Go forth and bring about abundant cheap energy, freaks.

Peace and love.