TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #328: The pitfalls of the Fiat Standard with Dr. Saifedean Ammous

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Dr. Saifedean Ammous to discuss the pitfalls of the Fiat Standard. Follow Saif on Twitter Read more about The Fiat Standard Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl

What is up, freaks? This is Jigsaw from... Oh, what the fuck was that? It's all... You want to play a game. That's all I got. It's actually Marty Ben.

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It's not a future financial product. It's here today, but they're creating a vision of what a future financial company may look like. Lend.HodlHodl.com for the lending platform. Enjoy this riff. 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 probably should be oh we're live don't cater to their framing is that is that what we're getting at yes it's it's frustrating yeah reject their premises is the point they're wrong exactly we're talking particularly i'm sitting down with dr safedina moose author of a few books on this bookshelf here a couple books two particularly yeah we're talking about this whole meme in the bitcoin space right now particularly in north america the bitcoin mining industry feels the need

to bring a bunch of information to a bunch of zealot hysterics about bitcoin mining's energy mix and they're pushing the narrative that bitcoin mining is going to incentivize a transition to renewables which i don't think is true i don't think a transition of renewables is is smart number one and then number two i've seen it personally bitcoin mining is going to incentivize more oil production because it's going to help oil and gas producers with their operations i agree i think it's um i think it's i think the idea of a renewable transition is just a very very dangerous idea it's one of those things that everybody likes to um it's like motherhood and apple pie you know everybody wants to say that they like those things that they're good and

everybody can't think of a bad thing about them although let's face it apple pie is terrible for your um your blood sugar but uh renewable energy is equally terrible perhaps for your chances at living in a modern civilized society basically the notion that these renewable energy sources can provide an alternative to fossil fuels is extremely dangerous it's not just misguided it's not just ridiculous it's also very dangerous because uh we we going back to relying on sunlight and wind isn't some futuristic utopia star trek world where you know you press a button and everything materializes without there needing to be any hard work going into it it means just going back to pre-industrialization that's what it means it's de-industrialization so we can

have 14th century technology on wind and solar we can't have computers we can't have all of these modern things that we like to take for granted like surviving winter you know reliably being able to survive winter that can't be done on wind and solar alone and um i think you know on a on putting bitcoin aside just the simple idea that you um engage in the streaming of the idea that the renewable transition is a good thing i think that's very dangerous um people need to wake up to it we're seeing the effects of that in um all these grids that are failing all over the world all of the countries where the price of electricity is rising over the last 10, 20 years.

That's because they're introducing all of these primitive industries, all these primitive technologies into their grids. So the more we continue to fashion the talk of this insane idea of a renewable transition, moving away from fossil fuels to renewables, the more, obviously, it's not something that can be achieved technically. We can't have the 21st century technology based on 7th century energy sources. The only thing that we'll do is we're just going to make energy more and more expensive.

And it's just going to get more expensive for people all over the world. So I think that's extremely dangerous to talk about that. But I also think it's unrealistic, as you say. It's not going to happen. Bitcoin is magically going to break the laws of thermodynamics and suddenly make it possible to build the modern civilization on solar and wind. It's just not going to happen.

It's not going to happen. And again, so going back, let's get to the crux of why it's a bad idea. I mean, you've been phrasing it as like 14th century technology. It's a regression. It all comes down to energy density. Wind and solar are not as energy dense

as oil and gas or nuclear. I mean, we can get the nuclear in a bit here but like that i mean that's the red herring like they really want it like clean renewable like they would go for nuclear which is the most energy dense on on the market but this weird fascination with wind and solar specifically as you mentioned is a regression why is it a regression because it's less energy dense humans have only progressed as a society as we've discovered more energy dense sources of energy yeah and the way that i like to explain this in my next book principles of economics which is a textbook on economics i have a whole chapter on

the economics of energy i think the way to think of it is that you know for something to be an economic good it has to be valued and in order for it to have value it needs to be scarce so there needs to be some element of scarcity about a good in order for people to have to value it as opposed to other things you need to make a choice between it and other things so that's why water is not an economic good if you're on a giant river right on the coast of the right on the bank of a giant river air is not an economic good because it's abundant everywhere so energy i think cannot really be understood as an economic good in itself there's infinite amounts of energy everywhere around us so the sun every day hits the earth with more energy than humanity consumes

in an entire year i think or maybe i forget the exact numbers but there's an enormous amount of energy coming to earth from the sun there's an enormous amount of energy from wind blowing everywhere all over the earth there's an enormous amount of energy in all of the fuels that are stored underground the fossil fuels which are constantly growing you know the amount of fossil fuels is as big as we look for where the more we look the more we find there's an enormously infinite amount of them existing under earth and the only limit is just how much we dig for it similarly nuclear energy i mean infinitely larger even than fossil fuels the amount of energy that exists out there because it's so extremely dense so it's not really accurate that energy itself

is the good what is an economic good is power is the ability to is the delivering of energy at a specific rate over a specific period of time that's what is what is a scarce good you know being able to have enough energy to perform this job in this place at that time that's what's scarce that's what people pay for so the sunlight contains jewels the wind blowing contains energy is all around us that's not valuable for us we can't pay for it we can't monetize it in order for us to value it in order for it to become an economic good it needs to meet our needs and in order to do that you need to direct quantities of energy at a specific period of time so power is what is scarce how much energy can you direct at a at the work or the problem that you face

per second that is the scarce good and that is what's difficult to have that's it's what's expensive to produce that's what's expensive to produce particularly reliably and that's where you understand how the energy market works that's why solar and wind are such an expensive catastrophe and it's completely unworkable and it's not something that can be fixed with small efficiency improvements not everything will end up following moore's law and just getting cheaper infinitely forever some things are just not going to get uh cheaper we need to accept it and solar and wind the problem with it is that the wind and the sunlight are not condensed sources of energy so you need large amount of infrastructure in order to harvest large amounts of energy

and then directed toward meeting a particular problem that you want to solve, heating something or moving something. So moving that energy from the abundant and low-density state of wind and solar into the on-demand high-power state that you require to operate all of your toys and essential devices and to warm your house and to keep your kids warm. All of those things require high bursts of energy per second, high power on demand.

So to transform solar low density, low power density sources into high power density available on demand, that's the expensive thing. And that is the problem exactly that fossil fuels solve. That's what fossil fuels are. They solve this problem

because they are nature's perfect, abundant, cheap, wholesome batteries. And they're just available all over the planet, concentrating the solar energy that has been accumulated on earth for millions and billions of years into tiny little chunks of condensed energy. I mean, it's just,

it's exactly what you'd wish for. I mean, just imagine, like if you understand how the world actually works, Your life is all about trying to dedicate and find energy to answer your problems. And Mother Earth has chunks of stored energy hidden for us like Easter eggs under its entire surface for us to go out there and survive the winter and move around. It's amazing. It's the most incredible gift the Earth has given us. It allows us to have all these nice things, and yet people are kicking the gift away and saying, no, we need to get off this gift and get back to 7th century medieval peasant, well, 7th century is not medieval, but get back to medieval peasant technologies, rely on the sun rising today so that we can get to survive and stay warm.

it's insane and there's this weird anti i mean anti-human is it's getting used a lot these days but it's true it's anti-human like there's this weird masochism in the mainstream that like we feel bad many humans i don't feel bad but there's many people out there who feel bad that we have the incredible ability to number one recognize that these fossil fuels are this dense energy provider that are natural batteries that can produce energy and then produce electricity for us and for some reason like we don't like that we've been able to harness this and build this modern society that we have today with all these lights the streaming technologies microphones and it's like for some reason the masses have been conned and psyoped into believing

that doing all this is bad yeah i have my theories about the reason and it's in the fiat standard but before we get into that, let's talk a little bit about exactly why it is that energy is important for our lives. A great way of explaining it is our friend Alex Epstein, who's been on your podcast before, has been online several times. Alex says, Alex has a great way of explaining it, which is think about the amount of energy you use in terms of the number of people that it would take to produce that work. So currently the average American has the equivalent of, I forget the exact number, but somewhere around 200 slaves effectively working for them all day. Think about how much energy you consume in terms of getting in the car, moving the car around, the energy that

needs to go to boil your water, make your water hot so that you can take a hot shower, the electricity that keeps your house lit, air conditioning, heating, all of the stuff that you use in your work your computer all of the devices that you use think about how much energy that contains and then divide that by how much energy a human being the average human being spends every day so each one of us will consume and produce work equal to around two to three thousand calories a day and yet the average person today gets hundreds times of that average person i would should say in a rich country in a rich industrialized country that has 24-hour electricity grids and heavy consumption of high power sources of energy the average person will have 200 humans

effectively working for them all day to produce their goods now of course it's not exactly equivalent to 200 humans because if you replaced it with 200 humans the 200 humans can't get you as far as your car can take you and they're not going to run as fast as your car can take you and they can't make your life as good as the machines and the energy that we consume does but it's nonetheless a good metric to kind of get the problem uh in perspective so you've got two human 200 humans as your daily slaves basically um in all those machines that you use every day now that's why your life is so much better than what your ancestors lives was where like a few hundred years ago, because up until a few hundred years ago, up until we discovered these amazing

batteries of nature that are fossil fuels, up until we started to massively deploy coal, oil, and gas into making our lives better, the vast majority of humans that have ever lived all throughout human history had nothing but their own energy sources, but their own energy to meet their daily needs. So you woke up every day and you had your own hands to meet everything that you need to do. You had your own 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day

that had to keep you warm, to keep you fed, to go get the wood, to keep your house warm, to go get the food, to hunt, to grow the food, to harvest the food,

to build your house, to secure your house, to build your clothes, make your clothes, wear them, make sure that they are good and continues to maintain them, maintain the house, all of that stuff, you only had yourself working for it.

And, you know, obviously you could hire others, but you had to obviously produce something in exchange for that. So you only have those two, 3,000 calories a day and you have to economize your energy in a way that would allow you to survive. So obviously when you think of it this way, you know, imagine I put you on an island

and you only have yourself and your own time and energy to survive. you see how difficult it is it's it's extremely difficult to be able to survive with only your own labor and not be able to use other energy sources the only people that historically had access to other people's to higher levels of energy were kings and slave owners historically so if you managed to be king or chief of a tribe you had 100 slaves or 500 slaves and those people ran around all day you know they need to take care of themselves but they spent a big chunk of their energy taking care of you if you had a slave

that person would go to the forest get firewood so then you didn't have to worry about ever being cold and think of you know once one whole slave is probably needed just to make you warm if you just outsource the getting firewood for them and then another 20 slaves would be responsible for moving you around and then another 50 slaves would be responsible for growing your food and harvesting your food and so on and producing your food and cooking for you so if you were a king you had something like a couple of hundred slaves working for you a few hundred years ago and that gave you a decent life that's what a very very very tiny minority of humanity had ever had and today because of the abundance of energy basically the average normal american has

something equivalent to hundreds of slaves mating their needs and not only that but they also have it in a way that some of the richest kings of human history have never had because as good as slaves can be to have you know obviously it's better to have more people working for you they are nothing like what the machines can do there's no slave that can take you as fast as a modern car and that's the miracle of how these fuels have improved our lives and it is precisely because of their ability to direct large quantities of energy at the problems that we want to solve to do the work that we want to do precisely at the time that we want it you know on demand And the ability to just flick a switch and watch a dark room go lit immediately without ever worrying about whether that can happen or can't happen or is the wind blowing or is the sun shining, that really is what makes our modern life possible.

And that's why these fuels are so essential. And that's why trying to move away from them is so dangerous. And you can't move away from them without them. Number one, you shouldn't do it. And that's one of the things that really grinds my gears about this whole debate is, again, accepting their framing. Words like, what is renewable? What is sustainable?

Even fossil fuels. I'm starting to be like, should we even use that term? Because I feel like that's a psyop to make it feel like there's dinosaurs that are scarce on the ground that we can only use. yeah i think i i i've seen a lot of people say that um the term fossil fuels is misleading and i generally try and not use it as uh often i prefer the term hydrocarbons which is the technical term they are hydrocarbon compounds and uh i think there's pretty compelling evidence that uh these don't have to come from fossils maybe they do come from fossils some of them but

there's no reason why these chemicals can't exist in the crust of the earth there are meteors on which gases and hydrocarbons have been found and there are places on earth where you know i've seen this in the south of turkey there are flames that come out of the mountain that have been lit for thousands of years and it's just gas coming out and burning for thousands and thousands of years continuously the idea that you had to have fossils there in order for this to happen i think is um it's not necessary it's an assumption that's been uh taken unquestioned but i that i doubt how valid it is yeah there's i mean if you want to look it up as the abiogenic process of creating these these hydrocarbons under under the earth

surface um uh vacal smell uh vaclav smell he writes a lot about this and natural gas powering the 21st century and makes a pretty convincing argument that there's most likely an abiogenic process happening under the earth that makes this possible. Yeah, and I think really natural gas

is the unsung hero here. I think if the world wasn't taken over over the last 50 years by insane people who don't understand anything, just children that are demanding, children that are basically

throwing tantrums and saying, we don't want the things that make our lives possible anymore. We want you to make them differently. If the world wasn't taken over by that and if we hadn't spent enormous amounts of money and capital on these insane misguided attempts to build all of these white elephant projects, I think the world would have moved a lot more toward natural gas over the last few decades. We'd have had a lot more investment in natural gas and natural gas is better than coal for power generation because it's much cleaner and it's more modern and probably safer as well. Put it through a pipeline. It's much easier to transport that than over rails with coal. Exactly. Yeah. It's much cheaper to transport. So we would have had a natural gas revolution if the world was not insane. And I think, and that's the point in the fiat standard, the argument that I want to present in the fiat standard is that, like everything, this can and should be blamed on fiat.

it is the fault of fiat everything is the fault of fiat and this is no exception and i i i have a whole chapter on fuels in particular in the fiat standard and it wasn't just uh there because you know i wanted to rant about things related to fiat i know to sell books um it's there because it's a fundamental part of the problem of fiat in my opinion the way that fiat inflation has been hidden over the last 50 years is by trying to convince people and gaslight them into believing that the things that they are that are necessary for them are not good for you because of various stupid pseudo-scientific ideas and that the way that you can save yourself and save the earth is for you to live like a 13th century peasant basically that's that's really what we see when

it comes to food and it's what we see when it comes to energy both of those things are extremely sensitive to inflation and we saw how big of a problem this was in the 1970s and i discussed this in the fiat standard so in the 1970s when nixon went off the gold standard or shouldn't say they went off the gold standard in 1914 but in 1971 they removed the peg or to remove the gold exchange window and so there was no limit on how much money the u.s government could generate and prices shot up prices of food and oil in particular rose significantly in the 1970s that was a huge issue this was the most important issue of the 70s whenever anybody remembers the 70s they think of inflation it was a massive global catastrophe and how did they fight it in the u.s well we have

very extensive evidence of the way that they fought it in the 1970s and that was when it comes to food they invented these insane dietary guidelines that tell people that you should eat industrial slop and mass-produced crops that are very cheap because that's better for you and that you should not eat meat and animal fats that have been produced for millions of years which all of your ancestors have eaten you know no matter where you are in the world your ancestors have relied on animal fats in order to survive everywhere in the world it's It's the universal thing that unites us as humans. We eat meat and all our cultures rely on animal fats.

And that somehow became dangerous in the 1970s when it became very expensive because of inflation. And somehow cheap industrial sludge became the thing that is healthy. And somehow all of the universities of the world began repeating this insane idea that, Oh, no, no, no, no. The animal fats that all of your ancestors have eaten

in order to bring you here were bad. They're giving you heart disease. They're giving you the heart disease that only started in the last 20 years once we started manufacturing our industrial sludge fats. And the answer, you'll never guess it, but the solution to your heart disease problem is the same industrial sludge engine lubricant

that we're feeding you, which started the whole heart epidemic, heart disease epidemic all over the world and so the answer magically for energy and for food is you need to eat you need to consume the cheap stuff and it's the same thing with energy with energy we've gone from up until the 1970s you had a two percent per capita increase in energy consumption per year since the beginning of the 19th century so we had about almost 200 years of uninterrupted growth in per capita energy consumption worldwide as modern technology spread And then that slows down in the 1970s and it stopped increasing.

And as prices of energy went up, we had an abundance of all of these silly pseudosciences explaining why we need to stop consuming all of these essential energy sources. So initially, we're going to run out of oil and that's why we need to stop. That's why prices are rising and that's why we need to stop using oil because we're going to run out and we're addicted and there's not enough to go around and we're all going to die if we if we don't beat the addiction on oil and that was the 1970s when the prices were rising then in the 1980s prices crashed and the production continued to go up and so they rebranded the scare story you know the conclusion is still the same obviously this is stupid

motivating reasoning so there's no evidence behind it the conclusion is still the same we're all going to die and it's all because of you consuming uh food and uh fuel to meet your needs and the answer is for you to live like a 13th century uh peasant and um but you know the details of why switched from there's not enough oil to go around to there's way too much oil there's so much oil that we're going to actually boil the oceans by burning all of this oil so you know the details may differ we may go from too much to too little but it doesn't matter because we're set on the conclusion and the conclusion is fixed and the conclusion is that you need to live like a 13th century peasant but like you look at this i mean it's not like it's one big

giant conspiracy to push those ideas i genuinely believe what's driving this is just this is where government fiat financing takes the scientific process it's just if you come up with a conclusion that tells the government what it wants to hear you get more funding and that's why i have a whole chapter on fiat science because in order to understand how we ended up living in a world where all of our politicians want to make us live like 13th century peasants and tell us that it's good for us it you have to get into the science the science is what's driving this and the scientific process the science exactly the the science this is this insane cult called the science and it's a government-supported religion that gets money from governments all over the

world to promote crazy uh apocalyptic ideas that we're all going to die and the only way to save earth is for you to obey and um it's if you look at the funding of science um in nutrition you know it's gone entirely down the insane pathway of you need to stop eating meat and you need to eat more of our industrial sludge and here's here's all this very complicated science about how to manage your intake of sludge in the most optimal way um but you know making sure that you get enough of our sponsors sludge because we're counting on you to do that champ and then the same thing we see it with the science on uh climate and energy like i mean it's it's absolutely insane when you think about it at american universities today there there are thousands of economists with phds

playing professors um and none of these people basically will actually stand up to stand up and say i actually think hydrocarbon fuels are good and necessary for modern civilization i mean it's just completely uncontroversial completely undebatable statement it's you have to be completely delusional to um think that this is a bad thing and yet not a thing not a single professor will say this the only person that we know who says this stuff is outside of academia alex epstein and you know a few others also from outside of academia all of them but there aren't any professors talking about that but all of these professors will give you an impassioned virtue signaling diatribe about how important it is that we move to wind and solar i mean

the disconnect between reality between just an entire academic establishment that lives in a world in which we need to get rid of what is making our world possible and the only question is how and when and how quickly do we do it versus a real world in which everybody continues to rely every single day on these energies that they just are casually telling us yep we're going to replace that they think of it like it's you know changing the color of your iphone uh skin you know it's just we could no we're gonna ban black and white iphones and we're gonna make it all green iphones from now on it's like if we just pass a law we get apple to do this then everybody has to use a green iphone and then the earth is saved they really think this is what needs to be done when

it comes to energy this is the depth of the sophistication that is discussing issues of energy in universities because for the last 50 years it's been corrupted by fiat financing to produce nothing but fiat apologia, fiat propaganda, basically. There's no inflation and you need to stop consuming the things that give us inflation because that's not nice of you.

Oh, and it's gotten to the point where it's, being in the mining industry, particularly close with oil and gas companies, it's gotten to the point, especially like with the super majors, where the fiat world has convinced them that they're bad and they're like actively trying to transition. It's like, no, be proud of what you're doing.

what you're doing is an incredible thing for humanity and yet you were succumbing but but the driver of that is the people who have the fiat money at the top exactly control the spigots they're like exactly if you want this money you got to posture this way yeah i mean folks if this was really an evil conspiracy like the oil companies would be at the forefront but they're they're not you know they're they're out there being apologetic about what they do they're out there making life possible for the world you know giving us modern technology giving us homes that function they're giving us warm winters they're giving us cars that move and airplanes that travel they're making every single thing that you like possible and they're out there basically

apologizing for it and promising you that they're going to be changing it's and you're absolutely correct i think this is this is really the way to understand it like um if this was just a corrupt process of corrupt companies then you'd expect the oil company would be the oil companies and their executives would be at the forefront of lobbying for this stuff to get what benefits them but it's because this is all fiat once the fiat scientific process has been set in motion in the direction of we need conclusions that tell us that this thing is bad and that thing is good so you know meat is bad and industrial engine oil refuse is good for you then that's it there's 50 years of research and academics and research centers and policies that are going to be based

around this similarly with energy once you go off on that path once the academics are going on about how fossil fuels are bad and they're boiling the ocean then you're set on the path of all everything Everything is downstream from that. The media, the press, public opinion, universities, policies, democratically elected leaders, and everything is going to go towards this direction. And here's the kill shot. I think this is really how they get to all of these industries and make them repeat all this insane nonsense. The financing, the fiat financing. You can't just go be an oil company today and raise money.

You need to go to Wall Street and you need to adhere to environmental sustainability regulations and standards and you need to issue a sustainability statement. This is all basically top-down enforced from larger corporations linked to an environmentalist agenda, which is coming from central banks, which have become extremely concerned about issues of the environment and diet. um you know my my um i'm eternally grateful for the good people at the st louis fed twitter account who did the best absolute possible advertisement for my book the fiat standard uh when it came out a week before thanksgiving and they tweeted about how you can save money and get more proteins from your thanksgiving turkey if you made your turkey out of soy so you know they're all they're so concerned about you know your food and your energy consumption they've become betty crocker they've become climatologists and they this doesn't just affect their tweets this affects their

regulations that they impose for financing and this affects everything in capital markets so it's not very easy for oil companies to go and just get money and tell the world yeah well you know what? Everybody needs our oil in order to survive. And until you people figure out how to survive without our stuff, we're not going to count out your stupid bullshit and pretend that the earth is boiling the oceans. If you say that, it doesn't matter how much of a rich fat cat oil executive you are and how many cigars you smoke in your boardroom with your other evil fat cat oil executives, you're likely not going to make it at the big companies. You need to count out to big capital until that is we get a bitcoin standard until we get a bitcoin standard this

is why bitcoin fixes this again everything is everything bad is caused by fiat and fixed by bitcoin well that's what i i want to create a bitcoin standard oil and gas company where you drill wells you sell the oil to market for cash and then you use the associated natural gas to To produce power to mine Bitcoin on site. And you can sell that oil to market, subsidize the mining operation, stack stats on your balance sheet. And if Bitcoin does what it does in the next 10 years, you won't have to go to these financiers and say,

hey, I need your money to do this. You'll be like, nope, I love oil. I love Bitcoin. We're making it happen. And there's nothing you can do about it. I own this property. I own this business. I'm producing these revenues.

I don't even need outside investment. There is one thing they can do, though. Cry harder. it's happening well and that's so like i i have that in mind working towards that yeah it's happening the mining companies i'm involved in that's what we're working but let's let's dwell a little bit on why that really is what bitcoin fixes it's the thing about the way that fiat works is basically you can't really ever get truly rich and financially secure on fiat because it's a melting ice cube so you can't just you know a ghost start a billion dollar company sell

your stake for a billion dollars and sit on those billion dollars and just be professionally full time rich for life you can't do that because the million dollars if you keep them in cash they're going to be devalued all the time and you know within a few years you find yourself with half the real wealth that you had so you know you worked for a billion dollars and 10 years down the line you've got something like 400 million it kind of stings so you can't just sit on the money and be rich and go and live your life and be a philosopher or whatever you have to keep playing the financial market casino you have to beat inflation and that's just a full-time job and so you have to keep going back to the well basically to drink again from the fiat casino

you have to keep playing the game trying to beat inflation trying to beat inflation over and over and over again and that's basically how political control is achieved through fiat this is why fiat leads to political centralization because you can't just get rich and independent and wealthy and then go sponsor the things that make you more money your money is constantly draining so you need to constantly go back and get and get invested more and of course the smart thing to do as i discuss in the fiat standard you know the smart way to work with fiat is to accumulate liabilities you know with bitcoin you want to stack as many bitcoins as you can with fiat you want to stack as many fiat liabilities as you can you want to buy stuff today own capital goods own stuff that

you can use today and pay for it with tomorrow dollars because tomorrow dollars are going to be cheaper so the smart thing to do is to get financing so everybody runs on financing so oil companies, everyone is constantly looking for financing because it makes no sense to save your own money and then go and invest it. It makes more sense to borrow other people's money because this money is devaluing. So everybody needs financing all the time. So as rich as you get, just, you know, the richer you get, the more financing you can get and the more you get into this game. So instead of just stacking money and getting rich, you're constantly getting richer by getting into more fiat debt and so you become more and more politically dependent on the system

on the financial system the fiat system on playing along with all their stupid fiat games on going along with all the stupid fiat narratives on making things um in your company operate according to whatever the latest current thing is and that just makes you uh makes everybody dependent that's and it makes society politically centralized then it puts more and more power in the hands of the people that control the printing press as if they need more fucking power but bitcoin fixes this because with bitcoin i know bitcoin fixes this even besides the mining issue bitcoin fixes this because now with bitcoin at least you can get rich and stay rich put your money in bitcoin and then you can be reasonably certain that five years down the line it's not

going to have lost half its value. It's more likely going to have doubled at least, if not much more. So with that, you can become independently wealthy. You don't have to keep going back to the fiat financing faucet, asking for more and presenting more and more ESG credentials so that you can get more money. With Bitcoin, you can just stack the money, watch it appreciate, and then you become independent. And that weakens the ability of centralized authority to continue to manipulate and dominate and gaslight society into believing insane

hysterical nonsense. Yeah, and this is, I mean, I know we don't have to focus on mining specifically and you can have localities just straight up buy Bitcoin, put it on the reserves, but this is something I've become very passionate about in the last few years, getting

cities, counties, even states that have energy, either excess energy on their utilities that they own or fuel sources on their land like natural gas in wyoming like i would love for wyoming to start a bitcoin mining permanent fund where they can they can issue a municipal bond to their constituents it's sort of like the volcano bond in el salvador but just on a smaller scale in wyoming you issue a muni bond to invest in mining infrastructure or you give your abandoned orphaned wells to a partner in the private sector on the mining side,

say, hey, come take this well for free. You can mine on this gas. Just give us 3% of the mining revenues that we're going to roll into this permanent fund that you can then build up that fund. And what does the federal government hold over these states? This funding. And so if you have this permanent fund that amasses a significant amount of wealth in it, the individual states can then begin to turn around and say hey no thank you federal government i don't need this funding anymore i don't need to go back to the the fiat well the federal government and that's to me that makes the most sense we're going to break away from this morass of these terrible politicians leading us down terrible roads and creating a shit ton of conflict and making our lives

worse off at the end of the day uh having movements like this at the the city state level is a good way to sort of break away. Absolutely. And I think it seems increasingly like we're headed to a system of financial apartheid where there's people who are in the fiat system who get access to cheap credit and are constantly benefiting from inflation.

And a majority of people are unable to get cheap credit. And so therefore they're being robbed by inflation. um and then there's a third class of people that have found the cheat code to the system and that cheat code is bitcoin where you stack sats and the sats and the sats appreciate over time and you become less and less dependent on the system because the way that it's going with the normies um you know back in fiat land the dark ugly place that you and i and your listeners have thankfully left but the way that it's going is it's been 50 years of inflation and 50 years of dumb pseudoscience trying to convince the peasants that actually inflation is not a problem and the

reason you're experiencing poverty and can't feed yourself or stay warm in the winter is because of the climate crisis and the way to solve that is that you need to go more hungry and more cold in winter and we need to rely on more expensive forms of energy that are far less uh useful for meeting your needs and in or and also you know we have all this new science now thanks to all these amazing scientists that we have and uh it's settled the science is in and the science says you need to stay home you need to eat the bugs you need to live in a tiny little pod you need to have a tiny a little golf cart for a car and you need to have a maximum range

of driving of 20 minutes away from your home and you need to use the CBDC currency, the CBDC in your phone and because of climate considerations you can't ever your money isn't good anywhere more than 20 minutes away from your house because

you shouldn't be going anywhere more than 20 minutes away from your house because that was going to consume too much energy like this is really the key thing as long as you get people to think that energy consumption is a bad thing then you can always alleviate the pressure from inflation by making people consume less and forcing them to consume less one way or the other and i think lockdowns are a great way to do that and i think you know the work from home culture

is going to help with that um stay home work from home get your bug soy burgers delivered to your home and um you know if we just have we can run society on a lower energy footprint if everybody lives like a bug man in a little pod and eats uh soy i mean we can massively reduce the carbon footprint of the united states of course by giving it the living standards of a very poor african country so if you once you've gotten down that path of just believing this original lie of the idea that consuming energy is bad then it's an infinite world of possibilities for the theaters to turn you into a bugman and make you live like shit and convince you that it's your fault that everything that the weather is bad and that it's the only way to fix it is for them to

get a print to get more money printed and for you to eat more bugs it's like the longer you keep eating bugs and living like a bug man and refusing to doubt in this narrative the more they can continue to print the more the scam goes on the more control they get and this is yeah this is what gets me very passionate about the mining industry right now the mining industry north america is catering to this framing it's like hey no we're only using 0.1 percent of the global energy consumption of the world it's like don't even like don't even see the frame it's not gonna be 0.1 for long it's number go up technology yeah number go up like energy use isn't bad exactly that's like you should be going back to these people who are trying to paint the bitcoin mining

industry as some world destroying industry and say no you are anti-human you do not understand how we live in this modern society that we enjoy today, and I'm not going to cater to you, you are an hysteric zealot that has sci-opped the world into believing that humans are bad and energy use is bad, and I think we need to start

calling them out. One thing they use is models. It's a cult, and I think it's useful to talk to people who believe in this stuff like you talk to survivors of cults. Look, if you went to a school and you were a nine-year-old kid

and they told you that the earth is boiling and dying and suffocating because of a disease called humans and that you're doing that because you're driving your car around. Your dad is killing the planet because he drove you to school today and because you have electric devices at home

and because you emit carbon dioxide. If you went to a school where they taught you that, congratulations, you're a member of a cult. This is what cults do. If you teach a child they were born into sin and they are sin and that they need to pay money to the people in charge in order for them to absolve themselves from this, that's a cult. You're just manipulating people and you're convincing them that the weather that's around them, it's rained too much or too little or it's too hot or it's too cold. That's your fault for doing the normal things that everybody's doing. and the answer is for you to give us more money and power.

But that's insane. And I think the amazing thing about Bitcoin, the reason I love Bitcoin is that it's forcing this conversation out into many people's minds. Without Bitcoin, this wouldn't really be there. 10 years ago, it was very difficult to make this case. Alex Epstein has had a much more difficult time,

I think, preaching this point to no coiners than he does with Bitcoiners, because Bitcoin really brings this question to the fore and prevents you from employing the usual mental tricks that people's hypocrisy employs in order to justify their abject hypocrisy when it comes to their views and their actions on climate. So everybody who thinks that we're in a climate crisis still thinks it's okay to drive a car and still thinks it's okay to run central heating in their house and thinks it's okay to log on to their laptop and use it to access servers of Twitter halfway around the world and shitpost on the internet, even though that's consuming energy and emitting carbon dioxide. So you have those people who live in this world where everything we do is bad and yet we're going to do it anyway because we need to do it. And they don't see the contradiction and they can't come to terms with it. And they want to believe in this insane idea that we can have the apple without the apple tree. We can just have apples without having to have any apple trees. So we can have nice things, we can have computers, we can have children that don't die when they're born because we have incubators that run 24-7 reliably because we have reliable 24-7 electricity. We can have computers and servers, we can have MacBook Pros, and we can have Zoom calls, and we can have all of these amazingly sophisticated technology.

But we don't want to have what makes it possible. We don't want to have the apple tree, which is all of these hydrocarbons. and the only way to come to terms with that is you need to reject the cult snap out of the stupid cult's teachings that you are bad that you seeking to keep your children warm through the winter

is you being an evil psychopath and accept the idea that yes energy consumption is a good thing and the more energy I consume the better my life becomes the more energy I consume the more likely I am to keep my kids alive through winter the more I can take them around

wherever i need to take them the more i am able to provide them with food and nutrition and all the things they need to flourish and prosper in life and that's just what people need to accept and bitcoin puts that at the forefront because it hits you know once you once you've caught the bug once you've understood the number go up technology bitcoin becomes about self-interest and people get bitten by the bitcoin mind virus and then it becomes very difficult for them to reconcile the fact that well bitcoin is good and bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity with the world view that um what is good is to not consume electricity and to go back to primitiveness bitcoin puts this front and center and i think it's helped a lot of people who were

generally like i think a lot of bitcoiners now are very skeptical of the old energy narrative um that they grew up with on the climate narrative bitcoin has helped force that because it's just put it out there in front of them all right you don't like electricity quit your bitcoin and go and use your currency your your national currencies which is you know very environmentally friendly like there's no proof of work in the venezuelan bolivar there's no proof of work in the lebanese lira there's no proof of work in the us dollar they don't consume anywhere near as much energy as bitcoin does so why don't you just use them if you think that energy consumption is bad there is no comparison between the venezuelan bolivar and bitcoin

So if energy consumption is bad, then go with the Venezuelan bolivar, you know, the environmentally friendly and sustainable option, the green renewable currency. And there's layers to this conversation too. What we should really be focused on is misallocation of resources, energy resources being one of the most important. And what does the fiat standard do? It allows us to misallocate these energy. Like imagine how energy resources will be allocated under a Bitcoin standard. Exactly. There are real environmental problems in the world. The idea that CO2 is boiling the ocean is not one of them. The idea that CO2 is going to change the Earth's temperature and make the Earth unlivable is not one of them. None of the CO2 scare stories are real environmental problems, but there are real environmental problems in the world. and i think they are massively amplified by the fact that we are having our time preference raised by inflation we're constantly discounting the future more and more because we don't have a reliable way of providing for the future and when our money is losing value that means we don't have a reliable way of storing value into the future that means there's a discount on everything else for the future. The value for everything in the future gets discounted because

we prioritize consumption now. And so this is why I think the soil gets depleted because people don't value the soil much because they discount the future heavily. If you discount the future heavily, you don't care about the quality of your soil 10 years from now. You care about the money that you make today. The higher your time preference, the more you discount the quality of your soil 10 years from now. And as time preference has risen and as the value of money has declined the quality of the soil has declined and nobody well not nobody but i mean the majority of agriculture now degrades the soil completely and then just adds fertilizer to it which is very unhealthy it's a very high time preference thing to do you've degraded the earth for short-term

profit you know let's maximize the crop today maximize the crop today and now we're at the point where you know today is the future that the past generations had discounted now we're paying the price for it yeah and it's it's a heavy price so that's what i worry i've been getting really deep into the beef initiative texas slim cole bolton from knc cattle here uh in austin and on the farming side of things particularly the ranching side of things it seems to be hitting a dire situation particularly with topsoil depletion and the the most of all the the profitability of actually running a quality ranch or farm is hitting a point where you have a lot of ranchers just throwing their hands up and saying, I can't do this. I can't survive on

this. So I'm just going to tap out. And this is because they're losing out to heavily subsidized like corn cropping and other areas of the food industry that the fiat standard is enabling. And so I'm under the impression personally that we're hitting, we may be reaching a point of no return if we don't quickly or quickly transition to a sat money standard that we're gonna be doomed for industrial sludge like here on out like do you how like how important do you think it is that we trans transition to a bitcoin standard in a somewhat timely manner i mean obviously it's the faster the better the human toll is enormous um you know people are getting sick because of of this. And I mean, I think the link is really strong. And I also discussed this in the Fiat

Food chapter. It's no coincidence that the soil is getting degraded, the quality of food is getting degraded, and the health of the people is degrading. These aren't just coincidences. And these cannot be unrelated to people's time preference. If you understand what time preference is, you cannot just say all this stuff is happening. People are making bad, high-time preference decisions with their food choices. People are making bad high-time preference decisions

with the way that they farm their soil. And that's all unrelated to the fact that their money is constantly being devalued. I don't think this is a tenable argument that can be made against that. And I make the case in the fiat standard. But I think,

and I do agree, of course, the damage is enormous, but I don't think there is a point of no return because I think no matter how much damage you do to the soil any soil no matter how damaged no matter how destroyed and dead can be rejuvenated and regenerated using regenerative grazing so you just need to let loose cows and they make the soil green again that's the beauty of regenerative grazing so um you know all over the u.s there are people doing regenerative grazing that are taking land that was used for soy and

corn and other fiat crops and the mass production of these crops completely destroyed and devastated the land and yet within a few years it's back to being great grazing land with very dense grass cover and very thick layer of nutrients under the soil so it's just going to continue to improve over time i think um if you start doing it and i um this is the optimistic thing about it in a sense you can upgrade like these things are not like an actual prison that's put out there these are just the economic realities of using this currency and if you snap out of this currency if you opt out of this currency you've basically uninstalled the fiat standard from your life and you've upgrade it to a bitcoin standard and you know you can uh you can escape this you can stop find find

a farmer buy beef from them and the more you buy from them the more you're giving them money to invest in more cows to go around on more land regenerate more land and make it healthier so um we can get a little bit too black billed and too doomy about it but um you know this this ends the moment you say it ends just as far as you're concerned and this is really the only useful thing to think about is just think about yourself individually in your own life you can snap out of this the moment you choose to you know you can get out of this the moment that you decide that you don't want to be in it because you get out of fiat you get into bitcoin world you start accumulating hard money you start thinking about the future more and you start eating like a human

being and that just is better for you and for people around you so the more people that join the better off the world will be we're gonna and i think it's um it's going to become more and more likely that i mean i think now we're entered the point over the last two years where people are getting into bitcoin even if they're not interested in any of the money stuff people are getting into bitcoin if they're interested in eating meat not just because of the memes on twitter and because of bitstein but because um because it's becoming you know if you follow what's going on if you looked at how restrictions were imposed all over the world we're not that far away from a world in which bill gates declares that you're not allowed to eat more than 10 grams of beef a day i mean

that's really not so far-fetched when you remember that just a couple of years ago he went up and said, hey, there's no going back to church or sports events or normal life until everybody has bought my products. And he just said it on TV and everybody just went along and all the world's public health Hitlers just went and repeated that.

And all of the world's presidents and kings and prime ministers just went along and said, yeah, that's what our public health expert Hitlers are saying. And everybody just went along with it. And we did get locked up at home, many of us, for a very long time. Some people are still locked up in some parts of the world. And how far is it from the day that Bill Gates announces a climate emergency and you can't eat more beef and you can't drive more than 10 minutes away from your house?

It's not that far. So that's the other thing, especially bringing it back to the context like Bitcoin mining industry, like cowtowing. and they're like no you have like this is what we have to do like people this is we have to lock down two weeks we we have to get our booster a lot of people think it's like yeah you can stand up and say no hey like you just mentioned you can stand up and say no i'm gonna opt out of this go to a bitcoin standard um i i know that i keep bringing back to mining but just top of mind like that i'm trying to get the message out to the mining industry we can stand up and say no we're going along with this like we're not we're not going to do this it is a personal decision a

choice that you make in a moment say no and yeah i think i if i if i were to make the uh practical argument uh for or the practical argument against kowtowing to this and uh for um And the practical marketing argument for cry harder as a response to this kind of attack is, look, you're not going to be able to win a, you're not going to be able to reason with somebody engaged in motivated reasoning. The problem here is not carbon dioxide. I think everybody in the Bitcoin mining industry is pretty much on board with this. Like if you notice the debates among Bitcoiners, you'll never see anybody serious say that, oh, well, you know, okay, no, this is a real climate crisis and we need to do this. It's all about, well, no, but people think it's a climate crisis. And so we need to frame our messaging in a certain way.

I don't see many Bitcoiners trying to legitimately make the case that CO2 is destroying the earth. there are obviously a few weirdos um and congratulations on uh on your cult membership wishing you all the best but really like nobody's serious about the fact that co2 is destroying the earth and within the bitcoin community like this stuff flies in the normie land among cnn viewers and new york times readers yeah you talk about this stuff and you can say it but nobody in the Bitcoin space is that silly. Like that's just, no, people aren't actually worried about a climate crisis.

A bunch of people might pretend to be, but look at the way that they live, look at their actions. They're not worried about a climate crisis. There is no climate crisis. But I think the case for just being upfront about that and saying, look, CO2 is not going to burn the earth. There is no climate crisis.

There is no catastrophe waiting for us. And energy consumption is what makes life worth living. And the real crisis would be if we stopped consuming energy. And if we reduced our energy consumption because of this hysteria about what CO2 is doing to the earth. i think this is a more coherent message because if you accept the premise if you accept the premise of the hysterics if you tell them all right well okay we agree indeed this is a crisis and the world's going to end and we need to move away then you've just played into their frame and you can't argue with them you can't argue your way out of this motivated reasoning because the whole thing is just a trap whose goal is to get you under their control the whole point is to get you to start performing circus rituals so that then there's control over it so once you know

once you've accepted the premise and you start kowtowing to them then the next step is it doesn't matter what you argue you know everything that you say is noise for them for them there's a problem which is the gods of the wind are angry at us and they're going to make Gaia destroy us. Whatever, you know, whatever story, whatever cartoon story they want to believe. But there's a solution and the solution is give us money and power.

So you can't tell them, all right, I agree with you. The goddess of the wind is going to make Gaia destroy us for our sins. But the solution is for me to not give you money and power. The solution is for me to keep my own money for myself. That's not going to fly. It doesn't follow from the premises. The whole premises are constructed in a way to arrive at the conclusion.

And you can't win this game. They're not reasonable. They're not being scientific about it. They're not looking for evidence and counter evidence. They're just, they're political and it's a political movement. It has political objectives and the political objectives are control. and so playing along is just helping them grab more control helping them control how you behave how you frame yourself how you frame your narrative and trapping yourself into their

claws and that's that's i think it's it's not going to work um because obviously there's if you accept the premise there's no there's no way that you can argue with the premise in order to refute the conclusion. So you're playing into their hands and you're making your position, frankly, incoherent. And I think like if you accept the premise that CO2 really is destroying the earth,

then I'm sorry, but all of the anti-Bitcoin hysterics are correct. Bitcoin is an insane, wasteful criminal enterprise. Why would we want to spend so much energy on making a currency if it's going to really destroy the earth that's an actually valid argument if you obviously only obviously if you believe in the insanely nonsensical idea that co2 is destroying the earth yeah co2 is destroying the earth every little bit of co2 reduction helps and the idea of moving the

world's monetary system into a fully electronic based system is going to require an enormous increase in the amount of electricity that it consumes and yeah we can save the earth by sticking to inflationary low energy currencies uh you can't really argue with that logic i mean it's if if it follows then yeah we should get rid of bitcoin but not just bitcoin we should get rid of washing machines who needs washing machines you know uh why should you get to wear clean clothes with a machine. Why can't you just wash them with your hands? We need to get rid of all kinds of different things as well.

So that's where I think the effective messaging will come. The effective messaging is, yes, Bitcoin consumes energy because it's worth it. Just like your washing machine consumes energy because it's worth it. Because the alternative is hyperinflation and political

control and high inflation and low inflation and all these different varieties of inflation and business cycles and genocidal maniacs having a printing press to subsidize all of their genocides. That's why Bitcoin is worth it. Everything that we spend electricity on, it's worth it because it's a better way of doing things. It's not worth it because it's going to allow a bunch of renewable energy projects to go up. Nobody cares about those renewable energy projects. They're

just boondoggles. They mean nothing. They're not fixing the earth. They're not going to make the weather better. They're not going to fix the climate. Whatever your cult told you about wind and solar is not true. It's just an extremely inefficient, extremely expensive boondoggle that a lot of people have gotten rich off of over the last 50 years. And it serves absolutely no useful function when introduced to the grid. It is completely superfluous to the grid because there are times during the year when the sunlight is zero and the wind is zero. There's no sun and no wind and you still need electricity and sometimes that might happen at peak load demand so you still need to have the whole peak load demand provided from a reliable on-demand energy

source like gas or coal or nuclear and adding wind and solar is just going to be operated at times where wind is running and solar is running when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing so So that just means you're adding, you might be reducing a little bit of gas consumption, but it's destroying the reliability of the grid by having to constantly shift between energy sources based on the energy that is happening. And it's completely superfluous

because you could just run the whole thing on one reliable unit of generation and one grid, which is what we've been doing for decades. And that's what's given us 24-hour electricity. so there's no good thing about renewable energy it's just a very expensive and inefficient and dirty way of laundering hydrocarbons it's really hydrocarbon laundering because you can't build solar panels without hydrocarbons and they consume an enormous amount of solar panels solar energy and they consume it at very high power and then they deliver very small amounts

of low power over a very long time and not very long time and they fall apart and then they can't really be recycled or the windmills that are filling up landfills all over the world because they also can't be recycled. So there's nothing nice

and we don't need to ingratiate ourselves to the scam of an industry. I'm going to speak for myself. I don't feel that I can need to ingratiate myself. And I think accepting the framing is just sucking you into having to play their game.

and once you've accepted the framing once you've accepted this um framing then there's no way around um you are the problem you know you are the carbon they want to reduce never forget yeah and we're and we're already seeing it begin to materialize the fact that they don't care about how much quote-unquote renewable energy is you have activists and politicians around the world particularly in europe um where bitcoin miners like hey we're using 100 wind solar and hydro and the activists are like that electricity could be used

for something else exactly we don't want you there exactly once you've accepted the premise this is the perfect illustration of what

I wanted to get at thank you once you've accepted the premise that CO2 emissions are boiling the ocean you have no defensible position

anywhere even your own breathing is up for attack why are you breathing every time you breathe you're releasing CO2 you criminal

how dare you you know that you have no indefensible position. And I think, nope, I'm going to put my foot down and I'm going to be crazy. I'm going to get laughed at by all the weirdos who want to believe what their CNN cult tells them. Nope, breathing, me breathing is not destroying the earth.

Me driving my car is not boiling the oceans. Me owning Bitcoin and making a Bitcoin transaction is not going to destroy the weather. Just like all of those other things are not going to destroy the weather. And I'm not going to let anybody tell me what to do based on what they think

my actions contribute to the weather. That's, I think, the rational way that people need to start talking about it. And I think Bitcoin is just a natural place where this is going to emerge. And I think a lot of the green hysterics think that, yeah, we're just going to bring

our green hysteria to Bitcoin and then we're going to be done with Bitcoin and turn it green. But I think the opposite is going to happen. The exact opposite is going to happen. They're just going to keep coming into Bitcoin. And because Bitcoin exposes this hypocrisy, as I was saying earlier, about the idea that you don't believe in this. Do you actually believe that consuming energy is a good thing or a bad thing?

Because Bitcoin exposes that. The more they do this on Bitcoin, the more it exposes their shtick on everything else. And I think, you know, Bitcoin continues to work. Bitcoin isn't going anywhere. and this green hysteria is only going to become more and more and more ridiculous to more and more people over time.

You know, Bitcoin is going to continue to operate. People are going to continue to benefit from using Bitcoin. People are going to continue to use it. And on the other hand, the weather is just going to continue to be the same weather that we've always had forever,

which is constantly changing. It changes day to day, it changes year to year, it changes season to season, changes decade to decade. There's nothing constant on earth, but it's largely pretty much the same throughout your lifetime.

So people are going to continue to see that there's no climate crisis. The weather is just doing the same thing that it's always done and Bitcoin works. So I think it's going to expose the hypocrisy of the green idea rather than getting Bitcoiners to change. And I think this is a great example

because in their perspective, you know, energy is a bad thing and we're trying to consume as little energy as we can and we want to make as much of that come from renewable crap. So therefore, telling them, well, Bitcoin runs on a lot of renewables, is telling them,

hey, we're going to eat all of your renewables. It's not helping. You're still consuming energy and there's no escaping the fact that Bitcoin consumes energy. So own it, accept it. It's real. You consume energy. You wouldn't be alive without energy.

Thank you for so eloquently stating that i've been trying to articulate this for like what feels like a year now and you just succinctly distilled it in in a 10 minute rant there thank you sir i think it's it really helps that in bitcoin people like us can talk to one another everywhere else we're just the weirdos that get laughed at and don't get research funding or um lose their jobs and then the you know you just cancel people with fiat money all fiat institutions anybody who dares say anything about CO2 not being the devil just gets canceled.

But in Bitcoin, we could continue to have this conversation. Of course, we always get the screeching idiots that like to sling their tomatoes. There's probably a bunch of them under this tweet already.

Yes. Live stream. Get off Twitter. You are consuming too much carbon dioxide. Stop. Be the change you want to see in the world

and stop consuming or producing carbon dioxide and then we'll take anything say seriously until then we're just going to continue here bouncing ideas off of each other and making a more eloquent and intelligent and precise case for why human life is more valuable than your city hysteria yeah and i i want to thank you too for like not being afraid i mean i i think it's because you live in a bitcoin standard and you've written some of the most prolific words that uh about the subject that many respect and like you specifically having the courage or just

you just don't know if it's courage or you just don't give a fuck but just being able to say out stand out there and say no i'm not going along with this climate hysteria i think it's definitely emboldened people it's definitely emboldened somebody like myself who probably in years past like yeah maybe we should just like try to appease them but like i think i've been completely i have been completely convinced like no there is no appeasing these people we do should not accept their frame humans are not bad we're good we're going to use more energy we bitcoin then that's the beauty of bitcoin because it's going to bring the sound monetary system to existence that forces us to be efficient with energy allocation too like that's the narrative we should be leaning

into as a mind energy efficiency that's what bitcoin is going to do yeah and cheap energy i I mean, I think this is the thing that we should be stressing on. Energy is a good thing. And Bitcoin is going to help us provide a lot more energy for the world because Bitcoin is an ongoing bounty. Every 10 minutes, there's, what is it now?

40,000 times 900. It was about $35 million. Bitcoin every 10 minutes is given out. No, sorry. Every day, Bitcoin is given out $35 million of bounty to people who have cheap electricity. So anybody who's got cheap electricity, if you have a source of cheap electricity

anywhere in the world, you can make a lot of money from Bitcoin. Just develop that, find a way of turning it into reliable, cheap electricity that runs 24 seven. And you can sell that to the Bitcoin network and make a lot of money. Like this is like a global bounty

for everybody in the world to go and make more cheap, reliable electricity. And cheap, reliable electricity is what has given us the modern world. There is nothing bad about that. This is what the Bitcoin mining industry should be proud of. It's really what we're doing.

We're giving the world cheap electricity. If you increase demand for anything, if you increase the quantity of people demanding to buy any good, that just results in more and more of it being made and more capital being invested in its production and therefore lower and lower prices for its production. So Bitcoin is doing that for energy

and it's going to increase energy consumption. And I think I'll leave the people who think increased energy production is a bad thing or consumption is a bad thing to think of it this way. If you'd like everybody in the world who lives in poverty to live according to the living standards of your average, say, American or European middle class person, we're not going to, we don't want everybody, well, I do want everybody to be Bezos, but let's, you know, Bezos, Jeff Bezos, obviously the richer you are, the more energy you consume. You know, people who have a private jet have the equivalent of tens of thousands of slave persons energy being used to operate this. so let's not go that far but if you want to have just your average

middle class Americans level of energy consumption and you want to give it to everybody in the world that's going to necessarily mean that we're going to at least 4x 5x the global amount of energy consumption that takes place in the world and that

cannot be done from wind and solar obviously, it cannot be done from hydroelectric because most people don't live near hydroelectric dams And it can't all come from nuclear. It will have to come from mainly from hydrocarbons, which is where more than 80% of the world's energy

comes from until today. And it is 80%, but in reality, it's more like 90% because as I was saying earlier, all the other stuff is really hydrocarbon laundering. Like, yeah, we do get a small percent from solar, but really we can't build, until we can build solar panels out of solar energy, then solar is just an expensive,

elaborate way of wasting hydrocarbons. We use the hydrocarbons to build the solar and then that thing produces the energy. So ultimately we're still utterly reliant on the hydrocarbons. So if you'd like the world's poor to not be poor anymore, if you'd like people

who have very low life expectancy, people who have very high infant mortality, people who live in places where premature babies can't survive just because the hospital doesn't have 24-hour electricity so they don't bother get any incubators because the incubators won't work

and the babies would die. If you want those people to move to the living standard where incubators work 24-7, there's reliable electricity, everybody's got a fridge in their house, everybody's able to stay warm throughout winter, that means four or five times the amount of energy consumption in the world today

and four or five times the amount of emissions that are taking place today. would that be a good thing or a bad thing i'd like you to weigh the pros and cons of this so on the one hand co2 emissions go up all right what are the pros and the cons of that and on the other hand um four five six billion people improve their lives immensely and improve their living standard and life expectancy and they get to live much better what exactly can carbon dioxide do that is worth more than these five, six billion people living a much better life than each one of those people knowing that their firstborn child has a very good chance

of surviving their first five years? What does carbon dioxide have to do? And what evidence do you have for the fact that carbon dioxide is in fact doing this thing that you were told by your cult it is supposed to be doing? Do you have the answer? i don't know we'll leave it at that safe it's always a goddamn pleasure sir thank you my man thank you for having me always fun all right peace and love freaks