TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #33: Saifedean Ammous

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, to discuss the history of money, why sound money is so important, and how fiat currency has caused negative externalities like fiat food. Follow Saifedean on Twitter: https://twitter.com/saifedean Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Pick up The Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/111947

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt at your boy marty bent we're here on a wednesday morning another coffee podcast in a new studio not barstool anymore we're at dig.com offices in williamsburg brooklyn have a really uh thrown together interview here less than 12 hours ago i think i think we decided we were going to do this i'm very excited for this guest i actually just finished this book i'm sure all of you uh have heard of this book because i've talked about it on this podcast before i'd like to introduce you all to safe adina moose safe welcome to the podcast thank you so much for having me marty it's a pleasure to be here it's uh pleasure is all mine i mean when i saw you at bit devs last night i was not

expecting you to say hey let's record at 9 a.m in the morning yeah we've been talking about this for a while and uh i remember we said well i was gonna do it when i came to new york but then here i was in new york and you were in front of me and we'd forgotten to arrange it so might as well just go and do it we said we'd do it so we should do it i'm a huge spontaneity guy so i love that i love that we're here now but let's jump into it you only have 40 minutes you've been on your book tour the bitcoin standard uh how's how's the tour been so far it's been great i've had a good time I've done, I think, six, seven cities so far. New York was yesterday.

Today, I'm flying to Charlotte and North Carolina. It's been great. I've met a lot of very interesting people and seen, met, and gotten to know a lot of cool Bitcoiners. So, I can't complain. Yeah. So, let's jump in to the Bitcoin Center. What I really want to focus on today is my whole, so my whole sort of, or not understanding, my whole, I think that people should learn the history of money. I feel like too many people don't know what money is to begin with.

And once you figure it out, it's really like, holy shit, what the hell have we been doing the last 100 years? So let's jump into the history of money and sort of how currencies have been debased. I think my favorite example in the book that you used was West Africa when they used the beads. And then the Europeans came over and were like, holy crap, this is their currency. Let's just make a bunch and bring it back and inflate their currency. Yep. So that's an example of money that was sound that became unsound over time, correct? And sort of what happened there?

Yeah, so the story is that glass bead, glass making technology was pretty rare in Africa at that time. And so glass beads were very rare. It was very hard to come by these. Nobody's quite clear where they came from. Some suggest they were made in Egypt. Some suggest that it was Phoenician traders who used to bring them along. But what we know is that about 500 years or so ago in West Africa, these little glass beads were used as money. And the reason they were money is the same reason that anything has ever been chosen as money.

It's that there's a mechanism to make it scarce. It's hard for people to inflate the supply easily. So for West Africans, a few hundred years ago, having a glass bead was a reliably scarce thing because it wasn't very easy for people to make more of it. And so people who would store their wealth in these glass beads, who would use it as jewelry, or who would use it as payment, would in the long run manage to preserve their wealth better than if they had stored it in, say, perishable goods that ruin quickly. so this worked well as long as obviously glass beads were hard to make then europeans show up

on the coast of west africa and they find that those they find that those beads had a much higher value in africa which of course makes sense because they were demanded in africa not for any sort of industrial use but they were demanded for their for the monetary use people were using them as a store of value. And so their price being much higher than the sort of industrial market demand for the beads as beads meant that the Europeans could go back to Europe and get those beads for very cheap and bring them to West Africa. So essentially, they had their own money printers. They were functioning like the modern central bank in Venezuela or Zimbabwe. It was It's trivial for the Europeans to get very large quantities of these beads.

And so when a European ship comes from Europe to West Africa with all of those beads, they start using those beads to buy up the stuff that is in Africa. It immediately causes them to be able to acquire a lot of the wealth that Africans have because these glass beads are very valuable. And so you start buying things. people don't know yet that the supply has increased so the prices of things begin to increase the value of the beads held by Africans continues to decline and over time Europeans were able to buy more and more and more of the wealth of Africans till it got to a point where it it

led to them buying slaves with those beads to the point where they came to be known as the slave beads and that's that's their name in many places in west africa until today and i think it's a great story to explain just why the issue of hard and easy money is really not optional this isn't android versus iphone where you can just decide you know okay some people like android and they think it's better but i like my iphone and i'm going to stick to it you know you can do that with formats but or with computer programming languages or platforms or whatever but with money it's not something that you can isolate yourself from because if the price of a if if your money is easy to make for others it'll be trivial for them to increase the supply make more of it and

then expropriate your wealth effectively they can just take the value that you put into your money simply by producing more and more of it so that's why you know if just because you have a money that you like doesn't mean it's very wise to stick to it so you're freaks with your favorite shit coin out there exactly bitcoin is not optional so let's jump into that like why do you believe that bitcoin is the best money that we've ever found you do believe that correct that bitcoin is I think so. I mean, so far, yeah, it promises to be the best money that we've ever invented. I mean, it's still only been nine years. I'd like to wait another couple of hundred years before passing this judgment definitively. But it looks promising so far. And the reason I think it's promising is because for me, if you look at the history of money,

there was a period up until, say, maybe a couple of hundred years ago, about 150 years ago. up until then the physical properties of things might have mattered in terms of what becomes money you know gold being not rusting and silver being hard to rust and corrode compared to other metals but if you look at it if you think about it more recently with modern industrialization the physical properties don't really matter because we can just make physical stuff with any properties we want particularly now with plastics and so on so you know we can make any metal or material in any properties physical properties you know whatever boiling temperature or physical integrity you know stainless steel can be even better than silver in many ways so

i think the physical properties don't really matter what i think matters now what has mattered in the last couple hundred years most is economic properties the reason that something is good as money or bad as money is just about their economic metrics particularly how the supply interacts with demand. And so the best money that we'd ever invented before Bitcoin, the best money that had ever been used, I wouldn't say invented, was gold, precisely because it was very hard for people to increase the supply of it. And I don't think a lot of the gold bugs, they're fascinated with the physical properties of gold. And these are cute and interesting. And you know, it's nice to look at. But that's not why it's money. And the reason it's money is that the of what I call

stock to flow ratio in my book the ratio of the existing stockpiles to the new production so gold is i gold was the best we had because it's very hard to find gold it's very rare and it's very hard to find it in large quantities particularly when you consider the existing stockpiles of gold on the market which are the sum of hundreds and thousands of years of gold production that have have been piling up because gold doesn't rust so you know the gold that was produced 3 000 years ago is probably still around somewhere today maybe being worn by one of your listeners you know it's it's always been there so it's very hard for people to increase the supply of gold meaningfully that's the key metric and so bitcoin improves on that it doesn't have any of the physical properties

of gold but it has the economic property that matters which is that it's very hard for people to increase its supply quickly. That's what I really think is very important about Bitcoin. That's why, and in a few years, it's going to start increasing at a lower rate than even gold. So there's that on the one hand, the economic property of the stock to flow. And then the second reason why I think

it's the most advanced form of money is that the ability of the Bitcoin network to clear about half a million transactions a day, and that's a conservative estimate of what we've seen Bitcoin do, assuming very few improvements, assuming no improvements from now on, assuming nothing is done to improve the way in which Bitcoin operates, we still can do at least half a million transactions a day. And so if you think about it, the ability of Bitcoin to offer final settlement

anywhere across the world in about an hour, in under an hour, for sending any amount of money from anywhere to anywhere else in under an hour, I think that's extremely valuable. If you compare that, if you wanted to send gold from here to China, you will not do it in under an hour, and you will not do it for a very small cost. It will cost an enormous amount of money. So Bitcoin's ability to have this many transactions and to offer final clearance in under an hour for about half a million transactions a day

means that the base layer of settlement in Bitcoin can be far more decentralized than the base layer of central bank settlement. And that's the key point in the subtitle of my book when I call the Bitcoin standard as the decentralized alternative to central banking. And this is, I think, a distinction that I make between people who think, you know, Many people think that Bitcoin is going to replace banks, and I don't think that's the case. I think Bitcoin is going to replace the central banking system of settlement, and that's where it's really strong. Yeah, let's get into central banking.

That's something that completely disenchanted me from finance. I worked at a hedge fund, a futures fund specifically. All you freaks know that I've said that too many times. but had to deal with currency markets and part of my job was to write commentaries and basically describe how the fund performed against market movements and a lot of that research was following central banks,

their announcements, and they were constantly setting targets, never hitting them, saying that QE was going to provide some benefits on the back end that never came to fruition and it seems like they're just sort of going at a whim throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks like they really don't have

any idea what they're doing i would say um how how did it get this bad i mean it's a well it's 105 year problem now or yeah under the west or yeah hundred central bank that started uh u.s central bank started what federal reserve was 1913 14 yeah 13 signed the act and 14 it came Christmas Eve, 1913 or something like that. Yeah, something like that. How did they get this bad? John Maynard Keynes, of all? Well, there's a lot of blame to go around.

Keynes definitely is part of the story. I wouldn't really blame Keynes, and I say this in my book. It's not like he was this genius who came up with these ideas of Keynes in economics. There's nothing new or interesting or intelligent about this garbage economics that they teach at universities. It's the oldest trick in the book of every kleptocratic government in human history. It's just how to rob the peasants to enrich the kings. So Keynes really didn't invent anything new. And it's not like he shaped the course of policy in the 1930s or that he changed the way the governments functioned.

If you look at the history, you know, the U.S. was already doing Keynesian economics back from the days of Hoover, and FDR came and increased the kind of Keynesianism that they were doing. And this idea that Keynes' work is what changed course is complete fiction, along with the many other fictions that they teach in econ textbooks. So the point is that, you know, they were already following this path of inflation and spending as a way out of the crisis, which was, of course, actually exacerbating the crisis. But Keynes came and provided, if you want to call it intellectual justification, although I think

this term intellectual in Keynes is a huge stretch. But, you know, if that's what people call intellectual these days, then yeah. So he provided this sort of big word, the justification for the kind of simpletons who want to believe this garbage. But I think, you know, the roots of the problem, just go back to the early 20th century, and it was a time in which what Hayek calls the fatal conceit began to dominate, particularly in U.S. politics.

The progressive movement was their view of how an economy should function was essentially that you have this Brahmin upper class of business leaders and government officials who are all, you know,

they go to the same universities and the Ivy League universities in the Northeast and they're all buddies and intermarried, and they run businesses and politics together. And, you know, this class viewed its role as a leading... Sort of like an arbiter for the country. Yeah, an arbiter and also sort of like the upper caste that will lead, not just the country, but the whole world. I mean, it was just the idea that, you know, if you think about the foundations

that these people started in D.C. to influence public policy, if you think about the attempts to spread democracy all over the world and building the League of Nations and then later the United Nations. I mean, it was all part of this drive towards progressive world government, having the world being run by New England progressives who know what's best for everybody. And so that includes everything from the American Medical Association deciding what kind of treatments are legal and what kind of treatments are illegal.

It includes everything from the central bank deciding how much money needs to be in the economy rather than it being an emergent process that emerges freely on the market. And the entirety of U.S. politics and later European politics started to head in that more statist direction. And central banking is no exception. yeah and what it's sort of led to is this uh culture of conspicuous consumption and another favorite part of my your book uh is when you sort of tie fiat currencies and the the runaway balance sheet of these central banks to the sort of ills that we're seeing in society like right now we have opioid crisis in the country gap between the rich and the poor is the biggest it's ever been or not the biggest it's ever been but it's pretty big right now um heart disease

all-time highs people are buying plastic shit at dollar stores like there's a ton of waste out there and you would attribute this to the fiat currencies correct yeah i think i think there's definitely a connection um and i think you know the the i've yet to see convincing counter arguments to this i've had people tell me well it's just a narrative fallacy which i think is the cheapest form of argument because you know if you think you can call anything a narrative fallacy but you know if you can't provide a better explanation

for how these things coincide with one another then you should probably stop leading all these rationality blogs and start reading actual economics you know because it's an entire industry of people who just refuse to ever learn anything and refuse to ever understand anything because

everything is you know correlation not causation and you can always just keep picking holes in things. But the point of education, the point of thinking, and the point of reasoning is to try to understand things and not, you know, try to find the best explanation that can explain things. And in my opinion, I think it's, you know, the economic mechanism is inarguable in the same way that you would look at any sort of price controls. If there's a price control today where the government says, you know, you can't sell apples for more than 10 cents a pound, any economist

worth of salt will tell you that will cause shortages in apples it's just what we know we've seen it happen in many places and we know the effect of it so what would be the impact of manipulation of the interest rate you know we we can think of the intro we can think of it is the interest rate is the price of money it's the price that you pay to borrow and it's the price that you receive if you lend you know with some margin plus or minus that's what the interest rate stands for so if an interest rate is artificially lowered if the government mandates that the interest rate should be lower than what it was what it would be in a free market then there's no question that that at the margin that will cause you to want to save less and to

want to consume more if interest rates are low it's easier for you to borrow it's less rewarding for you to save. And so I don't think that you could possibly explain the drop in savings and the rise in debt without looking at the price of savings and debt. So I find it to be very unconvincing when people try and dismiss this away. It's the price. It's just like with the price of apples. What happens if you restrict the price of apples? Well, producers are going to produce fewer apples because they can't afford it. And consumers are going to want more. So there's going to be a shortage. And I think the same thing happens with savings. Savers are going to save less when interest rates are low. Borrowers are going to borrow more. And so where do you make up

this difference? Well, central banks make up the difference by inflating the money supply, by bringing in new money supply into the market, which effectively causes prices to rise and causes consumption to rise and effectively eats up the capital stock of society over time. And that's the really dangerous thing if you think about it. Civilization is the process of accumulating capital. So reducing the capital stock is the exact opposite of civilization. It's what destruction of civilization is. And it's why Keynesian economics, we can laugh at how silly the economics is

and how idiotic the theories that he has is. But it's not a laughing matter. that it's extremely, extremely dangerous. It's nothing less than a recipe for destroying the capital stock of a society. In other words, a recipe for de-civilizing society, which might sound fun for the kind of generation that thinks watching Fight Club is cool

and bringing all these buildings down, but trust me, you don't want to see what it would look like if we have a reversal of civilization. It doesn't mean you and your friends going around in a Mad Max world and torching things for fun. It means like famine, disease, stuff like that.

Exactly. It means dying at 27 from simple preventable diseases. It means a lot of bad things. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I love that you brought that up, that it's sort of de-civilizing society because yesterday Stat came out.

This is what I wanted to jump into. Stat didn't come out yesterday, but this made me think of it so the average american 40 to 60 percent the number varies depending on what publication you read it read it from cannot afford a 400 emergency expense so there is no savings like people most people don't have any savings they're living paycheck to paycheck or living on the dole and this is not uh this is not sustainable in my mind and then yesterday the stat comes out uh inflation is at like eight year highs in america the cpi so what I wanted to talk about was the CPI in particular.

This is what these central banks use to track inflation, but if we really jump into the CPI and the history of the CPI, the underlying variables that go into it have changed many times throughout the past. So there's sort of a Orwellian, what do you call it, like an Orwellian

manufacturing of... Mathematical Orwellianism. Yes, exactly. That's a great way of putting it. It's a ridiculous measure. CPI is Fundamentally it's completely invalid as a measure So you can't look at a number like that

And think that it is even mathematically valid And any mathematician worth his salt Will look at it and tell you this is Mickey Mouse math It's absolutely ridiculous as a concept Because it pretends like prices are just this thing That you can measure That gives you an idea about what is happening To the price level

as if, you know, it's just this, you know, this force of nature that we're measuring the price level. And that's ridiculous, because the price level and what they measure is determined by what people buy and sell. And that in turn is determined by the prices. In other words, your choice to buy something and pay a specific price for it is not just about, it doesn't just set the price, The price determines your choice. What I mean by that is, you know, my favorite example for doing this, and a big reason how the CPI was constructed is if you look at food prices. So today I think they don't even include food prices.

I think they have rough rice if you're looking for a food statement. Oh, really? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Okay, so yeah, I've got rough rice, and that tells you what kind of stuff they need you, they'd like you to be eating. So if you think about it, in the 1970s, the reason for the construction of the CPI was because inflation was increasing very rapidly. And so they thought, you know, if we start measuring it

and putting in a bunch of economists to try and control it, then we could stop that because that will solve the problem. So, you know, it's like trying to think that, you know, your alcoholism will be solved if you just had a better... If you drink white wine instead of red wine. Yeah, or if you just, you know, get newer glasses or something like that. So if you look at it, in the 70s, the prices of everything were going up. And it wasn't because of some outside forces.

It was because the government was engaging in massive inflation, particularly after 1971 when the money supply was decoupled from any sort of redeemability to gold. So the price of everything was going up, not because things were becoming more expensive or food was more scarce, just because money was becoming more abundant. money was becoming easier. So the price of everything rises. So, you know, if you think about what you could eat in 1970, if you look at the price of a steak in 1970, you'd see that you

could probably buy a whole steak for maybe five bucks around that time, which is the same steak you'd get today for about 50 bucks in a restaurant. So you would think, well, you know, prices have gone up about tenfold. The CPI would show you that prices have gone up much less than that because it's only gone up by say about on average something like two percent per year three percent so you add it up i don't i don't know the exact numbers right now but roughly speaking it'll be something like it's doubled over the past 40 years which isn't that bad you know ten dollars instead of five dollars is not that bad of an increase over 40 years it's just a couple of percent per year most people can put up with that it doesn't really matter

if you look at it from the cpi however what the cpi does is effectively that as the as the price of the steak goes up the ability of people to buy the steak goes down and so instead they replace the steak with inferior uh substitutes so instead of eating a fine ribeye you start eating burgers made out of um you know the cheaper cuts i love burgers there's nothing wrong with them but But, you know, the price of a burger is usually cheaper. So if you move from eating the $5 steak to eating a $5 burger because the steak is now worth $20 or $10, the CPI doesn't capture that. The CPI shows that the prices are constant. You used to have your lunch for $5 and you're still having a lunch for $5.

But, you know, okay, moving to burgers is not a problem. But the next step, which is after the late 70s, which is where the dietary guidelines come in, the dietary guidelines were formulated with an economic perspective. The idea was how do we feed these people at the lowest cost? How can we provide food for society in a way that is affordable? And the answer, of course, is cheaper grains and corn and high fructose corn syrup. That's how you can produce what passes for food at a low cost. And the correlation of, like, that the addition to the food guidelines and the rise in heart disease is pretty stark.

You'd have to be a government-paid nutrition scientist to not notice it, and they're the only people who don't notice this. Other than that, I mean, you'd have to really, really, really use very powerful rationalization mechanisms to try to wish this away. It's astonishing how the rise in disease, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and all of those things coincided perfectly with the beginning of people being scared away from eating animal fat and moving towards eating industrial sludge that they were told as food instead. And you see the movement towards this industrial sludge is because as industry is advancing as uh as technology is advancing

it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce things that are industrial so if you don't care about nutrients in the food if you just care about including drugs like sugar in the food then it's it's a great way to make cheap food industrialization so you can get rid of inflation simply by telling people to stop eating you know the harmful terrible ribeye steaks that give them heart attacks according to your government scientists and start eating heart healthy canola oil and soy burgers fly fried in canola oil which is i mean disgusting sludge that you shouldn't feed to your pet if you had a pet let alone feed to human beings canola in particular i mean it's uh let's not get into all of that well i think we can jump into this from here so

like this is my big my big thing is like people are just have been born into this system and they're just like oh this is the way the world works like this is this is what's correct like you're like i was a 90s kid like i grew up eating fun dip where you literally stick like you lick you lick a stick stick into a bag of sugar and put it in your mouth that is like yeah what i grew up on luckily i've cut i've cut sugar out as much as possible i'm trying to go full carnivore it's hard i'm trying to cut out carbs as much as possible but the same uh with money and with food and diet and stuff we're sort of born like hey this is the way the world works and you're just going along and not until you're 18 to 25 and you start questioning like oh wait a second like

maybe this is wrong like what do we need to do because i'm a strong believer in that we need to get more people to understand what money is so i think everybody should read your book but absolutely beyond that like what it's it's a huge rewiring of the mental landscape of the world right um i thank you i hope so um that's that's a that's a good compliment i'll take yeah no it is and like we need and that's one thing like we i feel like we need to do as a society is like rewire brains like just because people people were born into this situation they're like hey this is the way the world works and it's really hard to convince people that like hey maybe this isn't the way the world should work yeah i mean it's it's it's if you think this is why you should

read history because otherwise you get the feeling that what you're experiencing today is just the norm and in many many ways what we have today is the norm today but it has not been the norm throughout all of human history and human society and you know it's it's usually been the exception and the effect of it is pretty, it's usually history shows us the effect of periods like this is not fun. So, you know, I mean, I just came to the U.S. Every time I come to the U.S., I'm blown away at just how much obesity there is in this country. It's really mind-blowing. Nowhere else in the world that I've been is like this.

It's, well, maybe the Gulf is a little bit like that, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf is closing in on the United States in that avenue of world leadership. But it's really astonishing, and it's not normal, obviously, and it's not healthy, and it's directly a consequence of the availability of cheap junk food, and it's not just the availability of it. You could make cheap junk food available, but people don't have to buy it. I think you can't underestimate the effect that government guidelines have had, you know 30 years of telling people in the media in the universities uh everywhere just people

being bombarded with don't eat bacon don't eat meat it's not good for you meat causes cancer red meat is associated with and you look at the horrible study behind this stuff i mean it's it it almost makes keynesian economics look respectable well not quite but i mean it's it's really on that level it's it's it's absolutely idiotic I mean the Ansel Keys study on which these dietary guidelines were based I mean no statistics student in high school could fall for this kind of garbage studies seven countries and you know one chart with three outliers I think or something like that it's just complete garbage as methodologically and you know but it it had the support of industry behind it.

Junk food has much higher margins because you're manufacturing sludge and then if you can just get the government to approve this as food then it's very profitable. Meat, on the other hand, has very low margins. This industrial

agriculture behemoth that has taken over the world has thrived on this inflation, has thrived on the idea that people are trying that government is just trying to make people not realize that they're money is losing value by replacing their food with junk and the result is massive massive health crisis yeah now so what's it like in lebanon i'm actually like i mean everywhere in the world is

catching up to the u.s unfortunately i mean the u.s is the world leader and everywhere else is catching up so you see obesity increasing and i don't know maybe this is just me trying to project things but I think this current generation I think the last few years I've noticed things have gotten significantly worse in Lebanon and it could be this is me, this is my

sort of Weston Price nutrition reading. If anybody's interested in reading more about nutrition, if you want the sort of alternative view, if you're looking for the Ludwig von Mises antidote to the mainstream nutrition. So just like in economics we've got

john maynard keynes as the sort of figurehead of everything that is wrong in nutrition there's a guy called ansel keys who was the figurehead for the anti-fat and anti-meat hysteria but the perfect antidote to that the mises to that is a guy called weston price i highly recommend a book of his called nutrition and physical degeneration and it'll show you the impacts of nutrition and malnutrition on that it's not just you know if you don't eat well you get skinny. It's really not that malnutrition. Obesity is part of malnutrition. And the effect of malnutrition are intergenerational. And that's really, I mean, it's a shocking thing to read when you see the examples that he illustrates. And there's another excellent book called Deep

Nutrition by Kate Shanahan that also applies these ideas of Western price to modern societies. So I highly recommend these, and I think my explanation of what's happening in places like Lebanon is, you know, junk food and restaurants, junk food restaurants came into Lebanon in the early 90s, and I think now is the time when you're beginning to see the real effect, because now we have children who were born to parents who were, you know, I mean, now the adults who are 20 years old were born to parents who had started eating junk before. Dipping sticks and fun dip in the 90s. I mean, before that, during the 70s and 80s, Lebanon had civil war. And say what you want about civil war, at least it got the Twinkies and fun dips out of the country for a while. So it could be that now Lebanon is regressing more. You're seeing far more obesity and far more deterioration of people's health. All right.

Staying on Lebanon, the man who wrote the foreword to your book, uh-huh i've seen taleb yeah we're uh we're huge taleb disciples on this podcast he would consider himself 11 teen correct is that i think so yeah yeah so what uh i would imagine you have the inside scoop like is he a full like is he fully sold on bitcoin yet is he is he a believer uh i wouldn't say so i'll be honest i don't think he's um i mean he's not a no coiner he's not a bitter anti-Bitcoin hater. He likes the idea, he's supportive of it, but he's just, I mean, and I kind of understand this, he's just not been interested enough to study it up close. He's interested in it because of, you know, what he mentioned in my foreword, the idea that it

constitutes an alternative to the monopoly of money that elites, or what he calls the intellectual yet idiots uh class um have so he likes it in that sense but no i can't he's not he's not technically uh studied it closely enough um to be a hardcore bitcoiner but you know can work on that and we're gonna end it on that you gotta get you gotta get to the airport um is there any like parting note you want to want to imbue on the crown here um i'll just say I'm glad to be here I hope your readers enjoy this And I hope they check out the book

And provide me with any feedback On this episode and on the book And thank you for having me Thanks for coming on, it's been a pleasure That's all we have for today, freaks Peace and love