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Israeli lobbying groups can have free reign to do whatever they want. And the impact has been

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absolutely devastating for America. And for I would say for the Middle East, in general, I think

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it's been terrible for the people of the Middle East, the natives, but it's also been terrible for,

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you know, the Israeli people who live in this, because it's a blank check to the worst elements

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in Israeli society. And it's just making these people have all the power in the world to be able

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to do whatever they want and therefore creating more and more enmity and creating more and more

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blowback and creating more and more conflict. And that's why, you know, here we are 78 years after

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the establishment of the Zionist land theft regime, it's still having to drag all of its

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young people into endless wars and conflicts because it's got a blank check from the US to

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keep paying for those things. So might as well just take people and put them into the meat grinder

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because we want to take the West Bank.

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We want to take Gaza.

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We want more land.

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All of the messianic idea of let's take the land

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because the Torah said so is insane.

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It's completely insane.

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And any person who thinks this is any legitimacy

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to this stuff is essentially incompatible

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with human civilization.

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All right.

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Hello, friends.

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Thank you so much for coming by for another episode

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of the Ben Wurman podcast.

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I appreciate you stopping by.

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we have an extremely special guest today this gentleman has been responsible for so many of

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the hours of my life being lost down different rabbit holes from bitcoin to the carnivore diet

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and more recently the whole israel palestine situation and we'll get into all of these things

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i don't know how we're even going to figure out what to talk about there's too many things too but

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seyfedina moose it is a huge pleasure to have you here sir thank you for coming

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Thank you so much for inviting me, Ben.

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So like I said, I have mentioned you and your books definitely more than any other person out there during the podcast so far.

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So it's difficult to know where to start, but I think we'll just do what we normally do, which is your backstory.

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And we love getting a good foundation for who we're talking to here.

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So we could start all the way back to you were born in Palestine and sort of tie the dots up to becoming a Bitcoin author.

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I think that's a really interesting journey.

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Anyone here that is not your average life story.

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So give us a rundown.

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Yeah, I mean, sometimes I look back and think,

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just how did all of this happen?

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And the short answer is that it was a very, very long process.

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I've been on this earth for 44 years.

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So a lot has happened.

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So I don't know how much time do we have today,

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but I'll try and keep it brief.

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So, yeah, as you said, I was born in Palestine,

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but when I was very young, we moved to Saudi Arabia.

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And I lived there until I was about six or so.

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Then we moved to Brazil, you know, natural progression from Saudi Arabia, go to Rio de Janeiro.

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So I spent two years there.

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My dad is a surgeon, and there he went to train in plastic surgery under what was then the world's pioneer and world leader in plastic surgery.

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His name was Pitangui, a Brazilian surgeon.

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So then after that, we went back to Palestine.

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We lived in Palestine until I finished high school.

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And then I went to university. I was at an American Quaker school in Palestine, probably, I think, the oldest missionary school in the Middle East.

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It's called the Friends School. So I've always had a soft spot for Quakers because of that.

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And then I went to the American University of Beirut, also a missionary school, a missionary university where I studied engineering.

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And then I did a master's in the London School of Economics in Development.

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And then I did my PhD at Columbia University in Sustainable Development.

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And after completing that, I moved to Lebanon, back to Lebanon, where I was a university professor for nine and a half years at the Lebanese American University.

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During which time, well, during my Columbia years, as I was doing my PhD, it was, you know, standard mainstream stuff.

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and I struggled to make any sense of it.

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But then toward the end, around 2007, 2008,

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as I was struggling to make sense of what I was going through,

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I came across, I think the entry of the rabbit hole may have been Karl Popper.

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I read Karl Popper. That led me to Hayek.

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I started reading Hayek. Hayek blew my mind.

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And then that led me to Mises and Rothbard.

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and that just completely radicalized me.

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What year was this, just for a timeline?

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2007 to 2009, really.

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That was my last two years during my PhD.

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And it was happening during the time of the financial crisis,

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which gave it extra impetus because you get online or get on TV

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and all of these Keynesian economists are in unison saying,

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yep, we have no choice but to print trillions of dollars

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and hand them to these bankers because otherwise,

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Otherwise, you won't be able to have bread on the shelves next week.

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So we have no choice but to give all of these bankers trillions of dollars and thank us for it.

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And everybody, you know, all of these economists are just nodding.

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You know, Bernanke or John Paulson would go on TV and say, yeah, we need $3,000 quadrillion for a bunch of Wall Street banks.

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And then all the economists would be like, yeah, well, you see, they're right.

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without the $3,000 quadrillion for Wall Street banks, we would all be in bread lines that have

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no bread and everything would fall apart. All the farms would stop working. All the food would

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stop working. All of those farmers and people who eat their food, they have no way of ever

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communicating or getting their goods across unless Goldman Sachs bankers make trillions of

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dollars every day. So, um, so that was, you know, uh, that was a huge wake up call,

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but also came at the time when I was beginning to read the Austrians. And then I found Mises

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daughter work sometime, I think in 2008 or so. Yeah. 2008. And, um, you know, made it more

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difficult for me to finish my PhD. Cause at that time, you know, I was thinking of this in terms

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of, Oh, wow. Wait until my committee reads all about this. They're going to be so excited because

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This is really interesting stuff that is going to help us figure out how to stay away from all of these methodologically suspect economic ideas.

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And, you know, that turned out to be very naive and innocent because modern universities, people don't really have.

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How do I put this?

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There isn't really much in terms of intellectual work going on.

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It's just basically write whatever you need to write in order to get published, in order to get a job.

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And nobody is interested in having actual real debates on intellectual questions.

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So it created a whole bunch of problems for me, delayed my graduation.

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I had to rewrite a lot of my thesis.

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But then eventually I did get the PhD.

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and then I moved to Lebanon where I was teaching economics and at that point you know I became

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pretty radicalized as a gold bug and I thought I was going to be in Lebanon maybe for a year or two

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while I figure out what I want to do because probably academia is not for me and the initial

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plan of what I wanted to do this was what I was focusing most my time on in 2010 11 and 12

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was to basically build a gold-based Bitcoin.

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In retrospect, I kind of came to the conclusion

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that the way to fix this mess is for people to have gold.

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And the way to have gold is to build an app

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where people are able to move gold around.

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And the way to do that would be to have the gold stored

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in cold storage effectively in Switzerland.

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And then when people send us money, we buy gold,

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and then they have the gold in Switzerland,

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and then we can move it around between network members

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where the gold doesn't move.

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But on your app, you see that your gold has moved.

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So it's kind of like Bitcoin,

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but instead of having magical imaginary coins in the sky,

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you have real physical gold bars in a Swiss vault.

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but sadly spent a lot of time and money on this in 2011 12 and 13 when i knew about bitcoin i'd

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heard vaguely about bitcoin and i was uh shamed to say it but i was very very peter schiff at that

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time i was basically every single stupid argument you've heard peter schiff make today i used to

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make at that time and i used to think you know well the bitcoin thing is interesting it's nice

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But clearly, it's not going to work. And I had this exact, really, really dangerous thing that I seen so many people when it comes to Bitcoin, which is it's maybe the most expensive mistake of my life, which is, yeah, I know why Bitcoin won't work.

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So therefore, I'm not going to be wasting my time getting into learning about the details of it.

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And that was the phase from Bitcoin under a dollar to Bitcoin over a thousand, basically, where I was just sitting there and thinking, yeah, well, it's not going to work.

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so eventually i around 2013 is when i started to

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realize i'm i'm an idiot and maybe i should be paying attention to this stuff in particular it

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was in 2013 two things i think well three things first of all the price kept going up and so i

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remember in 2011 thinking to myself huh this is a cool idea and i remember reading an article i

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I think it was a Wired magazine that wrote an article about Bitcoin when it hit $1 or maybe SlashDot.

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No, I think SlashDot was earlier.

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But anyways, I remember reading an article saying one Bitcoin hit $1.

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And I remember saying in 2011, I was going to New York for a summer job.

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And I thought to myself, yeah, I'm going to buy 100 Bitcoin for $100.

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And then I went to New York, obviously spent hundreds of dollars on all kinds of stupid nonsense that I don't even remember.

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And didn't buy the 100 Bitcoin because by the time I got to New York, it was like $8 or something like that.

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So I thought, well, clearly it's too expensive now and it's going to crash.

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And then the government is going to ban it.

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And then they're going to throw everybody in Guantanamo Bay.

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So if this thing does survive, it'll happen after the government throws everybody involved in Guantanamo Bay.

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And then it survives.

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And then maybe I'll buy when it's back under a penny.

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So very typical behavior.

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Very typical.

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It's just today.

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My friends call me.

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Yeah, okay, fine.

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Maybe I'll buy.

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But now it's 100.

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I'll buy when it's back over, when it's back under 20,000.

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Or I'll buy when it's back under 50,000.

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Typical, typical no-coiner behavior textbook.

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And the sad reality is you end up buying after a couple of digits have been added to the price So instead of buying when it goes under a dollar I ended up buying with well two three digits added to the price

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So then, yeah, so 2013, first the price keeps going up,

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and eventually you just start questioning your assumption

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because in my mind there's no way that it could have gone up

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to about $1,000 in 2013.

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And so clearly something is wrong about it.

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The other thing was there was – I read an article, I think it was Forbes magazine in 2013, talking about the massive hash rate on Bitcoin.

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And before then, of course, being an idiot, I had never considered actually looking into detail.

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And I hadn't even heard about Bitcoin mining being this industry.

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I remember hearing about mining in the early days.

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I remember even trying to download the software and mine on my computer at some point.

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But it didn't work because at that point, mining had shifted to like GPUs and I had a crappy old laptop that couldn't handle the software and fell apart.

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So then when in 2013, when I realized that, oh, wow, people are actually building mining facilities, they're actually buying machines and plugging them in in order to make Bitcoin, which for me awakened something which is, well, if because before that in my mind was, well, obviously one day when this becomes valuable.

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they're going to find a way to make more of it. It's not gold. It's digital. The people behind it

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are going to get together and say, hey, let's make more Bitcoin. But then when I found out that

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actually people are putting in serious capital investment to building machines and setting up

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facilities and connecting them to electricity in order to make Bitcoin, that means this isn't

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cheap, easy money. That means there may be a way in which the 21 million thing actually might stick.

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And then the third thing was the Silk Road, because when the Silk Road happened, it was, in my mind, that was the scenario of how Bitcoin dies.

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Some criminal activity is associated to Bitcoin, and then everybody related to Bitcoin is going to be considered complicit in that.

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And then they're going to throw a bunch of people in Guantanamo Bay, and then everybody else is going to get rid of their coins, and the price is going to die.

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so this happened in early 2013 when Ross Albright was arrested and so in my mind that was the moment

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when I thought okay now it's going to crash now it's going to die and instead it just kept going

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up so around 2013 is when I started recovering from no coin or derangement syndrome and started

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thinking more critically about it and started reading it but still unfortunately you know 2013

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14, 15, I still hadn't really spent a lot of time trying to understand it and focus on it. I was,

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you know, memes and Twitter and putting in some pocket change into it, thinking that,

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you know, this is too risky. This is too crazy. Who knows what's going to happen?

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But at least I got off zero, but unfortunately I didn't make it very far away from zero

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during those years. And then I got married in 2014 and had to spend money on all kinds of

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things like, you know, weddings and wedding rings and honeymoons.

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And then I had a child and then I had to spend all kinds of things on children and stuff.

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So then only after my daughter was born in 2016,

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and then I started thinking more seriously about needing to be more productive

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and do things more than just my day job at university.

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And that's when I started thinking more seriously about Bitcoin,

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started reading more and more and more about it and researching it.

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And in 2017, I decided to write a book about it.

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And then it was published in 2018.

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What was there to read that you were digging into?

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Because there's so many resources, books, podcasts, everything out there now that people have just no more excuses to not study Bitcoin and learn about it.

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But I'm assuming it was quite a few just random sketchy forums online that you had to dig through it.

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Where were you researching it from?

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Yeah, random sketchy forums online is one major one.

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Andreas Antonopoulos' videos were pretty big at that point.

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And there was that book written by a bunch of computer scientists, I think, at Yale.

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I forget the exact name of the book.

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Cryptocurrency Technology.

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That was a – I forget the name.

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But there was a book that was, I think, 2014 or so that explained the technical aspect in a way that was pretty useful, which helped me.

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But yeah, there weren't a lot of resources, which is why it was very easy to believe silly things because it was just – there was a lot of uninformed people online making very bold predictions about it.

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And it was difficult to tell apart the signal from the noise.

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But with time, more and more content started to come around.

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Oh, yeah. And of course, well, I should mention perhaps the most important resource I came across at that time was the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Pierre Rochard and Michael Goldstein. And it was truly mind-blowing because very few people had thought about Bitcoin. Well, maybe not few.

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At the beginning, a lot of people had, you know, among the small number of people who had been working in Bitcoin or related to Bitcoin, they'd thought about the idea of the fixed supply money and how significant that is.

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But nobody quite formulated what we today know as toxic Bitcoin maximalism in its purest raw freebase form, quite like Michael Goldstein and Pierre Richard around that period.

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So 2012, 13, 14, they wrote a bunch of blog posts, basically everything you need to know about Bitcoin.

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It's just very brief.

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and they had another guy who was working with them at that time, Daniel Kravitz.

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He termed the coin hyper-Bitcoinization, which was very powerful as an idea at that time

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because it really drove the point home that this isn't just going to be a side project for nerds.

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This is going to be serious business.

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So that really helped me begin to form it.

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I came across it, I think, in 2015 or so, or 14.

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I can't remember when exactly I came across it, but around that time.

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And that really helped me start to see things from the perspective of Bitcoin as hard money and the impact that Bitcoin can have on the world.

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and you know i'd already i i'd already most people i would say they come into bitcoin

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thinking about it say from a computer science perspective in the early days or more recently

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from a gains perspective for me i think i was one of the few people who had come at it from

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the austrian perspective where the most interesting thing for me from day one was the fact that this

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is a money supply that's fixed that the supply doesn't grow so i already knew how much of a big

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deal that would be before I ever heard about Bitcoin. I was a gold bug and I had a lot of the

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ideas that you read about in the Bitcoin standard were already formulated in my mind before Bitcoin

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came about. So whereas I would say for most people, it's a question of, oh, wow, you know,

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this is cool. This is interesting. Blockchain technology, cryptography, all of these are really

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cool things or maybe complicated things. But, you know, they come at it from this perspective and then

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they come across the idea that wow a money that first of all inflation is a big problem and not

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having inflation is a solution and that's why bitcoin is such a big deal that usually comes

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later for me it was the other way around it was i understood that this would be a big deal but

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being a deranged no-coiner i hadn't spent the time trying to understand why it could actually work

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so i thought wow wouldn't that be great if we had something like bitcoin but obviously it's not

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going to work and obviously i'm too smart to waste my time trying to learn how it actually works

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because i obviously i'm so smart that i know that it won't work and now i'm going to work on this

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19th century monetary technology and try and integrate it with an app because i am smart so

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So, but then by 2014 and 15, these kind of ideas began to take root.

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But also 2014, 15 was a brutal bear market, the most brutal bear market in Bitcoin history.

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If you think 2022 was bad, 2022 was really just one year of downward price action.

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So November 21 to about December 22, it was a decline from 69 to 15,000.

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but uh afterward it flattened out and it kept going up well back then it was a decline from

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about a thousand two hundred down to 150 so almost 90 and it dragged on for about two years

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so from november 2013 until around i think yeah the bottom was probably around november 2015 if

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i'm not mistaken but something in that range so it was very brutal 2014 and 15 i'm astonished at

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the fact that I stuck around because I think a lot of people sold, gave up.

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And sadly for me, you know, I didn't pay enough attention during that time.

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And I didn't stack a lot because all you could hear was Bitcoin's dead, Bitcoin died,

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Bitcoin failed, Bitcoin is not going to work.

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And, you know, we didn't have Bitcoin Twitter out there putting hair on our chest and telling

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is to tell the no-coiners to have fun staying poor and keep hodling.

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So it was a pretty brutal time

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during which I didn't really pay enough attention during Bitcoin.

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I was trying to get my own job in order.

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But then things started to turn around in 2016

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when Bitcoin started to go up and I had a child.

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So I started to think more seriously about what I need to do with my life.

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And then in 2017, I started to work on the Bitcoin standard.

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Amazing. One of the staples of this podcast is that we never get tired of asking the most simple questions because you never know who's listening. So I want to hear it straight from you. What is Bitcoin? How do you explain this to people?

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Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer software that operates a payment network that runs with its own inflation-resistant currency and allows you to transfer money to anyone else on the network anywhere in the world without having to go through any trusted third party and without having to go through any political institutions.

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that for me is bitcoin in a nutshell and then i would go through a more detailed explanation of

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what we mean by a peer-to-peer network what we mean by open source software that's another one

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that i would add to it i think it's important so what do we mean by open source software we mean by

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peer network and then i say you know the fact that it permissionless and doesn have a trusted third party is why it is effectively the fastest form of money in the world that allows you to have final settlement of financial assets in the fastest period of time

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And secondly, and the most important thing about Bitcoin is the fact that the currency supply is

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fixed means that it won't increase in supply unpredictably. And that means that it kills

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inflation and that makes it the hardest money ever and then i get into describing why hard

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money is such a big deal and what the implications are yeah and i think that's a good opportunity to

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inject what the problem is that we're actually trying to solve here because i think that

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we look around the social media landscape and our friends and family at the gatherings and

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people talking about what the problem is it's always some political fight left versus right

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or capitalism bad, rich people bad.

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At least that's all I hear from the Northwest

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where I'm from in Seattle.

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It's very left blue over there.

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I think you and I would agree,

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largely because I got this from reading your book,

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is that central banking is a real problem here.

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I know you really talk about central banking

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being the biggest problem on earth.

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So could you flesh that out a little bit?

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What is, like most people,

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I think if you just talk to them on the street

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and ask them, hey, explain central banking, what is it?

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People won't even know where to start.

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So how do you start explaining the problem that Bitcoin fixes?

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Yeah, I think most people have very little idea about what central banks are and what they do.

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They think they're just government institutions, like the DMVs, Department of Education, the police department, the fire department.

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It's just public servants out there trying to do their best.

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and if you're going to have some kind of libertarian leanings,

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you may be a little bit skeptical of the efficiency of using the central bank for this,

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but never, well, not never, but I think for most people,

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it's never too critical of what the central bank actually is and what it really does.

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But as far as I'm concerned, and I say this repeatedly,

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and I don't think it's hyperbolic at all,

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It really is the biggest problem in the world, and it is at the root of the vast majority of the world's problems.

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I think there is no such thing as an economic problem that isn't related to inflation.

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All of the things that people think of as economic problems are consequences of inflation.

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Unemployment is caused by inflation.

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Prices rising is caused by inflation, because by inflation, I mean an increase in the money supply.

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That's the correct definition.

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So prices rise, jobs get destroyed, business cycles happen, financial crises happen, governments go bankrupt, currencies collapse.

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All of those things, you think of them as different things and you grow up if you're getting educated or miseducated under a Keynesian system.

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You treat those things as if they're natural disasters.

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It's like you are an emergency worker and you're being taught about how to deal with earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes and so on.

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So one day you wake up and there's an earthquake.

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Why did it happen?

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It doesn't matter.

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Let's pull people out of the rubble.

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That's what you need to learn.

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So this is the approach that people generally have to economic ideas.

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Oh, no, unemployment went up.

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Oh, no, there's a fiscal crisis.

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Oh, no, the government is unable to pay off its debt.

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Oh, no, the government has defaulted.

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These things just happen.

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And the really pernicious thing is that the way that we fix those things, because people aren't taught about the causes of those things.

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They don't see that they're all caused by inflation.

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And they think that, all right, well, oh, no, that's bad.

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So clearly we need to have somebody in charge to fix it, just like the fire department.

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and the way that we have that person fix it is to just give them tons of money

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or have them print a ton of money,

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which, of course, is going to lay the groundwork for the next crisis and financial disaster.

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So putting all of this together really gives you, I think,

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a much better understanding of how the world works

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and why inflation is at the root of those problems.

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And I guess if I were to summarize it, as I explained in the fiat standard,

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I'd say the big picture summary of what the problem is with central banking and inflation is central banking makes money and banking a monopoly.

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So you cannot compete with your government's central bank and its banks.

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You can't decide to open a bank tomorrow that runs on gold, for instance, because you won't get licensed by the Federal Reserve.

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of the Federal Reserve only licenses fraudulent banks that use fake fiat inflationary money.

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Because if it licenses one bank that isn't fraudulent, that just offers people normal

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banking services where you just hold people's money and don't create money out of thin air

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and don't devalue their money, it would drive all the other banks out of business.

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In fact, a few years ago, there was a bank that wanted to do nothing, but it was called

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the narrow bank, which in economics, narrow banking refers to the idea of just basically

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running a safety deposit box for people. You take money from people, you put it in a box,

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you hire armed guards to make sure that nobody takes the money from those boxes.

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And then when people want to take that money out, you give it to them. And in this case,

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they were taking their reserves, putting them at the central bank, getting the, that was their

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business plan. They were going to put the reserves in the central bank and then pass on the central

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banking interest rate to their depositors and make a spread. That was it, which is a dream.

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If you could have something like this, just so much of the US capital markets would go to something

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like this because vast majority of people don't want to gamble with their savings. And if you're

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able to get the Federal Reserve's interest rate without having to go through a lot of risks,

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I think it's attractive for a big chunk of people's portfolios,

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not all of people's portfolios.

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You're still going to want to, say, have some stocks.

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You're still going to maybe want to do private equity.

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There will be parts of your portfolio that you won't do,

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but there will be parts of your portfolio

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where you would want to just have wealth preservation.

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So they didn't license that bank,

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and Caitlin Long has also been trying to get something similar.

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I was going to mention her. That's exactly what I was going to say.

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Yeah. And again, she's not having an easy time trying to get that.

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And the reason for this is not because those banks would be dangerous to the depositors.

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It's because they would be dangerous to all the other banks.

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Why would you put your money in these fraudulent institutions like JP Morgan or Citibank,

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who are holding on to a tiny fraction of the money that you give them and who could collapse at any time?

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When you could just go to the Federal Reserve, which is a lot safer than going through those banks.

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So then if you did that, everybody would take out a lot of their wealth from other financial institutions and financial instruments and just put them in that kind of bank.

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So you can't be having that.

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So you have to have a monopoly that prevents people from using responsible money so that everybody is forced to be using the inflationary money so that they can be robbed from inflation.

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So that's the kind of big picture understanding of what the monopoly is.

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And then the problems I would say, as I was describing the fiat standard, you can see there are two aspects to the problem.

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On the one hand, the first aspect of it is the fact that because the government and the central bank are able to devalue the currency, they're constantly robbing the people of wealth, which is terrible for people because it's making them poorer and poorer and taking away their wealth and compromising their ability to provide for the future, compromising their ability to save for the future.

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On the other hand, the second part of the problem is that wealth being constantly stolen from people and being given to the government gives the government an enormous amount of power and control over society because it's constantly taking away your saved monetary energy and therefore constantly making you poorer and constantly making itself richer.

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So this is why in the 20th century, as I explained in the fiat standard and the Bitcoin standard, we just have a long-term process of decline in savings, decline in financial security, decline in people's ability to think for the long term, increase in economic uncertainty on the one hand for individuals, and then on the other hand, an increase in state power.

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And you can't understand that without reference to the money printer. The money printer is just a constant tax on normal, productive people doing moral things and a constant subsidy to people in government who are not doing, I would say, moral things because they're relying on taxation, which in my opinion is immoral, and inflation, which is also immoral.

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So you're taxing the productive to finance the unproductive, but it's done at a scale of decades across the entire planet.

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And that, for me, is at the root of the vast majority of the world's problems because this makes war a lot more affordable.

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This makes all kinds of government programs a lot more affordable.

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this turns politics into an as men can use to call it an auction on stolen goods where if you

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and a bunch of people can get together and vote on stealing stuff then you can steal it and you

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can steal it very easily because the government has a lot of money because it can print money so

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it can finance uh well first of all it can steal for you through inflation and secondly it can steal

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through you for you through inflation financing jackbooted thugs who go around and steal for you

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And so all kinds of barbaric and uncivilized behavior become very sustainable and profitable in a modern society because of the money printer.

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And I don't think it would be workable otherwise without a money printer.

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So this is really why Bitcoin is so important because it brings you the possibility of being able to save in something that can't be devalued.

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And so therefore, you get to keep your wealth and the people who rely on stealing your wealth don't get to keep it instead.

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Yeah, and circling back to the timeline we laid out of the teen years, 2013 or so, that was when I was freshly going into my fiat university right there in 2013, 2014 to go straight to that econ 101 class for those easy credits where they were teaching me exactly that.

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You've got to have 2% inflation.

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It's good for you.

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It's amazing. Safe and effective. It's so crazy how this is just so stapled in everyone's mind that

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it normal to have this random inflation number Most people don even think of it but the people that do think about it and read the economics magazines they just hear this number and they say okay that works And one of the preliminary things

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that people must believe in order to fall for that is that deflation is a very scary, bad thing.

388
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So could you explain maybe what deflation is? It's obviously the opposite of inflation by name.

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What is this idea of deflation and how could a deflationary currency like Bitcoin actually

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change people's lives? Yeah, well, so the term deflation may not be entirely accurate in the

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case of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is inflationary in the sense that the supply is increasing and the supply

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never goes down. Deflation, I think the correct terminology for it is the correct terminology

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definition of deflation is a decline in the money supply. Now, the Keynesians call inflation an

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increase in prices and deflation a decrease in prices. I don't think that's accurate.

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But, you know, language is all about convention.

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So for me, the Keynesians have succeeded in destroying the usefulness of the I word.

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It's just better not to use the word inflation, which is why if you go through my books, you'll see that I don't use that term often.

398
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But I usually try and distinguish between an increase in the money supply and an increase in prices, because otherwise you're just stuck arguing about this terminology.

399
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So putting aside the term deflation, the key thing about Bitcoin is that the supply doesn't increase beyond what has been scheduled.

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And that there's a fixed supply.

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So the supply growth rate is constantly declining.

402
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Currently, we're already at 19.7, I think, million Bitcoin.

403
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So there's only 1.3 million Bitcoin to be mined over the next century or so.

404
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So the importance of this cannot be overstated.

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This is truly, for me, the most important technological development of the 21st century and possibly many centuries to come even.

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I don't think people quite understand just how enormous it's going to be.

407
00:36:23,738 --> 00:36:35,338
And the reason for that is the current monetary system, the way it works, is built on the lie that you need to increase the money supply in order for the economy to function.

408
00:36:35,798 --> 00:36:41,358
It's such an elementary lie, and I think it's a great IQ test.

409
00:36:42,018 --> 00:36:45,398
There are people who get it immediately, and there are people who don't get it.

410
00:36:45,398 --> 00:36:53,778
And if you're one of the people who don't get it, I regret to inform you that the stuff between your ear isn't high grade.

411
00:36:54,018 --> 00:36:55,078
Let's just put it that way.

412
00:36:55,177 --> 00:36:57,878
You may have fun staying poor, allegedly.

413
00:36:58,318 --> 00:36:59,878
Yes, allegedly.

414
00:37:00,738 --> 00:37:02,378
And the key idea is this.

415
00:37:02,378 --> 00:37:09,618
the money itself is not a good. It's not an economic good whose quantity matters

416
00:37:09,618 --> 00:37:16,758
to your satisfaction. Mises calls it a sui generis good. It's a good like no other,

417
00:37:16,758 --> 00:37:21,738
where the quantity of the good itself doesn't matter. What matters is the purchasing power

418
00:37:21,738 --> 00:37:30,738
of that good. And so therefore, you don't care if you're getting $5 or 50 yens or 5,000 euros.

419
00:37:30,738 --> 00:37:36,938
its quantity itself doesn't matter to the satisfaction that you get from it. So you don't

420
00:37:36,938 --> 00:37:44,838
care if you're using, if you're getting $5 or 50 Japanese yen or 500 euros, the number of units that

421
00:37:44,838 --> 00:37:48,398
you're getting doesn't really matter. What matters to you is the purchasing power. So if I told you

422
00:37:48,398 --> 00:37:53,918
would you rather have $5 or 50 yen, you're going to say $5, even though 50 is larger than five.

423
00:37:54,158 --> 00:37:59,138
Why? Because it's not like apples. It's not like homes. It's not like Lamborghinis. It's not

424
00:37:59,138 --> 00:38:03,778
something where the more you have of a good, the better it is. It's about the purchasing power.

425
00:38:04,218 --> 00:38:08,598
And so $5 have more purchasing power than 50 yen. So you prefer the $5 over the 50 yen.

426
00:38:09,098 --> 00:38:14,818
So what matters in money is its purchasing power, is its ability to be exchanged for other goods,

427
00:38:14,818 --> 00:38:22,858
which does not require the quantity of it to be increased because you can just increase

428
00:38:22,858 --> 00:38:29,778
the purchasing power of it. And this is such a powerful idea. And if you get it, you get money.

429
00:38:30,118 --> 00:38:37,457
And the most important implication of this is that any supply of money is enough, as long as it's

430
00:38:37,457 --> 00:38:44,098
physically manageable. You know, you can't run a global economy on one gold coin, because

431
00:38:44,098 --> 00:38:51,358
how do you break it down so that 8 billion people can have it? But you well, you could if you have

432
00:38:51,358 --> 00:38:56,518
financial assets backed by that one coin. The one coin would be worth $50 trillion if that was the

433
00:38:56,518 --> 00:39:00,618
only gold coin we had, and then there would be financial instruments backed by it. But ultimately,

434
00:39:00,818 --> 00:39:04,358
you don't need to increase the supply of money. This is the key point. You don't need to increase

435
00:39:04,358 --> 00:39:09,538
the supply of money as the economy grows. And if you get this, congratulations to your mother for

436
00:39:09,538 --> 00:39:14,078
bringing you to this world. If you don't get this, my condolences to your mother for bringing you

437
00:39:14,078 --> 00:39:19,977
into this world. If you think the world needs to make more money because we want to trade more,

438
00:39:19,977 --> 00:39:26,538
you are not going to make it. It's exactly as idiotic as saying, we need to expand the inch

439
00:39:26,538 --> 00:39:30,858
in order for me to get taller. No, we don't. The inch is the thing that we use to measure your

440
00:39:30,858 --> 00:39:37,078
height. And as you get taller, you just are measured with more inches. So it's very similar

441
00:39:37,078 --> 00:39:42,638
with money. If you had a fixed supply money, what would happen over time is that the value of the

442
00:39:42,638 --> 00:39:50,138
money would go up. So the biggest lie of modern economics is to convince you that the value of

443
00:39:50,138 --> 00:39:56,678
money going up would be bad and that the best way to fix it is to devalue your money, bring the value

444
00:39:56,678 --> 00:40:00,758
of money down. And the way to do that is to increase the supply of money. That's because

445
00:40:00,758 --> 00:40:04,998
modern economics is just propaganda for theft. It's just propaganda for theft through inflation.

446
00:40:05,498 --> 00:40:10,518
So everything you've learned at your university over the last century, I regret to inform you,

447
00:40:10,518 --> 00:40:13,438
has basically been inflationary propaganda.

448
00:40:13,878 --> 00:40:16,058
All of these Nobel Prize winning economists,

449
00:40:16,538 --> 00:40:19,098
the vast majority of textbooks that you've learned,

450
00:40:19,598 --> 00:40:23,138
all of the people that get wheeled out on propaganda rags

451
00:40:23,138 --> 00:40:25,718
like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal

452
00:40:25,718 --> 00:40:29,998
and CNN and all that stuff and Harvard University

453
00:40:29,998 --> 00:40:33,018
and all of these elite institutions,

454
00:40:33,738 --> 00:40:36,957
they are not some geniuses who managed to figure out

455
00:40:36,957 --> 00:40:39,098
great insights about economics.

456
00:40:39,538 --> 00:40:44,957
They're just actors who repeat the same stupid lines about, we need more money printing to fix

457
00:40:44,957 --> 00:40:50,258
things. And then when that causes a catastrophe, then guess what? We need more money printing in

458
00:40:50,258 --> 00:40:57,338
order to fix it even more. So this is what it ultimately comes down to. The fiat economists

459
00:40:57,338 --> 00:41:02,038
and fiat economics in general is one giant gaslighting operation to convince you that

460
00:41:02,038 --> 00:41:05,378
we need to increase the supply of money. And if we don't do it, everything would be bad.

461
00:41:05,858 --> 00:41:14,258
And the main and dumbest argument they have is, well, if the prices of things go up, then people are not going to be consuming.

462
00:41:14,578 --> 00:41:19,977
Why would you want to consume today if you can expect that your money is going to rise in value?

463
00:41:19,977 --> 00:41:25,818
And so you won't spend your money today because you expect that you can get more from it next year.

464
00:41:26,418 --> 00:41:31,138
And then because you don't spend your money, that puts people out of work.

465
00:41:31,138 --> 00:41:38,338
so your local restaurants and nightclubs they'd all go out of business if people stopped spending

466
00:41:38,338 --> 00:41:43,238
because they expect that their money would buy them more next year and then that puts people out

467
00:41:43,238 --> 00:41:47,977
of work and then those people have no work and so then they can't spend and then that puts other

468
00:41:47,977 --> 00:41:52,658
businesses out of work and then the people in those businesses can no longer spend and then

469
00:41:52,658 --> 00:41:59,158
that goes round and round and then affects everybody and now you your own business gets

470
00:41:59,158 --> 00:42:04,338
affected because people aren't spending. And that should teach you for being so selfish as to save

471
00:42:04,338 --> 00:42:10,438
for the future instead of just spending everything that you have today like a monkey. And that's

472
00:42:10,438 --> 00:42:15,518
essentially what Keynesian economics comes down to. We need you to always be spending. We need you

473
00:42:15,518 --> 00:42:21,618
to always be losing purchasing power to incentivize you to spend. Because if you don't spend, then the

474
00:42:21,618 --> 00:42:28,038
economy falls apart. And there are no words in the English language to describe how utterly moronic

475
00:42:28,038 --> 00:42:38,138
this is. The basic idea is people don't consume because their money is losing value. People consume

476
00:42:38,138 --> 00:42:42,957
because they need to consume, because they want to consume, because life is finite. One day you're

477
00:42:42,957 --> 00:42:48,818
going to die and you want to get to experience those things. And so if you're hungry today and

478
00:42:48,818 --> 00:42:53,598
you really want to eat and you have the money that can buy you the food, you're not going to be,

479
00:42:53,598 --> 00:43:07,938
There are no humans that are as stupid as the Keynesians pretend to be in their textbooks who are going to think, nope, I'm going to not eat today because if I wait another year, I'll be able to get a cheaper meal.

480
00:43:08,298 --> 00:43:13,518
So why would I eat today when I could just wait for a year and then my steak will be 3% cheaper next year?

481
00:43:14,058 --> 00:43:17,598
And so then you don't eat and then the steak guy goes out of business.

482
00:43:17,778 --> 00:43:20,498
This is exactly how they think, which is completely idiotic.

483
00:43:20,498 --> 00:43:24,977
In reality, if you don't eat today or for the whole week, you're going to starve and die.

484
00:43:26,078 --> 00:43:28,878
And so you're going to eat.

485
00:43:28,998 --> 00:43:29,538
You're going to spend.

486
00:43:30,098 --> 00:43:35,818
Your choice is not between a steak today and a steak next year that is 3% cheaper.

487
00:43:36,198 --> 00:43:41,698
You're not going to make it to next year and to be able to get the 3% cheaper steak if you don't eat today, you're going to die.

488
00:43:41,818 --> 00:43:43,558
You're going to starve from now until next year.

489
00:43:43,818 --> 00:43:47,598
So your choice is buy the steak today or starve.

490
00:43:48,018 --> 00:43:48,977
That's the real choice.

491
00:43:48,977 --> 00:43:53,118
and nobody, nobody is as stupid as the Keynesians

492
00:43:53,118 --> 00:43:55,078
in order to be able to think,

493
00:43:55,518 --> 00:43:58,678
nope, I'd rather starve so that I can spend more,

494
00:43:58,818 --> 00:44:00,338
so that I can spend less next year.

495
00:44:00,438 --> 00:44:01,498
It's just completely insane.

496
00:44:01,898 --> 00:44:04,977
People are nowhere near as idiotic

497
00:44:04,977 --> 00:44:06,218
as the Keynesians pretend they are.

498
00:44:06,758 --> 00:44:09,718
So you also want to buy a house

499
00:44:09,718 --> 00:44:12,138
and you don't care if it's going to get cheaper

500
00:44:12,138 --> 00:44:14,477
10 years from now, you need the house now.

501
00:44:14,558 --> 00:44:15,998
You don't want to be homeless for 10 years

502
00:44:15,998 --> 00:44:20,498
so that you could then eventually get to save 20% on your house,

503
00:44:21,238 --> 00:44:22,778
you're going to buy the house.

504
00:44:22,957 --> 00:44:23,798
You need clothes.

505
00:44:24,398 --> 00:44:26,858
So what do we see now?

506
00:44:26,977 --> 00:44:27,838
What has changed?

507
00:44:28,558 --> 00:44:32,998
But you're still going to be spending money on the essentials that you need.

508
00:44:33,438 --> 00:44:37,718
But I think there is some kernel of truth in their idiotic idea,

509
00:44:37,858 --> 00:44:44,558
which is that you're less likely to spend stupid money on stupid things that you don't need.

510
00:44:45,218 --> 00:44:45,358
Yeah.

511
00:44:45,358 --> 00:44:49,878
So you will buy housing, shelter, you will buy the essential things that matter to you.

512
00:44:50,398 --> 00:45:06,457
But are you going to be buying another piece of plastic junk that you don't need, that's going to fall apart very quickly, when you can expect that the money would appreciate over the next year or so, then allowing you to buy a much better piece of plastic junk that you don't really need?

513
00:45:07,238 --> 00:45:07,418
Yeah.

514
00:45:07,638 --> 00:45:22,457
In fact, you'll see that a lot of the conspicuous, unnecessary consumption that people engage in would go down if you replace the money with a harder money.

515
00:45:22,938 --> 00:45:27,438
Because a lot of that consumption is motivated by the idea that what am I going to do with this money?

516
00:45:27,638 --> 00:45:29,518
If I keep the money, it's going to lose its value.

517
00:45:29,518 --> 00:45:36,158
So do I, in a world in which money is losing value, it makes sense to buy the cheap plastic junk that you don't need today.

518
00:45:36,158 --> 00:45:39,618
Because if you wait one more year, you won't even be able to afford it.

519
00:45:40,158 --> 00:45:41,378
It's going to become more expensive.

520
00:45:41,438 --> 00:45:42,338
So better get it now.

521
00:45:42,858 --> 00:45:44,738
Better buy things as early as possible.

522
00:45:44,977 --> 00:45:46,018
Better hoard stuff.

523
00:45:46,678 --> 00:45:51,198
Better accumulate more and more things rather than accumulate money because money loses value more.

524
00:45:51,977 --> 00:45:54,518
So buy all kinds of cheap plastic crap.

525
00:45:54,717 --> 00:46:00,597
and that's a successful strategy in the fiat world. In a hard money world, it's a lot more

526
00:46:00,597 --> 00:46:06,077
similar to what the world was like in the 19th century. Less frivolous spending, less conspicuous

527
00:46:06,077 --> 00:46:13,697
consumption, consumption focused on essential and necessary things, and more savings. And that's

528
00:46:13,697 --> 00:46:19,257
where we really get to piss off the Keynesians. People would be able to save if the money was hard.

529
00:46:19,357 --> 00:46:24,497
And of course, this is a nightmare. If you're a kind of parasite who lives off of robbing

530
00:46:24,497 --> 00:46:32,437
people's wealth, then them being able to save in a form of money that resists inflation makes

531
00:46:32,437 --> 00:46:37,717
things very, very hard for you. It's very difficult. So that's why there's an enormous

532
00:46:37,717 --> 00:46:43,057
amount of stupid propaganda against savings, trying to present savings as if they are this

533
00:46:43,057 --> 00:46:48,257
sociopathic act, as Keynes described it. You know, when you save...

534
00:46:48,257 --> 00:46:51,157
They're so selfish and they're not investing in the stock market. How dare they?

535
00:46:51,157 --> 00:47:07,777
Yeah, you should be out there buying stupid crap that you don't need in order to put people into work so that they'd have jobs producing stupid crap that nobody needs and investing in companies that you don't understand so that they would have money to invest in all kinds of things.

536
00:47:08,257 --> 00:47:13,417
That's much better than saving, according to the Keynesians, because when you save, the money is just sitting there and doing nothing.

537
00:47:14,017 --> 00:47:16,077
And that's also very, very dumb.

538
00:47:16,777 --> 00:47:20,397
Money sitting there doing nothing is exactly what money is supposed to do.

539
00:47:20,397 --> 00:47:25,337
Money, when it sits there doing nothing, it's holding a value and transferring it across time.

540
00:47:25,337 --> 00:47:33,337
That's an enormously valuable good. In fact, that is the world's most valuable good as measured by

541
00:47:33,337 --> 00:47:43,177
total addressable market. There's arguably about $300 trillion of money in the world where people

542
00:47:43,177 --> 00:47:48,377
are just holding something whose sole purpose is to hold value into the future. That's much larger

543
00:47:48,377 --> 00:47:50,537
than any other market of any good.

544
00:47:50,677 --> 00:47:51,837
Nothing even comes close.

545
00:47:52,357 --> 00:47:55,937
So all of the NASDAQ is about $50 trillion.

546
00:47:56,477 --> 00:48:00,117
All of the S&P 500 is about $50 trillion.

547
00:48:00,697 --> 00:48:05,557
So all of the products produced by all of these 600 companies in NASDAQ and S&P

548
00:48:05,557 --> 00:48:12,097
are about $100 trillion in capitalization in terms of market demand.

549
00:48:12,597 --> 00:48:15,717
And yet the demand for just money, as I define it today,

550
00:48:15,717 --> 00:48:22,457
money is physical cash, checking accounts, saving accounts, and government bonds and gold.

551
00:48:22,777 --> 00:48:31,137
The demand for that is about $200 to $300 trillion. So the notion that money just sitting there is

552
00:48:31,137 --> 00:48:36,617
this useless thing is ridiculous. Why do people want $300 trillion of something that is useless?

553
00:48:38,077 --> 00:48:41,157
It's the Keynesians that are useless. It's not money sitting there that's useless.

554
00:48:41,677 --> 00:48:43,697
So money sitting there is extremely valuable.

555
00:48:44,457 --> 00:48:45,757
It gives you optionality.

556
00:48:45,917 --> 00:48:47,937
It allows you to transfer wealth into the future.

557
00:48:48,277 --> 00:48:52,757
It gives you liquidity so that you can get in and out of your position quickly.

558
00:48:54,077 --> 00:48:59,277
And you can benefit from opportunities that you could take advantage of.

559
00:48:59,417 --> 00:49:01,557
So clearly, there is an enormous demand for money.

560
00:49:01,557 --> 00:49:05,517
And clearly, being able to move money into the future, move economic value into the future,

561
00:49:05,577 --> 00:49:10,477
is extremely valuable for you if you have a time horizon for making decisions

562
00:49:10,477 --> 00:49:18,017
that is longer than a goldfish, you want to have something that can allow you to transfer money into

563
00:49:18,017 --> 00:49:24,497
your future if you care about your future. And I guess one of the key points that I communicate in

564
00:49:24,497 --> 00:49:31,297
my book, and perhaps maybe my original contribution to Austrian economics, is to explicitly tie

565
00:49:31,297 --> 00:49:38,617
people's time preference or people's valuation of the future as opposed to the present,

566
00:49:38,617 --> 00:49:44,177
people's future orientation as a function of the hardness of money. I think this is a very

567
00:49:44,177 --> 00:49:51,457
compelling thing that as the easier the money is, the less good the money is at holding on to its

568
00:49:51,457 --> 00:49:55,837
value, the more the money loses value over time, the less people are going to be thinking about

569
00:49:55,837 --> 00:50:02,937
the long-term future and the more their thinking processes are going to fixate around the present.

570
00:50:03,417 --> 00:50:07,817
On the other hand, the harder the money is, the better the money is holding on at value into the

571
00:50:07,817 --> 00:50:14,657
future, the more reliable it can provide for your future self, the more it drives you to think about

572
00:50:14,657 --> 00:50:18,797
your future self. If you've lived in a world in which for the last hundred years, for as long as

573
00:50:18,797 --> 00:50:24,157
anybody in your family remembers, you've always had a form of money that is always holding onto

574
00:50:24,157 --> 00:50:30,397
its value well or appreciating slightly. You are a lot more likely to think about your life in 10

575
00:50:30,397 --> 00:50:35,337
years from now because you know how to save for 10 years from now. Your parents have done it. They

576
00:50:35,337 --> 00:50:41,357
taught you how to do it. Your grandparents and their parents did it as well. And if you save for

577
00:50:41,357 --> 00:50:45,277
the future, you put money aside for the future, then the future comes around and you're better

578
00:50:45,277 --> 00:50:50,497
off. So constantly you're improving your life because you're saving and the value of the savings

579
00:50:50,497 --> 00:50:56,137
is going up and that's making you better off. And so you're constantly lowering your time

580
00:50:56,137 --> 00:50:59,977
preference. In other words, increasing your valuation of the future, increasing your focus

581
00:50:59,977 --> 00:51:05,397
on the future, becoming more of a future-oriented person. And this is not just important in an

582
00:51:05,397 --> 00:51:10,617
economic sense. It is very important in an economic sense because the more of a future-oriented

583
00:51:10,617 --> 00:51:17,497
person you are, the more you save and the more that you behave in a way that is future-oriented

584
00:51:17,497 --> 00:51:22,577
in your economic activity. But it's even very important beyond your economic activity because

585
00:51:22,577 --> 00:51:27,877
your orientation toward the future and the present, how much you discount the future compared to the

586
00:51:27,877 --> 00:51:34,337
present is, I would argue, the most important metric in your life, the thing that is going to

587
00:51:34,337 --> 00:51:40,137
determine your outcomes in life more important than pretty much anything else. Time preference is

588
00:51:40,137 --> 00:51:45,177
really, I think, one of the most important concepts in economics. When I used to teach

589
00:51:45,177 --> 00:51:49,637
Keynesian economics at university level, there was the usual garbage in the textbook that I would go

590
00:51:49,637 --> 00:51:56,737
over. But every class, every semester, I'd make sure there's at least half a lecture dedicated to

591
00:51:56,737 --> 00:52:01,057
talking about time preference. I'd always tell the kids, look, your stupid textbook doesn't talk

592
00:52:01,057 --> 00:52:04,337
about this, but this is the most important thing you're going to get from economics. So for the

593
00:52:04,337 --> 00:52:09,777
next half an hour or hour or whatever, we're going to be talking about this. It's not going to be on

594
00:52:09,777 --> 00:52:12,917
the exam. It doesn't matter, but it's going to be the most important thing you can learn from me

595
00:52:12,917 --> 00:52:19,917
after buy Bitcoin, of course, which some of them did do and they benefited enormously. But I'd sit

596
00:52:19,917 --> 00:52:25,257
them down and explain them the concept of time preference. And I'd tell them that this is what

597
00:52:25,257 --> 00:52:30,697
matters. I think there's an enormous amount of data about how future orientation is a huge

598
00:52:30,697 --> 00:52:36,397
predictor of success. People who are able to think in the long term are much more likely to achieve

599
00:52:36,397 --> 00:52:42,277
what they want to do in the long term. And the opposite, of course, is true. And this makes a lot

600
00:52:42,277 --> 00:52:46,417
of sense. I mean, I just urge you to think about it yourself in your own life. It's very easy to

601
00:52:46,417 --> 00:52:53,437
demonstrate this to yourself without having to perform sophisticated academic experiments.

602
00:52:53,437 --> 00:52:58,897
just stop thinking about the future for five years and then see where you end up in five years

603
00:52:58,897 --> 00:53:06,857
you know you spend all your savings today behave in a high time preference manner with all of your

604
00:53:06,857 --> 00:53:12,397
relationships so instead of behaving in a way that maximizes your long-term friendship with people

605
00:53:12,397 --> 00:53:16,217
instead of behaving in a way that maximizes their happiness and yours in the long term

606
00:53:16,217 --> 00:53:21,297
try and maximize the benefits you get from the friendship now how's that going to make you

607
00:53:21,297 --> 00:53:26,737
behave. If you discount your friendship with a guy from five years from now, you're much more

608
00:53:26,737 --> 00:53:30,197
likely to cheat them. You're much more likely to steal from them. You're much more likely to

609
00:53:30,197 --> 00:53:36,837
assault them, abuse them, do all kinds of horrible things toward them. And that's just how it really

610
00:53:36,837 --> 00:53:44,137
is. When the money is losing value, all kinds of horrible behavior is incentivized because people

611
00:53:44,137 --> 00:53:49,337
don't care about consequences. And that's why society falls apart under hyperinflation. It's

612
00:53:49,337 --> 00:53:53,897
not just that people lose their wealth, even more pressing than that, you know, people can lose

613
00:53:53,897 --> 00:53:58,377
wealth, it's catastrophic, but you can recover from that. It's like if you got robbed, and you

614
00:53:58,377 --> 00:54:02,037
lost your money. I mean, it's disastrous, but you can continue with your life, and you can rebuild.

615
00:54:03,137 --> 00:54:13,817
But if your life isn't, but if the money is failing at holding value for the future,

616
00:54:13,817 --> 00:54:19,197
then you are in deep trouble because now it's very difficult for you to be able to

617
00:54:19,197 --> 00:54:24,517
provide for the future. So then what do you do? You can't provide for the future. You can't think

618
00:54:24,517 --> 00:54:30,237
about the future. So why would you want to do long-term behavior that is conducive for the

619
00:54:30,237 --> 00:54:36,237
long-term of your well-being? Why would you want to get into a family? How do you provide for a

620
00:54:36,237 --> 00:54:41,137
family in 10 years, 15 years when you don't have an easy way of providing for yourself in 10, 15

621
00:54:41,137 --> 00:54:47,897
years. You become much more likely to commit crime because you discount the possibility of

622
00:54:47,897 --> 00:54:53,917
going to jail because that's a future thing. The present is I want nice stuff now. And so I'm going

623
00:54:53,917 --> 00:54:58,677
to go and commit a crime to get the nice stuff. And yes, there's a chance that I get caught,

624
00:54:58,797 --> 00:55:03,737
but that's in the future. And that's really what high time preference behavior is. And really,

625
00:55:04,437 --> 00:55:10,417
human civilization is the process of our time preference declining. As our time preference

626
00:55:10,417 --> 00:55:15,197
declines, we become more civilized, become more moral. We think about the long-term consequences

627
00:55:15,197 --> 00:55:19,357
of things. We save more. We accumulate more capital. It increases our productivity,

628
00:55:19,657 --> 00:55:24,277
improves our standard of living, and allows us to save even more and accumulate more capital,

629
00:55:24,777 --> 00:55:28,797
lowering our time preference further, allowing us to think more and more about the future,

630
00:55:29,417 --> 00:55:33,997
lowering interest rates. When we save a lot, that makes more capital abundant. It brings the price

631
00:55:33,997 --> 00:55:41,277
down and incentivizes more and more long-term investment. It is saving that leads to investment,

632
00:55:41,277 --> 00:55:46,477
and it's absolutely criminal how the Keynesians have convinced the world that saving competes

633
00:55:46,477 --> 00:55:51,857
with investment. You have to first save. Every single cent that has ever been invested

634
00:55:51,857 --> 00:55:59,517
has to have first been saved, and by saved, I mean not consumed. First, you have to not buy

635
00:55:59,517 --> 00:56:07,237
the consumption good and save the money. And then you have to deploy the money in an investment.

636
00:56:07,577 --> 00:56:10,977
Even if that time period was one second from the time that you got the money

637
00:56:10,977 --> 00:56:16,357
until the time you deployed it in an investment, you saved it. First of all, you didn't consume it.

638
00:56:16,797 --> 00:56:22,657
So only through saving do we have investment. You have to first save. And so something that

639
00:56:22,657 --> 00:56:28,017
causes people to save more is going to cause them to invest more. The more we save, the more capital

640
00:56:28,017 --> 00:56:33,077
we have available, the more of that capital we can deploy into investment. That's how the process

641
00:56:33,077 --> 00:56:38,457
of civilization works. We delay the gratification, we delay the consumption, we refuse to consume the

642
00:56:38,457 --> 00:56:43,977
resources that we have, and therefore we have the resources to invest, we have the resources to put

643
00:56:43,977 --> 00:56:49,417
them into productive use, and that then causes the increase in productivity, the increase in living

644
00:56:49,417 --> 00:56:55,897
standards, and the increase in incomes, and gets into a virtuous cycle where the more we invest,

645
00:56:56,517 --> 00:57:06,757
The more productive we are, the better off we are, the more we're able to think about the long term and the more we are able to provide for ourselves in the long term.

646
00:57:06,757 --> 00:57:12,137
The better behaved we are, the more moral we are, the more cooperative we are, the more peaceful we are.

647
00:57:12,197 --> 00:57:31,656
We realize that the long benefits of cooperation and peace outweigh the short gains of conflict and aggression and theft and so on So this is the process of civilization And then inflation is the exact opposite Inflation is the destruction of civilization because the exact

648
00:57:31,656 --> 00:57:37,256
opposite happens. You start realizing that your wealth that you're saving is not available, is not

649
00:57:37,256 --> 00:57:42,996
holding on to the value that you put into it. And so you become less likely to save. When you're

650
00:57:42,996 --> 00:57:48,796
less likely to save your consuming and you're engaged in high time preference, fast consumption.

651
00:57:48,796 --> 00:57:54,376
And that causes you to think more and more about the short term. And then that is reflected on all

652
00:57:54,376 --> 00:58:02,416
manner of behavior. And so you literally tear apart, well, not literally, but you tear apart

653
00:58:02,416 --> 00:58:10,256
the fabric of civilization. You tear apart the ability of people to have the incentive to behave

654
00:58:10,256 --> 00:58:15,616
in a way that is conducive toward long-term civilization. So why would I want to, you know,

655
00:58:15,676 --> 00:58:23,096
invest in maintaining a good relationship with my neighbors when I'm hungry today and I lost my

656
00:58:23,096 --> 00:58:27,696
savings and I feel robbed and they have nice stuff. And if I take it, then I'll be a lot happier.

657
00:58:28,156 --> 00:58:32,056
And who cares about what that's going to do to the rest of my life when I'm living next to people

658
00:58:32,056 --> 00:58:37,736
who know that I am a thief, you know? So you get more of these conflicts, you get more of

659
00:58:37,736 --> 00:58:42,856
the immoral behavior degenerate behavior all kinds of behavior that doesn't

660
00:58:42,856 --> 00:58:50,136
lend itself to good long-term outcomes and all of that becomes more and more of a problem

661
00:58:50,136 --> 00:58:54,796
and so that for me is why you know the subtitle of my second book the fiat standard is

662
00:58:54,796 --> 00:59:03,816
the debt slavery alternative to human civilization hard money gold had set us on a path of increasing

663
00:59:03,816 --> 00:59:08,676
productivity, increasing standard of livings, lower time preference, lower interest rates,

664
00:59:09,296 --> 00:59:15,896
increased future provision, and more civilization for thousands of years, interrupted by periods of

665
00:59:15,896 --> 00:59:22,376
inflation destroying this. And the last century has been one horrible, horrible interlude of

666
00:59:22,376 --> 00:59:30,476
inflation that has been undermining the very, very foundation of human civilization, in my opinion.

667
00:59:30,476 --> 00:59:35,856
yeah one of the things i want to point out too is you talk about that

668
00:59:35,856 --> 00:59:38,816
neighbor's analogy which i think is so good where

669
00:59:38,816 --> 00:59:46,776
the arithmetic of doing a bad thing and stealing from somebody changes when you're being stolen from

670
00:59:46,776 --> 00:59:53,016
every day through inflation and you get put in a more desperate state and this analogy of

671
00:59:53,016 --> 01:00:00,596
the increasing incentivization to do bad things in your society is very scalable and it can go

672
01:00:00,596 --> 01:00:06,096
all the way up to the nation state level where we have full-scale war going on everywhere all the

673
01:00:06,096 --> 01:00:12,036
time and i'd love to hear your take on this because you're there's a clip from your book

674
01:00:12,036 --> 01:00:18,236
that i took that i shared around quite a bit just explaining how you talked about the history of war

675
01:00:18,236 --> 01:00:24,576
and how in the past war would stop pretty quickly because one of the sides was run out of money.

676
01:00:24,876 --> 01:00:32,576
But now that we have infinite money printers everywhere, it changes this dynamic where we have infinity wars starting up and they just never end.

677
01:00:32,696 --> 01:00:40,696
So could you maybe give a little bit of color on that, why people need to understand this, how fiat money causes this crazy amount of war?

678
01:00:41,836 --> 01:00:44,476
Yeah, this is a very, very, very important idea.

679
01:00:44,476 --> 01:00:47,436
and I discussed it in my book.

680
01:00:47,516 --> 01:00:49,156
It was pretty controversial when I first made it

681
01:00:49,156 --> 01:00:55,256
and I think a lot of basically propagandized NPCs,

682
01:00:56,016 --> 01:00:58,236
a great tell of a propagandized NPC

683
01:00:58,236 --> 01:01:01,496
is to laugh and lash out at a new idea

684
01:01:01,496 --> 01:01:03,796
before even considering it.

685
01:01:04,296 --> 01:01:06,916
And so a lot of idiots laughed at this.

686
01:01:07,056 --> 01:01:09,476
Ha ha, people think Bitcoin is going to end war.

687
01:01:10,116 --> 01:01:14,176
And yet the more of an idiot you are,

688
01:01:14,176 --> 01:01:19,116
the more you are likely to not believe this.

689
01:01:19,696 --> 01:01:24,356
But I think there is no question that there's something very, very true there.

690
01:01:24,756 --> 01:01:27,516
If you look at war before the fiat standard,

691
01:01:27,996 --> 01:01:30,336
yes, of course, war happens and people are people

692
01:01:30,336 --> 01:01:36,276
and human beings have all kinds of horrible things that they do to each other

693
01:01:36,276 --> 01:01:37,036
and they've always done it.

694
01:01:37,536 --> 01:01:40,636
But if you look at what human civilization was achieving

695
01:01:40,636 --> 01:01:47,976
during the periods before fiat money.

696
01:01:48,396 --> 01:01:49,756
Particularly if you look at Europe,

697
01:01:50,136 --> 01:01:53,396
European war was becoming more and more civilized

698
01:01:53,396 --> 01:01:57,136
and the norms of war were being developed

699
01:01:57,136 --> 01:01:59,776
where civilians stayed out of war

700
01:01:59,776 --> 01:02:03,716
and wars were being fought between professional armies.

701
01:02:04,196 --> 01:02:05,696
So professional armies would get together

702
01:02:05,696 --> 01:02:08,896
and they would fight in a battlefield.

703
01:02:08,896 --> 01:02:15,856
And the reason for that was that it was extremely dangerous and expensive to attack civilians.

704
01:02:15,856 --> 01:02:26,736
And it was extremely dangerous for your political success, but more importantly, financially, because you needed the golden goose of the civilians working to pay you taxes so that you could fight a war.

705
01:02:27,436 --> 01:02:28,836
Because you don't have a money printer.

706
01:02:28,916 --> 01:02:29,936
You can't just print money.

707
01:02:29,936 --> 01:02:41,676
and so um the the war by the 18th and 19th century first of all you look at the data from 15th to the

708
01:02:41,676 --> 01:02:47,096
19th century see that the intensity of war or the percentage of people that were dying in wars was

709
01:02:47,096 --> 01:02:52,456
going down fewer and fewer people were dying as a percentage of the world population because wars

710
01:02:52,456 --> 01:02:59,796
were becoming more and more civilized because the kings who were spendthrift when it came to war

711
01:02:59,796 --> 01:03:01,996
generally didn't do well.

712
01:03:02,256 --> 01:03:05,016
If you were a king and you didn't care and you just went all out

713
01:03:05,016 --> 01:03:07,316
and you attacked all of your neighbors and you tried to conquer them,

714
01:03:07,956 --> 01:03:10,956
that wasn't going to really work out very well.

715
01:03:10,956 --> 01:03:17,416
It may have worked out at a time of very primitive human civilizations

716
01:03:17,416 --> 01:03:21,516
and tribes where wealth consisted of things that were very basic,

717
01:03:21,836 --> 01:03:27,076
land and cattle, and didn't involve heavy capital goods

718
01:03:27,076 --> 01:03:30,516
and an extensive capital production structure.

719
01:03:30,936 --> 01:03:34,136
But as the world's economic production

720
01:03:34,136 --> 01:03:35,096
becomes more sophisticated,

721
01:03:35,556 --> 01:03:37,016
as we use more capital,

722
01:03:37,536 --> 01:03:38,916
this becomes destructive.

723
01:03:39,176 --> 01:03:40,896
It's pointless to go and attack

724
01:03:40,896 --> 01:03:43,136
and pillage and destroy a town

725
01:03:43,136 --> 01:03:45,616
because you're going to be destroying their capital.

726
01:03:45,616 --> 01:03:49,296
And then that's a huge waste.

727
01:03:49,776 --> 01:03:54,656
You're better off fighting the military

728
01:03:54,656 --> 01:03:56,956
that controls that town

729
01:03:56,956 --> 01:04:01,436
in a battlefield, away from all the expensive capital, away from the homes, away from the

730
01:04:01,436 --> 01:04:05,276
civilians. And so then you gain political control of that place and then you tax them.

731
01:04:05,776 --> 01:04:12,936
So that's a much more civilized way of doing the good old rape and pillage and murder thing that we

732
01:04:12,936 --> 01:04:21,496
as human beings have been doing forever. We have, as a civilization, begun to reduce the amount of

733
01:04:21,496 --> 01:04:28,316
unnecessary violence that we engage in, aggressive violence, I should say, and try and limit the

734
01:04:28,316 --> 01:04:34,016
damage that comes down, that happens from conflicts. And I think the key to that is the fact that the

735
01:04:34,016 --> 01:04:37,816
kings could not print money. I remember there was a quote I came across once, I think it was Frederick

736
01:04:37,816 --> 01:04:43,596
the Great in Germany, may have been Frederick the Second, but I think it was Frederick the Great.

737
01:04:43,596 --> 01:04:47,876
And he said, somebody had sent him a note requesting all kinds of money for all kinds of

738
01:04:47,876 --> 01:04:54,416
things. And he said, basically, he said, I cannot meet your request, because I cannot shit money.

739
01:04:54,856 --> 01:04:59,376
And that was it. And I remember seeing that quote. And I remember tweeting it at that point that

740
01:04:59,376 --> 01:05:05,396
saying fiat fixes this. That's what fiat fixes. You had a king of giant empire at that time.

741
01:05:05,576 --> 01:05:11,596
And he just understood that he can't shit money. He can't just satisfy all the demands of all the

742
01:05:11,596 --> 01:05:18,036
people he wants. He has to run a budget like everybody else. Money is gold. You can't shit

743
01:05:18,036 --> 01:05:22,456
gold. You can't just print it. You can't make it out of nowhere. And so you have to manage your

744
01:05:22,456 --> 01:05:28,736
money. And so the best way to manage your money is to be very prudent about it. Don't go around

745
01:05:28,736 --> 01:05:37,516
destroying people's capital. Don't destroy your own people's capital in order to finance war.

746
01:05:37,516 --> 01:05:43,856
you want to be as peaceful as possible and you want to maintain your wealth as much as you can

747
01:05:43,856 --> 01:05:48,676
so that you can use it effectively in a defensive manner. That's the key thing.

748
01:05:49,036 --> 01:05:52,136
If you live in a world in which you can't just print money out of thin air,

749
01:05:52,476 --> 01:05:57,076
you want to try and maintain your wealth as much as you can so that in case of a real actual attack

750
01:05:57,076 --> 01:06:01,116
of your neighbor coming and attacking you, trying to kill you, you have enough wealth to do it.

751
01:06:01,456 --> 01:06:05,596
And then your neighbor has an incentive to do that as well. So what does that do? It gives your

752
01:06:05,596 --> 01:06:11,336
government and their government the incentive to be peaceful, to find peaceful solutions, to avoid

753
01:06:11,336 --> 01:06:16,576
robbing each other. And that's very good for civilization. That allows both of your countries

754
01:06:16,576 --> 01:06:24,036
to thrive and prosper and accumulate more and more capital over time. But then fiat fixes this.

755
01:06:24,356 --> 01:06:30,576
Fiat fixes the inability of kings and democratic leaders and presidents and parliaments,

756
01:06:30,576 --> 01:06:39,336
fixes their inability to shit money. It allows them to shit money quite truly, really. This is

757
01:06:39,336 --> 01:06:43,036
what happens. Now governments can just say yes to everything. You can just print money.

758
01:06:43,676 --> 01:06:50,256
Now war becomes very different because now under the gold standard, you fought a war for as long

759
01:06:50,256 --> 01:06:53,996
as you had physical gold. And then when you ran out of gold, that's it. You couldn't pay your

760
01:06:53,996 --> 01:06:59,116
soldiers. You were done. So that makes you a lot more conservative and that makes you a lot less

761
01:06:59,116 --> 01:07:05,596
spendthrift. And that's necessarily going to be the case, whether people consciously understand it

762
01:07:05,596 --> 01:07:12,876
or not. Kings and governments that are very aggressive are just going to blow away their

763
01:07:12,876 --> 01:07:18,456
capital and wealth and fight a lot of wars and eventually get destroyed. Whereas people who are

764
01:07:18,456 --> 01:07:23,276
able to understand the process of peaceful productivity, who are able to be civilized,

765
01:07:23,276 --> 01:07:29,596
were able to arrive at peaceful resolution, they will accumulate capital. So under the gold standard,

766
01:07:29,636 --> 01:07:36,536
we had this economic evolutionary process that rewarded peaceful, civilized behavior,

767
01:07:36,956 --> 01:07:43,996
that rewarded more and more cooperation between people and punished aggression, punished war.

768
01:07:44,956 --> 01:07:48,236
And then with fiat money, we get the opposite because with fiat money now, your government

769
01:07:48,236 --> 01:07:55,376
doesn't need to, it's no longer restrained by the quantity of gold it has. It's restrained by

770
01:07:55,376 --> 01:08:02,616
the value of all of the money held by all of the people using its currency. So it's very different.

771
01:08:03,016 --> 01:08:08,076
Back then, you had a big pot of gold in the government's treasury, and you had to manage that

772
01:08:08,076 --> 01:08:15,696
pot of gold not to run out. Now, the pot of gold is everybody's wealth, because everybody's using

773
01:08:15,696 --> 01:08:21,596
your shitty currency, which is paper money or credit. And the supply of that currency is very

774
01:08:21,596 --> 01:08:26,296
easy to increase. So as long as people have purchasing power stored in your money, you can

775
01:08:26,296 --> 01:08:32,296
rob them by printing more of that money without having to go and take their wealth. Under the

776
01:08:32,296 --> 01:08:37,296
gold standard, if you wanted to go fight a war and you ran out of money, you had to send your troops

777
01:08:37,296 --> 01:08:41,716
to go put guns to people's heads and search them for their gold to try and collect their gold.

778
01:08:41,716 --> 01:08:46,656
that made you very politically unpopular. And basically, it meant another war at home.

779
01:08:46,856 --> 01:08:57,095
People don want to give their money because the king wants to conquer some faraway land so that he can rape and pillage and steal things So no screw you I keeping my wealth And now you got

780
01:08:57,095 --> 01:09:03,275
to have a military confront your local population, which is just not very sustainable when your

781
01:09:03,275 --> 01:09:08,015
military is already being broke and trying to fight a foreign war. Well, with fiat, you don't

782
01:09:08,015 --> 01:09:13,115
have to send them jackbooted thugs to people's homes to take their money. You just print from

783
01:09:13,115 --> 01:09:19,655
the money and then you take them. So now the limit on your war effort has expanded significantly.

784
01:09:19,655 --> 01:09:24,935
Instead of the wealth held by the government, the limit in your war effort now is the wealth held

785
01:09:24,935 --> 01:09:31,755
by everybody using the government's money. And so that just allows them to run wild with war.

786
01:09:31,755 --> 01:09:37,135
And that's exactly why all of the belligerents in World War I suspended the gold standard in 1914.

787
01:09:37,135 --> 01:09:43,535
When they got into World War I, everybody suspended the gold standard and everybody got into printing money.

788
01:09:43,735 --> 01:09:45,695
And that's what allowed World War I to continue.

789
01:09:46,095 --> 01:09:57,095
Even though you look at the history of World War I, there isn't a single country that had anything substantial enough to gain from that war that would justify the efforts.

790
01:09:57,795 --> 01:09:59,495
Britain had absolutely nothing to gain.

791
01:09:59,495 --> 01:10:06,835
Well, I mean, not absolutely, but I mean, they wanted to destroy the Germans and limit German imperial ambition, which is ridiculous.

792
01:10:07,135 --> 01:10:12,975
They destroyed the British Empire in order to, what, you know, get Namibia from the Germans or whatever.

793
01:10:13,795 --> 01:10:16,295
Sounds like a very, very, very stupid trade.

794
01:10:16,875 --> 01:10:19,935
And the Germans really didn't have anything to gain from the war.

795
01:10:20,055 --> 01:10:26,055
They were – there was no reason for them to be fighting the Russians.

796
01:10:26,415 --> 01:10:33,795
The Russians probably – you know, this is something I'm discussing in detail in my next book, The Gold Standard, which is going to be a lot about – a lot of it is going to be about World War I.

797
01:10:34,315 --> 01:10:41,275
The Russians may have been the ones that had the actual objective from the war.

798
01:10:41,695 --> 01:10:43,555
They wanted to get Constantinople.

799
01:10:43,675 --> 01:10:46,455
They wanted to destroy the Ottoman Empire so that they would have Constantinople

800
01:10:46,455 --> 01:10:51,275
because it would allow them to have access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean,

801
01:10:51,935 --> 01:10:56,455
which would mean the ability to have a navy that was active all year round

802
01:10:56,455 --> 01:10:58,495
because the Baltic froze in the winter,

803
01:10:58,635 --> 01:11:01,355
so they couldn't get their boats out of the Baltic in the winter.

804
01:11:01,355 --> 01:11:13,555
But if they could control the Black Sea and Constantinople and the entrance to the Mediterranean, then they have a warm water port, which was open all year round, and that would allow their empire to expand.

805
01:11:13,555 --> 01:11:28,495
And also they had a lot of religious importance to Constantinople as Russia is the Orthodox Christian power, and Constantinople was the center of Orthodox Byzantine Christianity.

806
01:11:28,495 --> 01:11:30,935
And so Russia views itself as the continuation of that.

807
01:11:31,155 --> 01:11:35,235
And in Russian, they call Konstantinopel, the word for it is Tsargrad.

808
01:11:35,715 --> 01:11:37,075
It's the city of the Tsar.

809
01:11:37,295 --> 01:11:39,415
So they'd always wanted to take it.

810
01:11:39,495 --> 01:11:45,275
So maybe the Russian government at that time was the only one that really had a concrete goal to get out of the war.

811
01:11:45,335 --> 01:11:48,195
But pretty much everybody else was just fighting because they could.

812
01:11:48,855 --> 01:11:51,415
And the people had no reason to be fighting.

813
01:11:51,935 --> 01:11:57,975
But then once the money printer was broken into, it never stopped.

814
01:11:57,975 --> 01:12:02,615
We just continue to have endless conflicts between governments printing more and more and more money.

815
01:12:02,875 --> 01:12:04,575
And that's why the 20th century was so deadly.

816
01:12:04,815 --> 01:12:12,095
As Ron Paul puts it, it's no coincidence that the century of total war was also the century of central banking.

817
01:12:14,775 --> 01:12:25,415
Yeah, and that's definitely one of the things that I've been learning as I have gone down the rabbit holes of these different wars over history is that they truly are just banker wars.

818
01:12:25,415 --> 01:12:28,635
and these countries and armies are just puppets that they're using.

819
01:12:29,555 --> 01:12:31,735
And it's really wild as far as you dig into it.

820
01:12:32,735 --> 01:12:37,215
And wars have become so fiat that there are so many situations now

821
01:12:37,215 --> 01:12:38,735
where you can't even call it a war,

822
01:12:38,855 --> 01:12:43,055
but more of just an infinite death ray machine is fueled by the money printer.

823
01:12:43,375 --> 01:12:46,295
And I think that's kind of a good transition.

824
01:12:46,455 --> 01:12:47,875
You probably know where I'm getting at here.

825
01:12:48,415 --> 01:12:50,915
One of the other topics you've been talking a lot about,

826
01:12:50,915 --> 01:12:55,515
and I have just more recently been digging into is the Israel-Palestine conflict.

827
01:12:56,275 --> 01:13:01,315
And this to me is something that, like so many of these other rabbit holes,

828
01:13:01,435 --> 01:13:02,715
I mean, I'll give you the full story.

829
01:13:02,875 --> 01:13:06,415
So you definitely played a huge part in me looking further into this

830
01:13:06,415 --> 01:13:09,695
because I remember you posted, you've posted this many times,

831
01:13:09,695 --> 01:13:13,315
but you said the United States is an Israeli puppet state.

832
01:13:13,455 --> 01:13:15,195
And I just thought that sounds crazy.

833
01:13:15,595 --> 01:13:16,795
Like the USA is so big.

834
01:13:16,855 --> 01:13:18,275
We have all this money, all these people.

835
01:13:18,275 --> 01:13:21,395
There's no way that this little country over in the Middle East is actually controlling us.

836
01:13:21,875 --> 01:13:30,395
But the more you go down that rabbit hole, it puts a lot of meat on the bone of the bankers really controlling all these different wars.

837
01:13:30,895 --> 01:13:34,015
And the most recent one being this one we see in the Middle East right now.

838
01:13:34,135 --> 01:13:40,595
So I would love your take on how you would consider this Israel-Palestine conflict.

839
01:13:41,215 --> 01:13:43,955
I don't even know if you'd call it conflict, war, genocide.

840
01:13:44,455 --> 01:13:46,755
I'm leaning more toward genocide the more I learn about it.

841
01:13:46,755 --> 01:13:50,855
how would you clarify this as a result of fiat?

842
01:13:51,115 --> 01:13:57,755
And maybe just add some description of how you would describe what the situation really is on the larger geopolitical scale.

843
01:13:58,155 --> 01:13:59,815
Yeah. So that's a great question.

844
01:13:59,995 --> 01:14:04,355
And it's a question that is very layered because you can answer it on many, many levels.

845
01:14:04,475 --> 01:14:14,015
So the most obvious one that you see today is quite simply Israel as this genocidal ethnostate that's going around mass murdering people

846
01:14:14,015 --> 01:14:18,735
because they have the wrong religion, would not be able to do any of this garbage if it weren't for

847
01:14:18,735 --> 01:14:23,675
the money printer. Quite simply, just over the last year or so, over the last two years or so,

848
01:14:23,835 --> 01:14:29,475
since October 7, Israel's received, I would say, probably at least $40 billion from the United

849
01:14:29,475 --> 01:14:34,175
States government. And that's a serious amount of money. And more important, perhaps, than the money

850
01:14:34,175 --> 01:14:40,115
itself is the military technology and the equipment and ammunition that they have gotten.

851
01:14:40,115 --> 01:14:44,855
I mean, the amount of ammunition that they've used over Gaza is completely mind-blowing.

852
01:14:44,975 --> 01:14:45,955
People talk about Dresden.

853
01:14:46,155 --> 01:14:48,215
People talk about the bombings of Dresden.

854
01:14:49,035 --> 01:14:52,955
It's been two years of Dresden every day, basically.

855
01:14:53,975 --> 01:14:55,175
It dwarfs everything.

856
01:14:55,635 --> 01:14:58,355
Like, when you look at the amount of tonnage of bombs that have been dropped,

857
01:14:58,555 --> 01:15:03,175
like, all the atomic bombs we were told about were being so bad and crazy and terrible.

858
01:15:03,295 --> 01:15:04,235
This is way bigger.

859
01:15:04,235 --> 01:15:17,735
Yeah, we've had about 10 Hiroshima's just in this tiny little area of less than 400 square kilometers with 2 million people there basically being shot at like fish in a barrel.

860
01:15:18,655 --> 01:15:24,175
And, you know, this is not something that a country of 10 million people like Israel could maintain on its own.

861
01:15:24,315 --> 01:15:28,035
It needs to be relying on the money printer.

862
01:15:28,035 --> 01:15:30,575
It is fundamentally Israel is a parasitic entity.

863
01:15:30,575 --> 01:15:42,235
And of course, this is not something that you'll hear from the vast majority of morality and humanity-free subhuman trash that is out there constantly defending Israel.

864
01:15:42,915 --> 01:15:51,615
You know, Israel is this brave, plucky underdog fighting against these heavily armed savages that want to destroy civilization.

865
01:15:51,615 --> 01:16:00,575
No, Israel is a parasitic entity relying entirely on theft of the entire planet through the U.S. dollar in order to survive.

866
01:16:01,535 --> 01:16:04,855
And Israel has always been that.

867
01:16:05,015 --> 01:16:13,575
So the very simplest answer is if there was no money printer and American people had to pay taxes that went to Israel, things would be very different.

868
01:16:13,755 --> 01:16:15,075
And it wouldn't just be different for Israel.

869
01:16:15,175 --> 01:16:16,715
It would be different for all kinds of government spending.

870
01:16:16,715 --> 01:16:23,035
In a world in which you don't have a money printer, you need to get the money for everything from people first before you go and spend it.

871
01:16:23,435 --> 01:16:30,535
So you want to go fight a war in Iraq because America doesn't like – because Israel doesn't like Saddam or you want to fight a war in Iran.

872
01:16:30,995 --> 01:16:32,755
Americans have to put up the money first.

873
01:16:33,275 --> 01:16:35,595
So imagine – and remember the war in Iraq.

874
01:16:35,595 --> 01:16:56,695
When the Israeli agents in the U.S. government, people like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and that trash, remember when they were selling the Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz in particular, he went into Congress and he said, I think this war would cost maybe something in the range of $1 billion, but it will more than pay for itself in terms of the dividends.

875
01:16:58,135 --> 01:16:58,595
It's astonishing.

876
01:16:59,455 --> 01:17:05,075
And the fact that this guy was not held accountable for this is really why the world is so wrong.

877
01:17:05,595 --> 01:17:12,935
This, he said this in congressional testimony, and the war ended up costing the U.S. conservatively probably $5 trillion.

878
01:17:13,415 --> 01:17:16,275
He was off by 5,000-fold.

879
01:17:17,835 --> 01:17:20,115
And, of course, the bill is still coming in.

880
01:17:20,215 --> 01:17:23,995
You know, a lot of the veterans are still needing the help right now.

881
01:17:24,055 --> 01:17:29,535
So it's an eternal bill that just keeps increasing.

882
01:17:30,195 --> 01:17:33,995
But he's able to do that because the government is going to print money and they're going to go to war.

883
01:17:33,995 --> 01:17:39,495
and then the impact of the inflation is going to be felt through the inflation that we had in the

884
01:17:39,495 --> 01:17:46,535
years in those years and then the financial crisis that came in 2008 of course your keynesian uh

885
01:17:46,535 --> 01:17:51,595
fed lapdog economists are not going to say that but it was the inflation of the iraq war that

886
01:17:51,595 --> 01:17:57,255
brought about the financial crisis of 2008 it brought about the inflation and the valuation

887
01:17:57,255 --> 01:18:02,535
of the dollar and of course none of the people who sold the war had to pay a dime for it and

888
01:18:02,535 --> 01:18:07,515
they're still out there making money from speeches and they're still out there influencing the current

889
01:18:07,515 --> 01:18:14,135
administration. That wouldn't fly in a world of hard money. In a world of hard money, Paul Wolfowitz

890
01:18:14,135 --> 01:18:20,095
wants to mobilize American troops. He needs to get the money first. And so the U.S. government needs

891
01:18:20,095 --> 01:18:25,575
to go to the people and say, hey, we need to go and bring democracy to Iraq and that's going to

892
01:18:25,575 --> 01:18:31,115
cost a couple of trillion dollars. So we're going to need everybody to chip in a few thousand dollars

893
01:18:31,115 --> 01:18:31,915
or whatever it is.

894
01:18:32,495 --> 01:18:34,855
And Americans are just going to say, no, I'd rather have a car.

895
01:18:34,955 --> 01:18:35,795
I'd rather have a house.

896
01:18:35,895 --> 01:18:38,955
I'd rather have a nice vacation or whatever.

897
01:18:39,415 --> 01:18:44,995
I'm not going to be paying for bringing democracy to Iraq, quite simply.

898
01:18:45,335 --> 01:18:49,515
But when you're sold the fiction that there is no bill, that it is all free because of

899
01:18:49,515 --> 01:18:54,035
the money printer, then people don't see that they're paying for it.

900
01:18:54,035 --> 01:18:58,095
People are propagandized like morons into thinking that you can just kill people for

901
01:18:58,095 --> 01:18:58,355
free.

902
01:18:58,355 --> 01:19:06,055
and um you on an operational level you can mobilize the troops by just printing the money

903
01:19:06,055 --> 01:19:11,275
without actually taking money from anyone and then people will just see that in the devaluation of

904
01:19:11,275 --> 01:19:16,155
their currency and then like morons they're going to complain about inflation and they're going to

905
01:19:16,155 --> 01:19:20,655
ask for the government to impose more taxes on the rich or whatever in order to fix this

906
01:19:20,655 --> 01:19:28,155
completely for ignoring the fact that you can't just mobilize an entire army to go invade a country

907
01:19:28,155 --> 01:19:33,495
halfway around the world without actual economic resources. So if you don't know where they're

908
01:19:33,495 --> 01:19:38,495
paying for all of that, then you are paying for all of that. And I wish you all the poverty in

909
01:19:38,495 --> 01:19:47,375
the world as a reward for being complicit in this crime and for being dumb enough to believe that

910
01:19:47,375 --> 01:19:54,555
you have no role to play in financing it. So this is, and then when you look at the, so, you know,

911
01:19:54,555 --> 01:19:59,515
taking it to another layer. You look at the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East over the last

912
01:19:59,515 --> 01:20:04,835
few decades. If you have any familiarity with it, and if you're able to think critically beyond

913
01:20:04,835 --> 01:20:11,015
moronic propaganda, it's very obvious all of U.S. foreign policy has only one purpose, which is

914
01:20:11,015 --> 01:20:15,455
Israel. All of this talk about, oh, we're in the Middle East because of oil. Anybody who says that

915
01:20:15,455 --> 01:20:29,474
is a completely delusional idiot Oil is one of the most abundant things in the crust of the earth It all over the planet Nobody has a monopoly on oil If the entirety of the Middle East were to burn down in a nuclear war tomorrow

916
01:20:30,554 --> 01:20:32,734
we could still get oil from everywhere else in the world.

917
01:20:32,894 --> 01:20:35,994
There are so many oil fields everywhere.

918
01:20:36,594 --> 01:20:38,214
And the U.S. doesn't need oil from the Middle East.

919
01:20:38,214 --> 01:20:39,834
But also, I think even more importantly,

920
01:20:40,294 --> 01:20:43,834
is that it doesn't matter who's in power in the Middle East,

921
01:20:43,834 --> 01:20:46,034
whether Al-Qaeda takes over all of the Middle East

922
01:20:46,034 --> 01:20:47,794
or whether Israel takes over all of the Middle East

923
01:20:47,794 --> 01:20:48,914
or the British go back

924
01:20:48,914 --> 01:20:50,934
or India takes over all of the Middle East

925
01:20:50,934 --> 01:20:52,654
and all of the Middle East oil fields.

926
01:20:52,954 --> 01:20:54,994
No matter who it is, no matter who's in charge,

927
01:20:55,314 --> 01:20:56,914
if it's Vijay Modi or Netanyahu

928
01:20:56,914 --> 01:20:58,974
or Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein

929
01:20:58,974 --> 01:21:00,814
in charge of all of the Middle East oil,

930
01:21:01,214 --> 01:21:02,074
what are they going to do with it?

931
01:21:02,794 --> 01:21:04,054
What are they going to do with it?

932
01:21:04,334 --> 01:21:07,694
They're just going to pump it out of the ground

933
01:21:07,694 --> 01:21:09,454
and then put it in tanks and tell the Americans,

934
01:21:09,614 --> 01:21:10,814
nah, nah, nah, you can't have it?

935
01:21:11,394 --> 01:21:13,354
No, they're going to sell it on the market.

936
01:21:13,354 --> 01:21:16,274
and it's a global liquid market where anybody can buy and sell,

937
01:21:16,774 --> 01:21:19,514
and it's impossible to stop somebody from getting oil.

938
01:21:19,994 --> 01:21:24,234
And again, going back to 1970s, a lot of stupid propaganda about the fact that

939
01:21:24,234 --> 01:21:28,234
there was an inflation crisis in the 70s because of the oil embargo.

940
01:21:28,414 --> 01:21:29,174
It's complete nonsense.

941
01:21:29,514 --> 01:21:30,154
It was inflation.

942
01:21:30,274 --> 01:21:31,734
It was because of monetary policy.

943
01:21:31,734 --> 01:21:34,314
It was because of going off the gold standard in the 1970s.

944
01:21:35,494 --> 01:21:40,294
So we see that the foreign policy of the U.S. for the past few decades has been,

945
01:21:40,294 --> 01:21:46,694
particularly the Middle East, has cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, maybe a couple of dozen

946
01:21:46,694 --> 01:21:52,774
trillion dollars, you could argue, when you throw in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen,

947
01:21:54,074 --> 01:21:59,494
Syria, all kinds of horrible things, and then all of the money that goes to Israel.

948
01:22:00,094 --> 01:22:06,174
All of that, I think, is primarily about Israel. And all of that is because the U.S. is essentially

949
01:22:06,174 --> 01:22:12,054
an Israeli puppet state. The only way to make it in politics in the U.S. is to be an Israeli

950
01:22:12,054 --> 01:22:18,874
traitor, essentially a traitor of your country for Israel. That's why, you know, 1967, Israel

951
01:22:18,874 --> 01:22:28,774
attacked the U.S. military in a false flag. They sent out jets and torpedo boats and attacked the

952
01:22:28,774 --> 01:22:35,894
USS Liberty, aiming to sink it for hours. It had clearly visible U.S. flags. They communicated to

953
01:22:35,894 --> 01:22:40,854
the Israelis. We even have recordings from the Israeli pilots telling their command center,

954
01:22:41,134 --> 01:22:46,974
why do you want me to hit this thing? It's got a giant American flag on it. And the command center

955
01:22:46,974 --> 01:22:53,594
said, go ahead and hit it. Your job is not to ask questions, just do it. And they did it. And they

956
01:22:53,594 --> 01:22:57,234
attacked it. And they were going to sink the boat. And the point from sinking the boat was

957
01:22:57,234 --> 01:23:02,274
that it would have made, that they were going to implicate Egypt in it. And then that would have

958
01:23:02,274 --> 01:23:09,414
brought in the U.S. into the war against Egypt. And the U.S. may have nuked Egypt. The U.S. may have

959
01:23:09,414 --> 01:23:15,194
killed millions of people in Egypt because that was a flagrant act of war. Fortunately,

960
01:23:15,194 --> 01:23:20,674
they weren't able to sink the boat and they had to disappear when another boat started coming close

961
01:23:20,674 --> 01:23:26,394
and some survivors lived to tell the tale. And it's very clear that it was Israel that did it.

962
01:23:26,394 --> 01:23:50,554
Now, not a single American politician will talk about this. And I think it's absolutely stunning. If you don't think that America is an Israeli puppet state, ask yourself this question. What is a war act? Attacking soldiers is a war act. That was a war act by Israel against the United States.

963
01:23:50,554 --> 01:23:55,834
I don't think the U.S. has had a single legitimate war, at least since the World War II.

964
01:23:56,034 --> 01:23:57,394
You could even argue further than that.

965
01:23:57,474 --> 01:24:07,394
But definitely, I don't think anybody with half a brain cell can find a single war that the U.S. engaged in after World War II that was beneficial to the U.S., that was beneficial to the average American.

966
01:24:07,734 --> 01:24:08,874
No question about it.

967
01:24:10,174 --> 01:24:12,974
And none of them had any legitimate basis.

968
01:24:13,094 --> 01:24:14,554
The U.S. had no business going to Vietnam.

969
01:24:14,694 --> 01:24:16,954
It had no business going to Iraq, Afghanistan, all those things.

970
01:24:17,174 --> 01:24:18,374
It was all completely illegitimate.

971
01:24:18,374 --> 01:24:20,094
All of the reasons given were complete lies.

972
01:24:20,554 --> 01:24:25,974
The one legitimate time where the U.S. could have legitimately gone to war was that time.

973
01:24:25,974 --> 01:24:33,114
You had an actual government sending out its military to attack the U.S. military.

974
01:24:33,214 --> 01:24:33,894
It's an act of war.

975
01:24:34,734 --> 01:24:39,994
American politicians since 1967 universally never talk about this.

976
01:24:40,394 --> 01:24:41,394
They don't commemorate it.

977
01:24:41,534 --> 01:24:45,014
There's never been a congressman who's gone to the commemoration of the U.S.S. liberty incident.

978
01:24:45,014 --> 01:24:50,834
there was a very very very quick um commission whenever you hear about investigation commission

979
01:24:50,834 --> 01:24:55,714
that gets wrapped up very quickly then you know what's going on it's all being covered up and they

980
01:24:55,714 --> 01:24:59,354
said oh well it was mistaken identity which is completely ridiculous completely unbelievable

981
01:24:59,354 --> 01:25:04,534
and until today you know you don't see anybody offering any kind of coherent explanation for this

982
01:25:04,534 --> 01:25:08,634
this is just one of those things that's memory hold and if you talk about it then you're a weird

983
01:25:08,634 --> 01:25:15,534
conspiracy theorist, but there isn't a single coherent narrative. You won't find any of the

984
01:25:15,534 --> 01:25:21,894
pro-Israel traitors in the U.S. willing to get on a proper debate stage and argue about what

985
01:25:21,894 --> 01:25:27,194
happened there on the incident of the USS Liberty because it's completely indefensible. There's no

986
01:25:27,194 --> 01:25:32,654
way that anybody with an IQ over 90 could fall for the garbage explanations. There's

987
01:25:32,654 --> 01:25:40,194
eyewitness testimony, and there's countless amount of release documents from Israel itself.

988
01:25:40,414 --> 01:25:45,494
It was a deliberate attack against the American military. There is no way anyone could possibly

989
01:25:45,494 --> 01:25:51,874
be stupid enough to rationalize that, all of the evidence away, and try and pretend that this was

990
01:25:51,874 --> 01:25:55,874
a mistake. You basically have to be an American politician to believe something so absurd.

991
01:25:55,874 --> 01:26:06,474
So what this means in a very real sense is that the American political class will stand with the Israeli government against the American military.

992
01:26:07,134 --> 01:26:10,694
This is, I think, the real importance of the USS Liberty.

993
01:26:11,514 --> 01:26:20,834
Beyond just the fact that it was a false flag, it established the idea in the mind of the American military that your civilian leadership –

994
01:26:20,834 --> 01:26:25,014
at the end of the day, the U.S. is a country where the military is controlled by the civilian leadership.

995
01:26:25,014 --> 01:26:31,534
But the civilian leadership will not stand by the military if the military is attacked by Israel.

996
01:26:31,874 --> 01:26:34,714
I think the implications of this are just absolutely staggering.

997
01:26:35,374 --> 01:26:45,754
And it's a good thing most Americans are essentially drugged out on carbs and fentanyl because otherwise they wouldn't be able to handle this sort of thing.

998
01:26:45,754 --> 01:26:50,994
So, you know, it's very, very obvious what went down there.

999
01:26:50,994 --> 01:26:59,454
And since then, that was really the point, I think, at which the current political regime in the U.S. has been established.

1000
01:27:00,014 --> 01:27:05,894
Lyndon Johnson presidency and the USS Liberty basically set the tone.

1001
01:27:06,314 --> 01:27:13,114
And since then, the pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. have had a free reign to do whatever they want politically,

1002
01:27:13,114 --> 01:27:16,094
which was enormously important because before then,

1003
01:27:16,634 --> 01:27:22,354
John F. Kennedy was trying to register the Israeli lobby organizations

1004
01:27:22,354 --> 01:27:24,214
as foreign agents, which is what they are.

1005
01:27:24,254 --> 01:27:25,014
It's a foreign country.

1006
01:27:25,834 --> 01:27:28,534
But I'm not quite sure what happened to JFK since then.

1007
01:27:28,614 --> 01:27:30,254
But anyways, that thing kind of disappeared.

1008
01:27:30,254 --> 01:27:34,414
And then by, I don't know what happened, but some sort of accident,

1009
01:27:34,574 --> 01:27:35,694
they ended up with LBJ.

1010
01:27:35,834 --> 01:27:39,154
Jack Ruby's name may have been Jack Rubinstein, actually,

1011
01:27:39,254 --> 01:27:40,154
and they changed it later.

1012
01:27:40,574 --> 01:27:41,234
That's funny, huh?

1013
01:27:41,234 --> 01:27:44,374
But, you know, correlation is not causation.

1014
01:27:44,534 --> 01:27:46,934
But anyways, some sort of thing happened.

1015
01:27:47,094 --> 01:27:48,054
You know, who knows?

1016
01:27:48,054 --> 01:28:05,214
But LBJ came along and LBJ was the first Israeli president of America, the first Israeli puppet president of America, who just made it clear, you know, with the USS Liberty, basically, we are on the side of the Israeli government against the American military.

1017
01:28:05,414 --> 01:28:06,494
There's no question about it.

1018
01:28:06,494 --> 01:28:12,074
and also made it clear that Israeli lobbying groups can have free reign to do whatever they want.

1019
01:28:12,174 --> 01:28:17,094
So they lobby like they are local organizations, not like foreign organizations.

1020
01:28:17,654 --> 01:28:24,294
And the impact has been absolutely devastating for America and for, I would say, for the Middle East in general.

1021
01:28:24,294 --> 01:28:33,274
I think it's been terrible for the people of the Middle East, the natives, but it's also been terrible for the Israeli people who live in this

1022
01:28:33,274 --> 01:28:42,134
because it's, you know, yes, they're gaining more land and they're expanding, but it's a blank check

1023
01:28:42,134 --> 01:28:47,394
to the worst elements in Israeli society. And it's just making these people have all the power in the

1024
01:28:47,394 --> 01:28:52,194
world to be able to do whatever they want, and therefore creating more and more enmity and

1025
01:28:52,194 --> 01:28:56,714
creating more and more blowback and creating more and more conflict. And that's why, you know,

1026
01:28:56,714 --> 01:29:14,014
So here we are, 78 years after the establishment of the Zionist land theft regime, it's still having to drag all of its young people into endless wars and conflicts because it's got a blank check from the U.S. to keep paying for those things.

1027
01:29:14,014 --> 01:29:19,714
So might as well just take people and put them into the meat grinder because we want to take the West Bank.

1028
01:29:19,794 --> 01:29:20,414
We want to take Gaza.

1029
01:29:20,554 --> 01:29:21,254
We want more land.

1030
01:29:21,574 --> 01:29:25,254
All of the messianic idea of let's take the land because the Torah said so.

1031
01:29:25,494 --> 01:29:27,934
All of that stuff is insane.

1032
01:29:28,354 --> 01:29:30,054
Now, it's completely insane.

1033
01:29:30,454 --> 01:29:35,954
And any person who thinks this is any legitimacy to this stuff is essentially incompatible with human civilization.

1034
01:29:36,554 --> 01:29:43,954
If you think your holy book overrides actual property rights on the ground, if you think you can go to somebody and tell them,

1035
01:29:44,014 --> 01:29:47,694
you need to leave your house, I need to take your house, because I have this piece of paper where it

1036
01:29:47,694 --> 01:29:53,174
says that today I need to come and take your house because you're from the wrong race and religion,

1037
01:29:53,674 --> 01:30:00,194
you're basically incompatible with human civilization. The whole, you know, in my third

1038
01:30:00,194 --> 01:30:06,634
book, Principles of Economics, where I summarize economics from the Austrian perspective, basically

1039
01:30:06,634 --> 01:30:15,214
summarizing the work of Mises and Rothbard. In that book, I try and make the case based on the

1040
01:30:15,214 --> 01:30:18,674
work of Mises and Rothbard of why property rights are the foundation of everything in civilization.

1041
01:30:19,074 --> 01:30:22,374
The only reason we can have anything nice is because we accept property rights.

1042
01:30:22,994 --> 01:30:26,214
Ultimately, the protection of property rights is what gives us civilization. Only when we have

1043
01:30:26,214 --> 01:30:30,094
property rights can we plan for the future. Only then do we develop capital. Only then do we have

1044
01:30:30,094 --> 01:30:35,694
the stability to have peaceful relationships with one another. And only then can we as humans thrive.

1045
01:30:35,694 --> 01:30:46,694
And the notion that you can just override people's existing property rights because you've got an old religious document is a recipe for ending civilization.

1046
01:30:46,694 --> 01:30:53,854
Because, well, I'm just going to come up with another religious document that says, no, my God says this is mine.

1047
01:30:54,494 --> 01:30:58,074
And so then we're just back to being animals in the jungle fighting with each other.

1048
01:30:58,074 --> 01:31:13,234
I think there would have probably been a lot more peace, and there would have likely been a peaceful resolution of the conflict had the Israeli government not taken over the U.S. in the 1960s.

1049
01:31:14,134 --> 01:31:24,734
Had that not happened, the Israeli government and the Israeli people would have had to face a much more normal reality, wherein they have a budget to manage.

1050
01:31:24,734 --> 01:31:29,714
they, as you know, as we were saying earlier about 19th and 18th century war, if we had a hard money,

1051
01:31:29,714 --> 01:31:33,774
if they didn't have access to the US government's money printer, they have a budget to manage and

1052
01:31:33,774 --> 01:31:39,054
they have to try and reduce the amount of money that they spend on conflict. And therefore they

1053
01:31:39,054 --> 01:31:43,854
can't do very stupid and aggressive things because that invites more and more conflict. But if you've

1054
01:31:43,854 --> 01:31:49,394
got the world's money printer under your thumb, well then why would you do that? And so it sounds

1055
01:31:49,433 --> 01:31:56,853
absurd, but really, you know, after 9-11, the project, sorry, before 9-11,

1056
01:31:57,673 --> 01:32:05,033
the project for the new American century said that what we need is we need to take out all

1057
01:32:05,033 --> 01:32:10,333
these hostile forces in the Middle East that are hostile to Israel. Somehow that was sold to

1058
01:32:10,333 --> 01:32:16,113
Americans as being necessary for American interest. And, you know, this is where

1059
01:32:16,113 --> 01:32:23,773
equivalent to the Keynesians and the completely, utterly idiotic and vacuous nonsense that is taught

1060
01:32:23,773 --> 01:32:30,833
in mainstream universities on economics, exactly as idiotic and nonsensical is all of the

1061
01:32:30,833 --> 01:32:36,333
geopolitical stuff that gets taught, where generations of scholars have been

1062
01:32:36,333 --> 01:32:43,213
created to propagandize people to make them believe that somehow it is in the US interest.

1063
01:32:44,033 --> 01:32:52,313
Somehow it matters to the US whether Iraq is a democracy or a dictatorship or a monarchy or whether it's one country or 15 countries or any of that.

1064
01:32:52,393 --> 01:32:55,453
None of that actually matters to the US, not in any sense.

1065
01:32:55,513 --> 01:32:59,313
The US needs to protect its own borders and trade with whoever will trade with it.

1066
01:33:00,633 --> 01:33:03,253
And if they stayed out of Iraq's business, Iraq would be better off.

1067
01:33:03,293 --> 01:33:06,053
If they stayed out of everybody's business, everybody would learn to sort it out.

1068
01:33:06,493 --> 01:33:12,613
But of course, if you want to go and destroy other people's countries, you need an elaborate story.

1069
01:33:12,613 --> 01:33:22,973
And so we have all these idiotic, elaborate stories about, you know, we need to ensure American hegemony and we need to ensure the world is safe for democracy and we need to ensure that the world can do this and this and that.

1070
01:33:23,053 --> 01:33:24,453
It's all essentially Israeli propaganda.

1071
01:33:25,153 --> 01:33:29,173
And so the Israelis were very clear about the fact that we need to take out these seven countries.

1072
01:33:30,253 --> 01:33:33,213
Afghanistan, and these were countries that were hostile to Israel.

1073
01:33:33,573 --> 01:33:39,293
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

1074
01:33:39,513 --> 01:33:40,193
Those are the seven.

1075
01:33:40,193 --> 01:33:46,813
and indeed the u.s has taken out six of them only iran remains and guess what all of the

1076
01:33:46,813 --> 01:33:51,713
israeli traitors in the u.s government and in the israeli and the israeli government and its

1077
01:33:51,713 --> 01:33:56,653
employees in the u.s government from trump all the way down to your lowest level bootlicking

1078
01:33:56,653 --> 01:34:02,973
republican piece of shit who's out there posting about israel being his greatest ally what are they

1079
01:34:02,973 --> 01:34:10,033
all fixated on today iran bad iran bad iran bad they put their country right in the middle of

1080
01:34:10,033 --> 01:34:16,193
our of all of our military bases can you believe that they built the country thousands of years ago

1081
01:34:16,193 --> 01:34:21,373
and have been living in a place thousands of years ago precisely so that it would be right in the

1082
01:34:21,373 --> 01:34:29,513
middle of all our military bases that we have in iraq in afghanistan and in the caspian sea area

1083
01:34:29,513 --> 01:34:35,753
so obviously you can't have that that's a grave threat to u.s interest and your average american

1084
01:34:35,753 --> 01:34:41,533
politician is stupid enough to repeat this stuff and is integrity-free enough to go along and

1085
01:34:41,533 --> 01:34:47,273
continue to repeat this stuff. And that's why, you know, the top priority for Americans right now,

1086
01:34:47,773 --> 01:34:54,073
even though you walk in American cities and you see just endless encampments of homeless

1087
01:34:54,073 --> 01:35:00,453
fentanyl addicts, there aren't big American cities where your children can walk around freely at

1088
01:35:00,453 --> 01:35:05,513
night. And Americans think that this is just normal. Whereas, you know, in the civilized world,

1089
01:35:05,513 --> 01:35:07,993
It's completely normal for children to walk around safely.

1090
01:35:08,593 --> 01:35:13,653
It's, you know, you travel in China, in Japan, in the Middle East.

1091
01:35:13,913 --> 01:35:16,793
It's extremely common for cities to just be safe.

1092
01:35:16,893 --> 01:35:24,713
It's extremely common for there not to be dangerous, homeless drug addicts on the street out there harassing and abusing and assaulting people.

1093
01:35:25,313 --> 01:35:32,673
You'd think that might be a little bit more pressing than killing Iranians 6,000 miles away.

1094
01:35:32,673 --> 01:35:50,013
But nope, this is what your president and your Congress are constantly harping on about. And it's because they don't work for the American people. They work for Israel. So that's the second layer, if you want. There's the current aspect and then the foreign policy in general over the last 60 years.

1095
01:35:50,013 --> 01:36:10,333
But the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. And I think in particular, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is so intertwined with fiat because the entire genesis of the criminal enterprise that is the Israeli government was born out of the birth of fiat money during World War I.

1096
01:36:10,333 --> 01:36:15,613
and this is something that doesn't get discussed often and you know it's one of those things where

1097
01:36:15,613 --> 01:36:21,473
brainwashed NPCs will tell you ha ha ha you're just being uh crazy you're being ridiculous there's

1098
01:36:21,473 --> 01:36:27,213
no evidence correlation is not causation you know all of these um thought substitute uh

1099
01:36:27,213 --> 01:36:33,093
propaganda tools that um idiots deploy to protect themselves from believing uncomfortable truths

1100
01:36:33,093 --> 01:36:39,773
but in the first world war what happened was that um all these governments went off the gold standard

1101
01:36:39,773 --> 01:36:42,713
and in Britain in particular, they had a serious problem.

1102
01:36:42,833 --> 01:36:46,133
The war wasn't going well and they were broke

1103
01:36:46,133 --> 01:36:49,833
and they had engaged in so much inflation before the war

1104
01:36:49,833 --> 01:36:52,253
because the Bank of England was like the Fed today,

1105
01:36:52,593 --> 01:36:53,793
the center of the world economy.

1106
01:36:54,413 --> 01:36:57,113
And so it had a large margin of inflation

1107
01:36:57,113 --> 01:36:59,933
where it could create more liabilities

1108
01:36:59,933 --> 01:37:01,473
than the gold that it had on hand.

1109
01:37:01,473 --> 01:37:05,333
And it could be pretty confident that it won't lose the gold.

1110
01:37:06,813 --> 01:37:08,993
It won't have everybody show up

1111
01:37:08,993 --> 01:37:10,653
to try and redeem the gold at the same time,

1112
01:37:10,893 --> 01:37:12,913
particularly because its liabilities

1113
01:37:12,913 --> 01:37:14,993
were spread out all over the world.

1114
01:37:15,293 --> 01:37:17,893
So it would take a long time for banks in India

1115
01:37:17,893 --> 01:37:20,593
to send their pounds to England

1116
01:37:20,593 --> 01:37:22,173
and then withdraw their gold.

1117
01:37:22,693 --> 01:37:25,333
And then when the bank in India has gold, physical gold,

1118
01:37:25,633 --> 01:37:27,453
it's much more expensive for them to trade

1119
01:37:27,453 --> 01:37:31,533
with say a Chinese bank or a Iranian bank

1120
01:37:31,533 --> 01:37:35,233
or a French bank by sending the physical gold

1121
01:37:35,233 --> 01:37:38,853
versus just using the Bank of England's credit facilities.

1122
01:37:38,993 --> 01:37:41,693
So it made a lot of sense to keep your gold with the Bank of England.

1123
01:37:41,693 --> 01:37:45,593
And since it made sense to keep your gold to the Bank of England, it made sense for the Bank of England to print more.

1124
01:37:45,593 --> 01:37:53,093
So the Bank of England got into World War I already with only 39% of its pounds backed by gold.

1125
01:37:53,093 --> 01:38:05,008
So we already at a level where they had more pounds that were unbacked by gold than they had pounds backed by gold That was the situation in 1914 And then they suspended redeemability

1126
01:38:05,328 --> 01:38:08,848
and then they confiscated the gold. This is incredible that nobody talks about this.

1127
01:38:09,188 --> 01:38:14,308
They confiscated people's gold. It wasn't confiscation. They didn't go to people's homes

1128
01:38:14,308 --> 01:38:21,288
and take their gold, but they issued a directive where banks and post offices were no longer allowed

1129
01:38:21,288 --> 01:38:27,508
to make payment in gold. And they were telling people to make payment to those organizations in

1130
01:38:27,508 --> 01:38:32,448
gold. And so people ended up with paper money, and all the gold went into the banks and the central

1131
01:38:32,448 --> 01:38:35,668
banks. And I discussed this in detail in the fiat standards. It's an incredible episode,

1132
01:38:35,868 --> 01:38:40,388
which nobody talks about. Never. You'll never see it mentioned in the history books.

1133
01:38:41,228 --> 01:38:45,668
But they rounded up basically a lot of the gold in Britain, and then they had to ship it to the

1134
01:38:45,668 --> 01:38:54,248
U.S. to finance the war. So Britain, by 1915, was already in bad shape. And by 1916, it was worse.

1135
01:38:54,848 --> 01:38:59,408
And at that point, they desperately needed the U.S. to get into war. They needed the U.S. because

1136
01:38:59,408 --> 01:39:04,108
without the U.S. entering into war, things were going really badly for them. And for Britain,

1137
01:39:04,108 --> 01:39:11,088
I think probably the worst thing about World War I was the fact that Britain was involved.

1138
01:39:11,088 --> 01:39:16,628
because, A, first of all, it brought in all of these other countries from the empire

1139
01:39:16,628 --> 01:39:21,728
that came into the war and made it a world war rather than a European war.

1140
01:39:21,828 --> 01:39:24,908
If Britain hadn't gotten involved, it would have been a European land war.

1141
01:39:25,388 --> 01:39:27,208
French, Germans, Russians would have fought each other.

1142
01:39:27,768 --> 01:39:31,108
And as Neil Ferguson says, it's a really controversial thesis,

1143
01:39:31,448 --> 01:39:32,988
but I think he's absolutely spot on.

1144
01:39:33,388 --> 01:39:35,888
If Britain had stayed out, Germany would have likely won.

1145
01:39:36,128 --> 01:39:36,928
And then what would have happened?

1146
01:39:37,128 --> 01:39:39,148
Germany would have expanded its borders a little bit.

1147
01:39:39,148 --> 01:39:44,368
and what you would have ended up with, as Ferguson very provocatively puts it,

1148
01:39:44,808 --> 01:39:48,988
something quite similar to the European Union that you ended up with anyway by the end of the 20th century,

1149
01:39:49,348 --> 01:39:51,048
German political domination over Europe.

1150
01:39:52,428 --> 01:39:56,648
And that is something that Britain could have lived with a lot better

1151
01:39:56,648 --> 01:39:59,928
than it could have lived with the implications of what happened when it entered the war.

1152
01:40:00,108 --> 01:40:06,628
But beyond that, even more importantly is if Britain hadn't gotten into the war,

1153
01:40:06,628 --> 01:40:11,328
If Britain hadn't been ready to get into the war, the war would not have happened.

1154
01:40:11,768 --> 01:40:29,588
If you read the work of people like Albert J. Knock or Harry Elmer Barnes or Scott McMeekin or Pat Buchanan or Sean McMeekin or Scott McMeekin, he's written a great book called The Russian Origins of the World War.

1155
01:40:29,588 --> 01:40:34,688
and Patrick Buchanan, who's written a wonderful book on World War I and World War II,

1156
01:40:34,768 --> 01:40:37,048
but the World War I part is really...

1157
01:40:37,048 --> 01:40:40,348
And most people make this controversial because a lot of it is in World War II

1158
01:40:40,348 --> 01:40:44,528
and it's very controversial, but the World War I part is even more interesting for me

1159
01:40:44,528 --> 01:40:52,108
because the real problem was that the British and the French and the Russians

1160
01:40:52,108 --> 01:40:57,048
had had a secret alliance going for practically 10 years before the war

1161
01:40:57,048 --> 01:40:59,848
with the intention of confronting Germany.

1162
01:40:59,988 --> 01:41:01,228
They weren't happy about Germany.

1163
01:41:01,708 --> 01:41:02,928
Russia was worried about Germany

1164
01:41:02,928 --> 01:41:05,428
because Russia wanted the Balkans

1165
01:41:05,428 --> 01:41:07,348
and it wanted Istanbul.

1166
01:41:08,308 --> 01:41:10,368
And it had Austria and Germany

1167
01:41:10,368 --> 01:41:11,768
stopping it from expanding there.

1168
01:41:12,608 --> 01:41:14,568
And Britain was worried about Germany

1169
01:41:14,568 --> 01:41:16,488
building a navy and expanding an empire.

1170
01:41:16,888 --> 01:41:19,328
And France was worried about Germany

1171
01:41:19,328 --> 01:41:21,988
and wanted to regain Alsace-Lorraine from Germany.

1172
01:41:22,308 --> 01:41:23,608
So the three of them got together.

1173
01:41:23,728 --> 01:41:25,148
Now, if they had a formal alliance,

1174
01:41:25,148 --> 01:41:29,528
that form of alliance would have been formidable enough that Germany and Austria wouldn't have

1175
01:41:29,528 --> 01:41:36,208
picked a fight with it and would have likely given up on trying to take it on. And they would have

1176
01:41:36,208 --> 01:41:43,048
likely found an accommodation that wouldn't have evolved a lot of fighting. But the alliance was

1177
01:41:43,048 --> 01:41:47,508
secret and it was kept secret from the British cabinet and from the British parliament and from

1178
01:41:47,508 --> 01:41:55,128
the British people. And then when the war happened, the British entered the war. And I think that was

1179
01:41:55,128 --> 01:41:58,748
laid out as a trap deliberately in order to bring in the Germans.

1180
01:41:58,868 --> 01:42:01,508
But anyways, this is pretty controversial World War I history,

1181
01:42:01,648 --> 01:42:03,888
which I'm going to be getting into in my next book, The Gold Standard.

1182
01:42:04,408 --> 01:42:06,828
We love these controversial history stuff.

1183
01:42:07,048 --> 01:42:09,568
There is so much fiat history to undo.

1184
01:42:09,568 --> 01:42:13,368
This has been like the last five months of my rabbit hole diving

1185
01:42:13,368 --> 01:42:15,468
and just all these different historical events

1186
01:42:15,468 --> 01:42:18,828
that we were just beaten over the head with in school

1187
01:42:18,828 --> 01:42:22,368
are almost always completely opposite of what actually happened.

1188
01:42:22,688 --> 01:42:23,088
It's nuts.

1189
01:42:23,828 --> 01:42:23,908
Yeah.

1190
01:42:23,908 --> 01:42:39,588
Yeah. And then so the important part for our purposes to go back to Palestine and the US, and this is where it's really fascinating, is that by 1916, the British needed the Americans to get into the war and they worked very hard at it.

1191
01:42:39,588 --> 01:42:49,768
And eventually they managed to get it done by 1917. And the way that they managed to get it done was basically to it was a quid pro quo.

1192
01:42:49,768 --> 01:42:56,328
So the Zionist movement got the U.S. into the war in exchange for Palestine.

1193
01:42:57,068 --> 01:43:06,408
And that's why the British, as a repayment for getting the U.S. into the war, they issued the Balfour Declaration, which was to Lord Rothschild.

1194
01:43:06,408 --> 01:43:11,348
It was addressed to Lord Rothschild, which is pretty weird if you think about it.

1195
01:43:11,348 --> 01:43:34,068
Why would the US, why would Britain in 1917 at the height of World War I when things had been going terribly for them for three years, when the conflict was dragging on, when they were stretched financially, why would they be out there telling a British banker that they want to build a theme park summer home country for him and his buddies in the Middle East?

1196
01:43:34,648 --> 01:43:39,128
And the answer to that is that it was payment back for getting the US into war.

1197
01:43:39,388 --> 01:43:41,168
But you don't have to take my word for it.

1198
01:43:41,348 --> 01:43:44,848
You can go to the Rothschilds family archive, their own website.

1199
01:43:44,988 --> 01:43:47,468
Just go to the Rothschilds family, I think it's called the Rothschilds family archive.

1200
01:43:47,468 --> 01:43:48,068
Just Google it.

1201
01:43:48,348 --> 01:43:49,928
And they have a whole page on the Balfour Declaration.

1202
01:43:50,328 --> 01:43:50,988
And that's what they say.

1203
01:43:51,028 --> 01:43:56,128
They say that, you know, our family played a massive role in the Zionist movement because

1204
01:43:56,128 --> 01:43:58,468
the British wanted us to bring in the Americans into war.

1205
01:43:59,128 --> 01:44:20,603
And the Americans were brought into war based on the sympathy to the Zionist movement And I mean they put it in a nice way that America had sympathies to the Zionist movement but ultimately there was a lot of propaganda involved and there was a lot of again the money printer

1206
01:44:20,603 --> 01:44:22,663
because in 1914, the Federal Reserve was established.

1207
01:44:22,803 --> 01:44:24,623
And so what really allowed the U.S. to get into war

1208
01:44:24,623 --> 01:44:26,263
was the fact that the Federal Reserve was in place

1209
01:44:26,263 --> 01:44:29,703
because the Federal Reserve was capable of printing money

1210
01:44:29,703 --> 01:44:32,543
to give it to the government so that it could fight those wars.

1211
01:44:32,703 --> 01:44:35,283
Without the Federal Reserve, the U.S. couldn't have gotten into the war

1212
01:44:35,283 --> 01:44:36,443
as easily as it did.

1213
01:44:36,903 --> 01:44:38,443
It would have needed to raise bonds,

1214
01:44:38,723 --> 01:44:42,423
and it would have been a lot more tricky for them to get into war

1215
01:44:42,423 --> 01:44:43,603
without the Federal Reserve.

1216
01:44:44,203 --> 01:44:46,443
But they got into war, and I think, you know,

1217
01:44:46,443 --> 01:44:51,723
Now, the best American historians, they all understand.

1218
01:44:52,083 --> 01:44:59,183
They all say that the First World War was really the beginning of things going bad for the U.S. government, for the U.S. people.

1219
01:44:59,443 --> 01:45:05,183
That's when the U.S. government started to grow because the Federal Reserve and World War I happening around the same period, that was it.

1220
01:45:05,243 --> 01:45:07,623
That was the knockout blow for America.

1221
01:45:07,783 --> 01:45:09,463
It's just been downhill ever since.

1222
01:45:09,463 --> 01:45:14,803
even though there was a nice interlude after World War II. I think that pales in comparison

1223
01:45:14,803 --> 01:45:18,323
to what the U.S. would have been like if it had stayed out of World War I and if it didn't have

1224
01:45:18,323 --> 01:45:24,043
a central bank. And so because of this one thing, because of this deal, the U.S. essentially went

1225
01:45:24,043 --> 01:45:27,963
off the rails and has been going downhill ever since. And the Middle East went off the rails

1226
01:45:27,963 --> 01:45:33,383
because since then, all of the world's money printers have been fixated on one idea only.

1227
01:45:33,703 --> 01:45:39,443
We need to get the local population of this tiny little strip of land out or dead so that we can

1228
01:45:39,443 --> 01:45:44,943
move in people from all over the world because reasons. We need to move in people from Hungary

1229
01:45:44,943 --> 01:45:50,903
and Poland and Russia and Britain and France and Australia and Canada who have never been to that

1230
01:45:50,903 --> 01:45:56,443
part of the world and have no property in that part of the world or very little property in that

1231
01:45:56,443 --> 01:45:59,263
part of the world. We need to move them there so that they can take the property of the people who

1232
01:45:59,263 --> 01:46:04,543
have been living there for centuries. And that's just really for me why Israel is the most fiat

1233
01:46:04,543 --> 01:46:11,443
thing ever fiat israel is the most fiat entity ever it was created out of the genesis of fiat

1234
01:46:11,443 --> 01:46:18,223
and its survival has continuously relied on financing through fiat money whether during

1235
01:46:18,223 --> 01:46:24,843
the british period or during the u.s period and until today it runs entirely on fiat it's an

1236
01:46:24,843 --> 01:46:32,863
entirely fiat creation absolutely i couldn't agree more with all that so one last question

1237
01:46:32,863 --> 01:46:37,103
just regarding the current state of events, because I do think this is important for people

1238
01:46:37,103 --> 01:46:42,123
on both sides of the political aisle that are still locked into this debate, is the red team

1239
01:46:42,123 --> 01:46:49,783
and blue team that is perpetually ongoing. Donald Trump really talked about this anti-war stance he

1240
01:46:49,783 --> 01:46:55,263
was taking coming into this new administration. How is he doing so far with all this? What are

1241
01:46:55,263 --> 01:47:01,503
the numbers looking like with Israel? Because what I'm seeing is he's very happy to stop spending on

1242
01:47:01,503 --> 01:47:04,103
every country except for Israel. Is that what you're seeing?

1243
01:47:04,823 --> 01:47:10,723
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, yeah, I was pretty skeptical because, you know, he had four years

1244
01:47:10,723 --> 01:47:16,343
in office and that should have been a very good indicator of how the next four years would have

1245
01:47:16,343 --> 01:47:25,123
been unless you are a connoisseur of political hopium. So I had my hopes very, very, very low.

1246
01:47:25,523 --> 01:47:30,203
And, you know, I don't pay attention to American politics much and I don't particularly care.

1247
01:47:30,203 --> 01:47:33,403
I was pretty indifferent between him and Kamala Harris.

1248
01:47:33,563 --> 01:47:37,003
I don't think there was anything that would have been ultimately different.

1249
01:47:37,103 --> 01:47:40,883
And I think just yesterday, you look at the spending bill that came out.

1250
01:47:42,663 --> 01:47:47,823
It's pretty much Obama, Obamanomics, Bidenomics.

1251
01:47:48,443 --> 01:47:55,083
It's utterly, well, not utterly, but it's practically indistinguishable from the spending bills under the Democrats.

1252
01:47:55,083 --> 01:48:01,683
so i think yeah it's it's blue team red team and it's uh owning the libs and it's uh it's it's

1253
01:48:01,683 --> 01:48:08,323
idiotic childish and an utter stupid waste of time uh you're better off following baseball or soccer

1254
01:48:08,323 --> 01:48:15,123
because it's at least interesting and um it's honest and it's entertaining and uh you're

1255
01:48:15,123 --> 01:48:18,703
dealing you're you're looking at hard-working people really trying their best not

1256
01:48:18,703 --> 01:48:23,083
sociopathic mass murderers, doing horrible things all over the world.

1257
01:48:24,923 --> 01:48:31,383
You know, there was one brief moment where I was shocked when Trump initially got Netanyahu to stop

1258
01:48:31,383 --> 01:48:35,143
the war in Gaza, and he got a ceasefire, which I thought was a great thing. And I was,

1259
01:48:35,903 --> 01:48:41,623
I thought I would, I thought that would be a great thing, because it was completely unexpected.

1260
01:48:42,203 --> 01:48:47,283
And he did it in his first week in office, which seemed like it was going to set the tone for

1261
01:48:47,283 --> 01:48:52,423
things. In retrospect, you know, the way that then the deal unraveled, the way that Israel just one

1262
01:48:52,423 --> 01:48:55,263
day decided, no, you know what, we're not going to continue with this, and we're just going to

1263
01:48:55,263 --> 01:48:59,663
presume the war. And Trump just said, yeah, whatever, have at it, it's your war. Anyway,

1264
01:48:59,703 --> 01:49:04,843
it's not mine. Makes me think that it was far more likely that it was actually Israel that

1265
01:49:04,843 --> 01:49:10,583
needed the truce, but they didn't want to have the truce. They didn't want to have to ask for it,

1266
01:49:10,583 --> 01:49:15,403
and they didn't want it to have to appear like they wanted it. I think it was really just that

1267
01:49:15,403 --> 01:49:21,363
their military was overstretched and it needed a break. And so they presented it as if, well,

1268
01:49:21,443 --> 01:49:28,283
Trump has twisted our arm and so now we have to do it. But then they went back to fighting.

1269
01:49:29,143 --> 01:49:36,063
So I think that is a more likely explanation than Trump growing a spine and standing up for his

1270
01:49:36,063 --> 01:49:44,063
paymasters, basically. And since then, it's just been business as usual. Same old, same old.

1271
01:49:44,063 --> 01:49:49,983
Occasionally, he'll post a tweet saying something about not wanting to attack Iraq and not wanting war and so on.

1272
01:49:49,983 --> 01:50:09,463
But I frankly think the way that he's been acting with this whole entire idiotic terrorist episode, beyond just the fact that he's politically very much a Zionist and in the Zionist camp,

1273
01:50:09,463 --> 01:50:27,057
I think there just you know old age and insulin resistance are beginning to take their toll And I think we at a point where I don think he in the same kind of mental state where he was in 2016 I think this kind of you know the triumph of coming back into office after everything that he went through

1274
01:50:27,057 --> 01:50:31,478
and being able to win the election after that, I think it's just gone to his head. And I don't

1275
01:50:31,478 --> 01:50:37,917
think he is quite there. I think the- He looks terrible in the videos I've seen recently. He does

1276
01:50:37,917 --> 01:50:44,118
not look good yeah he's old he's old and he's fat and i mean people just think being fat is normal

1277
01:50:44,118 --> 01:50:50,397
being fat is an enormous enormous problem to your health at physical health and also to your mental

1278
01:50:50,397 --> 01:50:56,897
health and with time and i mean the grab the crap that he eats i mean he eats the worst kind of

1279
01:50:56,897 --> 01:51:04,917
garbage so i doubt that somebody at his age is um capable of being at that bad of shape and also

1280
01:51:04,917 --> 01:51:09,638
maintaining full mental health. And I think you look at the tariffs episode and just the erratic

1281
01:51:09,638 --> 01:51:18,817
way they went about it. 20%, 10%, 100%, 140%, three months off. Electronics, yes. This, no.

1282
01:51:19,277 --> 01:51:27,397
There is absolutely no way that you can... Exactly. It's a clown car. And there's no way that you can...

1283
01:51:27,397 --> 01:51:35,577
there's, I'll say this, any Republican who says this is smart, this is genius, would not have said

1284
01:51:35,577 --> 01:51:40,397
the same thing if it was Biden who was doing this. And in fact, these policies are much more likely

1285
01:51:40,397 --> 01:51:45,717
to be Biden policies than Trump policies. These are far more likely to have been passed by Pelosi

1286
01:51:45,717 --> 01:51:54,758
and Biden or Obama than Trump. And if last year you told any of the Trump supporters that

1287
01:51:54,758 --> 01:51:59,077
Biden's going to impose tariffs on all those countries based on the measure of the trade

1288
01:51:59,077 --> 01:52:01,017
deficit, which is such an idiotic thing to do.

1289
01:52:02,378 --> 01:52:05,777
He's going to impose all these tariffs on all of these countries based on this, and then

1290
01:52:05,777 --> 01:52:09,118
he's going to raise it on countries, and then he's going to bring it down, and he's going

1291
01:52:09,118 --> 01:52:11,858
to have a three-month pause, and then he's going to do this, and it's going to be to

1292
01:52:11,858 --> 01:52:12,557
de-industrialize.

1293
01:52:13,118 --> 01:52:20,457
You know, can you just imagine like the lib-owning industrial complex, all of these, you know,

1294
01:52:20,457 --> 01:52:28,378
midwit Republican influencers whose job is just to make fun of mentally ill leftist influencers.

1295
01:52:29,297 --> 01:52:32,757
You know, they would have had a freaking field day with this. They would have had so much fun

1296
01:52:32,757 --> 01:52:38,618
tearing down the Democrats for doing this. And over the last few months, it's all been,

1297
01:52:39,157 --> 01:52:43,398
yeah, no, actually tariffs are good because it's actually going to help us industrialize.

1298
01:52:43,398 --> 01:52:48,717
And then he removes the tariffs. Aha, see, there was the art of the deal. He managed to get us free

1299
01:52:48,717 --> 01:52:55,098
trade free trade is actually good tariffs are back on yep we're going to re-industrialize

1300
01:52:55,098 --> 01:53:01,337
we're going to bring back industry tariffs are off off to the deal free trade is good it's just

1301
01:53:01,337 --> 01:53:10,297
astonishing levels of uh npc conditioning six million d chess yeah always it's always there's

1302
01:53:10,297 --> 01:53:15,238
always there's always some kind of explanation for this and i think yeah it's grown to it's grown to

1303
01:53:15,238 --> 01:53:24,398
cult of personality status uh into a pretty dangerous level and you know all of this uh all

1304
01:53:24,398 --> 01:53:31,537
of this political game all of these political games they play are ultimately ultimately irrelevant

1305
01:53:31,537 --> 01:53:37,398
in the grand scheme of things here we are it's been now four months it's business as usual

1306
01:53:37,398 --> 01:53:43,378
they shut down usa id they've restored a lot of it so basically you know all of the talk that they

1307
01:53:43,378 --> 01:53:47,277
had about government efficiency, reducing government spending, Doge is going to cut $2 trillion.

1308
01:53:48,417 --> 01:53:55,517
It's ridiculous. And I think it's just, I've never seen, I think, a political promise

1309
01:53:55,517 --> 01:54:05,738
disintegrate as quickly as this Doge scam has. It's actually quite stunning because usually,

1310
01:54:06,217 --> 01:54:09,957
you know, politicians are always breaking promises, but they usually put in some kind of effort.

1311
01:54:10,457 --> 01:54:14,657
So it was only six months ago that Elon Musk was saying we can cut $2 trillion.

1312
01:54:15,378 --> 01:54:22,757
And then the last estimate they gave was something like $70 billion, which is a rounding error in the U.S. government budgets.

1313
01:54:23,317 --> 01:54:27,638
And it's nothing next to what they're adding on to the spending for defense.

1314
01:54:27,638 --> 01:54:32,277
So the Department of Defense has already gotten more than $150 billion more than what it had last year.

1315
01:54:32,537 --> 01:54:35,398
So the entire thing is a stupid circus is what I'm trying to say.

1316
01:54:37,138 --> 01:54:38,457
Yeah, couldn't agree more.

1317
01:54:38,457 --> 01:54:43,998
And I will just add, if you don't think that it is a circus, then you are the show.

1318
01:54:44,378 --> 01:54:45,537
You're not the audience.

1319
01:54:46,517 --> 01:54:50,498
I just pulled up a tweet of yours here that I think sums this up quite well.

1320
01:54:51,098 --> 01:54:54,238
It says, the U.S. left's Russian election hysteria was dumb.

1321
01:54:54,817 --> 01:54:56,898
The right's China trade hysteria is dumber.

1322
01:54:57,358 --> 01:54:58,957
Neither country threatens the U.S.

1323
01:54:59,517 --> 01:55:04,417
Israel owns your leaders, killed U.S. soldiers in a false flag, and sends them to fight its wars,

1324
01:55:04,517 --> 01:55:06,277
costing you trillions for no benefit to you.

1325
01:55:06,657 --> 01:55:07,358
That's an enemy.

1326
01:55:08,177 --> 01:55:12,437
And I think that's a beautiful way of putting it and a good way to start wrapping things up here.

1327
01:55:12,498 --> 01:55:13,417
We're about two hours.

1328
01:55:13,517 --> 01:55:16,057
I have so many notes of threads I want to pull on safety.

1329
01:55:16,197 --> 01:55:17,657
We'll have to do another episode in the future.

1330
01:55:18,557 --> 01:55:24,337
Where can people go find your work, follow you, and dig deeper into these rabbit holes you're diving into?

1331
01:55:25,057 --> 01:55:33,717
I'm on my website, safeddean.com, where you can buy my books, take my online courses in Austrian economics and Bitcoin economics.

1332
01:55:33,717 --> 01:55:38,197
and you can also find my podcast,

1333
01:55:38,317 --> 01:55:39,177
the Bitcoin Standard Podcast,

1334
01:55:40,037 --> 01:55:42,177
everywhere where podcasts are.

1335
01:55:42,898 --> 01:55:44,297
And I'm also on Twitter,

1336
01:55:44,498 --> 01:55:45,138
at Seyfield Dean.

1337
01:55:46,037 --> 01:55:47,697
And what else am I doing these days?

1338
01:55:48,017 --> 01:55:49,077
Yeah, that's, I mean,

1339
01:55:49,118 --> 01:55:51,057
these are social media in general,

1340
01:55:51,217 --> 01:55:51,998
Instagram, LinkedIn,

1341
01:55:52,498 --> 01:55:53,257
these sort of things.

1342
01:55:53,358 --> 01:55:53,657
Nostra?

1343
01:55:54,277 --> 01:55:54,777
Yeah, Nostra.

1344
01:55:54,777 --> 01:55:55,478
When are you going to become

1345
01:55:55,478 --> 01:55:56,998
a crazy Nostra maximalist?

1346
01:55:57,037 --> 01:55:57,677
I know it's coming.

1347
01:55:57,677 --> 01:55:57,697
That's true.

1348
01:55:59,217 --> 01:56:01,917
I just have way too many

1349
01:56:01,917 --> 01:56:04,037
fundamentalist beliefs

1350
01:56:04,037 --> 01:56:06,197
and maximalists in my life

1351
01:56:06,197 --> 01:56:08,378
that I'm

1352
01:56:08,378 --> 01:56:09,358
out there. Understandable.

1353
01:56:09,677 --> 01:56:11,697
It'll happen soon though. I'm getting

1354
01:56:11,697 --> 01:56:13,998
deeper and deeper obsessed with Nostra. I really think

1355
01:56:13,998 --> 01:56:14,978
it's going to fix so much.

1356
01:56:16,457 --> 01:56:17,017
Safe and

1357
01:56:17,017 --> 01:56:18,998
moods, my man. It has been a

1358
01:56:18,998 --> 01:56:20,917
pleasure and an honor to speak with you today. I

1359
01:56:20,917 --> 01:56:22,757
really appreciate it. Likewise.

1360
01:56:22,957 --> 01:56:24,037
Thank you so much. Have a good day.