00:00:00.000The politicians, the media, and the major corporations, of course, they are the beneficiaries of inflation.
00:00:08.920And the victims of inflation are essentially duped into voting for their own impoverishment because they're told they're going to be getting some of the spoils.
00:00:18.440But the spoils that they get are a tiny little fraction of the wealth that gets stolen from them.
00:00:30.000hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is a show
00:00:39.600for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today is
00:00:45.380the author of the fiat standard and the bitcoin standard who also runs his online learning
00:00:49.820platform at safedean.com dr safety namus welcome to trigonometry thank you for having me guys it's
00:00:55.140a pleasure to be here it's a great pleasure to have you on before we get into the conversation
00:00:59.480itself. Tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been
00:01:04.140your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I'm Palestinian,
00:01:09.640Jordanian, and I got a PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University. And I
00:01:16.460was a university professor in the Lebanese American University when I came across this
00:01:20.620new interesting toy called Bitcoin. And then it fascinated me. And then it drew me in like a
00:01:26.300black hole and took over everything in my life. And I left my university job and I started teaching
00:01:31.120online. So now I'm independent. I just teach to students directly online and I write books and
00:01:38.060I talk to interesting people on the internet like you. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk
00:01:43.400to us. I've listened to many of the things you've spoken about and read some of your work.
00:01:48.540You're a very smart man, much smarter than me or Francis. So what we wanted to do is to go through
00:01:55.080the basics for us and our audience to get a basic understanding first of all about money and then
00:02:01.860about bitcoin and maybe other crypto stuff as well so first question is what is money
00:02:07.880the short answer is money is a medium of exchange it's something that people buy not for its own
00:02:14.760sake you don't buy money because you want to eat it because you want to look at it because you want
00:02:18.140to use it for a certain thing it doesn't have a function in and of itself its only function is
00:02:22.700that you plan on later exchanging it for something else that's what distinguishes money from all other
00:02:27.600goods it's something that you don't buy for its own sake but for the sake of exchanging it for
00:02:31.580something else and so um that is what we call the function of medium of exchange because it's just
00:02:37.920something that you use for exchange and essentially this is something that has developed naturally as
00:02:43.380humans um you know as as human society became more complex as humans lived and started trading
00:02:49.540with more people we started developing more products we started living in larger societies
00:02:53.160the idea of trading things directly for one another becomes increasingly impractical you
00:02:58.940know if it's just five people on an island then all the only things that they can produce are you
00:03:04.920know maybe five or ten things or 20 things between them it's easy for them to keep track and to just
00:03:09.960exchange things directly but as the number of people grows it becomes difficult for them to
00:03:15.100exchange things directly for one another because you know the thing that you want to
00:03:18.540you would like to acquire is held by somebody who doesn't have the thing that you want to give them
00:03:25.260and so they don't they're not interested in your apples but you're interested in their oranges
00:03:29.780they're interested in bananas so you need to find somebody who has bananas and wants your apples and
00:03:35.420you give them the bananas you give them the apples you take the bananas and then you give the bananas
00:03:39.380the guy with the oranges and he gives you the oranges that you want so um as naturally you
00:03:45.220know as the number of goods increases in an economy naturally people start buying things
00:03:50.900not for the sake of holding them but for the sake of exchanging them and these things are media of
00:03:55.700exchange but over time you know bananas do a pretty bad job of being money because um you know they
00:04:04.340spoil in a few days and not a lot of people want bananas if the guy that you wanted to give the
00:04:12.020bananas to changes his mind then you're not going to find a lot of people who want the bananas
00:04:15.540so over time the things that end up playing the role of money end up acquiring certain end up
00:04:23.180having certain properties that make it that make them suitable for the purposes of being a medium
00:04:29.900of exchange of being exchanged and um you know some of these properties are that it is divisible
00:04:35.040you know bananas aren't very easy to divide into smaller pieces and that you can combine small
00:04:39.980pieces into one big piece so the whole thing is homogenous and another property is that it is
00:04:45.600portable that you can move it around so houses aren't very good as money because you can't move
00:04:50.260a house around you can't take it with you same is true with land and um i think over time though
00:04:58.300you know what ends up uh what ended up being the most uh common form of money around the world by
00:05:06.300the end of the 19th century was gold and so in my book the bitcoin standard i begin by explaining
00:05:10.920what it is that makes things good as money and why is it that gold was the world's only money
00:05:16.620at the end of or the world's prime money at the end of the 19th century and my explanation for
00:05:21.360that is that the property that matters the most for monetary selection is monetary hardness how
00:05:27.840hard the money is, because that determines the ability of the money to hold on to its value over
00:05:32.980time. And in the long run, that ends up being the most important property, because, you know,
00:05:38.780bananas will rot, fish or any kind of food will also rot. Other metals will rust and decay and
00:05:46.260corrode. But gold doesn't rust, doesn't corrode. And more importantly, gold, because it doesn't
00:05:52.860rust and corrode, we're constantly stockpiling more and more gold all over the world. And we're
00:05:57.320not consuming it you know it doesn't you you consume copper you put copper in machines and
00:06:02.880then the machines run out and the copper disintegrates and rusts and is thrown away
00:06:06.940but you don't consume gold you know you people mined gold 5 000 years ago and that gold is still
00:06:14.920running around the world today being gold it's in somebody's necklace or in somebody's gold coin
00:06:19.940it's still there it doesn't rust it doesn't corrode it doesn't ruin so the result of this
00:06:24.760The implication of this is that we have thousands of years of gold production piling up.
00:06:30.580Safety, can I interrupt just with a very layman question?
00:06:34.120What's the difference between gold and silver?
00:06:36.200And why do we perceive gold as having more value than silver?
00:11:48.680Silver has lost its value significantly compared to gold in the 19th century.
00:11:54.640Just to jump in again, I know you're probably going there anyway, but it seems like we're getting to the point of we're talking about, you know, gold is fairly consistent in having a certain value.
00:12:05.820And you talk about creating currencies that are linked to gold.
00:12:09.660And then comes a point in human development when that link is broken.
00:12:14.600And that, I think, is where a lot of the modern issues we have that we're probably going to talk about a little bit.
00:12:19.540So talk to us about that and how we got there and how that decision was made and some of the consequences of that.
00:12:25.140Yep. This is a major theme in my two books, The Bitcoin Standard and my second book, The Fiat Standard.
00:12:31.600So in The Bitcoin Standard, I trace the development up until this point where gold basically won over all the other monies.
00:12:37.940And the conclusion that I get to is that the hardest money always wins.
00:12:41.280And we also have several other examples. You look at seashells. And when gold comes into a society that has seashells, the seashells lose their monetary role because it's easy. It's not because people just think, oh, well, gold is shiny and yellow. It's because people keep making more seashells, but they can't make more gold.
00:12:59.940So the people who have gold maintain the value of their wealth in the gold, but the people who have seashells witness their wealth disappear.
00:13:22.880Inevitably, gold is going to drive out seashells.
00:13:25.360Your choice is whether you go poor holding seashells or you trade your seashells quickly while they still have value for some gold and you manage to maintain some wealth.
00:13:37.180And I think I personally think this was, you know, the development of the gold standard is not just me, but a lot of people also think the development of the gold standard at the end of the 19th century when the entire planet was basically using the same money and all the global currencies were effectively just different weights of gold.
00:13:54.780So there was no exchange market as it is today, where, you know, the price of the dollar and the pound and the yen are fluctuating.
00:14:00.400The dollar and the pound and the yen and all the other currencies were just different weights of gold, specific number of grams of gold.
00:14:07.920And so the exchange rate hardly ever moved.
00:14:10.760There was no foreign exchange market variation.
00:14:14.240It was just similar to the exchange between meters and inches and different units.
00:19:41.380And so as a result, the value of the paper money began to decline.
00:19:44.900and as a result they started collecting the gold from people's uh hands and so they instructed the
00:19:51.540post offices and the banks to only take payment uh to only make payment in paper money so and they
00:19:58.600told everybody to hand over their gold to their local post office and bank because that was needed
00:20:02.760for the war effort and if you weren't doing that then you know you were basically a traitor
00:20:07.680effectively so with this kind of emotional manipulation they managed to get gold out of
00:20:12.460circulation and get people to use the papers and of course the consequence of that was that prices
00:20:17.080rose so during world war one prices more than doubled and then after world war one there was
00:20:21.940a big recession and a big problem in england and they were trying to get back on the gold standard
00:20:26.160at the old rate but they couldn't do it because they had a whole bunch of other money a whole
00:20:30.140bunch of new money that was circulating and so it's it's like a comedy of errors where you know
00:20:35.780it's like we're watching one of these slapstick comedy movies but you know with hundreds of
00:20:41.340millions of dead people, where, you know, they make this lie, and then they just keep making
00:20:46.420bigger lies to try and cover it up. And the money supply keeps increasing. And that creates more
00:20:53.320problems, more inflation, more economic disasters, destroys people's livelihood, destroys people's
00:20:58.980savings, and creates, you know, economic recessions and all these problems. And then in order to cover
00:21:04.500it up, what do they do, you know, almost like an episode of Benny Hill, they go and they print
00:21:09.560more money to fix it and then it just continues to get worse and worse and then um that effectively
00:21:16.740leads to britain losing the british pound as the global reserve currency and the dollar which was
00:21:23.160managed by people who are slightly less insane than the bank of england so it was much stronger
00:21:28.460and got a lot of gold flowing into the u.s from europe the dollar takes over as the global reserve
00:21:33.720currency and it becomes the global uh money that is you know used all over the world but of course
00:21:41.020you know the americans then started using that as well and then in 1971 all the world goes off
00:21:46.740uh any kind of link with gold where the bank of where the u.s federal reserve uh stops or in the
00:21:53.700u.s treasury they stop redeeming gold in for their dollars and then there's no limit on how much they
00:21:59.260can print and so from 1971 onwards national currencies all over the world are backed by
00:22:05.640basically nothing it's just governments that are just printing and since then we see price inflation
00:22:10.480takes off and government debt takes off and we just I think you know it's it's it's it's at the
00:22:19.660root of a big big big number if not the vast majority of economic problems all over the world
00:22:26.580But of course, it's not something that is discussed extensively in your economics textbooks at university because your economics textbook is written by people who get paid from that printed money. So they turn your attention to all kinds of other inconsequential bullshit instead.
00:22:56.580jeans and sweet caroline like jersey boys and beautiful the next musical mega hit is here
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00:23:18.700wife does it in russia men who clean are executed for not being real men which is correct well for
00:23:24.960For those men who are living in the 21st century,
00:23:28.080Manscaped has an incredible offer for you.
00:25:14.360And by the way, can I just say before you answer that question,
00:25:16.540And as an honorary Englishman now, I've got no problem with my money going to annoy Europeans or whatever.
00:25:22.220Mess it up. That's very much on brand for us.
00:25:26.300Yeah, it's true. It is a major problem.
00:25:30.720It is a major problem all over the world.
00:25:32.840I think, you know, it's amazing when you if you follow the news over the last year in particular, you know, inflation is rising everywhere.
00:25:47.920There's an infinite number of reasons that they'll bring up.
00:25:50.620You know, it's happening because of supply chain disruptions and it's happening because
00:25:54.100of the virus and it's happening because of this and that and the other thing.
00:25:57.720And it's, you know, it's all distraction from the one very, very obvious cause, which is
00:26:02.320that the money supply just keeps going up.
00:26:04.640And, you know, you look at the rate of increase in money supply, it's just always going up.
00:26:09.320It's gone up vertically over the last couple of years, but it had always been going up.
00:26:13.520And the problem with this inflationism is it's like a drug addiction where, you know, there's no such a thing as a moderate heroin user. It's addictive. So you need more and more and more. And so even if initially, let's say in the 80s, inflation seemed like it was under control in the 80s and in the 90s, well, inflation, the more it seems like it is under control, the more tempting it is to engage in more of it.
00:26:39.480And then the more you engage in it, the more problems you create. And then if you think that inflation can solve those problems, then you're going to try and solve the problems of inflation with more inflation, which is what they're doing.
00:26:50.900And I think it is a huge problem. It's something that proper economists, what I like to think of as proper economists, you know, are the alternative schools of economics, the Austrian school of economics, which is what I consider myself a part of.
00:27:06.880They've been harping on about this for more than a century now, that this is the biggest problem in the world economy. And they are marginalized because, you know, there are a lot of very powerful interests that benefit from money printing.
00:27:20.300And so they'd like to deflect away from this and focus on, you know, all other kinds of inconsequential bullshit.
00:27:28.820But now it's, you know, the world's waking up onto the fact it's very hard to, it's becoming harder and harder for establishment economists and central bank to continue to make the astonishingly absurd lie that, no, no, no, no, our money printing is helping fight the price inflation.
00:27:48.560We're not responsible for the price inflation. The reason prices are rising is because of other things.
00:27:53.720And our money printing is how we're fixing this. It's becoming less and less tenuous in many more people's minds.
00:28:00.020And if we, you know, the people of England or the people of Britain or the people of America went to the ballot box
00:28:07.180and we had a choice of somebody who wanted to bring us back onto the gold standard,
00:28:12.780is that even possible now or are we just too drugged up now and there's no way out?
00:28:21.820Like if you voted for somebody, yeah, he could do it.
00:28:23.980It would require a massive revaluation of gold.
00:28:28.840So the price of gold would go up to maybe something like 10,000 pounds an ounce or 20,000 pounds an ounce.
00:28:34.100So theoretically it is possible, but practically and politically it's impossible.
00:28:38.420So if you look at somebody like Ron Paul in the U.S., he had a lot of grassroots support,
00:28:44.740But he could not translate that into political effective success because – and this is really the really pernicious thing about this.
00:28:54.040It's a very sustainable equilibrium because once you've started printing money, then the people who are in government have an enormous amount of power over society.
00:29:06.920And so they are able to use that power in order to get themselves reelected.
00:29:12.220And if you're going in with the agenda of I am not going to use the money printer, it's kind of like going into war without a weapon, you know, because politics is the weapon, you know, democracy is I'm going to give you free ponies and free hospitals and all of the nice things that you want, you know.
00:29:30.840And so the more promises you make, the more votes you get. So if you run on the platform of screw you, I'm not going to give you anything. You're going to have to work for things. You're not going to make it in politics. So a lot of people have tried. There have been a lot of economists and a lot of politicians who have run on this kind of hard money. Let's go back to gold platform. But it's a dead end.
00:29:53.140The bureaucracy, the politicians, the media, and the major corporations, of course, they are the beneficiaries of inflation.
00:30:03.660And the victims of inflation are essentially duped into voting for their own impoverishment because they're told they're going to be getting some of the spoils.
00:30:13.560But the spoils that they get are a tiny little fraction of the wealth that gets stolen from them.
00:30:21.620and that's the perniciousness of the scam you know so you're witnessing your savings destroyed
00:30:27.640you're witnessing your ability to save for the future destroyed and you're willingly giving it
00:30:34.000up because you're voting for people who aren't promising you you know we're going to give you
00:30:36.940free this and free that um but uh you know we see what how this ends up uh it ends up with a lot of
00:30:44.580you know nothing is free at the end of the day you're just promising these things to be done
00:30:49.980with central planners central planners are going to be doing those things and it's just going to
00:30:53.700um end up being more and more expensive and it's going to end up destroying the currency even more
00:30:58.900so um i don't really think that political solutions are possible this is a job for superman
00:31:10.180this is a job for bitcoin okay and we segue nicely into bitcoin so look here's the thing
00:31:18.000safe dean in i think it was in 2011 a friend of mine told me uh he gave me two pieces of advice
00:31:26.160get into silver and he said get into bitcoin buy bitcoin and obviously me being skint as a skint
00:31:32.880comedian i i didn't have the option of doing it i had no idea what bitcoin is i still don't really
00:31:39.280understand what bitcoin is can you do a basic layman explanation of what bitcoin is and actually
00:31:46.160why it's so powerful in today's economy yeah so bitcoin um you know the
00:31:52.400i'm not going to get into the technical aspect of it because it's going to take a lot of time to
00:31:58.360go into that so i'm just going to discuss it functionally you know i'm not going to explain
00:32:01.800how the car works i'm just going to tell you what a car does um and the importance of bitcoin is
00:32:07.320that it is a form of money it's a digital form of money that exists on the internet that is
00:32:11.320controlled by nobody nobody is in charge of bitcoin it's a protocol that anybody can use
00:32:18.240but nobody can control so it only has users it doesn't have admins and the really really important
00:32:23.740thing about it which is the focus of my first book the bitcoin standard is the idea of hardness
00:32:28.740remember when i said gold is the hardest money one and a half percent increase well bitcoin is even
00:32:34.520harder than gold it's becoming harder it's now increasing at around two percent it started off
00:32:39.980increasing at a pretty high percentage uh rate of increase but that rate declines over time and now
00:32:46.400it's at two percent and it's going to continue to decline and then eventually it's going to arrive
00:32:51.240at a growth rate of zero so there's only ever going to be 21 million bitcoin there's no way
00:32:56.960of making more than 21 million so we've already made almost 19 million at the time currently and
00:33:03.480there's only going to be another 2 million bitcoin that are going to be made over the next century or
00:33:07.520so the supply growth rate of bitcoin has already dropped significantly it's around the same range
00:33:14.080as gold right now and in the next few years it's going to decline below gold and it's going to
00:33:19.060continue to decline until it eventually hits zero and then stops growing so um what i'll say if you
00:33:25.980want the details for why you should read my book but basically this is extremely credible there's
00:33:30.220no way of anybody finding a way of making more bitcoin it doesn't matter how many petitions you
00:33:37.160sign it doesn't matter how many media how many university professors how many academics how many
00:33:41.640keynesian textbooks you write you can't make more bitcoin and so that's why bitcoin basically you
00:33:47.400know it's it solves the problem of politics we don't have to um we don't have to convince the
00:33:54.520crazy inflationists anymore we don't have to reason with them we don't have to win elections against
00:33:59.080them this is money that just doesn't give a about what anybody thinks it's just going to be there
00:34:03.720and it's only going to be 21 million and your only option is to deal with it or, as Bitcoiners
00:34:09.340like to say, cry harder. There's nothing you can do to change it or affect it. Well, on that point,
00:34:15.220Safedin, I don't understand Bitcoin or money nearly as well as you do, but I understand people
00:34:20.400and politics, I think, reasonably well. And the one thing I know is if a government has an incentive
00:34:25.240to punish you or to prevent you from doing something or to find a way to prevent you from
00:34:31.820doing the things that they don't want you to do, they will eventually, at least very, very hard,
00:34:37.080look for a way very, very thoroughly and very, very hard. And I don't know if they can prevent
00:34:42.060you from making more Bitcoin or force you to make more or whatever, but what they can do is prevent
00:34:46.020you from using it somehow, right? There must be a way they can prevent you from buying things,
00:34:50.800from selling things. There must be a way they can punish you. They can make it illegal, for example,
00:34:55.640right? So isn't that a real concern going forward? It's like, okay, I hear you. It's a really hard
00:35:00.780currency. It's not going to increase by more than a specific amount. It's a very easy medium
00:35:05.020of exchange. It can be broken up like it works in the way that money works. But isn't it, if it's
00:35:11.120in direct, directly against the interests of the people who run our world, they will find a way to
00:35:16.300prevent it from fulfilling that destiny, won't they? Perhaps, but I think, you know, the more
00:35:23.080you look into how it functions, the more difficult it is to find a way in which they can stop it.
00:35:28.120Because ultimately, this thing was built precisely with the objective of resisting capture and attack by government.
00:35:38.700So it's not optimized for your user experience.
00:35:56.280Think about it as like this ugly machine that you use to make a dirty job, to pull off a dirty job, but it does the job that you want, and that job is resisting capture by a central authority.
00:36:11.760And so the key thing to understand here is that there's no single point of failure in Bitcoin.
00:36:33.940There's no single server anywhere in the world that you can take out, and then you take out Bitcoin.
00:36:38.980Bitcoin is essentially a bunch of code.
00:36:41.120And so anybody who runs that code on their machine is able to join the Bitcoin network.
00:36:46.000So there are maybe 10 billion Internet capable devices around the world between phones and laptops and servers and so on.
00:36:55.320Any of these just needs to run the code of Bitcoin and find a way of connecting to other machines through the Internet and maybe not even through the Internet itself.
00:37:07.660You know, they could connect through radios and you could connect through mesh networks, you know, not necessarily through the Internet, but through just connecting through other computers that connect to other computers.
00:37:18.860With these kind of networks, you you will be able to basically do Bitcoin.
00:37:24.240So what it would take in order to shut it down.
00:37:27.840My question is, at the end of the day, if money is a medium of exchange and governments control whether you can convert Bitcoin into their money, because that's what you're going to have to convert it into to buy stuff, right?
00:38:10.840because it thinks they're immoral or illegal
00:38:13.360or undermining the economic system or whatever?
00:38:16.100They've decided Bitcoin is not allowed in our country.
00:38:18.760Am I ever going to be able to buy a house?
00:38:21.120Well, I think, you know, the example here to look at is if you look at your average country that has experienced hyperinflation over the past century, and there's many of them, when the currency begins to collapse and when there are problems, you know, people naturally move away from their local currency to dollars and pounds or euros, and they start using these currencies.
00:38:43.820and of course governments will clamp down on these currencies and they will stop they will
00:38:49.860ban people from using them but what that does is the exact opposite effect so when you say
00:38:56.200you can't buy dollars with you know our peso or our whatever it is well then what happens
00:39:02.360you're not going to destroy the dollar you're just going to destroy your local uh shit coin
00:39:07.100basically so you're just saying that this currency cannot buy real money and so people
00:39:13.900who hold this currency now value it less and they want to get rid of it more and they don't want to
00:39:18.520get paid in it so that's uh that's i think the reality in uh if you so um even if major governments
00:39:27.800decide to ban bitcoin you know that just gives a massive advantage to other governments to go
00:39:33.100and accumulate bitcoin or people in other countries to accumulate bitcoin hold on to it
00:39:37.080and then um you know the people who are forced to use the uh inferior currencies of their
00:39:43.960governments are just going to witness their wealth destroyed and the people who use bitcoin
00:39:48.800are going to witness their wealth accumulate and i have several examples of this happening
00:39:52.560with gold and silver so for instance at the late 19th century china and india were the last two
00:39:58.160countries that were on a silver standard and that was a massive massive mistake for which they're
00:40:03.960still paying i think until today because the value of silver continued to decline while the rest of
00:40:09.000the world was on gold and so that's what allowed the british and the europeans to essentially
00:40:13.660economically dominate china and india because their money was appreciating while the chinese
00:40:18.600and indian money was depreciating and so everything just got cheaper for foreigners in china and india
00:40:24.140so they could keep buying more and more things and this is uh this is effectively what you would
00:40:29.100be doing as a government if you ban bitcoin you're um you're basically um picking the seashells
00:40:37.660you're going with seashells and saying yeah we're just going to ban our peasants from using gold
00:40:41.780coins and then we'll be able to keep them on the seashell standard and then gold will just go away
00:40:47.900i don't think that's going to work safety and what would you say to those people who go look
00:40:54.440You look at the fluctuations of Bitcoin, you know, it will surge and then it will crash, etc.
00:41:31.220It's going up in many multiples of its value.
00:41:34.160So, yes, if you hold your local national currency, it doesn't fluctuate as much as Bitcoin, but it's trending down in real terms.
00:41:45.340You know, look at the price of houses in your local town in terms of your local currency, anywhere in the world.
00:41:50.800You know, houses just keep it getting more and more expensive every year. Well, why? We keep building more and more houses and the technology to make houses continues to get more efficient. So we have, you know, in real terms, houses are less expensive. We make them much more efficiently today. And yet the price of houses continues to go up. It's not the price of the house that's going up. It's the value of the currency that is going down.
00:42:13.220And so if you hold on to your national currency for the long run, and even if you try to beat the inflation by investing in stocks or bonds, you're basically not beating inflation.
00:42:26.160It's very difficult to beat real inflation.
00:42:28.160When I say inflation, I don't mean the CPI number or the consumer price inflation statistics that the government puts out, which is just another form of fictional statistics from government.
00:47:06.220the reason that young people can't afford housing and they need to get into,
00:47:09.720you know, enormous amounts of debt is that you're not just bidding against
00:47:14.080other people who want to buy a house you're bidding against people who want to buy uh
00:47:18.320an investment a saving account exactly and i think the interesting thing is that bitcoin is going to
00:47:24.720obsolete this use case for houses so i think the long run it's gonna you know more and more people
00:47:29.440are discovering that you're better off putting your money in bitcoin than putting it in a house
00:47:32.980therefore i think over time that's just going to return housing to being a consumer good where
00:47:39.500people buy the houses that they need to live in, not the houses that they, you know, not saving
00:47:46.220accounts. You use Bitcoin as a saving account. So I think one of the issues that people have
00:47:52.500with Bitcoin is it seems to be because it's such a new thing, there seem to be a lot of scam artists
00:47:59.040that you hear all these stories about people being scammed. You know, I got an email sent by
00:48:04.780my bank and now you can question the bank's motives for this but basically saying there's
00:48:09.180a lot of people out there using bitcoin using crypto as a way to scam others is this being
00:48:15.580overstated or is this a problem in the market no i think it's true i think it's uh it's it's a new
00:48:21.420technology and it's very difficult for uh people to figure it out quickly you need a lot of time
00:48:25.820you need to spend a lot of time figuring it out and understanding it um you know nobody has uh
00:48:32.140nobody's born understanding bitcoin you need to spend a lot of time understanding it so that is
00:48:37.420that creates a very rife environment for people to take advantage of people who are not very
00:48:42.180familiar with what's going on and personally i think um you know my personal opinion is that
00:48:48.140all the other digital currencies are effectively scams um that they're they pretend to be
00:48:55.880decentralized like bitcoin and that allows them to sell themselves as being the equivalent of
00:49:00.260bitcoin but they're not decentralized only bitcoin has truly managed to be decentralized because
00:49:05.440you know you look at the history of how bitcoin has developed the guy who made it he was anonymous
00:49:10.940he didn't nobody knew who he was it was just one person and he made it he you know he he put it
00:49:19.700online for anybody to use and then other people started to use it and then he disappeared and
00:49:25.580nobody knows who he is nobody knows uh what happened to him um he may be dead he may have
00:49:31.260just you know gotten rid of that identity and um moved on with his life but the important thing is
00:49:37.720that it's now been 11 years that he's been disappeared so the the person the only person
00:49:43.580who could control bitcoin has been gone for 11 years and bitcoin has been running for 11 years
00:49:48.220so we can and in those 11 years a lot of people have tried to take control of bitcoin a lot of
00:49:53.920People have tried to make changes to Bitcoin, and they've all failed.
00:49:57.520Bitcoin continues to refuse to be controlled.
00:50:00.980And so therefore, when I say 21 million Bitcoin, I know there's going to be only 21 million Bitcoin.
00:50:06.500I'm comfortable going out there in public and putting my name out and saying this is what's going to happen.
00:50:11.980And I know that if one day there's going to be more than 21 million Bitcoin, I'm going to have an entire bucket load of egg on my face.
00:50:18.700but i'm willing to take this chance because i think really the the you know the mold's been
00:50:25.700broken and there's no way to make another bitcoin there's no way to mess with bitcoin
00:50:30.000that's not the case with all the others once bitcoin was up and running it was the real thing
00:50:35.180it was decentralized nobody could control it and then if anybody came about and built another one
00:50:40.340them building another one was only going to um work and is only going to succeed if they were
00:50:47.300able to be in charge of it if they were able to be handling it and that's why basically with all
00:50:52.660the other currencies you know it only takes you 15 minutes of digging to figure out who are the
00:50:56.600people behind it and it's entirely easy for the people behind it to change the supply change the
00:51:03.580rules and we've seen that happen with pretty much most of the big currencies that they're run like
00:51:08.880startups whereas bitcoin is a neutral protocol bitcoin is like a language you know who controls
00:51:13.580the english language nobody there's no authority that can say what is the english language and to
00:51:19.220the extent that there are authorities that write dictionaries you know they don't make up new words
00:51:23.640new words emerge and then they incorporate them into the dictionary so um this is what bitcoin
00:51:30.120is like whereas all the others are um i i believe centralized and i think therefore they're
00:51:35.480they're essentially fraudulent because they're marketing themselves as decentralized but really
00:51:40.840they're just securities. It's a bunch of people issuing financial liabilities.
00:51:46.760Sorry. Oh, sorry. So you'd say even a big currency like Ethereum, which loads of people
00:51:52.160have bought into, you know, which has become pretty much mainstream, you would say that that is
00:51:57.320not a good investment? No, I would not recommend anybody put any money in any digital currency
00:52:06.020other than bitcoin and safety uh it's really interesting you've explained things so brilliantly
00:52:12.300in in a way that's simple to understand and i really appreciate and your books do a great job
00:52:16.880of that as well can we talk a little bit about since you're making predictions about the moment
00:52:21.740that we find ourselves in right now as a world particularly the western world uh so let's just
00:52:28.800go back a little bit 2008 you know we have a massive financial crash our solution is to print
00:52:34.820a shit ton of money and give it away mainly to banks and to ourselves, right? And then we have,
00:52:41.320you know, zero interest rates or maybe even negative interest rates, depending on how you
00:52:45.520want to look at it for however many years it's been, 14 years now. Then we have COVID when we
00:52:51.720go, okay, well, look, we've got this disease. I don't know what you guys did over there, but in
00:52:56.240this country, what we did is we went, stay at home. The government's going to give you shit
00:52:59.800loads of money that we're going to print, right? Now, you know, World War III, if we all survive
00:53:04.520that like where are we going to be because you know we had people on the show two years ago going
00:53:09.220inflation's coming it's coming and it's it's been coming and now it's here like what's happening
00:53:15.060economically and what is the future going to look like i mean um i don't have a crystal ball so i i
00:53:22.260don't really know um and i'm wary about making predictions in the future but i think um betting
00:53:28.440on these very strong very persistent uh decades long trends to continue is probably the best bet
00:53:36.900i think we're just going to be more of the same uh we're going to have more money printing
00:53:40.740more inflation more devaluation of the currency more price rises and um i think the dangerous
00:53:47.800thing that we're seeing increasingly is that the more this money printing we get the more power
00:53:54.460the government has and I think you know the last two years just the insanity of the idea that
00:53:58.780government can just decide all right we don't want you to get sick so you know screw your business
00:54:03.340screw your life screw everything that you care about you just need to stay home and we're going
00:54:08.200to lock you up I think this is just completely insane and I think it's something that can only
00:54:15.680happen when a government has this insane tool that is a money printer and so you know a lot
00:54:22.380of people would say well what would happen if we were on a bitcoin stand a lot of people have asked
00:54:26.820me this question what would happen if we were on a bitcoin stand and then covid comes along
00:54:29.800how do you expect the government to shut down the world and give people free money and the answer is
00:54:35.300exactly they won't shut down the world and then people would have to make their own choices and
00:54:39.840i believe in a world in which people have to make their own choices covid would have been dealt with
00:54:44.880extremely far more efficiently i think doctors would have done a much better job than what
00:54:50.180happens now when all these essentially non-medical bureaucrats were making decisions for millions of
00:54:58.020people rather than letting doctors and patients make their decisions for themselves. And we saw
00:55:01.460this with a lot of these medicines, which I'm not going to mention because I don't want to get your
00:55:04.940YouTube channel canceled. But there's a lot of these medicines that came about that were proving
00:55:09.740very effective, and many doctors were speaking about them. But the bureaucrats, they didn't see
00:55:15.540any power in it and so they were promoting the measures that involve power and submission and
00:55:21.460compliance and dependence you know they want to shut down your business so that you need the
00:55:25.900government for their money and then you'll have to vote for the government to give you more money
00:55:30.200and then they'll be able to control you politically and they'll be able to control you more and more
00:55:33.940so i think it's a very very dangerous world and another aspect of it is just the amount of
00:55:41.740government propaganda that we're seeing and the ability of the government to just brainwash
00:55:45.920everybody into marching along with everything that they want is extremely dangerous i think it's
00:55:51.600uh sadly i think things are just going to keep getting worse and of course you know nobody knows
00:55:56.300how things are going to get worse i mean uh you know if i asked you five years ago what's going
00:56:02.900to happen in 2022 you know you wouldn't have imagined that there's going to be a big war
00:56:07.360russia and ukraine you wouldn't have imagined there was going to be a virus and break out
00:56:11.100these things just come out of nowhere and they show up so i think you know we're going to be
00:56:15.840getting more and more of these kind of dramas in the next upcoming seasons of fiat world
00:56:22.920and things are going to keep getting worse and worse until bitcoin fixes things and i think it's
00:56:28.220just we need more and more people are going to wake up to bitcoin and they're going to join
00:56:32.320Bitcoin not because of, you know, not because of ideology, not because they want to fight
00:56:37.740the government, they want to take money out of the government, they're going to join Bitcoin
00:56:41.060because it appreciates and it gives them, you know, it protects them from inflation.
00:56:47.620It makes gains, you know, we call it number go up technology, the price of Bitcoin keeps
00:56:52.080going up, people kind of come for the number go up, and the more people join for the number
00:56:56.040go up, the more Bitcoin rises in value.
00:56:57.780And the more that this free market monetary system grows as an alternative to the clown world of fiat that is just threatening to nuke all of existence into oblivion.
00:57:13.840And I, you know, it's like the final scene of a movie where will the hero manage to rescue the sweetheart before the bomb goes off in the building or not?
00:57:25.580I think this is where we are right now, so stay tuned.
00:57:30.220And on that wonderfully positive note, SafeDean, it's been a great episode,
00:57:35.420and thank you, interviewer, and thank you so much for coming, for explaining to us
00:57:39.260and illuminating not only myself, but also our audience as to what Bitcoin is