Chat_137 - The Natural State of Fiat is Dictatorship with Daniel Batten

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Either you don't have a fiat currency or you don't have a democracy. But the two things together, and this has been proven, cannot coexist happily without the complete erosion of purchasing power of a civilization and the complete erosion of an empire, which is exactly what has occurred and what has occurred throughout history. The natural bedfellow for a fiat economy is a dictatorship. The natural bedfellow for Bitcoin is democracy. [00:00:46] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin. [00:00:54] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Than anybody else. You know, we've got a really fantastic conversation today. I'd never had Daniel Batten on this show, and I know him, and we've kind of crossed paths numerous times in the, in the past. But he does such a phenomenal job of laying out the. The green energy and the entire incentive structure for waste and mindless consumption and how this is so deeply tied to, to fiat and why bitcoin is actually able to fundamentally shift things back towards sustainability and balance. And this is a lot deeper than just, oh, people aren't putting. Using their recycling and they're not, you know, putting their glass bottles in the separate container. This is not a surface layer problem. This is an invisible problem at the foundations of society. And it's just so fast. Like we sprinted down this rabbit hole and, you know, we'll get into it in just a second, but I just want to thank our sponsors. This show is brought to you by Chroma. If you have not gotten your light health, if you're not thinking about your hormones and your energy levels and how your light exposure messes with both your mental and physical health, your state, honestly, I think it's time to take it seriously. You know, bitcoin is about going back inward and, like, reflecting and thinking about how things affect us that, that we kind of dismiss or push to the side. And, you know, the guys at Chroma have built some incredible products in relation to this. I've talked about it a bit on this show about how focused I've been on making sure that I block blue light at certain times of night and how much of a difference it's made. But they have amazing products for various things that you can do. And you can get a 10% discount with code Bitcoin Audible, all one word. That's the name of the show, so you should not forget it. And you can go to the link right down in the description. Easy to get it. And they have a bitcoin website specifically for bitcoiners too, which is really cool. This is also brought to you by the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report, which is their newsletter breaking down politics and events from around the world around financial and monetary freedom. And report 79, actually, when I think it's the most recent one right now. So China is actually looking to expand their CBDC globally, which is actually a big move because they've been pretty closed off about how they deal with their currency and they're posing it as a direct payment alternative to the US dollar system, as alternative rails that you can use internationally, while India has actually doubled the amount of banks that allow offline access to their CBD. The Financial Freedom Report is HRF's incredible work at just tracking the news around monetary and financial repression and also how to get around it, the tools and what's being built in order to solve it and how you use it. This is an unmatched resource and you can find it, you can subscribe just down in the description of this show. Speaking of tools for sovereignty, we're trying to fix the web structurally and the pub key stack being built by synonym is actually changing the entire model of the web. What if you could combine the decentralization and censorship resistance of BitTorrent with the traditional tools and environments that we are used to on the web? That is the mission of PubKey. If you are building unstoppable apps, if you're building bitcoin tools and you're not aware of this, well, lucky for you, now you are. And the link is so conveniently right down in the description of this show. Check it out. This is for builders. This is for people who actually want to make a difference and change the web. All right, so it's time to get into our combo with Daniel Batten. And we actually didn't dig into his project. Like he has a mining project that until literally the last few minutes, we kind of have like a false end to the show. And then I was like, wait a second, no, you got to tell me about this project. And so keep an eye out for that, because his project is so fascinating and you don't want to miss this, but I just think what this conversation really adds is he paints a brilliant picture of just how deep and pervasive the disincentive structure of fiat really is and essentially how nothing in society escapes its invisible grip. And that's an incredibly hard thing to portray. And I think he does a solid job. So get ready. It is time for our chat with Daniel Batten. The natural state of fiat Is dictatorship. All right, welcome back to the show. Daniel Batten, first time, first time on the show, which is, which is overdue. I feel like, I feel like this is, this is an embarrassment that we haven't gotten together and chatted about this because there's some numerous topics that I think we can go down here that I don't get enough attention on the show. But, but welcome, dude. Welcome to first time bitcoin audible. [00:06:09] Speaker A: Well, happy to be here, guy. Thanks for having me on. [00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, I think I watched something with you not too long ago, but I wanted to get. Because I don't remember exactly the details, but you, you have kind of a. I mean, everybody does, but a, a little bit of a back and forth. If I remember correctly, with your initial touch points with bitcoin, can you kind of give me the, the rundown of your thinking and, and what the. You know, because everybody comes at it from a different angle, right? Everybody has this like, oh, it was this thing that clicked for me. So what was that thing for you? [00:06:49] Speaker A: Well, to give some context, according to my mum, she said when I started crawling, I crawled backwards. I used to crawl under. I used to get really frustrated and try to crawl forwards, but I couldn't do it. And I crawled backwards and crawled under chairs. And my journey into bitcoin was kind of the same. I did it backwards. So I learned about bitcoin mining before I had any real idea about why bitcoin solved any problems at all at a financial level. And it was really only through learning about bitcoin mining and then getting more involved in bitcoin Twitter that I thought, what is this bitcoin thing anyway? And so that question really only formed about a year after I'd been researching bitcoin mining in a lot of depth. And the reason I was researching that is I was running an impact investment fund. Climate tech investment was a lot of what we did. And I've been reading about bitcoin's environmental impact and my initial impression was this looks bad. You know, it consumes a lot of energy and it doesn't seem to do anything useful apart from as a speculative asset. So, yep, I was guilty of that same reflexive knee jerk reaction. But I had a good friend in the bitcoin ecosystem, guy called Willy Woo who said, hey, dude, I think you should look into this a little deeper because what you're reading in the media is frankly a bunch of nonsense. And so he gave me some counterpoints and I went, yeah, that looks feasible, but I'm not sure it hasn't been quantified. So that just got me softened my position, you could say. But I wasn't convinced one way or the other. And then years later I thought, you know what, I actually want to answer this question for myself. So I'm not going to believe what anyone in bitcoin is telling me. I'm not going to believe what anyone in the media is telling me. I just want to find out the answer from first principles. And I had some time on my hand, I had this burning question, I thought, well, let's find out. Is it good for the environment? Is it bad for the environment? Is it kind of a mixture? Probably it's going to be a mixture somewhere in the middle. And to my surprise, I found out that actually it was even more positive for the environment than most people in the bitcoin mining ecosystem had been telling us. And I just couldn't believe it when I found out all the different applications, how it could help mitigate methane, proliferate the development of green energy, stabilize grids, obviate the need for gas, PEA plants, turn fossil fuel based heating into electrical heating vers through heat recycling. The applications were just mind boggling and I started to get very excited about it. And long story short, we founded an infrastructure investment fund which specializes in bitcoin mining that takes place on landfills. And we're currently looking for projects in Latin America, which is why I moved to Costa Rica. [00:09:34] Speaker B: Wow, so you're in Costa Rica now? [00:09:36] Speaker A: I'm in Costa Rica now. [00:09:39] Speaker B: Nice, nice. Yeah, dude, we've, I mean, we've, you know, covered a ton of stuff on the show in relation to pretty much every one of those things that you brought up. But the thing that just fascinates me to no ends and that I just love because this was my, I finally pulled the trigger on like hashing myself, um, was heating my house, man. I. And it was funny because it was a bit of a, like, I don't know, you stroke a luck, stroke of bad luck, I don't know. But I'd gotten minors and I'd been sitting on them for like a month or two and I hadn't actually done it. They were literally still in their boxes. And basically one of the, like there were like a few days that were the coldest days of the entire year. I guess two years ago, um, just absolutely freezing and our heat broke. [00:10:31] Speaker A: Right. Which part of the world are you in when you say freezing? It's like snowing, right? [00:10:36] Speaker B: Oh yeah, it was, it was like zero degrees. [00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:40] Speaker B: Fahrenheit so it was like really, really cold. It wasn't snowing, but we expect some cold times, but we're not like super prepared for like just crazy cold and which I'm sure there's people in Canada right now going like zero degrees. You baby. But, but, but. So our heat went out and you know, we've got a, we had like a six month old baby at the house. [00:11:04] Speaker A: Wow. [00:11:05] Speaker B: And I was like freaking out and I was like, all right, this is it. And I spent the next day rushing to get like a power cable conversion things and set up an outlet. Like, I spent a whole day, like, I have to get these things hooked up now. Yeah, that's an amazing story in a super short time. Had those babies blasting and heating house in the basement. And it kept us at a cool. Like it was like 65 or 68 degrees. Like it was cool, you know, it was cold. But they were downstairs in the basement. They weren't vented through anything. They're just like literally just chugging away and coming up through the floor. But it worked. And I was like, oh my God, this is so cool. Like, and I can't believe it took me long. So long. [00:11:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, often it comes for a need. I think heat recycling is one of the most exciting applications of bitcoin mining. A guy in Austria who was in the Alps and he was spending around 3,4000 Euro a year in burning basically fossil fuel diesel, probably for heating. And then he worked out. Hang on a minute. I. If I mine with it, sure. Electricity prices are high in Europe, so I'll lose money there. But if I factor in the, if I recycle the heat, I'm actually gaining money. And he was like up €2,000 a year versus what he would have had to pay in heating bills. And that's when he thought, hang on a minute, I'm not the only one in this category. And now he's been scanning his business. It's growing about seven times in revenue every single year. Because there's so many people in these cold parts of Europe who would love to use electrical heat, which is less expensive and they get sats at the same time. [00:12:42] Speaker B: That's so cool. It's so crazy, man. And when I, when I first did it, like right now, it's probably because the miners are old enough now and, you know, hash rates grown substantially. I'm probably taking a loss at this point. But what's funny is I still just want to mine for the SATs and I might actually just swap out the machine. [00:13:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, A lot of people do that. They know that they're losing money when they factor in what the electricity cost is. But it's doing your part for the network. [00:13:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I get to participate, right? [00:13:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:17] Speaker B: Get to, get to hash my blogs. Well, that's awesome. One of the post that was like, man, we should have had Daniel on the show already anyway. But you had a post not too long ago. It was a couple weeks ago when I first messaged you and it was talking about sustainability from the concept of fiat in general and like the big picture, like just the very nature of balancing resources. Can you, can you kind of expand on that and reiterate the, the post, if you remember exactly which one I'm talking about? [00:13:56] Speaker A: Yes, I do. So I spend my time going around the world looking at landfills. When people say, when did you move to Costa Rica? I say it was for the trash, not for the beaches. Because there's a lot of landfills in Latin America. So I see a lot of the waste and the decay of Western civilization that most people never get to see. Because a little bit like electricity, you switch on a light, you have no idea how that electricity reaches you. Similarly, we throw out some garbage. You have no idea what happens next other than someone takes it away and it's taken care of. Out of mind, out of sight. I could see that waste. And that waste is huge and it's growing and it's causing problems all around the world. Methane, as well as being 84 times more warming to the earth over a 20 year period, it also is responsible for a million premature deaths every year because it's, it's toxic. It's like standing next to a gas stove without the pilot light on. Right? It's something you don't want to be around. And so the waste of consumption of Western civilization and now the entire world, it's poisoning our earth, it's poisoning our air and it's poisoning our water. Because the biggest landfall in the world, you know what that is, the ocean. So there's all these countries around the world which don't even have landfills. A lot of island nations and the rubbish just gathers on the coast and then it gets swept out to sea. And the, the biggest landfill in the world is actually the ocean. So massive problem. And it's all driven by consumption. And if you follow that back in history, there was a really key event around 100 years ago. So what was happening in the 1920s were a lot of the big industrialists had this serious concern which Is hey, civilization is doing well. People have their washing machines, people have their cars, people have all their automated versions of what they used to have to do by hand or with a horse, right? And so we've used machines to really give people what they need but now they have what they need. That's bad for business. How do we keep selling to them? And they met with a guy called Edward Bernays who is the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he was the father of public relations. Back in those days it was called propaganda. And his first act was of public relations was to give it a better term. So he called it public relations. [00:16:26] Speaker B: Great propagandist right there. [00:16:28] Speaker A: Great propaganda. To give some context, Goebbels from the Nazi party in Germany looked up to Edward Bernays as one of his icons. He was brilliant at what he did and what would he do? So to give an example, cigarette company came to him and said we've got a problem. He said what's your problem? He said well we've only got half the market share. We could. He said why? He said well women don't smoke. We want you to solve that problem, get women to smoke. And he did some research, talked to his uncle Sigmund Freud to work out the psychology of it all. Came up with an idea and his idea was complete evil genius. And he realized the reason women didn't smoke was it was seen as a symbol of masculine power, not feminine power. So he said we've got to make this into a symbol of feminine power. What was happening at the time, the suffrage movement, women were campaigning to get the votes they suit, still didn't have the vote in certain states of America. And so he got a number of suffragettes right and in on this act and he, he said to the press is going to be this big event. And there were a whole lot of women who on cue, at the same time, I think it was in Times Square in New York, they rolled up their suspenders, they had cigarettes in the suspenders, they took them out, they lit them, they puffed on them, they held them up mimicking the Statue of Liberty all at the same time. And he supplied the headline to the press which was Women light torches of freedom. [00:18:06] Speaker B: Dear God. [00:18:06] Speaker A: Cigarette sales skyrocketed. So I'm sharing the story because Edward Bernays, he was absolute genius. He understood how to manipulate psychology at a level which could be commercialized. And what he did for these industrialists is he successfully transitioned the states and therefore the world from a need based economy into a desire based economy. And Everything that's happened subsequently. So we still had capitalism before that. Capitalism was surviving very well. But this was a new edge to capitalism, which was we're no longer giving people what they needed. We were purely giving based on what people desired and being very sophisticated in how we manipulated those human desires. So then the advertising industry took off and its role was basically to make people feel not okay about themselves, to feel incomplete. You know, you're. Because if you feel complete and happy, you don't need the products, right? You don't think you need them. But if you feel that there's something missing inside you, there's something not quite right, then you need that pair of jeans, those Nike sneakers, that, the fourth pair of Nike sneakers, that dress, that piano for your ballroom, whatever it is, to feel complete. Or that latest car. [00:19:24] Speaker B: There's an incredible alignment or kind of parallel to what social media does. Like, absolutely. Why we're trapped on social media, how it gets us to think that like, you know, Instagram's like, everybody else has the good life and the point is to make you feel depressed. So you want to follow and like get everybody's, you know, the highlights of, of their life and their vacation and all of this stuff. And then to be chasing the rage bait on Twitter and everything so that you're just, you're just mad and you're, you're afraid that you don't even know what's happening in the world and that you're not involved. If you're not up there arguing with somebody. It's, it's, it's crazy. Absolutely. [00:20:06] Speaker A: Absolutely. And so that's the context where bitcoin enters into the conversation. And you watch all that and you think, how on earth do you unravel that? How do you unravel the fact that if you're watching a McDonald's commercial, it's not actually you who's watching it, it's your child that's watching it. And that you've got to understand. You've had a team of child psychologists who have been advising on basically how to train your child to lobby the parent to take them to McDonald's. You know, how do you fight against that other than just turning the box off? And so the level of psychological manipulation that has been behind the desire based consumer society for the last hundred years has been immense. How do you start to unpick that? And then bitcoin comes along and what does bitcoin do? Bitcoin rewards you for not spending. Bitcoin rewards you for not consuming. So now for the first time ever you have a form of money which disincentivizes what humanity has spent the last hundred years indulging in, either as a consumer or someone who's manipulating people to consume. It totally changes the incentive structure. Now, there hasn't been any peer reviewed research done on this, but just anecdotally, you get to hang out with a lot of bitcoiners and you start to see your own patterns of behavior change. Do I really need that chair? Do I really need that bit of furniture? Do I really need that latest generation of car? These questions spontaneously come up because you're saying, or could I be getting more bitcoin with that? We've never had that last part before because there's never been an alternative. But now we do. Now we have this thing which is so much more desirable than anything we consume, that it's like the ultimate ambrosia. On one hand you can say it's the ultimate desire, but on the other hand, you can say it's a thing that kills desire. It kills that desire to consume and it gets us back to feeling complete as we are. And we've never had that before. And that's fascinating. And the more bitcoiners I talk to, I see exactly the same pattern. And again, I kind of approach this, not with any particular perspectives about bitcoin versus altcoin, but it's been my observation that as soon as you go into the altcoin arena, then, yes, the Lamborghinis and the consumption and all of that is very much part of the iconography. But within bitcoin, you got people like Jack Mallers and you see him and he's got this bookshelf, and the bookshelf's empty because either he sold all his books to buy bitcoin or he never bought books in the first place, other than maybe the few bitcoin books he has. And you see this consistently where it's not about the consumption, it's not about feeling incomplete. And in fact, if you're part of this bitcoin ecosystem, you feel the sense of I'm part of something bigger than myself anyway. That's a core human need to feel part of something bigger than you. Why do I need to consume stuff to feel complete, particularly when I can buy bitcoin with it? So that again, some people would say that endangers capitalism. I don't think that does at all. What it does is it can take us back. [00:23:16] Speaker B: It actually saves, restores what it actually was and kills a horrible incent structure that has been poisoning it for a century. [00:23:26] Speaker A: Correct? Correct, exactly. It takes us back to a needs based economy. Now. Not to say that of course we always spent money on desires, people always bought perfumes and latest dresses and clothes, et cetera. But that wasn't primarily what was driving, that was a little bit on the edge. And it's become the major drive of consumerism. And consumerism is a pollutive effect. It results in all sorts of distortions in the economy. It discourages people from looking to the future. It encourages very short time horizon thinking, high time preference, and it also has been environmentally ruinous. And I know that because I see the places where this waste gets put, which is our skies, our soils and our seas, and it's poisoning all three. [00:24:17] Speaker B: It's fascinating that like when you really dig down, like this is actually what the job of money is, is to actually create that incentive structure so that we do not cannibalize ourself as a society. Because you think about it like if we can only trade money, if nobody's making new money and both of us actually have to put like skin in the game costs, like, like the purpose of it is that I do something and I put it into the economy. Like if the economy is just you and you and me, I do something for you. I, I go out and hunt and get food or something like that. And then you build a shelter and we trade. And the idea is that the money, whoever has like quote unquote more money means that they're the ones who have put more into the economy by the explicit agreement of the other person, that the other person has basically said skin in the game. Yes, I agree. This is what it's worth to me. And such that like nobody actually has the ability to consume more than they've actually produced. And then together between the two of us, you can actually build more houses by yourself than you can splitting up your time between houses and hunting. And I can hunt more than by myself than I can splitting up between houses and hunting so that both of us are actually on net 20% more productive. And the value of the money eats up that extra 40% from both of us. And so what it ends up actually doing is it not only balances so that neither one of us are consuming more than we produce, which means the, the whole system is actually sustainable, but it ensures that those, those resources actually go to where they're best used. Because, because the person who is, who is basically more complete in their, their structure of production and getting stuff done actually ends up being More rewarded. But when you, when you have like the fiat mechanism, when you have somebody come in and they're just printing money like out the gate, like the nature of printing money from nothing and then consuming means that the entire, the structure of the entire thing is trying to eat three houses when we've only built two. [00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:26:28] Speaker B: It's literally consuming itself. It is cannibalizing itself. And everyone who is actually doing the production is getting poor and they don't even know it. It's just the time is being ripped away from them and they're having to run a mile a minute just to stay put right where they are. And if you have that systemic imbalance, one that works even when no one has a clue, it's happening, like if you don't solve that, you'll never solve any. Everything else is surface, everything else is three layers above that. You're talking about a foundation that is crumbling away underneath the building and you're like trying to prop up the skyscraper with some steel beams or something. You know, like you're, you're, you're. The game is failing fundamentally and you're never going to just kind of like, oh, I'll play it a little bit differently and we'll solve all this problem with band aids. No, no, you're, you have to fix the structure of the system. And so if money is the most desirable thing in society, it means because it's the most scarce and because it's the thing that allows you to get all things, which means that it should necessarily be the most desirable thing in society. It means that the highest desire or the highest incentive action is to save and not waste stuff. It means that the most incentivized thing to do is to not buy the house if you don't need the house, if you, is to not buy the car if you don't need the car. And so we actually get the proper weighting of what it costs to use stuff up now and not have it for the future. [00:28:04] Speaker A: Correct. And it reverses that desire based consumption without you having to hire your own team of counter psychologists to reeducate exactly complete again, like I'll give you an example. So in the house example, for example, one of the things Edward Bernays did is he had this piano company that came to him and he said, hey, we want to increase our piano sales. So he did a couple of things. He got some obviously attractive people to drape themselves over pianos. That always helps. He kind of started that whole movement. Pretty common these days, but it was revolutionary at the time he understood, you're not really selling the product, you're selling what the product is neuro associated with. Because human beings are very bad for distinguishing. Hey, I had that reaction not to the piano, but to the person who was draped over the piano. But they end up purchasing the piano. But the other thing he did was he. He basically changed the way that homes for the rich were architected. And he lobbied the people who are architecting them to change their designs when they're building new houses to always include a room, which was for the grand piano. So that's how far he went. He understood that if he wanted to sell more pianos, people needed to have the space in home. So he needed to have changed the way that homes were built. So again, no one was playing these pianos. It was purely there as a status symbol for the most part. They might get played a couple of times a year, but he needed to make it desirable to have this additional unnecessary room in the house that was occupied by this monolithic sized piano that would get played twice a year, if you're lucky, because that suddenly became desirable. So again, if you're on a bitcoin standard and you're thinking, well, do I really need that extra room in the house with that grand piano? That question doesn't even arise if you don't have bitcoin because you don't have anything as an alternative to do with that money, which is inherently more desirable. So that question, do I need this? Imagine if everyone, before they purchased anything, asked that question, how many purchases would no longer get made? I would say most of them. And that fundamentally reorientates society. Now, again, some people would say, well, wouldn't that collapse the economy? I don't think it would. I think people would spend that money on other things as well. Maybe experiences, maybe things that genuinely enrich them. Maybe in just investing into bitcoin or maybe investing into bitcoin companies or things that were associated with bitcoin, which would do something great for the world so that money would still exist. It just wouldn't be squandered in things which don't add productivity to society. [00:30:43] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, it's crazy to me that people like, wouldn't that, Wouldn't that collapse the economy? And I'm just like, you're, You're. You've literally got it all backwards. [00:30:53] Speaker A: If it collapses anything, if we lose something, then what we lose is not worth keeping in the first place. And what it replaces, it's replaced. Because two items cannot occupy the same space at the same Time. And if you have this perverse structure where you think you need to create purchase of junk and waste in order to have an economy, well, that economy should die, but it's not going to result in economic ruination. Something better will take its place. That couldn't take its place because this ridiculous, unnecessary, desire based economy was occupying that vacuum. And into that vacuum will come something much better. [00:31:30] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And like, just think like all big things are just combinations of small fundamental pieces, right? You know, like everything in life is just four different proteins and DNA. So you have to have everything that you change in those fundamental pieces expresses itself in, in a trillion different ways when you start going up the layers of complexity. But those fundamental things are the ones that guide everything. It's the difference. It's the electromagnetic connections between those things that make, so that, you know, hurricanes go from high pressure areas to low pressure areas. You know, like the smallest thing dictates what happens at the largest level. The same atoms that are inside of me are the same things that make up the craziest stars in the universe. And like, when you think about it like that, when you realize that this is no different in society and human organization and like relationships, and then you go, like when you realize that like making the money valuable makes people go, do I really need this before they buy something? And then think that the consequences of that could be bad? Like, that's absurd. That's absurd. It means if we are not doing that, what, how many perverse consequences are there in the economy if we're not even recognizing the value or the cost of the things that we are engaging in? Like, yeah, that is like, that's the cancer of the cell, right? That's the cancer of the organism is not recognizing that like, oh, I shouldn't actually eat this. I shouldn't, I shouldn't consume more at this point. I should actually save this so that the organism stays alive. It's just like, you know, if, if it can't survive the free market, then the hell. Why would we, why would we want it let it die? Whatever it is that you think we're going to lose. You know, if good ideas don't require. [00:33:19] Speaker A: Force, if you take it back to what you were talking about before, which is, you know, you want to do some hunting. I want to build a house. You have some skills. I have some skills. Maybe I'm better at building spears. You're better at building a house. We trade skills, we exchange money. But if you take that to its perverse extreme and mirror what we do today? I wouldn't do that. I'd say, hey, this guy over here has some nicer spears than you. His are a tip with bronze. You should really have some bronze tip spears. Don't you want to be better than your neighbor? And rather than put that energy into get you a whole lot of spears that you can use for hunting that are made out of robust material, material, maybe I cut costs and make them out of some lower grade wood, but they look really great, they're bronze tipped, they're not going to do the job any better. And you spend all your extra money and chasing that vanity metric rather than something effective and then your spears break and you've got to come back to me for more spears, right? Because I'm incentivized now to sell you more stuff. And I've worked out because I've done the math that hey, why should I make a spear that's going to last you for 10 years? I can't sell you more spears. I'm going to make it last one year so there's built in obsolescence. So I can sell you another spear. And at the same time I'm going to manipulate you to chase these higher cost spears, not higher value, not more effective, but higher cost spears. And so you're less effective at hunting. And meanwhile you're doing the same thing to me, right? You've worked out the same thing. So you're also working on manipulation. You're saying, hey, you should have an extra room here so you know you can entertain your neighbors. You know your neighbor has that. Don't you want to be better than your neighbor? And so you sell me a house which is more than I actually need. And so we now have a system which is based on mutual manipulation, not mutual service and adding value. Now that society would start to crumble pretty fast. And that's kind of what we've got here. So again, removing the manipulation, coming back to the principle of one human being adding value to another human being. Am I adding value, yes or no? Am I satisfying what this person needs to do what they want to do more effectively? And do we live in an arrangement where the society is doing that for each other? Yes or no? If Bitcoin can help move us back to that society where we're striving to add value, not striving to maximize manipulation from each person, from each transaction, then I think we're moving in the right direction. [00:35:35] Speaker B: 100%. 100%. You know, you think about like how much the devaluation or either the debasement or the, the growth. The deflation is not really the word because it's not, it's price deflation, not monetary deflation, but the, the growth in purchasing power of money affects that too. You talk about, you know, if I, if I sell you something that completely solves your problem, like permanently. Like just think about like on, on its face. Of course, of course. Everything that we would buy, we would desperately want it to just solve the problem permanently. Like if I put a fence around my house, I would want it to last forever. If I build a house, I want it to last forever. If I buy shoes, I want them to last forever. I want everything to be a permanent solution so that we can actually grow and scale what we are solving. The degree and complexity of problems that we solve only by having permanent solutions to all the lower complexity things. And if I'm selling myself out of a market, I'll use the example of I have rainbow flip flops that I've had since I was in high school. They are like literally 24 years old or something and I still have them. They're amazing. And you think about, it's like, oh, well, they sold them. They've, they've killed themselves. Well, if they, if they sell to the entire market and they can't sell to anymore and then they have a bunch of money and then their money is debased over the next 10 years and now their money only buys one tenth of what it originally bought. They're screwed. They have to, they need to sell crappier products so that they can sell another round of crappy product in five years. However, if they actually get money from selling, from solving everybody's problem of having good flip flops permanently into the future for half a century, well, that money at the end of 10 years is worth more, maybe double in purchasing power what it was originally. And they didn't sell themselves out of a market. They set themselves up with a foundation of value where they can solve any other problem that they want. And they can take the lessons they learn from making indestructible flip flops and they can build houses, you know, like, like it totally realigns everything. Everything. That one simple thing of does your money get shittier or does it get better? [00:37:53] Speaker A: And if you take that to the level of human health, like you're talking about flip flops and you're saying, well, what's the worst that can happen? You buy some flip flops, you have to buy one every year, no big deal. Okay, but what if you're taking that same principle to food, something you put into your body and people are doing the same equivalent of making shittier flip flops, but they're making crappier food. Okay, so what do they do? They say, well, we don't really need to use olive oil, let's use seed oil, even though it's carcinogenic. And we know that now. [00:38:20] Speaker B: Okay, we, we want to incentivize inflammatory and carcinogenic. Lots, just lots of problems. Why not? [00:38:26] Speaker A: And then basically you look at every food ingredient, you're like, well, who's going to know who really reads the ingredients? Just a couple of obsessive compulsive people. Anyway, we'll lose 2% of our market. Who cares? We'll make a much cheaper product if we swap out all the natural ingredients with a whole lot of letters and numbers. And then what else do we want to do? Well, we know that it's highly addictive, the combination of salt, fat and sugar. So we'll up our content there and we'll get the cheapest sugar, we'll get the cheapest fat, and we'll, we get the cheapest salt we possibly can. And that'll make it both more addictive and more cheap at the same time. Now you're not selling food anymore, you're selling addiction. You're selling something which you know again, in the same way that you have no idea how the electricity got to you when you switch on the light, no idea what happened to the rubbish when you put in the trash can. It's all this big mystery you put into your body and it just magically disappears. But it doesn't disappear. It'll do different things to the inside of your body. It will have different consequences for your body, for your lifespan, for the amount of energy that you have in your life based on the quality of the food you consume, it'll still taste roughly the same. But again, that feared economy has encouraged you to cut corners because you're continuously having your purchase power eroded. And the other thing you can do is shrinkflation. You just sell smaller portions. Well, okay, that's a little bit more obvious, but to just sell shittier portions of the same amount of stuff, that's easier again, that's more insidious. You don't see it. And so this whole pattern where in the same way that a politician given the choices of raising taxes or printing more money, they'll choose print more money because it's more opaque. And if you follow that through, the person who then suffers the consequences of inflation who's having to produce the same food for the same price, even though ingredients have got expensive, more expensive, has no choice but to either shrink the size or to make the same version but make it crappier. And so that whole pattern doesn't stop with the politicians and the money printers. It follows right through the entire system. And again, then you have this problem where socialists would get up in arms. They say, well, capitalism needs to know. Capitalism is not the problem. If you look at socialism, worse environmental catastrophes happen under socialism, and worse perversions of human rights have happened under socialism than under capitalism. That's not the answer, but it's this perverse mechanism, as you say, where you have this ability to infinitely print money that creates all these flow down distortions at every layer of society, including the health of our own physical body. If you look at pictures of beaches in the 1970s versus pictures of beaches today, you see a very different body type. And I don't believe that's a coincidence that that coincided with the ending of the gold standard. And you think, you know from the outside, if I caught myself saying that three years ago, four years ago, I'd say that's ridiculous, Daniel. How could the two events be possibly correlated? But once you start going down that rabbit hole and you say, well, you have money that degrades in its purchasing power, what does that do at every level of society? What does that do to food manufacturers? What does that do to the type of food they're forced to create? Now you go, okay, I'm starting to see the picture now. And what does that do to the human body as a consequence? Okay, I'm starting to see the pictures now. These are not just correlations, these are cause and effect relations. And then you say it's not just causing that in the human body, it's causing that at an environmental level as well. You start to see the picture and it all starts to add up. Now, will Bitcoin. Do I believe bitcoin will solve everything? No, I don't. Do I believe that it will fundamentally solve the problem where human beings will feel complete in themselves because we have Bitcoin. No, I don't. That might require some other things as well, but it does deal with a very fundamental issue, is that it's going to stop that manipulation of whatever inadequacies we feel inside of us which have caused us to want to try to fill that void by purchasing more stuff. It will challenge that fundamental desire and it'll cause us to reflect more and think, well, perhaps, well, why Was I expecting that some product was going to fill some need within me? Maybe I should actually look at that and do some introspection rather than expecting that some product is going to fix it. Bitcoin can help in the facilitation of that reflection. It's done something great for us. [00:42:52] Speaker B: Yeah, no, a thousand percent. It's so crazy. Like, I feel that, like, you gotta be. You're insane to think that like the picture on the beach has anything to do with the gold standards. Like, what are you, what are you? Ridiculous? [00:43:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's insane, right? How could it possibly. What a ridiculous. You've been brainwashed by a whole bunch of bitcoiners to believe that, right? [00:43:13] Speaker B: And the whole, fix the money, fix the world and then. I know it sounds crazy. I get the perspective when like I even make the suggestion that the pharmaceutical just cover up the side effects in healthcare and don't think about the actual fundamental health or prevention or actually correcting the imbalance, like correcting the bad habits in the people, but instead sell them a pill that will cover it up. That, that is the fundamentally same. It's the same mental framing. You know, like we think, oh, it's kind of like the, you know, don't feed the monkeys or don't feed the bears or whatever, because it will change their incentives and they'll come back, you know, kind of thing like in the, in, in like a zoo or something like that. But then at the exact same time, like, people just somehow don't allow themselves to apply. Something that we actually know on so many other levels to large complex systems is that it looks and feels the narrative that we tell about society is just totally different. But you know, if you rewarded every time a child through a straight up temper tantrum, just screaming angry because they wanted something and you gave it to them, you know, you know, without a doubt, that person is going to grow up being a horrible, angry, vicious person who throws tantrums, who screams at people, who gets mad at them in order to get what they want. Now imagine that every single time somebody made a purchase or made an irresponsible decision or went into debt that they couldn't afford, that you actually give them just a little bit of a reward, that their debt is devalued just a little bit, that them buying a house before they could even slightly afford a house and then have that house double in price in four years, and they think they've made a great investment decision. And it's not that the value of money has plummeted over that same period of time, like that reward mechanism, every single time, every single time they make a decision, this, this money's going to be worth less. So I'm going to just consume this, I'm just going to consume this. And they get, in exchange for giving up all of their long term framing their, they get this constant like dopamine hit, this social media level, like frivolous reward over and over and over and over again. And then over time they just take more debt out to get rid of the old debt. And it's this cycle of like perpetuity that like eats at your soul but constantly gives you the alcohol to be just drunk enough, the dopamine hit to be just chemically induced enough to cover it up and like tiny rewards at the cost of long term. Like meaning. [00:45:54] Speaker A: Absolutely. And we have that same, that exact same dynamic functioning at a nation state level. It's just that we the citizens are the toddlers and the politicians are the parents and we say, you better spend more money on X because I care about X and if you don't, then I'm going to punish you, I'm going to vote for those other group of people. But if you do, if you do give more money to X, then I'll vote for you, right? And if I'm rich I'll give money to you and I'll expect a return on that investment. And then the politicians have this convenient thing called a money printer right there where they can just magically give you what you've asked for so they don't have to endure the tantrum. The tantrum means like they don't have power in four years or two years. They can just by stealth kind of, you know, turn on the money printer and give you what it was you asked for and you don't notice the effects of it. What that means is that the natural symbiotic partner for a fiat monetary system is a dictatorship. It doesn't symbiote well with democracy because if you put fiat and democracy together then you have that toddler parent relationship where of course the parent's going to turn on the money printer when the consequence is they don't get to be the parent anymore in four years, they don't get to rule, they get the thing they care about most, which is power stripped away from them. Of course they're going to turn on the money printer. So what's the alternative? Either you don't have a fiat currency or you don't have a democracy, but the two things together and this has been proven, cannot coexist happily without the complete erosion of purchasing power of a civilization and the complete erosion of an empire, which is exactly what has occurred and what has occurred throughout history. The natural bedfellow for a fiat economy is a dictatorship. The natural bedfellow for bitcoin is democracy and participatory democracy. Because bitcoin, at its essence is a system of participatory grassroots democracy. [00:48:00] Speaker B: It's crazy how deeply those things are tied to each other. I talk about it, actually, I've gone into this a couple times recently into the show, because kind of taking out that thread of like dictatorship is naturally the. The end result of fiat is a dictatorship is that this happens, you know, between nation states, conceptually, in the same. In the same way. Because if you've got the world reserve currency and you can print the money and everybody else has to use it, you actually don't have, you know, usually in like a social dynamic or a. Just in a kind of power dynamic, right, Is that like one entity has X amount of power and then the next entity has partial. Like, you know, they're almost as powerful. But there's this spectrum, right? There's a spectrum from small to large. And the large does have a lot of power. But you can get a bunch of small together. Like you get a bunch of small countries together, and collectively they ought to have significant enough power together to basically come to the table and say, you know, this. We are exerting our sovereignty and we are saying this and we want this. Like, they should be able to balance it out. You know, if everybody on the playground stands up against the bully, like, clearly the bully can't actually stand up to that. There's a. There's a spectrum of power. Whereas in the fiat world, if you have a global reserve currency, there's basically a top dog. And then everyone else is only powerful in relationship to where they. How friendly they are to that top dog. Because every single other entity in that system is involuntarily paying the top dog. They cannot work for just themselves. No matter what they do, they are eating inflation that is directly benefiting the most powerful. Therefore, everyone who is getting together and saying, oh, I don't want to do what you say, or I don't want to be a part of this system is also at the exact same time completely propping it up. They. They're involuntarily also make giving them all of that power, and they can't actually take it away because they have to use the currency that the global system uses and all of their debts have to be paid back in dollars. They can't not give all of their resources and capital to the big dog. [00:50:28] Speaker A: Correct. And you know, if I had heard myself talking this way three years ago, I would have said, oh, come on, Daniel, it can't possibly be that bad, can it? Maybe a little bit here and there, but surely it's not that insidious because you want to believe that you live in a world where things aren't fundamentally that broken. It's kind of hard to reconcile that. Yeah, it is that broken. But I've seen too much to pretend anymore that that isn't exactly what plays out at a nation state level. So for example, what I said about dictatorship being the natural bedfellow for fiat economies, this is not theory. This is exactly the way the World bank and the IMF playbook plays out. They prefer striking business deals with dictatorships. Why? Because they don't have to consult anyone. Because they can sign a check very simply, what happens to the check afterwards doesn't really matter that much. But the reality is you now have a business transaction where you have lent a so called developing country a whole lot of money and now they have to pay a whole lot of loan repayments back at an exorbitant rate. And that's not the real kicker. The real kicker is if they default, you have all sorts of clauses which say, we can build a military base, we can extract your oil, your cobalt, your lithium, lots of strings, uranium. Right. At a very cheap rate. We can force you to devalue your currency so we can extract goods at even more favorable terms. We can ask you to vote with us on some UN resolution against one of our geopolitical enemies that we're trying to use leverage against. [00:52:07] Speaker B: Importantly, trying to get those agreements and get those things to actually go through in a free country is almost impossible because the government doesn't just run everything. You have to have a dictator. [00:52:18] Speaker A: Yeah, you have to have a dictator sometimes. You can do it with a democracy, but it's got to be in times of despair, such as Greece after the global financial crisis, where they really felt backed into a corner and had no options. But generally speaking, the imf, the World bank vastly prefer to do these deals with dictatorships. So it's playing out at a nation state level as well. And if again, if you look at Bitcoin and you say, well, how does Bitcoin offer an escape route for these nations? It does. And we've seen it, because we've seen examples in El Salvador and we've seen examples in Bhutan where El Salvador, by buying bitcoin for a strategic bitcoin reserve, has gone up in value 123% at least and increasing. Bhutan, where they've mined it, so they didn't even have to purchase it. They were using zero marginal cost power that would have flowed over the side of the dam or they would have sold it to India for a lot less money than they could have got through mining bitcoin with it, which now contributes 40% of their entire GDP. So we've seen these two small nations already who have said we don't need to take on IMF loans or if we do, it's of course we want to, not because we need to. Totally different dynamics. So now we're not going to default on it, we're just going to use it effectively. Right. It's kind of like the person who uses the credit card because they know they have enough discretion, they're never going to pay the 20% fees per month. They'll just use it to get a month versus free credit. Yeah, you can use the IMF in that way if you're smart. But most people are living hand to mouth and most countries are living hand to mouth that they have to incur those penalties and they have to incur those nasty clauses where either the credit card company and the ultimate credit card company is the IMF will get to use those extractive clauses if you do default on your payments. So we've got these two counterexamples that prove there is an alternative. And their economies have been very successful through in part in the case of El Salvador and in whole in the case of Bhutan, through adopting Bitcoin. [00:54:24] Speaker B: You don't actually have to sell your Bitcoin to access its value. You can actually borrow against it very easily without selling it. But when you do this, you need to be careful, careful. You need to do this with a company that is trusted, one that has survived a bare market and one that will literally show you that they have the coins, that they have proof of reserves or some mechanism where you can look at your balance and know that it is safe. This is why I've been a huge fan and a customer of Leaden for a few years now. So one of the bitcoin backed loans that I got a few years ago to finish renovations and the basement and studio in my house, I would have paid three times as much Bitcoin had I just sold it as it now takes me to just pay off the loan. And that's If I sell the bitcoin to pay it off, which I think I'm going to be able to get equity out of the house and pay off the loan and get all of my bitcoin back. This especially makes sense if you're making an investment. If you're doing something that is going to pay you income in the future, or if you're investing in bitcoin mining, it's a whole lot easier to beat the interest rate if you loan against the bitcoin and keep the bitcoin. Leden also makes this like crazy easy. Like if you went to do this right now, you could probably get the money by tomorrow. They do proof of reserves twice a year and I check. It's a very easy process. And you don't have to do monthly payments if you don't want to. You can just accrue the interest and pay off in chunks whenever it makes sense. And best of all, they just recently got rid of all the noise. They had some other features. They had Ethereum loans. They're like, nope, chop it. They had a yield product. Nope, chop it. They had loans where you could get a lower interest rate and they didn't have it on their books. They lent it out. Nope, chop that. Now it's just custodied, fully backed bitcoin loans doesn't work for every single situation or every person. But there are sometimes where this is an incredible, incredibly valuable tool to have. Don't overextend. Remember, bitcoin is volatile and read the details. But if you need access to your bitcoin's value and you just don't want to sell, Leaden is a brilliant and simple tool for doing exactly that. And I've been a happy customer for a couple of years now. You can check out the links right down in the show notes. It's Ledn Leden IO I want to dig a little bit in to Bhutan more because they're very quiet. Like El Salvador was very kind of loud about right. They announced it at the bitcoin conference. You know, it was like, oh, we're making a statement here. But Bhutan is one of those ones that as I said, like, you know, when we were chatting just before this is. They get mentioned a lot but they don't get talked about. Like what happened over there is really just kind of like a. Oh, and also the Kingdom of Bhutan, it's like, oh, and by the way, it's like half their gdp. Wait, what? What? You know, like, like I couldn't when I, when I heard that and it was this off, this offhand comment of like different countries that have adopted bitcoiner have had a play and like here's some bitcoin treasury companies and then they mentioned the Kingdom of Bhutan and it's like, oh by the way, now the, the amount of bitcoin they have is like practically half of their entire gdp. And I'm just like, how do you just wash over, Like I do a double take, you know, and I still, I still don't have like a big picture because they're so quiet about it. They like, as you said, they would prefer not to know, to not have people to know. But give me, give me kind of your picture of what you've seen about this and how, how they ended up in the position that they're in. [00:58:00] Speaker A: Okay, let's talk about Bhutan because one of my favorite bitcoin stories in the whole world. So Bhutan is amazing. If there were a nation state exemplification of Stay Humble stack sats, it's Bhutan, right? Because like you said El Salvador, I mean Bukele's a fantastic marketer and to his credit he's delivered on that marketing as well. So that's not a criticism, that's a celebration. But he's very good at marketing. Not everything that they have said has followed through. So for example, they predicted that by going to bitcoin they were going to save $400 million in remittance payments. Well, that was theoretically possible if everyone in the country started using bitcoin for remittance payments. But they haven't, they haven't got the technology architecture in place to be able to do that. So it's probably more like 4 million. So it's about 1% tops at the moment. Bhutan didn't do any of that. They didn't tell anyone of what they're going to do in these volcano bonds and we're going to make it a bitcoin city and we're going to attract foreign investment. They did none of that. They kept their mouths shut. And frankly they would have preferred if no one knew what they were doing. And it was only because someone looked at some geo satellite images and said what are those things there next to those dams? And let me bring in my buddy over here. Those are hash huts. Those guys are hashing, right. They are turning that stranded hydro energy into sats through using it to power the future of sound money. They're doing bitcoin mining. And suddenly the story was broken and I think it was 2022 that Bhutan was mining bitcoin they didn't want anyone to know why. What's the advantage of someone knowing? The IMF would have opposed it. Even though Bhutan doesn't have an IMF loan to their credit. They only would have got opposition. They only would have got everyone from the traditional finance world telling them what a terrible idea it was. The IMF has a track record of every single country who wants to either mine Bitcoin or buy Bitcoin. Telling them, we are very concerned, we think you should look at this seriously. We're concerned that it will destabilize your very volatile asset. Very volatile asset. You really should be thinking very seriously about it. So you have this concern which is born out of not data but really self concern. What's the real concern is that, well, hang on a minute. If you are using Bitcoin, that means that when your foreign exchange levels get low you can top that up using Bitcoin you don't need to come to us for a loan. That means that if this catches on then a whole lot of other countries around you, maybe Pakistan, maybe Kazakhstan, maybe some countries in Africa who also have stranded hydro or stranded flare gas emissions or maybe they don't have anything but they just have a bit of money they want to put into stacking sats. If this catches on then this could actually result in economic sovereignty for a whole lot of nations. Well that's going to deplete our customer base because in order for us to have a business model for geopolitical leverage, we need people who need us. And the more people who are on Bitcoin, like El Salvador doesn't need the imf. They took on an IMF loan but because they wanted it, not because they need it. They're not desperate. Bhutan, we're two to three months away because of COVID because they lost their tourist business which was part of what was driving their economy. They had two to three months left of foreign exchange reserves. If it got below that they wouldn't have been able to pay for imports. Guess who comes in when a country gets to that state of desperation? The imf. And they come in and they say we'll help you. There'll be some clauses and some conditions about extracting whatever minerals we want. If you default, military base is the usual suspects, but we'll help you. Bhutan did not need to take on the IMF's help. They now have 40 to 50% of their entire GDP. Through a Bitcoin strategic reserve they have been able to refurbish their airport. They have used part of that money to put up the salaries of people who work for the government, 50%, in some cases 65%. Imagine if you're in the US and you work for the government and someone comes in one day and they say, you know what, we didn't tell you this, but we've been mining Bitcoin on the side and we've got a bit of extra money and we decided we just want to give you a 65% pay rise. I mean, it's insane, right? That actually happened in Bhutan and not one off. [01:03:02] Speaker B: And it's explicitly not stolen from the people, like, like they've mined it with what would be waste otherwise. [01:03:09] Speaker A: 100% renewable, 100% surplus renewable energy. The land footprint is tiny. If you look at the pictures of where it's done, if you compare them to the vast open pits and the environmental ruination through cyanide and mercury and cadmium and other poisoning that happens when you do gold mining, compared to this tiny land footprint, which is nestled in this beautiful area surrounded by bush. [01:03:38] Speaker B: The. [01:03:38] Speaker A: Environmental impact is virtually negligible. It's using 100% renewable energy. It's an asset that would have been wasted, that they have in abundance, and it's creating prosperity for an entire nation state. The IMF said that any country who uses Bitcoin, or whether they mine it, whether they acquire it through purchasing, can expect to destabilize their economy, to destabilize their grid, to destabilize energy markets, to subject themselves to high volatility, to turn off foreign investment. The exact opposite has happened in every single case. [01:04:17] Speaker B: Not only has the exact opposite happened, but the exact opposite happened in like two or three years. [01:04:24] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:04:24] Speaker B: Like a massive shift in the exact opposite direction. [01:04:28] Speaker A: Not a small, like tiny two to three years. Exactly. So now other nations are going, well, hang on, we've got some stranded energy too. What do you need to be in Bhutan's position? You need water. Well, most countries in the year have water for part of the year and you need hills so it'll flow down using gravity. Then you've got hydro. And so how many countries in the world have hydro, which at sometimes because it's the rainy season, you're producing more hydro energy than you can utilize. Well, that actually applies to, ironically, any single country in the world that was persuaded by the World bank to overbuild a dam, which they were never going to utilize the energy of, because the World bank just wanted a big dam which they could fund and get a lot of interest repayments on. But it was overbuilt and it's not going to be needed for another 20 years until the population gets to this massive size. What could they do in the meantime? They could mine bitcoin with it. This is exactly what's happening in Ethiopia right now. Where large dam was built. The transmission lines don't exist to export that power. The story that is told of course in the media is all those bad bitcoin miners, they're taking power away from these rural villages who should be using it. Nonsense. The transmission lines don't exist. This was pure surplus power that was flowing over the top of the dam that now has contributed $55 million to the power board of Ethiopia. And guess what they're using that money for? To build out the transmission lines faster so that it can reach more rural villages. [01:06:01] Speaker B: So you can actually plug the freaking village in. [01:06:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's delivering more power to the people. So again, Ethiopia could be a prime candidate where they say, yeah, well rather than selling all our power, that's good, but why don't we do some mining ourselves? Why don't we benefit and plug in and not just earn fiat through selling power. We'll keep doing a bit of that, but 50% will save and we'll do our own mining like Bhutan is and we'll start stacking sats and we're going to do even better through doing that. And how many other nations in the world could do that? Nigeria has a massive amount of of flare gas emissions. They have all this oil and whenever they strike oil they strike gas. And it's mandated, it has to be flared. In other words, you just burn it, you just waste it because you can't send it through a pipeline. It's too expensive to build out massive wasted energy. And if you can use that for bitcoin mining instead, that's zero marginal cost energy. Sure, you've got to put generators in place, but the economics actually work out again, you can be stacking sats with that. So, so many nations in the world now, uk, if it didn't have. I won't comment about the current economic policy, I'll avoid the temptation. But if they had someone a little bit more forward thinking who understood both bitcoin and energy and finance, then all that stranded wind energy that comes from Scotland is just squandered to the tune of a billion pounds every year. They could be mining bitcoin with it. Greece, solar energy could be mining bitcoin. Darwin in Australia, Northern Territory could be mining bitcoin. Portugal, Spain huge amounts of stranded Solar and wind energy could be mining bitcoin with it. And again it's not as if it's even theory. It's happening in Texas right now. So we've got a model of using hydro, which is Ethiopia, Paraguay, Bhutan. We've got a model of using predominantly solar and wind energy as it increases in Texas and using that stranded energy. And that's working out really well. It's allowed them to put more solar and wind on the grid, it's allowed them to not have to pay curtailment fees, it's allowed them to stabilize the intermittency of variable renewable energy and it's made the solar and wind operators more profitable because now they have a customer, whereas before that energy would have been squandered, which allows them to do what any prudent business owner does and that's expand their business. So it's been amazing. These are not theoretical. Maybe on a bit of paper it could work. These are happening around the world and as they start to proliferate around the world, nation states will start to say well maybe we should be doing that ourselves. Bhutanas seems to be working out pretty well for them. Let's look into it too. And as that starts to happen, the influence of the IMF and the World bank decreases and that's what they're scared of. [01:08:47] Speaker B: I don't think people realize how much like the sovereignty of small nations threatens how the fiat system works. Like you think about like if the bitcoin price doubles from here, Bhutan is basically the only solvent nation on earth. Like they would have a degree of solvency, like they would have a degree of just sovereignty that was just unheard of in how the fiat structure works because they have, they have enough value outside of it that they don't have to care. That's not their main tether I guess to the rest of the world. And what's crazy about that is that you know, the IMF and World bank, if they don't give them loans or whatever, or the west doesn't buy their stuff or buy the things that they mine, they could actually just build stuff and produce for themselves. I highly recommend, you may have, you may already know this piece by Gladstein Structural Adjustment, the one about the IMF and the World Bank. And yeah, I highly recommend listening and, or reading that. I don't even know how far back it is now in the show I'll dig up the link to it but the, the level of detail and extending out the history and the breadth of this system and just how prevalent it is, is. You can look at like decades of this happening in South America and Africa and these countries were actually making rice for themselves, they were growing their wheat, they were producing energy for themselves, they were doing all of these things to make their own country better. And then essentially very conveniently dictators got installed, a couple of rebellions happened and IMF friendly dictators ended up being in power just you know, just by happenance coincidentally. And then suddenly there are these huge contracts and they come in and they just, they destroy the rice fields. And now they're all making coffee to sell to the U.S. now they're all, now they're all growing cocoa to sell to Europe like and, and now the entire structure of these tiny countries, economies are just like little factories for countries in the West. [01:10:59] Speaker A: And it looks great because gdp, GDP goes up, right? Yeah, because GDP is this perverse metric. It's like looking at the share market and saying, hey, well the economy's booming, the share market's going up, house prices are going up, the economy's booming. But we all know that's a cooked metric. Just like inflation is a cooked metric, so is gdp. It's a cooked metric because it measures how effectively a country is producing resources that earn export earnings, selling stuff to the west that the west doesn't need, whilst failing to produce the resources to feed your own country and keep it prosperous. That's really what GDP is measuring. And so of course if you have a town that's a country that's self sufficient, that doesn't need exports because it's actually self sufficient and you replace this with export earnings selling all these things, but at the same time people aren't able to feed themselves as effectively because you're producing non, what you call cash crops for the West. Yeah, it looks great on paper, look great on an IMF report decimating for the local population. [01:12:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think people like realize how devastating it is like if the US goes into a recession and they start to contract and they don't, they're not pushing ever more fiat out, the whole world goes into a recession. Yeah, small countries start defaulting, like if they can't get loans and they can't actually pay for their stuff, they have to plummet prices and start taking cuts on everything that they export because they need dollars from other countries to get in to actually fund their liabilities. [01:12:41] Speaker A: And I think this is why Bitcoin's so exciting, because it's not just operating at a nation state level down like Bhutan and El Salvador. That's one model, but at the same time it's grassroots up. So you're getting these communities that are starting to develop circular economies. And sure you can say, well, it's a tiny scale. And it is a tiny scale because of course you have all these mechanisms in place to try to resist that. It's not in the interests of banks to create good off rails or central banks to embrace it. You have all this FUD to wade through. That's just a rite of passage you go through with any technology. And this is not just a technology, this is a whole new system, right? This is like the Internet. It's a whole platform, it's massive. And so the amount of technological upgrading, the amount of FUD and resistance and entrenched systems you have to go through is immense. So of course it's going to take time. But if you start to look at what happens community by community, it's incredible. Like in Uvita, which is about two and a half hours from where I live in San Jose, Costa Rica, you can go and I can go there and I can transact in bitcoin. I don't need fiat because there's enough businesses there that will accept bitcoin. And you have this entire circular economy where money can be transacted peer to peer, you don't need middlemen. And in the case of Africa, it's even better because every time you transact between Tanzania and Kenya or Nigeria and Ethiopia or whatever it is, it goes through this bank set up in Europe in the middle when someone clips a ticket and then it takes three days to transact and it gets to you. Imagine if all those nations were able to transact peer to peer and you had these grassroots economies and it's already starting to happen. You've got these builders who are creating it. So if the world does go into recession and these countries start to lose that, thank goodness that from the grassroots up you have these circular economies that are incentivizing people to grow stuff that people need locally, right? Not what people want internationally. So again, this movement is starting to happen. So we have some rails in place. So again, if this whole fiat economy collapses sometime soon, we have a safety net. And that safety net is called bitcoin. And all the people in the world who often don't get a lot of attention because they're in Zimbabwe or they're in Nigeria or they're in South Africa and they're working on this grassroots adoption, they're the real unsung heroes of bitcoin because they're Helping it to build from a grassroots level up and empower community by community. And getting them off this fiat standard, getting them off the idea they have to produce these cash crops and be paid by someone else in some currency that can be devalued 40% overnight and often is. And suddenly they have an alternative which is ascending in value, not descending in value. [01:15:39] Speaker B: It'll be crazy to think that, like, you know, the next time the US goes into recession, the Kingdom of Bhutan might just not care. Like, it might not matter at all. Yeah, like, okay, well then that's fine. We actually get stuff that other people produce for cheaper because everybody else is in a recession and they have to take price cuts and we have all the capital. We can back our whole gdp. Like, we're so close to that. Like, you know, like, it's like, oh, it's 40, 50% right now. Like, what are you. How are you just doubling their money? We're close to them doubling their money. Like, you don't realize how quick, like, we're in the monetization event of Bitcoin and people realizing how powerful this is. Like, sound money is the key to sound society. [01:16:25] Speaker A: And they have the ability too, because it's not as if they're utilizing all that hydropower either. They've got a whole lot more hydropower and they can do a whole lot more megawatts. They could easily go to more than 100% of GDP through Bitcoin, which is insane. [01:16:40] Speaker B: So crazy. [01:16:41] Speaker A: Again, it's a model to the rest of the world of what's possible. [01:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, we are in weird times. You know, bitcoin's already, what, 16 years old, right? So. But it seems odd, like, there's like this element of serendipity that this exists alongside. We hit like, it was born in 2009 and which was one year after basically we tipped over the hill, right? Like 2007, 2008, the great financial crisis was basically the point of no return. That was. That was. We really move the QE everything stage, the fiscal dominance stage, where essentially the central banks. And you could have argued that this, it was essentially running the show. Like, the central bank decisions were basically in charge of what direction the economy went back in the 90s. But, like, when you really look at the whole apparatus isn't even like, sustainable without this structure. Like without this debt. It. It seems to have hit that escalating, like, like exponential, like, like run away from itself in the 2008. 2007. 2008 crisis. And then bitcoin is Born. And alongside this crazy global reorganization that's going on. And at the exact same time, this, like, Internet, like, identity crisis that the whole world is having, trying to figure out who the hell they are, what we actually believe, and ideas that nobody ever cared about are suddenly clashing into the norm. You know, like these, these fringe ideas are now having to, like, you have to argue with people online and figure out, like, can you even defend what you think? Like, this is all happening at the exact same time as sound money is being monetized. It's just. Is. Is it causation? Is it. Is it total coincidence? Like, I don't, I don't know. It's so crazy to see how big and complex. How does all of this align at the same time? [01:18:53] Speaker A: Some of it's definitely not coincidence. I mean, bitcoin was created out of exactly the perversions of the central banks and the trust systems that broke down. And it's no coincidence that the first bit of text that was written into the blockchain or the Genesis block was Chancellor on the brink of second bailout. So it was very much born out of that time. And if you look at what's happening now, again, rely on the mainstream media, which very few people in bitcoin Twitter do, but most people in the world to some extent still do. Even if they say they don't, it's still an influencer in the background. You will miss it, because the biggest story geopolitically in the world right now is not what's happening between Iran and Israel. It's not what's happening with BRICs and whether they'll find an alternative to the US dollar, because ultimately that's just one sort of fiat versus another. It's what's happening in Pakistan right now with the imf, because you are seeing this corridor. This is the front line of bitcoin versus the imf. And this is the absolute unreported story where you've had four countries in a row, Central African Republic, El Salvador, Argentina, and now Pakistan, who all said, we want to do bitcoin, we want to have a bitcoin strategic reserve, we want to welcome bitcoin entrepreneurship into our country, et cetera. We want to mine bitcoin. And in four out of four cases, the IMF said, we have some concerns. It's going to destabilize your economy, it's going to stabilize your grid. Now with Pakistan, they've said the same thing again, and it's starting to become a little bit transparent, particularly because their concerns have not played out in El Salvador or Bhutan that they really never had any sincere economic analysis behind their concerns anyway. It was purely protecting their self interest. So what's just happened in Pakistan is that Pakistan announced they wanted, they had 2,000 megawatts of stranded energy, wasted energy that they wanted to use for bitcoin mining. So to put that in context, 2,000 megawatts, that's 10% of the power of the entire bitcoin network. So that's significant. [01:21:11] Speaker B: I didn't realize it was that serious. [01:21:13] Speaker A: That's huge amounts, right? That's 10% of Bitcoin. Just boom. They want to turn on and start stacking sats. Imagine what that would do to the economy and that stranded energy, that's wasted energy. That's energy they already have that was getting squandered because they couldn't use it. Because, because it produced at the wrong time of day where people didn't need it. It was hydro flowing over the side of the dam or it was renewable that was not being used because it was the wrong time of day either at night for wind or peak of day for solar in most cases. So stranded energy, the IMF came in, said we're concerned what it'll do to energy prices, we're concerned what it'll do to energy markets, usual stuff. But then they realized that actually they're starting to look like clowns transparently because they've said this before in the opposite as you said, has not only transpired but it's happened within a very short time frame. So now they've had to backtrack a little bit and create the illusion that they're doing some analysis saying well we won't discard it outright, we'll do some analysis and then they'll produce some nice shiny report that says we've looked at it seriously, we've looked into these, we. [01:22:11] Speaker B: Have our peer reviewed paper and still going to be super volatile. [01:22:16] Speaker A: And on that balance we say that it's not a good idea. So it has the illusion of looking like some analysis has taken place. But here's the thing. Pakistan know that it's going to be good for their economy. They've seen what's happening in Bhutan, right? They know that India wants to do this too, their geopolitical enemy and they want to be ahead of the ball. They have Michael Saylor and CZ to do this. India is its early stages. They have, they're not as far advanced as Pakistan but they've had government representatives who said we are now starting to investigate. So Very early stages investigate whether it makes sense for us to acquire Bitcoin at a nation state level. [01:23:00] Speaker B: Wow. [01:23:00] Speaker A: No surprises because that came out in a couple of months or maybe even one month after Pakistan announcing the same. So again, in the same way that the United States acquiring Bitcoin means China has to acquire it. If Pakistan starts to acquire it, India have to acquire it. So we're seeing this game theory play out, which is incredible now. So it's getting very interesting what's happening in Pakistan. It's going to get real crazy real quick. Now, here's the amazing thing. With Pakistan, to start with, I thought, well, they've got no chance because they've got this massive IMF loan and the IMF will use it as leverage and say, no, we get to dictate terms. You can't do it. But actually they don't have a monopoly anymore because Pakistan is now pretty geopolitically friendly with China. And China is starting to play from the same IMF playbook. They've been watching what's happening. They've been saying this is a great economic model, but it's also a great tool for geopolitical influence. And over the last 20 years, they've seen that America's got distracted for fighting these forever wars sponsored by fiat currencies in the Middle East. Well, while the US is distracted, let's start developing all these economic relationships with countries in Latin America and Africa. And a lot of the recent loans have actually been made through the Chinese government, not through the IMF lately. And so that geopolitical influence from the IMF and World bank is starting to wane because of China. So now Pakistan's in the situation, they can go, well, if IMF you don't want to play ball, we'll just go to China and China will say, yeah, we'll give you a loan and we're not going to insist that you stop bitcoin mining. What does the IMF do? Pakistan's called their bluff. And then the irony could be that China could be the economic power that provides Pakistan a path where they can go ahead with their Bitcoin strategic reserve strategy, whereas China wasn't in the mix, they wouldn't have had an option and they would have had to have been dictated terms to by the imf. So the geopolitics of this gets absolutely fascinating. But what's occurring is that every time someone does something in their economic interests, like China acts out of its economic interests because it wants to have more geopolitical influence with Pakistan. But at the same time you see what they're doing, they're actually empowering Bitcoin. [01:25:17] Speaker B: It's rightfully taking power away from the IMF and World Bank. So even if it doesn't end up with China having immense power over Pakistan, it's actually still beneficial for them because they're in a position of subjugation and they're like just undermining the. Essentially, the fiat structure of the dollar side is meaningful to them. You know, like, that's why they're probably like, okay, well, we'll do it with better terms. And because this is going to help us in the long run because we are not going to have to be subject to what the west and the IMF and the United States want. And it's, again, it's going back to that fiat dynamic. Is it starting to shift? And rather than top dog and everybody has to pay for them and nobody can actually remove themselves from the structure, you're going to get a spectrum of power again. And small countries are going to hold small amounts of power rather than just be pawns for the king and queen. [01:26:17] Speaker A: And the cool thing about Pakistan is that Bhutan, El Salvador, people could dismiss them and say, yeah, but they're just small countries. Pakistan is not a small country. I don't know exactly what its population. I think it's around 100 million people from memory. Maybe I'll be proved wrong. But, you know, it's a big country. I mean, it's India, 1.4 million rather. So again, if Pakistan start, India will have to start. And then you have like the most populous country in the world who suddenly has a bitcoin strategy. And then it's from there. It's like you just wait to see how the dominoes fall. If a large nation like Pakistan starts forming a bitcoin strategic reserve empowered through bitcoin mining. You can see why the IMF are not keen on this idea. There's not an idea they want to catch on, but they have diminishing geopolitical influence. [01:27:17] Speaker B: It's funny to think about it in the context like that you brought up that, you know, everybody's focused on Ukraine, everybody's focused on Palestine and Israel and Iran. But when it comes, like, that's just kind of the same story, right? Like, that's kind of the same geopolitical struggle. [01:27:34] Speaker A: That's where the media want us to focus. You know, we, we focus where we're told to focus. We should be. I mean, look, look, of course there's, there's atrocities occurring in all these areas. And they're worthy of our attention. And there's an entire untold story about the real transition of power structures and these legacy financial systems, whether it's central banks or whether it's the ultimate geopolitical international central bank in the form of the imf. [01:28:04] Speaker B: That's not just the same political dynamics playing out really big and escalating. It's a fundamental shift in what those political dynamics are. [01:28:15] Speaker A: Fundamental shift? [01:28:16] Speaker B: Yeah, like it's a small crack in the facade of how the whole thing works. And understandably, that's probably why they're not talking about it. It's. It doesn't. It, it makes them look bad, reveals. It reveals their, their increasing lack of importance rather than their decisions and their actions being the most important and most talked about thing in the room, which is just crazy. [01:28:46] Speaker A: And as you say, it's happening at the same time. So the exact same thing is happening with the European Central bank right now, where they're suddenly throwing up their hands and they're going, oh my goodness, they're starting to realize what the repercussions are of the stablecoin bill and how that could be great for US Dollar hegemony. And they're starting to think, well, we better get going with our digital euro. And so they're investing all this money into a currency which no one wants, no one needs, no one's asked for, has been forced on them without any of the technical capabilities to be able to deliver. But still they're really hoping against hope that people are going to adopt this central bank digital currency. It's extraordinary. I mean, that's really saying how desperate they are to maintain relevance. And if you listen to their arguments for it, it's saying, well, really we need to do this because otherwise the power of the central bank to influence monetary policy has decreased. Oh no. As if that's supposed to be a bad thing. But most people believe that is a bad thing. Most people still live in this world where if you don't have a central bank to keep you safe and influence monetary policy, then all hell will break loose and you'll have financial anarchy. So most people still live in that world where for them to say that people would get concerned because they haven't yet seen that that's a structure that is unnecessary and has in fact caused perversions of economic incentives and has created more wealth disparity and more erosion of government responsibility than ever before. Not that it's created stability, it's created the illusion of stability. Most people haven't realized that Yet, Yeah. [01:30:28] Speaker B: It's so funny to me. And obviously without an extensive background in this, it doesn't seem so obvious. But it's so. Doesn't seem so obvious, like, comically ridiculous when you do understand the whole picture is that people believe they live in a capitalistic free market and they have a central bank. [01:30:49] Speaker A: You know how you're one of the biggest proponents for the central bank in history? [01:30:56] Speaker B: It's one of those. It's Karl Marx, and it happens to be one of those core pillars on the Communist Manifesto. Just so happens to be. It's like. It's literally like being in the concentration camp and like watching your friends go to the oven and being like, man, freedom sucks. Freedom is the worst. It's like, not. [01:31:17] Speaker A: Not. [01:31:17] Speaker B: Dude, that's not. You're. You're not calling. You got your words mixed up, brother. Oh, man. Ah, crazy. It's so crazy. And it's like we literally live in the upside down, you know, like, everything is the opposite of what we say it is. Like, everything. Bitcoin is bad for the environment. No, literally. And everything is literally about the overwhelming incentive of fiat to destroy the environment, to just waste resources endlessly. That war is good for the economy when war is obviously nothing but destruction. I can't. I still can't believe that, like, the number of people that I say this to, and then they just kind of like, forget about it and they go right back to war. Well, at least war will bring us out of the economy, out of the recession or whatever. Like, what are you talking about? Like, if this worked, why would you have to kill people? Why would you actually have to kill people? Why don't you just make a whole bunch of ships, send them out into the ocean, blow them up, and then do it again. Just do that forever, and we'll be infinitely rich. And I just. Like, everything is the opposite of the truth. And it's just the degree to which the mentality and the mental framing is poisoned at every level. At every level. In the culture, in the politics and the economics, in the health, in. In just buying a car. Deciding which snack to get is so insane. It is so insane. If you can just slightly alter how people think about something just a little bit 20 times a day. You. You fundamentally have changed everything about how the world works. [01:33:03] Speaker A: Yeah. There's a phrase in psychology called learned helplessness where you get so habituated to a current reality that you. You don't even try to change it anymore. Or maybe you don't even know that there's an alternative so for a lot of people, they've seen the graphs, they've seen the stats, they've seen that more consumption is good for the economy. They've seen that more war is good for the economy, supposedly. They've seen that IMF loans increase gdp and they go, yeah, well, that seems to make sense. All these guys seem to know what they're doing and it seems too complex for me to understand, so I guess we better leave it to them then. And that's where sovereignty ends. Because you've actually outsourced your trust to a set of people. Something in your bones knows there's something wrong, that there must be a better way. There is a better way, but you just, you've never experienced it. And as humans, we tend to go for what we know, even if it's bad, versus the scary unknown that could be good. And that's what holds back a lot of people from even contemplating bitcoin. That's why you can have people in the streets and you can say, hey, do you want to have $100 in cash or do you want to have $500 in SATs equivalent? I say, oh, I know that sounds risky. Just give me the cash. Thank you. Reflexively, without realizing what they're turning down. Because again, it's unknown, it's scary, and it's not in people's interests who have upheld these existing systems to educate you about what their competitor is. So it's up to all of us and it occurs at our grassroots level and because we're dealing with something systemic. Then again, to someone from the outside, it sounds just wacky and crazy because it challenges on so many multiple different levels and a lot of people just aren't ready for being challenged at that level at that time. So how we build these bridges of communication and lead people gently down the rabbit hole becomes super important. And I've talked to a few people recently and you've done a great job of this two guy, your video where you say, hey, if you want to understand bitcoin, understand bitcoin mining, understand how that works. Because once you understand how bitcoin mining gives you this incredible sound money that otherwise doesn't exist, you know, that's a great starting point for your, your journey for understanding why bitcoin is sound money. How it's not just this weird cooked up illusion which a lot of other altcoins are. [01:35:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, well, dude, we're, I don't want to take up too much of your time. We're like an hour and a half hour and 40 minutes or something like that, you know? Is. Is there anything else specifically that you really wanted to dig into? Because I know we had, like, a couple of threads that I had in my mind. I think I hit most of my big ones. But this has been an awesome conversation. Pretty good. [01:35:59] Speaker A: It's been great. I've really enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. [01:36:02] Speaker B: Hell yeah, man. Dude, thank you for coming on, man. It's good to hang out for a bit. I'm glad. I'm glad you finally came on the show, dude. Why don't you direct people to how. How to find you and, like, anything you want to plug project? You're working on that sort of thing? [01:36:19] Speaker A: Yeah, currently I'm working on this project of putting more bitcoin mining units on landfills so we can mitigate methane emissions, so we can take the bitcoin network carbon negative and kill the remaining pieces of environmental fudge. Show people that it's good for the environment right now, which they might otherwise have a challenge believing. [01:36:39] Speaker B: If you've got a minute, can we dig into that? [01:36:42] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, sure. [01:36:46] Speaker B: All right, so play this out, because I have thought about this, like, a little bit, but it seems like a. How do you even tap into that? What's the process of starting that one? Like, I would just be like, this sounds like a great idea, but how the hell do I even do this? I go to, like, Chad GPT and be like, all right, guys, how do we mine that thing out of a landfill? [01:37:06] Speaker A: Here's what you do. Well, here's what you do in our case. So you've got a choice. Do you deal with landfills that are already flaring, or do you go for the ones that are venting? And of course, me being me, I go for the more difficult option that has a higher impact, which is you go for the ones what you do. Venting. [01:37:18] Speaker B: Right. [01:37:19] Speaker A: So that's more challenging because that means that most of the States, a lot of them are flaring already. Europe is flaring. So that's why I'm in Latin America, because a lot of them are modern landfills. So that means they have these perforated vertical well shafts that release the methane from the landfill into the atmosphere. Why would you do that and stop there? Well, it's because if you get methane buildup, it's a environmental, Local, environmental hazard. You can get subsidence. It can catch on fire. There's health and safety issues. So you've got to get that out of the landfill. Now, that doesn't happen in a lot of places like Southeast Asia and India, they just have these open dumps and you do get subsidence and they do catch on fire. So in a place like Latin America, you have a combination where it's semi modern, you have a modern landfill. But it's. The regulations are arcane, so there's no regulation that says you have to destroy that methane. So it just goes into the atmosphere, contributes to climate change, contributes to bad air quality. In Mexico City, it's a massive issue because you have this whole hollow and it's at altitude and just gathers. Contributes to smog, which again, leads to premature deaths, those million per year premature deaths through methane exposure. And a lot of that's coming from landfills. So what you do is you look for landfill owners who are wanting to, in some case needing to destroy that methane because they've been told by the government, you have to destroy. You've got to do something. You can't just put into air anymore. And then what you do with it is you can either collect it as gas, that's expensive, it's hard, or you can turn it into electrons. You, you put a generator there, you capture the power, you turn into electricity. But then your problem is, well, what do you do with that electricity, right? It's like, okay, maybe it's too far from the grid, or maybe it's close to the grid, but the grid would need a major substation upgrade to handle it. Or maybe the government, like in Costa Rica, where I live, prevents the sale of power to the grid, so you can't sell it to the grid. So you've got all this electricity. What do you do with it? Well, who could use electricity at a cheap rate in the middle of nowhere? What a shame we don't have anyone who can do that, is what you would have said five years ago. But you do. We have bitcoin mining, and they are literally the only, the only user of energy who, because they spend 80% of their operational costs on power, would even consider going to somewhere remote like a landfill and setting up an operation. AI data center won't do it. They don't spend enough on power. Bitcoin mining, they do spend enough on power, and it makes sense for that extra capital investment. So they'll go in there first. And once you have bitcoin mining companies in there that have sunk that capital, then, yeah, you can get AI data centers that can use that capital. So it actually becomes an enabler for other users. It's the catalyst. But what's happened in the meantime is genius because you've solved a problem which is wasted energy. You've solved an environmental hazard, and you've solved a problem for bitcoin miners who are looking increasingly for cheaper forms of energy which are stranded. And so what we're doing is we're financing those bitcoin mining companies and we're looking for more and more landfill sites where we can do this form of mining, which is becoming more common, not less common, as hash price comes down and it becomes more and more important to secure the lowest cost of energy you possibly can. [01:40:41] Speaker B: Man, that makes me want to buy a landfill. What's the name of the project? [01:40:48] Speaker A: We call it Ch4 capital. But you see what's happening here. We started talking about landfills. We've ended talking about landfills. Landfills are. That's the icon of the waste of western civilization. Right. And so bitcoin is helping us in the first case because they're helping to reduce consumption. And at the back end, they're helping to deal with the legacy of past fiat consumption by turning the waste and the pollution into a monetizable asset. It's just this incredible start bracket and end bracket for where bitcoin not only replaces fiat, but it actually cures and heals the land, soil and air which has been putrefied by fiat. [01:41:29] Speaker B: Yeah. It not only literally destroys the incentive, it fixes the disincentive to poison the environment and create tons of waste, but it actually utilizes and cleans up the waste itself after the fact. [01:41:45] Speaker A: It deals with the legacy and it deals with preventing more waste in the future. [01:41:51] Speaker B: That's a great cat. [01:41:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And in terms of where people find me, Twitter's the best way still. So @DSBadden on Twitter and batcoins.com is where I do some of my longer form research. [01:42:06] Speaker B: All right, cool. Oh, Steph, I don't even think I knew about that. Batcoins. B, A T, C O I N. [01:42:12] Speaker A: S with a Z. Oh, okay. [01:42:16] Speaker B: Okay, gotcha. I'll definitely check that out. I don't think I know that one. All right. And I'll have the link to all that in the show notes. Dude, again, thank you for coming on. This was. This was. I really appreciated it. [01:42:29] Speaker A: Been a great chat. [01:42:29] Speaker B: All right, man. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I'll have links to the audio and read for structural adjustment by Gladstein since I mentioned that one. And then also, you know Daniel Batten's Twitter account, the batcoins website, where you can actually read more of his work. I've already brought it up. I'm probably going to scan through it and take a little bit of time here just to read, just for fun. And then also the pub key tools for anybody trying to build a better web. The financial Freedom Report for those wanting to keep up with kind of the news of financial repression around the world. But then also the tools and solutions for liberty and sovereignty and and Chroma to get your light health in line. They've literally been a game changer for me because I spend so much time reading on a screen and we discount how much that affects us. And also there's some really other great tools and, you know, places to buy bitcoin to learn more about it. I mean, obviously you have Bitcoin Audible, what a great resource that one is. And then tons to get into rabbit holes to go down. And just another huge thanks to Daniel for coming on the show. Thanks. I actually have one thing that you could do that will change your life. It will literally alter the fabric of reality and realign you with the universe. You want to subscribe to Bitcoin Audible and follow Guy Swan everywhere that he is. And I am out. Thank you guys so much for listening. I've got a lot to do in the next couple of days, but there is a ton on the way. So stay tuned and I will catch you on the next next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until next time, guys, that's my two sets. Sam.