YouSaid · the spoken record

Saifedean Ammous

lines on the record: 287
first: 2022-05-11
most recent: 2022-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Metal and it can't protect your wealth over time very well. So, what do you do? Well, you could invest, and this is kind of the obvious answer that Keynesians will give you, is, well, you just put your money in an investment. But investment is different from saving. Saving, the whole point of saving is that the thing is liquid and that the thing carries little uncertainty. You know, you just held the gold coin and it just sat there. It did nothing. It didn't take risk. You knew that it was going to be there in 10 years. Investment means you give the gold coin to somebody to go and do something with it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The effect is now it's much, much, much harder for everybody to provide for their future everywhere in the world. It's much harder. So how do I get the equivalent of the old gold coin that I could just put under my mattress and expect it to be there 10 years from now? Well, gold itself isn't cutting it. Gold can't keep up with inflation. And the reason for that is that gold is not being used as a money anymore in that you can't send it internationally. You can't use it to settle trade internationally, which therefore means demand for it monetarily is limited. And so it's becoming more and more an industrial metal. And as a result of the fact that its value doesn't keep up with inflation, it becomes economical to use it in industry. So we're seeing gold become like silver in that it gets used in industry. So the stockpile declines. And so the stock to flow ratio declines as well. And it becomes more and more of an industrial...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the past 60 years, 1960s to 2020, we get World Bank data on that, pretty reliable data on World Bank and European Union OECD data. I ran the numbers on that, weighted average, something like 14%.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing at 500% a year, and the dollar increasing at 8% a year. If you do it by value of the currencies so that you get the total supply fee, that's something like 14%.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preference and finding harder monies that allow us to provide better for the future is how we really, technologically we do that. I think of the hardness of money as being the control knob for our time preference. And you can see this reflected in the 20th century where we go from the money supply increases at around 1.5% under gold to this current situation where over the last 60 years around the numbers on money supply in fiat, the global fiat supply has increased at around 14% per year. So we've done a 10x in the increase in the supply of money annually. 14% is a weighted average. So if you take a basic numerical average for all fiat currencies, you get something like 30%, the average fiat currency increases by 30%. But if you value it by the volume of each currency so that you're not giving equal weight to the Venice Bolivar.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money supply was only increasing at one and a half percent, whereas the production of goods and services was increasing for most cases, for most periods at a higher rate than that. So you could buy more apples and oranges in houses and cars at the end of the 10 years than you could at the beginning of the 10 years. So everybody had a way of providing for the future. And with that, people lower their time preference. And that is reflected across all aspects of life. I think it's not just economic thing. You see it in the savings rate. You know, the ability to deny your self-gratification today. I could take the money that I have and throw a giant party, buy a sports car, buy a yacht, and yet you decide I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keep it so that tomorrow I can throw a bigger party or buy a better yacht or have a better life or give my children a better life. So all of human civilization really is the process of us lowering our time.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The higher our time preference, the less we care about the future. And the process of civilization is the process of lowering our time preference, where we start caring more for the future, we start prioritizing the present less and less. So we start being able to not consume everything that we have and store it. And so money is essential for that. And under the gold standard, everyone in the world had the ability to provide for their future by simply using the same money that they use. You would work a day and you would get paid in a gold coin and you could take that gold coin and keep it safe for 10 years and know that at the end of those 10 years, that gold coin would buy you slightly more than what it bought you the day that you earned it. So anybody could provide for their future and anybody could have very high degree of certainty that whatever they're saving is going to be there when they want it in the future.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This book that I mean, there's a whole bunch of things, and I won't be able to go over them, and I highly recommend reading the book. But if I were to pick one, I would say it's the impact that it has on our time preference, on our valuation of the future. So remember when we started the discussion, I said a key function of money is that it serves as a store of value. And the harder the money is, the better it is at providing us with a way for providing for our future. And so the harder the money is, the less we discount the future. We always discount the future compared to the present. So if I told you, I'm going to give you something today versus giving it to you 10 years from now, the same thing. You would prefer to take it now because then you'd get to enjoy it over the next 10 years. So we always prefer the present to the future. There's always a discount on the future. And that discount is called time preference, the degree to which we prefer the present to the future is called our time preference.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and under gold, everything was tethered to physical reality because there was a market commodity at the bottom of all of this. And nobody could print that market commodity. And so at the end of the month, if your bank made too many payments, if you made too many payments, there was a reckoning. If you were reckless, if you were insolvent, you went out of business. So there was no way to fool that. But then we moved to the fiat century and everything is credit. At the end of the day, the final layer is government credit. And so as long as you're friends with the government, basically, you never go bankrupt. So all kinds of hucksters managed to find their way into getting into position where they don't get bankrupt.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One another, so they won't move the ten dollars from my account to yours. At the end of the day or week or month, they'll tally all of the money that was sent from one bank to the other and then just settle the difference. So turns out at the end of the month, my bank had sent $15 million to your bank and your bank had sent $14 million to my bank. they give them $1 million and that settles it. That finalizes the transaction. So final settlement 3D is like the, you can think about it as the infrastructure of the system. And then you can think of these things as being the higher layer levels. And you had a wonderful discussion about that with Michael Saylor.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. So, the way that it works is let's say right now I'm going to pay you $10 over PayPal or credit card. So it shows up in your PayPal or credit card within a few seconds that I sent you the money and then that's yours. But did it also happen in those 10 seconds that my bank, which could be in another country, sent the money to your bank into your account? There's a lot of infrastructure underneath that. So what actually happened is that I have an account with my bank and you have an account with your bank. And when the message is communicated from my app to yours, my bank crosses out the money and your bank credits you with the money. And then at the end of the day, week or month, banks in the same city will settle with one another, banks in the same country will settle with one another. And banks from different countries will settle.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, arguably it does help in that regard. However, it isn't as if you couldn't have fast transactions built on top of gold. So you could have gold being used for final settlement and you could have banks settling with one another essentially using credit set”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's inevitably going to emerge institutions where it is centralized in physical location. And then these institutions trade liabilities for the gold. So really, the gold standard intrinsically must involve credit as becoming part of the monetary system. It has to be the credit, and because it gets centralized, it can easily be captured by the government. To be fair, The benefits of the fiat system is that it saves us on the cost of moving gold around, which is pretty significant. Generally, you know, moving a bar of gold across the Atlantic is going to cost somewhere between 0.1 to 1% of the cost of the gold bar. So you move it 100 times back and forth between the Atlantic. You need to pay the whole gold bar. The cost of the whole gold bar to move it 100 times across. Well, with fiat money, it's essentially government credit. And so it's just sending...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way that I write the fiat standard is that I try and analyze it as an engineering system in the same way that I wrote the Bitcoin standard. So with the Bitcoin standard, I looked at Bitcoin from first principles and tried to explain how it works for a reader that doesn't really have much of a background in computer science networks or economics. And I thought I'll do the same with the fiat. Let's just ignore the official stories and look at how this thing actually works. I think it does have value in the fact that the reason that they were able to pull it off is because it was not possible for people who don't want to be part of it to use gold independently of governments. This is really the key thing. Gold is just very expensive to move around. The fact that it is expensive to move around means that there's...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing gives you the ability to manipulate money quite like war. When you have a war, you can declare an emergency, you can call all the people who oppose you, traitors, you can get people to support you not because what you're doing is good, but because you play on their sense of tribalism.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult to say, really. I think it goes both ways. I think you can't have permanent war without fiat. And I also think there's a case to be made that you can't really have fiat without war.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not so sure. I wouldn't call copper a shitcoin as much as it is easy money, but I think a government currencies and other altcoins, I think, are shitcoins because somebody could click a button and make 10 times the supply.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shitcoin is my definition of a Shitcoin is that it's any form of money where somebody can produce it. Not necessarily, I guess. I think the difference. So there's easy money, but the shitcoin is something that someone can produce at a rate, at a cost that is different from the market cost. So gold, nobody can make gold except that they dig for it, and the cost of mining gold is generally in the range of the price of gold. Same true for Bitcoin”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was 4.25 pounds per ounce of gold, I think I might be wrong, but I have it in the book. So he'd set that price and it was a matter of national pride for people in England. The sterling is as good as gold because for two centuries it has been stuck to gold. There was the exception of the Napoleonic Wars, but for two centuries mostly it was stuck to that. And so they went off that and then they couldn't go back because if they wanted to go back, they didn't have enough gold. They shipped their gold to the US to finance the war. And they had printed a whole bunch of money that was out there. So this begins the problem for England, and that begins the end of England as the world's superpower. And the way they tried to fight that was to get more and more countries around the world to establish central banks and have unhold British pounds. So they'd hold, you know, basically dumping their bags like just any other shitcoin. If you get people to buy your shit,”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a bunch of people got into parts of the basements of the Bank of England and found this and published it, and now you can download it as a PDF and find all of the amazing details. So they confiscated the gold and they forced people to use the paper and they promised people that as soon as the war is going to be over this is temporary, we're going to be back to using gold. And of course, you know, if you told people in Britain, this is the real scam about fiat, if you told people in Britain in 1914, hey, we're going to go off the gold standard because it's better. I mean, there might have been lynchings of government officials because the British pound at that point, it had been the global currency of the whole world and the fact that they'd managed, the Bank of England had kept the British pound at a fixed rate next to gold for since Newton, you know, the exchange rate, the value of the British pound was set by Isaac Newton himself. He was the warden of the mint and he made the pound, a specific amount of gold. And since then, up until World War I,”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a fascinating book by a guy called John Osborne. So in the 1920s, I think his name was Montagu. He was the chief of the Bank of England. He commissioned one of his secretaries, John Osborne, to study what the bank did during World War I. And it was a study that was kept under wraps confidential in the Bank of England only released 2017, almost a century later.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, y Yeah, this is all new stuff. Obviously, nobody really likes to talk about this stuff because, you know, they're fiat economists, so they don't want to talk about the original sin.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And because it's the prototype that basically the entire planet copied over the last 100 years, we've had this same thing happen. The government prints money because of a stupid reason because somebody in power decided this was worth destroying everybody's livelihood and savings for. And then the consequences come in and then they start covering up with price controls, wage controls. And then that makes things worse. And then of course, throughout all of that, they're promising that we're going to go, oh, and also the other thing they did, which I mentioned in the chapter, is they stopped people from using physical gold and they confiscated the physical, well, they didn't confiscate it, but they took the physical gold and they gave people paper. I call it the fiat white paper. In Bitcoin, we have the white paper. The fiat white paper was that the Bank of England announced to all of its banks and post offices. And from now on, you should not make payment in gold and you should take payment in gold and you should encourage all your customers to turn it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To acquire the capital and the resources they need to produce more bread, which then brings the price of bread down. But price controls destroy that. Then they also implement wage controls. So you want to also make sure that people have high wages. So you raise people's wages artificially, your lower prices artificially, and you cause an economic problem. And this is basically, you know, I use this historical example because it's the birth of fiat because the Bank of England was the most important monetary system in the world at that time.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World War I prices more than doubled. And then the British economy is in bad trouble. Obviously, it's lost a lot of the labor force for four years that was out there fighting. Now those workers come back. You've got prices are up and so people are requiring, are demanding that the government control prices. And the government is trying to fix the problem of inflation by doing price controls, which is what they always do, which is catastrophic because it makes things worse when you implement price controls, when you make, you know, when you say, all right, well, bread can't be sold for more than X price. Well, that's just preventing bread producers from producing a lot of bread. And that's just making the problem worse. If you let the price rise, the extra price, first of all, it makes people economize so people will only buy what they need. And it provides the money for the bread producer.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so how Fiat Money was born. Yeah, let's get back to that. So they finance the war with that money. So what could go wrong? That's where we left off. Well, what could go wrong when you've just printed an enormous amount of credit and used it to buy bonds? What goes wrong is that the value of the currency is going to go down, or in other words, prices of things are going to go up. So during the war, prices keep going up. This is, of course, going to sound very familiar to victims of the 20th century. Government tells you it's because of the war. It's not our fault. It's because of the Germans. It's because of the foreigners. It's because of Putin. It's because of this. It's because of that. This has always been the case. There's always war is a very good cover for inflation, which is caused by monetary phenomena. So then the war ends. And inflation, prices have more than doubled over the past four years, over the four years.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Era under the gold standard they were trading with one another, they traveled, and technology was advancing, and they did not expect this war to last this long. And my favorite story from World War I is the Christmas truce football game, which I mentioned in my book. British and German soldiers at the height of the conflict. They stopped on Christmas Day and they played a football game against each other. I mean, this is not a real war where it's a war for survival. Britain didn't want to end Germany. Germany didn't want to end Britain. It was just kings who were emboldened by the fact that they had a printing press playing with the lives of the people. Take that away, take away the printing press, take away their ability to print money. I think we'd have had a much, much, much better 20th century.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massive, and it wasn't like Britain wanted to take over Germany and move their people into Germany and kick the Germans out. So there was no real value from that war. And that's why the British people didn't want to take part in it. And that's why if they hadn't done this enormously criminal manipulation of printing money to buy the bonds, Britain wouldn't have gotten into the war. Germany would still be a kingdom and Hitler wouldn't rise. And yeah, there'd be small changes in the borders of various European countries. I struggle to see how it could have been worse. I mean, I struggle to see who benefited from four years of carnage in Europe. And then this came at the height of civilization. Before that, the people of Europe had the golden...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. And I think when you have a true threat and a true evil and a true force that people really do think is genuine, you don't need to convince them. I mean, when it's real, people will want to fight and people will want to pay to fight. And I mean, I think on this particular example, I think the best way to fight Hitler is to have not fought World War I and not take out the Kaiser of Germany. If Britain and Britain and the US had not gotten involved in World War I, which really is the senseless war about nothing, what was in it? And what was the goal from anybody fighting that war? If you look at it, after World War I, there were very minor adjustments in the borders of the countries that were participating. So Germany lost some land, Austria lost some land, but really it wasn't all that...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how it wasn't at the gold standard mostly because under the gold standard, the government couldn't print gold. And so they had a budget and they had a certain amount of gold. And that wasn't just, you know, they couldn't infinitely increase it. They couldn't tax their population at will. And it's very difficult to take money from people, you know, go knock on doors and search everybody's home, see where they're hiding their gold. It's very complicated. On the other hand, when you gave them paper money, which is what the case was in 1914, you could take their wealth just by printing the money. And that's what changed everything when it comes to war. That's why the 20th century was the century of total war. Because under the gold standard, governments fought until they ran out of their own gold. Under the fiat standard, with paper money, with credit money, governments fought until they ran out of liquid wealth in the hands of all of their citizens.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideally, you don't. No, but I mean, of course, there are sometimes you want to fight for self defense. Yeah, you finance it, taxation Or”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he never could ask the question okay, and then what? So we just printed money to buy two thirds of these government bonds What's going to happen next? What could go wrong? Not a question Keynesians ask themselves because their jobs depend on not thinking about what's going to go wrong.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they took money essentially from the Bank of England, bought two thirds of the bonds that financed the war. And that was how England was able to keep going into the war. So that's essentially what they did is what we today know as quantitative easing. Back then, they just got, they printed money from the Bank of England or credit, printed credit, gave it to those two employees. They bought the bonds. The government could fight the war. Sounds like it's a nice idea. And Keynes, of course, being a huckster himself, he himself said, he wrote a letter to the Bank of England that was uncovered recently, and he said, I congratulate you on this masterly manipulation, I quote it in the book Masterly Manipulation is what he called it, that they basically managed to buy the bonds using the money of the government. And of course, he never had an idea of how economics works.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this only came to light in 2017. Only a third of the bonds were actually subscribed. So people, British people, and this is perhaps the greatest thing that they've ever done, they decided fighting a war in Europe is just not my ideal way of investing my capital. It's a stupid thing. Why should I go and fight? Because the Austrians and the Germans and the Serbians are at each other's throats. I'd rather invest in something else. So they only bought a third of the bond issue. And then the astonishing thing that happened, which really set the tone for the next century of war murder Keynesianism and theft and inflation was that the Bank of England went and got two of the high-ranking officials in the Bank of England to buy the other remaining outstanding two-thirds of the bonds under their own name with a line of credit from the Bank of England, so it wasn't their own money.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascinating history of the birth of the fiat monetary system is something that really only got uncovered in 2017. This is extremely, extremely interesting. In 1914, Britain joined World War I. And if you remember your history books, it's famous that this was called the August Bang Holiday. It was just going to be a few weeks where the British troops were going to go and kick European ass and come back triumphant. And most European countries believed that. But then the war kept on dragging on. And of course to finance the war, the government, this is what they used to do under the gold standard governments would issue bonds. So you'd issue the bonds. People would buy the bonds. The money would be used to finance the military. And then the government would pay off the bond over the next five or ten or twenty years. So for World War I, the British government, the British Treasury issued bonds for financing the war.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's peace and prosperity, but then over time, the next generation of kids become a lot more high time preference. They haven't worked hard. They don't understand the meaning of hard work. So they become more likely to. Engage in destructive behavior. So raise taxes, pass laws that require people to do things even when they're not hurting anybody. And that ends up basically eventually destroying the kingdom.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and if I were king, which is highly unlikely to ever happen, but I think if you look historically, the dynasties that have succeeded at lasting for a long time, the key thing that they managed to do is to basically be libertarian. The key to being a good king is to just leave people alone, let them do whatever they want, don't rob them too much or rob them as little as possible or maybe even don't rob them. And as a king, use your power only to punish people who aggress against others. Don't use your power to enrich yourself and enrich your friends. And that's really, like, if you look at smart kings, this is what they do. This is what they teach their children. And the cycle of kingdoms is that, you know, the first king understands this, builds the empire. And the first couple of generations, they get this, and the society is free, the economy is free. And because of that, the...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only way that all humans are self-interested. And so the only way that you're president in a democracy can provide for themselves is to maximize the amount of exploitation that they can do of the population during their brief stint. And then when he's out, you get a new one, and then that one wants to start all over again. So every four years, you get a new robber. With monarchy, you sign up for a multi-generational subscription to the same family. And when they have the security of knowing that his great grandson is going to be taking money from your great grandson, suddenly his interest in yours align because they both want your great grandson to be prosperous and have enough money for his great-grandson to take.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there might be a case that, so as I was saying, you need a majority of the population to get together and decide, nope, whatever is the case, the answer is voluntary. No matter how bad the disease is, it doesn't justify forcing people to stay home. You want to stay home, stay home, you want to wear a mask, take a vaccine, do whatever you want, but you can't force others to do that. So you need a majority of the people to strongly believe in this principle in order to get it in a democracy. Whereas in a monarchy, you just need the king to get it. And I think the reason kings are more likely to get it is that kings have a low time preference where they think about things for many generations, whereas in a democratic system, your president is likely only going to be there for four years or eight years or ten years or five years or whatever it is.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illness comes along. Unfortunately, the last couple of years showed that the vast majority of people are going to freak out and lose their mind and support whatever their stupid TV tells them to support. And, you know, there's always a current thing. And the media is always telling you that we need this current thing as an excuse for more and more government.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm not joking. And I think, I mean, I think morally and intellectually, I'm an anarchist, but the reality is we find ourselves in a world in which a lot of people are not. And the question is, what is the thing that is going to provide you with more freedom? And I think I'm recently coming around to the idea that monarchy might be the best way to provide people with the largest amount of freedom because to have a free society, you need a majority, perhaps, or a plurality of people to have a very strong understanding of libertarian ideas, to have a low time preference, to have a preference for the future. So you need a majority of the population to not decide to go and do something insane in order to continue to have a free society. When respiratory”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, full anarchist. I mean, I don't find any justification for the use of force. And I think recently perhaps, maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I'm getting senile. Maybe I'm getting wise. Who knows? But I'm beginning to become more sympathetic to monarchy. So I'm an anarchist.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to be more accurate, the distinctions between anarchism and monarchism. I think libertarianism is kind of a vague term that can encompass both.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choose to volunteer associate with people, and you only give your money to people you want to voluntarily give the money to. So you either buy their product or invest in their production. In that situation, the only way that a company can get my money is if they build a product that I value, or if they convince me that they are going to use it in a way that's profitable. And I may be wrong. I may invest in a company that fails, or I may invest in a company that turns out to be fraudulent, but that's my fault. It's my fault that I gave them my money and then it turned out to be scoundrels. But it's a totally different problem when we make it mandatory. It's violence. It's a crime to put a gun to my head and force me to subsidize companies and force me to come at Certain conclusions.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and it ends up just being the place where corporations, individuals, free markets, they can't coerce without the resort to government. So, you know, you think about all the examples of corrupt corporations doing bad things, it's always because they have certain privileges from governments. Because as it exists, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, all of these giant corporations, they can't do anything to me without government. They can't take any of my money and they can't force me to buy their stuff. And so doesn't matter to me. So if Coca-Cola is corrupted, that's a problem for Coca-Cola customers. That's a problem for Coca-Cola shareholders. That's a problem for anybody who deals with Coca-Cola. But as somebody who doesn't drink their stuff and isn't a shareholder, I have absolutely no interest in what happens. They could all go bust tomorrow and I don't care. I don't buy their product and I don't, and I'm not a shareholder. So in this situation where you”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choose to provide the good or to buy the good. That cannot be considered an alternative on an equal footing to a situation where one person or one entity gets to decide for everybody and those who disagree go to jail.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go to jail. You can't not pay for it. That's really the asymmetry which the market doesn't have, which is why, in my opinion, it's not as if I'm being stubborn and stuck on the idea that I want a market and that the government can't work. It's presented as if we're choosing between two different machines. Should we use an Apple or a PC? And I'm just constantly choosing one of them and saying that the other one can't work. It's not equivalent. It's not two machines. We're comparing between a machine and a gun to the head. We're comparing between a situation in which anybody anywhere is free to provide the service or the good and anybody anywhere is free to buy it from them or reject to buy it from them. So anyone can build a power plant. Anyone can succeed at it. Anybody can fail at it. Anybody can build it in a way that I can choose to take part in or not take part in. I can build my own. So we have a situation which 10 million people, let's say, they each can free.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of them, if you don't want to pay, if you don't want to, you know, all right, I don't want to be part of your power plant. I want to get my own generator. I don't want to do it. I don't want to pay for it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Luck to anybody who's going to be dating you if you think putting a gun to people's head is comparable to a relationship.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fundamental problem here is the idea that there is a feedback mechanism when there is coercion in one party, when one party can employ coercion and the other one cannot. So in other words, I'm going to put a gun to your head. I'm going to take your money and I'm going to use it to buy more guns for me to put against your head. But somehow you're going to put a paper in a box and that's going to deactivate my guns.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source