Transcript+
Welcome to The New Frontier, a Bitcoin centric podcast that bridges the gap between the transformative world of Bitcoin and the unique financial landscape of the Middle East. This podcast is brought to you by Onramp Mino and is Co hosted by Ralph Debran, Managing Partner, Onramp Mino and Harris Irfan, CEO of Cordoba Capital Markets and advisor to Onramp Mino. Ralph and Harris have built their careers in traditional finance, accumulating extensive experience across capital markets, investment banking and asset management. Each episode delves deep into how Bitcoin is reshaping finance, technology and investment within the region and beyond. From macroeconomic trends to real world applications, and from Islamic finance to sustainable energy practices, this show covers it all. In this episode, we have a truly special guest who has profoundly shaped the global understanding of Bitcoin and sound money. He's an internationally best selling author. Whose? Works include the Bitcoin standard, the Fiat standard, and principles of economics. His insights have influenced thinkers, investors, and policy makers around the world. He's also the founder of the Safety dean.com platform dedicated to educating people on Bitcoin and sound monetary principles. We are honored to welcome to the show Saifuddin Ammuth. Get ready for an enlightening discussion that delves into the principles of economics. The future of Bitcoin. And what it means for both conventional and Islamic finance. Let's jump right in. Hey everyone, thank you for joining the New Frontier. We have a special guest today, Saifuddina Moose, a best selling author and one of my favorite authors actually here to talk about, you know, the general macroeconomics of the Middle East. So say first of all, thank you for being here. I'm joined by my Co host, Harris Irfan. Say thanks. Really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you so much for having me, it's a pleasure. Great, great. So we're just going to dive straight into it. So safe given your work on macroeconomics, given you know, you thought in the Middle East, you spent time in the Middle East, had a few questions for you. So let's start it off with how have the economic, economic policies and strategies in the Middle East evolved in recent years? I mean, you've been here for quite some time. You've seen it evolve and you know, I want to understand more so in the context of diversifying away from oil dependence because the past few years, Middle East and oil have been intertwined. You can't think about one without the other, so. Please tell us your. Views on that. Yeah. I think the the transformation that has happened in the Gulf over the last couple of decades is truly remarkable. I think the World Cup in putter was a was a real milestone of a kind of very strong statement of the kind of economic capacity that exists in the region. Because I don't think there is anywhere else in the world that can host A1 city World Cup. I don't think any other city can host this. It's an enormous, enormous undertaking in terms of the infrastructure. So the world's major cities will have one or two World Cup level stadia. Maybe there are some big cities that can have three within driving distance from one another. Some of the very big metropolises, No cities that I know of have eight World Cup ready stadia. Qatar managed to pull together 9 and they managed to get a lot of people to attend it and that was just from the people in Qatar. It was because of extensive amount of travel for people coming from all over the world through Qatar Airlines and other airlines into Qatar. So I think that in terms of organization was a truly monumental achievement. And the fact that it went so smoothly and it went so well, and of course it's reflected in the quality of the football because for the players, it was the best World Cup ever because they didn't have to travel. They were all in one hotel for five weeks. So they managed to get into, you know, acclimatize, get into the proper rhythm, not have to move hotel rooms every day or two, which usually ends up ruining most World Cup campaigns. Just a lot of travel and players having to adjust and acclimatize it. Usually by the time of the semi final, one of the teams has a major advantage because it's playing close to where it played its previous game, whereas the other team had to travel 4 hours by airplane. And it ends up being a decisive factor in the game. And so the Qatar World Cup managed to get rid of that and it wasn't something cheap. It's not something easy to replicate. You don't have other countries that are capable of doing something like this. So I think that was truly remarkable, and I think it's really raising a lot of eyebrows. Obviously during the World Cup, there was a lot of negative publicity and propaganda about Qatar and about the region in general, but I still think the achievement itself was truly remarkable. At the end of the day, nobody's going to remember any of that stuff. Everybody's going to remember the One City World Cup. But many people I know say that it was the best World Cup in their living memory and I agree with that. I think it was amazing. Yeah, I mean, just in terms of the quality of the football, it was incredible. It was every game was what? Maybe not every game, but it was it was the best World Cup. I think I used to think the 2014 World Cup was the best I'd seen in my life. I think this one takes the award now. Yeah, I wish I was closer to home because I'm a big football fan and I would love to attend, but sadly I was in Canada where soccer is not a thing. It is, it's it's a bit of a thing. Canadians like their football, they just don't have a league. That's the problem in the US and Canada. They don't have a proper league. They have a franchise system which destroys the development of the sport. Yeah, I agree. And there's just so little investment in that space that, you know, the players don't get their value. You know, it's they'd rather do something else like play hockey or, you know, American football or something like that. And you know, it's not just Qatar though, save. I mean, you have Dubai Expo, you have Saudi Expo. It seems though that there's a lot of spending happening and over the long term seems to be paying off because it's like you said, raising eyebrows from an economic policies point of view. So do they do things differently in the Middle East compared to what we're accustomed to in the West in terms of monetary policy, fiscal policy? Yeah. I think one thing that's noticeable about the Gulf in particular is they've probably got the best monetary policy of, you could argue, any central bank in the world, because they've had their currencies back to the dollar. And none of them, I think, have depreciated significantly over the past 30-40 fifty years or so. And they've managed to maintain that effectively saying that they're not making any money from seniors. So inflation is not a source of income for the Gulf economies. They charge some taxes, very little taxes, but generally they leave people alone and they have an enormous amount of economic freedom. I think if you were to objectively assess the economic freedom in the Arab Gulf versus Europe in the US today, I think it's a lot freer in the aspects that matter the most, particularly taxation and inflation. So still of course they import the inflation from the West because the dollar is an inflationary currency and they're pegged to the dollar. They have to be pegged to the dollar almost, but well, they don't have to. But now we have Bitcoin, we're going to get to that. But given that it's the strengths of knowing that you have to use a dollar based system, they don't as good as you can expect. The currencies haven't devalued, taxes are very low. And I think what's truly remarkable now as you see that across the West, security is breaking down pretty much everywhere and the West is becoming less and less secure. The Gulf presents a truly good place for people to go and raise their families, for people to live. And so people who are interested in families, I think it's becoming more and more attractive to go there because the pay is good, the taxes are low, and the kids can play in the street. Very few places left in the world where kids can just go, wander out in the streets and play on their own. So I think this is truly remarkable. And the way that I see it, the way that I try and the way that I understand this remarkable transformation these places have witnessed, I think it's down to the fact that this is essentially a government that is in the market for a population. So they have had to learn how to run their governments properly because they need to get foreigners. All of these economies depend heavily on foreigners. And that means they're constantly trying to get the best deal out of the foreigners that they get and constantly trying to offer a better deal to the foreigners that they get. So I think this is similar to what you see in terms of markets. If there is a, if there's a firm that has a monopoly on its customers, you know, if you have the only gas station in a town or the only hospital in a town and by law nobody else can open another hospital, you have a, a captive population. And then you start neglecting the quality and focusing on how you can maximize the revenue that you can get from this captive market. Whereas in a situation where you have to compete for customers, you need to constantly be offering a better deal than other people. So the Gulf, I think since most of these countries or I think all of the countries have a majority of their population that is actually foreign, not local, they've developed extremely good institutions to try and attract people because why would people want to go live in a country that is not theirs unless it offered a very compelling package. And so I think this has helped them maintain this kind of competitive edge by constantly maintaining an attractive package for foreigners to come. And now we see people from all over the world coming. It's not just cheap labor, it's very expensive labor as well. And it's some of the most high skilled people want to move to these parts of the world because they've got a much better deal going on. I also think my other hobby horses to talk about monarchy. I'm a big fan of monarchy. It's not a very popular position to take. Very few people are brave enough to say this in public. But I have no problems with it. I think monarchy is a much better model for governance than democracy. Ideally, you know, I'm an anarchist. I don't want government, but pressed to choose. I'd rather have a king and a monarchy in particular, because I think the difference is that the monarch has a lot more security and power. And so he expects to be in power for a long time and he expects his children and grandchildren and great, great, great grandchildren to remain in power. So he has a time frame for his decision making that takes into account the well-being of you and your descendants generations from now, because he wants to make sure that his own kids are going to have a prosperous, peaceful Kingdom to be able to run and benefit from. And so I think this provides for an alignment of incentives that you don't see in democracies where every leader gets in and has four, five, 710 years, whatever in and in and in that time they can't, they are king, but it's only a short period of time. They can do whatever they want. They can do all kinds of things to benefit themselves and their children, but they can only do it for seven years. So they've got a very high time preference in that period. They care a lot about what happens in those seven years and they discount what happens later. And so that encourages them to borrow at the expense of the future and in order to finance the present. And they do that financially, but also in metaphorically in all kinds of different ways in terms of sacrificing the future for short term gain. So I think this and I think the Arab Gulf is a great advertisement for monarchies and you compare them to Arab countries that are not monarchies and you see very stark differences that I think should give a lot of the intellectuals in the Arab world a lot more to think about than they usually do. Very few people like to say the pro monarchy line, but even even monarchs, even pro people who are pro monarchy try and justify it by appealing to constitutionalism and appealing to parliamentary reforms. And that, you know, well, we're striving toward a democratic idea. But I, I think I'm unapologetically pro monarchy in a, in, in a strict sense, in the sense of the more decision making concentrated in an individual, the better he's able to carry out decisions. But I'd say the, the key thing for the success of this model, the way they are, I understand it, is that you need to have the respect for the right of people to exit or secede. And so here this I, I base this on the work of the Prince of the ruling Prince of Liechtenstein, Prince Hans Adam. He's written a book called The State in the Third Millennium. And in it he explains what he views as the vision of human freedom and what the state should offer in the third Millennium. And I think it's a very compelling and very mind opening vision wherein he says, essentially, look at how your iPhone is made. It's not made because all the iPhone users get to vote on who gets to be CEO. They don't get to vote on who gets to handle the design committees. They don't get to vote on any of that stuff. There's ACEO when he takes decisions and his decisions are practically final and that there is no right to appeal for the customers or for the workers. But everything is voluntary. And you as a customer, you only have one right, which is you could choose to buy it or not buy it. And the fact that you could just exit, the fact that you could choose to buy or not buy the good is what encourages and incentivizes everybody in that corporate structure, from the CEO down to the lowest employee to do their best. Because there are no bailouts in this world where if you don't deliver a good product, people are just not going to buy it and then your business is ruined. So that's ultimately what it comes down to is the right to exit. And what Prince Hans Adam presents is the idea that if this was the model for government, if people, if, if everybody respected the right for self determination, the right for secession so that individuals or individual regions could secede and exit countries, then governments would be a lot more accountable and they'd be a lot more efficient. And so for him, you know, all the last couple of 100 years of political thought are all about participatory democracy and getting more and more people to vote on decisions that affect them. But he's saying, no, we shouldn't go in that direction. We should go in the direction of CEOs, have CEOs who have more executive authority in their hands, but give people the right to secede and exit. So I think in a sense the Gulf is an embodiment of that because that that's what's happening in the Gulf because the majority of the population truly has the right to exit. At the end of the day. If you're British or Australian or Nepali or Egyptian or Syrian and you're in Saudi Arabia or Dubai or Qatar, at any point in time, you can choose to leave and that's it. Well, I mean, you have contractual obligations. You might need to pay money or something, but you can finish then your contract and leave. You don't have to stay at any point in time they can kick you out because they're very clear stipulations in the contract that specify what are the things that you're allowed and not allowed to do. And so because of that, there's a very clear relationship and it's continuously improving to the benefit of both parties. Yeah, that's. That's yeah. Sorry Ralph, you make some very powerful arguments there. I mean, I was somewhat anti monarchy until I heard your argument for why monarchy is low time preference. And then you appeal to my, my sort of sense that, you know, we should be planning for the future and our grandchildren and, you know, further down the line. And that's for me a very powerful argument. And it, it flipped my thinking on that. And having spent eleven years living in the Middle East, I also came to the conclusion that despite a lot of the stuff that you hear in the West about, you know, places like Dubai and Qatar and Bahrain and so on, actually it was a fantastic place to bring up a young family, a secure place, a place where, you know, I felt in many ways safe and free, perhaps more so than than other places in the West. So, you know, I, I think there is a very powerful argument there. Lots to unpack as well. And you, you, you even briefly having talked about, you know, low time preference, you touched on Bitcoin. And so I'm going to bring the discussion to well, the basis, I think let's, let's take a step back. Let's talk about Austrian economics because that's really your specialist subject. I, up until 2017, I was an insider, you know, I, I was a sort of Fiat insider, worked for a bank and I vaguely had come across this, this theory of Austrian economics. I'd read Derek O Dewani's book The Problem with Interest, which had a powerful impact on me. And, you know, many people that I knew and I, I guess I never really appreciated it until I did a deep dive on Bitcoin. And at that point in 2017, I left the industry and focused on this. I guess we could spend weeks discussing this subject you we could fill textbooks with it, but I guess in a in a relatively short space of time. Can you give us some background on the economic theories, the principles behind Austrian economics and and how they differ from mainstream theories? OK, well, first of all, I'm not going to let this pass without an advertisement. I've written an entire book to answer your question. So I wrote a whole book called Principles of Economics. It's out in English and a bunch of languages, and it's being translated to Arabic. It should be out very soon from Jarir, from Dar Jarir in Saudi Arabia. And this is a book that's written from the Austrian perspective and it's just a full treatment of the main ideas in economics is 18 chapters. Each chapter has a specific concept in economics like capital, labor and so on. Now, it's obviously very hard to summarize a whole book in a couple of minutes, but it's not going to stop me from trying anyway, so let's just go ahead. I would say the key starting point and the key difference between the Austrian School of Economics and the other schools of economics is that the Austrian School of Economics analyzes economics through the lens of human action, that they're looking at human beings acting. I guess a good way of thinking of it is that the material world around us, every single thing that we see that is non human, you could think of it as like as if it is putty that we as human beings shape with our hands into whatever form and shape that we want. We are able to manipulate that stuff in order to produce the things that we want from it. And it's all a product of our reason. We develop reason. We start thinking about what we want to do to the world, we act, we bring about changes in the world. And so if you want to understand the material world, you need to understand it through the eyes of the humans that shape it through and, and through the hands of the humans that act upon it. So how how this translates practically is that within the Keynesian or mainstream or neoclassical schools of economics, there is an analytical framework that is not based on human action primarily it is based on mathematical aggregates. And so in macroeconomics in particular, there are all these mathematical aggregates like unemployment, inflation, GDP, industrial output, aggregate demand. And we try to establish scientific relationship between those aggregates in the same way that physics tries to establish scientific relationships between its variables and its analytical units. And so in in physics that you'll try and develop regular relationships to understand, you'll try to study the regularities of relationships to understand the relationship between a pressure volume and temperature in a gas. And similarly in macroeconomics, they ape the traditions of science by trying to apply that into the on to the question of economics in in a macro sense. And so they imagine that if we just study GDP and unemployment and industrial output and these and inflation and all those things hard enough, then we're going to be able to uncover the physical laws of the universe that govern these metrics. And that for the Austrian is pseudoscience, that for the Austrian is invalid and methodologically. And so you may as well be using tarot cards because these aggregates are made-up in our mind and we are measuring certain phenomena. And there's no reason that the phenomena that we are able to measure through whatever incomplete and imperfect statistical office technique applied by government agencies, there's no reason to assume that the universe has to bend it to these fake aggregates that we make. And the reason for that, there are many reasons. And Hayek gets into a lot of philosophical stuff about the discussion of this. But ultimately the really precise answer is what Mises specifies, which is that the reason that you can't do that in the economic sciences is because in the natural sciences you have constant constants. You have physical constants that you're able to establish. You can, you're able to measure what is a meter and what is an inch and what is a second and what is a Kelvin temperature or centigrade or speed or all of these things that all these metrics for them that you're able to measure and reproduce between different locations between different people. But in economics, the, there is no such constant with which to measure things because all things are valued in the human mind. And so this brings us to the perhaps the main starting axiom of Austrian economics, which is the idea that value is subjective. And that's where the Austrians differ from others. So the others think that valuation is something that you can calculate, whereas for the Austrians valuation is something that is subjective. It is constantly changing and it is marginal, and it's the key term meaning that it is always determined at the margin, at the place and time where the process of valuation is taking place. Value is not something that is inherent in goods. So if you assume that value is something that is inherent in good, then that you can calculate it, then you can come up with all kinds of amazing equations and models and mathematical ways of representing economic phenomena, which can get you incredibly boring jobs in academia or more look at the jobs in banking. But let's face it, they don't really do an accurate job of describing how the world actually works quantitatively because it's just, again, for the issue that I mentioned, which is that there are no constants. So you're constantly making, trying to create relationships or trying to examine relationships that don't necessarily exist because ultimately what is shaping what is happening to all of your statistics and to all of your theories and to all of the metrics that you're counting? What is shaping it as human beings acting? And human beings are not a, an inert gas. Human beings have their own will and they have the ability to give value to things. And so it is their action that shapes everything. It is not, it is not an inanimate object. It is something that has a soul, has a will of its own. And so it acts on the world. It understands the world and it brings about changes in the world. And so these are the causative factors in reality and the regularities that you might see in social phenomena. You can, you can see those things, you can establish them, you can see how they can be made, and you can see the degree of reliability of them. But you'll never be able to establish the same kind of reliability that you do with scientific experimentation, like with gases or physical objects where you can determined with extreme precision, say, deliver a projectile to a particular distance because you're able to calculate those things precisely. But you don't have that in Austrian economics. So this is a little bit too much on the methodology. And that's basically chapter one. So we still have 17 more chapters. Let's see how far we can get along. But I'll, I'll, I'll putting the methodology aside and focusing on the practical implications of this form of economics. I'd say perhaps the most practical, the important way in which they differ from the mainstream economics is on the question of money. Because for everybody else, money is whatever the state says is. And the only question that an economist needs to bother his little brains with is the question of how do we get the government to manage money best according to some desirable moral subjective outcome that whichever School of Economics has. So whether it's for the good of the workers or the good of the GDP or the good of the nation or whatever it is, the only question is how do we get the government to manage that money properly. And the Austrians are completely heretic on this question because they their whole point is that they just want to get that guy asking the question about how do we manage the money. They want to get him away from your money, from our money. That's essentially the perspective from the Austrian school is how do we stop people trying to manage money? Because money is a creation of the market. And so the same critique that you would get from a free market economist on why you wouldn't want a central planning board to handle, say, the potato market or the car market or any kind of market, and why you'd rather have a free market that with free entry and exit affirms. The same critique would apply to the question of money. You wouldn't want the government to decide what money is, because when they do that, then they end up bastardizing the money. They end up inflating the supply. They mix the metals with cheap metals or they print more money and then they suspended the mobility of money for gold and they create all kinds of problems. So from the Austrian perspective is this, it's just this completely alternative understanding of reality to the mainstream economist where the mainstream economist think of themselves as the firefighters that are helping bring down the fire. What is the Austrians are just out there saying these guys are the arsonists. And for most arsonists, they don't realize that the arsonists. So they find it completely insane that they think they're putting out a fire. They're just, you know, pouring gasoline onto this. They're thinking they're helping. And then all these crazy people are telling them, don't pour gasoline on the fire. You're making it worse. So this is kind of, I would say, the the root of the misunderstanding between the two schools. So, I mean, there's a danger that I might now describe the central bankers of the Middle East as as arsonists and I, I don't want to do that. But do you, do you think there is a future in which economic policies in the Middle East could be, might be determined by and led by Austrian economics? I think so, because I think there's a, there's a, there's a huge amount of congruence between the two. So initially when I first started studying Austrian economics, that was what really made me begin to understand Islamic finance or to start to think about Islamic finance initially. Because before, before I studied Austrian economics, my, I was, you know, I was up until I was 27 or so, I had not been introduced to the Austrian school in any series since I may have read one article by Hayek long time ago. But up until 27 or so, I was still looking at the world through mainstream economic lens but once. And so according to that world, you know, I have the kind of general idea of what Islamic finance is. That interest is bad. And but I didn't give much thought to it. But then when I started coming across Austrian economics, which made a lot of sense to help me in helping me understand how the world actually works and how economics actually functions. It immediately started to give a vivid meaning to the ideas in Islamic finance or in Islamic Sharia banking in general, the ideas of why interest is bad and usually and so on. And I would say the Austrians would disagree with this. So like the Rothbard and Mises have written extensively on the problems of on, on why interest is necessary in an economy and why trying to ban interest is counterproductive. But in this book, in Principles of Economics, you know, the whole book is Rothbard and Mises. And I agree with them pretty much on everything. I introduced a few things that they didn't really discuss in detail, which I discussed in more detail. But there's one place where I disagree with them and it is on the issue of interest. In this book, I make the Austrian case for why I believe on a free market interest lending would be eliminated. And I think this is we're probably far away from a time when this happens, but I think there is a strong case to be made for this being the natural state of things because the Austrians, I think offer the best explanation of the phenomenon of interest. Why is it that we have interest on the market? And the answer is because of time preference. Time preference is the degree of discounting of the future, so how much you discount the future. So from the Austrian perspective, the higher a society or an individual's time preference, the higher the interest rate that he would ask for in order to sacrifice some good today. So if I have $100 today, the higher my time preference, the higher the interest that I need to charge you in order for me to give up on this $100 now and for you to pay it to me next year. So the more I discount next year, the more money you need to pay, right? Because I if, if I have a high time preference, if I don't think about the future, if I'm very immediate gratification focused as a person, then what happens one year from now doesn't really matter much to me. So I discounted heavily. And so in order to give up money today for tomorrow, I'm going to ask for a high interest rate. And so as my time preference declines, the interest rate would be expected to decline. And so from the Austrian perspective, Hans Herman Hopper shows that if you look at the history of interest rates, and we've got a book called 5000, or I think it's called The History of Interest Rates. It's by Homer and Silla SY, Double LA and Homer 2 authors. Or maybe that's one author, I forget, but if you Google those words, you'll find the book. But anyways, it's a very interesting study that looks at 5000 years of data on interest rates going back to Babylon and all kinds of historical sources. And it finds that there's an unmistakable 5000 year trend of interest rates declining over time. And this had reached its lowest point at the turn of the 19th century, at the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, when interest rate, the lowest interest rate was what the Bank of England was charging the government, the British government, which was around 2 1/2 percent at that point. So that was the lowest interest rate recorded in history, more or less. I mean, not perhaps not obviously there have been lower loans, but it's the lowest prevalent market interest rate or generalized market interest rate that we've had. And this is a, a, a, a trend that has lasted for 5000 years. It's not completely smooth because there's a lot of jumps up and down in it. You get a plague, you get a disaster, you get war, you get all of those things. They raise people's time preference and they make capital more expensive and they raise the interest rates. But unmistakenly you see this process of civilization, as Hans Herman calls it, the process of civilization is the lowering of our time preference. As we become lower in our time preference, we start thinking about the future more. We start behaving in a way that is more civilized and more conducive for long term prospering. And that is reflected in say, being more moral, more civil, better neighbor, better husband, better father, better student at school, just all kinds of ways in which you take part, take part in society in a way that is conducive for long term benefit. Ethics. Not necessarily the present, the expense of the long term. So that's the process of civilization. It's reflected in all these non economic ways, but it's also reflected in the economic way wherein we start saving more and we start accumulating more capital and that makes capital more abundant and so that brings down the price of capital. So this came to a halt in 1914 when World War One broke out and the world went off the gold standard. And our time preference has been destroyed and we have been going through a hell of a ride over the last century. But I think my hypothesis is this. If the world had remained on the gold standard for the last 110 years, so from 1914 we've been on the gold standard for another 110 years, what would have happened? Imagine the whole world has access to gold as money. Now I argue in the Bitcoin standard and in the Fiat standard and the principles of economics in more detail. I argue that that the hardness of money is like a control knob for your time preference and that when money is hard, then you're able to save for the future. And so if you're able to save for the future, you the future becomes less than certain. So your time preference declines and you start thinking about the future more and more. Whereas when you're money is easy, when your money switched to easy mode and then your money supply keeps growing, your ability to provide for your future self is seriously compromised. And now you shift towards short term focus. How do I survive? You see an extreme version of this in hyperinflation scenarios. In hyperinflation, people are living day-to-day and they start figuratively and literally eating the seed corn of the future, the food that they should be growing for next season. They have no choice but to eat it today because there will be no next year if you don't eat it today. They cut down tree bearing fruits for warmth in the winter. And so that's high time preference. That's prioritizing the present at the expense of the future. And when we destroy the money, we raise our time preference enormously. And I think history shows this all throughout. You see it when mores break out, the currency collapses, people's time preference goes up. Anything happens to the currency, time preference shoots through the roof. So imagine if the last 110 years we'd remained on the gold standard. So everybody in the world has the ability to save in the money that does not get easily debased. The money supply under the gold standard increases that are only around 10, not only around 1 1/2% per year. So imagine 110 years. Everybody on earth in the last 110 years has been robbed by inflation. Everywhere in the world. Your currency has been destroyed in terms of its value. It's not at 1% of the value that it had. So if your grandfather, a great grandfather 110 years ago, if he bought some money and he put it aside for you in any form of money, it would have lost value significantly over the last 110 years. Now imagine if it was gaining value every year, and imagine there was peace, there was no war, and the world continued to grow the amount of capital that we have, increase the availability of capital, and make more capital abundant. What's going to happen to the price of capital? What's going to happen to the interest rate? What's going to happen to the time preference? Time preference is going to decline. The interest rate is going to decline. The price of capital is going to decline. Eventually the price of capital is going to decline below the cost of storing capital, at which point, as a capital owner, it's profitable for you to lend at a nominal interest rate of 0. Because let's say the cost of storing capital is say, 1% per year. Then if the market interest rate is 1%, then you're going to happily lend to any person who charges you who, who asked for a 0% loan because he's saving you the 1% that you would have paid. So eventually the interest rate, the time preference continues to decline. We become more and more civilized, more virtuous, more moral as we accumulate more and more capital to the point where the natural market interest rate drops to zero. That people have so much capital and everybody is so trustworthy and everybody's so honest and everybody is so future oriented that it's there's never an issue of securing capital for anybody. Imagine you live in a very high trust society where everybody likes everybody, everybody's there for everybody. If you your house burns down and you don't have any more money, you're not going to have a problem finding people who will lend you money because they know that you're going to be good for it. Because money is so abundant that the interest rate on the money is say .8%. But they would be getting, they would have to be paying 1% to store the money. So therefore they'd lend it to you at 0%. So I think this is essentially what Islamic finance is about. It's about a world in which people don't charge each other interest rate because their time preference is very low. And Islam teaches people to develop this, but with through a clear set of instructions that allow you to arrive at this. So you purify your heart in all kinds of different ways and you perform the right rituals. And among these ways in which you reform yourself is that you do not engage in verbal lending. In other words, you bring your time preference down very, very low. You lower your time preference when it comes to the issue of capital and lending. And I think Austrian economics helps us understand how this would be something that would emerge on the market on its own. And I think it helps. It helped me understand why historically that has always been such a strong opposition to interest lending, not just in Islam, also throughout civilizations across the world. You see ancient wisdom that speaks about this and you can see it why it is. Interest rate lending is monetizing people's high time preference in a sense. And so it puts it, it creates problems for society at large and it leads to all kinds of negative outcomes. And I think Austria economics help me understand that a lot. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. I'll just comment quickly. Just, I know Harris, you have a lot to say about this topic. So I want to put something out there and then I'll flip it back to you because this is your area of expertise. I'm sure you want to pick syphon's brain around the Islamic finance framework, but just quickly save. So I was professionally and academically trained in Canadian economics and IT. Took. Five years for me to unlearn that, starting with, you know, the Bitcoin standard and going down that rabbit hole. And as I was doing my readings on the Austrian side, one thing that's so clear and that people fail to see unless they actually take the time to get into it, is that it is. So much more. Straightforward and just rational thinking versus, you know, in university, they Wood Forest US to memorize these equations and these relationships. And all it takes is to question one metric, which I like to bring up with some of my Fiat, my Fiat friends, is how come CPI is constantly changing in the way it's being measured? Like how is that? How is that rational? How is that? You know, it just doesn't make sense. So I just wanted to put that out there in case someone's listening. I mean, just give it a shot, have a little read. Saif's book Principle of Economics is one of the easier ones, if not the easiest to to absorb this type of content because going backwards trying to read Mrs. and Hayek and Rossbard is, you know, a bit more difficult than, you know, streamline economic text. But I'll stop there, Harris, I'll let you go at it. I know you have a lot of questions. Let's take a moment to talk about On Ramp Nino As a driving force behind the new frontier. Onrakmena offers best in class education and advisory services for Bitcoin accumulation strategy in custody. Our expert team specializes in crafting tailored Bitcoin strategies and providing recommendations that ensure your assets are both secure and accessible. Book a consultation with Onrakmena today to take the first step towards securing your financial future with Bitcoin. Visit ourwebsite@onrakmena.com to learn more. And schedule your consultation. Now let's get back to the show. Yeah, sure. I mean, thank you say for some really a very interesting take on the intersection between Austrian economics and the Islamic Economic model. And I'm, I'm fascinated to know more about the case that you make for Austrian economics with no interest. But let's put that to one side for now, because I think we are gradually leading towards a discussion specifically on Bitcoin because that's the sort of natural progression of, of, of what we're discussing right now. And I can certainly see Bitcoin fitting into a framework for Islamic finance because, you know, like you, I see that intersection between Austrian principles and the Islamic Economic model And, and I think that Islamic finance would reach its sort of ultimate goal if it had a sound monetary base. What do you think? What sort of potential do you think Bitcoin holds for Islamic finance in this regard? So I think the the the most obvious answer to this question is on an individual level. I think only really when I wrote the Fiat standard, when I really got into studying how the Fiat monetary system works, did it really occur to me just how how Haram Fiat money really is. I mean, you vaguely always know that it is Haram money because it's government and it's not gold and money in Islam is supposed to be gold. So you get the sense that it is Haram. But it's not something that, you know, we live in a world in which the sheikhs are constantly calling everything Haram. So it doesn't seem to be that profound when you say, oh, that's just another thing that sheikhs are going to call Haram now. But then you actually think about how the Fiat monetary system works and you realize, my God, this is Haram at every level. I mean, it's, it's got Haram baked in at the protocol level as as they say in engineering terms, that it's because even if you're just using paper money, even if you don't even use the bank, if you just take get paid in cash and you only spend cash, well, that cash is not the money itself. That cash is a receipt for digital money. Fiat money is digital money. And the paper you have is like a physical receipt for the digital money that allows you to get on the government's digital network essentially. And the way that that money is created, whether you like it or not, is that that money is created through riba, through usurious lending. So the government creates loans or the government issues bonds, settle back buys the bonds, or banks issue deposits to borrowers. When when, when a new loan is made, new money is created. So the printer then prints that money into existence, but the money is created when the debt is created. So at every level of the creation of the Fiat money, you, you have a riba. So you are a partner in the riba at every point. So from a personal perspective, just simply realizing this should encourage, I believe, any honest Muslim to really try and take the Fiat out of their life as much as possible. And I think this is now, I mean, I'm not a Sheikh, but I think you could make a very strong argument that at this point, it's not just that Bitcoin is halal and Fiat is Haram. I think you could even say that Bitcoin is fodd, that Bitcoin is the duty of a Muslim to get into it because the you. The argument for using Fiat money is, I would say, similar to the argument for eating pork. If you were on a deserted island. If you find yourself on a, if you get shipwrecked, you're on an island. There's nothing to eat on this island except wild boars then, and you find yourself that you're going to really starve and there's nothing else to eat then. I, I presume most chicks would say it would be halal for you to eat the pork to survive. So you could make that argument perhaps for the Fiat monetary system, because it is so pervasive in our life, it is so important. You need money to be part of the world economy. And if you're not part of the world economy, if you try and live without it, you're going to suffer massively. So you could make the argument that in order for us to survive in the modern world, you need to use government Fiat money. And so in the same way that you need to survive on that island by eating pig, you need to survive in this modern Fiat world by using Fiat money. But then what happens one day if a cow shows up on that island? And then you find that actually you get to a place where there are 10,000 cows just roaming freely. Now, is it still how bad for you to be eating the pig? I don't think so. And I think the same thing happens here with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin now offers you an alternative to the dollar, an alternative to Fiat money, which allows you to get your wealth out of RIBA and not be part of usurious lending, because there's no usurious lending taking place when Bitcoin is created. Bitcoin is a commodity that's created through a process of mining, similar to the mining of gold. So Bitcoin is a present good, whereas Fiat money is a debt liability. And so now that a halal form of money is available, I don't think that is a good reason for using Fiat. I can see why you would want to have, you know, a checking account with a few expenses in it, but there's no reason to deal with. I could, I could see maybe that is would still qualify as necessary pork. Perhaps you could make the argument for it. But keeping your money in banks even if you're not getting interest on it, or putting it in government bonds or putting it in financial markets that are based on the river money, I think is now a completely untenable position. I'm loving your analogy with the wild boars on the desert island and a cow showing up. I'm going to reuse that if you don't mind. Yes please. Do you know in Arabic they say the Habra Alma bottle at Daemon? If water becomes available, you cannot do the dry absolution. Dry absolution. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is essentially what's going on now. You, you, you could make do with Fiat before because you didn't have an alternative, but now we do. Fantastic. Great explanation. And I know that when we in the Bitcoin community like to say Bitcoin, not crypto and we separate the two. And you know, we're very careful to to make sure that when we explain Bitcoin to people, we're not talking about some rug pull somewhere with some, you know, ridiculous tech project by a bunch of developers who are there to enrich themselves. That said, I mean, in the Middle East, we are seeing a lot of, you know, Fintech hives appearing and incubators and accelerators associated with D5. Do you, do you think there are unique opportunities for Bitcoin in this regard to set up, you know, new decentralized financial services with Bitcoin as a monetary base, specifically in the Middle East? I certainly hope so. I think this is really likely going to be a a long term opportunity that I see at at a certain point flipping into a much more, much more aggressive growth phase. I just think that something needs to click at a certain point. But at this point, I think the difficulty between the difficulty of distinguishing between Bitcoin and crypto and trying to discern the difference between Bitcoin and crypto is still pretty large. So we haven't really seen this kind of very viral growth in the Middle East. To some extent you do see it here and there, but I still think, well, I mean, it's still at the point where a small number of people do it and they're not very vocal about it when they do it. It hasn't gotten to a point where it's the thing that people are doing. It's not this very popular thing yet. But I think the typical point will be when people really understand the, the, the Islamic analysis that I just made. I think once more and more people get that point and then a few influential people start promoting that idea, I think then we'll likely see a major shift in this regard. But until then, I mean, the nice thing about Bitcoin, of course, is that it still works whether a lot of people join or not. So it's already one of the 10 biggest currencies in the world. I think by capitalization at this point, definitely it doesn't work. I mean it actually. Works. I mean, I'll give you one example. I tried to make donations into Gaza for relief work on the ground and I couldn't do it through the normal banking rails. You know, it doesn't matter what currency it was, payments just get blocked. And the only way that one can get money into Gaza is through Bitcoin. And there are individuals on the ground who can use that money to buy essential goods and services. So, you know, it really does work, which which kind of leads me on to another question, actually just regarding geopolitical events in the Middle East. I mean, you know, obviously it's a big subject and more so in, in current days of the events around the world right now. And you've been very vocal about about events. But I, you know, I just wondered whether, you know, Bitcoin has proven to be a useful tool in this regard and facilitating work in places like Gaza. You know, how is it being utilized? What's the impact being on the ground? You know, how do these geopolitical events in the Middle East influence economic stability and growth in the region? Yeah, I think that's a great example. And I think that's also another reason why people eventually, I think in our region are going to wake up to this, because on top of the halal list that we mentioned is the fact that a lot of people in this region are on the wrong side of the financial authorities of the world. And so they get their accounts frozen and they get their central banks shut down and have their reserves confiscated and you get sanctions and you get war zones and you get all kinds of horrific things. And a lot of these people are turning to Bitcoin. You see it in Syria, you see it in Gaza, you see it in all over the region. You see more and more of this happening because it works. Because even in Gaza, I mean, it's this is, this is truly remarkable because Israel is doing everything it can to kill as many people as it can and to make life as impossible as possible, to make life impossible, I should say four people in Gaza for the future. And yet Bitcoin continues to work and continues to survive because it's a form of money that you can use into and out of the country. And even in the middle of the war zone, people are still able to use it. It's a very, very powerful tool because it's money at the end of the day. And everybody needs money. Everybody needs to access the division of Labor that money allows us to access. And Bitcoin just gives you that anywhere, anytime. And the technical requirement, I think people still have this idea that, you know, well, it's a digital thing. So it works with the computer. So, you know, once the power goes off, then my bitcoins are gone. Doesn't work that way. A Bitcoin doesn't just it's, it's not a game. It's, it's not Super Mario on your computer where if you don't save and the electricity goes, then your mushrooms are gone. That's not how it works. It's Super Mario on thousands and thousands of computers all over the world. So your mushrooms are safe. You're not going to be rugged. There is no single of piece of authority. There's no single authority behind it. There's no central authority that can decide to take your coins from it. So it's a, it's a very, very robust system to the point where your ability to access the network is immaterial to the safety of your coins. So even if you're unable to access it for a few hours or days through emergencies, you still have your savings there. And as soon as you can access them, they're they're yours. And it's unstoppable. There's no way that anybody can stop you from using it. You just need any kind of machine that can access the Internet. And I think Gaza is just a great advertisement for the resilience of technology today that even in all of this stuff, people still find ways of making electricity. People still find ways of charging their phone, people still find ways of accessing social media, and people still find ways of communicating with one another. And they still find ways of accessing their Bitcoin. They do it in Gaza every day. So check out Bitcoin for Palestine. They've been organizing incredible amount of relief work just from donations of people on Twitter. So this is this is truly remarkable. And I think it's going to open a lot more people's eyes to the true power of this technology because a lot of people are sympathetic. But as you said, they can't find a way of sending money. That's working because Zionist authorities all over the world don't want this stuff to happen, don't want relief to go to Gaza. Yeah, true testament of Bitcoins ability to, you know, protect your ability to transact safe. Wanted to switch it over a little bit. I mean, we mentioned how the region adoption is a bit lacking compared to, for example, the West and there is a bright future. So we honor Amina are here to help with that from an educational point of view. Now one thing I noticed in Dubai, for example, in the UAE is that the youth is very comfortable with the underlying tech itself. You don't have to explain concepts like, you know, hashes, blockchains, etc. I think where it's lacking is the understanding of sound money and its principles, and I think once we can unlock that, I think we're more likely to see a rise in Bitcoin adoption within the region on top of the Islamic Sharia compliance it provides. I want to turn the attention to so I know you've spent time in Lebanon. Lebanon is one of those countries, for those who are listening, that's going through hyperinflation, capital controls. I mean, myself, my family, my friends, I'm sure you have a lot of people as well that have been affected by the situation, Safe. And I'm wondering in Lebanon, it seems that Bitcoin adoption is also lacking, even though the system has turned against the people itself. Do you think Bitcoin could solve for that if more people, you know, what's stopping them from adopting it? Like what? What are your views on that? I think it's, I think 1 aspect of it is that Bitcoin is just a not easy to understand. There's a technical effort that needs to be put into understanding. And I think it's, it's really tempting. The vast majority of people, if not maybe even all people, are tempted to initially just dismiss it based on what you would learn from the first precursory observation of it. And so I was like that. I heard about Bitcoin early on and ignored it for a couple of years. And I had my very good, strong reasons for why obviously it couldn't work. And when I was making these very confident pronouncements, I had no idea how hashing worked. I had no idea how distributed networks worked. I didn't understand any of that stuff and I didn't understand the kind of resilience that Bitcoin has and it's resistance to control or the resistance to the central authority taking charge of it. So eventually you just need to get familiar with these concepts and there's no easy way around them. They need to spend some time to trying to understand it. And I think with time, more and more things are going to turn your attention to what it tell you. No, you need to pay attention to this thing. It's very important. So that's one aspect of it. Another aspect of it is I think in the, in the, in the parts of the Arab world where people have not had a problem of inflation historically because you know, of good governance or because of safety, because of the just the fact that your money continues to work and that you don't have to pay taxes. People are just not as they don't have a bitter experience with money, so they don't have the ability to develop the kind of healthy paranoia that you need to drive you to Bitcoin. So I think this is probably an impediment to this. And that's why people, I think I would say in the Gulf, there's a, there's a significant interest in the, the, the day trading aspect of it, the making a quick box, buying a meme, buying an NFT, this kind of stuff, which is completely missing the point about what really matters here, which is as a long term form of saving. But you know, if your bank account works and your currencies that Kuwaiti dinar or the Qatari, these currencies are doing all right. So they haven't had to think about the problem of inflation very seriously. And I think also unfortunately, people in the situations of conflict there is as as I was saying earlier, there is a large increase in your time preference naturally when you're in a situation where you're at risk. And so you discount the future heavily, and that precludes you from having a large appetite for something like Bitcoin with its volatility. That seems like it's going to be a problem in the long term. But in order to be able to stomach it, you need to commit to it to the long term. So I think intellectually and financially, your time preference rises in these situations of conflict that you've become unable to really get into Bitcoin. In these situations, sometimes people will use Bitcoin, but it will be transactional. You know, you, you, you use it to get your money out of a country. You buy something, you take the thing with you or, or you sell something, you take the money in Bitcoin, you leave the country with the Bitcoin and then you cash out the Bitcoin into something else. But that's not going to be the best setting for developing a long term saving plan with Bitcoin, which I think is what really matters and what the people should really be after. So I think it seems like maybe being in conflict might not be very conducive for this. It it, it's conducive to hearing about Bitcoin, trying it out, using it for payments, maybe using a stablecoin. But in terms of long term saving plan in Bitcoin, not very, not not very conducive. So maybe there is a happy medium, you know, not Lebanon, not Qatar. You need to be somewhere in like say the US, France in order for you to have the right amount of experience so that your time preface is low enough that you can get Bitcoin, but at the same time your currency in your government is bad enough that you are feeling the pain in your pocket and need to look into Bitcoin. That's so interesting. I, I, I love that description. Another question since we're on topic of the Middle East real fast Bitcoin mining and the energy of the Middle East. I mean right now states like Texas are dominating when it comes to Bitcoin mining. I think they've taken the vast majority of hash rate globally, and it seems that the Arab world is lacking when it comes to the integrating Bitcoin mining into their energy grid. They have huge amounts of solar irradiance. They have lots of oil, gas that they can flare. What are your thoughts on that? What do you think the game theory is going to be like? Do you think we'll see a world where mining gets more and more centralized within the Middle East, actually. I, I don't really have solid predictions about this. I will say I don't, people like to say that mining has geopolitical importance, that it is a race and who can accumulate more hash rate. I don't think that that is the case and I'm, I'm hesitant to use that pitch. I think a lot of people try and use that in order to promote Bitcoin that, you know, Bitcoin is the next biggest thing. So you need to build your own mining farms and you don't you? You don't need to be a miner of Bitcoin in order to use Bitcoin. In fact, Bitcoin is optimized for the holder, not for the miner. Bitcoin is by dint of being money. Bitcoin is designed to offer the miner horrific experience. If mining Bitcoin was easy and fun and profit, then Bitcoin would be an industrial commodity that would have enormous quantities and it wouldn't work as money. So the most important technical feature of Bitcoin, which I discussed in depth in the Bitcoin standard, which I think is truly the technical innovation that made Bitcoin possible because everything else in Bitcoin was there before that is difficulty adjustment. It was when you added the magic sauce of difficulty adjustment to all of these pre-existing technology and put them together. That's when they all managed to click together and work. And So what the difficulty adjustment does is that it ensures that the supply of Bitcoin is being produced in a decentralized way. So there's no central authority that decides how many bitcoins get produced. Anybody can join it, and yet the output does not change. So the output from the mining process is now at 450 bitcoins per day. And that would have been the case if today Bitcoin was being used by 8 people or 8 billion people. It doesn't matter. Bitcoin's going to be producing that amounts because it's constantly adjusting the difficulty of mining in order to to make the reward for mining happen at around 10 minutes so that we ensure that we're not producing more blocks. And this is what keeps the monetary policy working. So the, the, the, the moral of the story is that mining Bitcoin is extremely competitive because if you're able to make a profit, then the difficulty of mining is going to go up and only the most profitable are going to survive. And Bitcoin is constantly culling the weaker miners. And so the way that you are able to mine profitably is you need to have a lot of very cheap energy and you need to have it in the form of electricity reliably for a commitment for 24/7 electricity for about 3 years at least. If you're able to secure something like this where you have a very, very, very high degree of certainty in the fact that you are going to have 24/7 electricity running for three years at least, preferably five years at a cost of at most I'd say five or six cents per kWh, preferably lower than three cents per kWh. If you're able to secure that kind of cost. And you also have experience in just operations for this kind of facility where you're going to need the giant data facility and you're going to need to run it and you're going to need to give need to make sure that it keeps getting it's electricity. If you have a competence in this field of business and you have very cheap electricity, then you should think about getting into mining. Otherwise it's not a good idea. You you need to have very, very, very cheap electricity. You need to have a ability to build mining facilities. If you want to mine at scale. Of course, if you want to mine at small scale, if you have, say, free electricity at home, which may be a lot of people in the Gulf do, or at least very cheap electricity, then yeah, it makes sense to get one miner. But it is loud. So you want to put it somewhere away from the house and just keep it running. But ultimately, really, it's important to separate the real value of Bitcoin from the mining business. The mining business is just a business like any other, like growing bananas, like selling cars, like making computers. There's an industry. There are people out there who are doing it. You need to do it better than those people or as good as those people. Offer some kind of advantage to have some kind of advantage that allows you to compete and survive on the market. And if you're mining Bitcoin and you make a profit mining Bitcoin, but you then sell the Bitcoin in order to keep a Fiat profit, you clowned yourself likely because you're really missing out because even if you make money in this, you're missing out and just holding on to the Bitcoin. That's what's really what really matters So for me, what matters is the ability to hold Bitcoin. You need to hold Bitcoin for the long term. That's the real opportunity, the real opportunities that you have a form of money whose supply increases at only currently .8%, and that's going to only go down over time. So this is the real value proposition. And this supply of money has less than a .5% penetration rate on the market for monies. And I would expect that it's going to go up. And the only way for it to go up in terms of its market valuation is for the price to rise, because we can't just make more Bitcoin for everybody. They're going to have to come and share all the bitcoins that exist. So this is a great opportunity to get in right now. That's where the real value is. Don't think about mining as a way of securing cheaper Bitcoin. I would guess from my experience talking to just random Bitcoiners that I've met through the years, and I've met a lot of Bitcoiners, I would say more people lose Satoshi's mining than they gain. So you get into it thinking, OK, well, I'm just going to get this miner and I'm going to hook it into my house and I'm going to make more Bitcoin. And then you pay for the miner. And then if you run the numbers, you know, you run it for five years. And then if you run the numbers back and you think, well, if I just took the sum of money that I paid for the miner and bought Bitcoin with it, and then bought Bitcoin with all the bills of electricity that I paid and all the operational cost of the miners, I would have more Satoshi's. I think a majority of people would answer the question with yes, that it would have been more profitable for them to just buy Satoshi's. So only get into mining if you have things that I mentioned, very cheap electricity. And if you want to do it at scale, you need to have some kind of very clear idea about how to host those miners and build a facility that can handle them for a very long time. It's not something you want to do in the last minute, you know, just buy the miners and then look around for the place. You need to have very clear plan and you need to have very long term focus on it. But in the Gulf, I'd say obviously there's a huge opportunity because of the enormous amount of oil fields with the stranded gas that would make great deal for mining because it's flared gas. And so this is gas that, you know, most oil companies pay to have people safely dispose it and get rid of it. And now you can just turn it into bitcoins. So I would recommend looking into that if you're in the business. Of course, there's also there's an added cost in the region, which is that there's a lot of dust, as you know in most of the Gulf. And so that gets into the data centers and gets into the machines. And so it requires more cleaning and maintenance. So thought something to keep in mind. Very interesting. Feel like we could talk, I mean hours and hours and I'm mindful of yours. So from me, I'm going to ask a couple more questions to finish off the 1st is, is regarding education. Yeah, I mean, you're kind of an academic institution by yourself and people can find out more about what you do at saferdine.com. But I mean, I'm thinking from the point of view of academic institutions in general. Have you taken any steps to to influence how they teach economics and their economic curricula? Is that something that you you do or something that you focus on? And you know what? What impact do you have to achieve through your work, you know, educational efforts and through saferdine.com and and other initiatives? For me the the main thing was that it allowed me. Leaving academia and working independently online was the obvious choice for me because it was just a much more productive way of doing teaching. And in my case, they had the added incentive for the fact that my ideas were just not a good fit with academia as it is dominant today. So it makes a lot more sense for me to just try and teach online. And for me, you know, I think the the ability to reach people directly, I'd say is something that is a blessing that I had because of the success of my first book that it developed some kind of audience all over the world that is interested in the ideas of the Austrian economics. You know, they got in because they saw Bitcoin in the title and then they read it and they heard about an Austrian school. So suddenly in 2018, after I published the book, I started getting a lot of interest from people from all over the world who wanted to learn more about Austrian economics. And I just thought I should take the chance on this and start teaching online. And now I've been doing it for five years. Last month was my five year anniversary. So I've thought something like 7000 students, more than 7000 students so far. So that would have been like a lifetime in regular university to get through 7000 students. But thanks to the Internet, you could do it a lot more easily. And for me, this is just the how do you fight the darkness? You can curse the darkness or you can light a candle. This is my little candle in the darkness of cyberspace. You know, the, the Harvards and the Mits and the Oxfords and Cambridge, they have their enormous horns of propaganda where they're constantly churning out their stuff. You could try and go and fight the beast from within and just end up getting hoarse from shouting and achieving nothing and just being called an extremist. Or you can go directly to people and tell them, well, here's what I think and here's how it explains the world and you make your own mind up. And I think that's a lot more productive. It's a lot better for my mental health and sanity. It's a lot better for my social life. I'm not being surrounded by people who think you're extremely weird in your workplace at all times and places. I'd say it's probably good for my safety too. I. Think we can all identify with that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's next for you? I mean, any upcoming projects or initiatives? What can we look forward to from your end? So I'm I am working on 1/4 book right now but I'm not going to share details about it. I'm keeping it under wraps until it's out. I think you might enjoy it. But you know, I'm biased, obviously I'm writing the book, so buyer beware. But that's, yeah, that's my, that's my focus for now. So I'm heads down in this new book and you'll be hearing about it hopefully soon you'll get some more details on what's going on with that. Really looking forward to that. Again, like was well safe. Thank you so much for your time. This has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you for all the work you do and thank you for, you know, taking part in this fight. You're in your own way. So everyone is grateful, at least on my end. I've sent your book to many people. And, you know, I think a lot of people have done so as well. I've seen in the US, I think Dennis Porter may have shared the Bitcoin standard with a bunch of people. It is truly a gateway to the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And I think, you know, every other book you've put out has been amazing. We'll make sure to include all the details, all the links in the description. We'll be pushing it out, you know, on all social media channels. And thank you again for your time SO. Thanks, Dave. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure, guys. Thanks for listening. If you found the content valuable, please make sure to share with a friend and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Before we finish, a quick reminder that the content provided is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit Onrap Mina com Schedule a consultation.
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