Saifedean Ammous Talks About His Book “The Bitcoin Standard” And The Origins Of The Israel Palestine Conflict

Dr Saifedean Ammous is an internationally best-selling economist and author. In 2018, Ammous authored The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, the best-selling book on bitcoin, published in 37 languages. In 2021, he published The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization, available in 12 languages. In May 2023, Saifedean published his latest book, Principles of Economics, a comprehensive textbook in economics in the Austrian school tradition.

Saifedean teaches courses on the economics of bitcoin, and economics in the Austrian school tradition, on his online learning platform Saifedean.com, and also hosts The Bitcoin Standard Podcast.

Saifedean was a professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University from 2009 to 2019. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, a Masters in Development Management from the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

I didn’t know this when I reached out to Saifedean, but it turns out he is palestinian. In the last 30 minutes or so he talks about the origin of the Israel-palestine conflict. Please listen with an open heart and mind.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Website
saifedean.com
Twitter
Saifedean

0:08

OK.

All right.

OK, here we go.

I have the most amazing person on my podcast, I mean that Sefadeen.

So I’ve had some pretty cool guests, but I haven’t been this excited for a while because I’m new to this and I’m very excited this, this, the Bitcoin standard.

0:26

So look.

For the people who are in the Bitcoin world, you’re like this freaking guru, right?

But a lot of my listeners are like, what is this Bitcoin business?

What the hell is it?

So I’m going to start off this conversation with, like, a journey, OK?

0:44

Now the Bitcoin hardcore people will be like, Oh my God, don’t ask Sephardine these questions.

He’s like this professor.

You’re asking him stupid questions that, you know, in nursery, kindergarten, No, no, no.

Like.

It’s a journey.

We’re going to go on this journey, so we start off very basic, if that’s OK, Is that OK?

1:05

That’s fine, yeah.

All right, the most the simplest things are the most difficult thing.

I think people get this the other way around.

It’s really the most difficult thing to explain.

The simplest things, the most complicated things.

They become easier and easier over time as long as the basis is sorted.

1:23

So happy to start from squares in one.

Yeah.

So one of the problems that I’ve had in life is people have always, I’ve found so many people who’ve wanted to scam me.

There’s so many scammers out there.

1:40

And you know, even now, like for example, 4 weeks ago I got suspended from one of the hospitals that I’m working from because of my social media posts.

I’m very outspoken.

My social media activity, they don’t like it.

So we live in this age of censorship, and a lot of people reached out to me.

1:56

And they’re like, oh, we want to help you, we want to help you.

We run this successful company.

We can see how we can help you and support you.

But we want money from you first.

It’s just scam, scam, scam, scam, scam.

So when I first heard about Bitcoin, I I was very sceptical.

2:13

I was like what is this?

And there’s terminology being used like mining, crypto, blockchain and I was like, what does all this mean?

What processing per like?

How can you just make money out of nothing like this?

2:28

Doesn’t even make sense to me.

I’m already fed up with the Fiat system.

Is this just another thing that I just don’t get?

And I’m not techie, so I was very, very sceptical.

But over the last few years, and speaking to certain people like my brother-in-law, shout out to him and a doctor, Doctor Swaranjit Singh in California.

2:51

I mean, he’s a big Bitcoin advocate.

He loves you, by the way.

I realized I actually I I believe in everything that Bitcoin represents.

I’m all for decentralization.

I think so many of the world’s problems we see today and health and politics, financial, monetary system is the centralization and we need to get away from that.

3:12

So can we dive in there where we talk about Bitcoin?

You know this guy hiding behind a pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto?

In 2008, he launches this thing to a bunch of geeky people.

What the hell?

What is Bitcoin?

3:32

Well, Bitcoin is a piece of software.

I think we need to begin from the very basics.

Bitcoin is just the software, and, you know, software does all kinds of things.

Software is what allows you and I to speak across thousands of kilometers right now.

3:48

Software allows you to send me emails.

Software allows you to do all kinds of amazing things.

Now what this software does is that it runs a payment network that’s distributed all over the world that doesn’t have a central party and it has a fixed money supply.

4:06

I think this is really the these are the two most unique and notable properties of bit point that there is no central authority that runs the payment network.

So you have a payment network that’s functioning regardless of the president, not regardless functioning.

4:23

Without the presence of a central authority that gets to decide what’s valid and what’s not valid.

It’s just up there and it’s working.

And anybody who wants to join it can join it and abide by its rules.

And anybody who doesn’t want to join it can stay out of it and not have to use it.

4:39

So it’s quite different from the monetary network we have right now, which is compulsory.

You have to use your government’s monetary system, you have to pay taxes with it and you’re not allowed to have any alternatives.

You can’t set up a bank outside of your central bank’s supervision.

And the other thing which is extremely notable and the thing that got me hooked on this rabbit hole is the fact that the supply of the bitcoins that exist is fixed.

5:04

There’s only 21 million.

There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin.

There will never be more.

And so those two properties make this software extremely unique and extremely important in my opinion.

I think it is one of the most amazing and most consequential inventions in human history, if I may say.

5:22

So I know there’s a big words that a lot of big great inventions out there, you know, from plumbing to printing to sanitation and all kinds of different things that have given us electricity, cars, airplanes, all of these things that are amazing.

5:38

And I think Bitcoin has up there with them because those two properties, what I just mentioned, allow us to get rid of central banks.

It can allow us to function in the world where we automate away the functions of central banks.

And I think this is enormously important because central banks are, by my opinion, the biggest problem on earth.

6:02

I think if you don’t think that central banks are the biggest problem in the world, you have probably been educated by institutions financed by central banks whose main purpose is to misdirect your attention away from the problems of central banking and focus them on other problems.

Central banking is a cancer.

6:19

It is out there robbing everybody.

If you’re a human being, then you have been robbed by your central bank over the last century.

You, your parents, their parents and their parents.

The last four generations for everybody have been robbed through their central bank.

6:36

The central banks out there are benefiting a very, very tiny minority of humanity.

The people in charge of these central banks and the governments that are there, lackeys basically, and everybody else is being robbed by this.

And I think this is enormously disastrous.

6:53

And the reason we have to put up with that is because all of our payment networks have to be centralized, because the money that we had up until Bitcoin was invented requires centralization for it to work, because we move economic goods around very quickly with the.

7:14

But by the 19th century, with the invention of the train, with the invention of the Telegraph, we can move information, we can move economic goods extremely quickly across the world.

And then they’re getting faster with airplanes and cars and so on.

And so things move around very quickly and money can’t keep up.

7:31

Money is too complicated to move around because, you know, money needs to be secured and it’s difficult to move it around.

And so therefore, what we went for, the economic solution for that problem was to centralized money in banks and then centralized banks in central banks, and then have the government in charge of the central bank.

7:51

And then with the government in charge of the central bank, the government can move the money around without having to physically move the money around by just netting the transactions between different parties.

So if you’re in Britain and you want to send goods to somebody in the US, it’s completely impractical for them to send you physical money, whether it’s paper money or gold, across the Atlantic.

8:18

When you send them the goods, that’s going to be quite expensive.

Whereas if you have a central bank, they have a central bank, Then the two central banks can just net with each other.

And then at the end of the month or week or year, they’ll see all the transactions that went from the US to UK and all the transactions from the UK and the US, net them out and then move the balance in physical gold at the end of the year.

8:42

So that necessitated the centralization.

And then the centralization allowed for capture by governments and banking oligopolies.

And so small little cartels of very small number of people became able to control banking for everybody, and governments control banking for everybody.

9:00

And the result is that with them in control of the money, they can increase the supply of the money, thus devaluing the savings of everybody else.

And this is the most important thing to happen in the 20th century, in my opinion.

This is why the 20th century has been the century of war, endless war on the century of inflation and the century of theft, and the century of a ruling oligopoly that continues to grow in wealth while everybody else is continuously working and watching their wealth disappear, not knowing why.

9:32

You work hard, you keep working and keep saving, and for some reason, everything keeps getting more and more expensive around you.

And people think things just get expensive because that’s what things do.

But you need to stop here and pause for a second.

We have a lot more cars today than we did 10 years ago.

9:50

We have a lot more houses than we did 10 years ago.

We produce a lot more apples, a lot more oranges.

Practically every single thing that we have today is more abundant than what?

Than 10 years ago, and yet it’s more expensive.

That makes no sense.

Economics is about supply and demand.

10:06

If I increase the amount of apples that humanity is producing, you’d expect the price of apples to drop.

And yet we see the opposite happen.

Why is that the case?

Because things are not getting more expensive.

It’s your money that’s getting cheaper.

Why is your money getting cheaper?

Because your your money is becoming more abundant than those things.

10:25

So we grow the supply of houses and cars and apples and oranges by two, three, 4% per year.

But we grow the supply of Fiat money by 7-8, ten, 1520% per year.

And depending where you are, some countries grows at around 100% per year, some sometimes even higher.

10:42

So that’s the real problem of the world, and that’s come, that’s entirely a function of the centralization of money in the hands of central banks.

And Bitcoin is a software solution that allows us to route around all of that.

It allows me to put my savings in the money that central banks cannot debase.

10:59

Nobody can debase it that it will only ever be 21 million, and it allows me to send money halfway around the world without having to go through my central bank.

Before Bitcoin was invented, you had no choice.

You have to send your money through your central bank.

There was no other way.

11:15

Whatever money transfer business you could use, whether it was your bank, some app, PayPal, a Venmo, Western Union, whatever it is, if you were sending money across borders, you were going through your central bank.

There was no question about it.

And if you wanted to use any form of money, it had to be a money that was produced or controlled or monopolized by central banks, whether it’s the Fiat money or the gold that central banks monopolize and whose market they practically manipulated control.

11:42

Bitcoin is a break from that.

You know what?

This is perfect timing for this podcast.

I’ve just interviewed Ed Griffin.

The podcast came out just over a week ago, and I don’t know if you know Ed Griffin, the creature from Jekyll Island.

11:58

Yes, of course, yes.

It was such he, I talk to him now regularly.

I can’t believe it.

He’s 92 and you know, he’s just an amazing human being.

And he talks about the Federal Reserve, just like you, the central banks, and how they’ve corrupted everything.

12:15

Everything you’ve just said how everything I always say I, you know, before I started doing this podcast, I would say to my friends it feels like the the game of life is rigged.

It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how hard I do things, how successful I am.

Life is tough.

Just making ends meet.

12:31

I’m still paying off my goddamn mortgage.

I have to be so careful.

Things are getting more expensive.

The food, everything.

How how do people get by?

Like, I’m a surgeon and like, I’m like, finding it difficult.

And I’m listening to you listening to Ed Griffin.

12:48

It all makes sense.

And after Ed Griffin, I had someone called Runa Ostgard who wrote a book called Fraud Coin, which is about inflation as a 1000 year policy and how it’s all about debasement of the currency and devaluing and it’s all about power.

So when they inflate, they they capture most of that money and then we pay the price of it and we suffer as a consequence.

13:10

And I think you’re 100% right the way you just spoke, right.

And it was so beautiful, eloquent, The century of just death, misery, famine.

And, you know, impoverishment of the masses and enrichment of the few.

Let’s go back to Bitcoin.

So one of the things that got me really worried was like, I didn’t really understand it.

13:28

And you know, when you don’t understand things, you kind of get skeptical and you’re fearful of things you don’t know.

I was like, who is this guy Satoshi?

Whatever got, you know, it sounds like some guy from an 80s, you know, Hollywood movie, he was some bad villain or something like.

13:44

Is it real?

Is it CIA?

Is it some hacker?

But I guess, I guess it doesn’t really matter because I think the everyone around can see everything transparently and verify everything.

So it’s not like there’s a back door and some criminalities there.

14:01

Can I can we just clarify that?

Yeah.

So I think the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto was an anonymous person, he used the pseudonym and he disappeared, I think that was a critical ingredient in making Bitcoin work.

I don’t know who he is and I don’t know why and how he disappeared, but I think if he had introduced Bitcoin and he put his name behind it and he said hi, I’m going to do this thing.

14:29

And he stuck around for the last 15 years trying to manage the thing and trying to make it work.

I don’t think it would have worked.

I think this thing needed to be a Frankenstein that gets out of a lab and doesn’t have a doctor Frankenstein to have.

14:47

It needed to be Frankenstein’s monster.

It had to go out on its own and survive in the wild without somebody in charge.

And I think if somebody was in charge, it would have defeated the entire value proposition.

Because what he’s saying is, hey, don’t trust your government, the central bank, which very much on board with, but he’s saying instead, trust me, I got this.

15:11

But because he disappeared very early in the development of this thing, that makes things very different in that situation.

Because you now don’t trust him.

You don’t have to trust him.

You don’t need to trust him.

You don’t need to know who he is.

You don’t need to know anything about him.

It doesn’t matter.

He put this code and the code works.

15:28

And so you need to think about it in the same way that you think about the wheel.

Do you know who invented the wheel?

Have you looked into him?

Have you found out what he was like?

Was he a nice guy?

Was he good to his wife?

That’s what you need to know about the wheel, right, In order to get into a car.

15:45

No, you don’t.

The wheel works regardless of who invented it, Regardless of what he did with his life or she did with her life.

The wheel just works.

And that’s true for all of these technologies.

They work because they work because they they demonstrate the fact that they work and you can see them and you can understand how they function.

16:03

And so this means that we are able to see Bitcoin function regardless of who the person behind it was.

And so for me, I think yes, it is difficult to understand Bitcoin.

Now, I’m not going to, I’m not going to tell you that there’s a 15 minute video that you can watch on YouTube that’ll give you the lowdown to understand how what Bitcoin is.

16:26

It’s not you didn’t become a surgeon by watching a 15 minute Bitcoin on a YouTube video.

A lot of things are just difficult to do in life, but these are usually the things that are worth doing.

And a car was difficult to understand.

When people in primitive societies first saw cars and airplanes, they thought this must have been crazy.

16:48

This must have been possessed by demons in order for it to move around like that.

But then after a while, you need to just get over the infatuation you have with your own primitive reactions to things.

17:05

Get over the fact that, Oh well, but I don’t know how This thing and I it makes me feel like this.

And it makes me feel like that I’ve been.

I have a little bit of a brash university professor in me that just wants to tell people just like, just doesn’t matter what your reaction to it is.

17:26

Like when kids walk into a classroom and they just want to tell you their feelings about what you’re saying in the classroom and you just want to slap them in the face and tell them, look, it doesn’t matter what your feelings are about those things.

There are other people in this classroom.

I’m trying to explain this thing, shut up about your feelings, listen to what I’m saying, then maybe it’ll start making sense.

17:46

And in the case of Bitcoin, I think this is the situation here.

You need to just understand how it works from the technical perspective, and I’ll my book The Bitcoin Standard explains it in an in an intuitive bigger picture thing.

18:02

But I don’t claim that it is a sufficient resource for understanding Bitcoin from the technical perspective.

I think it gives you a good overview of how the thing functions, but you probably need to do more reading.

You need to run the software yourself.

You need to understand how it works, Make your own private keys and public key, use an address, send some coins back and forth.

18:25

When you do it that way, it begins to make sense.

And so I think that’s that’s what people really need to do.

I think it’s a very technologically significant and economically significant innovation and I think you should look into it.

18:40

My, my honest advice to anybody who’s said they should look into it, because I think we are headed to a world in which this is going to be the most important form of money in the world.

And I think you it’s in your interest, so they can do it.

Well, I can tell you I agree with all that.

18:57

By the way, your book is incredible.

And the reason why I love the book is a historical thing right at the beginning.

I love history.

I think history teaches us so much.

And you talk about the origins of money, and you talk about the Roman Empire and everything, and then the central banks, and then you do go over Bitcoin, but in a way that’s not overwhelming, especially someone like me.

19:17

So I love it and again, I’m just going to plug your book Bitcoin Standard, and I’m a bit slow on the uptake.

I was like, why is it Bitcoin standard?

And I was like, duh, gold standard.

This is the Bitcoin standard and I think that’s what you mean by that.

19:32

But anyway, I might be wrong, but I think that’s, I get it now.

So I I I got my private key, I got my treasurer, I got my public key and I bought some Bitcoin.

And you’re right when you do it.

It just suddenly, ah, it just suddenly clicks and it’s like podcasting.

19:52

For the longest time I was like, oh, I’d love to do a podcast, Oh my God, don’t know where to start.

And I start watching some YouTube videos and they’re all like, just do it, just start doing it and you’ll make mistakes and you’ll, you know, you’ll be like fumbling around.

But the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.

20:08

And it’s, I think it’s the same.

Just get used to the idea of Bitcoin and.

Suddenly it just becomes normal and it’s not like the strange thing anymore.

And all my fears and hesitancy about Bitcoin has gone out the window.

Can I ask you something?

I know the answer.

20:24

I would ask you.

You know, my kids are quite young.

They’re going to school.

I think school is a place where you’re meant to learn about life and prepare you as you become an adult for the world around you.

But there’s two bugbears I have.

I don’t feel schools teach children how to look after their health.

20:42

And I can tell you right now, I didn’t even learn that in medical school.

It was only in my kind of like early 40s I figured out I cracked the code of how to live a healthy life and I was like, what?

It’s so simple.

We should be teaching all our kids this.

And one of the things that really annoys me is why are we not teaching our kids how to eat properly, how to look after their health, how to exercise, all that kind of stuff?

21:05

The other bugbear that I have is why don’t we teach kids at school about money?

Where does money come from?

How to look after your money?

Your personal finances?

We don’t get taught anything about that.

21:21

Why is that?

Yeah, that’s an excellent question, and I think it’s an extremely revealing question.

I think the most important insights and the most important ideas and the most important realizations you get in life come from observing things that are patently obvious.

21:42

And just analysing the implications.

I think too many people get stuck on trying to analyse the details and getting into the small things and looking at very sophisticated ways of analysing extremely arcane little details.

22:00

But I’m a simple man and I think you make a lot more headway in life by.

Just looking at the simple things and understanding them.

So my favorite example of that is in terms of diet.

Most people, well, not most people.

22:17

Most people don’t care about their diet.

But among the people who care about their diet, you find an insane obsession with reading all every new scientific paper that comes out.

And this new paper says, well, you should eat broccoli in the morning after drinking water because it gives you this sort of takes away that.

22:33

And I mean, the stress of reading all of those papers and the stress of following all these different contradictory advice based on the say so of experts is enormous.

And you will most likely not make any progress there.

22:50

As opposed to just doing the very blatant, obvious, very simple things which any five year old can understand and my kid understood at a very young age, which is.

Just don’t eat sugar.

Eat red meat.

And that’s that.

23:07

That on its own is 90% of the battle won.

And so pick for most of your life, For the vast majority of things, you only need to pick the low hanging fruit.

The low hanging fruit is enough.

For the vast majority of people, the low hanging fruit is enough.

And so applying this to education, I think that it’s it’s very telling that.

23:29

You just need to observe this one little thing.

You send your kid to a school and they’re out there teaching them all kinds of things and that’s it’s incredible.

So if you’re in the US and New York, they’re teaching them sexuality at age 5 or 6.

They’re teaching them all kinds of absurd things that if you were an adult, if you started talking to your colleague in work about these things, you’d get fired for sexual harassment.

23:53

But somehow it’s OK for an adult to talk to a 5 year old about those things because.

It’s education or something like that.

So you see.

And that’s just OK.

Maybe you could say this is just an extreme example and it’s these crazy walks, but it’s not just an extreme example.

24:08

The vast majority of stuff that kids learn in most schools these days is irrelevant.

Nonsense.

A lot of it is just irrelevant.

Trivia.

One of my pet peeves is teaching kids about dinosaurs.

Why are you teaching kids about dinosaurs?

24:24

They’re never going to see a dinosaur in their life.

They’re never going to encounter a dinosaur.

It doesn’t matter.

And you have kids all over the world who can name 35 breeds of dinosaurs, and they’ll tell you what this one eats and how this one lies and how that one runs and why that’s completely irrelevant.

24:40

Wouldn’t you be better off learning about the cows that you eat and the different breeds of animals that you’re going to be eating?

So you have a lot of trivia.

You have a lot of horrible sexual education.

Which is completely inappropriate and arguably criminal.

24:56

And you’ve also got a lot of government propaganda.

Just how to believe the government, why the government is so good, Civic education, all of that stuff.

It’s all about how you are a small cog in a giant wheel, and your fulfillment in life comes from accepting that you’re a little cog and then you let the big cogs move you around and then you die.

25:16

And that’s how you die.

Happy, healthy death.

And so and then what they don’t teach you is how to eat and how to survive and how to manage your money.

And I think those are just two of the most important, very basic things that people need to do.

25:32

I mean, your, your material existence is your existence.

It’s it’s entirely absurd to pretend that.

You know, school is above teaching kids about money because we teach you the more important things, issues of the mind, and rather things issues of matter.

25:52

No.

If you don’t sort out your material well-being, you’ll die.

You can’t figure out how to live in a place that is clean, that is healthy, where you have clean sewage, where you have, where you’re able to afford the modern amenities that make life.

26:11

Possible You will die.

This is not a joke.

This is not a small thing.

It’s something that you should be extremely focused on.

But for the vast majority of people, they barely learn anything in school.

And then they learn those things at an old age, which I find to be extremely problematic because you could do so much better if you learn this at a young age.

26:34

And I think the reason for why they do that is, I mean.

You know by their by their fruits you shall judge them.

And the reason is clearly they don’t have a real interest in the educational child to the benefit of the child.

26:53

There is an agenda out there and it is not to the benefit of the child.

The agenda is to benefit people who set the agenda, the governments and the people who drop the curricula.

They benefit from this system.

27:08

They need you to eat their industrial slop because that’s highly profitable.

They need you to use their garbage money because that’s also highly profitable for them.

And that’s how you end up where you are.

That’s where you end up in the world in which the vast majority of people think it’s completely normal and healthy, that you eat garbage and that you use terrible money that’s designed to steal from you.

27:33

And they think we’re the weird ones because we.

We eat food that is nourishing and not poisonous.

And we eat money and we use money that isn’t designed to rob us.

Yeah, and for calling out this absolute bullshit of eating garbage, poison and using money that’s just toy money that’s corrupt, you get called conspiratorial and a quack.

28:00

It’s quite strange.

Seth Dean, why is it that when we we say all wars are banker wars, why is that phrase there?

I.

To be honest, it’s not a phrase I’ve heard that.

28:19

It’s not a phrase that’s been around for a long.

I’ve noticed it quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and months.

Maybe.

I don’t know where the origin of that phrase is, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it and in mind.

The Bitcoin standard and the PR standard I discussed this aspect of.

28:36

Fiat money, I think the way that money got centralized, particularly gold around the gold center got centralized in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries led to the centralized.

The centralization of money led to government having an enormous amount of resources at its disposal.

28:58

But it wasn’t its money.

And this is really the tricky part.

So the government is practically in charge of the central bank.

The government regulates the central bank, the government overseas the central bank.

And supposedly this is for your own good, to make sure that your central bank is doing things properly.

29:18

But the government can’t just go and take all of the money from the central bank, all of your money from the central bank.

It’s not their money.

It’s your money.

It’s your money.

You put it at the bank.

The bank puts some of it at the central bank.

And the government is there to make sure that the central bank and the bank manage your money properly, they say.

29:35

But you can see the incentives here, which is that’s a very, very, very, very lucrative giant pot of gold that is right under the noses of government.

And Ludwig von Mises is one of my favorite economists, the Austrian food economist.

29:52

He said history shows government can never resist the temptation of messing with the money.

And the most effective way of digging their hands into the cookie jar, getting into that giant pot of gold down the road from the presidential palace, has always been war.

30:14

So you can’t just say, hey, sorry, we’re going to take your money, You know, obviously it’s been done, but when you do that, people get upset.

How?

Why are you taking our money?

I worked hard to put the money in the savings.

You can’t just take half of them.

I want that money.

But if you tell people, Oh no, those evil foreigners next door are coming and that they are going to do horrible things to us.

30:38

But if you give me half of your money, then things will be fine.

Well then the people are far more receptive.

People have this tribalism.

People have this idea of being on my team versus your team.

And this is something that in the 20th century and 21st century, a lot of humans have learned to let that out into professional sports, which I think is great.

31:02

I think you’re much better off being a football fan than being a fan of your government.

Hating Manchester United fans is a lot better than hating French people or German people.

It’s it’s a far healthier thing because, you know, you watch a game.

Once a week on Saturday and you hate Manchester United fans for a couple of hours for singing songs against your team and then you get on with your life.

31:26

But when you like your government team and you hate the other countries team, then you can get manipulated into all kinds of insanely dangerous and destructive things, destructive and dangerous to do.

And to other people, which is, let’s just dig into everybody’s money so that we can defeat the evil French or the evil Germans.

31:47

Or whatever it is.

And of course, here the tragic thing is that this incentive exists on both sides of the border.

Both countries will have this incentive.

So there’s a very, very, very perverse incentive problem here wherein the governments of both countries, it is in their interest to launch war against each other because they are both then able to dig into the cookie jar of the central bank reserves and so they both benefit from it.

32:16

And of course, they’re not going to be the ones that are going to be fighting.

It’s going to be you and your kids that are going to be fighting and dying.

And so this is where the incentive comes from.

And so the centralization of money, I believe, in central banks creates this incentive for digging into money in the abstract.

32:34

But also more specifically, over the last few centuries, the way in which this digging in has taken place has not just been in a simple sort of.

Putting your hand in the gold pot and taking the gold and distributing it the way governments have done that is through bonds.

32:54

And the bond market has really been the culprit here.

The way that that works is all right, we want to fight the French.

The evil French are going to do evil things to us unless we fight them.

But don’t worry, we’re not going to take your money because, I mean, that gets old after a while.

33:11

It’s just tell people, hey, we’re going to take your money.

They don’t like it.

So don’t don’t worry, We’re not just going to take your money.

We are going to issue bonds, and then we won’t have to take your money.

In fact, you just lend us the money and we’ll pay you back with interest once we defeat those.

33:30

So the emergence of the bond market has been a wonderful boon for war mongers and people who love to see the blood of humanity flow in rivers, because nothing sells bonds like war.

And bonds are extremely profitable.

33:47

Trade for people to to to engage in.

And our governments are then able to essentially fool their people into thinking that war is going to be cost less.

Just give us the money, we’ll fight the war, and then we’ll come back after victory and we’ll pay you off and we’ll be able to pay you with interest, because defeating the evil enemy is going to have so many positive dividends for our economy.

34:13

That it’s going to be massively profitable for us.

And so from here you see where the ideology for war comes along and why so much of the garbage that your kids learn at school is about war.

34:29

I mean a lot of this, everything in every country in the world.

Kids learn a lot of criminal propaganda.

It’s it’s manufactured, that has National History and.

Why we need to fight our enemies and how we need to fight the the evil enemies of our nation.

34:49

But it’s really just an excuse to slaughter foreigners and enrich the bankers who are issuing those bonds and trading those bonds.

And so historically we see this, the market for bonds emerges and wars around Europe were massively profitable for who were massively.

35:12

Bullish for the bond market.

The more war there is, the more bonds need to be issued.

And so bankers in profit from these wars because they are, you know, it’s like you’re the house in the casino.

35:28

People go in to gamble and it doesn’t matter to you if you’re the casino, it doesn’t matter who wins.

You get a cut from the winner and the loser.

So that incentivizes war.

And that, in my opinion, explains why the same people who don’t teach you about money teach you that war is essential.

35:46

And that explains entirely criminal schools of thought, like Keynesian military Keynesianism.

So Keynesian economics is an absolute catastrophe, an absolutely bankrupt intellectual exercise, completely moronic.

36:02

Keynes was an absolutely despicable piece of shit.

He was as an individual.

I mean, he used to traffic, he used to go to brothels to rape children.

He used to take.

He used to this was his thing.

He would rape actual children in and the victims of sex trafficking basically in slaves who were sold for as sex toys for foreigners.

36:29

And this was this was him as an individual.

And his economics is not much better.

It is a reflection of that morality.

And so his economics is all about how we need to sacrifice the future for the present.

And that is reflected in everything that he does teaches in his economics.

36:47

And one of the most pernicious and through the evil aspects of Keynesianism is what is called military Keynesianism.

Wherein these there are no nice words I could use here, but these things that call themselves Keynesians.

They argue that war is good for the economy because war increases the amount of spending, and so when the government is spending more money, that leads to more economic activity, and more economic activity leads to more employment, and so that leads to economic recovery and that makes life better.

37:23

This is genuinely what these criminals believe and that’s why these Keynesian ideas.

Are so, so popular in spite of the fact that they are so patently and obviously the bankrupt.

Oh man, that’s heavy, heavy.

37:41

I agree with all of that, my friend.

Can I ask?

I’d.

I had some so many questions to ask and you just got me really down listening to all of that because it’s so true.

You were saying?

How central banks are government, government owned?

37:59

And Baba speaking to Ed, my understanding is the Federal Reserve is not federal and there’s no reserve, It’s a private institution.

Aren’t a lot of the central banks around the world now private?

Can you just clarify that for me like how many are actually state owned and how many are private?

38:22

I don’t have exact numbers on.

Which is which worldwide and how these things function.

I know the important ones.

And ultimately, really there is only one central bank that’s the US Federal Reserve.

38:40

Everything else is a branch of the US Federal Reserve.

Some of these branches are allowed to take the US Federal Reserve’s dollars and hold it in their reserves, and then issue their own stupid little pieces of paper with different pictures of different dead people on it.

And print more of this in order to rob their local population.

39:01

That doesn’t make them independent.

There’s really only one central Bank of the block and that’s the one that matters.

With the rest of them, I I don’t particularly know, but it doesn’t particularly matter because these people are just whatever, whatever is the situation with, say, the central Bank of Brazil or Peru or Vietnam or Kenya.

39:24

It’s completely inconsequential who owns it.

It’s just a front office for the US Federal Reserve and the, as I described it in the Bitcoin standard or in the Fiat standard, I use the term.

It’s not clear who wears the pants in this relationship because the government benefits and the owners of the central banks benefit, and the owners of the important one is the US Federal Reserve, and the owners of the US Federal Reserve are the banks.

39:54

So there’s a page on the US Federal Reserve called Who Owns the Federal Reserve?

And it’s a hilarious stage.

Check it out.

It’s very funny.

They say the Federal Reserve is not owned by anybody and then they send and they go around and say, well no, it doesn’t make a profit, it just, but then they say, well it pays dividends.

40:17

And of course, the important thing for the Federal Reserve is not that it makes profits to itself.

The profits of the Federal Reserve aren’t what matters because after all, the prints its own money, the important thing about it is that it allows its constituent banks to have an oligopolite allows them to have the whole system they profit from.

40:34

So I think Ed Griffin’s work on this is enormously important.

I I book The Creature from Jekyll Island is extremely, extremely important, but one of the most important books of the last century.

And in fact, if you go on Amazon, it’s always at the top of the best seller list.

40:51

Which I think is extremely telling.

Because I I’ve been following the specifically the best seller list on the money and market policy category in Amazon.

Because I’ve been following this money in this category for the last five years.

Because my book is on that category.

41:07

And for a very significant chunk of the last five years and 5 1/2 years since my book has come out, my book and his book have been at the top, which I think is enormously telling, particularly in mind of the discussion we had earlier about education.

They don’t teach you this stuff at university.

41:23

Everybody who goes to university learns from idiots like Paul Krugman, John Maynard Keynes, Ben Bernanke, all of these criminals.

And you are taught these ideas and you know works books by people like Paul Samuelson, Joe Stiglitz and Gregory Mankiw.

41:44

Everybody learns these from these names at university.

And then when they get out into the real world, when you look at what people actually read you want, you look at what Amazon sells.

Amazon sells very large percentage of all books sold in the US.

42:00

So it’s a very good indicator of what people are actually reading.

And it’s very different.

People read things that are very different from what is taught at university.

So when people go to university, they read the government propaganda.

When people get out in the real world, they don’t have to read anymore.

42:17

So if they do read, it’s because they’re intelligent, it’s because they want to learn about the world, and it’s because they use their mind and think.

You don’t have to read, you can just go and watch reality TV.

You can spend your time doing all kinds of things other than reading.

The people who choose to read are the people who choose to use their brain productively, and these people find their way to Ed Griffin’s world.

42:39

They find their way to bitcoins, that they find their way to those books.

And I think there’s very good reason for that, because these books answer actual questions that matter with and offer you actionable advice that helps you navigate your own life.

Whereas the rest of those books that you learn at university, they are trapped and you are the victim of these books because they teach you how to just become another one of the people that fall for all of these 100%.

43:06

So it’s it’s tempting to it’s tempting for people like me to particularly focus on Bitcoin and I sort of do that in the Bitcoin standard.

You know, I the Bitcoin standard and the Fiat standard, and I discuss the Fiat monetary system as it exists, trying my best not to pass too much value judgment on it.

43:29

Well, perhaps I do pass value judgment.

No.

But what I try and avoid is pointing fingers at people and saying they did this and they did that because I come at it as an engineer where I look at Bitcoin from an engineering perspective.

There’s mining and then there’s private keys and public keys and hashing and all of these things.

43:50

And then this is how the supplies kept the 21 million.

And these are the implications.

And then I do the same thing in the Fiat standard.

When I look at how Fiat works, we try and explain and understand and elaborate on how the monetary system wants to, regardless of who’s benefited from it.

44:06

In other words, we’re trying to understand what this monster does, and we’re not here to blame and point fingers at the people who are running this monster.

But I can’t but respect somebody like Ed Griffin.

44:26

Who just goes and lays it out very well documented, meticulously meticulously researched book and just points at the people who are doing this?

That there are people who benefit from this.

It isn’t just governments and governments are just particularly in democracies.

44:47

Government is just an endless revolving door of the actors who come in and say a bunch of lines from the Democrat.

You know Joe Biden is not, is not capable of controlling his own urination that’s in his life.

45:03

He’s he’s out there sniffing little girls.

I guarantee you he is not in charge of the US Federal Reserve.

He’s just another actor.

But, and we’ve had a long line of actors in this government, I think, yeah, there, there are special interests that benefit from this. 30%.

45:24

Oh, my friend, you’ve you kind of, like mapped up my journey.

Like as a kid, I just don’t understand anything.

It just didn’t make sense to me.

I just knew something was desperately wrong, and that’s where I saw it.

Then Ed Griffin’s book.

And then I came across your book 100% exactly.

45:40

And then suddenly I was like, oh, makes sense.

And I know people who are in the City.

Bankers, traders, bond traders.

I kid, you know, I sit down and talk to them.

They don’t even know.

Like the Fiat money system, they don’t even understand this.

45:55

They don’t even know where money comes from.

And they’re at that level where they’re bond traders, but it’s just numbers.

They’re trading, they’re doing analysis, and they don’t even know the fundamentals of how crooked and ridiculous everything is built on this House of Cards.

46:13

Can I just go back a bit?

So Bitcoin, what was incredible was, you know, you’re big.

You talk about how someone spent 10,000 Bitcoin to buy 2 pizza pies.

In today’s money, that’d be something like £240 million.

Better have been a good pizza.

46:28

You know, all these guys that were, you know, the tech guys who were mining in the in the beginning.

How do we know?

Like a lot of Bitcoin is not held now in a few hands, you know, you talk about that magic number, so people might not know this, but you’re right, only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist.

46:49

I don’t know why that number was picked, but that’s the case.

One how many bitcoins have been mined so far, how many have been are left to mine, and how much of it is concentrated in a few hands?

Because aren’t we getting into position where that won’t be good If Bitcoin is used more widely, that is just monopolized by a few people who got on the bandwagon early on?

47:15

No, that’s a good thing.

That’s why people are getting on the bandwagon, that if you didn’t have that incentive, then why would anybody ever switch?

The reason people switch is that the earlier you get in, the cheaper the Bitcoin you get.

And so currently we have 19 and a half million bitcoins in circulation.

47:36

There are another one and a half million bitcoins that are going to be mined over the next century or so.

We’ll take probably about another 100 to 120 years to finish mining that 1 1/2.

And the majority of that is going to be mined in the next few years.

So every four years, the rate of production of Bitcoin drops by half.

47:56

Currently, we’re doing 900 coins a day starting in May or April.

Next year it’s going to drop to 450 and three years ago it was 1803, four years before that it was 3604 years before that it was 7200.

48:13

So it’s constantly dropping by half, which means that if you look at the supply, half of the supply was created in the first four years and then the second-half is the rest of the 140 years or so, 130 years or so, it’s going to be created.

48:31

And So what this does is that it incentivizes people to get in early and that’s what allows Bitcoin to grow very quickly.

And yes, we do definitely have a lot of early bitcoins who have a very large amount of Bitcoin and they are going to have essentially unfathomable when for the vast majority of people.

48:48

But the vast majority of people are going to get into Bitcoin probably at much higher prices than where we are right now.

We’re still at the point where I’d say less than 1% of humanity is on Bitcoin so far.

So if you’re one of those 1%, you were lucky to be able to buy a Bitcoin at current prices, say, where one Bitcoin is $27,000 in that range.

49:13

And you could buy it a few years ago for $5000 and a few years before that for $500.

And for that $5 or that $0.05 if you managed to buy it at that point.

I mean, it’s just a very, very different proposition from being able to buy 10 years from now, you know, might be 200,002 million, 20 million compared to dollars.

49:34

So the purchase power of a Bitcoin keeps rising over time while the supply just gets less and less scarce and so therefore, sorry, less and less abundant.

And so therefore, that will result in a world in which, yeah, some people hold a lot of Bitcoin, but I don’t think that is a problem.

49:54

But I think it’s a problem is somebody having the ability to make money for free.

That’s that’s a big problem.

So I don’t mind if somebody has more toys than me.

I mind if somebody takes my toys.

And I think if you have a problem with people having more toys than you, you weren’t raised properly as a kid who needed to be raised properly.

50:17

Your parents did a bad job.

I think that’s really the only explanation of people who worry about inequality.

The issue is not that people have more than each other.

I think in On the contrary, I find it to be inspirational.

The idea that you look at somebody who climbed out of nowhere to become a very rich person, I think it’s it’s it’s it’s deeply inspiring and it’s deeply good that these people exist because it shows you that everybody has a chance to do something like this.

50:45

You could be the son of a janitor, and if you work hard, figure out what to do, you can become a successful entrepreneur and become a billionaire.

And I think these people existing is very good.

These people being there is very good for several reasons.

51:00

Number one, I’d like my kids to grow up in a world where this is possible, where they realize, and that’s true if I’m rich or if I’m poor, I want my kids to grow up in that world.

I wanted to realize that just because your dad is rich, you could, you won’t stay rich, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have to be rich.

51:18

And just because your dad’s poor doesn’t mean that you’re going to grow into necessarily being poor.

You can change your destiny and you control it with your own hands, with your own actions, with your own mind.

That’s the one other thing.

51:34

And the other thing is that when people have this enormous amount of wealth, it allows them to engage in large projects and allows them to engage in intergenerational process.

It allows them to invest in things that make life better for everybody else.

When you’re at a point where you have 10s or hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money, you were able to make the world better.

51:56

You’re able to build things for people.

You’re able to invest things that require enormous amounts of resources and a very long time horizon payoff, which most likely wouldn’t be funded if money wasn’t concentrated with these people.

52:13

So it doesn’t make me worse off that there are people out there that are rich.

On the contrary, they are able to finance all kinds of things from which I benefit.

They’re able to build giant projects in which I work, from which I purchased Woods.

52:31

They’re able to invest large amounts of capital, which increases productivity.

So that I think is a good thing about it and I don’t think it is a problem.

I should say though, when you look at today’s crop of billionaires, particularly people like Bill Gates, I think they give wealth a bad name.

52:51

But these people are parasites.

They did not become rich because they provided the world with value.

They became rich because they’ve known how to lobby and manipulate the Fiat system to their benefit.

Somebody like Bill Gates got enriched from patents and essentially it’s the work of lawyers.

53:09

It’s not that he was this genius whose contribution of code was so much, infinitely better than other people.

It’s just he had the best, the best lawyers I know.

What can I ask you something?

So a lot of wealthy, wealthy, super wealthy.

53:27

I don’t mean like you’re hard working, rich person who’s successful business and has done well in life.

I’m talking about he’s super parasitical predatory multi multi billionaires.

What they’re very good at doing is concentrating wealth, making monopolies, perpetuating their wealth.

53:44

How do we make sure that those who got into early into Bitcoin purely not because of their hard endeavours, But you know what?

There’s an opportunity.

They went in there fast, got some Bitcoin.

How do we make sure these people don’t concentrate their wealth and exploit others and monopolize?

Or are we just hoping that they’re bitcoiners and they’re a better beat of people?

54:04

So The thing is, they can concentrate their wealth if they want to, but that just means that they don’t spend, and that’s a good thing.

If somebody’s rich just sitting on 1,000,000 bitcoins, there’s only 20 million Bitcoin for the rest of humanity, and one guy has a million Bitcoin, and that person decides that he just wants to keep the million Bitcoin.

54:21

He doesn’t want to send them.

Well, you know what that does?

That just makes your bitcoins more valuable.

So that doesn’t hurt you.

On the contrary, it benefits you.

If he sucks up the money, he doesn’t use it to spend it on things, then that makes things more affordable for you.

54:39

If he goes out and starts spending, well, that does raise the price of things.

He can buy things, but that also reduces his wealth.

So there’s there’s no injustice there.

It’s just a consumer decision.

He can decide to do whatever he wants, there’s no problem there.

54:56

But the problem is when you say how do they exploit people or they take advantage of people, whatever, I just need to turn in possible with the hard money.

I’m just turning in the plug for my camera.

Sorry, one second.

Yeah, no worries.

55:39

Rookie mistake.

I’ll cut that later.

I didn’t turn the plug on anyway.

You’re saying spending?

Yeah, you you can’t.

You can’t exploit people and make take advantage of them with a hard money.

55:58

The primary way in which people do this is that they are able to create money out of thin air.

They make new money which devalues your money, which leaves you weaker and poorer, constantly getting weaker and poorer as they get stronger and wealthier.

We get rid of that and then in the world of Bitcoin only the only way that you can make more money is that you need to work to save others.

56:21

Can I ask you something I’ve been hearing since the late 90s?

It’s going to be a massive financial crash.

Everything’s going to implode.

Not like a recession, but I mean really bad.

Thenwehadthe.com Then we had the 2008 and we had the pandemic.

56:39

You know, I get it.

The Fiat system is the massive pon biggest Ponzi scheme ever.

We will.

We’re currently living in a global Ponzi scheme to keep printing the money out of nothing.

Inflation goes up.

This cost of living crisis isn’t ’cause you know, ’cause you and I are spending too much.

56:56

It’s because the governments are spending too much money that never existed.

It’s the cost of lockdowns.

It’s the cost of bailing out banks.

But I keep hearing, oh, the Ponzi scheme is going to crash, everything’s going to implode.

But is it?

Or is it too big to fail and they’ll just keep kicking the can down the road and printing more money?

57:15

Or are we reaching a point where it is so bad it’s going to all come down?

What do you think is the future of the Fiat system?

Well, that is the topic of my second book, The Fiat Standard.

So it doesn’t look like you’ve read it back.

57:32

Man, I’m disappointed.

Sorry, fail fail could do better.

It’s it’s not a short book.

57:48

It’s longer than a Bitcoin standard, so I can’t easily summarize it.

But I will say I I I don’t have a crystal ball.

I know what is going to happen, but I get under the hood of how the Fiat monetary system functions.

I study it closely, trying to understand how it works, and I try and arrive at the conclusion that to try and arrive at a way of thinking about how it’s going to develop over time.

58:17

And what I conclude is the, I mean, I don’t conclude, but I think there’s there’s definitely a case to be made that Fiat is a lot more sustainable than its enemies give credit.

So once you understand how Fiat works, once you take the red pill if you want, once you snap out of the indoctrination that you got at school in the university and you understand that this thing is a giant scam, the immediate reaction is this is going to fall apart next week.

58:45

I mean, I’ve discovered it.

Everybody’s going to figure it out over the next week, and then next week it’s all going to fall apart.

And people have been feeling that way since the 1970s, since 1971, really since they went off the gold standard.

And lo and behold, here we are 52 years later and The thing is still kicking.

59:02

So there’s, I think there’s good reason to believe that it is sustainable and that even with all of this money printing and all this inflation, it’s going to continue to chug along.

59:18

Doesn’t mean it’s going to be smooth, doesn’t mean it’s going to be good, or should clarify.

It’s not good for you necessarily.

But it’s definitely working out well for the people who run it conveniently and coincidentally enough, it turns out that it benefits people who benefit from it, not people who just are forced to use it.

59:41

Who could have thought?

All right.

But I think if I were to try and summarize the case for why it is going to, why it’s going to survive, I’d say this.

The way that the Fiat system works is that money is created whenever new debt is issued.

59:59

In other words, when you go to a bank and you take out a mortgage for $1,000,000 to buy a house for $1,000,000, that bank is not taking $1,000,000 from its depositors and giving them to you.

They’re not taking a million dollars of their own capital and giving it to you.

They’re making a new $1,000,000.

1:00:16

So the money supply goes up by $1 million.

When you buy a house for $1,000,000 and bank issues, a loan for you doesn’t go up by exactly a million, goes up, probably a little bit less because they put some of their capital behind us.

But in any case, they’re making up a new amount of money.

1:00:32

Now when you pay off that loan, that money goes out of circulation.

So the money supply declined.

If you default on the House, that money is destroyed and the money supply declines as well.

So this, I think is the corrective mechanism, which is that as long as money is credit, money is debt.

1:00:52

When new credit is created, new money is created.

And if you create a lot of money through creating a lot of debt, yes, you can create inflation.

Our supply should create price inflation.

You can create a situation where the prices of things rise.

1:01:10

But what’s going to happen now is that the more you create of that money, the more you’re going to set in motion the business cycle system wherein the credit expands and then the credit contracts and then when the credit contracts, the money supply contracts.

1:01:26

And so this is the pumping and contraction that happens with the money supply at all times.

And if you look at the last 60 years, so in the Fiat standard, I write the book in the post book in 2021, so I had 60 years of the data from 1960.

1:01:46

You see that the Fiat monetary systems expanded on average at around in the best cases in the best countries, something like 7% per year, whereas it expanded by 14% overall and count in all countries and that’s seems to be manageable.

1:02:04

The 7% for countries like the US and Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, it seems to be sustainable.

It goes up by eight, 910% per year usually and then you get one year in which it declines by 1% or 3% or whatever.

1:02:20

And then overall, it carries on at an average of around 7% per year, and that seems to be sustainable enough.

So it could maybe continue none.

It’s not going to be painless.

There’ll be a lot of recessions and a lot of crashes, but it will continue.

1:02:39

It could continue.

I of course there is a case to be made for why it could collapse, and I discussed this in detail.

But I think the interesting thing about Bitcoins rise here is that what happens is that as Bitcoin rises, it becomes more and more possible for people to live without taking on debt, and that sucks the oxygen out of the system.

1:03:00

So instead of the whole thing crashing down catastrophically, we could instead have a world in which the system appreciates sorry, there’s a system, and the Fiat system depreciates in terms of its value and becomes less and less significant, while the Bitcoin economy grows more and more.

1:03:19

Oh, I really hope so.

I always say debt is in slavery, I mean.

We’re just modern day slaves.

From the moment we’re born, we’re just indoctrinated and let’s go to university.

Massive fees come out of university, huge fees.

1:03:37

Too scared to speak up at work?

You need to keep your bill, your bills being paid.

If you don’t have a job, you know how are you going to survive?

So you get bullied around by your employer.

You can’t question your government.

Nowadays, 50 to 60% of your employment is actually state funded.

1:03:56

Through state direct organizations or the contracts that they give up for in this country, in the UK is awful.

You know, majority of people are working for the state directly or indirectly.

There’s very few people privately who are the minority that fund the majority is crazy that we were in this situation, but we’re slaves.

1:04:16

We’re slaves.

We We’re just laden with debt, student fees, and America’s health care fees.

And then your home.

It’s mortgage, this debt grip, death grip, vice.

It’s just awful.

It’s a horrible way to live and I think it shackles you, stops you from being free from your in your mind, in your soul.

1:04:37

And and I think the problem is the slaves don’t know it.

They’re they’re so comfortable in their slavery, they don’t even know what freedom actually means in terms of Bitcoin being adopted.

Can you see it being used for transactions?

1:04:54

Because right now it’s very niche still.

I think there’s one country, El Salvador, that’s made it legal to, you know, like recognized it as a currency.

Do you think other countries will do that?

Do you think you’ll get to a point where people will start comfortably trading or do you think the government’s going to come down and ban it?

1:05:13

And like even here in the West and even now, I’ve seen increasing comments on the apps about.

The regulatory bodies and you know are they going to clamp down on people using Bitcoin, They’re going to try and some way of regulating it because it’s such a threat.

1:05:28

Because it is a threat.

And if we look back at some of the the wars like Saddam Hussein, Mohammed Mohammed or whatever his name was, Gaddafi, you know, they were wanting to introduce gold backed currencies and I’m sure they were, you know, assassinated and killed.

1:05:48

Because that was a threat to the Petro dollar, the hegemony of the Petro dollar, You know, the Bitcoin is like that.

Bitcoin is really threatening the Fiat Petro dollar, the American dollar.

So are they not going to try everything possible to destroyer or shackle it or chain it?

1:06:07

I don’t know.

I don’t have a magic ball.

My optimistic case for this is that Bitcoin isn’t a competitor.

So it’s not some government that’s out there saying, hey, we’re going to introduce this new currency that’s better than the dollar.

Bitcoin is not a competitor for the dollar in the sense of a centralized currency, a national currency, a government that’s going to try to eat the dollar’s lunch.

1:06:30

Bitcoin is a new technology, and so you cannot think of it in terms of the world as it functions.

You cannot think of it as just another addition to the things that we already have that already function has the dollar does, it’s entirely new and so therefore it revamps the technological possibilities available.

1:06:59

It makes it a different world available for everybody.

And so now everybody needs to reconsider.

And so while it’s possible that beneficiaries of the current Fiat system might fight Bitcoin, I think the smarter thing to do is to realize, Oh well, we can’t really kill Bitcoin.

1:07:21

If we fight it, we end up just being late to it and we end up losing and we end up letting others buy more of it.

And so once you get Bitcoin, once you truly understand that this is just only 21 million and that this is only increasing at any particular at a fixed rate and that you can’t ask for a do over, you can’t say, all right, let’s switch to Bitcoin, but let’s cancel the 1st 19 and a half million and give me my fair share and have it redone according to the wealth that we have in the Fiat system.

1:07:59

Once you realize that you can’t do that, then you realize that fighting Bitcoin is just extremely stupid thing that you would be doing in order to waste your Bitcoin away.

You’re just blowing Bitcoin away.

1:08:15

And so I think the smarter thing to do would be to get in on Bitcoin rather than fight it.

And that’s why you see BlackRock is applying for a Bitcoin ETF.

Oh, wow.

Oh wow.

Wow.

1:08:32

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow, 17, yes.

Time is soon running out.

I’ve got so many more things to talk to you about.

Can I have you back in the new year?

No, I guess.

1:08:49

Yeah, let’s do it.

Maybe.

But before we end, we’ve got a few more things to talk about and first of all I just want to say thank you.

Thank you for being so patient.

I always think the best teachers are the ones that are patient with their pupils and, you know, are take.

1:09:07

Complex issues and explain it in a really simple way and understandable way.

I think that’s a sign of a great teacher and somebody who’s highly intelligent and knows their subject matter.

People who use gobbledygook terms and technical words and try and, you know, confuse you.

They actually don’t know their what they’re talking about or they’re just insecure.

1:09:25

You were amazing.

So thank you so much and thank you for being so patient.

Stephanie, I want to ask you.

About what’s going on in the Middle East right now and Palestine, Israel.

There’s so much hatred and anger going on and it makes me sad because I feel fundamentally what’s happening is like we talked about, it’s the bankers, it’s the the people that power who have instigated all of this, who are getting people to fight each other.

1:09:57

And that’s what humanity’s been like over the last 100 plus years.

We we seem to be fighting in.

You know, at each other’s throats and not looking at the real enemy, the real enemy of humanity are these private bankers who are hoarding the wealth and and enslaving us.

1:10:16

What’s your take on what’s going on in Palestine right now?

Well, it’s it’s it’s an absolute, it’s it’s an absolute tragedy.

I’d say it’s something that’s consuming me, particularly the last couple of weeks, but also for all of my life.

1:10:35

I was born in Palestine and it’s something that I followed very closely.

I.

Did know that?

Yeah, I think it is.

It is definitely highly relevant to the issues of money that we were discussing.

Ultimately, as we were saying, war is profitable and governments getting into wars is just lucrative thing.

1:11:01

And so governments all over the world have this incentive to get into war.

They have this incentive to finance other governments getting into war.

Israel is a topic that is pretty appealing to a lot of the people in the US and in Europe.

They can be easily manipulated like children into throwing tantrums about why Israel needs to to protect itself.

1:11:24

And that has been extremely lucrative for the military industry because the US hands out billions of dollars every year to protect Israel, with those two buying enormously sophisticated weapon, which then puts Israel in a position where it doesn’t have an incentive to coexist with its neighbours.

1:11:41

It doesn’t have an incentive incentive to be respectful of its neighbours.

It has the incentive to be belligerent.

It has the incentive to keep stealing land, behaving more conflict because they get land out of it, they get weapons to fight conflict.

And the more Palestinians try and fight back, the more excuse they have to get more weapons, more money.

1:12:02

It’s it’s a very vicious and bloody cycle.

It is a function of Fiat money and in fact it goes even further than that.

In fact, if you look at the history of Palestine, the entire idea of establishing A Zionist entity in Palestine, the idea of building Israel as a Jewish state, you know, political Zionism as opposed to cultural and religious Zionism, which is something that is benign.

1:12:30

You know, Jews living in Palestine, as in the case for hundreds of years, hundreds of years Jews have lived in Palestine.

They were living their normal relations with Muslims and Christians in the land.

Things only started to become a problem when the Zionist movement came about and they said we want to establish a national homeland, which is major red flag for anybody who’s on that homeland who’s not actually from Palestine.

1:12:56

I was not actually Jewish because suddenly you’re saying this is going to be a place for Jews and Jews from all over the world can come here, whereas the people who are here who are not Jewish need to get out basically.

And so this is the root of the conflict.

The root of the conflict is the growth of belligerent political Zionism.

1:13:15

In my opinion.

Jews existed before then.

It wasn’t a problem.

There was never any talk of we need to ethnically cleanse the Jews out of Palestine.

Under the Ottoman system, the several ethnicities and religions existed and coexisted and everybody paid taxes to Ottomans.

1:13:36

And you had about 400 years of peace in in Palestine around that time because all these minorities and all of these populations could coexist together because none of them wanted to kick the others out then early 20th century.

1:13:54

And the connection here is that it was Britain going off the gold standard that put it in a position where it needed the support of the Rothschild family in order to manage to finance the war.

And that’s why during the midst of the war in 1917, when things were looking leak for the British Empire and I discussed in the Fiat standard, I look at the financing of the war and how Britain so a few points that most people don’t know, they don’t teach you these things in school.

1:14:24

When Britain went into war, it effectively went off the gold standard, although nobody really likes to talk about this.

But they started telling the the banks and the post offices were told to take payment from people in gold and off the payment in paper money and to collect all the gold and remit it to the Bank of England.

1:14:44

So the Bank of England effectively took away all the people’s gold and gave them paper.

And then of course that led to the rise of prices.

And the reason they wanted the gold was to finance war expenditure.

And so 1914191519161917.

1:15:01

Prices are rising, war doesn’t look like it’s ending.

The British soldiers are bogged down in an endless interminable battle and things are not looking like they’re getting resolved and British fiscal position is in deep trouble.

1:15:17

And it is at that point that the Rothschilds family chose to lobby the British government for the establishment of Israel.

And it was a completely unthinkable thing initially.

And if you know it was, it was absolutely shocking for most people who lived in Palestine.

1:15:37

And it had to be couched in all kinds of qualifications and terms.

Saying it was shocking for most Jews as well.

The majority of Jews at that time opposed it because what you were saying is catastrophic for Palestinians who are not Jewish and for Jews who are not Palestinian, because you’re saying we’re going to make a homeland for Jews in Palestine.

1:15:58

So that means if you’re not Jewish in Palestine, you are going to be a second class citizen or you’re going to be killed or you’re going to be transferred.

Whereas if you were a Jew outside of Palestine, then you can no longer be considered a full citizen of your country.

1:16:15

So if you’re a British Jew and now there’s a Jewish homeland, well, what are you still doing in Britain?

And so it was a big problem for many Jews.

They opposed it because this was going to lead to an undermining of their belonging to their homelands, to their countries, where they’d lived for centuries, whether it’s in Europe or in the US or anywhere.

1:16:40

And it was a big problem, obviously for the local population, but nonetheless it went ahead by Fiat, because the British government had a lot of power at that time, a lot of money.

And with the financing of the Rothschild town of the Europe are the Zionists.

They were able to provide settlers with enormous amounts of weaponry, enormous amount of financing, and they were able to drastically change the demographics of place.

1:17:06

They managed to eliminate a large number of people.

They lensed about 800,000 people in 1948, Ninety 47 and 48.

And of course, when the story is told.

Sorry, sorry.

Wait one second, One second.

1:17:22

When you say ethnically cleansed 800,000 people, what do you mean by that?

They moved them, They forced them to leave or they killed them?

Because I’m aware that there were deaf gangs and there were, you know, gangs of Jews, Zionists killing and burning villages.

1:17:39

Can you just expand on that?

And what do you mean by the 800,000 ethnic cleansing?

So it’s Jewish settlement began to increase very rapidly after the Balfour Declaration.

And so at the time that the Balfour Declaration was made, the percentage of Jews of the population in Palestine was under 10%.

1:18:02

And then it continued to increase quickly throughout that period because they were migrating from all over the world, but mainly Europe.

Really, it was, it was mainly Europe.

They were migrating from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe to Britain.

And they were building military organizations and they were supported by the British to a very large extent.

1:18:23

And they allied with the British to fight the local population and to disarm the local population.

So in 1936, Palestinians were protesting against the increased arming of Jewish militias, Zionist militias and the Zionist militias, and the British imperial authorities repressed the Palestinians, disarmed them and put down the rebellion over three years.

1:18:48

And then the Palestinians were effectively left without weapons from 1939 onwards.

And then the British continued to ruled the place until 1948, and then they decided to leave in 1948.

1:19:04

But from the 1930s, the Britain the Zionists had become very convinced that the way to solve this problem was to ethnically cleanse or transfer as they like, the terminology that they used as transfer.

And so there are very good accounts of this highly meticulously researched and detailed work that’s been done by Israeli historians on the Israeli strategy of transfer and ethnic cleansing.

1:19:35

So from the 1930s, it became clear, look, if we want to have a homeland in that land, there’s just no way around it.

We could lie to ourselves in the 19 in the early 19th century and the early 20th century, it was possible to say, well, we’re just going to move there and it’s an empty land and we’re going to get away with it.

1:19:56

We’re just going to make it into our own homeland.

But by the 1930s, it became clear this was not an empty land and the local population was not happy about the idea of the country becoming a national homeland for a population that was predominantly formed, as any local population anywhere in the world would be, you know, wherever you are in the world right now.

1:20:15

And imagine if I told you one, I’m guessing, let’s say 10% of Britain is South Asian.

It was Indian, right?

Probably something like that.

And as we said that Britain needs to become a national homeland for Indian people, and then we started inviting immigration for Indians, I’m going to guess that the 90% of the rest of the population are going to be happy about this.

1:20:37

And so in the 1930s, they drew up the plans for ethnic cleansing Palestine, and then they drew up the maps.

Specifically, they understood which communities needed to be moved in order to establish territorial contiguity for the Jewish state.

1:20:53

So in 1946, the United Nation comes up with a partition resolution and they say, well, the British, the British mandate is going to come to an end when the British leave, What are we going to do with this country?

And the United Nations comes up with an idea of let’s divide this country into two.

1:21:09

And so in that, in that, in that plan, the Jewish state was to get 55% of the land.

The Arab state was to get 45% of the land and at that time the ownership of the land was private land, was only 7% Jewish or something like 93% non Jewish, and yet they were going to give them 54% of the land.

1:21:37

Granted it’s not exactly the same because the majority of the land is unowned.

So they were getting the majority of the unowned land, but still they were getting even within the Jewish state in order to give them all that land, 45% of the population of the Jewish state was not Jewish.

1:21:55

So that was the partition plan that they say, well, the Arabs rejected the partition plan.

So the common story is the Arabs rejected the partition plan and then the Arab armies attacked and Israel had to defend itself.

And that’s why the refugees were created.

That’s first of all, the partition plan was on its own as completely crime.

1:22:11

You’re telling people that there’s going to be 45% minority in the Jewish state.

It’s going to be Arab and that that state’s going to have to be a Jewish state.

So effectively you’re going to have to have second class citizenship.

But that was the UNS idea.

1:22:28

Whereas the Zionist movement were very clear about the fact that they wanted to transfer most of those people that were on their property so that they could establish a very strong and decisive Jewish minor Jewish majority.

And so the Arab state is the Arabs would have lost a lot of land from the partition, and a lot of them would have stayed in a hostile state that wanted to turn them into a second class minority or ethnic cleanser.

1:22:54

So of course it’s completely unthinkable that anybody would accept that kind of proposal.

And of course, the Zionists would accept that proposal because it was extremely favorable for them.

So then when the.

But throughout that point, throughout that period, the Zionists had begun with the ethnic cleansing.

1:23:12

And in particular in 1947 is when they really picked up the plan for ethnic cleansing.

And they drew up something called Plan Dalat, which they’d drawn up in the 1930s and is very well detailed in a book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pape.

And he’s an Israeli historian.

1:23:28

He looked at original documents from Israeli organizations and archives.

And by the time that the British Mandate and the British Mandate ended on May 14, 1948, and on that day, by that time, the Zionists had already ethnically cleansed 250,000 Palestinians.

1:23:49

And by ethnic, the clans, I mean literally going to those villages and shooting at people, closing, surrounding all the exits of the villages except for one and then telling them we’re going to attack this village tomorrow and if you don’t leave, we’re going to kill everybody in this village.

1:24:06

And these religions have already been disarmed by that point.

So they did it with a few villages where they killed everybody in the villages and then they made sure that everybody found out about the story so that the rest of the population would leave because they were going village to village, depends the people.

And so they’d already ethically cleansed 250,000.

1:24:24

But before they declared the state of Israel, and then when they declared the state of Israel, at that point Arab armies tried to intervene.

And here the common common Zionist idea is that the Arabs, you know that all these mighty armies of these giant countries came against plucky little David Israel, which is completely fabricated nonsense.

1:24:46

Israel was heavily financed and supported by European powers.

They had a lot of support from the Soviets because they were highly socialist society at that point with communist land ownership laws which persisted to this days.

There’s no private property ownership of land in Israel or land is owned by the government.

1:25:03

It’s a highly socialist society.

And they had support of the British.

They had support of the richest European banking families like the Rothschilds.

They had an enormous amount of weapons and they were fighting on their own turf.

Whereas all these Arab armies, they were nascent armies.

1:25:21

They didn’t have a lot of money, they didn’t have a lot of resources, and they weren’t fighting on home turf.

They were fighting in alien territory and they had no hope of defeating Israel completely.

They were just trying to save as much of the territory as they could from and to try and prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

1:25:40

And they managed to only only keep about 20% of Palestine, which is the West Bank and Gaza.

And these are the parts that Israel was not able to conquer in 1948 because they were very heavily populated by Palestinians and they are the parts to which they kicked out.

A lot of the Palestinians were in the rest of the country.

1:25:57

So instead of taking 55% of the country, as was the partition plan designers ended up with 80% or 78% of the country.

And they kicked the rest and they kicked about 80% of the population In that part they conquered.

1:26:15

There was about a million Palestinians there.

They kicked out about 800,000 to 1,000,000 from their homes over the period from 1947 to 1948.

They massacred hundreds, thousands, and they kicked out about 800,000.

1:26:33

These became the refugees, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, in the West Bank and Gaza, in Jordan and in Egypt.

Just painful, hearing that.

Painful.

1:26:50

You have this narrative in the West that Palestine was this empty land.

There’s just a few Bedouin Arabs.

There’s no culture.

There was no civilization.

The Jews came, they came back to their homeland and they made it flourish.

1:27:06

Look at it.

It’s the beacon of democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by suspects and despots.

And it’s it’s thriving.

Their economy, their culture, they’re they’re better people.

And I I did a post on X today where I said, you know, reasons why the Nazis and the Germans got away with what they did was they sold it to the population that, you know what, Jews are not human.

1:27:30

They’re subhuman.

They dehumanize them.

What we’re seeing today is no different.

Palestinians aren’t human.

I’ve never seen so much racism and Islamophobia and just horrible like in the in the newspapers and the media, the mainstream media.

1:27:48

The way they talk about Palestinians, you know, go get them, you know, get rid of all of them.

It’s their fault.

It’s, you know, it’s Hamas.

That’s it.

It’s their fault for voting in Hamas.

They never overturned Hamas and it and it’s human beings have just descended into this mob and they’ve lost their humanity.

1:28:06

It makes me so sad and everything’s this is clearly a complicated issue, but it’s all about context and you’ve laid out very well.

The origin story, the history.

Palestine wasn’t an empty, barren place.

There was a thriving community, multicultural, multi ethnic, living in harmony and exogenous forces started to change that.

1:28:32

And like you said, like if 10% of Asians said right, England’s going to be a, you know, Indian homeland, subcontinent, homeland.

And then they forced all the English people into Wales and Scotland.

I don’t think they’d be very happy about that.

1:28:48

And then when they start taking bits of England and Scotland and they’ve got nowhere to go except into the sea, they’ll be like, what the hell, man, we need to fight back against us.

But then people go, oh, then it’s unprovoked.

You’re just fighting because you’re an evil animal and that’s an excuse for us to kick you out of your homes even more.

1:29:09

This has really been the story of the last 7.

And also the Indians will say, oh, why, why don’t you go somewhere else?

Why don’t you go to Ireland?

That’s a white country.

Why don’t you go to France or Germany?

That’s a white country.

Like, why do you have to stay here in England?

Go, go somewhere else, go, go to your friends, those other white countries in Europe.

1:29:26

And it’s like you just don’t get it.

The Palestinians, the Christian Palestinians, the Arab, Muslim Palestinians, the Shia, Sunni, the Druze, all these multi ethnic people, they live in that land and ultimately what is going on is neo colonialism.

1:29:43

It’s colonialism, it’s ethnic cleansing.

It’s about land grab land and the way you justify it is to play a victim.

And yes, they were victims in the Second World War.

But the victim now cannot become the perpetrator and the villain this is can’t do that.

1:30:03

And to just say that the Palestinians are subhuman and you know that this they’re the bodies, they’re the bodies, they’re the ones who are the terrorists.

If you ask the average Palestinian whose family was burnt in a village or forced out of their land and now living in a one bedroom shack shack, you know in in Gaza in an open air prison.

1:30:28

Subjected to, you know, water being turned off or electricity being turned off or, you know, people coming in the middle of the night and arresting you for protesting, they would say they were terrorized.

The the people are being terrorized by the state on a daily basis.

1:30:43

I think this year something like 43 children died before the crisis even happened.

Palestinian kids were killed.

You know, what about those kids?

Like, are they not being terrorized?

I mean what what are their parents thinking?

But it’s.

Stephanie we live in this very upside down world where everything is inverted.

1:31:03

You know, good is bad, light is dark.

And the stuff I read just makes me really, really sad.

They, they, they they they say that why don’t the Palestinians go to Egypt?

Why don’t other Arab countries take them in?

So I go, well, hold on one SEC.

They’re already Why don’t they go to the US and Europe?

1:31:24

Yeah, it’s ridiculous, this idea that, hey, there’s conflict in your land.

Just leave.

No.

Well, why don’t the other people leave?

What?

What?

What kind of moral standard is this where somebody can terrorize you and then just leave?

Yeah.

And you think they’ll be allowed back in?

1:31:41

So in this tiny, overpopulated area of Gaza, Exactly.

So they say that, oh, look how good the IDF is.

They’re telling them to move to the South, where they’re going to bomb the north.

And then, you know, but they’re collectively punishing the population.

1:31:57

They switched off the water supply.

And also just this is just the continuation of the same policy that the Israelis have followed since the 1930s.

This is ultimately what it comes down to.

More Arabs.

Sorry, more land, fewer Arabs.

That’s it.

That’s what they’ve done since the 1930s.

1:32:13

And everything they do is with this in mind, how do we get more land?

How do we get more Arabs out of the land?

So for me, I think the main driver of the conflict is the issue, understanding the issue of the refugees, the issue of the ethnic planning of 1948.

And secondly, equally important is the fact that after the 1948 war was over, property in Israel was all assigned more than 80% of the land on.

1:32:36

I think even more than 90% of the land of Israel is owned by something called the Israeli Land Authority.

So you can’t own land as an Israeli citizen, you they get assigned land by the Israeli land authority.

And guess who they assigned the land to?

1:32:52

Only Jews.

So the Palestinians who lost their property in 1947 and 1948, who got driven out at gunpoint, cannot go back to their land.

But an American, an American or a French or an Australian Jew who just presents evidence that they’re Jewish or just converts to Judaism will get assigned that land at a subsidized cost to go and live there basically, and have a home in that same plot of land or the same actual physical home, like my wife’s family are from Yaffa.

1:33:28

Their home is still standing in the outskirts of Tel Aviv today.

It could be given to a migrant from halfway around the world who knows nothing about the place, no connection place, purely due to the fact that that migrant is Jewish.

So this is really the injustice here.

1:33:45

We can talk about the history and the events and the violence, but there’s this recurring, continuous nonstop injustice of the fact that you do not have the private property, you do not have private property law in Israel.

Property is contingent on religion and that means that Palestinians are destined to be dispossessed.

1:34:06

So you can’t own land.

And you, if you try and fight back against this year the terrorist and then you get fought and you get killed and you get moved into refugee camps and you get bombed and you get your life ruined.

And this is what drives this conflict in my opinion.

1:34:24

So if you ask me about my way of solving this problem, and you know, I’m not expecting to win any elections anytime soon, but for me, the solution is simple.

The solution is property rights.

It’s it’s the idea that you don’t have to belong to any particular religion to be able to own property in a particular piece of land.

1:34:42

Everybody should have the right to own land in the Holy Land, regardless of their religion.

And that’s it.

That’s it.

If you just turned Israel into a civilized society where property is not dependent on religion, and then gave the indigenous population, the original owners of the majority of the private land of Palestine, the chance to own their land again, that for me is the end of the conflict.

1:35:09

I don’t think it is reasonable for Zionists to want to have a land that is free of Palestinians.

I don’t think it is reasonable or just for them to think that we can just kick out millions of people and deny them the right to return and keep bringing in foreigners from abroad, subsidizing them and paying them money so that they can come and live here.

1:35:29

I think they need to just accept the idea that somebody living on a piece of land is not up to you, just displace them.

This is violence.

This is criminal.

So for me, the solution is not, I don’t want to get rid of Israelis, I don’t want to kill Israelis.

I don’t want to fight Israelis.

1:35:45

And I’m not a violent person.

I’m not a religion person.

I do not believe in violence as a solution and I definitely do not believe in the targeting of innocent civilians.

I think if you were to ask me, I think you could eliminate the conflict if you if you were to move Zionist mindset away from exclusive ownership and control of the land to individual ownership and control of individual plots of life.

1:36:17

Meaning, as a Zionist, as a Jew, you are allowed to live on that land, you’re allowed to own it, you’re allowed to live on it, but you’re not allowed to kick others out because of their religion.

And if you just eliminate this very basic idea, which any civilized human being in today’s world should have no problem accepting, but somehow that moral standard goes out of the window when it comes to Israel because of the guilt that people have about the Holocaust and because of all kinds of different reasons.

1:36:44

If you just eliminate that simple presumption, the idea that it is OK for one people to kick out another people just purely by the dint of their religion from this plot of land, I think that eliminates the root of power because that’s what we had before 1948.

1:37:04

Palestinians lived with Jews and Palestinians, you know, Muslims and Christians and Jews lived together and they were able to coexist and there was no problem of anybody wanting to kick anybody out or ethnic cleanse anybody until the Zionist came in from Europe with their European ethno fascist ideas of purity of land and purity of race on a plot of land.

1:37:27

That’s that’s where the problems come from. 100% that I I keep reading places.

Oh, but the Palestinians hate the Jews.

They want to kill all the Jews.

I take it your family’s been displaced.

If you’re Palestinian, you know you’re you’ve had to move away from there.

1:37:46

Do you hate the Jews?

Do you want to kill all the Jews?

No, I don’t.

I’ve I’ve thought about this long and hard, and I’ve thought about the conflict, and we are in no position to be in and we are in nowhere like a position of strength where we could even afford these kinds of ideas.

1:38:06

And I’m not somebody who has a problem with people of different religions or races.

I’ve traveled all over the world.

I’ve lived all over the world.

I get along with people from all over the world.

I’ve lived in many countries.

I have no problem with anybody based on their race and religion and I think for the majority of people in our generation, this isn’t just virtue signaling.

1:38:25

We don’t just say those things.

We grew up in a world that is very multicultural, multi ethnic and so it’s difficult for us to muster this kind of ethnic hatred because and particularly for somebody like me who’s travelled around the world, you know these things emerged in societies that we’re well segregated.

1:38:43

So if you grew up in 17th century France, everybody you met was from your tribe, someone looked similar to you, spoke a language similar to yours, believed in the God similar to yours.

1:38:58

And so anytime you met somebody who was slightly different to believe in a slightly different God, the slightly different version of Rio religion that felt like a stranger, that felt like an alien, that felt like they it could incite, incite fear in you and then create hostility.

1:39:15

But in today’s world, we grow up looking at TV’s, showing us people from all over the world.

We see how everybody’s similar.

Everybody just wants to live like everybody else.

Everybody just wants to raise their kids and have a future.

And I genuinely say it.

I do not want to kick anybody out of anywhere.

1:39:33

I don’t want to destroy anybody’s property rights.

I don’t want to end anybody’s life.

I am not a violent person.

I’m an anarchist and that means peace.

In my book, anarchy does not mean violence, means opposition to the initiation of violence.

1:39:49

So I have no interest in initiating violence and I do not condone or support any violent acts against anybody.

I think the problem though, is that the ruling government of Palestine, there’s only one government in Palestine.

1:40:05

It is the Israeli government.

It is motivated by an ideology that is predicated on the other ring of Palestinians and the inferiority of palace Palestinians can’t have property.

Palestinians can’t move around freely.

Palestinians can’t go back to their grandfather’s land.

1:40:22

Even if they live in a refugee camp that’s 5 kilometers away from their grandfather’s land.

They cannot.

And even though the land is empty, in many of those cases, many of those villages were destroyed not in order to take the land itself, but in order to just clear all the populations so that it wouldn’t have too many Arabs in their country.

1:40:40

And that’s for me.

What is the solution?

It’s just that the land is big enough to fit all of the people that want to live there.

And there is no point from this senseless massacring and senseless violence and senseless hatred.

But I do not think that people who are identified as Zionists are able to say the same thing.

1:41:02

They are not able to accept me living on my grandfather’s land that was lost in 1948.

They cannot accept that.

They have an idea that no, it’s OK for somebody to come from Brooklyn and take that land and build a home on it, but it’s not OK for me to go back to.

1:41:18

And that, I believe, is the problem.

And I that that’s what I find so infuriating about this idea that, well, Palestinians just hate Jews.

No, we don’t have the power to afford something as absurd as just hating an entire group of people.

1:41:37

And the people who are throwing that accusation are out there denying us the right of owning our property simply because of our religion and our being from the wrong religion.

I’m going to be speaking to a journalist about this on Thursday and my understanding is.

1:41:59

I have to get going.

I’m now we’re running a little bit late on time.

I really need to get.

Yeah, I know we took a little bit longer.

Listen, I just want to say thank you so much.

It’s been a real pleasure speaking to you and I hope I can get you back again and I’ll post everything on the website.

Thank you so much.