#130: Fiat Food is Destroying Our Health featuring Saifedean Ammous

Welcome back to another episode of the Meet Mafia podcast. If this is your first time joining us, we have one goal and one goal only, and that is that you, yes, you, listen to this podcast and get at least one valuable piece of information that inspires you to go radically change your health today. If this is your second, third, fourth, or a hundredth time listening to the Meat Mafia podcast, we are so grateful to have you, and we are so thankful for your continued support. Before we get going, if you would not mind going and following us on all of our platforms, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and, of course, Twitter, we would greatly appreciate it. This just allows us to expand our reach, and your reviews, comments, and feedback give us more and more things to think about and improve the show with.

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Go check them out in the link below and use our promo code mafia for a discount on your first six months with CrowdHealth. Alright. Saif, welcome to the Meat Mafia podcast. It, seems serendipitous here.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. It's so great to be here.

We heard that you've been preparing for a long time for this episode. Yeah.

I've been preparing by eating meat all my life, basically. Yeah.

We are saying that we initially bonded on Twitter over superior nutrition, but now it's superior cooking technology that we also have in common. There's a big announcement this week about Meat Mafia switching to team cast iron.

Partially done.

Oh, stainless steel. Stainless steel. Wow.

That's stainless

steel. We'll we'll

edit that out.

Edit that one

out. Due to your recommendation.

Glad to hear that. Thanks. Yeah. I think it's it's it's a it's a major awakening taking place in the world.

Yeah. Well, one of the reasons we are excited to talk to you, first, we we owe you credit to orange peeling us. So it's not every day you get to speak to the person who, convinced you to buy your first piece of Bitcoin. So gotta thank you for that before we get going.

Thank you, sir. Glad to hear that.

Yeah. Seems like yesterday, I was walking around Boston with the Bitcoin standard in my ear just being like, I think Safedidina's onto something with this. Yeah. So Is Is that when

you're doing, like, your long marathon walks and stuff?

Yeah. I was doing these long walks and just that's when I was actually really going down the carnival rabbit hole too, kind of oddly timed, my Bitcoin orange peeling. And I think that, you know, I was just I was going these walks with with your book in my ears. I'm like, alright. Like, listen to it.

I'm one and a half speed trying to get through it. But it was, you know, that's when it all happened. So appreciate you.

Glad to hear that. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's it's a vortex, Bitcoin and carnivore. It just sucks you in and then you end up with a lot of Bitcoin and a lot of meat. It's it's inevitable.

Everybody's gonna go down that path.

Yeah. Do you ever wonder why that connection is?

Yeah. I've wondered extensively about it, and I've written about it in the Fiat Standard. There's a whole chapter on Fiat food. I think, you know, the the the, well, the first obvious way is that to think about it is, well, all human history, humans have eaten meat. So in my book, I begin with the work of Weston Price Mhmm.

A man I like to call the Mises of nutrition. He's similar to Mises in economics and that his work is enormously important but it's completely ignored by the mainstream because it's completely inconvenient for the lies they wanna peddle. And this guy traveled around the world in the early twentieth century just when airplanes were invented and he went to places that were completely isolated or almost entirely isolated and whose food was domestically produced and whose food was traditional that people there had been eating for centuries and maybe millennia not linked to, global food markets. Mhmm. So he went to those places and he looked at what these people were eating and he left The US and Canada, he's Canadian, and he left The US and Canada looking for this, idyllic Garden of Eden diet, thinking that there's some vegetarian traditional culture where people just figured out the right formula of the right combination of plants to eat without meat because at that that period, you know, the late nineteenth century is when these ideas of vegetarianism and veganism had first begun to become fashionable.

Mhmm. And he was one of those people and he was out there looking for how do we figure out the correct way to make a vegan vegetarian diet work and he thought, you know, by going to all these primitive isolated tribes, he'll be able to get it. So he traveled all over the world to get to places that, you know, they didn't have train tracks and they didn't have extensive links with the rest of the world for trading food but he could take his airplane there and he could land somewhere and he could go down and talk to the locals and see what they did and what they ate. And he took their food and he shipped it to The US and had it analyzed in a lab and he looked at the mineral content and the vitamin content of it and nutrient content. And he was, incidentally, he was one of the people who invented by who discovered vitamins.

So he's he's, he's he's very important in the world of nutrition. And what he found, to his surprise, was that in all cultures everywhere in the world, everybody ate meat. And in fact, all diets revolved around animal fats. There was no culture anywhere in the world that was free of animal fat. And what he found was, I think to the extent that people ate plant food, they ate it as essentially a vessel for delivering plant for delivering animal fats.

So the diet's centered entirely around animal fats. And this is the most important thing that he comes, across from his, travels. So I think the better way to turn it around is to Well, so first of all, we have the idea that all over the world, meat is the food of humans. Animal fat is the food of humans. And then the other thing is all throughout human history, if you read the Bitcoin standard, all throughout human history, people have been using whatever is the hardest thing to make as money.

Similarly, you know, all over the world you look and you see that people used glass beads when glass beads were rare, but then when gold coins came into the places where there were glass beads, glass beads stopped being money and gold became money. Gold became money and replaced silver, replaced everything that was less hard. All over the world, everyone always thought everyone always sought to use the hardest thing as money. So the question is not so much why is it that people who are into Bitcoin and meat, that's the natural human condition. People are always into meat and the hardest money.

And currently, the hardest money is Bitcoin. The question is why is it that fiat people are into, fiat food and the fiat money? Why are they into easy money and shitty food? And I think if you think of it this way, it's becomes a better way of understanding it because yeah, once you're using shitty money, your money can't hold on to its value and then it's only a matter of time before you have to resort to eating crappy food. And I think it's no coincidence the century of fiat money witnessed the deterioration of the money as well as the deterioration rate as well as the deterioration of the food and that's what we see and that's what I discussed extensively in the fiat standard.

In particular, after 1971 when, the dollar was delinked from gold, you see the disintegration of the American diet and the global diet as well. You see the disintegration of, the quality of the dietary recommendations that are being taught at universities and medical schools and being offered by governments. Suddenly, governments are out there telling everybody in the world you need to eat more grains, you need to eat more pulses, and you need to eat less meat, and you need to worry about, your saturated fat intake. All of that comes along at the same time that the money gets destroyed and it's no coincidence. It's driven by two factors that are related.

On the one hand, the destruction of the value of the money leaves people unable to afford the food that they want because that food, you know, you can't just print cows. Cows need to spend time grazing and, getting sunshine and growing and then getting slaughtered and processed in order to make meat. So if you make more money, the price of cows is going to go up. But it is sort of possible to print effectively industrial food. These are much easier to produce because you can add, you you can add the artificial fertilizers to soil.

You can increase the crop yield. You can't increase the nutrients in them, but you can increase the crop yield. You can increase the calories. And so the dietary recommendations shift toward trying to minimize the inflation that people feel. And by telling them, hey, no, you actually don't need to be eating all these expensive things.

These expensive things are bad for you. So quit the eggs, quit the meat, quit the dairy. Focus on soy and grains and corn, basically, all the cheap industrial crap that can be industrialized and can scale easily. And so that becomes the focus of the dietary recommendations to cover up inflation. And, you know, on the one hand, your money is becoming worth less and less so you can't afford to get the food that you need.

On the other hand, where is that purchasing power going? Well, it's going to the people who can print the money, the government. And the government is the one that gets to finance all these nutrition departments, all these dietary recommendations. So that gives them an enormous amount of wealth to use in order to shape dietary recommendations. And here we can look at the work of Nina Tychoels on, how saturated fats have been demonized over the past fifty years or so, it's no coincidence that, you know, the government that was destroying the value of money was the one that was telling people to stop eating the things that they needed and that they could have an enormous impact of this with this message because they had all that money that they were destroying that was essentially going to them.

You know, they're destroying the value of your money by printing new money. That new printed money finances all the nutrition departments that tell you it's okay that your money is broken because you don't need to be buying real food with it. Just eat industrial waste. Eat seed oils.

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Why was it important to you when writing the Fiat Standard and that chapter on Fiat Food to include the work of Weston A. Price as opposed to all the other books and things that you had done, to to research who you'd reference?

I don't know. I I mean, I think, it comes down to the fact that the book was really very influential on, my understanding of nutrition. I read it a long time ago. And when I first read it, it really blew my mind. I mean, the, we we are, we're taught to think of today as being a time of abundance, that people are healthier than ever, are better fed than ever.

And then you look at that book and I mean the book was written in the twenties and thirties so it was, the things were still much better back then. But he talks about the deterioration of the soil and he talks about the deterioration of the nutrient contents. And this was back then. And he talks about the diseases and illnesses that spread. And you can just extrapolate.

You know, back then is it it was much better than now. And you can extrapolate and then you can see, yeah, all of the nutrition and health problems that you see around today, they're not, I think this is really the mind blowing conclusion you take from that book. It's not that everybody is sick because of abundance. This is the kind of self flattering explanation that modern science likes to put on it. It's just well, we've gotten so rich that everybody can afford to eat so much and that they make themselves sick by eating so much.

And that's not true. We're not rich because people are not able to eat the things that, they would want to be able to eat ideally. We are poor and people are having to make do with cheap industrial waste and that's what's making everybody sick. So the abundance of food is what is driving the illness but it's not the abundance of good food. It's not the abundance of rich people food.

It's the abundance of industrial waste, essentially. It's the abundance of heavily processed plant fats and it's the abundance of heavily processed corn and sugar and soy and all these products. These are the things that are driving the illness. And these things, as well what I like to call fiat food, if you look at their development over the twentieth century, and I'll discuss this in the chapter as well, it was heavily subsidized by governments every step of the way. So all over the world, governments are subsidizing these crops.

Governments recommend these crops. And the reason they recommend them is because they can't afford to people can't afford to eat the meat that is what they need. So, you know, Weston Price's work is very pivotal in this. Unfortunately, there's a Western Price Foundation today. They're pretty active and they're Yeah.

Quite well known. But unfortunately, they don't quite take this message home. And unfortunately, what they do is they get stuck on all these, what I think are largely irrelevant details about, yeah, well, Weston Price traveled to this tribe in this isolated place in The Pacific or in, Switzerland or in Africa or whatever. And he saw that they were eating this particular plant. And so then the the people in the Western Price Foundation will scramble to try and get this plant imported and it's very expensive.

And like, it's just the plant that they ate because they had to eat because of the crap that grows there. But the important lesson to take home is the animal fat and the animal protein. That's what matters. So a lot of the people in the Weston Price Foundation, you know, they come from a kind of vegan or vegetarian background. And for them, it's a transformative impact that, yeah, we should be eating meat.

But they don't quite take it far enough. So they take it to the point where, yeah, they'll eat meat every day which for them seems like an enormous step. But they don't push it to the logical conclusion in my mind which is, well, if you can afford to, which you can if you live today, you know, meat is very cheap actually, then why not just eat only meat? I mean, try it out for a month and see how it goes. And it's extremely affordable.

A lot of people think being a carnivore is expensive. It's not. You can do carnivore practically for nothing. Just go to the butcher and get the meat scraps and the bones. He'll give them to you for free or very close to free.

Boil them and eat them. So there's really no excuse. They're delicious. It's very nutritious. Just need a little bit of salt on it.

So if you're broke, it's no excuse. And if you have money, you know, you can go from cheap ground beef all the way to very fine steaks. All budget ranges. It's it's no excuse. But, I think Western Price gets misunderstood and his work gets, used in all these kind of, slightly gimmicky ways where people are just selling you all these very elaborate formulas and recipes and diet plans based on what this tribe and that pride tribe ate.

And I think the really important, takeaway takeaway message from it is just eat as much meat as you can.

Was your interpretation of his work something that changed your beliefs, or were you kind of, like I guess, when did you really establish your beliefs around nutrition being more meat focused than plant focused?

I mean, I started first I first started being low carb in about 2018, '20 '19. That's when I started to cut down on carbs and immediately just felt an enormous improvement just by eliminating, sugary sodas and reducing my bread intake. So that was the first thing. Once I heard people say, well carbs are bad, well let's try that. And I wasn't really emotionally attached to these things all that much.

Like I liked meat always. And so cutting down on bread wasn't such a big deal. But I immediately started feeling better. And then it was just, you know, the the more I cut down, the better I felt. And then the more meat I ate, the better I felt.

And then the more I read about nutrition, the more it suggested to cut down more. So it just kept on cutting down. And I think Weston Price came first. And by that point, you know, I'd I'd already gotten to a point where I was pretty low carb. I'd say, unfortunately, you know, going through the Weston Price route was a little bit of a diversion in a sense because you listen to what the foundation say and then you start thinking, oh, I need to eat this plant and I need to prepare it that way.

And the other thing is that they really obsess on is, the methods of preparing plants. So you have to soak your rice and you have to sprout your beans and you have to do all of these horrific things. And, you know, you go down that path and, it's kind of a big waste of time. But then very quickly, I came across the Zero Corn Zen blog and, and it was a light bulb moment. Wait, you don't soak and sprout and do all of that bullshit and you don't eat any vegetables and you don't eat any fruits and you just replace all of that with more meat?

I saw that and I thought, alright, well, you know what, I'm gonna try it for a month. I was living with my brother at that time and him and I decided, alright, we're gonna do it for a month. That was October 2015 and I did it for a month and I haven't looked back. Like once I've tried it, it's just, yeah, this is infinitely better than anything else. And just the, you know, the health benefits are enormous and also just the, the fact that you've just basically found the cheat code to eating and then you don't have to worry about anything anymore.

You don't have to read any labels. You don't have to plan diet. You don't have to count calories. You don't have to do anything. Hungry, eat meat.

And that's it. And then eat until you're not hungry anymore and then get on with the rest of your life. Like the amount of mental energy that it frees up to allow you to go and focus on other things, it really was life changing. And like a few months later is when I started writing The Bitcoin Standard, I became much more productive. I, you know, my life has just completely changed since then because I'm no longer obsessed with food all day.

I can just go Absolutely. To the butcher once a week and fill up the fridge with beef, eat it whenever I'm hungry, and that's it.

Think yeah.

I was

just gonna say, think about the societal level of resources that we're wasting trying to figure out what to eat.

It's amazing. I'm saying oh no. Yeah. And like I go to the supermarket and it's just really all of these aisles. You people don't need them.

Like, just go to the butcher. Yeah.

Yeah. When you have that carnivore epiphany, it's like you go through the grocery store for the first time and you just are like, I can't believe that people are actually buying all this shit. It's like there's 40,000 products in here, and there's nothing that's actually considered food besides the meat in the outer aisle of the grocery store.

Yeah. It's

like once you have that epiphany, it's just insane to think, like, people are literally buying all of their food in these inner aisles.

Yeah. And if you think about just how much of a waste this process is where people, you know, they work hard to make money to then go and buy these things to then go home, spend a lot of time processing these things, trying to turn them into slightly edible form, and then they eat them, and then they get digestive problems and health problems from eating them. And then they spend their life trying to deal with these problems, going to the doctor and taking pills. And, like, you think about how much time and effort and money goes into this process versus how much benefit comes out of it. There's very little nutrients in that plant.

Mhmm. And a lot more anti nutrients, a lot more damage, a lot more toxins, sugars, all of these things. It's such an incredible shortcut. It's such an incredible life hack to just skip all of that Absolutely. And go to the meat aisle.

And like the really tragic thing about it is, people think, well, food is a problem, food security is a problem, people are hungry. The tragic thing is that if in every supermarket, I think they throw away meat scraps that have more nutrition than everything else in the supermarket.

A %.

Yeah. The the I mean, I used to go to the supermarket, and I'll get the fat that they throw away. And sometimes, usually they'll give it to me for free. And I asked them, what do they, what do you do with this if you don't throw it away? I do it and I take it and I make tallow with it sometimes.

And they say, well, we give it to people who throw it in, basically agricultural fields. They use it as fertilizer. Which is insane. I mean, obviously, it's good that it goes to fertilizer rather than being waste, but this could be feeding people. I mean, you could just feed an entire town off of the scraps of the butchers.

Just whatever goes into the butcher and the scraps that are there are enough if you get rid of all the crap that's in the supermarket, if they just replace that. But it's it's, yeah. Once you see that moment where you just think, yeah, everybody's basically a drug addict and they're addicted to all of these things Yeah. And they think the tragic thing is that they think that they're doing nutrition. They think they're being responsible.

They think they're being healthy. It's just an addiction. It's no different from an alcoholic. It's no different from an any other kind of drug user.

Definitely. The way you think about efficiencies too when it comes to food and then you translate that over, like, in your book, The Fiat, Standard, you talk about central planning, which is basically, like, the the exact opposite of creating these sort of efficiencies. I almost feel like in a lot of ways, and you touch on this in your book, that central planning is the root of all evil when it comes to these inefficiencies that we see. The junk in the middle in the middle of the grocery store, confusing people with the wrong information on what they should be eating, the the guidelines. Like, it it's all steering people in directions that really aren't supporting them to their optimum self optimal self in the long run.

It absolutely is. And it's, you know, a lot of people will will try and ridicule this by saying something along the lines of, you know, you're gonna blame Biat for the emergence of plant food. I mean, people have eaten plants forever. Well, yes, they have. But historically, before the twentieth century, I mean, plants were basically poor people food.

Yeah. And, you know, people today like to glorify olive oil as if it's this, nutritional amazing superfood. It was always poor people fat. It was what you ate if you couldn't afford animal fat. And it was mostly used for soap, for skin, for candles, for all kinds of other things.

But you only, and maybe for dressing salad, but you didn't cook in it. If you had to cook in your olive oil, you were in a famine or you were very poor. I mean, this is a and and there are sayings about this in Lebanese folklore, you know, if you wanna talk about how someone is better than somebody else, you'll say, Nasib Semneu Nasib Zet. So some people are in ghee or tallow. Some people are olive oil basically.

So basically poor people are not very good people. And it's, it's So, yeah, we would have had these things as food. You know, poor people will always have to resort to eating crappy things. But what has happened in the twentieth century is that the dietary Overton window, thanks to central planning as you were saying, thanks to the fact that government have all this money, has shifted toward portraying these things as being the best thing that you can eat, the healthiest thing that you can eat. And then with industrialization, we've made them highly addictive.

So people think that they're delicious and people think that they're healthy. So fruits, you know, fruits have become massive sugar bombs. And people think, you know, people eat the fruit and they get a sugar high and they think they're being healthy because, oh, wow, I'm getting the feeling of eating something fresh and natural that's making me so healthy. No. You're just getting a sugar high.

That's all there is to it. And so, you know, people think olive oil is this amazing food. It's not. It's not a very good fat. It's in fact, it's very difficult to tell us apart from soybean oil even in laboratory conditions.

You know, you could take olive oil from the supermarket and it's difficult to tell if it's been mixed with soybean oil in a lab. If you can't tell in the lab if it's been mixed with poison, it can't be very good. But again, because dietary nutrition and because non nutrition science is centrally planned, it gets determined from top down and it gets marketed as if it is a good thing. So all of these crappy foods continue to get this halo around them, you know. Mhmm.

Olive oil is the super food. You need five portions of fruits and vegetables. And vegetables have always been poor people food and it's barely edible. And trying to make vegetables edible is an extremely complicated thing. Like if you read Weston Price, you know, the lengths that people went to to in order to try and make these vegetables edible.

And primarily, the only way that you can make them edible is by putting a lot of animal fat on them. Mhmm. And that's really how you can make them edible. And other than that, you know, people just get used to them because they use them extensively. They get addicted to them.

They get used to the, taste of it. But really, I think without the without the destruction of money, I think the world's diet would be a lot more food heavy, a lot more meat heavy, and that would be great for human health and it would also be great for the environment around us because instead of using instead of growing all these enormous amounts of crops all over the world that deplete the soil, kill the biodiversity, we'd have animals grazing in rich, lush, biodiverse soils.

Mhmm.

Yeah. I think a lot about you've said this a few times. You said, eat meat, drink water, and get on with your life, which I think is such an incredible way to think about food and nutrition and that was something that we wanted to talk to you about is how many people are getting themselves stuck because they're almost addicted to this they're thinking about food almost as mouth pleasure as opposed to like the function and the nutrition that you that you should be deriving. And I think that that's something that everyone goes through when they first go carnivore low carb. And I think it's an experiment for everyone to try because it completely rewires your brain on what food actually is.

Yes. It's almost like emerging out of a cave where you were in that cave and all of your life was, you know, how do I plan the next 100 meals of my life? You know, I need to cook for today. I need to buy the food for next week. I need to, buy think about what am I gonna be eating in the next month.

I need to plan a trip to travel to this place so that I can try this thing. So much of your life is just around all of these different forms of candy that really aren't making you Superman. They're not helping you. It's just mouth entertainment. And if you snap out of that, your life is just so much more fulfilling because you can get a lot more stuff done.

And it's also a lot more entertaining. Like if you think of your food as entertainment, you need better food and you need better entertainment. There's a lot better ways of having fun in life than abusing your digestive system. It's there to digest food. It's not an entertainment system.

Yeah. There are ways of entertaining. Use your brain for entertainment, you know, not your digestive system. It's an extremely inefficient thing to do to, you know, eat several pounds off things for the pleasure that they give you. Like because you still need to poop them out at the end of the day and so it's a, you know, you're putting them in your body.

Yeah. There there are more efficient ways of having fun. So I mean, the way the way that I like to think about it is, when when I tell people, yeah, I just eat meat and water, they're like, oh, don't you get bored? For me, it's a little bit like I'm building my house, you know, putting my house together. I'm putting a brick on top of a brick so that I could build a house.

And these people are building their house, but they're throwing a party while building the house. Yes. And so they see me focused on just putting the bricks and, you know, running the pipes and making sure the reef the roof doesn't leak and making sure that the house is in right order. And they think, wow, that's really boring. Well, no.

It's not boring because once I have a house, and it's strong and sturdy, and the roof isn't leaking, and the pipe's working, and the sewage is working, then I'm gonna have a lot of fun with that house. Totally. Meanwhile, if you're throwing a party and getting drunk while building your house

Yeah.

You're never gonna get a roof that doesn't leak. You're never gonna have a plumbing that works, and you're gonna spend all of your life, you know, having fun fixing your house, having fun dealing with the, you know, throwing a party while trying to deal with all of those problems. And you're never gonna get to experience what it's like to actually have fun in a house that is functional. And that's how I think of food and your body. Food is nutrition.

It's nourishing your body. It's making your body stronger and healthier. And,

you

know, you just get it out of the way in a few minutes every day, and then you go on with your life. And then you find real entertainment. You find real productivity. You produce. You make things that are of value for others.

You work. You focus on achieving the things that you want to achieve in life. And then when you want entertainment, yeah, you can have entertainment because you've got a healthy body. I mean, the the amount of fun that you can have with a healthy body

Yeah.

Is incomparable to what you could have when your body is not healthy. And I know this, you know, I used to I used to eat garbage. You know, I used to eat everything that's in the supermarket, and I was the connoisseur of garbage food. You know, I I I knew everything from the Snickers to the Pringles to the Bounty bars to all of that stuff. I knew it all, and I ate enormous quantities of it.

I've tried that, and it's not as fun as what I can do now that I'm healthy. Yes. I can, I can I can play sports? I can be in much better shape when playing sports. It's a lot more fun than eating a bag of chips.

I can climb mountains. I can swim in rivers. I can I I go to swim in oceans? I've I've done incredible things that I would never been able to do without a strong health or that I could have gotten really hurt doing if my health wasn't good. If my body wasn't well nourished, I could have gotten injured very easily.

The amount of fun that you can have with a healthy body is a lot more than anything that you can get out of anything from the supermarket in a can.

Yeah. Absolutely.

That's really, I think, the the idea. And so when people tell me, well that's boring and that's not fun, they just have a very, very, very sad idea of what fun is. If you get your fun from a pack of plastic in the supermarket, you're not having good fun or good food.

No. It's something we spend a lot of time talking about is viewing food as a holistic asset. And like the whole point to what you're saying is like you're supposed to build this amazing base, this amazing metabolic machinery

so

you can live a badass life, so you can write books and play with your kids and do better at your job. So I don't think it's a coincidence. It seems like that you go in carnivore in 02/2015 and then a few months later, you're writing the Bitcoin standard. I I think it's just it's Yeah.

Although I should say no. I think I started writing the Bitcoin standard in 2017, so not a few months. Yeah. It was that was about a year later. But yeah.

Mhmm.

But just that, like, creative output that you're getting from, like, building just just a healthier version of yourself. And you think about how many people, unfortunately, like, can't give their gifts to the world because they're just used to being in this metabolic rut because they're just eating these things that aren't actually food. So that's why we talk about taking this stuff so seriously because like this show exists because we're able to get our health on track and then focus on Yeah. Putting a product out into the universe. It's just so interesting to think about that.

It truly is. I spent my twenties basically being, fat and, lazy and eating garbage. And then in my thirties, I got my shit together and I became very physically active. And like I maybe the biggest regret in my life is the fact that I didn't get to enjoy the things that I enjoyed in my thirties like I did in my twenties. In my twenties, I was getting my pleasure out of the supermarket effectively.

And in my thirties, I was getting my pleasure by getting good at playing soccer, by climbing mountains, by doing all kinds of fun activities that I couldn't do in my twenties. And it's it's a major regret. And I've I've tried both. And I think it's a real shame that many people just don't ever experience that. Many people never get to experience what their body is capable of.

I think it was, I'm not sure one of the Greek philosophers, which one it was, who said, it's a complete shame for a man to die having never experienced what their body is capable of. I think of that a lot and I wanna teach that to my kids. Like there's there's an, you're given a body as a gift. You're only gonna have that body once in your life, and it's only going to achieve its peak, for a certain period of your life where you're going to be able to achieve things that you won't be able to achieve for the rest of your life. I mean, you're either gonna be too young or too old.

And if you miss out on that, it's such a shame. And if you miss out on that because you're trying out all this plastic crap from the supermarket, because you prioritize the plastic crap in the supermarket, because you're prioritizing drinking alcohol, or you're prioritizing drugs, and you're just letting your body withered away, I think it's an absolute shame.

It's also just easy to get stuck in these paradigms. I mean, imagine if you had in your twenties or in your thirties never come around to that idea of getting healthier. Like, where would you be if you had just continued on that path?

Oh, yeah. I think about that a lot. And I think it would be a very, very bad place. Like, psychologically, physically, financially, probably, all kinds of ways. I think my life would have just been enormously different.

I I don't I don't think I'd have the family that I have today. I don't think that I'd have the life that I have today. And all of that is only possible because you give up on the crap in the supermarket.

Yeah. What the idea of paradigms I think paradigm is like a Greek word that just means patterns, and it's I I think about it in terms of how people think about money. Like, we live in this system that uses fiat currency, and that's just how it is. People are born into it or have been born into it, and they don't understand what an alternative world could look like. And you spend a lot of time talking about this.

And I think the same is with, like, what we talk about on the nutrition side, which is like, hey. You can eat meat only, be optimal, and avoid all the junk that this, you know, these central authorities are telling you to eat, and you'll be healthier. But people really struggle to take that leap into, like, trying to understand something different or take the time to experiment with, like, what what is this, whether it's meat, meat only diet or or Bitcoin. You know, like, what really is this? I feel like people just really are reluctant to trying something out for themselves.

Yeah. I think it's, it's a very frustrating thing particularly with people that you love, people in your family, you know, and you just see the same self destructive patterns repeat, and you see the what's really, really hurtful is to just watch the refusal to snap out of these patterns and paradigms and just self destructive activity. And it's, yeah, I think the vast majority of people don't want to be shaken out of their comfort zone and and they wanna rationalize. It's a lot easier to just rationalize what you're going through. So, and I tend to I tend to be on the side of, you know, it's I care more about the person than I care about my relationship with the person and I'm willing to risk destroying my relationship with somebody in order to tell them the truth.

I think this is very uncommon today. Most people want to sugarcoat it to each other and want everybody to be nice to everybody else. Sugarcoating itself is a word that tells you what it is. Appropriately. Exactly.

It's a, you know, you shouldn't tell people that they are killing themselves. Just let them kill themselves and applaud them while they're killing themselves. And, I've been in this situation many, many times and I think I think perhaps perhaps this this is what a lot of people need. They just need some tough love. They need somebody to tell them the truth.

Look, you might think that you're doing the best that you can but you're not. You're taking choices every day and these choices are destroying you and there's an alternative and you could be doing it otherwise. But it is very frustrating because people really, really like to cling on to what they have. And I think the majority of people, it's really sad, but the majority of people don't want to ever change. They don't wanna ever take the, path of admitting that they're wrong.

And they think they're taking the easy path by sticking to their habits. But, you know, one way I like to present it is no. Actually, I'm the one who's taking the easy path. You know, you're choosing to indulge in this garbage today, but that's not the easy path because you're choosing diabetes and, all kinds of diseases that are gonna be a lot more difficult for you to deal with than it is going to be for me to deal with not having those things. So if you really wanna take the lazy easy way out, just eat meat.

Yeah. It's the easiest way to go through life. Like if you if if you compare the path of eating meat only versus indulging in garbage and then you look at all of the consequences that follow from it, you will see that, you know, in the long run, the consequences of eating garbage are a lot more inconvenient and a lot more tiring and exhausting and time consuming and eventually, you know, time consuming in the sense of they'll consume you and have give you less time. So take the easy way out and eat meat. But most people don't wanna do that.

Most people don't wanna because because it's it's again, it's not it's it's really high time preference what it comes down to. And that's another factor in in in the fiat food chapter, in the fiat standard, but also across the whole book which is when your money's losing value, your ability to provide for the future is compromised. So therefore, the future becomes more uncertain. The more uncertain the future is, the more you discount the future. And so the more you prioritize the present.

And I think this is something that you see in everything over the last century. And my whole book is like putting on this, what would the world look like if something happened around 1914 that raised everybody's time preference? Guess what? It looks exactly like the world that we're living in right now. We used to build buildings that lasted hundreds of years.

Now we build buildings that last a couple of decades and then they need to be taken apart or renovated. We used to eat more predominantly meat all over the world. Now we eat predominantly poisonous candy all over the world because we can't think of the long term. And you see it everywhere. You see it in the family.

You see it in the way that scientific research is conducted. You see it in all kinds of aspects of life which we discussed in-depth in the Fiat standard. And I think this is really, a big part of the reason why people don't want to snap out of it because they aren't able to, think of the long term. They aren't they aren't able to prioritize the long term. They're much better off.

They're much more used to thinking of the present and prioritizing the present. And so, the giving up of candy today is gonna give you withdrawal today. And well, who cares about what's gonna happen in five years' time? Like, we don't have an easy way of thinking about what's gonna happen in five years' times anyway. And so people discount the future heavily, and so therefore, they don't care about it.

And sadly, I mean, like when you first become a carnivore or when you first go low carb, you're astonished. I mean, I remember when I first tap when it first happened to me when I about twelve, thirteen years ago and I just saw the improvements, you know, from just very little reductions in processed food, I saw incredible improvement in my health. And in my mind, it was just like, oh, wait until everybody else finds out about this. And then you go and you tell people and they just look at you like you're weird and they keep eating their junk. They're not even curious about the fact that maybe it can help their life because, oh well, who cares?

You know, it's all in the future. I'm thinking about now. There's the candy today. So yeah, I think most people are just gonna, have to either, you know, go through the very negative consequences before they begin to change or they will never change.

Yeah. We've also lost this ability to your point to just have this intrinsic understanding of what makes our bodies feel really good. Like, experimenting with different dietary inputs, figuring out the best approach that works for you. But instead, we focus on these weird like arbitrary data points where it's like we're so hyper focused on keeping our LDL within an optimal range. But it's like you're fat, you're depressed, you can't get your dick up in the morning.

So like is focusing on the LDL actually the right thing? I don't think so. And I think that's one of the interesting things with going carnivores. It like gives you the ability to relate to other people and tell stories and like get back to like, Okay, how do I actually feel though? Do I need data or a watch to tell me how good I'm supposed to feel?

Yeah. The whole watch thing and just complete obsession with all of these metrics is just yeah. I think, you should be able to tell all of those things about your body just by listening to your body. And the reason that you can't is because you can't listen to your body because you flooded it with so many harmful things that you can't tell the signal from the noise, because your body's just drowned out in candy. That it's you don't know it it it's very difficult for you to make any progress with experimenting with things because, you know, I removed this one particular candy and then added another one.

How much of a big difference is that going to make? I'd, you know, if you really wanted to be meticulous about this, if you really wanted to try and understand how your body works, do one month of carnivore because we know that meat is the one food that is essential. Like you can't survive without animal fat. You cannot survive and thrive for a long time. It's the one food that's truly essential for humans.

And it's the one food that's truly complete. So we know many people throughout history have lived for decades on just meat. So you can do a month. And we know that, you know, nothing else will be nothing else will be able to sustain you. So just do an elimination diet where you just do carnivore for a month, see how you feel, and then start adding other things and then see how you feel.

And this is what really kept me in carnivore forever because once you've tried the first month, it's kind of like a trap, what I'm doing here, because once you've tried it for a month, there is nothing that you can add that's going to improve your diet. This is the the thing that I've had and this is, you know, whenever anybody wants to say anything bad about carnivore, tell them alright, so how do I improve my diet? What what should I add? Like name one food that I should add to my diet that will make me healthier. And nobody has ever and and like the one person who's kind of made a compelling or at least coherent case, yeah, you should add fruits and sugars was Paul Saladino.

And he scammed me into trying fruits for a while and I felt like crap, that does not improve my health. I don't know why. I mean, he gets a lot of exercise. He's surfing. He's out there surfing every day.

So maybe for him, he can handle them. Maybe he wasn't eating enough meat. Maybe he was eating way too much organ meat and not enough muscle meat. But I tried it. I feel great on meat alone and when I add fruits, I just go back to sugar addiction.

I go back to constantly having to think about sugar. I go back to getting these sugary cravings, thinking about where the next sugar hit is gonna come from. And once, you know, you've started with fruits, then, you know, your sugar your inner sugar addict is going to start becoming a lot more, greedy. And you're gonna start craving the cheesecakes, and you're gonna start craving all the other highly processed candy. So that's just no way to live for me.

Like I I I'm much better off just being, on meat alone, not getting on the sugar roller coaster at all in the first place. Because just simply getting on it is raising your sugar blood sugar level, getting sugar crash, needing more sugar, is just eating several pounds of sugary stuff and indigestible fiber every day for practically zero nutritional benefit did not appeal to me.

Mhmm. Yeah. I keep coming back to just thinking about, like, the inefficiencies too with, like, this whole conversation. It's it it, seems like there's so much that people spend their time on, and they they they're wasting their time going down these rabbit holes trying to find a silver bullet, when you can just simplify it. And if you simplify it and just commit to it long enough, you'll reap the benefits of it and understand what it actually means to be caught in that, like, health paradigm.

Like, you're you're caught in a a healthy way of living for four weeks for the first time in your life, and you actually understand, okay. This is where I need to actually spend my time. Like, this is the person I wanna be.

It really is. It's amazing. I remember when I, when I wasn't very strict carnivore before or when I was, like, very low carb before I started carnivore, there would be times, you know, obviously, the the less crap that I eat, the better I feel and the more focused, more productive I am. And you never really get these kind of crashes which you get when you're eating garbage. And then occasionally, I'd find myself, you know, feeling not too well, being a little bit, sad, unproductive, unable to get my work done, unable to focus.

And you start drifting into the dark places and thinking, you know, what is wrong with me and what is wrong? And you start thinking about all the things that bother you in life, and you start bringing up and dwelling on all of the things that you shouldn't be dwelling on. And then I remember, oh, wait. I had a pizza yesterday. That's why I'm being a stupid little bitch.

I should just go and eat more burgers and drink more water. And tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up and I'm gonna be a little bit less of a bitch, but I should stop eating the crap that makes me feel like crap. Yeah. And that's it. And like, now that I look back at those times, like, yeah, every time you every time you eat that stuff, you're putting yourself on that emotional roller coaster.

And it's such an enormous toll that it takes on you. Like the the I don't care how good you think you feel. If you haven't tried going a whole month without any sugar spikes and without any sugar downs, you don't know what it's like and you don't know what it's like for you to be at optimum health. Like just not having any sugar spikes whatsoever. And I know like a lot of people can handle their sugar, a lot of people can handle their carb, you know, I call it metabolic privilege.

There are people out there that can eat garbage and still look great and still work out and still achieve athletic, feats of enormous endurance. You know, like most most professional athletes can basically get away with eating whatever they want. Yeah. If you're, you know, if if if you're blessed enough, that you have the kind of body that can achieve elite athlete levels Yes. You can pretty much eat anything, and it doesn't really matter.

And this is why the worst people you need to listen to are the, professional athletes when it comes to diet. Because in their mind, you know, yeah, I can eat bagels, I can eat pizza, I can eat whatever I want, I just go to the gym and I feel great. But even they, you know, they won't be like that forever. Eventually, they're gonna hit 30 or 40 or 45 or 50, and at some point, it's gonna start showing up and they're gonna need to start watching their food. And even they, I would think, even they would actually probably do better if they would snap out of it and just eat meat only.

But most of them won't try it just because they have no reason to. Like they can get away with eating that stuff. They won't try it until they have to basically, until they start developing a belly or a double chin and then they really need to start watching what they eat.

Yeah. I'm really intrigued by this concept of just saying to yourself, stop being a little bitch. And the reason why I'm saying that is I we wrote about this on Substack a couple weeks ago and I was basically I think I titled it like my recipe for anxiety and depression. And it was basically like instead of figuring out how society can serve you, just finding a really powerful mission and just trying to serve society. So I know obviously nutrition plays a big part in establishing that mindset, but also like do you think it's important particularly for men and women too just to like latch on to like latch on to a big mission that they can just go all in on?

Yeah. I think a huge part of it is just not needing anything from other people, like freeing yourself from expectation of anything from others. That's just because as long as you're expecting others to do things for you, then you're always going to be disappointed and you're always going to basically be that little bitch. And if you just snap out of it and you realize, you know, not, everybody's on this earth for a limited time and nobody came in obliged to do anything for me, you know. And the only people that owe me things are people that I signed contracts with.

And if they're not fulfilling their part of the contract, then I should just stop fulfilling my part of the contract, snap out of it, sign a contract with somebody else. So just get rid of the expectation that others owe you things. I think that's an enormous part of it. And all of these things, I mean, it's strange how you would think this is unrelated to diet, but it's strange how these things are such a common experience among people who go through this kind of dietary changes. I really do think there's something about shitty food that makes you a, little bitch.

Like it's just you you get into these You're right where you eat. Yeah. Yeah. You get into these emotional states and then, you know, once your sugar levels are down, everything looks shitty in life. Everything looks bad and you just see the worst in life and you're you dwell on it.

And I think it's just, you know, perhaps at a very basic level, it's just your body making you feel like shit so that then you go and seek out the sugary treat that will make you feel better. And that's just the addiction pattern. Like it's it's it's common for all kinds of other drugs. Like your body is playing tricks on you to get you to indulge in the drug again. Yeah.

It's just gonna make the withdrawal nasty until you go and grab the next drink or the next piece of candy or the next hit of whatever drug that you take. That's that's what withdrawal is. And so this is why I've made this tweet a long time ago and I just keep going back to it. It might be my favorite tweet of all time of my tweets. And it was just like I I was at the supermarket.

I remember it. I was at the supermarket and I just looking at all the cornucopia of garbage in front of me and I just remember taking my phone out and tweeting, I wonder how much of modern philosophy is just nerds mistaking the roller coaster, the emotional roller coaster of sugar addiction for the human condition. Wow. Because I really think it is. Like it's just people like I looked at all of that crap and I'm like, if I ate that crap, yeah, I'd be on an emotional roller coaster.

And I'd be inclined to sit down and write about, you know, the human condition being this shitty roller coaster that I'm on. But really, I chose to take that ride. You know, I bought the ticket. I took the ride. That's not the human experience.

That's the eating Yeah. Garbage emotional roller coaster experience. And I think an enormous amount of modern philosophy and heck, I mean, maybe even ancient philosophy as well is just plant eaters doing plant eater things. And I think it's it's a very different world when you're off the smack

of eating plants. It almost pulls you like away from your your willpower and your focus to just, like, keep your concentration on the one thing you're trying to work on, whether it's write the Bitcoin standard or the Fiat standard, start a podcast, whatever it is. But it it it puts you on that energy roller coaster where you're not able to just keep at a status quo and and just operate from the same point every single day.

Yeah. In fact, I this was really startling for me because, I think I I came across this, I'm not sure if it was a book or an article. I think it may have been an article about a book, and I can't remember what the name of the book was. But it was arguing that a great way to hack your willpower and to develop willpower is to quit sugar. Apparently, sugar destroys your willpower.

And for me, it was always the other way around. I always thought about it as, you know, you need a willpower in order to stop eating sugar. And then, once you snap out of eating sugar, then you get off the emotional roller coaster and then you stop being a little bitch and your life gets in order. It might The causality might be more direct. It might be that sugar just actively ruins your willpower.

And I think there is something to it based on my experience. I think there is something to it. And it There is something to it also because generally, once you get into that mentality of taking the quick high, once again, into that mentality of just I'm gonna eat something and it's gonna make me happy right now, then you start prioritizing pleasure over happiness. You start prioritizing the high time preference, short term kick of happiness over the low time preference, long term thinking, building sustainable things that bring you sustainable joy in life. In other way, I mean, you could think about it as, you know, the difference between, just wanting to take a hit from a drug versus focusing on your long term career.

Right. The more drugs you do, the more happy you get from the feeling of getting a drug, the less you're enticed by the vision of you achieving your goals in five, ten years time. This is how people fall off the rails and destroy their lives. Like you start a heroin addict, you start a heroin habit, and then heroin is just so much fun that you know, well, who needs to finish college anyway? Who needs to keep their job anyway?

Because, you know, the joy that is gonna come to you from sticking to your job and ten years of saving and, you know, having all that long term focus, and starting a family and building a family. I mean, it all sounds nice in theory, but, you know, the heroin is nice now.

Yeah. Yeah. Something I can't stop thinking about while we're having this conversation is just the inputs of your food determining the outputs of your life. So like Harry was mentioning when we kicked off the show, I remember you telling me this when you were still living in Boston. I was in New York.

You started listening to the Bitcoin Standard on audiobook and you listened to it twice. So the second time, you could solidify it. And I think about some of the regrets that you were saying that you had had in your twenties and if you would just prioritize the right food, maybe the output that could have come from your twenties. And then getting your diet on track that leads to you writing this book that's so influential to thousands upon thousands of people. And even you look at someone like a Jordan Peterson with some of Makayla's autoimmune issues, she gets him to start eating meat and greens and then just eventually meat.

And all the men that he's had an unbelievable impact on. That's all stemmed from like the food that you're putting into your body. And you think about that, it's probably crazy for you to think about the impact that you've had on all of these people. If that all stemmed from you, like, taking control of the food that you were putting into your system, and just the output that came from that.

Yeah. I I mean, I I I know my body. I know my life. I know my brain, and I don't think I would have done it if I had, been eating garbage. And I think, you know, there's something about our generation where, you know, thirty years ago, it was a lot easier for people to eat supermarket food and handle it.

But these people, you know, our parents, they had spent their life eating supermarket food and then they had us born weaker effectively. And so we can handle it less. I think there is there is something about it. Like it's, one of my favorite nutrition books is Kate Shanahan's Deep Nutrition.

So good.

Yeah, which is also heavily influenced by Weston Price. And she's looked at what has happened to basically American jaw lines and American, you know, she goes through high school photos over time. And you see that the markers of health and the markers of good looks have disintegrated. And you see the fertility has disintegrated. You see sperm counts have disintegrated.

You see all measures of what is healthy, what is a healthy expression of the human body have disintegrated over time. So a lot of older people might laugh when they hear us say this because, you know, well I've been eating supermarket crap all my life and I've been highly productive. I think that there is obviously a lot of truth to it but, you know, if you're 70 today, then yeah, you could have eaten crap throughout the fifties and sixties. But, you know, you were born likely in a household that didn't have access to anything like the crap that you were born into if you're 30 today. And that's why, you know, we're a lot weaker, I think.

We can handle that stuff a lot less. And we, I think, you know, you see this expressed in all kinds of different ways that it's go and I think with time, that's only going to exacerbate. That it's just gonna be necessary that you're if you're gonna wanna be productive, you're gonna have to say no to the supermarkets. Majority of the stuff that's in the supermarket because it's gonna be harder and harder to stay healthy when you're eating normally. And, you know, Kate Shanahan shows you like some of the most amazing specimens of people that we could think of, like people like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Claudia Schiffer.

They were born in tiny little villages where they ate very primitive food. They didn't have massive supermarkets and their parents had that had that. And then now you look at their kids, you know, their kids, they're born into the supermarkets. They don't quite look as amazing as them. And then you see this kind of disintegration happening.

So it's, I think it's very it's it's very obvious when once you see it, you can't really unsee it.

Yeah. You touched on it too with the on the Fiat standard about the soil too, which is, like, measurably different than what it was fifty years ago in terms of, you know, nutrient density and, nutrient quality in the soil. And I think that's something that has been overlooked for centuries and centuries. I think when we originally came here, like George Washington was talking about how we just keep moving west to avoid addressing the problem of soil degradation because they couldn't grow any more, food on the soil because they would just monocrop the soil and and Yeah. Plants would stop growing.

So it's a lot Yeah. And the

other thing they did is they killed the bison in order to Right. Kill the Native Americans. And in order to fight the Native Americans, they killed a lot of the bison, and that's what depleted the soil also massively. That's why, Bittstein wants to revive the bison and I fully support them. I think this country is gonna be made great if you replace all these horrific soy and corn fields with bison grazing fields.

Could you imagine?

Awesome. Such an incredible animal. It's so powerful. Freaking delicious too. Yes.

Just not that much fat in it. That's the only problem.

Yeah. But it's okay.

Yeah. What, what what do you think of all the noise that's out there? Like, how do you deconstruct whether it's intentionally put out there by central planning authorities, governing authorities, or if it's just, like, mass confusion where we're we're all like, I I almost struggle to think that, you know, we all can't come to a consensus without there being some sort of, like, nefarious angle with, the noise that's out there when it comes to either eating right or, you know, all all the different topics out there when it comes to being healthy.

I think, this is, the next chapter. So I use the fiat food, chapter in the fiat standard to talk about, you know, how food has been destroyed. And that leads us to explain that leads us to the next topic, which is nutrition science, you know, where all these nutrition scientists are doing. It's an excellent question, you know. Like how is it that all these gym bros on the internet have figured out that, you know, you cut down on processed garbage and you start feeling like Superman.

Whereas all these nerds are sitting in all these heavily funded university, departments studying nutrition, writing completely inconsequential garbage papers that nobody's going to read about this obscure mechanism in the body that and how it relates to this or this or that or the other thing. And they have absolutely nothing useful to tell you about, you know, maybe stop eating garbage that our sponsors subsidize, that that our sponsors produce. And I think this isn't just I mean, nutrition science is obviously enormously corrupt and hugely, hugely compromised. But it isn't just nutrition sciences. It's economics as well which is, you know, my original black bill on academia because I was doing my PhD in economics and I came across all this garbage and then came across the Austrian school.

And I thought to myself, wow, this makes a lot of sense. Why do they teach us this garbage? We were just really in a cave all of these years learning all that nonsense. And it's the same thing with nutrition and I believe it's also the same thing with climate. And, you know, the more I read about more topics, the more I realize there's a lot of garbage in them.

I'm not very well versed in physics, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the garbage physic a lot of the physics out there today is, garbage as well. So I think and what I try and do in the next chapter, in the in the fiat sciences called, which is called fiat science, is to look at how fiat money has affected the scientific process. And I think this is obviously something that is not going to be very popular among academics and I don't expect a lot of academics to pick up the baton and run with this thesis because their payment, their paycheck depends on it. So but I think there's, the real issue here is, first of all, it sounds like it's such a great idea. Like who would not want to finance science?

You know, science is amazing. Science has given us all these incredible things. Let's put more money into science. And if the government can, you know, finance science, then that's a great thing. And if it just puts it introduces a tiny little bit of inflation to finance education and science, we will all benefit enormously from science.

This is the kind of compelling logic of, government intervention in the field of science. But as an economist, you try and you realize, well, nothing is free. So what are the costs? How does this come about? What at what costs do we get this free science?

Well, let's run the numbers. Let's take a look. And so you realize obviously what how does you start thinking about the economic incentives. So first of all, under a system in which governments don't finance science, the only way for you to become a scientist is to go out there and produce something that gets other people to willingly hand over money for you because you what you're doing is valuable. So if you're going to get a job at a university and the university is gonna call you a scientist, the only way that they're gonna give you that university job is if the output that you produce is valuable.

You're either teaching students useful science that they can then take to the real world and make useful things with it or you're coming up with publications that improve the state of knowledge for humanity and make the world a better place so that the people who benefit from these publications finance the university and finance you to make more of that stuff. So as long as that was the case, which I believe was the case up until the early twentieth century, then science is tethered to reality. There has to be an actual value of it. You can't just spend all day wanking in an office making irrelevant garbage and then telling the world you have to believe me. You have to, you know, you you have to make a better mousetrap.

Mhmm. It has to be catching more mice. You have to be producing more stakes. You have to be making better cars. There has to be something coming out of all of this wanking or else it's just wanking, you know?

Yeah. So once you take away that market feedback and then you have a government bureaucrat allocating scientific funding, you've cut off the market feedback. You've cut off the test of usefulness. You've cut off the test of the market's ability to judge what you're doing. And so therefore, there is no corrective mechanism for stopping people from wasting their life and wanking pointlessly, which is what we've ended up with.

Yeah. That's really the key thing. Like it's not so much that wrong ideas come out of science. People will always come up with wrong ideas. People will always be stupid.

There will always be stupid ideas. The problem is that there's no corrective mechanism. There's no consequence for being wrong. And this is this is a really powerful quote that I quote from a certain scientist. I think his name is Brian Nozick.

Maybe something else, I forget. But the name is in the art standard. And he said something, there is no cost to being wrong in modern science, but there is a cost to not getting published. So if you think of this, you can write whatever you want as long as you get it published. And so what's gonna happen?

First of all is we have this enormous, enormous, enormous flood of scientific papers just completely beyond anybody's ability to read. You know, there isn't a single field of knowledge where there's a single person who could read all the academic papers. It's just impossible. Like I remember when I was at a university and we were told, you know, you need to publish in academic journals. We were given a list of the journals that we could publish in.

And there's absolutely no way that I could read all of those journals if I wanted to be, knowledgeable about my field. You know, simply in my field, and, you know, you would think, you know, to stay abreast of developments in the field, read the scientific journals. That's impossible. Literally impossible. If I didn't sleep a single moment all year long, I wouldn't get through all of the journals.

That's how much crap is being churned out. There's no cost to publishing all of that crap. It's just an industry of really churning out content free grammatically correct and politically correct papers. It's just they're constantly churning them out. And so what determines the success?

Because there's no market test. It doesn't matter how much you get published. And what matters is that you get published. So and and the people that have captured this are the publication industry. So the academic publishing industry, they've managed to basically be the bigger winners of the whole funding science scam.

So they get the university professors to write and edit their journals, then for free. And then they get these same universities to pay exorbitant, enormous, ridiculous, criminal sums of money to subscribe to these garbage unreadable bullshit journals. So you have the professors slaving away, spending years trying to publish those papers, and then the same the university that pays their salaries has to pay thousands of dollars to the academic publisher to get those journals. This kind of made some sense back in the pre digital era because the journal would actually print it out on nice, fancy looking paper and you could fool academics who are not very clever people generally into thinking, oh well, we know we have to pay them the big bucks because they're printing all this on money cost money to print those things. Well, now all these journals are electronic predominantly.

So you're basically paying an enormous amount of money for PDFs, basically. PDFs that were written by your own university professors. So the the journals are just making money. And it's in everybody's interest to keep this ridiculous charade going. The academics need to keep printing so they need to keep publishing so they keep writing and they want more publications.

And it's in their interest that more publications, get made. The universities, on the other hand, they need to get more publications on their library, in their library, so that they can look like a good university. That's how you get a good ranking. All of these bullshit academic crankings of universities, it's not about how well you're going to learn. It's about how much money the university pays to the publishing mafia which also issues the university rankings.

And it ranks the universities based on how much money it gives them for the journals. That's one of the important criteria. So the universities want to get, more publications. The academics want to get more publications. And the journals, of course, wanna make more publications because they're making money.

The end result is an infinite inflation in publication and a complete loss of any kind of sense or logic in those papers. If you want to understand anything, I strongly recommend that you start by not reading anything in the academic literature. It's it's a it's just a it's a it's a denial of service attack on your brain's ability to process knowledge. Like if you try to re understand nutrition by going and reading nutrition academic papers, you'll get lost. You know, there's an infinite number of papers about all kinds of different obscure topics and you won't make any progress compared to just, you know, looking at Instagram and seeing what are all these fit people on Instagram doing, what do they recommend.

Let's just, you know, pick 10 random accounts on Instagram, do one month following each one of them and see how you feel. You're gonna make a lot more progress than if you spent those ten months reading every single paper out there on PubMed, which is just gonna get you lost in a world of irrelevant trivia, basically. Yeah. It's It's completely irrelevant to your life. Well, this paper, this thing causes that levels of that thing to rise in your body and doesn't matter.

So all of this is the incentive structure of academic publication industry. Now think about it when it is politicized, when there is any kind of political incentive to sway the results in any particular way, then you've got a feedback loop that's gonna get you stuck in that result. No matter how absurd, no matter how wrong. That's why economists still believe in the garbage Keynesian model even though it continues to get refuted over and over and over and over again by reality. That's why nutritionists continue to tell you about how you need to eat six to 10 portions of grains even though that's basically poison, even though that's a recipe for diabetes, even though everybody's getting fat from listening to that stuff, even though they put it in schools and school kids are getting fatter and, less healthy than ever, There is no level of real world feedback that will cause academics to reconsider.

The American Heart Association continues to go along with the results of what they want. That's it. And in the case of nutrition, you know, the drivers, as I mentioned earlier, was we want to get people to eat the cheap crap. And then, you know, to cover up for inflation. And then there's this giant industry that thrives on making all of that cheap crap.

And then that industry has the incentive to continue to propagate it. And so the only way that you're gonna get a job in nutrition in any fiat university is if you go along with the garbage and ideas. And that's why if you look at who are the people that have made actual progress in advancing our understanding of nutrition, people like Nina Teicholz, she's not a PhD in nutrition. People like Gary Taubes, not a PhD in nutrition. All of the most important influencer influencers on the Internet that have actually changed millions of people's lives to the better, none of them almost has a PhD in nutrition.

In fact, the only thing that those PhDs with nutrition have done through this process is to go to these influencers and waste their time and troll them and try and get the people that are following them to stop following them. So you this is and this is and you know, I love to do this. You get all of these fat PhDs going to all these gym bros and telling them, you're just a gym bro. You don't have a PhD. My PhD is from this or that or the other thing.

And I think people should be eating garbage and that's why, and you know you shouldn't listen to him. And one of my favorite things to do on Twitter is to just tell those people, look you're fat, shut the fuck up. Yeah. You don't get to talk about anything related to nutrition and food and health if you're fat. It's you know, you're free to be fat but you need to shut the fuck up about food and nutrition if you, if you're fat.

It's it's just very simple logic. Like you can't completely disregard, only in academia can you just completely disregard the topic. And like they act surprised and they act shocked. And I remember once I did it to this professor in England and she went crazy. She started tagging my university, I was still at university at that time, just started tagging my university account and telling, how is your university going to feel about the fact that you're saying these sexist remarks to me?

Like, what sexist remarks? It has nothing to do I didn't mention anything about you being a woman. I just said you're fat. It's nothing you could be a man and it was fat. I would say the same thing.

And I have said it to a lot of men. Just yesterday, I was, calling Nasim Taleb fat for doing the same thing. He was trolling Nina Teicholz, and he's fat. He's extremely fat. He's got bigger boobs than her.

You don't get to talk about nutrition when you've got gigantic boobs and a massive belly. Like, you just all of your opinions are invalid by definition. And she she wanted to get me canceled by my university because of that. And of course, the funny thing, you know, I go to Lebanon where you know, I was in the university, I was teaching in Lebanon where all of this woke cancel culture thing didn't exist. So the lady who runs the university Twitter account saw me in a few days later.

She's like, hey, remember that crazy lady that was telling me, that was tagging our account because of this? Like, yeah. It's like I wanted to respond and tell her to shut up, but I decided not to do it. Yeah. But yeah.

But this this is what academia has devolved to. I mean it's essentially speaking propaganda to people trying to improve their lives. So there's all these people out there really actually doing the scientific method. Like the only way that you can become a successful influencer on Twitter is if you get real people to retweet you, to follow you, to say I listened to this guy and it improved my health. I've gotten healthier, I've gotten better, I've gotten more muscles, I've lost fat.

This is how you make it. Like yeah, you can buy influence, you can, and then there's all these ways of, you know, boosting social media engagement. But eventually, if you're out there selling garbage to people, if you're telling people to eat garbage, you're not gonna make it. Yeah. It's a real world of real results.

You have to actually get, give people real results in order for them to come back, in order for your account to get a new serious engagement in the long term. And that's science. That's what science is. That's the scientific method. You try what this guy said.

You see what it does to your body. And then if it works, you keep listening to him. If it doesn't work, you don't listen to him. The and so it's a survival of the most adept, and academia is nothing like that.

You see it on nutrition Twitter a lot with the Gymbros that you're talking about. Harry and I joke about this all time all the time because you'll have some scientist or MD that comes out and will say, show me the peer reviewed study or whatever. Then the Gymbro will just say post physique, and it'll be a picture of him flexing with, like, a six pack or something. Exactly. And it's funny, but it's true though because that's that person's actual proof of work.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. Show your physique instead of it.

All of these people it's amazing. All these academics, like, they look like crap, and they obviously don't have, flattering pictures to share online. And they think referencing some study from PubMed is science, but that's not what the scientific method is. It's so dumb to call reading PubMed science that it's it's it's hilarious because you're trusting a university, and you're trusting the funders of the university. You're trusting the people who did the study.

You're trusting the people who tallied the results. You're trusting the people who published it. And then they're just delivering it in a in a PDF that you're gonna download or you're gonna take that as an authority for your life. That's not what science is. Science is experimentation.

So your subject of this entire debate is your body, and and you can experiment with your body. You can try to go one month on a diet of Twinkies and Doritos like those people recommend and see what happens. Yeah. And then you can try and cut out the Doritos and the Twinkies and see what happens.

Yeah. I had a tweet the other day. It was about the difference between science with a capital s and science with a lowercase s. And capitalized science has these gatekeepers, for, like, the information, tech access to technology to actually, like, do the research and, like, access to funding. It's crazy how gate capped science is

now. Absolutely.

It's nuts.

And and and it's it's and, you know, could get a bit boring talking about methodology here, but it's fascinating that, you know, you can't just go and do an experiment. You know, you and I can't just go and do an experiment and publish the results because there's all these, you know, the institutional review board that needs to make sure that we're not doing this and we're not doing that. And if we wanna do it, it's gonna have to be enormously expensive. But this is all gatekeeping. It's essentially, guilds that protect themselves by preventing outsiders.

And, of course, this is very useful for propagating lies because if you wanted to spread actual useful knowledge, you'd have an open system of experimentation. And I would just wonder, you know, back in the day or when before the Internet, it made sense that you would have these kind of archaic systems that we have today. But now, why can't these trials be much more open? Why can't all these trials be conducted extremely openly to the point where you know the people who are on it, you know? There's these people, these are the Twitter accounts, and they're participating in the trial.

You know, I'm talking about trials for medication, but also all these nutrition trials. Why can't they be out there in the open? Why can't the results be, available for everybody? Why can't you go and talk to the people who took the medication in the trial and say, hey, what did you guys feel like? Tell me your results.

Why can't they publish the results openly? Everything has to go through all of these behind closed doors. Only the experts get to see it. And of course, you know, for the simple people, they think, you know, that's just how you make science properly. It's not.

It's just a scam. And it's it's and and and it's an amazing scam because it is it's such an incredible bait and switch because, you know, the the the whole enlightenment ideal of science was, oh, we come from the dark ages where we had all these priests who were the only ones who were allowed to read and write and they would tell us things, and we would just have to trust them and believe them because they are the ones who read and write. And now we're gonna replace that system. We're gonna replace the church. We're gonna replace all of these things that are based on authority rather than knowledge.

We're gonna, then rather than experimentation, we're gonna replace them with the modern scientific method of experimentation. And we're gonna do experiments, we're gonna do the scientific method, and we're gonna go by the authority of nobody. So it doesn't matter how much of a priest you are. It doesn't matter how many times you think God spoke to you. I'm going to I'm going to make, the experiment myself.

I'm gonna verify the results myself. So you'd think, you know, this would be the idea here. Yeah, alright. So now we're gonna be doing science. Alright.

Well, let's do science. Nope. You can't do science. Only these new guys in the white coats get to do the science. Yes.

Only the people that are, you know, instead of God spoke to them, the people who get the scientific funding from the government, they're the ones who are allowed to do science. And so they've undermined the authority of the church but under the pretext of we're gonna replace appeal to authority with scientific experimentation, and then went ahead and bait and switched you and took away experimentation and replaced it with a new appeal to authority, except the authority is government funding now.

Yeah. And it's amazing the stories that you're hearing about on the Internet of people taking their health into their own hands. And I think carnivore is an amazing example of that is because something they love to use as a weapon against carnivores that, you know, they don't have the papers or the research or the data published. Yet we can go on the internet. You know, I had ulcerative colitis that I healed through a carnivore diet.

I can connect with 30 plus other people that have healed their colitis through a carnivore diet. So, like, they've gone through the experimentation. I can connect with them in a way that these papers aren't allowing me to do, and I can actually heal and get to the root cause of what's bothering me in the first place. So to your point, that's actually what science is supposed to be.

That really is it. And, you know, the the the, the the amount of experimentation that comes out of these Facebook groups is is incredible because all of these people are going through the same symptoms. They're trying the same different things. And you report your results and then others will benefit enormously from it, you know. And then, of course, you if you're going through the same problem, you're also going to experience the same kind of questions along the way.

Well, alright, I did this and that happened. Anybody else have that happen to them? And then, yeah, it turns out that, yeah, well, I that happened to me and then I took this and that fixed it. And this is how, I've done it for a long time. This is what my wife does with the kids.

Like, I mean, at this point, I trust my wife's medical knowledge more than most doctors because she has a superpower called all these mom groups on Facebook Yes. Where she just goes I mean, kids are kids and they're all going through the same crap all the time. And it's actually incredibly powerful. Like this kid my kid is doing this, this, this, and that. And then she just searches the Facebook group.

She'll see many instances of kids going through the same thing, and she'll see all these discussions. If she has anything new, she'll offer it, then she'll ask, and all these people will jump in. Yeah, my kid had it, and we did that, and it helped. And it's amazing. It it works, and it's it's it's only possible now because the Internet made communication so much easier.

It's actually really tragic to think about if we hadn't had fiat science, if we hadn't had science through authority, if we haven't had the scam of centralized authority and government funding deciding everything for science over the past few decades, it's amazing to think about how much more advanced we'd be and how much more, useful all the knowledge we have would be. I mean, there's just so much knowledge out there that has become common knowledge on the Facebook groups, and everybody knows it and everybody agrees with it except for your doctors. I mean, it's it's incredible. Yeah. How many times have you heard the story of the person who went to Facebook, cured a disease, went to the doctor and told the doctor, I'm eating this and this and that.

And the doctor told them, oh no, you shouldn't eat this. Go back to eating the shit that almost killed you before you saved yourself because my textbook and my standard of care says you need to get sick like that so that I could then recommend the highly profitable pharmaceutical poisons for you.

Yeah. It it's not it's like a lot of the doctors we had on early early on in the podcast or, early on when we were podcasting, they would talk about a lot of the confrontation that they would run into with the established medical authorities. Gary Fettke is one. Yeah. He's literally curing people from getting, amputations by changing their diet.

And he ran into serious problems with the Australian health authorities, to the point where they were gonna revoke his his, ability to practice medicine, which is great. I mean, he was helping people. And, ultimately, they were gonna take away his his license to practice medicine just because the advice he was giving. Yeah. Do you I think it was Dwight Eisenhower who said, be wary of the scientific technocratic elite.

And it I have a hard time convincing myself that we're not living in that time period right now where there's these gatekeepers who control access to all the money, power, and, information to basically do what they they want with, like, the average person. Do you feel like we're kinda living through that period? Absolutely.

And it's just I mean, it's it's, when you when you think about it in a historical context, it's no different from every other period. There's an, there's there's a group that has access to knowledge and a group that treats the rest as cattle. And I think it's just no different now. It's just they use the pretext of these nice sounding ideals that it's all scientific rather than it being, religious. So So they've replaced, oh, well God spoke to me and God made me the one that needs to tell you what to do and you have to listen to me or else God will throw you in hell.

They've replaced that with government spoke to me and government gave me the money and told me that you have to listen to me or else you go to hell. It's insane. I mean, it's in all those fields, it's almost become like a, it's for me the best counter indicator. I mean, once I see somebody in any kind of field saying, oh, this guy is a quack who's going against established opinion and established standards of care, I immediately pay attention. Interesting.

Yeah. It's been enormously fruitful. So for instance, I've hosted on my podcast, I've hosted I've hosted Doctor Malcolm Kendrick, a Scottish doctor who's written a book, proposing an alternative theory of heart disease. It's extremely compelling. It's all about blood clotting from inflammation.

And it's and it's extremely compelling when you look at the evidence. And it was actually a pretty common theory in the nineteenth century back when heart disease was not very common Yeah. Because people weren't eating as much garbage as they were eating right now. But it was pretty well accepted that inflammation leads to these problems that develop into heart disease later on. And that then in the twentieth century got completely replaced with a cholesterol, diet heart hypothesis which is pure garbage obviously.

And again, he's basically getting lynched for it and he gets excommunicated for it. You know, Tim Noakes, you may have heard of him in South Africa. He's got an enormous number of people, millions of people in South Africa have fixed their diets by going low carb. He's also gotten into enormous amounts of trouble. I mean Crazy.

I I I don't even know anything about archaeology. I've heard this guy, Graham Hancock. And I saw that in his Twitter, he published a collage of all these articles in mainstream press of all these butt hurt archaeologists saying Graham Hancock is dangerous. He's promoting fiction. He's going against medical, against established opinion and against authority and expertise and all of the, all of the, consensus of our cause.

And I wanna pay attention to what this guy is saying. Yeah. Yeah. It's just it's it's clearly if you if you're if the argument against you is that you're going against the establishment, then that means the establishment has no argument. If you were just an idiot who's out there saying something really stupid, it would be very easy to say, no.

You're wrong because one, two, three, four. And that's what you would do. But if you're going if you're having to pull rank, if you're having to say, where's your degree from, If you're having to resort to, going by these garbage academic journals and just, you know, show me PubMed pissing contests, then, yeah, I'm not going to follow anything. I'm going to take that guy seriously. And it's really a very powerful signal because you will get so many people and I try and get those people on my podcast all the time.

I get so much knowledge just by not listening to what the, experts want you to say because the experts have been thoroughly corrupted in the fields that I understand. So I'm much better off assuming that the other fields are also corrupted.

That's the amazing thing about doctor Noakes is that he was fighting for his license, yet a lot of people don't realize he created one of the original running gels in South Africa that was, you know, carbs, sugar to fuel you through the race. He wrote a whole book on why carbs are essential for endurance and optimal per performance. Yeah. And the information he came across for high fat diets was so compelling that he was willing to do a one eighty, publicly admit that he was wrong Yeah. And then run towards this path to make people healthier.

Yeah. Yet he's the doctor that's at risk of losing his medical license, and it's the same thing with doctor Doctor. Becky.

Yeah. And then and then when the case of notes, it's when he became diabetic himself, and then he realized they had to stop it, and then he stopped it and he felt so much better. Sean Baker's also gone through something similar as well. He's an orthopedic surgeon, and he gets all these extremely obese people whose joints are cracking, falling apart because of the extra weight that they do and because of the fact that they can't move properly. And he tells them to fix their diet, and that's been ruining the business for his hospital.

Yeah. I, I I always think about just these doctors who are standing up against the establishment and almost, like, try to look at history in reverse. And, like, over time, like, people who really made change or created a shift in the way we operate, they were always the crazy ones. They were always the fringe guy, you know, standing out on the limb, willing to put their ideas out there and take the criticism. So so I agree with you.

Like, whenever I hear of someone who's like, I think of, like, Alex, is it Alex Gladstein or Goldstein who's, the climate change Alex Epstein. Epstein. Sorry. I'm like, I wanna listen to what he has to say. Like

Yeah. Yeah. That's another great example. You know, the arguments against him are always, oh, you don't agree with the consensus of 97% of scientists. What does the consensus say?

How can you defend it? What is the argument? Show me where the climate crisis is. Show me where on the big blue and green ball the carbon dioxide hurt you.

Yeah. That, that hits on a point that I I wanted to ask you about just in terms of, ESG. Yeah. You're you're probably your three favorite letters. You know, the meat eating diet has run into the same problems that Bitcoin has in terms of trying to fight this ESG narrative.

Is there a particular like, it it's it's almost feeds into the same conversation we're having with sort of gatekeeping the information, trying to, like, steer people in the wrong direction. But I just find it so funny that these two things run into the same problem of, like, the ESG, using the ESG narrative or lens to try to beat them down and suppress these two, you know, these two movements.

Yeah. It's I think it all goes back to inflation, and that's why the chapter after Fiat Science in my book is on energy, fiat fuels.

We're doing a good job following

your chapters. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, the, it's all related because the two things that are the most politically sensitive issues when it comes to inflation are food and fuel. Because they're the things that people are consuming constantly. So every day you need to buy fuel, every day you need to buy food, every day you're consuming it, and every day you notice what's happening to the price.

So these are things that are being consumed constantly. Everybody has to pay them every day and they affect your mood constantly and they affect how you vote and they affect how angry you are with your government. So government is really enormously invested in trying to make you think that food and fuel are not becoming more expensive. And the best way that, obviously the best way to do that would be to just stop destroying the money. But obviously, no government's gonna do that.

So the second best way to do that is to just go ahead and try and convince you to use inferior substitutes. So this is why, and this is kind of the, this is the thing that people used to laugh at me when I first published the Fiat Standard. And, I think every passing day, they laugh less and less and less because it's no coincidence that the same government that destroys the money finances dumbass scientists to tell you that meat is bad for you and is bad for the planet and that fossil fuels are bad for you and they're bad for the planet. And that, you know, hydrocarbon fuels are gonna boil the oceans and the carbon dioxide concentration is going to ruin everything. And similarly meat, you know, cow farts.

Imagine this giant enormous planet that is capable of handling all kinds of things is unable to handle cows farting. And like whether you believe in God or you believe in nature, like imagine this giant ball that is going to be thrown out of whack because cows are farting. It's just so absurd the notion that this is in any way taken seriously by anybody. But this is the stupid world that we live in. And of course, it's not, I you know, having studied this stuff at a very high level, I used to do my PhD in sustainable development so I was one of the people who believe in this garbage.

And I've come across the evidence supposedly that is presented for it and it's just an idiotic religion. There's no evidence for it. It's just complete matter of faith. And, the only evidence for it is just basically you have to get funded. And if you wanna get funded, you need to believe this stuff.

If you don't believe this stuff, you don't get funded. So all the papers are written from the premise, from the starting premise that CO two is destroying the planet, that cow farts are ruining the planet, that, hydrocarbon fuels are ruining the planet. And then they talk about inconsequential little irrelevant details. But, that's really how the whole thing works. And so there's very little, evidence that any serious person could look at and see that there's anything to it.

But, the financing is what drives these conclusions. And that's why I think, you know, to go back to your original question of why Bitcoin and meat, I think those, this is another way in which those two things come back together because the forces that make you think that meat is bad and inflation is good are the forces that, once you've beaten one of these, then it's easy to see that the analogies and the similarities to snap out of the programming with the other one. Yeah. So that's why I think you see this becoming, it seems for fiat people, it seems weird that all of those people want to eat meat and they wanna consume those hydrocarbon fuels and they wanna use Bitcoin. But what's really weird is all of these masses of idiots who have been brainwashed into eating garbage using inflationary money and thinking in that they can thrive and survive using pre industrial technology.

But all, really, when it comes to fuels, the the key point is that we can't have all of the nice things that we have today. We can't have computers and Internet and cell phones and, surviving winter and functional infrastructure. All these nice things that we have that we take for granted that are the reasons why our life expectancy is high and the reasons why surviving winter is no longer such a dramatic ordeal are because all these things are because of hydrocarbon fuels. This is what makes our modern life possible. And life without hydrocarbon fuels is a return to barbaric primitivism and that's no fun.

That's the only realistic alternative. And you're being gaslit into believing, well solar lit should be the term because they wanna get rid of the gas so we're not gonna be able to gas light. But it's gonna be a flickering solar light. You don't, you're being told that the solution to fixing the weather is for you to just eat cheap stuff that doesn't suffer, that doesn't get inflated heavily because it's industrial and easy for us to produce, eat and consume, essentially fuel less sources of energy that are that are basically not practical for our modern technology. You can't have you can't run a modern company on solar and wind.

You know, like Apple and Amazon like to virtue signal about this stuff, but they say they're 100% carbon net neutral. It's bullshit. They just buy forests and then they consider that buying these forests is, substituting for their carbon, but they have to they have to emit carbon. You can't run anything in Amazon or Google or Apple without, reliable twenty four hour high power energy, high high density power. This is just the only way that we can have any nice things in life.

Do you think that or are you optimistic that we can pull back from the brink of these incorrect ESG narratives, wokeism, plant based advocacy, or do you think there's just too much critical mass there at some point?

I mean, I don't know. I don't really have a crystal ball, so I can't really tell how things are going to unfold in the future in this regard. I think my only reason for optimism is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the only way that I'm optimistic. It's the only reason that I'm optimistic because Bitcoin is a practical solution to those problems.

If it wasn't for Bitcoin, we'd have to be out there evangelizing and trying to convince people. And that's just a thankless task. I remember when I was a gold bug when I used to think that gold was the answer. It was impossible and it was frustrating and it was depressing and dispiriting and demoralizing because it relies on having to convince morons and morons don't wanna be convinced. Morons want what's easy.

And the great thing about Bitcoin is that it doesn't rely on convincing anybody. Bitcoin works regardless of whatever anybody else thinks. And so it continues to work, it continues to appreciate, it continues to get stronger, and it continues to offer you a way out of clown world. It continues to offer you a way to maintain your wealth and to prevent others from robbing you and most importantly, to prevent your wealth from being robbed to finance the clown world. And so I think it's going to be really down to Bitcoin to save us.

It's gonna be the the whole Bitcoin carnivore thing is gonna be more than just a funny Internet meme. Mhmm. Because, you know, the way things are going, you look at how inflationary money is going. We're headed towards a central bank digital currency system where all of your purchases are gonna be determined by government policy. And so the way that they're gonna be fighting inflation, and this is kind of the conclusion of the Fiat standard, the final chapter is the way that they're gonna be fighting inflation, if the nineteen seventies were any guide, the way that they fight inflation is by teaching you to have fun staying poor, basically.

And with central bank digital currencies, they're gonna be able to do that a lot better. So they've had 50 of propaganda trying to prep you up for the idea that you shouldn't eat meat and that you shouldn't consume, oil and gas. When they have the central bank digital currency, they're gonna be they they don't need to convince you anymore. They're just gonna ration these things. So meat is not gonna be expensive, but you're only gonna get 300 grams of meat a month or something like that.

And oil is gonna be cheap but you're only allowed to drive for, you know, three hours a month or something like that. Yeah. And so that's how they're gonna be fighting inflation. And then in that kind of world, the only way that you're gonna be able to afford the modern fuels and the only way that you're gonna be able to afford meat is Bitcoin.

Yes. It I think about, like, the fiat world and it almost has just created all these derivatives of product like, further away from productivity. So, like, there almost needs to be this return to, like, the basis of productivity in the forms of food and fuel so that people can actually people who own Bitcoin can actually access the food and fuel that they want to use to live, you know, whatever lifestyle that they're gonna be living. But, I guess my question to you is once CBDC has become a thing, do you think that's a trap door that people are gonna be able to get out of once that, you know, once they start living in that sort of Sims world of, electronic government backed money?

I don't know. I think the only way out is going to be Bitcoin. And I think the longer you take to get out, the worse off you'll be because you'll be able to exchange your fiat CBDCs for less and less Satoshis. That's what it really comes down to. So it's sort of similar to the issue we were discussing earlier in terms of getting people off of food, off of crap food.

Like for the vast majority of them, they won't want to change until they get really sick. And similarly, I think with money, unfortunately, it's, individuals are only going to change when it becomes really, really, really uncomfortable. And, who knows what different people's pain tolerance is.

It's been an interesting experiment these past few years seeing where people are willing to kinda draw the line in the sand.

Yeah. A lot of people still haven't put any line anywhere. They will just bend over and take whatever is given to them. Mhmm.

Do you

think that there's almost gonna be, like, two fractions of tribes of, you know, one tribe that's in these huge urban cities that is using CBDC. They're probably eating fake meat commodities and kind of just going along with what the government is telling them. And then another camp of people that are probably in the Bitcoin camp, they care about defense and eating animal protein in in these, like, smaller communities. Do you kinda see that divergence? I do.

I definitely see that. That's kind of the conclusion of the Fiat standard that I think we're heading towards a system of essentially financial apartheid. The if you stay in the matrix, basically, you get to live in a tiny little pod and you're constantly told to not leave your house because of various viruses and illnesses and climate change or whatever stupid nonsense. You know, all of these retarded, suicides are gonna be used as excuses to stop you from consuming fuel and consuming real food. You're gonna have your kibble delivered to you while you are on Zoom and living in virtual reality all day, you know, in the metaverse.

So and remember, like, the the the key thing to understand about inflation, and this is Michael Saylor. He says this, you know, inflation is a matrix is a vector. It's not a it's not a one number. There's no inflation of 3% or 7%. Inflation is a different number for every single good.

And these goods aren't all the same. So for the for things that can be produced digitally, inflation is always negative for them. You know, every year, data gets cheaper. Every year, hard drives get cheaper. Computer screens get cheaper.

Things that are well, computer screens are not digital. They're industrial. And the things that are industrial also get cheaper or get expensive only a tiny little bit, you know. Your laptop is cheaper this year than it was last year. Your TV, all these things slightly get get slightly cheaper.

Digital goods get cheapest. Electronics get cheap a little bit. Industrial things, get, you know, approximately zero, minus two, plus two, plus three, plus five, something like that. And then you get into the natural goods, the things that involve human time, the things that involve natural processes that can't be rushed like food, you know, grazing cows. You can't just press a button and graze a cow.

These things don't, these things go up in price. These things don't decline in price. So the challenge for the fiat authorities is to move you away from the things that go up in price toward the things that don't go up in price. That's where these lockdowns are gonna be very useful because you don't need fuel. Fuel is a difficult thing to make so the price of fuel isn't isn't going to go down significantly because you can't just, you know, click a button and there's a very extensive infrastructure that needs to be used for it.

So you need to consume less fuel, you need to eat less meat, you need to eat more kibble, heavily processed garbage, and, consume more digital experiences. So instead of taking your car to drive somewhere so you can climb a mountain, just stay home, wear a headset, and get to experience the mountain at home. Instead of having relationships with human beings that you go and see, stay home and get on the metaverse and talk to them while they wear fancy avatars and you know, who needs real people anyway? Just look at the actual avatar. It's much better.

And so I think this is where we're going. Like, your electricity consumption is gonna be reduced massively when you're living in a tiny space, especially for all these tiny spaces and small apartments and big buildings. That's a very low cost for heating. So then, you are experiencing life through a screen. That's relatively little energy consumption as opposed to going out and actually doing stuff.

And then you're eating heavily processed industrial kibble which is very cheap. So this is the, this is where the fiat world is going. This is how we can maintain fiat without hyperinflation. That's the way that this is going to succeed. And this is the way that, you know, how are you gonna retire on your bonds when your bonds are getting wiped out all the time and their value and the value of the currency is getting wiped out?

Well, you can retire on your bonds if you're stuck in a tiny little pod and, you know, you'll be happy because you're saving the earth. You're fixing the weather. So you know, if you believe that, good luck to you. But if you don't believe that, then yeah, you're gonna have Bitcoin and you're gonna be out there and you're gonna get sunshine on your face and you're gonna eat real meat and you're gonna burn glorious hydrocarbon fuels. And guess what?

It's not gonna do jack shit to the weather because you are not Earth's thermostat. You can't control the Earth's weather. You can't control the sea levels. You're an insignificant tiny little fart on Earth. You are not affecting the Earth and so live your own life.

I love it. I love where we've gotten to this conversation. We touched on a lot of the topics in your book, the the Fiat Standard, which I think is a phenomenal read. And, I just wanna thank you again for coming on because you've had a huge impact on us and just sort of inspired us to start making those changes. I mean, seriously, when I was, reading The Bitcoin Standard, I was still working a nine to five job.

And, once I saw Bitcoin, there was kinda no going back towards, like, you know, what I what I saw through your work. So Glad to hear what you're doing.

Sir. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, guys. Awesome.