{ "episodeId": "SLP45", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "jeff_deist": { "name": "Jeff Deist", "role": "guest", "tag": "JEFF" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.89, "text": "You're listening to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Listen in as I interview the best and brightest improving your Bitcoin and economic knowledge. Welcome, listeners. This is your host, Stephan Livera. Today, my guest is Jeff Deist. Jeff is the president of the Mises Institute, and he previously worked as Ron Paul's chief of staff, having previously worked as a tax attorney in private equity. Jeff is also an excellent writer and public speaker, delivering some excellent talks. He also hosts Mises Weekends, which is a great podcast featuring Austrian economists and some fellow travelers. Now, personally, I am a big fan of the Mises Institute, and I've learned so much much from reading the countless books, articles, and listening to talks, watching Mises Institute YouTube videos over the years. So I donate money to the Mises Institute, and I'd encourage my listeners to also consider that if they get value out of the Mises Institute. So Jeff, first of all, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "01:04", "start": 64.0, "text": "Well, thank you so much. Let me open with a question for you. Sure. How's that? How get-- tell us the state of the Austro libertarian movement in Australia and how you came to find out about Mises, Rothbard, et cetera." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17", "start": 77.37, "text": "this is an inter- Okay, so- I would say the scene in terms of Austrian libertarianism in Australia is relatively small. How I actually found it, funnily enough, I was, I was a kid, I was sort of fourteen or fifteen years old, and I was on an IRC channel, and some guy in an Oz politics IRC channel linked to a Mises Daily article, and he would regularly link to those, and at the time I was a kid, I thought, \"Oh, what is this crazy anarcho-capitalism Austrian economics thing?\" But then over time- I actually started to read that, and as I understood more around that, that was what sort of started me going down that rabbit hole of then reading, you know, the greats such as Mises and Rothbard and Hopper." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "02:02", "start": 122.38, "text": "Well, I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad you've stumbled across us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:06", "start": 126.36, "text": "Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's exactly it. And I think Bitcoin is something that, well, Austrian economics is something that's helped understand, Bitcoin in some ways. So, so Jeff, a couple months ago, I think this is around August twenty eighteen, you actually interviewed Saf Dean Amos on his book, The Bitcoin Standard. So let's start off with a little bit on your thoughts on Bitcoin generally." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "02:29", "start": 148.74, "text": "Well, I'm glad I interviewed him, I'm glad I read his book. It was recommended to me by a great friend of ours in the Bitcoin community named Caitlin Long, some of your listeners might know her. a-and here's the thing, what you or I think about Bitcoin doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it's for the market to decide. And that's what's so beautiful about it, is it's not a, a government-issued currency, and it's not issued by any big institution, it, it, at least in-- by design. It Peer-to-peer network, with a currency sort of globbed on top of it. So when we say, \"Well, is Bitcoin money? Or does Bitcoin work well? Or is Bitcoin, fiat? Or is Bitcoin susceptible to this or that?\" Well, you know, all these are questions for the marketplace and whether people want to use blockchain for all kinds of things, whether they in particular want to use Bitcoin for monetary exchanges, whether they want to use some other coin, instead of Bitcoin, I would, I would say side with Safedine on that and say probably not, but that's a matter of, of very, vocal opinion on both sides. You know, these are all questions for the market. No, no one person can decree anything, and so none of us can decree it's money. and, and that's both the-- that's the beauty of it, is that it's something that is arising in the marketplace or, or attempting to arise in the marketplace. So, you know, all of us who are libertarian minded are worried about central banks. We all wake up in the These banks are completely out of control. They're, you know, putting liquidity into places in, in the market where it shouldn't, exist. they're keeping interest rates too low, they're encouraging all kinds of malinvestment, and more, and more importantly, it's not just economics, it's a form of control. you know, money is half of the equation in every transaction. On one side, you've got the good or service being purchased, on the other side, you've got the money, being given for the good or service. So the idea that government controls, such a big piece of every transaction ought to scare us, not, not just in terms of our economic wellbeing, but in terms of our control and in terms of our sovereignty over our lives. I, I would assume that, well, socialism is sort of coming back, as you may have noticed, but For, for most of us listening, we understand that socialism has been refuted both empirically throughout the twentieth century and, and also theoretically by great, writers like Mises and Hazlitt and, and Rothbard and Hayek. So, you know, most of us would reject the idea of a currency of a planning board to sit around for wheat or for automobiles and say, \"Well, in Australia next year, manufacturers should produce this many automobiles, the workers should be paid this much per hour, and the cars should be...\" Sold for this price? We would all say, \"No, no, no, that's central planning, that's a recipe for disaster, and that's what happened in the former Soviet Union.\" But in effect, maybe a bit overstated, but if in effect, that's what, central bank boards do. They sit around and determine the supply and price of money in an economy or in a society, and, and I think, that, that's very worrisome. I think it's a pretty new experiment, too, especially in the United States. It's only about a hundred So Bitcoin or cryptos as an attempt to, to b-build something, not a parallel system, but a separate system is something that I think we have to encourage." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:58", "start": 358.48, "text": "Fantastic comments there, Jeff. And, so I suppose then, obviously projecting out much further into the future, obviously if it is mass adopted, do you believe that Bitcoin could enforce some sort of financial restraint or discipline on what are currently very profligate and destructive and wasteful modern nation states of today?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "06:21", "start": 380.94, "text": "Oh, absolutely. Bitcoin and cryptos, if they were successful, they could be a political challenge to central banks and also put the brakes on them. As, as a matter of fact, that's what Nassim Taleb says in his intro to Saifedean's Bitcoin Standard book. He says, \"Look, even if Bitcoin fails, we've proved now it can be done, and that alone ought to give central bankers a bit of pause.\" I mean, it is a potential form of competing currency, and that's exactly what Hayek talked about. when he, when he wrote his essay on de-nationalized money, I think the-- as I mentioned earlier, the, the, the, relationship between money and the state is a deadly one. It's one that finances wars and inflation and all kinds of, government mischief. And so I think anything that, can take us away from government money is, is a, is a wonderful development. I also think it's a scary development for central banks and, and, profligate national governments. So, I think if, if Bitcoin ever got a lot more traction, let's just say, they would be rooting against it, and whether they would be openly or, surreptitiously acting against it is a different question, but it's, you know, we shouldn't put it past them" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:38", "start": 458.04, "text": "Yeah, definitely. And now one of the comments that Saftein often echoes is that in many cases, the central bankers will be some of the last to actually understand Bitcoin, because they're, they're just sort of trapped in a certain paradigm of thinking. Do you have any comments on that?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "07:53", "start": 472.97, "text": "Well, it's true, and it's, it, what's the saying I'm paraphrasing here? It's hard to make a man understand something when it's, it's in his self-interest not to. In other words, they make a living providing us with, dollars and, and- interest rates and, determining the money supply. So, you know, it, it's like a surgeon who any ailment you present him with, he, he suggests surgery. I think that central bankers tend to think that they run the world and that they ought to run the world. So, sure, they're-- they, they have a self-interest in sort of ignoring it and hoping it goes away. And if they can't do that, we've always-- we've already seen signs that they'll attempt to co-opt it. certain countries have said, \"Well, maybe our national bank" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "08:37", "start": 516.82, "text": "It's one step removed from the, a national government or a national central bank itself, if you just go over to the investment bank houses, which in the US are basically almost cousins of the Fed, the primary dealers who avail themselves of new bank reserves first. You know, when, when, when a Citibank or something like that starts talking about, or a Goldman Sachs starts talking about develop-developing a crypto or a blockchain or using crypto or even hypothecating crypto, then you know that they're nervous because they're trying to, to take a look at a, at a new industry and figure out how they can run it and co-opt it. So we, we really have to avoid that. I think any, any sort of intermediary in the cryptocurrency world needs to be, fought against Against that, we don't need any Goldman Sachs, we don't need any Citibanks, we don't even need, Coinbase's and Coindesk's. We need, you know, true peer-to-peer wallet currency. That's, that's my strong opinion that, that middlemen, brokers, Mt. Gox is one example, middlemen are bad news and they go against the whole point and the whole purpose of cryptos." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:46", "start": 585.62, "text": "Yeah, that's actually a really well nuanced take. I think many, Bitcoiners, many of the more hardcore Bitcoiners would really agree with you there, whereas a lot of the people who aren't so steeped in sort of the philosophy and the ethos of Bitcoin would be more sort of comfortable with trusting the third party, let's say." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "10:05", "start": 604.86, "text": "Yeah, and we see where third party financial intermediaries have gotten us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:10", "start": 610.03, "text": "Exactly." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "10:11", "start": 610.79, "text": "Right? In the past hundred years or so, I mean, banks aren't most people's favorites. And, the sad part about it is that they aren't even lending on actual savings of local people. And it wasn't that long ago, just a couple generations ago, I mean, p-- people really lent money based on someone's-- based on how much money they had to lend, and there were small local banks, and somebody like my great-grandfather. obtained a loan because his-- he was known around town, and he, you know, people thought he was trustworthy or whatever, and he had a, you know, halfway decent job. and so we're so far removed from all that when we're just in this, this era of digital money and this, this era where, central banks can create dollars out of thin air, use those to purchase bank assets, and inflate their balance sheets. you know, we're, we're ins-- we're so far removed from what banking was ever meant to be that- the, the, you know, we really have to say that it's-- that we, we have to just get rid of it. I don't think there's any saving the, the banking systems in, as corrupt as they" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:14", "start": 673.99, "text": "are, at least in the West. Right. And I think, sort of related question that just came to my mind now, one of the great Austrian monetary scholars, Guido Hulsmann, has spoken about how in the past, under a sound money standard, there actually wasn't as much-- there was some level of credit, but it was more-- So much like as much of an extending loans as what we have now, but it was more like extending c-commercial terms to a business. So let's say, you know, I'll give you these goods and you pay, pay me within thirty days, that kind of thing. Do you have any comments on what we might see from a debt versus equity sort of world view if we move to a more, quote unquote, hard money standard such as gold or Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "11:57", "start": 717.02, "text": "Well, I think we'd see a lot less debt. I don't know who I was reading, I was The other day, I think again it was, Nassim Taleb, and somebody pointed out, he said, \"Look, credit should always be difficult, unless you're some absolutely blue-chip borrower, whether that's a company or an individual, somebody with lots of assets to pledge against it, you know, collateral, somebody with a proven track record. Credit should always be tight. C-credit should always come at, at a, at a fairly, stiff rate of interest, if we think about it naturally. I mean, people loaning money- That they might not get back, and not only risking not getting it back, but foregoing that what they could do with it here and now. You know, that should always carry a price if we just think about it in human terms. We, we prefer money today to money ten years from now. That's why nobody wants their dream house when they're ninety," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:53", "start": 772.6, "text": "right? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "12:54", "start": 773.7, "text": "You, you want your dream house when you're forty. So you might borrow some money to get it, and that's okay, as long as everyone's, willing to do it. But the problem is, of course And made, the, the process of borrowing and lending so, so different than it would be otherwise. But I think we'd see a lot more things like our grandparents saw. I think we'd see, fifteen-year mortgages would be the norm, for example, with, with at least twenty percent down and no more than, let's say, three time-- no, loans no greater than, let's say, three times household income. That was a pretty standard arrangement not that long ago, and it turns out that when you loan people money and they've got twenty percent down- Down, default rates are much, much lower. I, I mean, that b-because of skin in the game, people stand to lose money, the money they put into something, they'll fight much harder to figure out a way to get a second job or, or get some roommates or do whatever they have to do to keep paying their mortgage, let's say if they get, if they become unemployed, from their regular job. And we saw, of course, the exact opposite, especially in the US housing market in the run up to the '08 crash, we saw all kinds of" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "14:04", "start": 844.08, "text": "borrowing, you know, multiple times their annual income to buy ten condos and all this kind of crazy stuff. And, you know, none of that would happen, in my opinion, in a rational market-based lending system. It would just be a lot harder to borrow money, and a lot of people don't wanna hear that. They would, our neoliberal friends would say, \"Oh, come on, that's just gonna be a huge drag on the economy, and we'd all be poor.\" Well If what we've got today is prosperity, it's a false prosperity. It's, it's sort of like saying, \"Well, I had a ten thousand dollar limit on my credit card, and I had nine grand charged up, but then they sent me a letter that said they're raising my credit limit to twenty thousand, so I now can go out and charge eleven thousand dollars more.\" Well, in that period where I'm charging that additional eleven thousand, my neighbors might look over and say, \"Wow, he's doing pretty well. Seems to have all kinds of new stuff, a big TV" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "14:59", "start": 898.72, "text": "That's artificial and that's, that's not based on a, a, a foundation of actually increased earnings to justify the increased spending. So that's how I kind of look at the economy, the economy in the West, and of course, I include Australia weirdly when I say the West. You, you know, it, there's an artificial, there's an artifice to it. Now, look, you gotta hand it to the central bankers, they've, they've managed to keep this thing going an awfully long time. And we have more debt worldwide than we had in two thousand and eight, both at the governmental level, at the business level, and at the individual level, way more debt worldwide than we had in two thousand and eight. So you gotta ask yourself whether anything's been solved. I think the answer is no." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:42", "start": 942.16, "text": "Yeah, fantastic comments there. And the other thing, Obviously I agree with you about, you know, credit should be tight in a full reserve banking system. However, some difficulties I sometimes face when I'm trying to explain this kind of system to people is they think, \"Oh, but how would I afford this house? Because housing is so expensive.\" But then ultimately we have to understand that actually using Austrian economics, we can sort of try and understand the world and understand why many of these things are overpriced as they are now." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "16:11", "start": 971.08, "text": "Well, sure, there's no question that prices, prices always adjust. But there's more of a, almost a moral, a cultural question involved. If you read, you mentioned Dr. Guido Holsman, if you read his books, The Ethics of Money Production, which I think is free in HTML form on our site, The Ethics of Money Production. If you read that book, you start to realize that maybe we have bigger houses and fancier cars and nicer vacations than we deserve. I mean, nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to hear austerity. But what if that's the case? What if, things are artificially swollen in our economy? That, I, I guess you could make a weird argument that that's a great thing and that central banks and, and in tandem with fiscal policy have sort of created a prosperity that wouldn't be there. But the flip side is, is if it all comes crashing down, you haven't done anyone any favors, you just sort of fooled them. So there's, you know, we talk-- we think of these things in financial and economic terms, but there's a, there's a much bigger society and cultural component to it as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:14", "start": 1033.71, "text": "Yeah, exactly, precisely that. And, look, so I think there are some relevant things for Bitcoiners that they can learn from Austrian economics. There are many key concepts that I think, apply. So are there any key concepts where you believe Austrian monetary theory can help a person understand Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "17:32", "start": 1052.42, "text": "Well, of course, I definitely think there are, and this is-- It's great that you brought this up, because again, there was another Twitter feed, the, Twitter dispute going on the other day about whether someone needed- To know any Austrian economics to properly appreciate Bitcoin, a lot of people were arguing yea or nay. I kind of agree, I don't think you have to know much about economics or, or in particular Austrian variant of economics to appreciate, what cryptos could be. I think you could just, be wary of banks and wary of the state. I mean, that said, clearly, Menger's ideas about the origins of money that it arises, as a commodity with some sort of pre-existing use value, is- is, is definitely, applicable here. There's, I, I'm not really interested in the nuts and bolts or the weeds of the, the argument about whether or not Bitcoin satisfies Mises' regression theorem, and, and just very briefly, the regression theorem is the idea that if we go back far enough, Bitcoin or any other money would have had some use, some pre-existing use other than as money itself. It would have had a commodity use. And some people say, \"Well, Bitcoin's just an electronic network, and it wouldn't have had any use.\" And then I- Other people say, no, no, no, the technology itself, the ability to conduct transfers, with a ledger, that, that technology is the value, that's the underlying value, and so we can't just be thinking in terms of, you know, the old analog world and physical things as commodities, that in the new world there could be an intangible thing that's a commodity. Yeah, I, I guess I'd lean a little bit towards that latter view, but I'm not worked up about it because, again, as I mentioned earlier, whether Bitcoin- Bitcoin is money is up to the market to decide. it's not, it's not for us to decide by, by arguing" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:19", "start": 1159.07, "text": "and," }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "19:20", "start": 1159.81, "text": "and hashing it out. It's, it-- what, our opinions don't much matter. and we don't want big opinion makers when it comes to cryptos. We don't want certain people with lots and lots of crypto who can sort of move the market and, and make arguments one way or the other. We want it decentralized, we want it spread out. We don't want a hub and spoke We want a loose sort of spider web network when it comes to crypto. So, yes, I think, I think Austrian concepts of the origins of money, in Menger, I think Mises' regression theorem, I think Hayek's denationalization of money, that's more of a po-political theory than, an, an econ argument, but maybe most of all just the, the, the calculation debate. I mean, if you understand why ca-why socialism fails in the Misesian sense and in the Hayekian sense, because- Because you can't, without a profits and losses, you can't figure out what prices should be, and you can't figure out how, where to allocate things and where to place your capital and your time and your energy properly because you don't understand what's working and what's not without profit and loss signals. And I think that, that same argument applies in spades to central banks. they don't know-- Who, who can know what interest rates should be for three hundred and, you know, fifty- fifty million Americans, nobody can know that. Nobody can know what's the best interest rate for everybody. If you're, if you happen to be an older person who's no longer working and hoping that your savings will last you w- you know, you might want interest rates to be fifteen percent so that without take-- without going out and having to buy risky fang stocks or whatever, you can just make fifteen percent on a simple money market account or something like that. If you're a young person wanting to buy your first home, you might be thrilled. like Trump said, you know, and real estate loves cheap interest rates. You might love it if you get two percent interest rate. so there's no one size fits all policy possible, there's no economic calculation possible. central bank Investors don't have a, a magic wand, or a crystal ball. So I would say that, all of these, all these concepts, are great, and I think really crypto's came out of an Austrian community. If, if you read most of the originators, most of the early adopters, these were people who were familiar with Austrian economics, which is of course one reason why some of our neoliberal progressive friends like Paul Krugman don't much like it, they don't like the people behind it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:51", "start": 1311.29, "text": "Yeah, exactly. And I, I The point you were mentioning there around the calculation debate, and I think another component that maybe you could touch on is sort of related to how, Dr. Bob Murphy did a talk years ago, and he called his, his talk almost defense against the dark arts, right? So with an Austrian economics understanding, we can help understand why, you know, why we shouldn't be worried about, say, the mainstream deflationary kind of hoarding argument. Do you have any, thoughts on where Austrian economics can help? Kind of inoculate people against faulty beliefs on money." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "22:27", "start": 1347.27, "text": "Wow, deflation. some of your listeners probably know Jim Grant, of Jim Grant's Interest Rate Observer, really brilliant guy. He said deflation is the process of a society getting richer. Because the, you know, goods and services become cheaper, and things that used to be available only to the very wealthy, come down the ladder a little bit, become very, become available to, to ordinary people, like air travel, which was once just the province of the very wealthy, and now, if we fast forward a few decades, we find things like, all kinds of things are very, very cheap that used to be expensive, like laser eye surgery, like a DVD player, I mean, you name it. There, deflation is actually, A good thing, and people need to get over the idea that deflation means that the economy is suffering. as far as people hoarding money, look, look, there's a sat-- there's a form of satisfaction from money held. If somebody is, is hoarding money, that, that generally tells you a couple things. One is that," }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "23:30", "start": 1409.53, "text": "They fear, the future, so they wanna have some money put aside, and maybe they fear the banking system if they-- if they're literally hoarding it at home, but presumably they're hoarding it at a bank. And number two is they, they're uneasy enough that they get more psychic satisfaction from having money in the bank than they would from the stuff they could go buy with it. And so why is that a problem? Who, who are any of us to tell someone, how much money they need set aside for a rainy day? What an absurd thing! I mean, how Perverse. Imagine what our grandparents or great-grandparents would think. They would all, they'd all be thrilled if they knew we had a bunch of money that we were hoarding. They'd say, \"Good, good thinking, \"because they, they endured things like the Great Depression and two world wars, where there was-- they were thrust into great uncertainty in life. So I don't, I don't buy this hoarding business at all. That's, that's nobody's business. None of us has a responsibility to get up in the, in the morning and stimulate the scale, a macro scale, the, the Keynesians are just wrong. You don't create a, a better economy by, by encouraging people to using fiscal and exc- excuse me, fiscal and monetary policy to go buy stuff. You don't need to stimulate demand. We all want stuff. The question is whether we lead productive enough lives to pay for it all. So what, the, the focus of any healthy economy is in increasing and accumulating capital and then using that capital to create ways to make the provision of goods and services more efficient, more productive, so that e-every person can produce more, we, we in a roundabout way get a higher and higher standard of living as a society. So it's, it's saving money th-though via profit and capital accumulation and then deploying that capital that makes us rich, not spending. a-a-and we all want stuff, a-and if they make credit cheap enough, we can all-- most of us can get the credit to go buy stuff that we haven't earned the money to buy. So that's not the problem The problem is, is creating an economy that's more productive per capita, and that's not harmed by, people holding onto money." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:38", "start": 1537.89, "text": "Yeah, fantastic thoughts. okay, so Jeff, you were touching on this earlier, p-potentially with, some of the comments around the reg-regression theorem requirement for physicality. just curious, do you have any thoughts on why there is a slight split between some Austrian economists who are more bearish or anti-bitcoin versus some who are- not necessarily, you know, think it's gonna go to ten million or whatever, but some who are more open to the idea of Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "26:05", "start": 1564.55, "text": "Well, that's-- Well, one, a short answer is age. the boomers tend to be a little more skeptical and the, the millennials tend to be, a lot more pro. I'm stuck in the middle as a Gen Xer, so I'm, I'm pretty pro, crypto, but I don't, I don't focus on it and I, and I certainly don't think gold's role in the, in the world economy, and I think if you doubt that, ask yourself why central banks hold so much of it. And a lot of central banks around the world are increasing their gold reserves even as we speak. The reason they're doing that isn't because gold is super special or it's some magic metal, it's just that it has always served as a store of value in uncertain times. And so even if it's just this lump of metal that sits there versus its much, sexier modern cousin, Bitcoin, it still serves a purpose. Of dealing with uncertainty, because for all of our great talk about monetary policy, nobody really knows what's going to happen, and that includes brilliant central bankers and quants who went to Ivy League colleges and Wharton. so in response to that, the, the thing to do is to, is to, to hold some assets that in the past, with the, the, the best knowledge we have of history, have, have held their value when things got a little sideways or a little rocky or even a little backwards. And, and gold Gold still serves that purpose, so I'm not, I'm not somebody who likes to dismiss gold and gold bugs, you know, out of, some sort of feeling of superiority or something like that. I think that's, that's foolish, and I, I think a, a gold standard could still be a great thing for the world. I'm not sure that we'll, that we'll ever get close to it, but, You know, even Alan Greenspan said that his job as a central banker was to try to mimic a gold standard of sorts, which, which seems a bit ironic now. So, you know, I think the split is-- I think it reflects age, like I said, a generational thing, and I also think it, it just, it just challenges old orthodoxies and," }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "28:17", "start": 1696.67, "text": "And, and that's part of it. People don't like to give up a, a, a certain way of thinking, and I, I sort of understand that on both ways because I like gold and I like crypto too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:27", "start": 1706.74, "text": "Yeah, no, I think that's a, a very insightful commentary to add on the topic. I think some within the Bitcoin community, I, I look, I think I'm sort of partial to this idea that gold may hold some level of, you know, store of value in the future. I think some people in the, some of the Bitcoin- Owners might argue that, oh, well, see, gold didn't necessarily fail from a technical point of view, it just sort of failed from a centralization and therefore getting co-opted by the government point of view. Do you have any comments on that?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "28:58", "start": 1737.57, "text": "Well, sure, it, it, it ha-- I don't think gold has failed, but it's, the, you know, governments made it difficult. There are, there are legal tender laws. You can't go pay your taxes or other bills in gold, for example. a-and, and also gold isn't that, as a result, gold isn't just that easy to use. It's just something you have to hold onto. And then also, a lot of gold is owned by people who don't hold it physically. So the-- so you've got this metal And all of a sudden, you've got a counterparty risk, and that could be something as simple as your local bank and with its safe deposit might not let you in one day or might have a bank run, or, or something much bigger where you've got your gold held abroad or, or it's just in a gold money account, that it's not in any way, you know, it's commingled with other, with other gold and, you know, you never really know about or see the physical. So there's, you know, gold became an For a lot of people, where they don't hold it physically, so that, that can be a big problem. a-and, you know, like you said, it just sits there, it doesn't pay any interest, it doesn't, you know, i-issue dividends. it's just, it really is sort of a-an insurance policy, and of course- The irony, oh, like it is with regu-- like with regular life insurance, let's say, is that, okay, insurance is a good thing to have in a rainy day, but in a real deluge, insurance companies would go under and you wouldn't get paid. In a real deluge, you might not be able to use physical gold for anything. so it's, it's just one of those imperfect approaches where we have to say, \"Look, there's never been a time in human history where gold wasn't worth something.\" There's never been There's been a time in human history where grandpa died and left us some gold coins and that was a bad thing. but there have been times in human history where grandpa died and left us a bunch of worthless stock certificates for a company that doesn't exist anymore. So You know, the anti-goal arguments, all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, \"Who am I to say I'm better than people for, for thousands of years who have given it value?\" you know, that I'm not, I'm not, interested in bucking that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:15", "start": 1875.04, "text": "Sure, sure. And I think, that's that, like you were mentioning earlier with Nassim Taleb, that's very much like that whole, concept of the Lindy effect, this thing that because it's been around for so long, it's more likely to now" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "31:29", "start": 1889.39, "text": "It's the best we can do, you know, and so much of this is, is, muddling through. I, I, I really think oftentimes libertarianism is just private solutions, a-and the best we can do and better than government but not perfect, and I think better not perfect ought to be our rallying cry as opposed-- because it, it helps us not only sound like, but also steer ourselves away from utopian thinking." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:54", "start": 1914.29, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a very insightful comment as well, great way to explain it. let's switch- Gives a little bit, but on this same idea of better but not perfect, maybe, something I really admire about the Mises Institute is that it doesn't try to be a think tank or a Beltway libertarian institute, but rather focuses on education and keeping the message true to libertarian private property principles. And I think it might have been, I'm not sure who, I think it might have been Lou Rockwell who explained it as this concept of doing an end run around the state. So maybe you could just comment a little bit on that educational strategy and the results so far?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "32:30", "start": 1950.5, "text": "Well, we're definitely not interested in public policy. We don't think there ought to be public policy. I don't think we need a housing policy or an oil policy or a Bitcoin policy or anything else. I think the market can, can work these things out. So I, I personally find the term public policy, problematic, to use the awful parlance of our time. Problematic. No, it's just awful. I mean, public policy, and, and anyone who, who uses the term unironically, I think they, they really come across sounding pompous. Don't you agree about, you know, public policy? Oh, come on. I mean, the last thing we need is a bunch of, twenty-eight year old liberal arts majors deciding how society should be organized at think tanks. Y-you know, that what we need is humility. even, even in the libertarian world, but especially outside the libertarian world, there's just hubris everywhere, and social media really intensifies that. It really, encourages us to be, dogmatic and, To absolutists and to, to sort of cross our arms and say, \"We've got all the answers.\" And of course, liberty is a, is all about saying we don't have all the answers. That's why government's so dangerous. Nobody ought to be in charge of organizing millions of people's lives. It's a recipe for disaster. So I really think libertarianism is a humble doctrine. I think it's a, it's a, a doctrine of, of humility and, and letting private solutions, local solutions work. And so I, I hope anyway that, that we apply that at the Institute and say, \"Look, there's, there's some brilliant thinkers out there, who, a lot of whom are dead, some of whom are still around, some of whom are just coming up, and you ought to be reading and learning from them, but you're not going to get them, in your public schools. You might not even have econ in high school, what we call high school, you might not have it in undergraduate, and even if you do, you won't get very good economics, and even if you go to," }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "34:27", "start": 2067.48, "text": "get a word about Mises, you might not hear anything about the history of economic thought, a-and this is often the case with the aforementioned brilliant, young economists, Ivy League economists who populate the Federal Reserve Bank staff, for example. so we're really here to just be a, a private school of sorts, a-an end run around this, this, academic gatekeeping that wants to, to, to, decide what kind of econ is taught, what kind of-- I don't like the term mainstream, but Mainstream economics, 'cause it wasn't always the case that we, that we thought stimulating demand was the be-all end-all. And, and by being a kind of an alternative school, we can, we can be, exactly as much or as little as any particular student needs. In other words, some of our students are long-haul truckers who have serious XM radio in, in their cab and can listen on the road. Some of our, students, if you wanna use that term, are- Stay-at-home, husbands or wives, and they, you know, listen, at home. And some of our students actually come here and be, you know, when they wanna be a summer fellow with us, and they wanna get really deep into it and use our library and, and research, and then they say, \"Oh my gosh, I love this stuff, and I wanna go be a, a PhD economist,\" so they actually, you know, go off to, to some university and do that. But some people just wanna follow our Twitter feed and maybe occasionally Than they otherwise would. So we wanna be there for any kind of student, any age, any point in their life where they can just, consume as much or as little of our free content, as they desire. And, and, You know, we ha-- we hope that we strike a chord with some people, and we do our best to do so, with the understanding that we're probably never going to be a majority or, or mainstream view. That's just, that's just sort of the way it is, at least at the present moment, I think we have to accept that, a-and not water things down to try to be bigger, because I think that never works, but instead say, \"Look, you know, throughout human history, a five or ten percent, devoted vanguard of people can make huge That I'd rather be trying to create a, a really great five or ten percent than trying to sort of fool, or, or pull one over on fifty-one percent to get them to start coming over to our side." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:54", "start": 2214.22, "text": "Excellent. And as Ron Paul often said, he spoke about this concept of the remnant." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "36:59", "start": 2218.87, "text": "Yes, it's, it's a bit of a loaded term, but it's true. and what's so funny is because of baby boomerism, no offense to anyone, the remnant is actually younger today. and, and I found this out working for Dr. Paul, sometimes a, a parent would come in with their twenty-two year old college student, son or daughter, and it, and it would be the son or daughter that got them interested in reading some, some Ron Paul or some Austrian economics or whatever in my It wasn't the parent influencing the child, it was the other way around. And so, younger people today are really more interested in, in some of these ideas because I think they face a tougher road than their parents and grandparents did. So they're just looking around saying, \"Well, what happened? What happened to the economy? What happened to, why do-- why do I have all this student loan debt? Why do jobs seem harder to get? Why do people switch jobs so much more, more frequently than my parents? Why aren't there pensions anymore? Why isn't there tenure anymore Why isn't there a quicker, easier track, to partnership in a CPA firm or a law firm? Why isn't being an MD, nearly as good as it used to be? You know, all these things that, that were so rock solid for their parents and grandparents are sort of shifting sands for them. And as a result of that, younger people are interested in these ideas. They're also interested in socialism, unfortunately. It's a double-edged sword. But the bottom line is they're searching, and i-i-it's up to us to do the, the best we We can to, to help, with the narrative and, and hopefully pull some people over." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:33", "start": 2313.19, "text": "Fantastic. And now on this topic of education, I've noticed that some people who come into Bitcoin, they then become more interested in learning Austrian economics. So do you have any ideas on how these people can best learn, and do you have any suggested resources or book recommendations from the Austrian school?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "38:51", "start": 2330.58, "text": "Well, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, if you read The Theory of Money and Credit, which Mises wrote, it's really his first full-length book, he wrote it at about the age of Page of twenty eight. So, it's o-- it's a little more than a hundred years old now, and I swear there are so many sentences in that book that just jump right out of you, that absolutely apply today. And, and it's so interesting to read that, you know, when the US Fed wasn't even created, of course, the Bank of England existed then, but, to, to see how prescient he was. And there's really no better book written, I think, about money. If you, if you can read and, and digest that book," }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "39:26", "start": 2365.97, "text": "and it The Theory of Money and Credit is, is really an easy read, and, and of course, an even easier read is Murray Rothbard's little ninety-eight page pamphlet, which we have on our site free, called What Has Government Done to Our Money? Now, obviously, it predates cryptos, but it'll really give you the lowdown on the, the quick and dirty lowdown on what, what money is and how government corrupts it. But, look, from an Austrian perspective, there's no better book you can read on cryptos than The Bitcoin Standard by Seif And not only does it explain cryptos, but it also gives you a little mini history lesson about money, about, about, about, and about Austrian economics. It's, it's really a fantastic book. It's not super long, and, and I think pretty much anybody can, can digest this book. It's really written for a lay audience, which is refreshing, and it's, it's such a great book, so I recommend it very highly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:23", "start": 2422.54, "text": "Fantastic. Okay. look, I think that's pretty much all we've got time for. So if you've got Thoughts, and also just tell the listeners how they can find you and find the Mises Institute, and also just if there's anything to keep an eye out for, you know, that's coming out from the Mises Institute." }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "40:38", "start": 2438.09, "text": "Well, we're working on, on, some fun stuff this year. We, we are having events around the country, not your way, unfortunately, but, really we're getting more and more into the podcast space because for, for whatever reason, a lot of people like to consume and digest information that way. we've got some great" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "40:59", "start": 2458.69, "text": "You know, just if you have some time, go to mises.org, m i s e s dot org, and look around. we've got all kinds of stuff there. You can spend the rest of your life reading some of these, books and papers and, and watching some of the videos we've got there, Find me on Twitter, my name is Jeff Deist, it's d e i s t, so it's all one word, Jeff Deist on Twitter, and, you can find out or keep abreast of pretty much everything that's going on at the institute." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:23", "start": 2483.32, "text": "Fantastic. Well, look, Jeff, it's been a really great conversation. I've really enjoyed speaking with you, and thank you for coming on. Yeah, it was a blast. Please have me on" }, { "speaker": "jeff_deist", "time": "41:31", "start": 2491.18, "text": "again." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:32", "start": 2492.01, "text": "So there you go, that was SLP forty-five with Jeff Deist. I hope you enjoyed it," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:42", "start": 2502.47, "text": "Some Bitcoiners suggest that Mises Institute are anti Bitcoin, but I don't think that's really correct. I think it's more like, as Jeff said, it's not up to us to decide, this is for the market to decide. And also, there are various opinions amongst Austrian economists, as we touched on in the interview. So in terms of books and things to read, as Jeff recommended, there's Mises' book Theory of Money and Credit. There is Rothbard's book or pamphlet called What Has Government Done to Our Money? These are both available for free on Mises. And also if you haven't already, definitely go and read Safdean's book, The Bitcoin Standard. Turning now to the podcast, I picked up a few more five star reviews by Sven and P double. P double wrote, \"Great interviews with knowledgeable guests to further your technical knowledge about the Bitcoin ecosystem. Thanks for the reviews, guys. Also, a story from one of my listeners, I won't dox his name, but he introduced his dad, a self-proclaimed technophobe, to the podcast, and he has turned into a Bitcoiner. He's currently halfway through the content in just And even started going to the gym for, for more free time to listen to it. So that's a fantastic story, love it. Also, I picked up two new Patreon supporters, so big thanks to them and my existing supporters. If you'd like to donate and get access to the private Telegram chat where you get the inside goss on upcoming guests and you can also suggest questions to ask, go to patreon.com/stefanlivera. 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