115. The Pitfalls of the Fiat Standard: Marty Bent interviews Saifedean Ammous

Fiat money doesn't just affect economic exchange, its impact on society is much wider. In this episode, Marty Bent, host of the Tales from the Crypt Podcast, interviews Saifedean about the ways fiat money encourages negative societal impacts ranging from climate alarmism to soil degradation to poor diets. They focus on the widely accepted need to transition to from fossil fuels to “renewable” energy and how government funding of science encourages the publication of studies that predict catastrophes and propose state intervention to avoid them. They also discuss how government statistics are manipulated to underplay the negative impacts of fiat and how people can opt out by adopting a bitcoin standard.

Resources

• Marty Bent’s website.
• Marty Bent on Twitter.
• The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein.
• The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episodes with Alex Epstein here and here.
• The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episode Is CO2 the Climate Control Knob? with Tom Nelson.
• The St Louis Fed compares the cost and protein content of turkey and soy.
• Marty Bent podcast episode with Untapped Growth for discussion of regenerative farming. 
• Link to Saifedean podcast with Nina Teicholz for discussion of fiat nutrition.
• Bitcoin mining council estimates of the bitcoin network’s global energy usage.
• Saifedean’s first book, The Bitcoin Standard.
• Saifedean’s second book, The Fiat Standard. See chapter “The Cost of Fiat Fuels” for statistics on growth in per capita energy consumption falling from the 1970s.

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