Can Bitcoin Rebuild Civilization? w/ Saifedean Ammous (WiM592)

The "What is Money?" Show

Robert Breedlove

Bitcoin, Breedlove, What Is Money, Investing, Rabbit Hole, Cryptocurrency, Money, Finance, Education, Robert Breedlove, History

4.8 • 710 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Saifedean Ammous joins me to explore the core principles of Austrian economics, how time preference shapes personal growth, and why cooperation depends on delayed gratification. We connect the dots between morality, money printing, and civilizational decline, and show how Bitcoin realigns incentives toward regeneration and stability. Saifedean Ammous is an economist, professor, and best selling author of “The Bitcoin Standard”, “The Fiat Standard”, “Fiat Food”, and “Principles of Economics.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	You see this how people's perspective shifts in life and in politics after they have children.
0:04.0	Quality of life metrics go down, but somehow meaning in life goes through the roof.
0:08.3	Most of the things that you see on the TV these days, it's just stupid antinatalist propaganda.
0:12.5	If we're lowering our time preference, then civilization is becoming more mature.
0:17.1	The process of civilization, we could think of it as the decline of time preference.
0:20.5	To cooperate with each other that's why a five-year-old girl with access to a gun that she obtains
0:24.6	from the division of labor is able to shoot the most powerful man in the world and kill him
0:28.6	hyperinflation being like the most reliable way to induce a mass psychosis
0:33.6	what you see happening is the rewind of the process of civilization.
0:38.3	We always have to use everybody else in order to have money.
0:42.3	The integrity of the money supply maps on to the integrity of civilization.
0:48.3	The hardness of money is being like a control knob for the time preference of society.
0:52.3	You can destroy the currency and then overnight you can see how everybody's time preference
0:57.0	increase.
0:58.0	Why has this not propagated into mainstream economic science?
1:03.0	The reason I think these ideas are just not popular is that they don't pay the bills of economists.
1:18.5	How are you, my friend?
1:19.3	I'm very good.
1:20.3	Thank you for having me, Robert.
1:22.0	It's so good to see you.
1:24.8	I think it's been a year or two years since we saw it. I think two years probably since the last conference in Miami.
1:27.3	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	...

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