 Hello, everyone. This is once again Radio Rothbard. I'm Jeff Deist. Most of you know the man with whom I am speaking, Dr. Saifidine Ammus. He is of course most famously known for his book, The Bitcoin Standard, but in addition he holds a PhD from Columbia University. We don't hold that against him. He is an economist at Lebanese American University, but he's currently spending some time in Canada working on, among other things, a project which is now taking the form of Saifidine.com. Saifedine, his first name.com, which is going to feature an opportunity for you to learn not only more about Bitcoin in his book, but also to take courses from him, attend seminars with him. And this is the sort of thing that we are seeing amongst more entrepreneurial PhDs and academics, people like Para Bailand, who are branching out from just the university teaching model and seeking tenure and really finding popular audiences. So all of that said safe, and I'm allowed to call him safe. You guys all have to call him Dr. Ammus. I mean first and foremost, education is so dismal that a guy like you has to have courses online for 50 bucks after all these billions have been spent on in universities. Very true, very true. In my defense, you know, Jeff, I do have a degree from Columbia, but I'm not in that company there. A certain Mari Rothbard, I presume you've heard of him, PhD from Columbia. Well, we don't hold it against him either. Exactly. So it's fine. You know, it's it's like a scar that we carry with pride. So, but yes, you're absolutely correct. The state of education is dismal. And I think, you know, the diagnosis I would offer is that since education is largely state-run pretty much everywhere in the world, particularly higher education, you know, the the consumer experience has become dismal. The educational system runs to the benefit of bureaucrats who sign the research grants for one another and who are able to keep funding going to their favorite causes. And so it's just a system of securing funding from the government printing press rather than securing the satisfaction of the consumer. And so we see, you know, I've joked about this on Twitter before that hundreds of billions of dollars spent on subsidies and research for higher education for many decades. And you look at what universities have to say or what university economists have to say about Bitcoin and it consists essentially of misconstrued stories about some fantasy bubbles in tulips in Holland in the 17th century or whatever. That's the extent of the university analysis seems to be to just shout tulips tulips tulips something that's grown so much over 10 years and has grown to have such a massive computational infrastructure around the world. They insist it's just another bubble of similar proportions to the tulip bubble, which lasted only a few months and is extremely incomparable to what's happening with Bitcoin. And I think, you know, Bitcoin is a huge slap in the face of the academic establishment because the academic establishment in economics is fundamentally built around the premise of government management of the money supply. It's meant to answer the questions of how best we can manage the money supply. It never questions whether we should or should not manage it. And Bitcoin offers this real life refutation of the idea that you need the state to manage money. And so academics are stumped and people are interested in finding out more and I think that's what led me to find this entrepreneurial opportunity that I could be teaching a large global audience of people who are interested in these things thanks to the internet without having to go through all of the formalities of the university system because any university system is becoming harder and harder to teach those things and to have the freedom to experiment and to talk about new topics. And of course, you went out and found a popular publishing house and you wrote for a popular audience in your book, The Bitcoin Standard, but perversely, the incentives for most academics, tenured or seeking tenure, is to write goofy academic articles that are read by hardly anybody. That is very true. Yeah. In my case, my publisher was actually an academic publisher, even though it's a bit of a popular Yeah. I mean, I think of Wiley as publishing for lay readers as well. Yeah. I mean, they do, they do both. And I think my book benefited from that. But it's, it's, it's publishing also, I think, as an industry that needs to change massively and the internet is disrupting them. But it's still in much better shape than in education. You know, books actually do get on the shelves, but in education, people it's so completely separated from market pressure that people go into universities spend, get into debt for many dozens of thousands of dollars and graduate with no skills whatsoever, no useful information. So one of the interesting things about Bitcoin is that it has gotten people talking more for the first time in a long time about theoretical economics. In other words, because of Bitcoin, because of this applied technology, people are talking about things like what is money? What is value for where does value come? These kinds of things. It's almost like it took something to shake up the economics profession and get people talking about this stuff again. There's no more theory. I mean, this is, so in some ways, Bitcoin forces people to struggle with theory. Yes. And it's, you know, it's, it's something that we up until 2009 would fight about on papers and books and on the internet. But we never had real life examples of monetary goods being born in front of our eyes and growing in this way. So it's a fascinating real life experiment. And it's amazing because it's, you know, it's a real life living reputation, refutation of the notion that government management of money supply is necessary because or, and also the notion that the growth in the money supply at a particular rate is in any way necessary because you look at the Bitcoin economy, the supply grows now at three, four percent. And, you know, the size of the economy has grown over the past 10 years far larger than the growth in the supply of money. But it does not seem to have restrained the growth of the network. So the idea that you need more money for an economy to grow is refuted every day that Bitcoin continues to grow. So it's making people ask a lot of questions on these topics. And I think it's no coincidence that amongst Bitcoiners, the ideas of Austrian economics are becoming more and more popular. And, you know, my book is becoming more popular because it has, you know, Austrian economics has the answer for those questions. Yes, it does make sense that you don't need to expand the money supply for the economy to grow. We can have a money supply that doesn't expand it. It can work. And here we see it with Bitcoin. And I think it's a terribly exciting time because the Internet allows us to just basically re-establish education and research and scholarship in the Austrian tradition all over the world without having to go through all of the government-controlled academic institutions. We can just do everything online. Do you get pushed back or do you ever regret devoting so much to your book? In fact, if I recall, the first seven chapters are really about economic theory and history. Well, I mean, I've gotten a lot of jokes about it, but I don't think many people hated that. I think people seem to have enjoyed it. And, you know, people tell me that, you know, they usually, when they expect to read things on Bitcoin, they expect, you know, this fluffy marketing material about all of this futuristic stuff and how we're going to revolutionize everything with blockchain technology. And my book is obviously very different from that. It's a bit of a slap in the face to walk in and start reading about all the dead Austrian economists instead of futuristic utopias. But I think, no, I think people generally enjoyed it. I think it's, there are a lot of very valuable books describing the technical aspects of Bitcoin. And I couldn't have done a good job doing that. But I think the economic analysis, I believe, was valuable. And I think it's in a sense of indication of the Austrian school. It's why no mainstream economist is able to write anything coherent about Bitcoin that explains what's happening with Bitcoin or that sets out clear expectations and predictions of why they think it should fail or how it would fail. You know, all we hear is just people joking about tulips that there's no serious scholarship that can come out of the mainstream tradition on this question. Yeah, I recall you and I speaking offline one time. I want to get your thoughts on this today. I'm going to say the Mises Institute was right. We were right not to promote or hype Bitcoin eight years ago or whenever. And in a sense, we're still right. I mean, imagine some kid comes to one of our conferences and takes the $5,000 his grandmother gave him and puts it all into Bitcoin. And then we hear from his grandmother. I mean, we were right. Do you agree? Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, the Mises Institute is doing something extremely valuable by putting all of that Austrian economics material there. But I don't see why you should be cheering on for one particular choice of the free market in terms of money. I believe you're doing a great job in terms of spreading knowledge and awareness that is helpful for people to understand Bitcoin. But you don't want to cross into the territory of Bitcoin cheerleading. I struggle with that myself. I'm always trying to tell people, you know, I'm not trying to get you to buy Bitcoin. I don't care if you buy Bitcoin. I'm not here to promote Bitcoin. And you don't want to be in that position because people can lose money. And that's not the point. I think it's more important to be educating about it. So I agree with you. But the other thing is, if we think back to the hype at one point, I mean, it doesn't make any sense that every time you go buy a sandwich at Starbucks, this is recorded on an electronic ledger somewhere and that it takes up server space forever and ever. That's not a transaction that's meaningful or that's ever going to be challenged. We don't need Bitcoin for that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the way that Bitcoin was promoted, that everything is going to be instantaneous and free forever. That this is this magic technology that has gotten rid of trade-offs forever. I think it was over exaggerated. It was done by people who didn't quite see how the economic scarcity of the system would work because block space is scarce and there's a limit to it. So yeah, Bitcoin is likely not going to evolve in that manner in which everyone is able to have all of their transactions and their coffees recorded forever. But it still offers an enormous amount of value as a monetary asset and it seems to be growing more and more as a settlement asset rather than a final transaction payment network. And that's really one of the key points in my book. So you're going to start launching some of your own courses again through your website, Safedin.com, including one, an introduction to economics that's going to be based around man economy and state. You're going to have a course called Hard Questions on Hard Money and most immediately you're going to have a course called the Bitcoin Standard, the same name as your book, and it's going to start live later in July, July 22nd to be exact. It's only $50, which compared to what people spend on books and all kinds of things is nothing. So the way that I'm thinking of it is that as an educator, if you look at the university system in the US where we have good data, you see over the past 50 years the tuition fees have skyrocketed and you look at university professor pay, it hasn't actually skyrocketed, while if you look at the number of professors per student or how much time each student gets to spend in a classroom with a professor, a full professor or someone with a PhD, it has not gone up. So where is all that tuition money going? And the answer is it is going to the bureaucracy, it is going to the administrative arm of the educational industrial complex if you want. It's all those people who are able to assign research grants and government grants. And there was a time in which administrative duties were extremely important in the operation of a university, but I think that time has well passed us now that we have all of these wonderful online tools for productivity that we can utilize. And so with pretty basic software for calendars and online webinars, you know, I could for just a few hundred dollars of signing up for these services every month, I could essentially do everything that the university allows me to do, but even more efficiently because I can do it online. And I just essentially eliminate the middleman of all of these bureaucrats at the university. And I remember this, you know, when you're at the university, so much of your time is taken up every day as a professor with dealing with all of these bureaucrats at the university whose only raison d'etre, you know, the only reason they're there, the only reason they turn up and take up your time is that they need to keep making work in order to justify their job. So they're always asking us to fill out forms and, you know, write reports and do all sorts of work for the university. And it's all, you know, reports nobody reads and forms that don't matter for anything. But, you know, that's how they get to keep their job. So much of the university system is just all of that fake make work that you would expect to see in any kind of organization where the price system doesn't function. And that's that that's what happens with universities. And that's why, you know, students spend a lot of time and money and learn little and professors also spend an enormous amount of time at universities and don't earn very much. And I think, you know, the internet is just allowing us to completely disrupt that. And I'm taking, you know, I'm thinking that this chance of trying to reach this audience of people who are more and more interested in Austrian economics because of Bitcoin, because of the rise of Bitcoin, I think gives us a good opportunity to start building for a larger online educational infrastructure, really, for teaching Austrian economics. Hopefully in a few years, you know, this website will have had and, you know, will have accumulated several courses on several topics on Austrian economics. Eventually, you know, as you were saying, I start with man economy and state, but I hope to develop eight or 10 courses that would be the equivalent of a major in economics from a university and for about less than a tenth of the price. Well, I think it's a fantastic project. Of course, ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot of our own courses at mises.org on our academy page. We're always adding new courses. We don't, to my recollection, have a Bitcoin course. So if you're interested in going farther further into the Bitcoin standard, the book and the and the meaning and the theory behind it, Safedin, Dr. Ammus will be starting a course in July 22, which is just a few weeks away, 10-week course, July 22 to September 23. You can go to safedin, s-a-i-f-e-d-e-a-n.com to find out more about it. And all I can say safe is that we really, we wish you the best with this. We hope it's exceedingly successful. And we just want to let a thousand flowers bloom. I mean, we want people to find the truth and find good content wherever they do. And so we certainly don't view you as a competitor, but a friend and a fellow traveler. And ladies and gentlemen, you should check out his site and stay with us at Radio Rothbard. Thanks, Saf. Thank you so much, Jeff. And I definitely don't see this as a competition. You know, the world needs a lot more people educating on Austrian economics. There's far more room for just, for more people. For more content like this, visit mises.org.