A Tool, A Vote, A Reality

A return.

November 15th is Steve Irwin Day. For those unfamiliar, Steve was an Australian wildlife conservationist and television personality who achieved worldwide fame as the host of The Crocodile Hunter (1992-2006).

Audiences were spellbound by Irwin's dangerous encounters with animals on the series. He thought nothing of tangling with deadly snakes, spiders, lizards, and, of course, crocodiles. In addition to his hair-raising adventures, Irwin considered himself a wildlife educator, sharing his knowledge and zeal for animals with his viewers.

In terms of passion, enthusiasm, and frenetic energy toward one’s work, Steve Irwin was unmatched. When asked about the infectious excitement of his Crocodile Hunter adventures, he said,

“I believe that education is all about being excited about something… That’s the main aim in our entire lives is to promote education about wildlife and wilderness areas, save habitats, and save endangered species. If we can get people excited about animals, then by crikey, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to save them.”

Steve dedicated his entire life to his cause; his passion oozed off of screens across the globe. Steve loved the world and the world loved Steve.

In 2006, Irwin swam over a venomous bull stingray in shallow water, inadvertently provoking the animal to attack. He was stung in the chest and immediately went into cardiac arrest, and he was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Mother Earth had lost one of her strongest fighters.

Despite his sudden and unfortunate death, Steve Irwin’s legacy carried on. The essence of his being holds steady in the mind of many, and both of his children have followed in his footsteps, living and breathing the conservation and fondness of wildlife.

I was four years old when Steve passed, yet his impact remains with me to this day. Thankfully, television networks continued to show reruns of his mystical performances after that fateful day in 2006, entrancing me in the process. What a lucky child I was to have watched a magician of life in his natural habitat.

When I think of someone that lived with lifeforce, I immediately think of Steve Irwin. Words cannot describe how special and unique this man was, but it is one thing in particular that Steve said that sticks with me the most.

“What good is a fast car, a flash house, and a gold-plated dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I’ve been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is going to help humanity. I want to have the purest oceans, I want to be able to drink water straight out of that creek, I want to stop the ozone layer, I want to save the world. And you know money’s great, I can’t get enough money. And you know what I’m going to do with it? I’m going to buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what, Charles? I don’t give a rip whose money it is, mate. I’ll use it and I’ll spend it on buying land.”

You can feel the passion through the screen. You can see how devoted Steve is to conserving and protecting wildlife. Look at the way his wife watches him. Excitement radiates out of his body and into your soul.

What sticks with me isn’t just Irwin’s enthusiasm, it’s the underlying truth behind his message. Money is no good spent on frivolous luxuries and materials. Money is a tool that can be used to fuel and advance humanity and our greater planet. Every expenditure of money, be it consumption, production, charity, taxation, or investment, is a vote for the world we want to bring to light.

Steve understood this better than almost anyone. He wanted all of the money, he couldn’t get enough of it, because every single cent was going straight back into preserving wildlife. What did Steve see as the impact of this allocated belief? 

“I’ve been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is going to help humanity.”

Steve wanted to save the world. He knew money was a tool to do exactly that, and he knew money was a vote for the reality he wanted to live in.

Look around the investment world today, what do you see? It’s often VC’s plundering young companies with exorbitant amounts of debt and pressure in order to generate an exit and a large return on investment. It doesn’t matter how you do it, they want growth-growth-growth as quickly as possible. Combine this with the fact that VC firms often spray capital like a shotgun and you get a messy, complicated, and overburdened investment industry that has no real purpose outside of making money.

Seriously, is investing in a food delivery service like DoorDash, a company that lost $1.36 billion last year, really our best use of money? For starters, this is the classic zombie business that is allowed to sustain itself under a debt-based monetary system. Ask yourself, how is a company that lost $1.36 billion in a single year still in business?

But hey, good for the VC’s that invested in an unprofitable business that expensively delivers mostly unhealthy food to people too lazy to cook for themselves, because DoorDash went public and they were able to claim themselves as breadwinners, right?

How can any VC lay claim to their investment in DoorDash being successful when the business loses over a billion dollars each year?

How is the state of the world such that somebody who invested in a business that lost $1.36 billion can have themselves and others believe they are a high-quality investor?

Are these investments aimed at bringing humanity to a better place?

Or are these things simply ways of making money? 

What would Steve say?

These games are strictly monetary.

But the blame doesn’t go to the players, it goes to the system.

When a monetary system exists that is manipulated, inflated, and debased by a central authority, over-speculation and greedy acts of investment will inevitably sprout on top of it. The cost of capital becomes made of pixie dust and fairy tales, birthed to life by a magic wand at the Federal Reserve.

If I handed you $100 today, and told you that it would lose 90% of its value tomorrow, you would either go out and spend it right away or pull the trigger on a high-risk speculation in hopes of keeping the money’s value. The devaluation is at a lower rate and pace in reality, but a little bit of theft isn’t morally better than a lot of bit of theft.

When inflation occurs (inflation = the creation of new money), a portion of the value held by all shareholders is stolen and placed wherever the new money is allocated.

Every time a dollar is printed, a dollar is stolen. That cannot be right.

Broken money lays the foundation for a broken world.

The fiat monetary system, aka the U.S. Dollar and all other government forms of money, is broken.

If you were to travel to another planet trillions of light years away and discover that the inhabitants conducted their economy in such a way where a select small group of them had full authority and the ability to print money whenever they wanted, while the rest of the inhabitants had to deal with it, would you be of the belief that such a system was equitable and justified?

If your answer is no, look around Planet Earth, we call that central banking.

If your answer is yes, I can’t help you.

Money is devalued by central banks, initiating a high-time preference, incentivizing people to speculate in the short-term, laying seed for the growth of financial plunderers and engineers (why do you think VC’s, private equity firms, and hedge funds were almost never a thing under the gold standard?).

The opposite would be a money that increases in value every year, initiating a low-time preference, disincentivizing risky speculation, laying seed for the growth of profitable investments directed toward promising research and development projects.

The truth is, under our current structure, a grossly unprofitable company like DoorDash is able to “succeed” because VC rounds pile on top of each other one after the other. One need not fret that the business they invested in lost $50 million last year, new investors are coming in to cover the losses in hopes that further investors down the line will be able to mask their malinvestment. It’s one big Ponzi scheme. Investors’ attitudes gloss over the fact that the company they are giving money to is throwing away their money every year and instead turn to the hope that enough new investment can pile in for them to head to the exits and get out of dodge.

Under a sound money system, one where there can be no new money created, and the value of the money that does exist goes up every year, investment in a business model that continuously loses money would almost never happen, and rightfully so.

Under a sound money system, because the underlying currency goes up in value each year, holders of that currency do not need to stress over allocating their capital elsewhere in hopes of maintaining their value. Today, we are told we need to make our money grow. And it’s true; if one does not put risk on the money they own, they are guaranteed to have it lose value as a result of inflation.

In the fiat system, you have to earn your money twice. Once when you work for it and once when you risk it.

The broken fiat monetary system has turned would-be savers into perpetual risk-takers. Risk is inherently dangerous, and when everyone is introducing risk into the system, something is bound to break. This leads to the boom-bust economic cycle.

When the script is flipped, when we need not worry about “growing our money,” and instead can save and watch our money’s purchasing power increase, investment becomes much more selective and specific to using it as a tool and a vote to create the reality we want to see.

Today, the dynamic goes something like, “Shoot, my money is worth less every year, I need to put it somewhere quickly to make sure I can keep my wealth.”

Under sound money, the dynamic would go something like, “Life is good, I don’t have to agonize over putting my money somewhere else, I can simply hold onto it and watch it increase in value.”

The approach for investors under sound money switches to, “Well, I know I can hold onto my money and see a return, so it wouldn’t be smart to take a high-risk approach and/or invest in a company that loses my money. I will instead use my money as a tool and a vote to bring the world to the reality I want to be a part of, and as long as I’m seeing some sort of profit, I can be liberated, as I know those profits are denominated in a money that gives me a return.”

How can we get to sound money? By adopting a decentralized, immutable, finite, digital monetary system backed by cryptographic and mathematical verifiability grounded in the laws of physics.

That monetary system is Bitcoin.

When Bitcoin is adopted as the global monetary singularity (a matter of when, not if), a new metric will arise to measure the performance of an investment: return on humanity.

Call it the Steve Irwin Indicator.

An investment in a food delivery service would receive a low grade, an investment in a network of regenerative agriculture farms restoring the soils of our planet would be extremely high.

Regenerative agriculture and the perils of monocrop agriculture deserves its own post, but, in short, switching to regenerative farming requires upfront costs that may hinder short-term productivity. Of course, under a low-time preference, the focus isn’t on the short term, it’s on the long term, because the money isn’t constantly being devalued, which largely removes the need to make a quick buck at the expense of quality, or in this case, the roots of the very planet we live off of.

Sound money fixes everything because everything is connected to money.

Steve Irwin knew he was here to make the world a better place and I know I’m here to make the world a better place. I know money is a tool and a vote to do exactly that, just as Steve taught me. 

I want all of it. I can’t get enough money. And you know what I’m going to do with it? Give it straight to the people, ideas, and businesses bringing prosperity to this planet. There won’t be another investor with a higher return on humanity than me, and I’ll make sure of that.

And guess what, I don’t give a rip whose money it is, mate. I’ll use it and I’ll spend it on leaving Earth in the best place possible when my time here is done.

Bitcoin is the start. Bitcoin is the foundation. Fix the money, fix the world. Suck up all of the money out of the fiat system until it’s completely dried up, then we can head for the Bitcoin oasis.

Steve is already there. I’ll be there. Will you?