Robert Breedlove The Truth About Money

[Speaker 3] (0:00 - 0:16) You are now listening to the here for the truth podcast hosted by Joel Rafiti and Jurassimos What's up everybody welcome back to the here for the truth podcast I'm Joel Rafiti. [Speaker 2] (0:16 - 1:56) I've got my co-host Jurassimos in the house with me as always This is episode 106 and we have Robert Breedlove in the house today The topic which we're discussing today I think is of great importance and I think it's incredibly necessary particularly for truth seekers to really begin to wrap their heads around these topics of the economy, of capitalism, of inflation, of Bitcoin, of what is money and begin to really simplify and understand what this means and how it impacts you in a deeper way So I'm really excited to share this conversation with you all Just before we get into that, our private membership community, Friends of the Truth is absolutely amazing You're gonna get to know us, you're gonna get involved with three calls a month You're gonna join the most incredible community of truth seekers and head to friendsofthetruth.co to learn more about that In the next couple of weeks, Jurassimos and I will be making an announcement and opening the doors to Rise Above the Herd 5 I know many have been asking and eagerly awaiting when the next round of that is going to open as well So you can head to riseabovetheherd.co and join the waitlist but we'll be making an announcement to open applications formally in a couple weeks as well Again, thanks so much for all your support We love what we do and we get to do it because of the fact that you guys listen So much appreciated and enjoy this episode All right, everybody, welcome back to the Here For The Truth podcast Really looking forward to this conversation today We have the amazing Robert Breedlove in the house Robert Breedlove is a freedom maximalist, ex-hedge fund manager and philosopher in the Bitcoin space Robert now hosts the What Is Money show where he engages in deep conversations with some of the world's most prolific thinkers Robert, thanks for being here for the truth, man [Speaker 1] (1:57 - 2:00) Happy to be here, guys Thank you for having me [Speaker 2] (2:00 - 2:16) Absolute pleasure One way we always love to start these conversations, particularly with new guests, is I'd like to dive into your own personal hero's journey a little bit What are the major rites of passage that you really experienced in your life that, I guess, allowed and facilitated for you to be the person that you stand here today being? [Speaker 1] (2:17 - 5:12) Wow, that is a hell of a question I don't know where to begin I guess I could just name a few things that I feel like have been instrumental in my character development You know, I've always been a very curious person I've talked about this on other podcasts, but my mom really pushing me towards education, towards self-study, towards reading I think that's been very, very much defining for my life I would also add that I guess when I was 11 years old, I started doing I was doing wrestling and football And when I was actually in the off-season, I was going to strength training, trying to condition for wrestling and football There was a gentleman there named Steve Fowler, who was an Olympic weightlifter, competitive Olympic weightlifter And so I had a friend that started training with him, getting really good results, so I started training with him And that led to this, let's see, 5-6 year career in Olympic weightlifting So I was training twice a day, morning and evening I ended up competing internationally I was very thoroughly obsessed with the sport Like we would watch videos about it all the time, draw pictures, you're visualizing the technique And this sport, if you've seen CrossFit, like the explosive overhead lifts that people do, that's what we were doing competitively So we do snatch and clean and jerk And yeah, that seems to be very formative And just goal-setting, visualization, discipline, you know, like it was a very disciplined lifestyle And I carry that into adulthood now I just strive to live a pretty disciplined lifestyle I'm not quite as rigorous as it was when I was a kid But you know, doing my best I'm trying to think what else here I've had some really good mentors, you know, some people that just were very effective at their craft, typically in business And I've been fortunate enough to interact with people that I think are, that I view as super competent in their domain of expertise And just to be around people like that, you know, to learn how they do what they do and how they think, they're little nuggets of wisdom that they're so kind to share here and there It was all very helpful for me I don't know if that's exactly where you were going with that question But I was just giving you what came to mind [Speaker 2] (5:13 - 5:26) Nah man, it's all good, we appreciate it It's personal to you and I think it's a great answer So you host a podcast called the What Is Money podcast So I know we have a limited time here But I mean, is it too general for me to ask you, Robert, what is money? [Speaker 1] (5:28 - 11:30) Yeah, it's a huge question One that we spend quite literally hundreds of hours exploring on the show And you know, I have a document with many answers to this question, like over 50, 5-0 I've blogged about several of them, maybe like a dozen or so Very seemingly simple question, but it definitely opens up into this cavernous kind of philosophical rabbit hole And maybe one useful way to conceptualize money or one of the useful framings or definitions is that money is the language of value And so if we try to parse that apart a little bit, language, somewhat obvious, like we, the three of us are all running the open source software called English right now This is a, it's a software package, right? And it only works to the extent that we have, that we share consensus on terms So when I say the word term, right? I have to assume that you have in your mind roughly the same meaning as I am projecting That's what makes me, lets me be able to make noises with my face hole and you can decrypt it in your own mind and we can communicate, right? It's a very powerful software package People don't typically think about language that way, that it's a technology, but it is I would also add in here things like numeracy, right? Mathematics is another one of these very powerful software packages that we don't think about a lot But it's something that distinguishes man from animal in a lot of ways And so money is the language of value Value is a bit of a mysterious term I think Ayn Rand has a great definition for value And she says, value is that which man acts to gain or keep So it's the, whatever we are orienting human action towards Uh, you could say actually that any action you're taking in a particular moment is an expression of your highest value, right? We all have an internalized hierarchy of preferences or values Things we want to do, right? And whatever you're doing in that moment comes at the necessary exclusion of all other things you could be doing, right? Action, any particular path of action is mutually exclusive to all other potential paths of action So money is something that is communicating It takes all, everyone has their own internalized hierarchy of value We're acting in the world, expressing what we value And money is this strange sort of linguistic software that compresses all those preferences, which are just, they're ordinal So first, second, third, fourth It turns all that ordinal data into a cardinal value, which is the price So you can actually put a number to the worth of something, right? The worth of a commodity, the net worth of an individual, right? In a purely economic sense So one useful way to describe money is as this software package that we're all running that lets us transform our individually held preferences into a collective data point that we can all orient ourselves against which is the market price And that sounds super abstract So I'll try to bring it down to earth a little bit If you are a copper producer and you see that the price of copper suddenly spikes You don't need to know why You don't need to know that maybe a copper mine in Chile collapsed, right? The supply was cut All you need to know is that the preferences of humans across the world competing in the same market relative to the supply of available copper has suddenly caused that price to move up So now you as a producer have a direct financial incentive to produce more copper If the price goes up, well, then all of a sudden you can afford more exotic forms of mining, for instance On the other end of the market as a consumer when the price goes up, you're incentivized to use less or to use substitutes Maybe you can use bronze instead of copper or whatever it may be So the market price is this miraculous coordination tool that no humans need to share a narrative or a story about what happened at all We can just mathematically express the real conditions of commodities and assets in the world relative to the preferences of all market actors And so we get this like unbelievable amount of data compression, right? There's all these things in the world that are affecting the copper industry Logistics, energy, mining, tariffs You know, there's countless things that influence the price of copper But all you need to know as a producer is that the price moved, right? So you get this unparalleled capacity for data compression And that is necessary for running the distributed computing process we call the market You have to have accurate prices such that markets can satisfy human wants Which is to say, solve problems, basically So without money, you know, without the language of value, the market process is not possible And we are really reduced in our capacity to increase our standard of living to increase the satisfaction of human wants to solve more problems So it's hard to overstate how important of a tool that is even though it can be a bit difficult to describe [Speaker 2] (11:32 - 11:47) Yeah, for sure I don't know if you got anything to say, but we can elaborate more on this But I was just curious because money is so important And yet we've been conditioned, many people have been conditioned to think money is the root of all evil And so I'm curious your thoughts on that [Speaker 1] (11:47 - 15:29) Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because there is a misconception right there That's not what the Bible says The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil Not that money is the root of all evil The Bible references money thousands of times Talks about the importance of honest weights and measures And if you look at Christ in particular, the story of Christ, right The archetypal human consciousness, right Meeting betrayal with compassion and hatred with love And just a purely a perfect human essentially What does it tell us that the one time Christ loses his shit in the Bible Is on the money changers People that are tampering with the weights and measures They were actually using to coordinate the market process There's only one time that man goes into full rage mode And it's against the money changers, which today we call central bankers So that was a bit of an aside But to answer the question in particular, I would agree that The love of money or the love of worldly things Can be a very reliable pathway to evil, right If you consider that evil is Willingly afflicting on someone like something in your own self-consciousness You know, you would not enjoy You know what hurt you If you willingly inflict that on another for worldly gain, right To get more stuff, more food, more money, whatever it is That seems to be a pretty reliable pathway to evil And I think it also speaks to The tremendous power of incentives to shape human action And when I see Christ flipping out on the money changers Again, if money is the language of value It's as if you're attacking language itself And which is something we've seen done By a lot of aspiring dictators across time A lot of wokest and modernity Attacking definitions like man and woman Like all of these things If you attack language or money Again, if money is language of value This is the mechanism by which we adapt ourselves to reality, right Reality is always changing It's this infinitely fluid and complex domain We're constantly trying to adapt to it in ways that are Prosperous for us, right We're trying to satisfy more human wants in the face of all this Unknown, right All this complexity If you attack the medium by which we adapt to reality Which is either language or money You totally undermine the entire human enterprise No matter what it is So this is how I would interpret The importance of money and the reason Christ flipped out But there's a key difference there, right The importance of a tool to appreciate and use it properly Does not mean loving the pursuit of that tool for its own sake So we have to distinguish between I guess just the purpose of a tool, right The money will not bring you happiness You cannot accumulate more money And just become happy by virtue of possessing it But it is an indispensable tool for the market process to work And the market process is what satisfies human wants It's what creates innovation And it's what creates wealth and abundance in the world [Speaker 2] (15:31 - 15:56) Yeah, I mean you mentioned You brought up, I guess, Ayn Rand earlier I mean she said the verdict you pronounce upon money Which is the source of your livelihood Is the verdict you pronounce upon your life, you know So if we think of money as the means of one's survival Then isn't that simply a love of self? Wouldn't that be a love of my potential? In terms of my pursuit of it in that regard What are your thoughts on that? [Speaker 1] (15:59 - 17:09) Yeah, I like Ayn Rand because she kind of She presents this much needed counterpoint Where a lot of people that consider themselves compassionate And I think we all have this to some extent Maybe not everyone But most people seem to have this general orientation towards the world That they would like to do good in the world, right Obviously you want to do good in a way That satisfies your own self-interest in the process That's the ideal, right What's this term? Icky guy, you guys heard of this term Where it's like what you're good at What the world needs What you have experience in At this, you know, center point in this Venn diagram But Rand's making a pretty strong point I think that self-interest is a very important part of that equation You can't just be selfless That's not enough There needs to be self-interestedness too To balance how things get done in the world, right You can't pour from an empty cup As some wise man once said Like you can't just be selfless There has to be a self-interested component to the market process You look like you wanted to say something [Speaker 2] (17:09 - 17:29) Yeah, I was gonna say like And if one is trying to continually pour from an empty cup Like what's that doing to themselves psychologically In terms of building resentment and guilt, etc It's like what's the real motivation When someone says I'm doing this out of love Yes, under the guise of selflessness or altruism, etc But what's the true motivation Is I think is the question that Rand really proposed there [Speaker 1] (17:30 - 22:25) I agree with that And this I think it's very pragmatic To trust human self-interest You know, it's very reliable I don't want If someone's gonna bring me a proposal of some kind And they're like, hey, I want to do this thing We're gonna do all these things for you We don't want anything in return I don't trust that arrangement I want to know where their interests lie Like even if they're being honest with me And totally forthright Like I, the way I look at the world I'm gonna be inherently distrustful Until I understand what their take is So and that's I think you can generalize that to market participation overall That what did Adam Smith say in the Wealth of Nations That it's not the goodwill or altruism of the baker That provides customers their daily bread He's doing it out of his own self-interest So we want a world Where people pursue their individual self-interest What we also want though Is for that pursuit of individual self-interest To not negatively impact someone else's pursuit Of their own individual self-interest So this is why I always try to hone my work Into the idea of consent The idea of private property The idea of inviolable ownership So if I'm free to go out into the world And make things of value, right Plant a garden, build a business Provide you services of any kind And you are free to do the same And then the idea of private property or ownership Is that you then deserve by virtue of justice, right If justice means people getting what they deserve Shouldn't you, don't you deserve To keep the things of value you yourself produce Through work or through trade I mean that's just like the very basic premise Of private property And the follow-on of that is That is the right limiting principle, right This is the proper limiting principle For individuals to pursue their own self-interest Accumulate all the assets and wealth they want So long as they respect The private person and property of other people That I do not acquire wealth By taking or stealing or coercing Or acting violently towards anyone else I only engage in reciprocal consensual Relationships in exchange That is, that's what we've been trying to get to, right This is the 1215 Magna Carta King John signed The principles and exclusive scope Philosophical scope of government Were life, liberty, and inviolable property And that word property is so tricky I think I'm giving up on it I think I'm going with ownership Because property confuses people Just the idea of ownership itself That the actions you take in the world That create things of value You should have the exclusive rights to those things As should I, as should everyone else And we should all be left free To exchange with one another The fruits of our labor And this is what creates The economic division of labor This is what allows us to become more productive, right So we get an economy Which means we get more outputs per unit of input We accomplish greater results with less efforts Like saying the same thing in a different way That is the magic of the marketplace That human beings operating in concert Are more productive than they are operating in isolation But that process will only work So long as we engage in this normative structure Of private property That you keep what you earn I keep what I earn Like very simple But we don't have that today Like taxation is a violation of this principle Inflation is a violation of this principle Regulation is a violation of this principle Confiscation, war, like you go down You can go on and on and on We have not fully implemented the principle Of purely consensual exchange in the world Therefore we don't have Private property in a pure sense We still have this element of socialized property Which is basically systemic theft And the largest institution of systemic theft in the world Is the central bank When they print money They're stealing assets from the savers of dollars And reallocating those assets To people getting the newly printed money first And this is why I think central banking is like Core to the evil in the world today [Speaker 2] (22:26 - 22:55) Yeah Yeah, one way I try to, I guess, explain You know, the importance of private property to individuals Is like even like in a hunter-gatherer situation If I was to, you know, forage my own fruit, food Or, you know, my own meat or whatever it might be Then someone else comes along and claims to have a right to that That's actually threatening my survival Because that private property is the means It's now the means of my survival Right, the means of my production is the means of my survival And ultimately that threat is the cornerstone of slavery [Speaker 1] (22:56 - 28:11) Yes Oh, I mean, taking the words out of my mouth in a way I would define a slave as someone Who has a 100% effective tax rate Which means that all the fruits of their labor Do not belong to them They go, they're 100% taxed And, you know, taken by a taxing authority On the other end of that spectrum Someone, which we don't really have many someones With a 0% effective tax rate But we do have sovereign nations, right? The United States doesn't pay tax to anyone else It has a 0% effective tax rate Well, we refer to countries today, nation states As sovereigns for that reason So you could now plot the plight of modern man Right on that spectrum What is your effective tax rate? That's what percentage of a slave you are And it's a bitter pill to swallow And people, hey, they resist it Like, what do you mean? Who's going to build the roads? Who's going to do this? Who's going to do that? We, you know, first of all Government doesn't build roads They hire private contractors They spend stolen money to do it It's somewhat obvious that you're going to be Less careful with money that you didn't earn I mean, we just know this very basically In Las Vegas, they call this a free roll, right? If someone's going to give you the money To gamble on the craps table You're just going to take a really high risk Because you have no skin in the game, right? You didn't earn that money The same is true when someone's spending stolen proceeds They don't have any skin in that game So it's very easy to be profligate, you might say And I would just like to highlight one other component to this That we often talk about private property rights Which again, I'm going to just go with ownership There's kind of a better term for that But very seldomly do we stop to consider that private property rights Are the one side of the same coin Of private property responsibilities Because if you Basically what we're saying is When you have ownership in an asset You own a car, right? You have the exclusive right to enjoy the features of that car You also have the exclusive right to exclude others From enjoying the features, right? You can say, maybe you'll give your friend a ride That's nice of you to do But you can also not give the guy The homeless guy that wants to jump in your car a ride You have the right to say no If you want to keep enjoying the features of that asset In this case, an automobile You must also consider that you are simultaneously responsible For taking care of that asset For maintenance and upkeep on the automobile So when we debase currency or we engage in taxation Not only are we destroying individuals' rights Or individual ownership over the means to their survival As you described But you're also deprecating responsibility itself And this is ancient Aristotle said this If you take that to the extreme Aristotle said when everyone owns everything Nobody takes care of anything There's no incentive for individuals to take care of assets When you've just socialized ownership to the state Or everyone owns it You know, it's public property That's equivalent to destroying any incentive to take care of it whatsoever And I think, I mean, this is a tangent But you could read Rothbard on this In the Ethics of Liberty He makes a strong argument that Improving the integrity of ownership Is actually the solution to the environmental crisis Because what happens right now is You have these areas of the world Like the ocean that are not privately owned Right, these are just This is the tragedy of the commons at scale It's profitable to just throw your pollution in the ocean For many companies Because the ocean doesn't sue you The ocean doesn't do anything about it, right It just takes the garbage But if we assume that the entire world was Privately owned by individuals, right That we had this These property rights and responsibilities Traceable down to an individual level Now if you decide to dump pollution in the ocean Or my parcel of the ocean Or maybe it's into my river That I will actually sue you, right I will come after you, right And that forces you as a would-be polluter To now consider the cost of pollution Whereas if there's no one to do that If there's just this public property That no one's going to sue you for dumping on You don't have to worry about that You just dump the pollution and move on So to force producers to impute The cost of pollution into their operations My argument, which I'm echoing for Mothbard Is you need really strong private property Really, you need full private ownership Of the means of production And ownership of resources in the world [Speaker 2] (28:11 - 28:15) Simply put, there's no motivation to care Or protect for anything if it belongs to no one [Speaker 1] (28:15 - 28:21) When you debase private property rights You debase private property responsibility That's a big point [Speaker 2] (28:21 - 28:29) I'm curious, how would that go about In your view to auction off parts of the Pacific Ocean? How would that look in actuality? [Speaker 1] (28:29 - 30:21) Because it's pretty large It's pretty large And you could say that maybe just By virtue of technological reality We haven't done it yet But look how much uproar there is Among environmentalists Like Leonardo DiCaprio, right? His number one thing in life is Let's clean up the ocean I don't think it's a feasible venture Until you really think about The economic incentives involved With caretaking Taking care of something like the ocean, right? It's three quarters of the Earth's surface It's massive If you don't give someone Financial skin in the game An incentive to take care of it It's not going to get done You cannot do this with legislation or law It will never happen And I mean, that's my opinion It's somewhat radical Because most environmentalists think We need more government More legislation More taxation And I'm advocating for the exact opposite It's like, no, you need Less violations of private property Much stronger ownership And this just natural incentive to Enjoy the features of something But only that's something that you take care of Right? And that It's important to always remember that We use all these abstractions To describe ourselves, right? Nation states, companies Conservative, liberal Like all these different groupings We put ourselves in But at the end In the ultimate final analysis of reality It's individuals acting in the world Individuals deciding What means to use to pursue what ends There's no United Nations making a decision There's no United States making a decision It's individuals that are acting So we have to curate our incentive structure For individuals [Speaker 2] (30:22 - 31:16) It's a hypothetical But I think the basis of the argument is correct You know? And I mean, I can just speak for myself as well Like I grew up working in family businesses And in that kind of situation Regardless of how much input one individual has You're working towards a common goal So the incentive isn't relative to my input Now as an entrepreneur The amount of work I do You know, is equivalent to what I'm going to receive as well Whereas in that situation previously The pie is going to be cut the same way Regardless In the one common machine, so to speak So I cared far less about my effort, right? I cared far less about how focused I was About how efficient I was About how effective I was But now when I wear the total responsibility In a more of an entrepreneurship role now Then everything's material I care far more about everything, right? [Speaker 1] (31:17 - 33:00) I do the best that I possibly can all the time Because of the incentive The responsibility also is far more important to me as well Obviously 100% This is why I love the word ownership over property Because it's applicable beyond just the economics domain Like we want to take ownership of the things we've done in life, right? People will say this often Like if you make a mistake, just own it You know, or often I've heard entrepreneurs say They want their employees to think like owners, right? You want your staff to think like owners This idea of just an ownership mentality I think it's so important If we really want If we actually care about the ecological preservation of our world Then you want people to act like owners in that world You want your staff, 8 billion people that we are We want people that take an ownership relationship with nature And it's tricky because people You know, this very leftist wokest thing Almost views people as like a parasite on the planet And they're like, oh, we need less people and more Like tell people what to do It's very anti-human, I guess And the view that I'm trying to orient The counterpoint I'm trying to make is The metric should be human flourishing first and foremost And I think the proper means to the end of human flourishing Is this symmetry of rights and responsibility That's enshrined in the ancient principle of private property That would be my argument [Speaker 2] (33:01 - 33:13) Yeah, well, I mean, in all of life, in all of nature Like the most important thing is that organism's survival So, of course, socialism is anti-life When you look at it through that lens [Speaker 1] (33:13 - 34:15) Right, and socialism is a policy of institutionalized aggression Against private property That's how it is properly defined Again, we could say property is a bad word I'm still trying to get away from it But I'm stuck in that paradigm It's individualized private property Or it's socialized public property And it's a spectrum The closer you move to individualized ownership The more symmetry of rights and responsibilities we have In the world The more easily I can discern That my self-interest stops where your self-interest begins Right, we mediate conflicts over resources via private property But to the extent that we move opposite on that spectrum Towards socialized public property There's no symmetry We've obfuscated the whole thing And what ends up happening is you get Soviet Russia Yeah, right You get the state owning everything And extremely bad outcomes for human flourishing [Speaker 2] (34:15 - 34:46) Yeah, and also like the mentality of, you know The people that systems like that breed Are those that feel within themselves that they're unable to produce They feel as though they have nothing great to offer You know, they feel mediocre in general So, you know, what's the kind of psychological symptom Of pushing that kind of symptom on individuals as well? You know, if one believes that How much they receive is equivalent to their need As opposed to their production [Speaker 1] (34:47 - 36:36) I think you're intuiting something very important here I have an episode with Matthias Desmet He wrote a book called The Psychology of Totalitarianism Really focusing on mass psychosis How it happens, the problems with it, etc And we had a really good discussion about this very thing Like how the violation of private property Or the socialization of property Can actually contribute to mass psychosis It's one of the things he describes in there a lot Is that people losing touch with reality, right? And as we kind of described language earlier It's a tool we're using to stay in touch with reality Both describing objective reality And communicating about subjective reality If that tool doesn't work Then obviously we're going to be out of touch I think you could look at Again, we said money was something The language of value When you debase money you're violating private property So you're This communication system That's intended to share accurate messages To facilitate adaptation When that's under attack People are literally losing touch with reality Yeah, right? Like you're actually not Like you go to perform an action And you expect a certain Roughly A result within a certain span of values But that action, the feedback is not there You're not getting proper feedback So I think there's a deep point to be made That the more rapidly we violate private property Or ownership The more quickly we drive ourselves insane Individually and collectively [Speaker 2] (36:39 - 36:48) Well, I mean you made the correlation Between money and language earlier It's like distorting, you know, 50% of the English language Or taking away 50% of the words, right? [Speaker 1] (36:48 - 37:44) Exactly It's like the ability to communicate is going to be Incredibly severed, yeah And when you look at the ascent of Authoritarians, let's say historically Or aspiring authoritarians The first two things This can't be a coincidence, right? The first two things they need to control To start to cast this spell over the people Is they have to control the press, the media And they have to control the money So again, they have to control these linguistic tools By which people adapt to reality and see through bullshit If I'm going to be a dictator And put you in my little private realm of bullshit Where I'm the god king and you're all my peons I need to stop those two tools from working So it, you know, it's a bit abstract But man, I can't, I just don't think that's a coincidence No, neither [Speaker 2] (37:46 - 37:54) You mentioned inflation earlier I feel like that's something that many people are very confused about Can you give us like a simplistic understanding of what inflation is? [Speaker 1] (37:56 - 49:26) Yeah, this is another one of those terms Kind of like property And you know, maybe some of this terminological confusion Is a result of us living inside of a state paradigm Because we've been conditioned, right? That prices should just go up And that's a good thing And that's good for you And it's good for the economy And that house you bought in 1980 Is worth, you know, five times as many dollars on paper But what is being hidden by all of that Is the depreciation of the purchasing power of each unit of money So this is a very long topic But I'm going to try to summarize it as best that I can Money is a technology that humans select, right? Just like we always select any tool The right tool for the job We're always looking for a better tool for the job So we've gone from, you know, carrier pigeons To smoke signals To telegraph To digital communications, right? Same aim We just really want to communicate with one another across space and time But better tool for the job So we adopt better and better tools When it comes to money One of the things you really want is that whatever wealth Whatever you sacrifice to obtain that money Right? Assets you would sell for money You would trade You would sell your farm for money, right? The expectation is that that money would hold its purchasing power across time So that you could hold on to that money for five years And then five years later exchange it for a farm of roughly equal value At best, right? So when humans were selecting the best tool for the job when it comes to money Gold became money through this process And the reason is No matter how much time, effort or energy humans allocated towards gold production The supply of gold increased the most slowly Which is to say its supply was the most resistant to debasement or inflation Right? The inflation of the gold supply And people get hung up here too So I'll try to expand When you increase the number When you increase the units of gold You increase the supply of gold You are effectively diluting the claims The purchasing power of gold for the people saving in it And this is true of any money, right? So if Let me try to give this analogy The Babe Ruth baseball card analogy If there's 100 Babe Ruth baseball cards in the world Each one's worth $10,000 Yeah Every time, say someone discovers or finds out Oh, there's actually an extra 50 Babe Ruth baseball cards Right? Or an extra 100 or whatever it may be You're now compromising the rarity of that baseball card And what we would say the analogous point in money would be You're compromising the scarcity of the money or the supply integrity You're compromising the capacity of money to hold value across time Because there's more units being produced That are diluting the savings of existing savers So I hope that made sense And then the reason gold is selected is because it's the least The asset that is most resistant to debasement That no matter how hard we try to produce more of it It's the thing we can produce most slowly So if I park my economic value or wealth in this money I know with the highest degree of certainty I'm not going to be No one's going to inflate it or print more gold or what have you So gold became the global premier store value for that reason It's the most inflation resistant asset in the world Now Problem with gold is that it's physical So it's very hard to carry around physical gold And transact day to day in physical gold So we needed to put all the gold in one place And have that custodian issue paper notes That were redeemable for the gold So we could trade more easily with each other Now what we had with gold When I said it's inflation resistant Is we had an asset that's really good at holding value across time Right Holds purchasing power across time This is one of the core properties of money It's a good definition for money actually Another one A tool for moving value across space and time So gold was really good at the time dimension Suffered in the space dimension It's physical It's heavy You got to secure it You know, it's cumbersome to use How are you going to buy a cup of coffee with gold? It's like gold dust You know, there's too much value density per unit of gold So we needed to centralize the custody and issue paper on top of it So that we could get a monetary technology That was good for moving value across space Right I can now move this paper claim on gold across space very easy And when that paper claim became an electronic claim It became even easier to move the money across space So with a gold-backed currency We had successfully augmented money Such that we had a good tool for holding value across time In gold But we had this currency layer Software layer put on top of it called currency So we could move it across space effectively This works wonderfully This works great Holds value across time and moves value across space easily The problem is Is that we introduced What we call in markets counterparty risk Basically means that you need to trust that custodian That's holding the gold Not to violate the contract And print more units of currency Than they have actual gold and reserves That's the core problem with a gold-backed currency And it is that exploit that has been taken advantage of Time and time and time again You just can't trust human nature to manage the money supply So inflation properly understood today Is we got all the gold moved into a bank We issued paper on top of it I'm going to gloss over a lot of history here By 1971, Nixon had revoked the gold standard So that the paper currency, the US dollar Was no longer redeemable for gold And I'm going to skip some nuance here But we've now moved into this world Where we think that government paper in our pocket is money It's no longer redeemable for gold or any other commodity So all we actually have in our pocket is a Uncollateralized debt from the government And because the money is not redeemable for anything Specifically gold This gives the Federal Reserve Which is the central bank of the United States And it's, and by extension, it's commercial banking arms The capacity to print new money ad infinitum That you can just print new units of paper As many new units of paper as the market will bear, right? You're lending them into existence You're buying, in the case of the Fed They're buying US government debt Which are treasuries And then the government is spending that money into existence The money goes into banks It's lent on top of So the money supply expands even more But the basis of all this is This divorce from economic reality That the money is no longer money We've divorced currency from money, right? That the currency is no longer redeemable for gold Which is money And this has become a real problem, right? This is basically a source of limitless revenue for governments And my simplest way to capture all of that In one little phrase that's resonated with people And it's the proper way to understand inflation, in my opinion Is that inflation is legal counterfeiting And counterfeiting is criminal inflation There's no actual mechanical difference in the two things, right? That the crime that George Floyd, for instance, right? Counterfeit $20 bill Is why he was initially in custody, I think, with the police That is the exact same action that the Federal Reserve The Central Bank of the United States Perpetrates by the trillion, right? There's no mechanical distinction between these two things Only a legal one It's only a matter of which way the guns are pointed So, and that is the proper way to understand it That the world, the problem with the world, in my estimation Is that we are governed by An institutionalized system of currency counterfeiting And if one group of people can just produce new units of money That everyone else is forced to use As we are forced to use the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies Through legal tender, through capital controls Through other compulsory means Then you have given those individuals that can print money Have the license and ability to steal human time, effort, and energy And all the products they're from So this is the big problem in the world That we have, in a supposedly free market capitalistic West We have an anti-capitalistic institution At the heart of every modern economy called the Central Bank That's used to perpetrate systemic theft And everything that I just said Is wrapped in this pseudoscience called Keynesian economics That justifies the monopolization of money and the printing of money It says we actually need it, right? This is even the term inflation itself is a euphemism You're diluting the value of the asset The only thing that's inflating as a result is the nominal price, right? It takes more dollars to buy the same thing So the price goes up on paper But what you don't see is the purchasing power of each unit Each dollar being diminished And it is this cognitive I call this a cognitive optical illusion That people just see the number going up, right? Stocks go up, houses go up, gold Like assets just keep going up in dollar price It disguises the actual debasement of purchasing power And people just fall for it People have been falling for it for a long time But, you know, studying the history of money Will tell you pretty quickly that that illusion does not last forever I mean, you can't fool economic reality forever And eventually currencies hyperinflate Or economies fail as a result of this distortion And this is where Bitcoin is very passionate Just saying like, look, we need money that nobody can counterfeit That would be useful for everyone [Speaker 2] (49:26 - 49:42) Yeah, that was my next question It was like, if we continue down this path that's been going on for so long Where do you see this heading? What do you see as the reality of the West, of the United States? And how is Bitcoin the answer? Or one of the answers? [Speaker 1] (49:42 - 59:49) Well, I would like to take a page out of your guy's book, actually And talk about the nature of truth You know, we talked about price distortion a little bit earlier When you start printing money, basically It becomes more difficult to understand Whether a price change was a result of supply and demand changing Or if this is a consequence of the printing of money, right? You can't... Now, I can't tell in a world where money is being monopolized and debased Whether this price signal is telling me there's a real demand in the marketplace The price went up because people really wanted this thing Or if there's just a central bank policy They just changed the amount of dollars It creates distortions in this information system Now, there's a saying on Wall Street that price is truth And I think there's a lot of potency in that saying Because again, you're taking all the preferences of the humans in the world And all the available supply of the commodity Whether it's copper or whatever it is And you're saying, this is the number, right? Copper is... I'm picking a number out of the air I don't know what copper is actually priced at A hundred dollars an ounce That's the truth of that asset, right? It's taking everyone's wishes and superimposing them Onto the available supply of copper in the world And it gives you one number Like there's a lot of data and information in that one number And one of the definitions of truth I learned from the American pragmatist I think this was Peirce It may have been James Said that truth is found at the end of inquiry And so there's a subtle distinction here Where we again, trapped in language We talk about truth Like it's just, oh, there's just There's a truth out there that you could know But the reality is, I think that This huge, fluid, complex universe Is much more complicated than anything We could ever fit between the ears So in the pragmatist, as I understood it Kind of made this point That there's the capital T truth Which is like the ultimate reality of everything that is That's beyond human comprehension on multiple levels What we need to worry about For pragmatic reasons Is the nature of this pragmatic truth Which is like, we can keep inquiring Deeper and deeper and deeper There's this intelligibility to reality That we can inquire into When we get closer to that capital T truth Even if we can never reach it We can develop a more pragmatic relationship with truth Let's say And so this idea of debasing money Is actually destroying the truth-seeking mechanism The truth-discovery mechanism of markets So if price is truth, price discovery is truth discovery For pragmatic reasons I'm not saying we're getting to ultimate capital T truth here But pragmatic truth emerges through the market process Another more obvious definition of truth Would just be like an accurate portrayal of reality Right, so as we've sort of alluded to earlier Money is meant to be a representation of human time and energy Right, this one's fairly obvious That you, why do you go to work, right? You go to work to spend your time and energy On something that's serving others in some capacity That's a consensual exchange of your time and energy for money The money that you receive You then expect to be able to go back out into the market To a restaurant, on a vacation, to buy a car, whatever it is And you want to be able to trade that representation Of your time and energy called money For the time and energy of other people, right? To build the car, prepare your meal, whatever it may be So when we talk about truth being an accurate portrayal of reality Money is this proxy tool we use to trade human time and energy Time and energy are fixed for each of us, right? They're strictly finite We only have so much time and so much energy When you engage in a currency counterfeiting monopoly That's just producing new units of money It's the equivalent to an institution printing new time and energy for itself While diluting everyone else, right? Again, it's another angle on that aspect of systemic theft That the central bank perpetrates So I would argue, like, okay, we have the basement of currency destroying Truth as the end of inquiry in the market process It's interrupting and confusing the market process It's debasing the time and energy that money is intended to represent, right? That you put your hard, your blood, sweat, and tears into this thing You want to be able to redeem it for something of equal value Well, currency counterfeiting diminishes that too And another definition of truth I think is really apt here is Heidegger Said that truth is unconcealedness That which cannot be concealed, right? The all-encompassing nature of ultimate reality in a way And it's always there to be seen Like you can't necessarily perceive it or understand it But truth is unconcealed Truth is all-encompassing Truth is whole Something like that And so this gets a bit into the Bitcoin thing But what we have today with central bank currency counterfeiting It's a black box You don't know how many dollars are in circulation You don't know how many dollars will be in circulation You don't know the criteria for central bankers deciding We don't know who profits from it We don't even know who owns the central banks, right? It's a black box You don't see anything Totally concealed And now the opposite of central banking This purely opaque, dark thing is Bitcoin Bitcoin is just language It's just open Like there's nothing hidden inside of it It's open source software Meaning that every aspect of its protocol is Inspectable and observable to anyone, right? This is the nature of open source technologies You can literally examine the source code down to the letter There's not even an opportunity to conceal anything It's absolute unconcealedness So when I look at fiat currency I see this institution destroying the truthfulness of money, right? Destroying price discovery Destroying individual rights to the fruits of their time and energy And it's done through opacity and concealedness, right? Which is the destruction of Heideggerian truth And then over here in Bitcoin We're talking about something that's You can inquire into it as much as you want It's open source software It has a fixed supply So it perfectly represents the supply integrity of your time and energy That you are sacrificing to obtain it And then the protocol itself is Inspectable and observable by anyone So it is unconcealedness It's the ultimate implementation of unconcealedness It's open source software So let's try to take this all the way back to the original question Where is the West going? I mean, guys, the study of monetary history Is really bleak in this regard Like once you start debasing currency Mises wrote about this in the 40s There are only two possible outcomes And this is not empirical This is a rigorous theoretical deduction You have only two possible outcomes Once you start to debase currency Either you keep debasing it until you hyperinflate it Or you stop debasing at some point And you have this giant crash back to economic reality And now if we move out of the theoretical domain into the empirical What have humans done always? They've always given into that temptation to just keep printing Right? It's just It's like a it's a drug addiction That we think this little bit of, you know, we're We've fallen on economic hard times There's not enough money to go around We'll print just a little bit to stimulate the economy In big air quotes And that'll get us going again and we'll get moving Once you start to quote unquote stimulate the economy What are you actually doing? You're distorting prices You're causing capital to be misallocated You're violating private property rights You're confusing the market process So it sows the seeds for the next disaster, which is even worse And then that is used as an excuse for printing even more money And the cycle repeats until the currency collapses And when the currency collapses Social cohesion goes away, right? Look at study the nature of hyperinflations Or just think to yourself If the money stopped working right now How many people could you actually deal with in the world? Hopefully you have a small circle of trust, right? Family, friends You could maybe get on with But beyond that small circle of what? 10, 15, 12 Maybe you've got 100 people, whatever Maybe you're the coolest guy in the world You've got 150 best friends There's still 8 billion other people you can't interact with When the money breaks So I feel like this whole conversation can kind of be correlated to like Even psychological shadow work, right? [Speaker 2] (59:51 - 1:00:25) Like you sow a lie You act against the self You do harm to another Just getting further and further and further away from the truth And so by the time you try to recover Like the process is going to be deep, dark and incredibly more difficult And there's this increasing build of the fear of facing all the darkness Of facing all the lies that I've sowed Of facing it all And so we just keep adding on top of it More makeup More self-sabotage More whatever it might be To get away from the volatility Which is actually going to bring us back to homeostasis [Speaker 1] (1:00:26 - 1:04:38) I think it's a beautiful I wouldn't even say it's an analogy I mean, I think fractals are the geometry of nature, right? Things are self-similar at different scales, basically So when you're describing shadow work at the individual level What else would we expect the collection of all the individuals to behave like? Other than something like a macrocosmic individual, in a way And this also gets into the nature of addiction itself I said addiction earlier, but I mean that with I had a cognitive scientist on the show, John Brevicki He speaks of this much more intelligently than I can But he describes the nature of actual addiction As the process of reciprocal narrowing And so, you know, rough example A man with alcoholic tendencies has a bad day at work So he goes home and he has a couple of drinks, right? Well, then he's hungover the next day He shows up late for work That snowballs into a thing with his boss He's in even more trouble He has an even worse day at work So he goes home and he has a few more drinks than he had the night before And it's a very simplified example, obviously But that is kind of the shape of addiction That you build this little monster inside you that justifies More of the substance, right? Despite it actually causing negative things in your life, right? You're trying to put the band-aid on the negative things in your life But the attempt to put the band-aid on Is the actual genesis of the problems Or the exacerbation of the problems And it culminates in the guy either in rehab Or dead in a ditch somewhere And it's very structurally similar to the printing of money As I described earlier It's like you print a little bit of money to try and fix the economic problem You cannot fix an economic problem with printing money Because all you're doing is shifting This is a key point too It's not creating any new wealth If I create new pieces of paper called dollars I haven't created any new factories, equipment, knowledge I haven't satisfied any human wants I have just shifted ownership of wealth From the hands of people saving in dollars Into the hands of those receiving the newly printed dollars first So it's just theft You can't solve problems by stealing And it's an addiction, right? There's a self-deception element to it Where we're literally... People that run the world today are telling us We needed to print six trillion dollars Because of a pandemic the past two years If you don't just stop and sit with that for a few minutes And realize how asinine and insane that is Yeah, and the addiction is perpetuated by our adversity to pain Yes, yes Absolutely, absolutely Yeah, it's you... It's an analgesic, right? You're running from the pain, right? You're taking that next drink Or you're printing that You're engaging that next round of quantitative easing Trying to kick the can down the road and stave off the pain And all you're doing is exacerbating the ultimate and inevitable day of reckoning I'm gonna print some more money That's right, exactly right Yeah, it's unbelievable So like... Yeah, yeah Last thing I would say about that Just again, check out the episode with Verveke The opposite of the reciprocal narrowing of addiction Is the reciprocal opening of love When you're engaged in a real authentic relationship with someone You want to open up more and be more vulnerable And show them the good, the bad, and the ugly Such that they feel more comfortable and confident To now open up to you more And you can know them more deeply For the purposes of them knowing you more deeply Like it's this equal and opposite beautiful force [Speaker 2] (1:04:38 - 1:05:04) It's so true Because if you think about that even just socio-politically If someone got on TV, a politician or someone And was like, hey, listen You know, we fucked up the last couple years, you know There's some things that we thought were gonna be a certain way And they weren't And like, you know, we're gonna try to be better Now, granted, they could be just manipulating But who does that? Like, you know, how often do you see a politician or CEO Express that level of vulnerability? [Speaker 1] (1:05:08 - 1:05:55) No, I agree completely And I, you know, I'll just share this And I never know where to go in these conversations Because I've been going down this rabbit hole for so long You don't know, you know, where to meet the audience exactly But my current view is that there's a deep continuity Between the complex system That is the individual human being And the complex system of networked human beings We call the global economy, right? There's a deep continuity between Kind of like the fractal thing we just described Like the dark night of the soul Or I forget how you put it That an individual faces Shadow work Yeah, shadow work There's some manifestation of that in a global economic sense [Speaker 2] (1:05:55 - 1:06:01) Well, I mean, it's the great hermetic principle As above, so below As within, so without Yes, perfect [Speaker 1] (1:06:03 - 1:07:39) And, you know, what is then facilitating The exchange between the micro and the macro? And if I'm looking at the answer to that question In just an economic sense The answer is money, right? Language matters, too But what do we say? Actions speak louder than words We understand that Well, what is capital, right? Capital, like the actual stuff we're making Is the result of many thousands of actions So it's one thing for me to say I'll put money into a deal It's another thing for me to sign the document, right? That's a much higher signal That, oh, I'm probably going to put money in the deal But you're not going to count Money in that deal until the money hits the account And it can't be reversed, right? The check clears or the Bitcoin settles Whatever it may be So there's a very strong signaling mechanism That we're tampering with We're tampering with the money And it creates feedback, I think, psychologically People are more likely to engage in self-deception Yeah You know, you could get it Like in Bitcoin circles We talk about fiat food, fiat medicine, fiat culture, right? There are apparently near ubiquitous But definitely pervasive effects from the corruption of money It tends to corrupt everything that it touches And, you know, I think if you just take a look around the world today You'd be hard-pressed to find a better explanation for what's going on [Speaker 2] (1:07:40 - 1:08:09) Well, I see it simply as a magnifier, you know It simply magnifies what that individual already is What kind of qualities, the level of their character They've actually developed within And, you know, even like this whole concept of welfare All we're doing is distorting the reality principle We're distorting the relationship between rights and responsibility Which is obviously, as we've discussed, the foundation Of us solving anything in reality, I guess, yeah [Speaker 1] (1:08:10 - 1:09:26) I agree with you that there's a magnifying effect, right? And money has this effect, right? Someone's described it as kind of like alcohol But if you're kind of naturally a happy-go-lucky person And you have a few drinks Well, you tend to be a little bit more happy-go-lucky But if you're brooding and dark inside And you have a few drinks It sort of amplifies your personality in that way I'm a little hesitant to leave it at just that though Because I think of people growing up in Situations of extreme depravity or poverty Where you're kind of like forced into survival It's like steal or starve kind of thing And so there is this element of values being imposed upon you Through incentives, you could say And so it's not just like Maybe that kid that's stealing instead of starving Maybe he has really goodness in his heart, right? Whatever, he could be the next Mother Teresa The next Steve Jobs, you don't know But when he's forced into this situation of economic dispossession His character development path can go off course By no fault of his own, right? It could just be the world And so there's this feedback, I guess is what I'm getting at [Speaker 2] (1:09:26 - 1:09:31) He's also responding to the corrupt system Right, the distortion in the system That's what I'm saying [Speaker 1] (1:09:31 - 1:09:53) So sometimes I get into these conversations People are like, well, you just need to fix the individuals I'm like, I don't think you can just fix the individuals There's also the systemic angle Like if we could de-corrupt money Or whatever that means You know, just move on to a Bitcoin standard And remove theft from the global economy Then maybe we would There'd be that fractal reflection in the individual, right? [Speaker 2] (1:09:54 - 1:10:06) People would be less thieving overall Yeah, so where does Bitcoin receive its value from? You know, we're talking about the gold standard And superimposing money Like how does that concept work for Bitcoin? [Speaker 1] (1:10:07 - 1:17:22) Yeah, it's a great question Again, we're going to compress a lot into not so many minutes here But one of the ways I've explained why gold became money And this is actually a great answer One of the most useful answers to the question, what is money? What properties are they seeking in the tool called money over time? And I've spoken at length about this in several places So I'm just going to briefly go through it But my interpretation of what people seeking good money Is they want something that is divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, and scarce Those are the five properties of good money That's why gold was selected Because basically over a whole history of experimentation It was determined that monetary metals best satisfied those properties They were the best tool for the job Silver, bronze, gold Of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce As we said earlier Meaning that no matter how hard we tried to increase its supply Its supply was the most resistant to inflation Or the least flexible, right? You couldn't change the supply that much That made it a very useful store value asset It also highlights where gold suffered, right? Gold is not portable Not that portable relative to paper dollars or electronic dollars That's much more useful for transacting across space as we described earlier So what made gold good money Is that people consensually selected it as the right tool for the job Just the best tool we had for money And you know, I specifically say a gold-backed currency as we described earlier If you could trust human nature If we weren't sinful, corruptible creatures Gold-backed currency would work great But human fallibility being what it is You can't trust humans to safeguard the money supply So if we take that framing for why gold became money It had the most divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity And we apply that to an examination of bitcoin Bitcoin is infinitely divisible One bitcoin right now is divisible into 100 million subunits called satoshis Um, the software protocol can be updated in a backwards compatible way To increase that divisibility further So it basically has infinite divisibility Bitcoin is perfectly durable in the sense that it's just distributed information The example I like to cite here is the bible You can burn as many physical copies of the bible as you want But that will do nothing to destroy the bible itself, right? The bible is this distributed set of information That is so deeply permeated The collective human consciousness that it's not going anywhere, right? It's just pure distributed information, right? Bitcoin's the same It's just every node of bitcoin is running in the entirety of its history You could stamp out as many nodes as you want But every time someone else boots up the software They have the whole history of bitcoin right there Obviously in terms of portability, bitcoin way outperforms gold Because that was a big drawback with gold as we said earlier But bitcoin being just digital information You can move it at the speed of light Can't get much more portable than that in this universe Recognizability has to do with authenticating the veracity of the money So you may have heard the term sound money This was in regard to the sound gold would make When you dropped it from a certain height It gave a very particular resonance And this gave credence to its authenticity That it wasn't, you know, lead painted gold, things like this There were also these techniques called assaying People used to assay gold, A-S-S-A-Y And they would just, you know, do these certain measurement techniques To make sure it was gold, basically Bitcoin has this radically new feature set for recognizability That you can audit the total supply So just by running a node, you can audit the whole world You can say, what's the actual total supply of bitcoin? And spoiler alert, the answer is always less than 21 million, right? That's the most bitcoin there can ever be is 21 million And so it's totally resistant to counterfeiting, right? I don't need to rely on the sound bitcoin makes when I drop it Or like, you know, some little caliper measurements of the bitcoin Well, there is no physical bitcoin But you can know with certainty, right? That the bitcoin you have is yours And that it's a guaranteed fraction of a total supply of 21 million So you know no one can debase you through inflation And that leads into the final property, which is scarcity itself I want to be very particular here Scarcity occurs wherever demand exceeds supply So when there's more wants for a thing Than there are of the thing to go around People need to compete for it And they compete for it through the market process, basically It's different than value Obviously, oxygen, very valuable to human life But there's no price on it Why is that? Because there's so much supply in the atmosphere That the supply exceeds the demand So oxygen is free Money is kind of interesting when it comes to scarcity Because since money lays claim to everything else It's basically always scarce as a concept At least people always want more money Because money can be used to obtain anything that the market can generate So what we really want And what we really mean when we say scarcity Or what I mean when I say scarcity of money Is I'm talking about the integrity of the supply Again, this is why gold was favored as money historically It had the most integral, most predictable supply over time So I know that whatever fraction of gold that I own I won't be debased And with Bitcoin, we've perfected that, right? You can know with perfect certainty That if you hold 100 Bitcoin You have a 100 out of a possible 21 million forever There's no one that can ever do anything about that And that's better than gold too Because we don't know the future of gold, right? We could figure out We could mine ocean floors We could mine asteroids We could figure out how to make gold more cost-effectively in a lab All of these things could compromise its integrity as a store of value And the same is not true for Bitcoin, right? There's no way to increase the supply At least no one's figured out How you could possibly increase the supply of Bitcoin beyond 21 million So I think with Bitcoin Satoshi has effectively invented a virtually perfect money, right? [Speaker 2] (1:17:22 - 1:17:59) Infinitely divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, and perfectly scarce Thanks for sharing, man Definitely a lot to consider for sure I know you've got limited time But one more question for you So that's all dependent on the amount of people that agree to those qualities Right? Or it's a network effect essentially Yep So can it be banned? What if they turn the power off? What are your thoughts on, I guess, those two questions? [Speaker 1] (1:18:00 - 1:20:59) Yeah, just speak to the properties of money first The properties that I'm trying to highlight there This is what people have selected for in good money historically I feel very confident about that What you're saying is, and you're right, demand is subjective, right? I can't say objectively humans will always choose these things for money But what I can say, and this is somewhat more axiomatic, I guess People don't like to be stolen from, right? That's pretty fair to say, I think Maybe not universal Maybe there's a few exceptions, whatever But in general, people don't like to be stolen from If you're holding savings in a currency that someone else can print and debase Then you're being stolen from That's right If you're holding savings in an asset that people cannot arbitrarily print or debase You're saving in something that cannot be used to steal from you as much That's why gold is a better long-term store value than dollars That's why Bitcoin is better than gold So one of the ways I view this is It's not as more inflation, taxation, regulation is pressed upon people People in pursuit of their own individual economic livelihoods Are forced to evaluate other options And the most resistant option, right? The most, the lowest, the form of money with the lowest counterparty risk As we described earlier, the counterparty risk Which you could define counterparty risk as like a violation of contract And in that way, you could think of Bitcoin as like an inviolable contract It's like you're holding this fixed amount of money in that way That no one can steal, no one can inflate, no one can violate So in a world where government overreach is increasing, right? More wealth redistribution, more theft, more confiscation, more taxation People are kind of like, through osmotic pressure almost The pursuit of their own survival and self-interest Pushed into a more untouchable asset, let's say A less seizable asset, more inflation-resistant assets And at the very end of that particular spectrum is Bitcoin So it's like the ultimate safe haven asset In a world plagued by wealth redistribution schemes Now, what happens if they turn out the power and can they ban it? I'll start with banning it I would point people here actually to an episode I did with Preston Pysh In his Investors Podcast, BTC001 I go into depth on that But there was a, Bitcoin's just information, first of all So to ban Bitcoin in the United States at least You'd have to overturn the First Amendment [Speaker 2] (1:21:00 - 1:21:00) Mm-hmm [Speaker 1] (1:21:00 - 1:23:46) There is some case precedence for this The feds try to classify pretty good privacy software Which is PGP software They try to classify it as munitions I think this is back in the 90s So that you could not export PGP software outside of the US And that entire case took a turn against the feds When someone printed out PGP on paper and said, look, here it is This is PGP software, it's information on paper Obviously protected under the First Amendment How can you classify this as munitions? And so since then we have had the case precedent That open source software is protected under the First Amendment in the United States Even if that was overturned and you try to ban it You get into some really weird things When you make language illegal again It's like, what? I can't wear a t-shirt with a certain word I can't say certain words Colors can be illegal Math can be illegal It doesn't make any sense You get into la-la land really quick Now the power going off is interesting Because this does highlight a vulnerability To the extent that your energy That you are dependent on a centralized power grid That is the extent to which you can be shut out of the Bitcoin mining network But to try, the only way to stop Bitcoin Through this attack vector would be turning off The power worldwide forever You'd have to stop the production of electricity Or that would be necessary to stop it And that's very far-fetched as far as I can tell I mean if we did have some type of Cataclysm that caused that We'd probably have bigger things to worry about I feel like we couldn't do this podcast anymore, obviously That's right, that's right So, and if anything, these are good questions That come up a lot But in pursuing the answers to them You end up in these really fantastical Far-flung, like low probability situations Where you're like, well the world like Really needs to implode to a point To where we're going back to the stone age For Bitcoin to not work So if that eventuality is not part of your model Then Bitcoin will continue to exist And if Bitcoin continues to exist And humans continue to print money Then Bitcoin continues to out-compete All inferior forms of money And people in pursuit of their own livelihood Choose the best money available to them And so far as I can tell, Bitcoin is the best money We will ever have available to us [Speaker 2] (1:23:47 - 1:24:09) I completely agree with you, man Those last two questions were sent in Thanks for answering them Robert, I think your message is an incredibly important one Just thank you so much for your knowledge And for how much you've invested In sharing your knowledge in this arena Particularly, thank you so much for your time Anything you'd like to leave our audience with In terms of where you'd like to guide them? [Speaker 1] (1:24:10 - 1:25:23) No, I really appreciate you guys having me And I'm glad you're talking about truth That is a very poorly understood topic these days So it's good to help people equip themselves With the right tools to investigate truth And I guess the last thing I would say Is just I think the most important promise of Bitcoin And we didn't get into this But central banking is used to fund global warfare And so to the extent that we can Devitalize the central bank That we can move our wealth into an alternative system Is the same degree to which we can reduce The probability of World War I and World War II happening again Fiat currencies were indispensable To the scale, scope, and severity Of those conflicts in the 20th century And at rock bottom, I think Bitcoin is this Peaceful humanitarian mission This ethical alternative to The monopolization and counterfeiting of currency So if you want to vote against the possibility of World War III Then consider studying and perhaps saving in Bitcoin [Speaker 2] (1:25:25 - 1:25:30) Awesome Guys, thanks so much for listening We'll see you next time Take care