Robert Breedlove - What is Money? Bitcoin: Bringing Freedom to the Masses

Full transcript: Robert Breedlove on London Real

2:39 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Robert Breedlove, the philosopher, writer, freedom maximalist and Bitcoin focused entrepreneur. You are the founder and CEO of Parallax Digital, a crypto asset consultancy firm, and host of the What Is Money podcast, where you hold conversations with some of the deepest thinkers in the digital world. You’ve described Bitcoin as a quote, “humanitarian movement exposing the greatest con in human history, that of central banking.”

3:06 You believe that by learning about the connection between honest money, entrepreneurship and civilization, we are renewing hope for the future of humanity, and you believe Bitcoin is the greatest tool for human freedom ever created, and predicted that by 2031 it could be worth 12 and a half million dollars a coin. Robert, welcome to London Real. Brian, thank you so much for having me. Hey, it’s great to have you here. I’m super excited to go deep here, and maybe zoom out a little bit, because for the past six months we’ve just gone really heavy into crypto assets and DeFi, and we’ve kind of gone in, maybe into the details.

3:42 You know, we’ve had Michael Saylor here talking about his kind of paradigm shift, or parallax shift. Jeff Booth was here last week, kind of blowing my mind on inflation deflation. I know you’re a fan. Raoul Pal, we’ve gone into protocols. I’ve had, like, the founder, Avax, was here this week, and I think it’s worth zooming out.

4:00 And so I’m glad you’re here today. It’s a question I ask my students in the D5 Academy all the time. I say, “What is your relationship with money?” And we’re always we’ve always hit London Real, been kind of looking into this kind of this unspoken phenomenon that is money. We’ve had Robert Kiyosaki on here multiple times, and he said to me in the studio, “Brian, you know, poor people work for money, rich people make money work for them.”

4:27 And strangely enough, if you look at our thousand episodes over 10 years, you know, Robert a chunk of them are trying to understand what money is, and they’re some of my most popular episodes, and yet I feel like we’ve always been looking at it maybe through the long wrong lens, which is, right? It’s great to have you here. Also, we’ve always been questioning paradigms, whether it’s talking to Jordan Peterson in the studio or talking about psychedelics or going through human movement to like question what’s going on in our brains.

4:54 So I think it’s perfect that you’re here today. I’ve spent a lot of time with Dennis McKenna and his brother, Terence McKenna, who used to live in Hawaii, like you. I think he once said, “I don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish.” And I feel like sometimes we’re so stuck in this paradigm of money, you know, that we don’t even know what it is sometimes, and that’s why it’s great you’re here today. So I want to jump into this.

5:18 I figured we might want to do this in kind of three parts, maybe first talk about what is money, then maybe what is Bitcoin, and what is the future? You got some deep questions on this, and our thoughts on this before we get started. Something hit me the other night and I had to tell you. I know you’ve got, you know, young children and I do as well, and I was reading a story to my two boys the other night. They’re four and five years old, and they love pirate stories.

5:40 All right, so there’s the pirate, there’s the ship, there’s the gold, there’s always some conflict, and my son Caden said to me, “This, Robert, and I think you might like this.” He said, “Papa, why does the pirate have a treasure map?” And I just stopped, and I thought, why does he have a treasure map? And after a minute I thought, well, because he doesn’t have Bitcoin. And it was just, you know, it’s this weird thing, because like, why does he?

6:03 Well, because the value that he really wants, he can’t carry with him. He’s got to hide it. He can’t have fiat currency anyways. There’s a lot of things to unpack there, but I thought it was a good question, and maybe this episode will answer that question for him. Maybe 10 years when he watches it.

6:17 So anyways, great, great to have you here. Curious on those thoughts, and I’m probably going to start with the greatest question that I think you like being asked, which is what is money, and what do you think about some of those thoughts I just mentioned? That’s great. I like to hear that your son is already thinking deeply about this topic. That tells me he will not be disillusioned by the world around him as he grows up.

6:42 You know, that question, the reason I named the show that question, is because kind of twofold. One, there are many answers to the question, “What is money?” It is not as simple as it may seem. And two, I think I guess I’m making kind of an attempt at inception in a way. If you’ve ever seen that movie where they plant the idea.

7:04 I’m trying to just plant this seed in the minds of people. It’s like, just ask yourself this question. If I could just get people to walk away with this inquisitive nature about money, I think that is a gateway into this rabbit hole that unlocks a lot of other important questions, you know, like what is value, what is government, what is society, etc. So One of the answers I’ll give, which I think you’ve already alluded to, well, is money is the economic water in which we all swim.

7:36 You know, there’s this great commencement speech by, I think it’s, I forget the name of the guy, but he’s talking about this, what is this? This Is Water speech. where he says there’s a young fish swimming by an old fish one day, and the old fish says to the young fish, “Hey guys, how’s the water?” And the young fish kind of looks at that funny and they swim on by, and then one young fish says to the other, “What the hell is water?” You know, it’s this, it’s something that we think through more often than we think about.

8:12 So this is the psychotechnological aspect of money. So just like literacy and numeracy are part of our cognitive software, money too is very much embedded in our mental architecture. It’s a little bit interesting, though, because, you know, literacy and numeracy, clearly these are just psychological tools that we’re using, but money is kind of a hybrid, right? Money has a psychological aspect to it, but it also has to have rooting into the real world, right?

8:44 There has to be some thermodynamic bridge, something to substantiate money. It’s not purely a mental construct that we can just arbitrarily toy with, despite central bankers’ best wishes and efforts. Another way to think about money is that it is a contract with the future, actually. So, and this gets into the aspects of money as kind of a marketplace emblem for time itself, for human time. So clearly we all tacitly know this.

9:19 We go into work or we start a business, or we engage in some entrepreneurial effort, sacrificing our time, our energy, our effort to obtain money. Right, so we’re trading basically labor for money, and then if we have rendered value to the market, or we’ve provided favors to the marketplace that it finds valuable, we can then take that money and redeem it for similar sacrifices from others. Right, you can go to the restaurant, order your food or buy your car or whatever.

9:52 So in this big global macroeconomic game, we’re basically trading favors with one another, and money becomes this social contract with the future that I can reliably go out and exchange my time, effort and energy for this token that will hold that value across time, such that I can redeem it from others in the future. So there’s a couple of answers there, and then, you know, I would like to speak to the treasure map too. You know, the pirate with the treasure map, I think this points towards the destiny of money.

10:31 Actually, money is it has to be encrypted somehow. Even gold historically, right? The reason gold became money, and there’s a long history there, but one of the main reasons is that no one, the alchemists weren’t successful, we could not figure out how to create gold from lead or anything else. So this supply of gold was rigid. No matter how much time, effort, energy we put into it, it was the commodity whose supply increased the most slowly and predictably, which made gold the ultimate store value historically for a number of other reasons as well, but we’ll just focus on the supply aspect.

11:10 That meant that gold’s formula effectively was encrypted, right? By chemistry or physics or whatever way you want to look at it. No one could crack the code on gold. So it is the destiny of money to become encrypted, and that’s, you know, leads us straight into the Bitcoin discussion for later. Yeah, that treasure map thing is deep, because again, you just made a good point.

11:33 You know, I was thinking you know, I don’t know what the alternative of the fiat currencies would be in the Caribbean at that time. Anyways, but even if he could get them, they wouldn’t be necessarily worth anything, or they could even use them, or he, or she, the pirates, like you said, the gold somehow had a fixed supply, and even he knew that. And I’ve had this conversation before. My wife’s from Bulgaria, and her mother, we call Baba. You look where Baba keeps her money back in the day, you know, and she, she knows not to keep it in local currency.

12:04 You know, the smart money goes into gold, or maybe, you know, a dollar, because it’s maybe the next best thing. And so again, the pirate has it. He knows he can’t carry it with him. He knows he has to hide it somewhere, and that’s also potential, that contract with the future, right? There’s a lot of deep questions there.

12:22 Yeah, and so That’s a great point. There is, you know, another definition of money. Actually, it’s intended to be the trust minimized asset, so it’s the asset you can hold and store value in that you do not need to trust anyone else. It is the minimal amount of need to trust anyone else, which is to say you have minimal counterparty risk, and to hold physical gold, you knew no one in the world could counterfeit your supply. No one could expand the supply and dilute you, and if you self-custody, right, as the pirate was doing, or maybe as Baba was doing, if they buried it in their backyard.

13:00 You trust the custodian, because not only is it foolish to store your wealth in fiat currency where the issuer can just debase you, or they can just print money and dilute you, but if you stored your physical gold with a custodian that’s equally dangerous, right? They’ll raid your safety deposit box, or anytime the geopolitical situation gets too dicey, you could just lose your gold. So it’s been the destiny of money to be something that is encrypted, either by a treasure map or by a chemistry formula related to gold, or both, and it’s been the destiny of money to be something that the individual can hold, right, that I can hold and possess and not need to trust anyone else.

13:47 That maximizes my individual sovereignty and economic agency in the world. And you’ve also, you know, called money our most brilliant idea, and if we go from like hunter-gatherer tribe and we try to zoom into maybe a century ago, I mean, when we’re hunter and gatherers we didn’t need it, but soon it became, like you said, this water, this incredible way to kind of quantify value. But then, and I’ve heard you talk about this before, and maybe talk about now, when we stopped moving around we became agrarian.

14:15 It then became an asset, and then you go on to say, as humans we always want more of something, and that’s when things really started changing. I wonder if you could talk about that concept, because I don’t think a lot of people have really thought about some of those ideas. Yeah, this is a great origin story actually. So, we’re, to your point, we’re hunters and gatherers for a long, long time, right? So just nomadic people moving around eating whatever we can kill.

14:41 The most, the assets we had then were mostly just tools, right? Mostly just bearer assets, the things we could carry, but eventually, and the reasons why are, a little bit debated, but I like the one theory that we settled down and became agrarian so we could start growing wheat to make beer, like we think it was to grow food, but there’s a lot of thoughts out there that we actually, and we figured out we could also eat the grain, et cetera, et cetera. Once we fell down and became agricultural for the first time in human history, we started to create a real economic surplus.

15:17 Right, we’re growing more than we can eat, so all of a sudden we need to store this food somewhere. We also started producing these agricultural assets, right, plows and buildings and, you know, all the tools necessary to grow the food. So this was the genesis of capital, really, you know, beyond just bearer assets, like your dagger and whatever. So this not only did government emerge at this time, because now we had assets that we needed to protect, right, so we needed a protection-producing enterprise such that plunderers did not take this economic surplus, but it also, as economic surpluses emerge, they emerge in more places than one.

16:07 So these centers of agricultural activity became centers of economic activity. Right, one group would grow one form of plant, one group would grow another, they would trade and this is how we sort of organically discovered what economists call the division of labor. And the easy way to think about this is, you know, there’s the old adage, many hands make light work. So like, if you can do something that you’re really at, and I can do something that I’m really good at, then, and we can trade, then we are both better off, effectively.

16:43 But again, that trade, there has to be some intermediary, right? Otherwise we’re kind of stuck needing to match our wants exactly right? You need to have the exact amount of bushels of whatever and I have the exact amount, so money emerges through this process of trade as quite simply the most liquid asset, the most tradable asset. So and maybe an easy way to think about this is once people recognize that something is widely accepted in trade, right? Say it’s you know, for a long time it was salt, for instance.

17:21 Then all of a sudden I don’t need to necessarily demand salt for consumption. Right, if I’m trying to trade my farming tool for your fishing rod, I may very likely trade it into salt, just knowing that you’re gonna accept salt in trade, right? So salt sort of becomes, if you think about the trading in the world, is kind of this set of concentric spheres, and the topmost sphere is the most tradable asset. Once that recognition sets in with everyone, everyone’s trying to trade for the most tradable asset, because that gives you pure optionality, right?

17:57 I can take that asset and get anything I want, no matter what I want, I have to satisfy. I know that I could swap salt, if salt is money, for that thing. So this, and this is very important, because what are entrepreneurs doing, right? What is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur is a profit, effectively, that is mapping his current action to anticipated future market data in pursuit of profits.

18:31 So the word profit and profit are very closely connected here. To deal with the uncertainty that an entrepreneur faces, what is the ideal solution to uncertainty? The answer is options. You want as many options as possible. And this gets us to another definition of money, which is an instrument of pure optionality in the marketplace.

18:53 It can literally be redeemed for any good or service that any market actor can produce. So I think that’s, I like that origin story about the agricultural age, because it points not only to the emergence of the state but also to the emergence of money more generally. And it also introduces a strange component. I forgot there was this movie when I was a kid, where it was this really popular movie around the States, where it charted, it was kind of a comedy, but it charted this tribe in Africa that had a Coke bottle dropped in, and once the Coke bottle dropped in it was a scarce asset, and they used it, and then people saw it and they became greedy, and it changed the whole social structure.

19:32 And so you kind of implied that once we got agriculture and once we got assets, then humans wanted more, and then in that pursuit of wanting more we start getting into the issue with central banking and inflation, etc. Maybe you can explain that link a little bit better, because you have that same thesis that as humans we always want more, we always want something that we don’t. What is it for nothing, right? That’s an important thief core thesis of everything you’re saying, because a lot of people either don’t want to agree with that, or don’t want to think about that, but that is part of the root of the problem of what we’re even talking about here, right?

20:10 Yes, well, it’s the thing that’s kind of paradoxical, or maybe ambivalent, you might say, is that. And there’s a whole deep metaphysical conversation here, but I what, you know, where should we start? The universe is kind of something for nothing, right? We don’t really know. Maybe the Big Bang is not the right model, but all of this came from basically nothing, according to a lot of modern physics.

20:35 So, the galaxy, actually all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy and many billions of other galaxies throughout the universe, they are storms of stars revolving around a black hole. We’ve identified a black hole at the heart of almost every galaxy. So there’s something revolving around, you know, nothing, the ultimate nothing. And in man, you know, the heart of man is never satisfied. So there’s this black hole in all of our hearts, effectively, that’s driving us to pursue something for nothing.

21:07 Right, we always want more. Frankly, and it’s ambivalent, because this is driving the entrepreneur. Right, the entrepreneurs are trying to brilliantly, elegantly but sort of lazily solve problems, so I just want to create a tool that will let me leverage my efforts. Right, let me, let me accomplish greater aims with less effort. That’s it.

21:32 That’s the other pursuit of the entrepreneur. So to get something for nothing through innovation or trade, right, that’s a pursuit but if you cross this kind of moral line, you can also get something for nothing by stealing, or, or, you know, being violent or aggressive. So it’s this ambivalent black hole in the heart of man, I think, that drives economic activity in the world. And to get back to I’ll branch this into central bank, and this is very broad strokes because we’re covering a lot of human history briefly, but so in this pursuit of something for nothing we’re trading, we’re innovating, something emerges as the most tradable asset in different economic networks across the world.

22:20 But as these economic networks start to interconnect themselves, especially in like the 18th, 19th century when we start to develop telecommunications, the world starts to become kind of one big mind, effectively. And so market actors, through their voluntary action, are pursuing a form of money that best provides five services. And this is, you can think about this as the properties of money or just the services that market actors seek in money itself.

22:54 And this is an important point too, that that will help us with Bitcoin later. People often get really hung up on physical goods, like, what is this physical good but a better way to think about the economy is that all market actors are seeking our services ultimately, right? I don’t care about the physical Tesla. I care about how fast it can move me. I care about what form of status representation it gives me, you know.

23:22 There are services that car are rendering to me, that’s what I’m actually demanding. It has nothing to do with the physical object itself. Now, often time, those services need certain physical features, but it’s the services ultimately that matter. So that’s an important point to remember. In money we’re seeking a tool that provides us five critical services or properties.

23:44 It’s visibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. I’ll, we can go into detail on that after if you like, but essentially monetary metals best satisfied those five properties, right? As a tool they were the most divisible, durable, recognizable, portable tool available historically. Of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce, which is to say that, as we said earlier, its supply was the most predictable. It was the hardest supply to change, therefore it was the most inflation-resistant money.

24:25 Therefore it’s the best store value in the world, right? And we all know that, right? Everyone knows gold is a great store value. It’s valuable. Very few of us, it’s a tool that’s so old, I like to joke that we forgot why it’s valuable.

24:40 You know, people everyone knows gold’s valuable, very few people know the properties of money. One other little nuance here I’ll insert that’s important: people typically think of scarcity as purely a supply-side phenomenon, but scarcity actually occurs when demand exceeds supply. So you can have something that’s extremely valuable but non-scarce, and if it’s not scarce it’s not going to have a market price. Oxygen is a great example here. Clearly oxygen is very valuable to life, but it’s so abundant that there’s no market price for it.

25:14 Yet, hopefully there’s not. So gold was the best monetary technology we had historically, but it had one critical shortcoming. This is a technological limitation that introduced an attack vector for central banks to exploit, and that is that gold is physical. It’s heavy, it’s expensive to secure, it can be violently confiscated. So to economize the use of gold and to scale it as a monetary technology, we started putting gold in warehouses, and the warehouse would issue a warehouse receipt, whereas each receipt was redeemable for one ounce of gold on deposit.

26:01 Market actors all of a sudden figured out, okay, this is a much cheaper way to transact in something that’s as good as gold. So in that one property of money that gold really lacked, which was portability, currency positively augmented the portability of gold, such that it made it globally transactable. And this, this was, this was escalated even further when we later abstracted currency into electronic form. So, those custodians or those warehouses ultimately became banks, and again just due to the economies of scale, right?

26:34 The more you can centralize gold, the less fixed cost you have related to its abstraction in the currency, the more efficient, uh, and cost-effective it is to use gold as money. So this was great. This allowed us to have, these, the all of the desired services of monetary properties were now gathered into a single technology, which was gold-backed currency. Wonderful, right? What’s the problem?

27:03 Money needs to be trust-minimized, right? We’re looking for the trust-minimized asset of exchange. What have we just done by abstracting gold into a currency? We’ve introduced the need to trust the issuer or the warehouse. We now have to trust these guys that hold the keys to the castle, or the keys to the gold, so, so to speak, not to print more money than their gold reserves can justify, not to commit a contractual fraud with their customers, because that’s what each paper certificate represented.

27:36 Each banknote was redeemable for a certain unit of gold. If they issue those banknotes in excess of their reserves, it is a contractual fraud with their customers. Well, turns out the monopolist on violence, the state and the government, quickly figured out, as a means of getting something for nothing, all they had to do was target these centralized custodians of gold, and this basically served as a near limitless revenue source for government. Right, if I can just break into the It’s not like a physical break-in and shakedown.

28:18 Typically they just allow banks to suspend redemption of gold, right, where the customers can’t get the gold out, and then the government will take over the issuance of the currency. It will become a sovereign currency, then they’ll print way more promises to gold than they actually have gold, and they’ll defend that asymmetric privilege with forced violence, coercion, compulsion and the like. And that’s really what gets us into the age of central banking.

28:44 You know, the most recent example of this was post-World War II, the United States enters the theater of war late, declares itself victorious, holds the Bretton Woods conference, says gold, the dollar will be pegged to gold, every other international currency will be pegged at the dollar. Countries accept this largely because they don’t really have a choice. The U.S. holds the most gold, they have the dominant military force in the world, and they also accept it because there’s this pretense of being able to redeem their currency for dollars, and in turn for gold, so they could call bluff of the U.S. if they were irresponsible with monetary policy.

29:27 Well, this goes on for about 30 years, and countries start calling the United States’ bluff as it prints more currency than it can justify with its gold reserves. And around 1970 Germany tries to repatriate some gold, and that’s when we have the infamous 1971 Nixon Shock, where he, uh, temporarily, quote unquote, suspends redeemability for gold, and we go on to this fiat currency standard and 50 years later here we are, globally still on this temporary fiat currency measure. And so these are some big dates for people to kind of understand, where their people were just taking a little bit more liberties, a little bit more liberties, and this set us up.

30:06 And like you said, I think it was 70 and 71. I think England wanted some other gold back as well, and so yeah, we, the, the president made the decision with the Fed, to, I guess, like you said, do a temporary uh, taking the dollar off the gold standard, and then of course, you know, last year and this year we print, you know, a record amount of dollars, and we’re even further, much further deeper than we ever expected to be a few years ago. Now, ultimately, though, you think this is, this is also the common fatality of any type of a central banking institution, because ultimately the citizens demand more, maybe something for nothing, and this cycle repeats over, you know, hundred-year periods.

30:51 This is something that I talked to Jeff Booth about, this concept just of inflation and deflation and whether you point the finger at someone doing it bad. This is a cycle that repeats, that even the rich lose at over a hundred-year cycle. Usually it’s the poor that take the initial hits with inflation. But then the rich take a hit when everything is confiscated by the governments or wars or that kind of thing. Can you just speak on your thoughts on that, as in, is this inevitable when we lock ourselves into money as we used to know it, at least?

31:22 Yeah, so I think that, you know, first of all there’s this old saying that there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government solution. So that’s how we got into fiat currency, right? It’s, it’s this self-deception. I think, you know, this is not, I don’t like to paint this as some type of cabal behind the curtain that’s planning, in, you know, detail, how they’re just going to victimize society forever. It’s incremental, right?

31:54 There’s this gradualism to it, where if you just follow the incentives, right? A government owns the monopoly on force and violence, so they can basically do whatever they want in the physical domain. The most important tool and the most important incentive schema for human beings is money. So in this, in the interest of getting maximal leverage, or maximum something for nothing, government can then apply that monopoly on force to control this instrument that is human time, frankly.

32:33 Right? Money is human time. They’re indistinguishable. Money emblematizes human time in the marketplace, as we described earlier. So now, instead of trying to, like, go door-to-door and physically coerce people to do what you want, you can just control this concentrated source of power and human time, and apply your willpower and print your willpower onto the world, your political power under the world.

32:58 So humans in position of power, let’s say policymakers, they’ve always managed to convince themselves, they’ve managed to rationalize, like, oh, we just need to take a little bit of this, monopolize the money just a little bit, or just print a little bit more money to do, accomplish aims A, B and C. And again, nothing’s more permanent than a temporary government solution, right? Every time they add these bureaucratic layers, which they funded through the theft of monetary manipulation, right, whether it’s inflation or it could be direct taxation as well.

33:37 They’re basically adding layers to this bureaucratic beast that never, it doesn’t ever suffer any Darwinian correction. There’s no creative destruction in the government until a government is absolutely destroyed, right, either in war or overthrown by revolution. So you end up with this coercive element at the heart of every economy, which is antithetical to what an economy is meant to be. Right? We create value only through voluntary exchange.

34:08 When you and I enter into a trade, the only reason we trade is because you think what I have is more valuable to you, and I think the same. I think what you have is more valuable to me. So when we exchange, at least psychologically, we are both better off after the trade. If you remove this, it is called the inequality of exchange, is what economists call this. So it might be intuitive to think that we’re trading things that are equal in value, but that’s not at all what’s happening.

34:35 It’s you have to think what I have is more valuable, and vice versa. When you break the mechanism of voluntary exchange, you destroy value creation. So when you engage in involuntary exchange, which is to say theft, coercion, compulsion, violence, you are destroying value. And that, I think, is the fundamental problem: humans have managed, humans in position of power have managed to rationalize coercion, compulsion and violence as some temporary solution to some temporary problem, and they’re just accumulating these long-run risks over time.

35:13 And, and diverging, the other thing here is that the structure we inhabit then becomes divergent from the collective wishes of market actors. It’s not what they would have voted for. So you’ve got more and more theft accumulating in this system of voluntary action, and when they diverge significantly enough, there has to be a reckoning. The reckoning comes as warfare, or it comes as revolution. So I think again, the destiny of money is to be encrypted.

35:45 And I think gold historically is kind of the analog. Like, we needed, the reason humans chose gold is because it was the thing humans could not pollute with their opinion or political willpower. They could, no matter how much we tried to imprint our political will on gold, we couldn’t change it. So gold became the base layer operating system, or the prime mover for human action, if you will. And now we found something new.

36:10 We’ve created this man-made institution, or this man-made money, in Bitcoin, that no man can corrupt. No man can bend its rules that we ourselves cannot break. So we need we need fair and immutable rules as the bedrock of peaceful cooperation, because if we can twist the rules, that is the best strategy to be able to be the rule maker, is to be able to win in perpetuity. Obviously, right? If I can sit down under the game of Monopoly and I can make the rules, you’re going to lose every single time, 100 of the time.

36:47 You will lose. That’s exactly what the central bank is. It is the rule maker. This gets back to the old Rothschild quote: “Give me the ability to issue a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.” And so before we jump into Bitcoin, can you talk about then this concept of inflation when we’re looking forward into what technically should be a deflationary world?

37:15 And this is something that Jeff Booth talked a lot about. When you pull out your mobile phone, you see the price of everything going to zero, and yet when you look out into the world, the price of everything is going up. And so maybe we just finished with inflation before we jump into the phenomenon of Bitcoin and what it means, and how maybe it is the only thing that can keep us honest as humans? Um, what are your, what are your thoughts? How, how do you explain inflation to people, because most people don’t get it?

37:42 I mean, here in the UK, the government sent out furlough checks, and everybody was celebrating that fact, and I just wanted to say, this is going to hurt you the worst. The people getting those checks, you’re going to pay for this 10, 20, 30 times over, in that inflationary cost. But nobody wants to hear that, and as Jeff said, it’s those people that are in such a crisis mode that they can’t even process that, because it’s not enough money to even live.

38:08 So how do you actually explain inflation to people? Um, first of all, I’d like to say you’re absolutely right. Those people that are most excited about those checks are the ones that are being victimized the most, right? Because, and by definition, because they, the reason they’re the most excited to get a check for pounds or dollars or whatever, is because they depend on that dollar or pound being valuable in the marketplace, right? The more excited you are about getting a check from the government, clearly the, the higher proportion cash is of your net worth, which means you are being victimized the most through inflation.

38:45 When they’re producing more of that, they’re diluting the thing that you depend on to store value across time. But it’s a kind of brilliant deception in a way. So, I’ll throw out some quick numbers here. In the U.S., and you may have to check me on them, because they’re a little bit dated, but it came out to roughly forty six thousand dollars per U.S. household. The, the post-COVID monetary expansion, right?

39:15 So they printed roughly 46 thousand dollars per 130 million U.S. households, I think is roughly the number. The check comes out and it’s around thirty-five hundred dollars per U.S. household. So what’s the delta, right? 46 thousand dollars per U.S. household produced, around, call it four thousand sent to each U.S. household. Where is this 42,000 shortfall?

39:43 Well, of course it’s doled out at the whim of politicians, let’s say, And that is the percentage of a dilution that will ultimately roll downhill to those depending on the fiat currency to store value over time. So you’re absolutely right. It’s those that are most excited that are most victimized. To speak to inflation and deflation, we are trading, innovating to become better, right? To become better at producing things with less effort, to become more productive, which is to say, to become more wealthy.

40:22 These things are actually indistinguishable, right? All of the reason we enjoy all these modern miracles of the marketplace is because we have deeply divided labor. Right? Again, many hands make life work. When you have eight billion people coordinating themselves through money in a globally a global symphony of supply chains.

40:44 All of a sudden, we get a lot of innovation, right? Like how you and I are now talking, now, from around the world through a telecommunication device, like, that’s a miracle. This is magical. This magic comes from the marketplace. It comes from the division of labor, and it becomes more affordable over time because we have competition, free market competition, so producers are competing with one another to satisfy the wants the marketplace demands at a lower and lower price, at a higher and higher quality.

41:16 Competition, economic competition, in this way is a discovery process, right? And that is that is what creates a high quality of life and abundance in the world. So, in a normal market economy, where money is holding its value over time, right, like on a gold standard for instance, we should expect that on average the prices of goods and services would decline as we become better and smarter at making things. You see this in the world of software and hardware, right?

41:51 Over the past 10 or 20 years, because it’s a newer industry, largely independent of the state. The state has not been able to print faster than we’ve been able to get better at making technology, frankly. So you’ve seen a lot of price deflation, right? Prices have declined. Your big-screen TV that used to cost thirty thousand dollars is now two thousand dollars, whatever.

42:15 But when other market spaces are not innovating as quickly, right, and then you could look at something like uh, I like the example of a really high stake. There’s not really a lot of innovation we’re going to be able to come up with to make that cow eat his grass faster, grow faster, go through the process, get the steak to the grocery store. You’re not going to deflate ribeye steak like it’s a pretty, it’s an energy-intensive product, so you can’t really deflate it much more.

42:50 When central banks start to increase currency supplies, you end up with more and more dollars, which are just call options on this stuff, the goods and services, the things that are very energy-intensive, like a rib eye steak. We can’t technologically innovate that process much more. That’s going to go up in price a lot. You know, your Netflix subscription and, you know, your big-screen TV may be coming down in price, but energy-intensive items go up. And so we’ve normalized, and I would argue a lot of this has to do with the corruption of money leading to the corruption of academia, that we’ve, we’ve normalized the concept of inflation that we’ve been sold, this false bill of goods that tells us it’s necessary for a healthy economy, and it’s deceptive enough to work, because if you own a house, it goes up in price nominally.

43:41 If you own stocks, they’re increasing in price, anomaly, and we’re not, again, we’re thinking through dollars but not stopping to think about dollars, right? We’re just saying, if the dollar value goes up, then everything’s good. I have more dollars than I had before. My broker statement says I have more dollars than I had last year. Everything’s great, right?

44:03 But what they’re, what you’re not perceiving is that that unit of economic perception that we call the dollar is being diminished, right? So you’re losing purchasing power, is what economists would say. So what the economy is intended to render is price decreases, price deflation, which is to say more purchasing power to the consumer, more freedom. But central banks harvest this economic surplus that the market is creating through inflation, and then they wrap this theft.

44:37 You know, inflation is just taxation. Taxation is just theft, and if you don’t believe me, and those words sound harsh, read Rothbard. There’s a long literature on this, right? If you don’t consensually negotiate the transaction and the price, then it’s theft. If I come into your house and tell you I’m going to take this from you, and you have no negotiating leverage, what is that?

44:58 That’s theft, right? If I send you a bill that you did not negotiate with me, as the IRS does here in the U.S. every year, that’s theft. So this theft has been normalized and wrapped in this deception of nominally increasing prices, although people’s actual purchasing power is declining. In a way, that’s confounded the world, frankly. And I talk to smart people.

45:26 I talk to smart money guys, and they still think I’ve accepted this, that inflation is necessary for a healthy economy, but it’s obscuring the truth, and the truth is that prices should decline as we get better at making things and smarter in our production processes. Yeah, and I think it is harsh for people to hear when you say taxation is theft, inflation is theft, but it goes back to this concept. I think of the sovereign individual. I know you’re a big fan of that book, and it’s something, one of the most profound phrases that was said to me on this show, was back in 2012 when Graham Hancock was on my show, and he got very angry at one point, and we were talking, I think, about psychedelics, and he said you have sovereignty over your own body.

46:11 You should, you almost by social contract definition you have sovereignty over your mind, over your body. And we didn’t really talk about money, but that’s in there as well, right? That’s woven into the fabric, and a lot of people have spoken this over the hundreds of years, and it’s something you believe is true as well, and all this sleight of hand is trying to take that away from us. But when we actually step back and say, wait a second, what does freedom mean?

46:35 Freedom means I can ingest something, I can think something, and I can have my own money and not have someone take it away from me, tax it, inflate it. And this all comes down to this reminder of a belief that we have, that sovereignty. Maybe you can just give me some of your thoughts on that, because we spent the last couple years here fighting for freedom of speech. I had to fight for free and fair elections this year when I ran for Mayor of London. The police surrounded me and stopped me, and they banned me from campaigning at one point, which again really made me feel like someone was taking my sovereignty away, or someone else’s, from listening to a message.

47:12 So maybe just speak on that, and then I promise we’re going to jump into Bitcoin, because I want to go there as well. Well, so sovereignty, I would define as the authority to act as you see fit. So it’s just me. I mean, it’s almost indistinguishable from agency, right? And it’s something that we all desire.

47:35 No one wants to be under the thumb of anyone else. I think this is a very not only human desire but a life. We want to cooperate. We want to have a relationship. That’s the most important thing in life, but it needs to be voluntary, right?

47:51 You can’t, like, you, this is obvious in a romantic relationship. Like, if someone was trying to, like, force you to date them, like, that doesn’t work, right? There has to be this mutuality of two sovereign people coming together and deciding together that they want to be together. If you try to force any element of that, then the whole thing is disequilibrated and destroyed. So sovereignty, it’s something we commonly relate to countries today, because again, they’ve had this they have actually had the authority to act as they see fit by wielding force.

48:26 But I would argue sovereignty actually inheres within the individual. You know, this is the, this is the Viktor Frankl final human freedom, right? That you always have this gap that no one can confiscate, which is the space between your external circumstances and your internalized reaction. No one can take it. You can be tortured, you can be beaten, or whatever.

48:53 You can always choose, right? You can always choose, and I think that is the generative source of actual sovereignty. And this is closely related to these ancient principles of life, liberty and property as well, right? Something we’ve had. We actually got from London, you know, 13th century Magna Carta.

49:14 I think this idea had been around before then, but it actually was crystallized in the Magna Carta, and that civilization had to be based on these things. And life, liberty and property, you know, very simply, is future, present and past freedom, right? To lose your life is to lose your future. If someone murders you, they take your life, they’ve taken your future away from you. Your liberty is your present freedom.

49:39 If someone imprisons you, then they’ve taken your present freedom, right? And property is a product of combining your life and liberty with features in nature, and storing that freedom in property, right? Though and this is, there’s a nuance here too. People often think that, okay, my house is property, or my stock certificate is property, or whatever, but it’s actually not the thing itself. It’s not the asset.

50:10 Property is the relationship between the owner and asset, right? Such that if someone breaks into your house, you have a certified relationship with that home that you can kick out or use force if necessary to get them out, or call the police, or whatever it may be. And it’s that relationship to the extent that it’s socially acknowledged, right? That is property itself. So you can’t have true sovereignty without property rights, right?

50:43 And this is the bedrock of Western civilization: the pursuit of life, liberty and property. We kind of bastardize it in the U.S. We switch property to pursuit of happiness. But we’ll let that one go. That was like a slavery thing.

50:55 We’ll look at the ancient principle. And another way to think about money and fiat currency inflation is that money is kind of like the highest form of property we have, right? As we said earlier, it’s redeemable for anything else in the marketplace. So it’s, it’s like an apex property, right? If you will.

51:16 When a central bank is producing, or when they’re arbitrarily increasing the supply of fiat currency, they are diluting the property rights, again, of those depending on the dollar to store value across time. So fiat currency inflation is nothing more than a violation of private property rights. There is no, there’s no stimulus being provided. There’s no now, you could argue in the short run it does give a stimulative effect, but it’s generating these long-run consequences, which is you’re basically stealing wealth from those depending on the dollar and allocating it to people.

51:53 So it’s stimulative to those who are receiving stolen proceeds, but it’s damaging to those that are being stolen from. So inflation is basically a violation of property rights, the violation of your past freedoms, and that is destructive, right? It’s destruct, it’s corrosive to the bedrock of Western civilization that we’ve laid out here. And I’ll draw, you brought up the Graham Hancock interview, which I really enjoyed. I listened to that one.

52:25 It’s a damn good one. He is one of the most compelling lecturers I’ve ever heard. There’s something psychedelic here too about Bitcoin, actually. I know we haven’t gotten into it yet, but my view on the state itself is that we have this we have this externalized ritual structure, right? It’s something that we, there’s patterns of action and rituals that we have used over time to kind of protect our borders, you know, and enshrine our culture and trying these principles as well, like life and liberty and property.

53:11 And this is, in my estimation, actually the macrocosmic reflection of something we have internally, that we have as part of our in our neural architecture. We have what’s called the default mode network. And I think Michael Pollan gave a great example about this. These are essentially the patterns of action we have done persistently over time. They just become, in, like, you can actually see the tracks carved in your neural architecture, that they become these habituated patterns of action, if you will.

53:46 And Michael Pollan, in his book, forget the name of the book, How to Change Your Mind. That’s right, How to Change Your Mind. He describes the default mode network as like a ski mountain with these grooves, you know, ski grooves carved into it, and that your thoughts will kind of naturally follow the grooves, your thoughts and your actions. It’s just path of least resistance. But he said the interesting thing about psychedelics, and this is one of the most powerful features, is that they disrupt the default mode network.

54:17 So he described the psychedelic as like a storm rolling in and being a coat of fresh powder onto the mountain, so it covers up all these grooves and allows you to see the whole picture, if you will, and kind of establish new patterns, new habits, new behaviors. And I think that Bitcoin has a lot of psychedelic properties. If you’ve been down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you’ll see people having these personal transformations, and it’s a whole thing. But I think that’s what’s happening here, is that we have Bitcoin as a money, as a digital asset that the state cannot control, coercion cannot bend, rules that are unchangeable, effectively.

55:03 That is disruptive to this externalized default mode network that we call the state. Right? These are just the patterns we’ve sort of adopted from history, and we’re carrying out unthinkingly, often, right? And to the point where it’s self-deceiving. Right, like, I think of Jerome Powell, who’s the chairman of the Federal Reserve here in the U.S.

55:23 He’s on national TV saying there’s absolutely no relationship between monetary policy and wealth disparity, saying that the more money we print has no impact on wealth distribution. Yeah, and, like, I don’t know. I don’t know if he actually believes that, but I know he’s actually wrong. It’s either a bold-faced lie or he’s completely ignorant, and he runs the Federal Reserve, so either outcome is really bad. So I kind of view, and that’s a bit of a cosmic, um, meandering, there, but I think there is a psychedelic property to Bitcoin.

55:59 Now, I think you got something there. You know, I’m going to take that a little further. You know, the early days of this show, we went down the rabbit hole of psychedelics. I had people like Graham Hancock on. We were on the Joe Rogan Experience, who was talking about ayahuasca.

56:12 I had some ceremonies here, and I got to go revisit ayahuasca back in 2018 with Dennis McKenna. Actually went down to Costa Rica, and I had a few ceremonies, and Dennis is Terence’s brother, who was one of the great bards back in the day, talking about, you know, all these concepts, paradigm shifts, and, you know, in a poetic way that he spoke. I highly recommend everybody go listen to those tapes. And one thing that just hit me when you were talking about that is that both Dennis and Terence, they always say that the beautiful thing about the medicine is that you have a direct relationship with it.

56:45 There’s not, um, a professor trying to get in the way. There’s not like a cult leader. There’s not a, um, a religious leader that are trying to get in the way of you and your truth, in what they’re trying to say. So they always say, I’m not trying to tell you what’s going to happen to you, or how to interpret it, or what to do with it. It’s your relationship with the medicine.

57:05 And in a way, Robert, maybe that’s what Bitcoin is. You finally, for maybe one of the first times in your life, and maybe the pirates had it too, but maybe not, is it maybe you’re having a real relationship with money, and it’s not gone through a filter of a government, a central bank, or someone who can manipulate it or tell you a story about it? And maybe for the first time you’re feeling what it’s like, you know, to actually have a value layer that you can exchange.

57:30 And perhaps maybe that’s why it is strangely psychedelic, and maybe personal, some of these journeys. Um, I don’t know. Do I have something there? That’s the first time I’ve ever talked about that. I think you do, and it’s something I’ve touched on in a lot of my work.

57:45 I mentioned this earlier that I’ve come to view money as like the base layer property protocol of human action, or you might say the prime mover of human action. So the character of that base layer becomes reflected in our own character, right? There’s this reciprocity, and this gets back, there’s a long history of this discussion too, of the mutual interaction between the creator and the created. Right? I think Churchill said something like, the buildings we make in turn make us.

58:18 And you could possibly extend that to tools as well, that again, the actions we carry out day to day, and that becomes imprinted in us as procedural knowledge. And we often think that, like, everything comes out of the head, but there’s a lot of intelligence in the body. Right? Like, if you, I don’t know if you ever notice this, but when you’re punching in, like, a key code to your debit card or whatever, you don’t think through the numbers every time, right?

58:44 Especially if you’ve done it a few times. There’s just this intelligence in your hand or arm that just whips out a pattern real quick. So we, this is the, and I’ve talked to some cognitive scientists about this, that’s what consciousness is doing, actually. It’s the aperture of conscious awareness that’s trying to embed these things in procedural knowing, so we don’t have to think about them, which is the same thing as social institutions, by the way. Again, that macro default mode network creates institutions as cognitive expedience, so we don’t need to think about every action we’re doing, especially if we’re doing it repetitively.

59:20 We want to economize it, clearly. And this gets to that old Alfred North Whitehead quote, that I’ll roughly paraphrase, but he said, it’s conventional wisdom to say that we should think before we act, but civilization advances by the opposite, actually. That we advance based on the number of important operations we can carry out without having to think about them. Right, this is how we’re economizing human action. That’s the whole point here.

59:54 So there is a deep connection there, and I like that this idea of having a direct relationship with the medicine. I think it was also McKenna that said all language is a lie. Yeah, you know, we’re using these little pieces of artwork to kind of point towards the truth that is itself ineffable. We can’t describe it. And maybe Bitcoin is, there’s something there, you know, that we’ve approximated sovereignty across history, you know, and it’s been decentralizing over time.

1:00:24 This is important too, that, you know, in ancient Egypt you had the sovereign pharaohs, and everyone else was a subject, pretty much. And then as we’ve progressed our governance systems across time, we now have something like representative democracy, which is the voter is at least much more sovereign than the subjects were under the ancient pharaoh. So sovereignty has been decentralizing over time, and maybe that’s what Bitcoin is. Is the greatest decentralization of sovereignty we’ve ever had, because now you as an individual can have inviolable property right, and this is the crux of it.

1:01:00 It’s that you have a property right that’s independent of the monopoly on violence. It can’t be confiscated, can’t be manipulated, can’t be inflated, which we haven’t talked about yet. But, uh, those are some things that Bitcoin does. Yeah, let’s jump into Bitcoin, but there’s, there’s other layers you mentioned there. I mean, language is the thing that the McKenna brothers bang on all the time, because it’s kind of a, it’s a layer that, uh, it’s also a lot of those, like Pollan said, those tracks down the mountain.

1:01:26 We use language all the time, and language is constructed on the back of a lot of these, you know, oppressive frameworks. We don’t realize it, and we’re in the middle of it. Um, so what is Bitcoin? How do you tell that to people? How do you tell your grandma?

1:01:39 How do you tell people on the streets? And for people maybe that are first learning about Bitcoin, they’re gonna look at you like you’re a crazy man, and that this thing could actually change consciousness, sovereignty. Because if you’re new to this, it’s hard to imagine that something they can’t see or touch has the power. So how do you start that conversation with people? Well, I’ll give you my 30-second elevator pitch for Bitcoin that I think is useful, because you know, I’ve spent five years thinking about this almost exclusively.

1:02:13 And it’s not just that sounds like crazy people, like, what do you mean, you’re thinking about just? But it’s not just Bitcoin. it’s all of this. We’ve been exploring the relationship of man and money and property across history, and how it’s transformed our socioeconomic systems and sovereignty, etc. My 30-second pitch on Bitcoin is that it is simply an insurance policy on central banking or fiat currency, and the more dollars that central banks produce, the more valuable that policy becomes.

1:02:45 So that’s, this is a very simple introduction to Bitcoin. To go a step deeper, we could say Bitcoin is a digital disruptor to gold, as we’ve laid out here. So maybe a step deeper, we could say that Bitcoin is the separation of money and state. So again, as we’ve said throughout all of history, the state has wielded its monopoly on force to monopolize money as a means of economizing their control over human beings. But in Bitcoin we have the first money or proper right that’s independent of the state.

1:03:29 Again, we define property as this relationship between owner and asset. So in the physical world, if you’re going to own your house, you need an enforcer of some kind, right? There has to be some physical enforcement of your relationship to that house. But with Bitcoin, it’s just an informational property right, and the enforcement is done by the Bitcoin mining ecosystem, right? There’s this, there’s a whole microcosm of capitalism called Bitcoin mining, where computers are competing to solve this puzzle uh, allocating the energy expenditure to security of the network.

1:04:08 And it’s really ingenious, actually. So the larger Bitcoin becomes in terms of market capitalization, the more secure its network becomes. So you can think of it kind of like a safe that gets harder to crack the more money you put into it. Something like that. And I would also say that, you know, I, if you people will follow my work to the bottom.

1:04:32 It’s like, again, this is why I go, what is money first? You have to get to those services that money renders to you. That’s the bottom answer to that question, what is money? He’s like, what is money? It’s divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity.

1:04:45 These are the properties you need from a good or asset in the world as money. So in that sense, Bitcoin has virtually perfected the properties of money. So if we look at divisibility, each Bitcoin is divisible into 100 million subunits called sats. The code can be updated in a backwards-compatible way that increases that divisibility. So if that were ever insufficient for economic activity, as if Bitcoin ate all the money in the world, and all of a sudden a loaf of bread would, you know, cost half a sat.

1:05:23 Uh, Bitcoin’s code can be upgraded to accommodate more divisibility. So it’s perfected divisibility, effectively. Bitcoin is just distributed information, so it’s stored everywhere and nowhere, as people like to say. Every node that runs Bitcoin has an entire history of transactions. Like, I don’t, this is the ethos in Bitcoin.

1:05:47 They say, don’t trust, verify. When you run your own node, you don’t need to trust anyone. Talk about trust minimization. Like, you have the whole verified recorded history of the entire blockchain, the whole history of transactions, locally, and so does everyone else. So no one can cheat, right?

1:06:05 It’s all these computers checking each other’s work. And so in that way, I think Bitcoin is perfected durability. Again, durability is just the persistence of money across time. So the analogy I like to use here is something like the Bible. What is the Bible?

1:06:23 Well, it’s a book, not really. Like, you can destroy a single Bible as a single book, but no one can destroy the Bible. Right? Like, it’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s been printed a bazillion times, and it’s distributed information that’s embedded in global human consciousness.

1:06:40 Right? You can’t get rid of that. Bitcoin’s similar, right? It’s just, it’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s in code.

1:06:47 You can back it up in any number of formats, and many, many people do to protect the network. Clearly Bitcoin has perfected portability, because it’s just digital information. It can be moved at the speed of light. Can’t get much faster than that. Recognizability is how easy is it to authenticate the money, to verify.

1:07:09 It is what it is, you know. And with gold, gold got the name sound money, actually, which you’ve probably heard from the sound it would make when you drop gold from a certain height, that would indicate if it was gold or if it was copper plated with gold. So there were these old techniques for saying the authenticity of gold that was related to its recognizability property. And with Bitcoin, again, if you’re running a node, not only can you verify that all the Bitcoin you’re being sent is authentic, we can also audit the total supply.

1:07:44 We’ve never had anything like this. You can just check, make sure there’s only 21 million, and everyone can do the same. So everyone’s automating everyone else. And then finally, you know, as I think we’ve banged on a lot today, scarcity is very important, right? The reliable, predictable nature of the supply of money is really important for its store-of-value function over time.

1:08:10 If there is someone that can violate the supply of money, as central banks do, in perpetuity, then they have every incentive in the world, the most powerful incentive in the world, to do so. So that is what, that was the game-theoretic process that drove us towards gold as the most, the asset most resistant to inflation or debasement. But with Bitcoin, we have something even more radically new, and I argue that you know, Bitcoin itself is clearly an invention.

1:08:39 It’s man-made, but I argue in a lot of my writing that it has led us to the discovery of absolute scarcity. We’ve never had anything like this in history. Everything has been relatively scarce, even with gold. If we could, you know, magically flip a switch and have everyone in the world go out and start mining more gold, we could get a lot more gold above ground much quicker. So even gold is just relatively scarce, to how much labor and energy we’re allocating towards it.

1:09:08 But with Bitcoin, we have the first fixed-supply asset in human history, and that has a fixed, auditable, unchangeable supply of 21 million. So no matter how much energy we allocate towards Bitcoin mining, we cannot change that. And this is the genius of Bitcoin too, is that it has this algorithmic feature called the difficulty estimate. So the harder you try to mine Bitcoin, every two weeks the algorithm basically adapts to how much effort’s being allocated towards this production, such that it always adheres to this fixed and diminishing supply curve towards 21 million.

1:09:46 So it’s, we’ve, this is, I mean, really mind-blowing. It’s almost like we’ve created a living money, right? This money adapts to our action. When we try to mine more of it, it becomes harder to mine. If we try to mine less of it, it becomes easier to mine.

1:10:01 So it’s constantly adapting and improvising itself to our action. I mean, it’s something that’s responsive to human action. So an asset that is actually responding to how we respond to it. It’s a very interesting thing to think about, but the punchline is, with absolute scarcity, that it’s the perfect store of value. Right, if you own a thousand bitcoin, you have a guaranteed 1,000 of a possible 21 million that there will ever be.

1:10:34 There’s, we cannot say that for any asset historically. Never before could you own a guaranteed fraction of the total supply of any asset, including gold, historically. So this makes Bitcoin the ultimate money. Yeah, and, when the more I think about Bitcoin, I look about Bitcoin, and I was talking to Jeff Booth a little bit about this couple weeks ago, is that it’s almost as if we’ve now constructed the ultimate transparent, disciplined form as a species to value each other, and finally we won’t be able to violate our own promises to ourselves.

1:11:11 You know, I think when we first got on here we were talking about Jocko Willink, and Jocko’s famous expression is discipline. It’s all discipline. It’s all, I’m going to show you a picture of me up at 4:34 a.m. doing my workout, because I do it every day, and by showing up every day, I don’t lie to myself and I do what I say I’m going to do. Right? That’s, and ultimately I think humans value other humans by doing what they say they’re going to do.

1:11:34 That’s kind of how we celebrate people that are successful. And yet with our monetary system, we’ve almost always given ourselves that wiggle room, right? We’ve sold ourselves our own lie to kind of make up when things don’t go so well, or give us a little bit of extra, but it’s almost like Bitcoin is this disciplined device, and since it’s transparent, nobody can cheat on what you say you’re going to do. Is that the way you look at this network, as like making sure the best version of ourselves shows up every day, or am I taking that too far?

1:12:05 I love that you bring up the term discipline, because that is exactly what gold was historically. Gold was the financial or free market discipline on every organization, including government. Right? So if a government was being irresponsible with monetary policy, gold would flow out of its country. Right?

1:12:28 People would call its bluff, as we described earlier. And this was a check on government tyranny and oppression. And it’s also the reason central banking has become what it is. They needed to throw off this yoke of discipline so that they could, you know, again, no human being wants to be under anyone’s thumb. That includes a group of human beings called government being under the thumb of gold.

1:12:51 Right? That was the market’s way of exerting force on the government, so the government has invented this intermediate layer called central banking to really throw off this discipline, if you will. So, with Bitcoin we have created an incorruptible money. I think that’s another, like, that’s maybe the bottom of the rabbit hole. There’s a lot of meaning packed into that, and it’s this disciplinary force that imposes almost like a hyper-responsibility on the individual, because we’ve laid out, it gives the individual great sovereignty, great power, but the flip side of all that is responsibility.

1:13:31 You lose your keys, you’re toast. There’s no, you don’t call Bitcoin HQ and get your password reset. There’s none of that. It’s like, it’s a bearer asset. You lose your keys, it’s as if you buried your gold in the backyard and forgot where you buried it.

1:13:42 Right? Yeah. And that we need, we need something to push against. We need something inflexible, right? Just like gravity, or anything like there has to be some invariant for us to press our strategy against and build around.

1:14:01 Otherwise, if we can bend that rule, then whoever can bend it will bend it, right, to favor themselves and disfavor everyone else. And there’s another interesting parallel here, in that I mentioned that absolute scarcity, we’ve never had. Money has, again, intended to be this marketplace emblem for time. We’ve never had any, we’ve never experienced absolute scarcity before Bitcoin, except in time itself. Time is the one thing we cannot produce any more of.

1:14:36 None of us. Right? So money has, we’ve always been trying to map money to time, right? And Bitcoin has successfully achieved that. We have an absolutely scarce money mirroring absolutely scarce time.

1:14:51 So I think this is, like, a radically new super-integral substrate on which we scaffold, a new scaffold, to new echelons of civilization. And this is why I think the digital age, it’s, it’s something radically transformational that we haven’t even conceived of yet. Yeah, I, the next 20 years are going to be probably the most exciting time to be a human, or the most transformational time, you know, exciting for some. And maybe I even say to my students, maybe ever.

1:15:22 You know, will we ever get this type of adoption and change? Even if we’re, you know, flying around in cars one day, like, this could be the quickest adoption of a technology in all of human history, potentially. Although who knows. So far so good. So far, look, though, you’ve been watching this for five years plus.

1:15:41 The last 18 months have gotten really interesting, you know, maybe accelerated by stuff that happened with the pandemic, especially thinking of people like Michael Saylor, who I know you’ve had 17 different conversations with so far. You know, it’s, it’s gotten people to look at this space who normally wouldn’t, and it’s got a lot of people talking about it, thinking about it. What’s been notable for you in this past 18 months, you know, but, and it could include someone like Michael Saylor now, with, I think, seven billion dollars of Bitcoin on a publicly traded balance sheet, which is again mind-boggling.

1:16:17 And you’ve talked to a lot of people. Jordan Peterson, he was right here in my studio, actually, talking about ayahuasca with me before I went down to Costa Rica to see Dennis McKenna, and he said, “Brian, look out. He said it’s got tremendous potential, but it’s also very scary.” You had a conversation with Jordan about Bitcoin. What are you seeing from some of those big thinkers, and does it surprise you what they’re saying?

1:16:42 Or not? Well, I’ll say this, because part of the Bitcoin rabbit hole, as you get into this whole history of statism that we’ve covered, right, and how corrupt and awful it’s been. And as someone that has kind of been beating this drum for years now, it’s like, guys, the state model doesn’t work. You know, it does, it fails, and it’s not, it’s not good for humanity. I have still been kind of just dumbfounded how fast all this has changed post-March 2020, right?

1:17:17 Like, I was saying to you offline before, that I was in Los Angeles before it was a great and free place, an enjoyable place to live, and then all of a sudden it’s like a communist state of California overnight. So the quickness with which things have changed culturally and governmentally has been astounding to me, even as someone that’s seen it coming, quote unquote, right? So I do think that COVID is the inflection point into the digital age, the point of absolute acceleration.

1:17:49 You see guys like Michael Saylor, who, you know, he’s sitting on 500 million dollars, not really thinking about it too much. And then all of a sudden COVID hits, central banks are you know, expanding supplies like mad, and he’s, he’s pushed into thinking about it, right? Like, what am I going to do with all this money? I’ve got to store it somewhere. And that gets him into the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

1:18:10 So I wonder, you know, he’s, he’s just a tremendous mind. I mean, you talk to him, he’s just unbelievable. I wonder how many more guys like that are coming, because they have to be. You know, they have, there are a lot of rich guys and girls out there, and they’re gonna wake up to this. I sent this out recently, that it’s a very simplified view of Bitcoin: productivity creates wealth.

1:18:44 Taxation reduces productivity. If you’re getting robbed, you have less stuff than you would otherwise. Inflation is taxation. Bitcoin is the only money in human history with a zero percent terminal inflation rate. So if you are a human and you prefer abundance to poverty, then at some point you will be buying Bitcoin.

1:19:09 That is my position and belief, and that’s why I think Bitcoin does globalize. So, and then with Peterson, you know, I, he is a bit of an idol of mine. I think he’s, you know, he’s one of the greatest living thinkers and philosophers in the world. And actually digging into his work specifically, his book Maps of Meaning, he wrote a lot about alchemy. You know, Carl Jung, which he, I think, got mostly from Carl Jung, but you know, the aim of alchemy, we joke, we think that, oh, it’s, they wanted to turn lead to gold.

1:19:47 Those morons. Right? But it’s a lot more sophisticated than that, and alchemy was something that was practiced all over the world for thousands of years. And you know, we alluded to this earlier, where there’s this mutuality between creator and created, that the alchemist actually thought they had to purify themselves morally to invent things that were useful. So there was this reciprocity between man and creation.

1:20:13 And alchemy was, it was kind of like proto-science in a way. It forked away from the church and became what would later become the scientific method. There’s a lot. It’s the ultimate rabbit hole, so I won’t go into it too deeply, but the aim of alchemy was to produce the lapis philosopher, which was the philosopher’s stone, and one of the lines in Peterson’s book described it as the substance, the incorruptible substance that would serve as an antidote to tyranny in the world.

1:20:48 And so I find it profoundly interesting that we have finally developed an incorruptible substance with an incorruptible fixed supply of 21 million, and its great promise and use case is the separation of money and state and the destruction of the economic tyranny inflicted by central banking. And it’s disruptive to gold, right? It’s like we thought that we’re trying to make gold out of blood, but it was actually the lapis floss form. The process wasn’t the thing.

1:21:18 It was the process, and that’s all Bitcoin is. It’s just a process. It’s an incorruptible process. So the alchemists were finally successful. Perhaps.

1:21:28 Welcome to the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And it’s fascinating, because you know, we’ve been teaching this stuff for about six months, and, um, Robert, I get people showing up in my classes that, you know, are ayahuasca people, they’re human movement people, they’re meditation people, and they’re like, Brian, I’m not a finance person, but I know I need to be here. I know something is happening here that’s more than just about my IRA, or more about me making some money.

1:21:53 People really are feeling this now, and they’re getting it now, and it’s a, it’s a bold statement. You said that, you know, COVID really was that acceleration point, and it really was. And listen to Michael Saylor, and he said, that’s the moment where I got to see, I got, I got to see a shift that parallaxes, you would say, where, wait a second, that’s not what I thought it was, and I have a fiduciary duty to invest my treasury in something that’s the best for my shareholders.

1:22:18 And guess what? It’s not money. It’s not, it’s not dollars, and so he went down and made this bold move that’s turned into a phenomenon in itself, really. And again, like you said, how many other highly intelligent people or people sitting gatekeepers, maybe what I would say, or wealthy people, that have yet to join us in this conversation? And like you said, Michael brings a lot, with his brain power, to this, to this table.

1:22:44 Imagine, you know, another thousand different versions of Michael’s, from, you know, artists to creators, to all that, sticking their brain power in. I mean, it’s, it’s hard to imagine in a space that’s already hard to imagine. Um, what, what is the state of the art now of this space? Because, man, every six months, it seems to really be changing. Are you more optimistic than ever?

1:23:07 Are you now seeing government be concerned about this? Is this something that you see? The next two years, are they all positive, or the things that we need to really look out for? Well, times of great change are inherently turbulent, so I think there’s a lot of unpredictable flow over the next few years as we transition, you know, into the digital age. But I think there’s a very positive outcome here, and again, I just try to think in terms of incentives.

1:23:43 And Bitcoin itself, you know, for all of this complexity and rabbit hole that we’ve been down, it can also be considered or conceived of relatively simply, in that it’s money wrapped in military-grade encryption, designed to survive, optimized to survive any attack. Right? That’s literally all it is. That’s its only function, really. Like, just survive, create a new block every 10 minutes, adhere to a supply cap of 21 million.

1:24:14 That’s it. Uh, it’s very basic. It’s very stripped down. Like, you know, it’s open source, so you, there’s no attack vector on it. Everyone can see it from every angle.

1:24:24 It’d be like trying to hack the rules of chess, or something. You know, everyone knows the rules, so you can’t twist them or change them. And so I’m very optimistic about nation states actually bending their strategy to accommodate Bitcoin, once they realize they can’t bend Bitcoin. Right? It’s like, what is the invariant?

1:24:46 And the way to think about this is, every strategy is adapting itself to the invariance or the constants that it faces. That’s what gold was. Right? Gold was the most invariant economic substance, so we all, nation states included, bent our strategy around gold. Well, now we’ve perfected monetary invariance or constancy in this 21 million supply.

1:25:10 Bitcoin. So I think that, just following incentives, the complex of nation states and central banks who hold a monopoly on currency production will act in their best interest and just print money to buy Bitcoin. Right, there’s, there’s this game-theoretic element, where, like, once one nation state starts buying it and starts to get, starts to benefit from increases in purchasing power, then all of a sudden every other nation state is looking at their situation and running the same calculus.

1:25:42 By the way, Bitcoin, the other crazy thing about this: it’s the only asset in the world, I guess you could maybe argue gold here as well, that the more valuable it becomes, the more desirous it is. It’s less risky. It’s more likely to succeed, actually. The higher is market capitalization, whereas if a stock goes up in price, you know, it’s supply and demand, you’d be less likely to want to buy the stock because it’s higher price, but with money it’s different, because if it succeeds, all the purchasing power goes there over time.

1:26:17 So I’m very optimistic that nation states will start to produce this currency that cost them nothing, right? To produce fiat currency. This is an important point. The U.S. dollar is a centralized database at the Federal Reserve. It’s an SQL database maintained physically inside of the Fed.

1:26:38 If they want to increase dollar supply, it’s just control-enter, right? There’s, there’s no effort, basically no cost. It seems logical to me that the currency that can be produced ad infinitum will be produced at infinite to acquire the money that is strictly finite. Right, you have every incentive in the world to do so, especially once you realize you can’t stop the money, you can’t stop this money, it just survives. So what do I have to do?

1:27:06 I guess I just have to buy some. All right, even, even if nothing more, as an insurance policy against its own, against its success. Right, if you own a central bank and you think Bitcoin has a one percent chance of success, but its success is an existential threat to your business model, well, then you might as well put one percent of your assets into Bitcoin, that way you’d be even money, even if your business model is disrupted. So this calculus I’m very, very bullish on, and I think my longer-term view is, as Bitcoin continues to monetize and nation states continue to acquire it, it just dissolves these power structures of the state that we’ve become.

1:27:46 So I don’t know. I don’t expect a violent cataclysm of any sort. Everything I’m saying here with a grain of salt, because who freaking knows? Right? We have no freaking, there’s no historical corollary for this.

1:28:04 But I think if it’s just Bitcoin monetizing absent any geopolitical conflicts, which is unpredictable and possible, I think it just dissolves these power structures, and we move into this new form of of sovereign individuality as being kind of the cornerstone of civilization, which is, you know, it’s the libertarian dream, frankly. Just to have free, uninhibited trade and actual liberty in the world. Yeah, those are some really interesting scenarios. I mean, obviously Michael Saylor is trying to now issue as much debt as possible so he can buy as much Bitcoin as possible.

1:28:41 I mean, he told me that was a strategy, and it is. He’s continuing to buy Bitcoin. He’s now got over a hundred thousand, I think, seven billion. He suggested you mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin, uh, is what he said, or sell your house and buy Bitcoin, or mortgage it. And when I asked him, checked him on that, he said, “Yeah, Brian, I think that’s the best decision to make.”

1:28:58 And so it’s interesting. Some at some point someone from the federal government will probably wake up and make the same conclusion, maybe, which means buy it. And you’re right, maybe it is like a dissolving. Maybe you compare it to, say, media, where it used to be a few newspapers and a few television channels, and because of the internet and YouTube, etc., it started to dissolve, and maybe it continues to dissolve, to where there’s fewer gatekeepers, and now maybe what the poachers become gamekeepers.

1:29:25 And now maybe there is this libertarian society that’s possible, and there are bumps along the way, but it’s that power structure is definitely dissolving slowly. So, it’d be interesting if and when, and if we’ll even know, if something like the Fed starts to buy Bitcoin, because that would be interesting. It would be, it could trigger the author Saifedean Ammous, who wrote The Bitcoin Standard, calls this a reverse bank run, that if it is disclosed that a central bank is acquiring Bitcoin, it will trigger this fever pitch for other central banks to do the same.

1:30:04 And again, they all have access to currency production, so they just print currency and buy Bitcoin. That could be the end game for what Bitcoiners call hyper-Bitcoinization, which is kind of like, it’s like an anti-hyperinflation. Right? Instead of the currency depreciating to worthlessness, this is Bitcoin appreciating to global money. That sounds a little scary, too.

1:30:26 That sounds like it ends kind of bad, too. Well, I mean, the other thing we didn’t get into this a lot today, but Bitcoin radically disincentivizes violence because it can’t be stolen. Again, the rules can’t be changed, so there’s no incentive to try and monopolize. You can’t monopolize Bitcoin, so there’s no incentive to try to do so. It’s really expensive to steal, if not impossible to steal, if you custody it properly.

1:30:55 So when Hitler invaded Poland, for instance, the first place he went was the central bank to raid their gold, right, because war is expensive, and you need the gold to pay your bills. Well, if we’re on a Bitcoin standard, Hitler raids the Polish central bank, there’s nothing there. So there’s no carrot for warfare. Even so, although this is where I’m kind of, I have dissonance, right? I think there’s a lot of turbulence in transition, but the longer-term outcome is violence, coercion, compulsion radically disincentivized, and then strategy becomes the only wealth acquisition strategy.

1:31:29 Then becomes productive, long-term, fruitful cooperation. Yeah, and again, we’ll probably have to have you back for another conversation, because like you said, that whole violence angle is very interesting, you know, because like you said, the state kind of introduces commerce without violence, and yet then there still is non-approved state commerce with violence. That’s what the whole show The Wire was about, in my opinion. I found myself thinking about The Wire when I was preparing for this, Robert, somehow, because you kind of have humanity with its own desires, right?

1:32:02 Maybe wanting something for nothing. Maybe that’s a drug. Maybe that’s something. You’ve got the state saying you can do these certain things, and then you have reality where the drug dealers are providing the humans what they want, and it all goes around in an endless circle that the show kind of typified. And strangely, this fiat currency system, right?

1:32:19 And so, yeah, if you start introducing some other structures, some transparencies, you know, does that take out some of these patterns, the violence? You know, you could see how it could. Yeah, I think it’s all about incentives. I think the way I’ve described it is that incentives are the soil from which human action springs. So if you change the incentives, you change the outcomes, frankly.

1:32:42 And I haven’t seen The Wire, but does sound like there’d be some interesting parallels there, because fiat currency is a hell of a drug, man. It’s confusing people and destroyed civilizations many, many times. You get really high on it in the beginning, right? Everyone’s just having a spending spree party, and then there’s this inevitable reckoning to reality, like the hangover or rehab or something. So yeah, that’s, that’s your best line of the show.

1:33:11 It’s a hell of a drug. A couple final things before we close. DeFi. D5 is, you know, a term that’s roughly used for kind of everything not Bitcoin in the blockchain space, and honestly, like, on May 8th I got the news that I wasn’t going to be the next mayor of London, and we kind of went heavy into this space, because it reminded me of things we used to do on Wall Street, but now it was done in this decentralized way. And again, we probably don’t have two hours to get into the benefits or lack thereof of Ethereum and all these other blockchains.

1:33:40 And again, I talked to Michael Saylor about this, and Michael said, “I like Bitcoin because it has low aspirations.” You know, and he’s got a great point. Like you said, it’s simple. It does this job really well. Low attack vectors, and guess what?

1:33:52 The FCC is going to leave it alone for now, and I get it, but it’s also hard not to recognize some of the incredible innovations that happen. And even Michael said there’s a place for digital currency as opposed to digital property, with the stablecoins, etc., which, you know, have programmable aspects without getting into it massively. What is your take on what’s becoming a rapidly larger chunk of the market cap of crypto assets, which is non-Bitcoin assets?

1:34:21 What’s your take on that? Yeah, you know, this has historical precedence that in bull runs these alternative crypto assets tend to even outperform Bitcoin, but then in the bear markets most of them get wiped out. So my big issue with DeFi is the D, right? This is decentralized finance. In my estimation, Bitcoin is the only crypto asset truly centered on the principles of decentralization.

1:34:50 It has provable decentralization. People have tried to hijack its rules, change its code, you know, the blocksize wars of 2017, Bitcoin has survived and thrived, bring out all attacks. Whereas every other crypto project does have a central point of at least influence, if not manipulation. So I don’t think there is decentralized anything other than Bitcoin. But that’s not to say it can’t be achieved, and this is something I’m thinking about a lot lately is how do you quantify decentralization?

1:35:27 Balaji is another guy, I don’t know if you’ve had him on, but he’s brilliant. He’s written a piece on this. Okay, on how you quantify decentralization that I think is useful, and I reserve my opinion, right? Again, I think I hold 100 Bitcoin in terms of crypto assets. I think it’s the best risk-adjusted bet in the world.

1:35:50 But that’s, but even Bitcoin started out as a centralized idea in Satoshi’s mind, right? And it became decentralized over time. So I reserve my opinion to see if any of these other projects can cross the chasm, but for now I’m just sticking to Bitcoin. Yeah, there’s a ton of innovation happening there, and I think that’s all good. I had Tyler Spaulding here on Friday, who bought Bitcoin back in Jan 2011 and runs Flexa Networks, which is the AMP token, and he said, Brian, Ethereum is probably the single biggest driver of Bitcoin value.

1:36:24 And he said, like it or not, you have to, it’s, it was a great way to show the world that Bitcoin was something special, and without it it might not be where it is today. And I thought it was an interesting point to make, that my Maxilla’s friends like Max Keiser, who I know is watching this, are gonna, you know, they’re gonna squirm when he says things like that. But again, it’s a good point, and there is some incredible innovation going on in these pieces.

1:36:49 As far as the survival, I, I respect what you’re saying about that, as far as opinion, but I must say the innovation, and also some of the breaking down of these oligarchies in the banking industry, that’s being challenged. I see a lot of good coming from there as well. In the DeFi space, and it’s changing so fast that there are just like new ideas, new protocols happening as well every month, and I know that also happens in bull runs, and that also happened with banks issuing their own currencies back in the United States’ early history.

1:37:20 So I know there are rabbit holes there as well, and again, we’ll probably have to have further discussions about that. Final question: what’s next for you, Robert? I mean, you know, next few years for you? I mean, you’re opening a lot of people’s minds to these ideas. And you know, ideas are the key to everything.

1:37:39 You know, that’s how the memes are created, which are like genes, which move these things forward. What’s next for you? What’s important? Yeah, I’ve, you know, 2020 was such a water here for so many people in so many ways. And for me, I was operating a crypto asset hedge fund, and I just woke up one day and was like, our benchmark is Bitcoin.

1:38:04 I’m like, what am I doing trying to outperform Bitcoin? It’s like, I spend all my waking hours trying to outperform this thing, and it’s the best. Before, it’s really hard for Bitcoin, by the way. And I think partially from my interaction with Saylor, so a couple of things, my writing, am I talking about Bitcoin was becoming popular. Saylor reached out to me at this kind of opportune time.

1:38:27 I’m like, I just, I’m gonna start talking to people on a show or podcast, just as like a side project, and so he, he agreed to be my first guest. That was a huge success. The Saylor series is I get blown up like every day, dozens of messages from people saying how transformational that’s been. I think, but I think Saylor has orange build more people than any other human. Yeah, yeah.

1:38:50 So I mean, he’s really impressive. And then this quote is what really was the nail in the coffin for me was, uh, from H.G. Wells: civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m like, this is a real this is the game we’re playing, playing for the future of civilization.

1:39:13 Either we get this, you know, total Orwellian status dystopia, China social credit score, central bank digital currency tyranny model that’s being exported right now, by the way. You know, it’s countries around the world are trying to get this in place, because it’s very efficient. It’s a very good way to get something for nothing in terms of tax revenue. Or we can educate people about life, liberty, the principle of inviolable property that Bitcoin actually represents an implementation of.

1:39:48 Right? We’ve grabbed this principle we’ve been talking about for almost a thousand years, and we pulled it down into the real world, and we’ve implemented it, so now we can build a libertarian, laissez-faire, freedom-maximized civilization on top of Bitcoin. And so my inflection point was like, okay, I can either contribute to that or I can sit here and try to outperform Bitcoin. And it was just a wake-up call, so I’m focused on the What Is Money show, as I said, trying to accept that question with people.

1:40:20 I’ve launched a circular, which is like a newsletter. It’s called the Freedom Analytics. I don’t like calling it a newsletter, because I never talk about the news. I’m writing about all these topics, you know, macroeconomics, history, philosophy, government, money, etc., and I think I also want to start part of this transformation. I think that people, part of Bitcoin is it gives you a why.

1:40:47 It’s a really big why. All right, so myself, I had been, you know, quote unquote successful financially, but I was, my why was being diminished, actually. I was less lively about being alive, let’s say, and Bitcoin just revivified me, you know? It gives me this real deep why. I wake up now charged up to read, write, talk about this subject, educate people.

1:41:16 I’m getting bombarded with messages about how helpful it’s been for people, so I’m just I hope to deliver that experience to others, and I think it’s going to come in the form of live events, you know, we’re doing kind of audio, audio video media, and the podcast. I’m doing written media with the Freedom Analytics. The next thing would be to do some kinetic media in person, bringing people together that that are successful and resourceful and looking for a deeper why in life.

1:41:45 So I think I think that’s the direction I’m going. That’s super exciting. You know, good for you for being able to step back from, you know, those hedge fund days, because it’s very hard, uh, it’s very hard, because you were swallowed up, and somehow subconscious fiat money narrative in there as well. You know, that’s right. It’s hard to get away from.

1:42:05 I, I got lucky enough to break away from that 10 years ago as well, and start pursuing something that didn’t necessarily make sense, you know, and, uh, but it was pulling me there, and, and again, we started kind of democratizing information and putting these ideas out there, which a lot of people have, a lot of paradigm shifts. And then recently we’ve been in this space, and first of all, I have to agree, like, the y is everybody in this space has it. There’s so much energy, there’s so much love here.

1:42:36 I mean, this, and even Jeff Booth said that he was a mild man or Canadian. First of all, he said Bitcoin could save humanity, which is not something Jeff would say lightly. As you know, Antigone said, Brian, there’s a lot of love in this community, which is strangely a message that’s always come from some of our greatest guests on London Real. At the end of the day they say, if this is about, uh, we are all one, and this is about looking out for the greater humanity.

1:42:59 That’s what they all say after two and a half hours in the chair, whether you’re a bodybuilder or an activist or an author. You know, they all say that. It’s uncanny. Robert, what they say, and in some way, Bitcoin is love too. You know, it is, it’s we are all one type of stuff.

1:43:16 So yeah, we’re, we’re enjoying this part of the journey in a huge way. Yeah, I, I love that you said that, and part of what love is, is this inspiration to give something for another, and that’s exactly what Satoshi gave the world, right? This is the guy, guy, girl, team, whatever. I think he has the greatest liquid net worth in the world right now, so he’s probably worth 60 billion, liquid, hasn’t touched it, and he gave humanity this gift that could unlock the next level of civilization.

1:43:53 So there’s definitely an aspect of love to it. It was that just the luckiest thing that ever happened to humanity, because if, if he hadn’t have done that, you can’t argue that it would have happened otherwise. In the last 13 years, happy birthday Bitcoin this weekend, but would it have happened? It’s not obvious that it would have, because a lot of things had to come into place to get it to where it is now. To be truly decentralized, I think he had to disappear, you know, otherwise he, Satoshi, is the mythological bedrock on which Bitcoin is built.

1:44:25 And we know that mythological relationship and money is very close, right? Pull the dollar out of your pocket, and, God, we trust. You know, it’s this instrument of faith, this contract with the future. So I, I do think had there been some singularly identifiable individual to denigrate, attack, smear, coerce, it would have jeopardized the decentralization of Bitcoin. So Satoshi really gave humanity a good gift.

1:44:57 It’s all so strange. I think it’s proof we’re living in a simulation, and, uh, it’s a lot of fun. So I’m sure Elon would approve. Robert, I really appreciate the time, as the sun comes up in Hawaii. That’s what we’re working with here.

1:45:09 So, Robert, appreciate that. How can people get your podcast on audio, YouTube, and then how can they get the circular? Yeah, so I think the first, easiest place to go is my Twitter page, uh, which is at Breedlove22. Again, my last name is Breedlove, that’s B-R-E-D-L-O-V-E. There’s links to the show and the Freedom Analytics there.

1:45:31 The show is what is moneypodcast.com, uh, and the, uh, Freedom Analytics is on Substack, so there’s links to all that on my Twitter page, and the podcast is also on YouTube. Great stuff. We’ll have links below here as well, and in all our show notes. Robert, appreciate that. I hope we can have another one of these sometime in the next few months.

1:45:52 Appreciate all, appreciate all the content. Like I said, the Saylor series is epic. You’re 17 in right now? 17. Yeah, we’re toying around with the idea of maybe stopping at 21.

1:46:04 So that’s a nice touch. You’ve had some great conversations with people out there, from Lex Fridman to Tom Bilyeu, to a bunch of people we’ve had on, Jordan Peterson on the show. I highly recommend people watch those as well. They’re really good, and, um, yeah, just enjoying you being in this space. So thank you very much.

1:46:22 Until next time, keep doing what you do. Thank you, Brian. As a long-term fan, it’s an honor to be here, so thank you so much. Awesome, thank you so much. All right, everybody, follow this man.

1:46:31 We appreciate you being here, and we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care. Bye.