-
Unknown A
How is it that all the economic reports make it seem like the economy is red hot and yet people feel like they're in a recession? What's going on?
-
Unknown B
Well, all those metrics are baked. You know, they reverse engineer all of them. We've talked about the inflation metric before, cpi, the Consumer Price Index. This is a basket of goods that change in price over time. This metric has been revised, I think I want to say, three to four times in the past 30 or 40 years. And a metric that is designed to measure price changes, the government actually decides to exclude anything, any particular commodity that's in that basket whose price changes too quickly. So if food or energy changes too quickly and causes inflation rate to appear too high, they exclude food or energy to manage that number toward what they want it to be. So it's basically a bullshit metric. If I may be so frank. I think the unemployment numbers are similar. I'm not as familiar with them, but as I understand it, they've been revised like 12 months after the fact.
-
Unknown B
So they'll issue a certain number a month later and say, you know, oh, unemployment was 8% last month. And then 12 months later they will say, oh, actually our numbers were wrong, we need to revise this upward to 12% or whatever. Of course it makes headlines and has an impact when it's released in a timely manner. But when you mention the, the amendment 12 months later, it doesn't make quite so much of a splash. Also with the unemployment numbers, we have this thing called labor workforce participation rate. Well, now there's people that just at a certain point of not looking for a job, they just exclude them from the calculation. So it's people that are actively looking for a job are considered in that calculation of unemployment and of certain, you know, if you haven't had a job in six months, someone could fact check me on the exact amount.
-
Unknown B
They just exclude that those individuals from the calculation itself. So that's another way of managing the unemployment numbers to suit the narrative that any particular administration is trying to push.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Why do they manipulate cpi? Why do you think the government wants to make a narrative when people are still encountering reality?
-
Unknown B
Hmm. Well, I think there's a lot of theatricality that occurs inside of fiat statism. Right. It's the whole like the meme where the dog is sitting in the room and everything's burning down and he just says, this is fine, this is fine, this is fine.
-
Unknown A
Do you think they're just trying to control the perception?
-
Unknown B
Well, I think you, what you don't want is Social revolt. I mean, that's the, you know, people are going to feel the pain, but then all of a sudden you're also telling them, oh, you know, your feelings are valid. And inflation is running at 15% as measured in 1980 terms. So you're getting milked at 15% a year, which means your purchasing power is getting cut in half every seven years. That's a bit more painful, I guess, for people. Whereas if you just do the same thing to them but tell them inflation's 3% or 4%, everything's fine, you're just pretending, basically. And I guess that does have kind of an analgesic effect on people. Just the belief that maybe things aren't quite so bad. Sort of reminds me of censorship a little bit where, you know, if enough people get censored, individuals start to self censor.
-
Unknown B
So creating this illusion that, you know, things are okay, then you individual, if you're feeling the pain, you might be more hesitant to speak up. If, if the guy on TV is telling you, oh no, inflation's low and numbers are up, you might be like, well, what's wrong with me? I can't find the job, I can't get ahead, I can't make ends meet, rather than standing in unity with people saying, hey, this is actually a broken social system or social contract and we need to do something about it. So that would be, I mean, that's my hypothesis, but in general, really, the entire idea of trying to manage an economy is just a bunk metaphor. It does not work. Right. An economy is a complex adaptive system. Central banks often refer to their policy tools as levers, right? Like, oh, if unemployment is up, what is it they try to do here?
-
Unknown B
If inflation is high, then they will increase unemployment to reduce inflation, I think is the one that they use. And so they act as if this complex adaptive system, they metaphorize it as if it is a machine that they can simply press buttons and pull levers and cause inflation rates to change and unemployment rates to change. And I think that is ultimately as hubristic and silly as a meteorologist trying to control the weather. Right? We don't understand what an individual human being will do. You can't say with certainty what an individual human being will do from moment to moment across time. Right. Without getting into the argument about free will, it's not predictable, at least. Right. No one can predict on this earth what words you're about to say next. That's up to you and your own psychology. What in the world makes us think if we can't Predict one human psychology, what they're going to do moment to moment.
-
Unknown B
Why could we possibly predict what 8.5 billion human psychologies involved interconnected in a global marketplace, competing and cooperating, innovating. Why do we think anyone could predict the outcome of that complex adaptive system? And yet that's what central banks do when they try to manage or steer the economy. It's just, it's silly. It's an antiquated, outdated, industrial age mentality and it doesn't apply to the reality of complex adaptive systems.
-
Unknown A
So you said that part of the reason they do this is they want to avoid social revolt. Do you think that Trump getting elected is biased? That tame version of a social revolt?
-
Unknown B
You know, it seems like it's a populist movement to some extent, right? People are feeling the pain. And look, I'm, I'm the worst guy to talk to about politics in general, but just as an observer, it seems as though the Democratic Party was really trying to overplay the race card. And, you know, everyone needs to vote based on race. And people, People just started to wise up to that and say, you know what, that doesn't actually make sense. It appears to me it's always, it's not red versus blue, it's the state versus you, basically. And so the Democrats overplaying this divisiveness card, while at the same time, you know, we expanded the money supply 40% in four years, right? So all of that price, that monetary inflation created, price inflation that was dumped on people, that was a tax, basically the invisible shadow tax of inflation that we've talked about a lot.
-
Unknown B
People have been coping with that pain and suffering with that pain, while at the same time you had, you know, Joe Biden was going on the super bowl doing a commercial saying, oh, I love ice cream. And you know, shame on ice cream producers for increasing the prices of ice cream. We're going to make sure that these greedy capitalist ice cream producers don't increase the price of ice cream anymore. You also heard Kamala flirting with the idea of price controls. Like, how insane is that? This is Soviet style statism, basically, right? And just to be real clear on this, prices are data packets about consumer preference. To try and regulate prices is like trying to regulate consumer preference. You can't pass a law to tell people what they want. Right? A price is the economic expression of what people want. So to try and regulate prices, it only does one of two things.
-
Unknown B
It creates surpluses or shortages. Right. The market does not clear where supply and demand meet as an honest pricing System does, and it creates distortions that ultimately harm people. Right. This is why millions of people starved in Soviet Russia, etc. So I think all of that nonsense was basically dawning on people. Like, I think people have a good detector, even if they don't understand the complexities of how a price system works and money printing manipulates the price signal and all of that. I think people just start to see through the bullshit a little bit. And look, I'm no fan of any politician, frankly. I'll be very interested to see how many promises Trump has made actually get kept. However, at least in his rhetoric, he was much more honest seeming right, that he was talking about actual pain and actual problems that people were feeling, whereas the Democratic Party was taking this approach of everything's fine and what's.
-
Unknown B
Whatever is broken will regulate prices and crazy shit like that. So I think at the end of the day, Team Red was just a little bit more in touch with truth, and that's why they won.
-
Unknown A
It's interesting. So the concept of price gouging, I think, feels relatively intuitive to people that, yeah, somebody should control that there should be an upper limit. People were very happy when Scarelli, I forget his name, but the guy that bought the drug and then raised the price like a gazillion percent ends up going to prison. People, I think, feel like, yeah, there should be some sort of cap on some of these things. Yet the Democrats got voted out of power. And even here in California, there was a referendum for rent control and that failed.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So somebody somewhere is getting the message. Why? Why didn't the Soviet system work? Like, why don't price controls simply calm businesses down from price gouging?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. So basically you think about capitalism as like a decentralized computing system, Right. Where people are making decisions about how best to allocate capital to satisfy customer wants. Better, faster, cheaper. But all of that computing system is based on the data input of the price, Right. It's what other people are doing where supply and demand are meeting in every market. It's telling entrepreneurs what to do. Basically, it's signaling to them how much consumers want something and how much what supplies are available. So, for instance, if there's an earthquake in Chile, I've probably used this example before, but it's a pretty simple one. And a copper mine collapses, right? And let's say the flow of copper to the market now from that mine ceases. All the people interacting with copper in the world, Right. Whether you're a consumer or a producer, they don't need to even know about the copper mine collapsing.
-
Unknown B
They don't need to know the story. They don't need to know the background, the history, nothing. All they need to see is, okay, supply of copper coming to market slowed down, so therefore price went up. All they need to see is the price of copper went up. As a producer of copper, I'm now incentivized to produce more. And because the price is higher, maybe there's new methods of production that weren't economically feasible before, that all of a sudden are, right? So I'm incentivized to alleviate that shortage by producing more copper and bringing it to market. And on the other side, consumers, in the face of that price increase, are incentivized to consume less or use substitutes or delay consumption, right? So consumers are incentivized to buy less, producers are incentivized to produce more. This is how markets rectify problems, basically. And so it's that complex adaptive computational system that is only possible with the individual ownership of the means of production, which is to say individual private property rights.
-
Unknown B
Socialism violates private property rights, right? It steals from people and allocates capital arbitrarily according to bureaucratic whim. And so in Soviet Russia, they had pricing czars, right? They were making like 10,000 pricing decisions a day, right? A guy sitting in a tower deciding what a nail cost. But he's not. The nature of knowledge itself is he has no knowledge about what entrepreneurs actually need, right? He doesn't know the supply of nails at any given point. He doesn't know the demand for them. He's just really taking a shot in the dark. And actually, a lot of those pricing are a lot. There's a strong argument to be made that it only lasted as long as it did because they were able to copy prices from the free markets in the US all right? They could peg to what the free market data was generating on certain goods.
-
Unknown B
So it's just a matter of decentralized compute versus centralized compute. And if you consider that each person has a finite bandwidth, their awareness, their attention span, like only so much data can flow through your eyes and ears and head at any one time. You're talking about in a decentralized competitive free market, you have the bandwidth of everyone, right? Feeding that system. So it's whatever the data throughput of an individual market participant is times all market actors. That's your total data throughput for that decentralized computing system. In a centralized computing system, you only have the throughput of the bureaucrats, the pricing czars, whoever's making the decisions, everyone else is just following the orders. Not to mention all the data has to go be passed up from the market actors into the central bureaucracy. The decision has to be made, then it has to be passed back out into the productive actors and then they have to execute against that plan and that has to be enforced because none of these people are following their self interest.
-
Unknown B
So the entire thing is just very inefficient. It leads to the misallocation of capital, which basically means capital that's being allocated inconsistently with the wishes of consumers that have the power and wherewithal to buy something. So it, it distorts reality basically and it destroys civilizations. And what happened by the end of Soviet Russia, it wasn't even an economy anymore. It was a dis economy. You have to check the exact numbers. But I want to say they brought in like, you know, $90 billion of inputs annually and they had $30 billion of outputs. It was a dis economy. Right. An economy is when more, less inputs come in than outputs go out. You're increasing the value of things. And Soviet Russia was the opposite. You know, most people were employed as narcs on one another. They were telling on each other. You get all of these non productive paper pushing jobs inside of the state bureaucracy.
-
Unknown B
And as the old saying went, you know, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. That's what Soviets said towards the end of that whole sham. So I hope there's enough learning from this across history that people in the United States have said no. Basically. I know living in Miami, there's a lot of people from Cuba and other places in South America that have had different issues with communism and socialism. And there were signs on all kinds of people's yards saying, you know, no, no, Kamala, communism and whatnot. So I think it had something to do with that. Right? People do learn from history to some extent. And you combine that with a good bullshit detector and I guess that's the result that we got.
-
Unknown A
Why do you think then, given we just dodged that bullet, why are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Because as much as I love capitalism, it has not in its current iteration yielded results that are sustainable.
-
Unknown B
I mean, we've talked about this, right? It's not capitalism anywhere. You've got a central bank. You are at best 50% capitalist and you are 50% Marxist or communist. Because money is one half of every transaction. And money under a central banking paradigm is centrally planned. Central banking is the central planning of money. This comes from measure number five in Marx's 1848 manifesto to the Communist Party that the state has to have central control of cash and credit for communism to work the printing of money is the violation of private property. Right? Marx said you could sum up communism in one sentence, which is the abolition of private property. So at one end of the spectrum, there's, and we've talked about this communism, the institutionalized abolition of private property. The opposite of communism would be capitalism, the institutionalized perfection of private property and the transfer of private property through consensual contracts.
-
Unknown B
Right. We can agree to trade things only by consent, not by coercion. The spectrum in between is effectively socialism in all its different forms. It's an institutionalized policy of aggression against private property. So whatever the average tax rate is of a particular country, that is basically what percentage it is socialist. And to get that tax rate, you really need to know not only what is the explicit tax rate of, say, the average taxpayer, but you also need to know how much savers are being debased through currency counterfeiting. Right. The shadow tax of inflation also goes into this equation. So we don't have capitalism anywhere in the world, nor have we ever had it anywhere in the world. We've had different, you know, different intensities of it. But, and the United States would be a great example of. When we were founded as a constitutional republic, we did not have a central bank.
-
Unknown B
We, we had no income tax. There were very low and predictable and oftentimes no state taxes. Largely we were funded through tariffs and rule of law was pretty much minimal and centered on the preservation of life, liberty and property. And what did we get? We got a massive economic boom. One of the most successful economic stories in human history. You could also look at places like Hong Kong that had a similar beginning where they had very stable rule of law, very low taxes, and a lot of capitalism, places like the UAE today, they're doing this right, Very low taxes. Do they have a fed, do they have a central bank? I believe they do, but I would say that they are not engaging in currency counterfeiting at the same rate as the us Someone could check me on that as well, but I know their explicit tax rate is much smaller than what we have in the us so, so basically you let entrepreneurs keep the fruits of their labor and leave them alone, and you tend to get successful economic stories.
-
Unknown B
But the, and that's capitalism. But the extent to which you start to progress along that spectrum of socialism towards communism, you, you slide closer to that Soviet style diseconomy we just talked.
-
Unknown A
About, do we need any breaks on capitalism? Like, if you had your druthers, I know you don't vote. You said earlier you're the worst person to talk to about politics. So do you 1. Do you consider yourself completely removed from politics because it's just a protest vote? This is so corrupt. You can't engage.
-
Unknown B
You know, I think the most powerful vote you can cast is the way you save and spend your money ultimately. So I consider holding purchasing power in Bitcoin or physical gold, which is outside of the fiat system. Right. They can't print money to steal your purchasing power. If you're holding your savings in gold or bitcoin so you're protected from inflation and then, you know, obviously optimizing yourself from a tax standpoint, this is the most effective vote you can cast against the apparatus of coercion that is the state, because you're actually taking your energy out of it. Right. You're not participating in a popularity contest and hoping that the guy that you elect will represent your interest and make things better. Right, Right. Is that. That's very soft, right? Sure. Does it help more so at a grassroots level, I think, but when you get into large centralized bureaucracies, I don't think it helps that much or as much.
-
Unknown B
What really helps is actually removing your energy from the system. And so that's what I look at it as is like I actually try to boycott the system by holding my purchasing power outside of it.
-
Unknown A
We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about business banking. Running a business is hard enough without spending hours managing your finances. That's where Found comes in. Found is a business banking platform designed specifically for small business owners. It consolidates everything, expense tracking, invoicing, tax prep, and even setting aside money for business goals into one simple, easy to use platform. And small business owners. Absolutely love it. Found has over 30,000 followers star reviews with users saying things like Found makes everything so much easier. Expenses, income, profits, even taxes. If you're ready to streamline your finances and get back to doing what you love, open a Found account for free at found.comimpact that's F O-U-N-D.com impact to get started today. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont bank member fdic. This is a paid advertisement.
-
Unknown A
And now let's get back to the show. My take would be that right now we're living through a very interesting moment where who you vote for matters based on their worldview. And we are ultimately in a moment where we as a people are deciding whether we want that top down authoritarian control, whether we want freedom of speech or not. And it felt pretty consequential. This is the first time where I really felt like yo, people need to get out and vote now I'm cool whatever way people want to vote. I don't think I have a monopoly on the truth, but I do have a very strong take on what I think. And to me this really felt like a referendum of a revenge of the working class. I forget who said that, but I think it's an absolutely brilliant assessment of what just happened. And going back to my initial question, I think really what just played out is you can put out all the reports in the world that say everything is going well, but if the average person has to be a degenerate gambler to stay ahead of inflation, if they go to
-
Unknown A
the grocery store and everything is going up, up, up in price, real wages are flat, you're making less in your 20s than your parents did. You're looking at what's going to happen to your kids. You don't not feeling super optimistic. The deaths of despair for young men are skyrocketing to the point where it's bringing the overall average age, the average life expectancy down in America, which is absolute insanity. And so people are just like, say what you will dear politician, but the reality is that my life does not feel the way that you're describing. And so it really does it, it becomes gaslighting. That is so blatant that you, even if you want to reconcile with it, you're not going to be able to, which is pretty fascinating. So anyway, I get what you mean about you can cast, you're going to cast a potentially even more important vote by what you do with your money.
-
Unknown A
But I think for the average person, they don't want to think about where to put their money. They want the system that they live inside of Capital T, Capital S to be moral, to use my own words. And so going back to what you said about cpi, glad you brought that up. So if people understood why the government manipulates the CPI specifically, part of it is because your entitlements as you age are based on the cpi. And if the CPI goes up, they have to pay you more, which they can't afford to do because they'd have to print more money and we get on and on into debt, which I'm sure we will talk about. But so the, the way I look at the government is the government has a tendency to become evil and inflating money is evil. Now, I have a feeling you agree with that.
-
Unknown A
If you would give people that quick primer for why is inflation evil? Because for basically my entire life till about five years ago, I thought it was a natural law of nature that money inflated by 2%.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I realized too, I didn't answer your question that like, do we need any breaks on capitalism? And so I'll try to wrap both of those answers together. If you mean by capitalism the right of individuals to own property and trade it by consent only, right? And if there are any violations of that ownership, people can seek retribution through the rule of law, right? If you steal my car, then I can go to the police and file a police report and seek to have that retribution enforced by the force of law. This is the purpose of the rule of law, actually, is to preserve private property. I don't think you need any breaks on that, right? That's just really saying, do we need any breaks on individual human freedom? I mean, I think the breaks are almost built into it. You know, we talked about in episodes prior, life, liberty and inviolable private property.
-
Unknown B
This is what was in the Magna Carta in 1215 when King John signed it. I think this is the entire purpose of, of government, right? It needs to use a legal monopoly on force to defend life, liberty and property. That is it. That is the entire philosophical purpose and scope of government. It doesn't need to do anything beyond that. Anything it does beyond that I would consider to be in that domain of government being evil. So the second part of your question, why is inflation evil? Because it is a violation of private property rights. If you are a saver and you're holding money in a bank account, right? That means you have gone into the marketplace, you have provided labor, or you've rendered favors to the marketplace to other people, right? You go to work, you add to the productive output of society by producing goods and services for other people.
-
Unknown B
You are paid in money. Those are tokens that basically say, hey, you rendered other people a useful favor. You did something that other people deemed to be useful as signaled by the money that you were paid. And this receipt is something you can use to take back into the market later and redeem similar favors from other people for them to produce goods and services for you. That is the social contract of money if you're whole. So basically, if you have savings in a bank account and you inquired it consensually, that means you've added to the productive Output of the species and not yet subtracted from it, right? So you've added to human productivity, you've solved problems for people, but you haven't been paid or compensated in return until you go into the market and spend that money. So what happens when you're holding savings in a bank account and a central bank will counterfeit that currency is they are debasing or diluting your purchasing power.
-
Unknown B
So the favors that you rendered into the market that you saved up for yourself for future use or you've delayed gratification, well, they start to steal that energy. That purchasing power is what economists call it, right? And this is basically what that money is capable of purchasing, right? It goes down as prices go up, basically, right? So if you've got a million dollars in the bank and steak is, you know, $10 a pound, then you can get a hundred thousand pounds of steak. But if the price of state goes up to $20 a pound, then you can only get £50,000 of steak, right? It goes down as prices go up, purchasing power goes down. Basically, it's an inverse relationship that then means the person who was prudent and diligent and provided favors for other people and saved for future consumption is now being disincentivized from doing so.
-
Unknown B
You're now incentivized. Well, my money's not going to hold purchasing power. I might as well spend it on something now. Better yet, I might as well spend all of it and just borrow more. Because if I borrow dollars today that are going to get weaker over time, that I can borrow strong dollars today and pay back weaker dollars over time. And indeed this is because currency is being inflated in this way. It pushes everyone, it's incentivizing everyone to take on more and more debt. So the evil component of it, and obviously when you take on one more debt, you become beholden to creditors. You know, you get in the whole, that whole game, right, where once you are indebted, you're also paying interest to creditors. And that can be a downward spiral for a lot of people that don't know how to manage debt intelligently.
-
Unknown B
So it sort of increases the pressure of that trap. And the evil part of it really is just that. I mean, if you consider theft to be evil, right? If someone rightfully owns something, they worked to acquire it. They worked, you know, you worked to make money to buy this table, right? That someone built, and you consensually traded the money you had with them for this table. Who else has the right to come and take your table, right? You worked for the money. The guy built the table. You guys had a consensual trade. Does anyone in the world have a moral or just right to come and coercively take your table? I mean, I think it's a pretty hard sell, at least from a moral angle right now. People could get into, oh, well, if there's an emergency and someone really needs it and all of that.
-
Unknown B
But if you give. What's the saying that if you give governments more power in times of emergency, then governments will create an emergency to take more power. So you give that little chink in the armor to give them that inch that they take a mile. And I just don't think it can be justified.
-
Unknown A
So do you think there's any amount of government that's good?
-
Unknown B
You know, the government that governs best, governs least. Governs best. I think, as has you just putting.
-
Unknown A
Up with the fact that you doubt you can get it to zero. Like in your ideal world, would it be zero?
-
Unknown B
You need. There's a reality of physical force in this world. So we have to have a way. And there's the reality of people violating private property. Right? People can take your stuff if someone takes your stuff and you, you know, short of taking the law into your own hands, it is useful to have recourse to a legal structure that has, you know, the force of law behind it to fix, to right that wrong, so to speak. And so, yeah, I think a government that's ideally local, not very centralized, and that really focuses solely on the preservation of life, liberty and property. Preferably one that uses like an English common law tradition. This is where, you know, disputes that have occurred over time and the ways they were resolved, these become discovered laws that get codified and say, okay, this is how people have resolved law or disputes over time and that becomes ossified as law.
-
Unknown B
So it's like a legal discovery process rather than a legal. A fiat legal process where some guy is elected into power and he just signs a piece of paper saying, this is the way we do things now. All right, Then you're at the whims of whoever's in power. That is much. The outcomes of that tend to be much worse, right? The individual in power will use the law to serve their own interests. We've heard this law, this term lawfare, come up recently where it's that very thing, right? The law is not the ideal of the law was equality in the eyes of the law, that we have one fixed rule set that is evenly applicable to everyone, whether you're a President or a pauper, right? Everyone in between. We're all beholden to the law to the same extent, in the same way, just like we're all beholden to the laws of physics to the same same extent, in the same way.
-
Unknown B
But when you start to unevenly apply the law or you know, Ms. Bend a Rule or you know, bribe a judge, this is where we get the term corruption, by the way, right? Which has its. Has an etymological root in the word, shares one with the word rupture. So this evenly applied rule set all of a sudden has a rupture in it and you get rules for the not for me type of situation. And that is where government really falls apart. So to the extent government applies the rule of law evenly and the rule of law is developed organically through a legal discovery process, and it's truly restricted to the preservation of life, liberty and property, I think this is the libertarian ideal and kind of a high level. And I know this. You know, people may say, oh, that all sounds good in theory, but like, where does the rubber meet the road?
-
Unknown B
You could read a book like the Ethics of Liberty by Rothbard. He goes through a lot of these legal aspects and talking about boycotting and bribery and all these specific edge cases in the law and how it would be in a libertarian world. Is it perfect? Probably not, but I think it's a lot better than what we have. And once you create the situation where people can game the system, right, they can bend the rules to benefit themselves and exclude or harm others. That's a really nasty game, right? Because it's all about hard pressed to.
-
Unknown A
Find a system that can't be gamed full stop.
-
Unknown B
I know one.
-
Unknown A
Say more.
-
Unknown B
Bitcoin. Bitcoin's the only game that human beings have ever invented that they themselves cannot game. It is inviolable private property. No, it's an incorruptible monetary system. And so. And considering that money is superordinate to law, right, as Rothschild said, give me the power to issue a nation's currency, I care not who makes its laws, because if you can issue the currency, you can rewrite the laws. Trust me, that's what lobbying is basically, right? It's private money rewriting the laws to benefit its interest, having an incorruptible monetary layer. A game that humans cannot game themselves. A social institution, the only social institution, so far as I can tell, that human beings cannot corrupt. That's really important. That is equality in the eyes of the law and an actual implemented system, not just written onto a constitutional document under the hopes that all future politicians will adhere to that code.
-
Unknown B
We have an actual economic incentive system that causes or not causes, induces or encourages people to follow it rather than just hope basically that that will follow the US Constitution for all time.
-
Unknown A
Is the sum total of what makes Bitcoin amazing that it can't be inflated?
-
Unknown B
Well, no, the fact that bitcoin and to be very specific, we're talking about monetary inflation. So the actual arbitrary increase of a money supply over time. Bitcoin has zero percent arbitrary inflation, or you could say zero percent unexpected inflation, right? It's the only fixed supply money and fixed supply asset for that matter in human history. I also think it's the only one that will ever exist. Now there are 50,000 shitcoins out there and you know, there are a few hundred of them that will tell you they too have a fixed supply or they have a diminishing supply, or they have whatever. But none of those crypto assets are decentralized. So all of those are based on promises. You're trusting some individual or group of individuals to keep their promise. Only Bitcoin is the battle hardened, proven, provably or highly credibly decentralized crypto asset. And for more on that, you could read a book like the Block size wars of 2017.
-
Unknown B
Decentralization is not something Satoshi created in a lab. Bitcoin started out centralized too, right? It was just in the mind of one guy. But the way it was released, the, the organic path of its development, the idiosyncrasies associated with its proliferation, all of the attacks on it and the attacks that it has survived, this is what has grown. It's grown into a battle hardened, decentralized monetary network. That's not something you can just recreate in a lab. So Bitcoin, Yes. Inflation, not even resistance. Inflation, immunity. Basically there's 0% unexpected inflation in Bitcoin. That's a really big deal. It's a huge idea. But it's also a digital bearer asset, right? So to hold a bearer asset is if I have physical possession of it, I'm assumed to be the rightful owner. So if I have a gold bar in my hand, I don't need a contract that says I'm the owner of that gold bar.
-
Unknown B
Possession is ownership. Basically Bitcoin is the same, but it's the first digital bearer asset. So it's to just possess information, which is the private key is to own the bitcoin. And now this gives you a number of very unique advantages. One, you can secure that in a multi key setup. So you don't, you don't have to just hold one key. You could break that key into three pieces or five pieces and have a quorum, right? So you need two of three to spend funds, or three of five. And that type of security model is much more robust. Right? You don't have single point of failure. You have redundancy, but you still have full control over the asset. This is also very similar to how we secure nuclear codes, by the way. There's not just one guy with his finger on the trigger. There is a group of guys that need to do very certain steps at a very certain way and a very certain timing before anyone can press that button and hit launch.
-
Unknown B
You know, it's a multi key setup effectively. So you get nuclear code like security models with bitcoin, because it's a digital private key, you also get extremely high portability. Right? Gold does not move over a telephone wire. We can only move promises to gold over telephone wires, but we can't move physical gold. So, you know, Saylor would say something like gold has very low frequency final settlement. But bitcoin has very high frequency final settlement. I can send you bitcoin over a telephone line and we can settle with finality in an hour. On the other side of the planet, right? I sent you gold, effectively a bearer asset, physical Bitcoin, if you will, through telecommunications around the world. No problem. Try doing that with gold. Not possible, right? You need trains, planes, boats, armies, whatever to secure that.
-
Unknown A
Still feels like it's nice. I'm glad that that's true. But when I really try to boil down why I think the current system, it breaks. Let me walk you through a speed run of what I think is wrong and why I think the fact that it can't be inflated makes it a solve for what I think needs to be solved for. I don't want to seem like I'm overhyping bitcoin, whatever it is. I just need something that can't inflate. So here's my speedrun. The reason that the economy is what it is and goes in Ray Dalio's six step loop is because of the ability to print money. So whenever I say inflate, anybody listening right now, if you can hear my voice, I mean print money. So print money, inflation, same thing. Counterfeiting, same thing. So printing money is counterfeiting.
-
Unknown B
Inflation is counterfeiting is criminal inflation.
-
Unknown A
Correct. So if you make that impossible now all of a sudden people can only spend money that they have when they can only spend money that they have now, the government is going to ask your permission because there's no way to hide this stuff. There's no way to tax you without you knowing you're being taxed. Inflation is them printing money so that they can spend more money than they have. And everybody is fine with it because you don't realize that there's a problem. If you had $100 in your bank account, you still have $100. Nobody is complaining. The problem is if that hundred dollars only buys half the amount of stuff that it used to, you've lost half your money. But people can feel it. They're getting frustrated, they're upset, but they don't understand what exactly is happening. And so the reason that I say that this is a moral problem is we've created an incredible capital market system that's absolutely amazing.
-
Unknown A
I couldn't love it anymore if I tried. However, it makes the average person have to gamble their money on the stock market or crypto or whatever in order to outpace the inflation that they're experiencing. That if they're anything like me, they just thought happens. They didn't realize that a central bank would was in coordination with the government deciding to counterfeit just to keep it nice and clear. What's happening? To constantly counterfeit money to allow the government to spend extra money because. Yeah. And then to get back to the why are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Because when they put the money into the system, when they counterfeit it, what they end up doing is buying assets from people that already hold them. And, and this is the part that I think a lot of people don't understand. So one, if you don't own any of the assets that they buy, your sol, you don't experience any of the joy.
-
Unknown A
You're going to be downstream of that. And then on top of that, there are a bunch of assets out there, your house price being one of them, the stock market being another. Not exclusively. Some of it goes up because there just is increased value. But a lot of the value of the stock market is simply keeping up with inflation. So the odds that your house is actually going up in value is low. So if you were to price your house against gold or Bitcoin, you're going to see, oh, wait a second, it's not changing in the way that I thought it was. It's only when you compare it to the dollar, which is probably going down in value due to inflation. So now the average person, they're the money that they're socking away, saving is going to be worth nothing. They will have been brutalized and stolen from.
-
Unknown A
And once you start using that language, like wait a second, my grandpa, who's been a good dude, worked his ass off, blue collar, sleeves rolled up, janitor, working two, three jobs, you know, until his 80th birthday, he had to work to his 80th birthday because all the money that he was saving every month ended up being nothing. That's. People need to understand that is the system that they're living in right now. That's the system we have right now, today. And once you have something like Bitcoin or even just a gold backed currency, now all of a sudden it's like, okay, cool, as long as it's not fractional reserve, then I have something where I can save my money.
-
Unknown B
And that's the key though. A gold backed currency always depends on the promise of a custodian.
-
Unknown A
Yes.
-
Unknown B
Not over issue the paper, to not issue more paper than they have gold in reserve, right. So to speak. From an accounting standpoint, if you are running a bank, basically, right, a traditional bank where people deposit gold with you and you issue them banknotes or warehouse receipts, which are little notes of paper that they can redeem for gold in the future. Every time someone deposits gold with you, that's an asset on your balance sheet, right? You have gold in your warehouse, that's an asset. Obviously it's a bearer asset. As we touched on the paper you issue to the depositor, it's an iou, right? You owe that gold to a depositor, right? As represented by that banknote. So an honest bank, a non fractional reserve bank, a full reserve bank would be one where assets equals liabilities, right? Such that if all depositors came to redeem their gold at once, the bank would have no problem satisfying all of those obligations because they have all of the liabilities covered by assets, right?
-
Unknown B
One to one. A fractional reserve bank is when a bank starts to over issue that paper relative to the gold, so they have more liabilities on their balance sheet than they have assets, which is an insolvent, fraudulent operation. You can't scale gold because it's, it's a physical metal, right? You can't send it over a telephone wire. As I said, you can't scale gold as a transactional transactable money at a global scale without having a gold backed currency. But the gold backed currency depends on the integrity of individual bankers, right? You need to trust the bank not to over issue the paper. And even if for Argument's sake, all the bankers were perfectly trustworthy. They're all saints. None of them ever lie. None of them ever over issue the paper. You still have to deal with the government who might, in time of crisis or war, as is typically the case, decide.
-
Unknown B
You know what, we need some extra funding. There's a whole lot of gold in that bank over there. Why don't we just go have them loan some of it to us forcibly, right? We can write the laws and have them loan it to us cheaply. Or we could just suspend customer convertibility. We could seize the gold as was done in 1933 by Executive Order 6102, right? It was private gold ownership was outlawed under a threat of imprisonment or a fine. Which is crazy, right? Like you can't own gold. What the fuck? What do you mean I can't own gold? Like it's just a thing that I own and hold in my hand. You're telling me I can't own and hold a thing in my hand? That's the problem, right? You can only scale gold with the promises of others. You are dependent on trust in human beings.
-
Unknown B
Bitcoin fixes that, right? We can actually have a digital gold that is trivial for individuals to custody themselves or if they want to custody it with an institution. You can break the key into multiple pieces and you can have a collaborative custody schema even among institutions. So you can mitigate the counterparty risk. You can inhibit a government from coming to any one institution and seizing the bitcoin. Because every institution only has one piece of the key, right? You can't. They need to work together to unlock funds. So you, you, you inhibit the government's ability and banks ability to break that promise. Should you choose to, to promise it to them. You can also choose to hold it yourself and promise no one, right? This is the don't trust verify ethos of Bitcoin. Not your keys, not your cheese. This is a big deal. You. We can now have a monetary, a sound monetary medium that can scale for a global society that does not depend on the promises of fallible, fallen, sinful human beings.
-
Unknown B
This is the essence of trust minimization. And this is why Bitcoin is digital sound money. Gold is non digital sound money. You know, just the way I look at it is we have two rough visions of the future. There's one vision of the future where we have things like electricity, the Internet and artificial intelligence. In that world, Bitcoin is dominant money because we can transact with one another without the need to trust. Counterparties, basically. Right. We can minimize counterparty risk and maximize our ability to move purchasing power over time and space, which is the purpose of money. There's another view of the world that's more dystopian. Right. For whatever reason, solar, weather, global war, whatever. The thing is, we don't have electricity, Internet, AI in that world. I think non digital sound money, like gold will, will be dominant because, well, people are going to be dealing with each other in physical space a lot more than they're going to be dealing with each other in digital space.
-
Unknown B
So you can make that assessment for yourself. Obviously there's a whole gradient in between and decide, right, there's a 90% chance we have a digital future and a 10% chance we have a non digital future. And then allocate your cat, the cash balances in your portfolio accordingly. Right. I have 90% Bitcoin, 10% gold. So it's not really Bitcoin versus gold. It's not either or just like everything else in the world, it's probabilistic. And if you're going to be a savvy investor, I think you just have to look at the spectrum of possibilities, decide for yourself which way we think, which way you think we are going, and then construct your portfolio accordingly.
-
Unknown A
Okay, so I buy into a lot of what you're saying about private property. You want a government that is small. You want to have sound money so that you hobble the government from getting too big because they're going to use money printing to do it. But do you think that we have a moral obligation to take care of those less fortunate than us at the level of government?
-
Unknown B
Do you? The question is, do I think that the government has a moral obligation?
-
Unknown A
Do we as individuals, us in a country, do we have a moral obligation to take care of those less fortunate?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Look, when you say invoke the term moral obligation, I get very hesitant to be that prescriptive about it.
-
Unknown A
Interesting. Why the word moral? Why is that the tripwire?
-
Unknown B
Well, I truly believe in human freedom. Right. So if I'm going to put a gun to your head and say you need to go and take care of the needy, that sort of defeats the purpose. Right.
-
Unknown A
But then doesn't that mean that I don't have the moral obligation to do it? Or does it mean that I have the moral obligation? But I. You don't think that it should be enforced?
-
Unknown B
So it depends on the moral code you subscribe to, of course. Right. I think this tends to be the domain of the church or religion Right. Many wisdom traditions teach us to tithe right to tithe to the church, to take care of the less fortunate, etc. I am a subscriber to that. Does that mean I'm going to impose that prescription on other people? No, I don't think that is something that holds weight for me. However, I think in a world with very strong private property, we naturally accumulate and construct more wealth, right? That is the whole point. And here's a way to think about this, by the way. Every time someone spends time and energy taking an asset from someone else. You've heard me talk about this before. Maybe there's two ways to create wealth in the world. Or, I'm sorry, two ways to acquire wealth in the world.
-
Unknown B
Making or taking. Right. I can build the table and, you know, spend my labor to create something of value and trade with other people that are also doing the same thing. That's the path of making. That's the entrepreneurial path. That's the constructive path. Or I can just get the $5 wrench and go and bludgeon the guy over the head that built the table and take his table, right? That's the path of taking. That's the path of criminality, statism, coercion. Every time someone spends time and energy taking rather than making, that is time and energy they could have spent producing something, right? So that is a decrement, a decrease the productivity of the species because that person's time and energy, the taker, was spent taking rather than making. Further, because they took it from someone that built it and produced it, they have disincentivized that individual from producing in the future because that individual did not get to keep the full reward of their labor, which was the fruit of their labor, right?
-
Unknown B
So if someone's getting 20% of the fruits of their labor stolen every year by an organized criminal syndicate called the government.
-
Unknown A
Try 53.
-
Unknown B
53. Okay, then they are 20% disincentivized from producing, right? Like, if I can only keep 80 cents of every dollar that I make, well, then I'm less incentivized or rewarded to produce as much.
-
Unknown A
I agree with you, and all of that makes sense to me in the abstract, but I think the thing that we end up struggling with, and I'm.
-
Unknown B
Sorry, this is not even abstract, this is like, axiomatic. If someone is spending time and energy taking rather than making, then our net productivity goes down and the incentives for producing go down.
-
Unknown A
Because you live in a world where humans fall on a spectrum from an evolutionary perspective, where even though Trump won by a quote, unquote landslide. It was really, what, three points, four points? I mean, we are basically divided down the middle. I think there's an evolutionary reason for that that you need. When you think about getting a species to work cooperatively together in flexible but large groups, you're going to need some people that are compassionate and saying, basically, just think about it from a caloric standpoint. Let's say that you go out and you hunt, you come back with something. Now, if you're smart, you're going to store the calories that you can't eat right now in my body. And the way that you do that is you give me something, even though I didn't get anything on the hunt, you're going to give me some so that I eat.
-
Unknown A
So when I'm the one that wins, I come back and I give you some next time. So in a world without refrigerators, the way that you store fat is on the people around you. Now, the catch is that if you do that, I start going, ah, Robert's a great hunter. I don't have to go hunt. He's just going to feed me in the hopes that one day. And so now other people go, no, we, we can't stand for that. We can't have freeloaders. So you get people that they skew compassionate the left, and you get people that skew personal responsibility the right. And you need the tension between the two to make sure that we don't get a bunch of freeloaders that turn into parasites that drag the place down. But you also need people that understand, dude, we've had central banks since 1668. The modern world's pretty amazing.
-
Unknown A
So even though I can tell an aggressive story about how evil and sinister and all that stuff that it is, and it really is, the problem is it also gave birth to a pretty amazing world.
-
Unknown B
Did it though? Did it?
-
Unknown A
Can we say more?
-
Unknown B
We can't attribute, because we have all of these modern marvels and all of this, this standard of living right in the post industrial age, which, by the way, like GDP per capita basically for human history is flat forever until we hit the industrial age and then it goes completely vertical. Right? Do we attribute that to central banking? Like, why? Just because. Do wet streets cause rain? Right. Correlation is not causation. I would argue that the market has succeeded in spite of all of the money printing and the theft and the warfare funded by central banking. What? Take warfare alone, right? The possibility, the scale, scope and severity of World War I and World War II were only possible because of money printing. Typically a country goes to war when it runs out of money. It, it signs an armistice, right? It cuts a deal because guess what?
-
Unknown B
It's war chest is empty. But when, when it can hyper inflate the currency, its war chest goes from being its own balance sheet to the balance sheet of everyone using the currency, right? So wars get larger, longer and worse. Wars.
-
Unknown A
People understood war is this mo is.
-
Unknown B
The most diseconomic activity human beings can possibly engage in, right? We mobilize humans and capital to go and destroy humans and capital. It is anti economic. It is the antithesis of an economic process. It's a diseconomic process. And so that is enabled and worsened by money printing. I would say that everything that we enjoy in the post industrial age is in spite of central banking. And you were asking about, you know, the moral obligation. The point I was trying to get to is the stronger private property becomes, the more we increase the standard standards of living per capita or GDP per capita, if you want to use a metric like that. And that in my view actually enables the furtherance of compassion, right? Compassion's a bit of a luxury, right? Like you can have compassion in your heart, but to actually act on that compassion and to be able to give people things, to give people stuff, food, shelter, whatever it is, well, you need an economy that's producing that, the division of labor.
-
Unknown B
And to have the division of labor, you need private property rights. And so the stronger private property becomes, the more economic abundance we have, the more capable the successful among us are, are of being compassionate to others in a material sense of actually giving to them. The more we violate that principle and say, oh, we need to tax the rich or steal from whoever to fund any. Even if it's a, you know, a scheme to feed the homeless or whatever compassionate scheme that is cooked up, I think it actually is cutting off the nose despite the face type of thing, or sawing off the branch on which one rests. You are hamstringing the ability of the market to produce more goods and therefore take care of more people. Even if you're doing it out of the compassion of your heart, right? We're all voting blue to tax the rich and fix the homeless problem in San Francisco or whatever the thing is.
-
Unknown B
And just look at the history of it. Look how incompetent government has been at allocating capital. There's this story, this was not that old. I think in San Francisco they spent like $3 million in 15 years trying to open a public restroom, something like that. There was also talk of, I think this was Biden's electric vehicle charging program. You know, they spent X billion dollars and they had three charging stations or something by the end of it. It's like government is. Mises would argue all government action is a misallocation of capital because it involves the coercive extraction of resources from people through taxation and inflation. And so it's much easier to spend money that you didn't earn and it's much easier to spend it foolishly. And I think that's what governments basically do. So what do you take away from necessary evil? Perhaps because we need to defend life, liberty and property, but when the, the institution charged with the preservation of life, liberty and property starts to aggressively violate private property, we get very perverse outcomes.
-
Unknown A
Yes. So what do you think when you look out at the world and you see every civilization of every any size has a government?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I think it is a reality of physical force, like I said, like.
-
Unknown A
We do, that people want somebody to take care of them.
-
Unknown B
Well, it's, it's not that you want, it's, it's a protection service. Right. So if we look at the origin point of government, it comes in the agricultural age, once we stop being hunters and gatherers and we settle down in one place and we start to create an economic surplus. Right. We've got grain in the silo, so to speak. Well, you now need to defend that grain in the silo from other people that want, that are hungry, that want to come and take it. So the local area defense network that protects intruders from taking the grain in the silo is basically the origin point of government. And so that's what you want it to do, defend the property and lives and liberty of the individuals living within a territory. However, it's a very complicated and bloody history. Right. Because once you give people that physical power, that monopoly on force, what do they start to do?
-
Unknown B
They extract tribute from people inside of the territory. Right. And so how do you. This has been like the age old problem is how do we create a central monopoly on force and entrust people to run that monopoly on force in a way that they won't bend it to serve their own interests. Right. And we've, there's been many experiments on how to do this best across time. I would say the United States and the founding Fathers are the best one we've done yet. Right. The decentralization of power, checks and balances. You know, the US Constitution was written basically to prevent the implementation of a central bank to maximize local State power and to minimize central state power. You know, we were. We were founded as a constitutional republic. So a constitution being an enumerated list of things the government can never do, right? This is the Bill of Rights, right.
-
Unknown B
Cannot infringe on the freedom of speech. Can. Cannot infringe on the right to bear arms, et cetera. These were meant to be absolutes that absolute spheres of human freedom that government could not violate. However, after three attempts, we got the central bank, right? We got the Fed in 1913.
-
Unknown A
What is it people are clamoring for? So they clamor for protection when they put in a government. Protection and coordination, I would say, is probably fair. And then what are they clamoring for when they say yes to a central bank?
-
Unknown B
Well, we don't really say yes to a central bank. I mean, if you read, at least in the United States, you could read the book the Creature from Jekyll Island. This thing was snuck in over a holiday weekend after a private meeting on an island off the coast of Georgia called Jekyll Island.
-
Unknown A
But are there any modern economies of any significance that don't have a central bank?
-
Unknown B
There are not these, you know, a.
-
Unknown A
Lot of someone somewhere is clamoring for something.
-
Unknown B
You're not voting it in, though. Like these things, they're private banks that are basically installed. It's not the will of the people that is choosing to have this thing installed.
-
Unknown A
Is it a signal of corruption?
-
Unknown B
It is the ultimate institution of corruption, in my opinion.
-
Unknown A
So you look out at all the governments having one of these, and you're like, that is a tower to memorialize the corruption in the country.
-
Unknown B
It. Okay, again, if we define corruption as the uneven application of rules. While a central bank has the legal authority to counterfeit money, if anyone else counterfeits money, they go to jail.
-
Unknown A
Let me give you a.
-
Unknown B
How is that? Like, those are. That is the bifurcation of rules, right? If you and I go and play basketball and I put a gun to your head and say, my shots count four, your shots count two. Is that a corrupt game? Or I can print points for myself and you can't.
-
Unknown A
If I were playing against my wife, it would be very fair. And I think that's going to be one of the arguments. So there's that. I think the. You're probably not recognizing the power of people who want things to be fair in this whole equation. But the reason I think that people are clamoring for a. A central bank, even if they didn't vote for it, is the promise of stability. Hey, we're going to manage things. You're not going to have the Great Depression, you're not going to have people jumping off of buildings and Wall street because we're going to make sure that you're protected. Yes, it's fractional reserve banking, but it's FDIC insured. And so that the same desire that makes them want to have a government to protect them from a bully, they want the central bank to be able to print money because they don't understand inflation and they feel like, ah, I'm now protected.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, but they're not protected. I mean, yes, the aims of the Federal Reserve are low and stable unemployment and stable prices. Right. Low and predictable inflation. Have either one of those things happened? I mean, you look at the purchasing power of the dollar since 1913, I think it's down 99%. Does that sound like stable prices to you? That means the prices of everything have gone up a hundredfold in over 100 years. We've had worsening boom and bust business cycle. Each time we have a bust, we have to print exponentially more money than we did the round before. Because each time we print money, we inject more liabilities into the system. It's just, it just doesn't work. And Austrian economists like Mises, you can read his book, the Theory of Money and Credit. He has laid out a very strong theoretical foundation for why printing money, counterfeiting money, centrally planning money doesn't work.
-
Unknown B
And I've, I don't know any honest intellectual on this planet who has ever sat here and said that it does work. The only thing it does is act as a source of limitless purchasing power extraction for the shareholders of central banks at the expense of everyone forced to use the currency via legal tender laws and other acts of compulsion. So I don't know how you could ever justify that morally, ethically, pragmatically, economically. It just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. And I think the corruption of money also leads to the corruption of many other things in the world. Right? When you're printing money and you can steal purchasing power from everyone, well then you can use that purchasing power to buy narrative, or to buy mainstream media outlets, or to create fake news, or to wage wars. It, it is a very insidious power, right?
-
Unknown B
If Lord Acton said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, I don't think there's anything closer in the sphere of human affairs to absolute power other than the printing of money, considering it is the thing that everyone works for. And if you are the institution that can create it without performing any work, and you can use it to extract the work energy of other people. Well, then you will do everything in your power to deceive them into believing that it is good and necessary for them and their economy, which is indeed what Keynesian economics does. It's a pseudo scientific paradigm that tells us every time there's a problem in the economy, the government just needs to pull that lever and print more money, baby, and everything's going to be all right this time. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. And what happens? Well, we get to look recent history.
-
Unknown B
We print 700 billion in 2008. That was a big number back then. We thought that was a very serious amount. That's less than one tenth of what we printed in the post pandemic world. Printed $8 trillion. Okay, give it a few years. We're gonna print 10x that it doesn't stop until the currency hyperinflates into worthlessness. And I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, but anyone that wants to challenge me on this, open a fucking history book about fiat currency. Tell me how all of them end. Either the country gets conquered or the currency hyperinflates. Right. The oldest and most successful fiat currency today, I think, is still the British pound, which has lost over 99% of its value in 320 years. So those countries, UK, US were still in power. Fiat currency is still working. But all of those before us have failed, been conquered or hyperinflated.
-
Unknown B
So, you know, how many times do we need to learn this lesson?
-
Unknown A
A lot. We'll get back to the show in a moment. But first, I have an important message for entrepreneurs. You did not start your business to play small. You started it to build something extraordinary. But here's the truth. Big visions require big tools. That's why I recommend Shopify to every entrepreneur who's serious about building a business. It's not just a sales platform, it's a partner in your growth. Shopify powers some of the biggest brands out there, like Alo, Allbirds and Skims. It's the backbone that lets them sell seamlessly, whether it's online, in store, or even on social media. With features like shop pay, they boost conversions by up to 15, turning browsers into buyers and dreams into real hard revenue. Upgrade your business today and get the same checkout Skims uses. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.comimpact all lowercase again, go to shopify.comimpact to upgrade your selling today, that's shopify.comimpact and now let's get back to the show.
-
Unknown A
All right, so you've got a magic wand. You, you're holding tight to that magic wand. Trump comes to you and he says, robert Breedlove, with your magic wand, what do we do? We want to make everything better. What do you do? If you were going to do three big things, and I mean, you can do anything, what are the three big things you would do to right the ship?
-
Unknown B
Promote bitcoin education and help people transition to a sound money economy? You say bitcoin and gold, for that matter. I'm not actually partial. People want to stick with gold, and that's their thing. Freedom.
-
Unknown A
So not. I don't think bitcoin the official currency.
-
Unknown B
Well, here's what I don't like about that. Because it's legal tender, tends to be the compulsory use of something. So I don't want to tell people they have to use bitcoin, but just educate people about, oh, this is how money actually works. We suggest this as the best money. It's the ultimate sound money. However, gold also works if you want to use that. Or it could also have free banking. Right. Just let banks issue their currency and go through that whole painful experience of different banks blowing up and people learning their lessons the hard way and let the market sort it out. So, I mean, I'm admittedly radical in my views as an anarcho capitalist. I think we need just the preservation of life, liberty and property, and then the market solves everything else better than any central institution possibly can. And so the big theme of those three things is just minimizing statism, minimizing revenues to the state, therefore shrinking the state and maximizing human freedom and the market process.
-
Unknown B
I think that solves the most problems with the least effort.
-
Unknown A
All right, if you abolish taxation, you're saying the government has no sources of revenue or the government has to become a maker.
-
Unknown B
Well, so the again, pre income tax the US Government used to fund itself through tariffs. Right. So it's actually charging taxes on imports. Those are at least imposed on outside countries, and those are countries that want to access domestic markets. I'm not. I still don't think that's a good idea. I think that actually is still destructive to net wealth. You know, people would probably accuse me of being an idealist or utopian in this respect, but I don't think nation state structure really works. I'd like to see a world more of, like, free private cities instead of 200 some odd nation states. We have 20,000 free private cities that can trade with one another with very little friction. You know, if there have to be tariffs to fund that security network, so be it. Maybe they charge a flat tax just on land, right? They're actually defending land ultimately maybe the owners of that land need to pay a consensual, not even a tax, a consensual protection fee.
-
Unknown B
So you're paying a percentage to that protection service to provide that protection, that physical protection from foreign invasion. And again, you know, it's, it's the devil's in the details because when you put that power in the hands of one group of people, it's very difficult to prevent them from using that power to extract more resources than then the consensual protection fee was agreed to be. And so that is like an ever present risk or threat. And I think that's where something like Bitcoin is very important. Because if a jurisdiction starts to treat people unfairly, let's say they agree to a certain protection fee and then the state says actually we're going to take 2x3x, whatever it is, people can vote with their feet very effectively, right? They can leave that jurisdiction with their purchasing power intact, their bitcoin private keys intact. Even if the government gets nasty and starts seizing their physical assets, well then people still have a much better chance basically of leaving with purchasing power and a digital bearer asset and therefore incentivizing.
-
Unknown B
You're like creating a free market competition dynamic between different jurisdictions. So all of a sudden, jurisdictions now that can't print money, they are accountable to their P and L, right? Their revenues are protection service fees and their expenses are providing physical security. If they mistreat their citizens, well, their citizens will leave with their capital, so that will actually decrease their revenue. So you will be incentivized as one of these free private cities to be accountable to the preferences of your customer. You want to keep them. And you already see a little bit again, like know a place like UAE I think is kind of competing basically for global talent and capital by offering really low taxation. So that's more of an ideal world that I would like to see.
-
Unknown A
That. Certainly that was not the answer I was expecting. Now, do you think that there's an element of chaos that's going to be born out of that? Because as you're describing it, I'm like running through my head, I'm like, okay, gangs are definitely going to rise up in some of these cities. They're going to coerce you into staying. I know they're not supposed to, but of course they will. People will try to leave, they'll put capital controls on it, like they'll find a way, even if it's just a wrench attack. But then people will escape as much as they can. It just feels like, whoa, I get why in my mind I get why people try to consolidate into larger groups of people where there's a stable, non corrupt government. Feels like the human tendency. But play that scenario out, where do you think the, what would be the points of friction you would worry about?
-
Unknown B
Well, I mean, so your worry that gangs will rise up, I mean that's what governments are, frankly. Government is the biggest gang in the room. Right. They have out competed all the other gangs and deemed themselves to be the legal authority of the land. So I don't think that the absence of the biggest, most centralized gang is actually going to create. Yeah, you're going to have. When we say gang, it's like, yeah, people organize themselves into groups and those groups compete for their self interest. You know what we associate with gangs is that they tend to engage in physical coercion and crime. Right. So in a world where people do have digital bearer assets, I think it is much more difficult, much less profitable let's say to engage, to engage in traditional gang activity like trying to physically coerce people and take their stuff. Much easier to do that in a world where people are using physical cash or physical gold.
-
Unknown B
So yeah, would it be more chaotic? It's like there's this example of wildfires in California which you know, there's, there's like this kind of the same topography that's in California also is the same and down in Mexico and so there's a lot of government intervention and this is like Baja California area where they were trying to manage forest fires basically. Right. That they would burn. They would try to burn. Every time one of these fires would start, they would extinguish the fire and try to basically dampen it. Whereas in down in Mexico they would just let these fires burn. Basically right. As more anarchy if you will, they just let the fires burn. Well what happened is that when you prevented those fires, micro fires from burning, underbrush accumulated until a big fire did hit and then it burned so fucking hot that it burns away the topsoil and does a lot more damage.
-
Unknown B
Basically it becomes this giant conflagration. Whereas down in, you know, Mexico is just this sequence of smaller fires. There's more of a natural process. And so it's that pressure release kind of mechanism where when we try to centrally plan something, sometimes we create the unforeseen consequence of creating something much bigger and worse. You know, we could say, oh, we've had this long period of peace in the 20th century and this nuclear stalemate, and everything's been great, but what is that setting us up for? You know, we don't really know. Is it better to just have, you know, disputes resolved at a smaller scale more frequently, rather than having disputes delayed and resolved with a very low frequency, but with a lot more catastrophe? You know, an author like Taleb would say delayed volatility is exacerbated volatility. So we have to be careful when we're trying to manage systems and dampen volatility, because ultimately, volatility is a reconciliation to reality.
-
Unknown B
And if we stop that reconciliation to reality and engage in it much less frequently, then the ultimate reconciliation can be a lot more painful. So I think the argument for decentralization is just you want more, you want less. More power, more widely distributed, basically, so that you get whatever pressure needs to be released. It's released in smaller, more frequent pockets and places, rather than being compressed for many decades and blowing up in World War 3 or whatever the catastrophe might be.
-
Unknown A
Okay, absolutely fascinating. Few answers have ever made me want to write a story set inside of the world I imagined than that one. I Utterly, utterly fascinating idea. Now I'm going to take away the magic wand. Right now. You've got Trump coming into power. He, it looks like he's going to have Senate, probably House Judiciary, and the Supreme Court's pretty much on his side. What do you want to see him do in order to take steps to alleviate some of the wealth inequality that we have, start moving towards stronger personal freedoms. Private property mentioned tariffs earlier. He didn't seem to love the idea.
-
Unknown B
What.
-
Unknown A
What should he do in the real world, starting when he takes office?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I mean, he's flirted with the idea of abolishing the irs. That's a great first start, right? You abolish the irs, you abolish a lot of wasted human energy navigating. I think the IRS tax code is somewhere between when I have a master's degree in taxation, when we studied it in college, I want to say it was like 9 million words long.
-
Unknown A
Good Lord.
-
Unknown B
It is literally impossible to navigate. Also impossible to comply with. You comply with one law, you're out of compliance with another law. It's like it's designed to just be this fucking trap, basically. And there's so much human cognitive energy pouring into gaming this thing Right. Like this whole army of tax accountants and tax attorneys, like trying to find loopholes and exploit loopholes and all of that's non productive energy, right? If we had a simplified or preferably a non existent tax code, these guys could go be engineers and build something that people actually use rather than just navigating a purposelessly complicated set of rules that have just emerged because of, and I think it's the fiat currency complex, right? It's a lot of people having these competing interests inside of the rule structure trying to benefit themselves. When you looked at these things in the tax code, it's like, okay, here was the original law, then it was modified this way.
-
Unknown B
Well, then it was modified that way because someone didn't like, you know, this lobby group, they didn't like what they got, so they lobbied for this counter proposal. And then on it goes and you read this law and there's all these exceptions and back and forth and rules. And by the time you're doing this, you know, we have things like the alternative minimum tax, for instance. I don't know if you've heard of this. It is this weird other like parallel calculation you have to do on yourself in your tax world is like if you meet certain criteria, then all of a sudden you have this other giant tax liability that just pops out of nowhere. And so anyway, I won't go into it because I don't frankly haven't looked at it in a decade, but it was just a nightmare to learn about in college.
-
Unknown B
It didn't make any sense. It's totally arbitrary. It doesn't map onto anything in the real world. Right. It's like we're just putting ourselves in this cognitive trap. So to abolish all of that and liberate all that cognitive human labor and reduce all the associated violation of private property, I think that would be a huge one. So if Trump's going to make good on that promise, that would be absolutely massive. I don't know what he said about the central bank, if anything. I mean, he has said that we're going to start stockpiling a national reserve of bitcoin. He wants the United States to be a leader in what he says. Crypto and bitcoin mining. I think, you know, he's still suffering from the conflation between crypto and bitcoin. Only bitcoin mining would be of any geopolitical significance so far as I can tell. That would also be a huge win just to get, you know, it's contributing to the monetization of bitcoin.
-
Unknown B
Obviously that would put the United States in a better position economically as against other countries. But I think also by contributing to the monetization or the acceleration of Bitcoin's monetization, this accelerates the d monetization of the state. Right. Or the defunding of the state by removing in the long run money printing as a revenue option. And then ultimately you're, you know, enriching this asset that's hyper portable, hyper concealable and lets people vote with their feet very effectively. So all of that would be good for our move away from centralized statism towards a more decentralized world. What other promises has he made? You know, I think just, you know, the general theme of deregulation that tends to come with Republican administrations. That's a good thing, right?
-
Unknown A
Do you think Elon has a shot at actually doing something meaningful there?
-
Unknown B
He's flirting with this idea of the government efficiency agency cutting department of governmental efficiency.
-
Unknown A
Yes.
-
Unknown B
Cutting 2 to 3 trillion of government spending. I mean like all the government spending by the way, euphemism for stolen purchasing power. Right. So you're reducing the stealing of purchasing power, you're increasing the integrity of taxpayer private property. Again, that's a step in the right direction. So yeah, I don't know, like I, you know, I don't trust these guys any further than I can throw them. I mean maybe I can throw them a little bit far, but I don't.
-
Unknown A
Trust throw some of these guys.
-
Unknown B
I, we'll see, we'll see what plays out. I, I, My general philosophy would be never trust a politician. Don't think that a politician's coming to save you. There's very few instances in human history where politicians have, have stuck to their word. Maybe now would be a good time to bring up Mr. George Washington though is, I don't know if I'd classify him as a politician necessarily, but he was a president. He was a president, but he was different. Right. This is one of the founding fathers of the United States. The leader of the American army that rebelled against the British Empire. I think their decisive victory was this. I think it's 1781, the battle at Yorktown, if I recall correctly, where Washington defeated General Cornwallis of the British Empire. And you know, we had been fighting for these principles of establishing the United States as a constitutional republic.
-
Unknown B
Right. It was largely a tax rebellion against the British Empire. Also a rebellion against the bank of England, which was the central bank of England. People wanted to be free. Right. These were highly educated men. These were very strong Christian men. Mostly the seal on Benjamin Franklin's house, I think said rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God. Like, these were guys that were very, very fucking serious about expanding human freedom. And the thing I like about George Washington is that he led and won the ragtag group of rebels, American soldiers, against the British Empire. Now, we had help too, but we won, right? He earned the victory, right? He had skin in the game. He was a leader of men. He went to war and he won years and years and years.
-
Unknown A
An incredible story.
-
Unknown B
And at the end when he, he achieved victory, they wanted to make this man king, right? We fought to become a constitutional republic, but at the end of that, it was, they put the keys of power into the hand of this man and all he had to do was accept and close his hand. And frankly, he earned it, right? He led the army, he conquered the new territory. But the old way of kings, well, he is the new king. He would have been the new, you know, the king of the American empire and his lineage and his descendants would have become the next kings to who we all paid tribute and homage and forevermore. And what did he do? Do? He channeled this like, it's really like a staggering amount of philosopher king energy, you could call it Christ consciousness, right? He, he refused that temptation to near absolute power.
-
Unknown B
He put the interest of the human family above the interest of his own family lineage in a way. And he said, absolutely not. I will not be your king. I will be your president and I will be your two term president and I will refuse the third term and we will be the constitutional republic that we set out to be. So he put the interest of human freedom above his own direct, more selfish, you know, genetic self interest, let's say. And that is just a staggering accomplishment as far as I can tell. Like, we often talk about Marcus Aurelius as a very significant philosopher king and he was. But I don't think we give enough credit to George Washington and I hope that, you know, we can cultivate more male leaders like that that actually take the larger perspective on what this is all about.
-
Unknown B
Like we're trying to advance human freedom in its totality, not just trying to advance me and my freedom here and now and for my future descendants. Right? That's the, that's an old game and it's a bloody game and it's nasty and it, it's, you know, it gave us the life that was, what was brutish and short that someone said. And by channeling this, you know, Christian sort of value framework, this philosopher king Energy, if you will, by doing what's right in the greater scope of humanity. You know, this was a man that was integral to his word in a way that few people possibly can be. But he sets a very powerful example for all future leaders. And so I hope we can get back to that. You know, it's.
-
Unknown A
How do we get back to that?
-
Unknown B
Well, so he's a trustworthy man, right? Because he did what he said he would do, even in the face of great temptation. And the words trust and truth share an etymological origin. They're both related to a word that basically means steadfast, true, solid, right? Something that's dependable, reliable, has integrity, right? Whether if it's the truth, it's a representation of reality that is high fidelity, right? It's an accurate portrayal of reality. And if someone's trustworthy, that means they do what they say they will do, right? He is a man of his word. He is integral. His words and his action are integrated together. Bitcoin is a system of absolute truth, right? If money is a language of human action or a language of power, it's a language in which lies cannot be told. It's something that incentivizes people to interact cooperatively rather than coercively because, you know, it's hard to steal, impossible to inflate all these things we talked about.
-
Unknown B
And, you know, there's a saying that no man is better than his incentives. So I guess as an open question to how much does that honest incentive system induce honest, integral, moral development in men? I'm not sure. But I hope that Bitcoin enables the process of individuation in a way that helps people become more like the spirit that the founding fathers were tapped into. Like taking seriously the collective human enterprise, not any specific nation state, not any specific lineage, but creating something that's sustainable for all of us across time, right? That ideal of equality in the eyes of the law, the ideal of innocent until proven guilty, freedom of speech, right to bear arms. All these things that give us a symmetry of power, such that there's no asymmetries, where one group is exploiting another group. Like this is the ideal. This is the principle.
-
Unknown B
And so my hope is that Bitcoin can enable the cultivation of more men like Mr. Washington.
-
Unknown A
George. The could have been bitcoiner?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
-
Unknown A
All right, we've got some speed round stuff from our fearless producer over here. Drew, what do you have for us?
-
Unknown B
All right, we're getting set up. Can we start with number one?
-
Unknown A
So we're going to be responding to clips.
-
Unknown B
Yes, I have a couple of clips.
-
Unknown A
And a couple of tweets.
-
Unknown B
Just want to get your opinion on it. Quick take minute, 30 seconds.
-
Unknown A
Nothing crazy.
-
Unknown B
Money is just a number in a database. That's what it is. And it's primarily an information mechanism for labor allocation. My opinion of Bitcoin is that, I mean, I think Bitcoin is probably a good thing. I think it's primarily going to be a means of doing illegal transactions. But that's not necessarily entirely bad. Something maybe shouldn't be illegal. It will be useful for legal and illegal transactions. Otherwise it would have no value as a use of, for, for a legal transaction because you have to have a legal to illegal bridge. I don't own any bitcoin. All right, is that a hot take.
-
Unknown A
Or a not take?
-
Unknown B
I think it's a useful definition of money that it is a database of labor, right? It's. You could think about it as tokenized human labor as we described earlier. Someone goes to work, they provide labor, they receive money in return. That money is redeemable for labor from others later. Right? That's a useful definition. What I think he misses though is that Bitcoin is the only error proof database. It's the only database that can't be manipulated, right? So when a central bank owns that database and all of a sudden they award new tokens, you know, new units of tokenized human labor energy to themselves or whoever is nearest the currency spigot, they are debasing the units of tokenized labor energy of everyone else. So they are introducing an error or entropy to that database. This corrupts the signal that money facilitates, which is the price signal.
-
Unknown B
It also disincentivizes savers from saving and incentivizes savers to become debtors, right? To accumulate debt as we described earlier. So yeah, you could call money a database of tracking labor. However, the ideal database would be one that is error proof, one that cannot be manipulated or changed willy nilly by the whim of any bureaucrat. You want something that can only be changed by those who are actually rendering useful work to other people. And that's what Bitcoin is.
-
Unknown A
Very interesting. So I'll say that was a weird take. The. There's two things that I want to get to and it's weird because he's obviously this is so old, so I think he's sort of just encountering it. But there's two things. One, once you understand that money's a technology that allows people to capture the energetic value of their labor to be used at a future date. Then all of a sudden it's like, whoa, that's really incredible that we came up with a way, whether it was shells back in the old day, grain, salt, whatever, that you were able to say, I went and did this thing and I have a reward for that that I don't have to spend now, I can spend later. It's equal in the importance to giving somebody else food so they can store fat on their body in your behalf.
-
Unknown B
Equal. The language, I would say huge. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
The other thing that I want to focus on is this idea that I think is incredibly important now, as you see the Chinese government ratchet up, what they're doing with the social credit score is you, you need to allow things to have a potential illegal use. And if you try to get illegality down to zero, you have to go into the pre cog business where now all of a sudden you are trying so hard to eliminate every possible way that somebody could do something wrong that you do end up with a 1984 thought crime stuff. And so he said it a little bit awkwardly, but even if money, bitcoin, whatever, is used for illegal transactions, if it has a real utility, you should let that in. It's just like freedom of speech. Of course people are going to use speech to say hateful, horrible things, but that doesn't mean that you eradicate speech.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, or just like US Dollars, right? US dollars are used for all kinds of illegal activities. It doesn't mean they, they turn off US dollars. Or an invention as simple as the knife, right? Where people use knives to prepare dinner every night and other people use knives to kill people. So we don't make knives illegal. People have used cars to run people over. It's like, you're not going to make cars illegal. I guess the tool is amoral, right? Money is a tool. You can't impute any immorality. The tool like, oh, someone uses for an illegal purpose. We need a legalized tool. That is fucking nonsense. Makes no sense whatsoever. Reach. All right, number two, a hot take from Andrew Take. What do you think about cryptocurrency? Are you invested?
-
Unknown A
Yeah. So I'm a proponent of crypto. I do use crypto. Bitcoin, Eat the big ones. Okay, I think that chasing crypto pumps is now over. We're not. The bull runs over. The stupid money is gone. I see. They launch these coins and then they start a telegram community. Everyone's like, yeah, we're all in this together. No, you're not. You're not in this together. If you buy crypto at a dollar and then you sell it at $10, someone bought it off you at $10, they start these stupid communities. So all of you sit there and don't dump so that the developer can dump.
-
Unknown B
You're all dummies.
-
Unknown A
You're all dummies.
-
Unknown B
That's a pretty good description of crypto, not bitcoin. Yeah, it's in general, crypto could be described favorably as gambling devices and unfavorably as pump and dump schemes, as he's describing. Right. You create a token, you create a community, some kind of value proposition, a website, a white paper, whatever. You create this hype. You know, it's going to be the next decentralized world computer whatever, whatever. And you get people to buy this hype, this innovation theater, as I call it, the price goes up.
-
Unknown A
That's good.
-
Unknown B
You're the original issuer of the token and then you just dump it after it's 10x or whatever your multiple is. And so, yeah, that's basically what crypto is. They're pump and dump schemes. The, the, you know, people are basically being used as exit liquidity. So people are getting rug pulled all the time. And that's why it's such a disgusting space. Overall, what's unique about bitcoin, once you understand like the properties of good money, like we've talked about before, and bitcoin is basically this ultimate sound money. You know, call it digital sound money. It's, it's an ideal asset. You have that same type of dynamic, but there's no better asset to dump it into actually. So, you know, when it 10 X's. Well, what are you gonna do if you're gonna sell your bitcoin for what, like for dot? Well, you don't want to sell it for dollars because dollars get debased.
-
Unknown B
You don't want to sell it for gold because gold has, you know, more seasonable, has a more higher inflation rate, all these things that make it inferior to bitcoin. So bitcoin, you're left with just this perpetual pump scheme. Basically it just goes up because it is the most superior monetary technology we've ever had. So it's, you know, yeah, crypto is pump and dump and then bitcoin is crypto minus the dump. There's just no better asset to dump it into. So therefore it just pumps.
-
Unknown A
For me, I think people need to understand that all capital markets are gambling full stop. And there's something about the way that it gets crystallized and manipulated. In crypto, that's extra creepy. But if you fail to understand that the stock market is a big gambling pool that attracts gamblers, you will be very confused. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't like them. It doesn't mean that I don't think that there's a huge purpose to the capital markets. There are. But you. A hedge fund is literally betting against things for things. It's going to go up, it's going to go down, like it's gambling.
-
Unknown B
So, yeah, Mises would say all human action is speculative because we can never know with certainty that our actions will create our intended outcomes ever. Right. So it's all speculative. It's all gambling. Right? It's all gambling. You don't know anything that you're trying to do is going to work out in your favor. So we're dealing with probabilities in every step of our lives.
-
Unknown A
Y.
-
Unknown B
All right, this one you're familiar with. You've seen this one before. The US Government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money. It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we borrowing in a currency that we print ourselves? I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say, why do we borrow our own currency in the first place? Like you said, they print the dollar. So why.
-
Unknown A
Why does the government even borrow?
-
Unknown B
Well.
-
Unknown A
The.
-
Unknown B
So the. I mean, again, some of this stuff gets. Some of the language that the.
-
Unknown A
Mm.
-
Unknown B
Some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by selling bonds. Is that what they do? Yeah, they sell bonds. Yeah, they sell bonds. Right. Since they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah. So a lot of times. A lot of times, at least to my year with mmt, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing. But there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to. So, yeah, I guess I'm just. I can't really talk. I don't. I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking about, like. Because it's like, Jesus, the government clearly prints money. It does it all the time, and it clearly borrows.
-
Unknown B
Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation. So I don't think there's anything confusing there, bro.
-
Unknown A
He lied on his resume. Like, that is crazy. That. That clip is crazy.
-
Unknown B
It's crazy. It.
-
Unknown A
I've Seen it titled as the scariest clip on the Internet. That is by far the scariest clip on the Internet. That guy was actually advising President Biden on his economic policy. That's insane. I can't, I can't fathom.
-
Unknown B
I think he has a music degree or something. Like he doesn't have a degree in economics, clearly. I would say in short, that's your brain on fiat basically. Like it just makes no sense whatsoever. If I were to try and demystify what he's saying us he doesn't know what he's saying. Well, I think what, I think if.
-
Unknown A
You could answer her question. What he wishes he understood.
-
Unknown B
Here's what's going on and I'll try to say it in as simple terms as possible. US Government issues shitcoin called US Treasury. It can issue as many of these shitcoins as it wants, right? This is debt. Creates it out of thin air. Uses treasuries to borrow dollars from the Fed, the central bank of the United States that can also issue US dollar shitcoin out of thin air ad infinitum. Right? So US Government issues US T shitcoin as many as they want to borrow as many USD shitcoin from the Federal Reserve as they want the dollar. That's how dollars come into the system. They are born at interest. They are borrowed into existence. There's an interest rate paid to the private owners of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve whose names we don't know, but we have some ideas about it, right? In general, that's the circle jerk that's going on here.
-
Unknown B
And the cost of that is externalized onto everyone using USD as a savings vehicle. They're getting their purchasing power debased with each new dollar that is counterfeited into existence via this mechanism. And this is what, this is the circle jerk that bitcoin fixes.
-
Unknown A
Yowza. I still can't believe that clip is real. It looks like parody, but it's not.
-
Unknown B
Clown world.
-
Unknown A
Jesus.
-
Unknown B
Clown world.
-
Unknown A
All right, last one after bitcoin just.
-
Unknown B
Hit an all time high. Somebody was right. But I know this is not financial advice. Disclaimer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer.
-
Unknown A
How bananas do you think it's going to go?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. So this is a tweet I put out on March 6, 2024. This was right around the bitcoin having, which I believe was May 2024 this year. Someone could check me on that, but I think it was May. And historically bitcoin puts in a new all time high price roughly approximately 18 months after the having. So I put this tweet out, you know, I hope you guys like bananas because over the next 12 to 18 months, Bitcoin is going to go bananas. And I retweeted it today or yesterday sometime recently here in November because, well, bitcoin's at a new all time high price. But I think we're just getting started. I think we're going to put in a really face melting number by the end of 2025. And you're going to. I'm already getting bombarded by the way. It's so weird to be in bitcoin because you go through this entire cycle of drama where bitcoin price goes up.
-
Unknown B
People are all texting me, fomoing how do I buy? And then as soon as bitcoin price goes down, they're like, oh my God, it's going to zero, right? Like it's all over, like should I sell it? And then bitcoin goes into sidebound trading for three years, you know, between having cycles before it goes into that giant blow off top and everyone's quiet, everyone thinks, oh, bitcoin's still a thing. Like no one talks to me. It's radio silence, you know, you're still into that, what's wrong with you? I was like, I've seen this, this is the third cycle I guess I'm going into now. And sure enough, you know, Trump got elected. I'm getting blown up with people asking me questions about it. And so, you know, those who live by the crystal ball are bound to eat glass. I am not making this prediction for any reason other than entertainment purposes.
-
Unknown B
This is not financial advice. This was just my read on bitcoin's prior price movements as it relates to prior range bound trading and mapped over its having cycles. But I, I put this prediction out I think three years ago at this point that I thought it would trade north of $300,000 by its next market cycle peak. That was my prediction three years ago. So I'll just stick to that one for entertainment purposes only.
-
Unknown A
And what time duration is that before.
-
Unknown B
The end of 2025?
-
Unknown A
Wow.
-
Unknown B
300K. Before the end of 2025. Above 300k. Nice.
-
Unknown A
Wow. Well if it hits that number, my friend, I'll take you out for a very nice day.
-
Unknown B
And that would put it around a little bit less than half of gold's market cap. Gold's market cap's around 15 and a half trillion. I think that would put Bitcoin probably around 5 or 6 trillion market cap. Again, someone could check me on that. But I think that's about right. Five or six trillion seems like a reasonable number for this cycle. And then next cycle I would expect it to eclipse gold's market cap and and go on up from there.
-
Unknown A
Be fascinating to watch. And speaking of which, where can people follow along with you to see what you're up to?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Thank you for having me. Always love talking to you. A lot of fun. I'm whatismoneypodcast.com and I'm on Twitter @ BreedLove22.
-
Unknown A
I love it. All right, everybody, speaking of other things that I love, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Michael Saylor, welcome back to the show. Happy to be here. It is very good to have you. Now, at the time of recording, bitcoin is over 100k and has been for quite a while at this point. So I think the question of is bitcoin real? Is dead. But now.