Robert Breedlove on the Hidden War on Financial Freedom EP 465

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Copilot for Microsoft 365 helps you streamline, automate and unlock innovation so you can work faster and smarter. Learn more at Copilot dot Microsoft three. Six five.com dot coming up next on passion struck. I joke that the debt ceiling translates into the sky as the limit because the only thing they've ever done with the debt ceiling is raise it. That's all that happens.

Debase the currency, raise the debt ceiling. A cycle as old as time. When you understand that debasing currency is violating those ownership claims between individuals and assets, you're debasing the purpose of civilization, really, which is just to preserve. What do they say possession is nine tenths of the law, right? I talked to a brilliant attorney.

He makes the point that 100% of the rule of law grounds out in private property. It only exists to resolve disputes over resources. So we're talking about undermining the very basis of the rule of law itself, the very basis of civilization, the express purpose of government, which in a purely philosophical sense, post magna carta, is the preservation of life, liberty, property. We're undermining the preservation of property. And so this is catastrophic cascading effect on the world.

John R. Miles
Welcome to passion struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions.

On Fridays, we have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEO's, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 465 at passion Struck. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, to be better, and to make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here.

Or you simply want to introduce us to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize in a convenient playlist. Give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com starter packs to get started. I'm thrilled to share an incredible milestone we've just achieved.

We've officially crossed 40 million downloads. And this isn't just a number, it's a testament to the movement we're building, the conversations we're sparking, and the change we're inspiring across the globe. I'm also excited to announce that my new book, Passion Struck, won the gold medal at the Nonfiction book Awards and also was a winner of the Eric Hoffer Book Award. We also just launched the audiobook version, and you can find it on Amazon or wherever you purchase books. In case you missed my interviews from earlier in the week, I had intriguing conversations with Alex Edmonds and Angela Foster.

Alex is a luminary in finance and economics from the London Business School, and in this episode we delve into his compelling new book may contain lies. Discover how Alex dismantles the minefields of misinformation that bombard our daily lives, from fabricated tales to flawed studies. And he also provides strategies to thrive in a world awash with misinformation. Angela is a leading voice in health optimization and biohacking. As a former corporate lawyer turned health and performance coach, Angela has transformed her life and now helps others do the same through her podcast, high performance health.

In this episode, we dive into our insights on achieving peak physical and mental performance, exploring the latest in biohacking, nutrition, and lifestyle strategies. Please check them both out and I wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. If you love either of those episodes or today's, we would appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and families. I know we and our guests love to see your comments. Now let's talk about today's interview, which comes from our vault.

If you're interested in cryptocurrency, you'll want to listen to this conversation with Robert Bridlove, a freedom maximalist and bitcoin entrepreneur. He explains inflation in a clear and concise way, helping you understand the fundamental concepts behind cryptocurrency and bitcoin's performance. Even if you haven't been following the conversation, this episode is a great way to jump in. It's an educational deep dive on money, inflation, property, bitcoin, and assets. Robert will discuss how bitcoin is freedom and individual sovereignty during the digital age.

You may just want to take notes and listen to it multiple times to fully grasp the information. Thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin.

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John R. Miles
I am absolutely ecstatic and honored today to welcome Robert Breedlove to the Passion Strike podcast. Welcome, Robert. Hey, glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, as we were talking about before, I would say when it comes to many of the topics we're going to be talking about today, I would describe myself as a novice to maybe a little bit on the spectrum above being a novice.

But I remember as a kid, I started learning about money, really by playing monopoly and seeing from playing the game what investing was really about, how money worked. And then when I was in fourth or fifth grade, I started a paper out because at that time my parents would pay for the bare minimums, but they wouldn't really pay for anything above that. And so I needed to find a way to get some income in and I wanted to have purchasing power so I could play arcade games and do other things. But I always like to start the conversations off by getting an understanding of how someone takes the path that they do. So wanted to understand how you found this passion for investing and really understanding the value of money and how that led to where you are today.

Microsoft
Yeah, I guess where I am today is like working on this show, the what is money show. As the name implies, we do a really deep dive on the nature, the history, the technological, psychological, sociological aspects of money. I mean, even just starting at the top, when you say that money is a technology, some people that blows people's minds, they never think of money as a technology. They think of it as some government creation of some kind. And I think when you start looking at the historical development process of money, it just unlocks a deeper understanding of a lot of things, of human nature, of human history.

And it's a very interesting rabbit hole, to say the least. And I guess how I got onto that path was growing up, I was just a ferociously curious kid I was fortunate enough to have a mom that really nurtured that curiosity. She took the policy that if I was old enough to ask the question, I was old enough to know the answer. So I remember many times her sitting down with me, burying our noses in an encyclopedia, trying to answer some esoteric question a five or six or seven year old kid ask. And obviously I learned a lot in school, but she was equipping me with the.

The importance of self study and how it can be used to really figure out anything, right. Solve almost any problem in the world if you just apply your mind in the proper way. So very grateful for that, I guess. Also I was probably predisposed for the financial aspects of life. My father was an accountant and a successful entrepreneur.

He ran a logistics business for many years. He ran many businesses, but his largest one was a logistics business. And I pretty intensely curious kid. Once I picked up reading on my own, like the age of ten or eleven, I got serious about it. I started trying to figure things out for myself.

The first topic that really fascinated me was space and the cosmos. So the first area of reading I went into was astrophysics. I just wanted to understand. We camped a lot. I grew up in Tennessee, so we spent a lot of time outdoors.

I was always curious about what's going on with all this space and stars around us, and dug into some great books like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. And many of those authors, I guess, helped satiate some of my deeper curiosities about the world. And it just reinforced that point that you really could learn a tremendous amount just through self directed study. And as I got a bit older, my next fascination, and when I say fascination, these are things that just confound me. Like when I looked at them, I couldn't make sense of them at all.

And when I looked at things like the stock market and I heard people talking about it, it was completely mysterious. I'm like, none of it made sense to me. What does this mean? You're trading stocks? And I couldn't understand it at all.

So I started going into that rabbit hole, basically. I spent years reading the Economist magazine, which if you've ever picked up that magazine, it's like they published every Sunday, and it's like getting a book in the Mail every Sunday. It's not just about economics, right? It's about politics and arts and science and art and technology, all of these things. So very densely informative, well written publication.

I'm grateful to have made a habit out of reading that for several years. I think it toned up my vocabulary and my understanding of the world. I will say, in retrospect, the Economist magazine is totally absent of austrian economics, and it really just has keynesian economics in it, which is a bit of a problem. So I was going down that path, and when I found, I ultimately came to the book the creature from Jekyll island, which is a book by G. Edward Griffin on the inception of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States.

And it was at that point that I pretty much realized that central banking was the problem in the world. I'm probably 18 or 19 years old when I read this book, but I was struck simultaneously by there being no adequate solution to central banking. It just seemed to be this anti capitalistic institution at the heart of every modern quote, unquote, free market economy. And it was basically being used as an organization that could perpetrate systemic theft through the counterfeiting of currency. It's a currency counterfeiting monopoly.

That's all it is. And obviously, when you destroy the free market fundamentals of the most important market in the world, which is money, it has all these second and third order consequences on other markets. We often talk about this on the show. One of the big ones is price signal distortion. When central banks counterfeit currency, they disrupt this economic nerve signal that coordinates other markets, actually exacerbates the boom and bust business cycle.

That's just one example of something that central banking causes that's very harmful to the world. So the realization that central bank is a big problem, but there is no adequate solution to it at the time. I just put this thing on a shelf intellectually and said, well, there's a problem, but I have no idea what anyone can do about it. And I'll skip ahead years later. 2014, I think, is when I first discovered bitcoin.

So I'm probably 28 years old at this time, and wrote it off. I just wrote it off initially, I was like, oh, this sounds ridiculous. Magic Internet money. I did believe that some digital money would ultimately emerge, but I thought I was just operating under the fallacy that bitcoin was version one of what would like the version 50 of bitcoin. Maybe that would be the thing that fixed money, something like that.

But essentially wrote it off in 2014. And it wasnt until 20 1617, really the 2017 bull market again drew my attention, and as it did for millions and millions of people, and this time I actually did the work. I actually studied what bitcoin is. I was very fortunate to have read the book, the bitcoin standard by safety and a moose the weekend it came out, which was like April 2018. So by that point, I'd already built a pretty strong conviction in bitcoin.

But after reading his book, that I guess was the final piece in that puzzle that I had been puzzling out over the years. Like, what can we do about central banking? It's basically prevents us from having free market economics in any real sense. The realization was that bitcoin could actually be a technology that's disruptive to gold and therefore disruptive to the central bank. That was quite revelatory, to say the least.

And that's it? Yeah, a couple of years. I was running a hedge fund at the time. I was talking and writing about bitcoin a lot. All of that work was becoming popular, and I finally decided to start a podcast in November 2020.

And my first guest was Michael Saylor. We did a long form series together, 17 episodes in total, about 25 hours ish in content, and the show was just taken off. So now I've pivoted my professional focus to this read, write, and talk about history of money, nature of money, bitcoin, and I really enjoy it. I enjoy wrestling with big ideas, trying to puzzle things out and trying to bring those big ideas, big abstract notions that we often get into these deep conversations, trying to bring them down to earth for people, to make them palatable and simple. So hopefully that gives you a rough idea of my path into bitcoin clay.

John R. Miles
Well, its interesting for me because we both started out on completely different trajectories and weve both ended up almost in the same exact place, yet on different core focus areas. But I would say what I do with the majority of my time is, as you said, read, write, and talk about what I'm passionate about. And I don't think I know a decade ago, when I was sitting in a Fortune 50 as the CIO, this would have been the farthest thing from my mind that I would be doing now. Well, I understand you and I have something in common, and that is we both spent some time in accounting firms. I happened to be a senior manager at Arthur Andersen in Houston when Enron went down.

Microsoft
Oh, wow. So I could write a book just on that. But I, although I was on the accounting side, I ran the cybersecurity practice for them, for the southwest, but it was really my first indoctrination into understanding. I'm not even sure I understand it now, but this float of money that happens across these big corporations, and I remember when we had the financial debacle in 2008, 2009, all these companies, as large as Home Depot, et cetera, worried about going out of business. And I think people don't realize that on the balance sheet, it's not like they're carrying billions of dollars.

John R. Miles
There's this float, and you could probably describe it better than me, but there's this float in and out of money on a daily basis. And I know for Lowe's, who I had just left during the middle of this, they were worried weren't even going to be able to make payroll and pay the 350,000 employees. If someone who's listening to this doesn't understand what I'm talking about, and you just shed some light. Yeah, well, it's a tricky one. So I would just start with.

Microsoft
Enron is a common point between us here. Enron is a great case study of corruption, right? It's. I would define corruption as a publicly applied rule. In the case of Enron, it was generally accepted accounting principles, right?

When those rules are circumvented or twisted or broken or manipulated or made exception to for private gain, that is corruption, right? There's a rule set we're all supposed to play by general accepted accounting principles, IFRs, whatever it is. And when one individual organization circumvents those rules to enrich themselves, they're not playing by the rules. So that is the nature, the true nature of corruption. And I think that's the essence of central banking itself, right?

That money. One way to interpret it is as this rule set for markets. Now, historically, we had a free market money like gold, which was this unmanipulable rule set. It has a certain supply. No one knew how to compromise it, necessarily.

It had a predictable growth rate at about 2% year over year. So as a market actor, you knew you could park wealth in something like gold and no one was going to confiscate it or inflate it away or anything of the sort. And this also explains the problem with fiat currency. When we get off of a gold standard, you've now given all of that, that rulemaking power to an arbitrary, politically appointed authority, right? It's no longer a matter of entrepreneurs selecting the best tool for the job, which is what made gold emerge as money.

But rather it's a political institution forcing market actors to use a monetary technology they would not otherwise use. And you could also think that when you're debasing currency, you're twisting and breaking those rules that are intended to be universally applicable, right? And this is a key point on the understanding of money that I put into this nutshell that most people seem to appreciate, inflation is legal counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is criminal inflation. They are mechanically identical.

There is no difference between George Floyd counterfeiting a dollar 20 bill and getting arrested, murdered, whatever you want to call it. The crime that he was punished for is the same crime the Federal Reserve perpetrates by the trillion. It's just done under the aegis of a legal monopoly. But it's mechanically the same thing. We have laws against counterfeiting currency, because counterfeiting currency is used to redistribute wealth from the savers, using dollars as a store of value into the hands of counterfeiters.

Yet we enshrine that very practice in the central bank. It's the same thing. So when we talk about the nature of corruption, this publicly applicable rule, the dollar, and this is an express mandate of the Fed. Right. Price stability and full employment.

Well, price stability implies, at least that the dollar is going to hold its purchasing power over time, if not increase. And what has happened over the past 100 plus years of federal Reserve existence is the precise opposite. So Enron, skirting these public rules, vaporized, what, $70 billion in wealth? Something like that. 60, $70 billion.

John R. Miles
And thousands of jobs. Yes, thousands of jobs. It's exactly what the federal like. If you run the numbers on the amount of purchasing power, and I want to be clear here, purchasing power is equivalent to stealing human time and energy, right? Because human time and energy is a primary input into every industrial process and every good and service in the world.

Microsoft
There's nothing in the world, even things that are made by machine. Right. There was a man at some point in that chain that helped fabricate the machine from the raw materials of nature to make the machine that makes the good that gets delivered to you. So human time and energy is an indispensable ingredient to every good and service in the world. And when you counterfeit or depreciate currency, inflate currency, you're just stealing purchasing power out of the monetary medium and putting it into the hands of the counterfeiters or the central bankers.

So its this idea of corruption being at the heart of every modern economy, thats a real problem. And you brought up 2008 and 2009. Thats a very predictable consequence of central banking. This is Ludwig von Mises. 1949, I think, was the year he published human action in the United States.

And I want to say it was a few years prior to that, where he had presented the austrian business cycle theory. And he basically said that once you start debasing a currency, that you will exacerbate the boom and bust business cycle. This is back to that price signal distortion. If you think about money as, or at least the pricing system which is denominated in money, is a nerve signal thats coordinating all these disparate economic processes, such that you don't need to know that there was a fire, a giant fire in South America that destroyed all the palm trees. You don't need to know any of the story, or the narrative, or the politics or the reasoning.

All you need to know as a market actor is that the price of palm oil went up, or whatever the commodity is. And that is a direct signal and mathematical incentive for you to use less palm oil, or if you're a producer, to sell more of it, to produce more and sell more, or if you're again a consumer, to use substitutes. So this, it's hard to overstate how important the price signal is for coordinating strangers in the global economy. And when you start to debase the medium in which that price signal is expressed, you are injecting entropy or uncertainty or confusion into the entire market process. So over the past two years, we've seen global m two, which is a measure of global liquidity, increase roughly 40%.

That's in a two and a half year time period, global money increased 40%. This is in the wake of COVID Obviously, the inflation was a consequent result of that. The supply chain disruptions the deeper you get down this rabbit hole. I argue a lot of the cultural sickness in the world is based on this as well. The mass psychosis.

Theres so much confusion being injected into the market process. Productive market actors are being squeezed harder and harder. So theres a real pain. Theres a real acute financial pain thats being afflicted. But there is the generalized ignorance about money and economics makes it impossible for people to properly attribute the cause of that pain.

Most people think, if you're a Democrat, you think it's the Republicans. If you're a Republican, you think it's the Democrats. If you're maybe semi aware of what's going on, you think it's a world economic forum, or IMF, or World bank. But in reality, I think it is. And admittedly, maybe this is an overly simplistic view, but I think it's just the fact that we are debasing the most important and all encompassing technology in the world, which is money.

Or confusing if you think about how many people coordinate their actions based on money, right? What do most people do? Most people work a job. Why do people work a job. They work to get paid.

John R. Miles
Yeah. So they can have a standard of living. Yes. Now, if you monopolize currency production and there's one issuer that can counterfeit and others that cannot, obviously that counterfeiter is going to be able to disproportionately higher and influence the patterns of human action. You can hire people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do.

Microsoft
And so I guess to get all the way, I'm throwing a lot at you here, but such as the rabbit hole, there's a lot of layers to it. A really key piece to understand is just the nature of ownership itself or the nature of property. I think ownership is maybe a more useful word because when you say property, people tend to think of a tangible asset. But the nature of ownership, which is the relationship between an owner and their assets. I have exclusive power to control the assets that I own.

I have the exclusive power to exclude others from using them. This is private property. This is what makes civilization peaceful and prosperous. When you debase currency, you are deteriorating or degradating the ownership claims that individual market actors have on their assets. You're actually debasing private property rights.

And this is, it's a big kind of bitter pill to swallow because first order thinking would tell you, well, if we're out of money, as the us government does this all the time, we're doing it right now, right? We just hit the debt ceiling. The government's out of money. They've hit their borrowing limit. They're engaged in deficit spending, so their expenses way outstrip their revenues.

What other choice do they have? Can't borrow anymore and expenses exceed revenues. What do governments do? Create a trillion dollar coin. Create a trillion dollar coin or increase the debt ceiling.

Like I joke that the debt ceiling translates into the sky as the limit because the only thing they've ever done with a debt ceiling is raise it. That's all that happens. Debase the currency, raise the debt ceiling. It's a cycle as old as time. When you understand that the debasing currency is violating those ownership claims between individuals and assets, you're debasing the purpose of civilization, really, which is just to preserve.

What do they say? Possession is nine tenths of the law, right? I talked to a brilliant attorney. He's a libertarian attorney named Stephan Kinsella on the show. We've got an ongoing series together.

He makes the point that 100% of the rule of law grounds out in private property. It only exists to resolve disputes over resources. So we're talking about undermining the very basis of the rule of law itself, the very basis of civilization, the express purpose of government, which in a purely philosophical sense, post magna Carta, is the preservation of life, liberty, property. We're undermining the preservation of property. And so this, it's a catastrophic cascading effect on the world and people.

When this is a foreign subject to people, they would say, oh, you're over indexing on the money. It's not that bad. You just print a little bit of money, it's not hurting so many people. But I think it's the invisibility or the difficulty in perceiving the economic impacts of printing money that makes it a real problem. One of the definitions, this is Henry Hazlett.

He has a great book, Economics in one lesson, and Im going to roughly paraphrase here, but he defines economics as the science of hidden consequences. So its very easy to see the example he uses the broken window, right? Someone breaks the window and a keynesian economist will say, oh well, that was good for the economy. You created a job for the window maker, but what you dont see is the proprietor that had to pay for that window repair. You don't see what his money would have otherwise went to.

Maybe he would have bought a fine suit or invested in his business or whatever it is. So there's the scene, broken window, increase in glassmaker jobs, but there's this unseen decrement to savings and investment. And so I think the debasement of currency, let's say the state and central bankers have benefited from the relative invisibility of this, because if we just print money, nominal prices on assets go up, wages go up, the price of your home goes up, the price of your stocks go up, the price denominated in a debasing currency of anything that cannot be debased tends to go up. So this has a weird cognitive optical illusion on people where they think they are getting richer, theyre becoming nominally richer. Theres more dollars on their brokerage statement, more dollars in their appraisal of their home, whatever it may be.

But what the hidden consequence that's ill perceived is the diminishment of the purchasing power per unit of dollars. And that's what this scam is based on. That is the whole scam right there. We can print money to solve problems, but the reality is you're robbing people's ability to engage in consensual stressed about pests. When you have pest problems, don't call just anyone, call the Orkin pro.

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Microsoft
It's what grandma would want at participating McDonald's for a limited time market exchange. Yeah, and can I just take us a couple steps back? And I'm gonna just put some things out that I know you can correct me if I am wrong, which I may likely be, but my understanding is, when we started the Federal Reserve, the reason the United States became the gold standard is that we captured a lot of gold coming out of world War two. That's right. As a result, this new paradigm was created where everyone in the world was basing the currency off of gold.

John R. Miles
And in essence, you could have thought of it as Saudi Arabia owns a piece of the gold, and England owns a piece of the gold, and Germany owns a piece of the gold, and the Philippines own a piece of the gold. And that was going on for decades until the Nixon administration took a huge gamble, which they decided to move away from the standard. And at the time, England could have said, I want my gold back that I own, if I understand it correctly. But no one made that call. And so from that point on is when the fiat currency paradigm that we're in now really started.

And what has ended up happening is, over time, we just keep printing more and more imaginary money that is not based on any foundation thats underpinning it. And over time, this kept giving the central bank more and more power over what happens to our ownership that were giving away to a single institution. Am I thinking about this in the right way? Yeah, you are. And then I happen to hear Michael Saylor speak.

Who you brought up, who, as we talked about before, I've known for well over a decade, and I trust his judgment because he's one of the most wicked smart people I've ever met. But he was talking about the declining value of money. And when we keep printing like we did during COVID as you brought up, we are losing more and more of the money thats in our bank account. Is everything im thinking about here. Correct.

So can you put this into maybe a better way that people could think about it when the central bank is printing this much money and were about ready to do it again? How much of our money is really being undercut in this process and our purchasing power? Yeah, it's a great question. You're framing it broadly correctly. If you give me a little room here, I'll try and just give a brief explanation of how gold became money and then where governments took it from there.

And while you're doing that, maybe just hit on property as well, because we think of property as our home, car, stocks, whatever it may be. But properties, the way you lay it out, is completely different than that. Yeah, I've been beating this drum for so long calling it property because that's what libertarian philosophers call it. But I think a more useful term in the modern parlance is ownership because it's not a tangible thing. Ownership is clearly not a tangible thing.

Microsoft
It's this relationship basically between an owner and an asset. And that, as Mises said, if history has taught us one thing, it's that private property and civilization are inexorably bound. You can't. That's the whole point, right? It's we either kill each other over every sandwich or we respect one another's ownership.

You made and bought and justly acquired the sandwich. I will respect that as you will reciprocate for me. And that enables civilized relationships. Otherwise, we're barbarians fighting over everything all the time. So to rewind the clock way back to the transition point from hunter gatherer society into the agricultural age, it was this point that was so critical because for the first time in human history, when we began to engage in agrarian society, we started to accumulate an economic surplus.

So when you're hunter and gatherer, it's just whatever you've got on you, right? Those are your assets, your dagger, your clothing, your satchel, your skins, whatever, and you're just going place to place, surviving. There's no settlement. You're not sitting there farming land or raising livestock, right? There's no economic surplus that you're accumulating.

You're just very much living a subsistence lifestyle, let's say. Now when we settle down into an agrarian society, well, what do we do? We start to create economic surplus, right? We've got farming tools, livestock, crop yields, grain, or saving grain for the winter, whatever it may be. We have resources that need to be custodied and protected and protected from plunder, which is a really big deal.

This point. We get a couple of things. We get the first growth and economic surplus humans have ever started to create by consciously engaging in acts of production rather than just consumption, right? When you're a hunter and gather, you're just basically consuming. You engage in small scale production, making your tools and weapons and whatnot, but you're basically consuming all the time, whatever the earth has to offer.

But once you switch into agrarian lifestyle, you are consciously sitting down, setting out, choosing a plot of land. You're engaging with reality on longer term time horizons. So you're looking at the stars, you're figuring out when to plant, when to harvest, you're learning about the seasons. You are engaging in an actual sophisticated production process. Let's say that leads to the creation of economic surplus.

So that's one big change, right? Big fundamental change. The other one is the origin point of government itself. This idea of having a monopoly on violence that, well, we have all this economic surplus, we now need to protect it. There's other societies or other maybe hunter gatherer groups that may seek to come in and steal the grain or steal the livestock.

So you actually had to create this security provider function in society to protect the economic surplus. So you get the origin point of economic surplus. And government essentially government is that monopoly on violence. And so now you have a world where people are producing an economic surplus. And in that world, people naturally start to trade with one another, right?

I've got a bunch of things. I've got a bunch of grain. I want your salt, whatever it may be. We figure out, hey, we can trade. This engages the division of labor, which Adam Smith so brilliantly wrote about in the wealth of nations.

This is a fundamental mathematical economic reality. So long as there are differences in skillset or ability, that its a win for both parties to trade. Its like you focus on what you do best, I focus on what I do best. And we create more output per unit of input through trade. That is the magic of the division of labor.

And thank God for that, by the way. If human beings were not more prosperous, acting in cooperation than we were in isolation, we would just live in isolation. There would be like we take society and social cohesion for granted. But I think it's rooted on this singular economic principle of the division of labor. We are richer working together than we are apart.

So we discovered that. We discovered that through this kind of agrarian lifestyle, getting us into a market process, the societies that did it best flourished most. They created the most wealth, they out competed the others, and we moved into this world that's much more market driven than it was in the days of hunters and gatherers. And so a simple way, and look, we could, I talked about this for hundreds of hours on the show. But a simple way to understand money is just, you have this storm of goods trading, right?

People trading goods, there's merchants and things moving all the time, goods, commodities changing hands all the time again, all to intensify, exchange and tap into the division of labor. A simple way to understand money is whatever asset becomes the most liquid or the most tradable or the most saleable or the most marketable, right. Another good definition of money is the most marketable commodity. That asset becomes money. That's what it is.

That's the standard of trade. Because now no matter what I have whatever I have to offer, I know that if I can trade it for the most liquid asset, even if I dont want the asset, I have no use for gold. Lets just assume gold was the most liquid asset as it ultimately became. I know that I can swap my goods for gold and then go from gold to any other asset because its the most exchangeable commodity, the most marketable commodity. So theres this natural emergent economic phenomena.

This has nothing to do, this is not a government decree. There was no government that came out and said hey, gold is money now guys, everyone except gold. It happened through this trial and error process. And the asset with the best monetary properties basically is promoted into the role of money over time.

Again, im going to gloss over some history here, but I think pretty much everyone, they understand the value of gold, right? That gold is something valuable. Its been used as money for 5000 years. The world again, through a lot of trial and error. Weve had a lot of different countries try silver standard, bronze.

Weve done all kinds of different things but those that adopted gold. And again, if you wanted a deep dive on this, you could go read the bitcoin standard by safety and moose. It will give you a very thorough explanation of why gold out competes everything else and becomes money. By the mid 18, hundreds were on a global gold standard. You could take gold anywhere in the world and it was spendable.

We were basically on a one on a free market monetary paradigm. And that's even currencies. Currencies initially were redeemable for units of gold basically. And that's why many of them are named after a unit of weight like the lira, the pound, even the dollar. These were in reference to a certain weight of gold.

So I could go into a bit more about that. But a very quick punchline. The one drawback of gold is a monetary technology, there's a few drawbacks, but one primary one is portability. It's hard to move gold across space, so it's hard to engage in high frequency exchange when you're using a heavy physical commodity money, like gold. Now, when we abstract gold into paper, that makes exchange much easier, right?

We can move paper across space much faster. So currency was like an augmentation layer on top of gold to make it more transactable. So I'm going to get into World War two now. Thank you for giving me the room. World War two.

First of all, the reason World War one and World War two were of such a historically unparalleled scope, severity, duration, lives lost, is precisely because we'd gone from this global gold standard onto fiat currency standards at times of war. So what this did, war is a very expensive enterprise. Historically, two monarchs go to war. The first one that gets financially tapped out, or he's struggling to make ends meet to continue funding the war effort. They would cut a deal, they'd sign an armistice, right?

It was. War was considered just like aristocratic, gentlemanly affair. It didn't really affect mainstream society. And it and wars tend to be short duration and not such a severe global scope. But once you go into a fiat currency standard and now a belligerent nation is no longer confined, their war chest is no longer confined to their own balance sheet.

They can now tap into the balance sheet of the entire civilization by printing money, can print more money to pay for the war effort, and externalize the cost of that printing onto productive market actors up until the point of hyperinflation, you can literally siphon all of your nation's resources into the war effort, versus just having your own confined balance sheet. That's what exacerbated the duration and scope and scale and severity of world War one and World War two. And so, fast forwarding again, near the conclusion of World War two. Let's just say it clearly here. Once we get to a gold standard, gold is what makes the world go round, right?

What is the old Rothschild quote? Give me the power to issue a nation's currency. I care not who makes its laws. Which is another way of saying, let me hold all the gold and issue the currency on top of it. And I don't.

That's the only power. It's the ultimate power in the world. Laws don't matter. You can buy whatever legal changes you need, you can buy whatever armies you need. It's absolute power, essentially.

And so, predictably, every time Hitler would invade a country, what is the first place he would go after conquering a country, he would go directly to their central bank and confiscate whatever gold reserves they had. Again, war is a very expensive effort. You can't even sustain the enterprise unless you can pay for it. So it stands to reason that if youre going to conquer a country, the first thing youre going to do after conquering them is seize their assets. And gold was obviously the premier asset.

This plays out enough times. Hitlers invaded enough countries, seized enough gold that England, France, I think he seized Polands gold. And that was the final trip point that they said, oh, my goodness, if the blitzkrieg is not stopped, then Hitler is going to invade here. And Caesar gold, like the whole thing, we could lose. So what are we going to do?

Well, let's ship the gold to North America. North America is like now our geographic safe haven to protect our gold stores from nazi plundering in the event that we get invaded or conquered. And so a lot of gold starts to flow to north America, and weve got the United States, whos been aloof, not really wanting to enter the war. Its not really much of our interests, right. We had actually commercial interest to sell.

We were selling things into the war effort, but there was no financial incentive to become involved. But after enough of the gold came here and were seeing this war play out, there comes a point where we had 30 million Russians dead, I think, fighting Nazi Germany. Germany had taken severe losses. France and England are on the ropes. There comes a point where the United States is completely fresh and saying, oh, we can just go in and end the war and declare ourselves victorious.

And that's exactly what we did. And then, predictably, what's the first thing we did at the conclusion of World War two? Well, of course, we had to change the monetary order because we're the superpower now. We've won the global war. And so we hold the Bretton woods conference.

There was a lot of debate, like, what type of monetary standard were we going to use? Keynes was putting forth the energy based money or commodity based money. But ultimately it was decided us dollar would be pegged to gold. Every other currency in the world would be pegged to the us dollar. And this gave the United States the deficit without tears, I think the French called it.

They also called it the exorbitant privilege, where we could export these green pieces of paper, and the rest of the world would send us goods and services that take human time and energy to produce. We're sending them paper that takes us nothing to produce, no effort. We're just printed or send them a ledger entry in a bank. A lot of this was abstracted into electronic format, and they're sending us real economic goods and services. So this was a really great deal for the United States.

We're just able to siphon wealth off of anyone in the world. And it works. So long as dollar redeemability for gold is upheld, so long as Britain is sending us exports goods and services, and we're sending them dollars, well, those dollars are only as good as the gold they lay claim to. So long as the United States makes good on letting Britain redeem dollars for gold, then that system works. Well, what happened?

Predictably, the United States started to overissue dollars well beyond our gold reserves. I think towards the end, which was 1971, as you appropriately highlighted, the United States was levered something like six to one. We had six times more dollars in circulation than our gold reserves could justify. So we're running a fractional reserve of about 16%. This is a fraud, by the way, because if you're a bank, you should be a 100% reserve bank.

You have liabilities to your customers. If they come to redeem their money, you need to be able to satisfy that liability to the extent that you cannot. And you're running a fractional reserve, you're running a fraudulent operation. Well, United Kingdom called our bluff. I think they repatriated some gold in the sixties, as did France.

And it was in 1960, 919, 70, where Germany attempted to repatriate their gold that catalyzed this 1971 Nixon shock, where he took us off the gold standard. It was said to be a temporary measure. He blamed it on the greedy capitalist and capital markets, as statist bureaucrats always do. They continue to do it to this day. They talk about the gas prices being the gas station operators fault.

They never talk about the central bank, they never talk about the manipulation of money. They never talk about currency counterfeiting. And here we are, 52 years later, in this global fiat currency experiment that was said to be a temporary measure back in 1971. And the central planning of our money has only festered and started to infiltrate other aspects of the marketplace. And it's my view that you cannot have free market capitalism or human flourishing until you eliminate central planning.

We know this as Americans will tell you this. Red blooded Americans will say, central planning doesn't work. We learned when Soviet Russia failed and the United States won, free market capitalism won. But very few people will take that same framework of understanding and look at the biggest, most important market in the world, which is money itself. It is impactful on the pricing of every other commodity market on the earth.

Yet we have central planning in the market for money in every modern economy, every single one. So the entire notion of free market capitalism is an oxymoron so long as the central bank exists. But I wanted to give your audience a really overarching view of what money is, how it, why gold became money, how governments corrupted it. And where we are today, people take it for granted that government paper is money, and that's just not historically true. Okay, where I'm going to go to next, before we get there, is I wanted you, since you laid out that story, I wanted you to go into the war that's happening now between Ukraine and Russia and maybe the economics around it and how much, because the west is trying to bleed Russia out of money.

John R. Miles
But is that even possible in the ecosystem that exists? So is that something that you can talk about? Yeah, I would be less useful, I think, on this particular topic, given that I'm clearly the views I've just laid out for you. It's an overarching view of history, I think where we are today is that currency counterfeiting monopolies run the world. Obviously, Russia has their own central bank.

Microsoft
The United States has their own central bank. These are private organizations, by the way. We call it the Federal Reserve. It's not federal, literally, as private shareholders, undisclosed private shareholders. There are no reserves.

There are no reserves. Let's get into this, because I think this is interesting, and then we can go into why we need to change the system. So, just to finish on the Russia, it's basically what I see happening now is fiat currency causes societies to rip themselves apart over time. So that's why I think we've moved from this unipolar dollar world to a multipolar world. And I expect that to worsen over time.

I think nation state cooperation will fragment more and more as this fiat currency experiment drags on. And ultimately, I think what we saw happen to the Soviet Union in the 20th century, that they were economically out competed and bankrupted. Right? So the Soviet Union fragmented into 30 some odd of its previously conquered territories. I think we see a similar thing play out with all nation states.

This is a scary punchline for people. But the big implication of bitcoin is that it bankrupts the nation state model of human organization. Preston. Yeah. So we're sitting here in very uncertain times.

John R. Miles
I'm a big believer of something called social impact theory, which is that history tends to repeat itself. And as you've talked about, we went from hunter gatherers to then going into these industrial revolutions. We're now in the fourth industrial revolution. But along the way, we went from so many people being laborers in one form or another, whether they were blacksmiths or bakers. And I believe we're going back into that just in a different sense, because we're going to have more and more freelancers as AI and automation and other things start displacing so many people from their jobs.

And I think people are going to be independent operators on their own. But we're facing this tipping point right now where here we are and in the United States, and I think it's true in other countries, all the major banks are laying people off, tech companies are laying people out, laying people off by the tens of thousands. Youve got people like Ray Dalio saying were about ready to enter one of the worst recessions. Now other global leaders are saying the same thing. What should the audience be thinking about with all of this thats going on right now, and what are some of the potential implications?

Microsoft
Well, that's a really, really big question. And I always hesitate to be overly prescriptive about what people should actually be doing in the face of all this uncertainty, because obviously we're all trying to figure this out. I would say that the tech layoffs, this is another good aspect on the consequences of corrupt money.

When you compromise a monetary technology's capacity to hold economic value over time, this is the store of value, function of money. We want a money to hold whatever purchasing power we put into the money, we expect to be able to take out at least that much. You don't want to take out less because that doesn't work. If you take out more, great. But really, it's meant to be this tool for pure optionality in the marketplace.

Whatever purchasing power I put into this thing, I should be able to redeem that purchasing power across any market, for any commodity, any good or service that I want. Now, when you break that, as we've done with fiat currency, as we said, once you de peg from gold, you've given all of the power to issue the nation's currency the deficit without tears, just deficit spend and print money to cover the difference. You've given all of that power to a political organization. The equivalent thing is like if someone gave you a money printer, what would you do with it? I mean, I think almost every human in the world would just keep pressing print until the thing stopped working.

And that's essentially what every central bank has done. So in that world where money is not functioning as a store of value. People are forced, rational market actors are forced to figure out where, what can store value across time? How do I preserve wealth across time? The money doesn't work, what am I going to do?

Well, they result or they resort to other markets. Right. Real estate, oil, obviously gold, to the extent you can get physical delivery of it, and very popularly in recent years are equities, in particular these high growth tech stocks. They get these crazy valuations, somewhat rightfully so. Some of these digital companies have huge network effects and different valuation multiples that arent really comparable to older industrial players.

But also people are buying them just to preserve wealth. People are using Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google stock as a store of value because us dollars don't work and treasuries pay sub 1%, whatever it may be, in an inflationary environment, right, where your CPI and CPI is a terrible metric, but we'll just use the government's statistic. When CPI is running at eight 9% and treasuries are yielding one, you're in a negative real yield environment to the tune of seven, eight 9%. That doesn't work, right. You're being forced further out along the risk curve, out of bonds, out of currency, into equities, real estate, or something more risky, frankly, when you stop accelerating the expansion of the currency supply and uncertainty in markets.

Again, if money is like a hedge against uncertainty, this is a very pernicious thing, because as you're printing more money, you're creating more uncertainty in the marketplace. So youre creating more reservation demand for dollars and currencies. You want more optionality in the face of uncertainty. Money is a tool for optionality. So the more uncertainty thats being created through the printing of money, it also creates this demand to hold more money, which historically has been very confusing for central bankers because theyll print money and theyre worried about inflation.

But the inflation doesnt happen immediately because theres so much reservation demand for people to hold the money, and theyre like, oh, well, inflation didnt happen, well just keep going and going. But there becomes this point where the moneys not adequately holding its value, the psychological disposition towards currency flips, and people actually start to sell currency to buy anything that cant be printed. And so thats how the path towards hyperinflation. So the tech layoffs, this is symptomatic of the corruption of money. This is again, the liquidity is now being pulled out of the market because we had too much inflation after the COVID printing.

Now central bankers are trying to pull the lever in the opposite direction. Well, obviously the assets that have been monetized, like large tech equities, are getting value sucked out of them. And what does that lead to? Layoffs. So it's this, I guess the point I'm trying to make is when you break the money, other asset classes that should not be monetized become monetized.

And now, because they are monetized, they are now vulnerable to central bank policy. So now when the central banks pulling things back, you get tech layoffs. So its very pernicious. Again, this is how we move along that spectrum from free market capitalism towards central planning. The printing of money is infecting all industries.

As far as advice goes for people, the first thing is to just accept that we are in radically uncharted territory. There has never been a global, coordinated, fiat currency experiment like this, ever. We've never had central banks around the world in lockstep depreciating their currencies and then using the purchasing power stolen through the depreciation or debasement of currencies to enforce things like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, these things that fly in the face of the Nuremberg trials. There should be no forced medical procedure. That was one of the big moral, if not the moral point at the end of World War Two is the atrocities that were committed by Hitler.

A lot of that was initiated under forced medical intervention, and we swore that was a crime against humanity. That should never happen. Yet here we are again. We're already flirting with that line. It's very evil.

And so I would encourage people to accept that we're in a very uncertain place in history. I would strongly argue that optionality is the most sufficient strategy in the face of uncertainty. So obviously this means accumulating savings. Now this is a tricky one, because all the money is broken. This is where I think bitcoin is really strong.

Physical gold is really strong assets that you can own independently, protect independently, bearer assets, these things all, they matter a lot. And I'm not trying to be Mister doom and gloom here, but just the peace of mind that comes with owning things that you know you own independent of anything else in the world, is very important. And then I would just encourage people to study, right? Ask these fundamental questions. I'm not here to sell you any idea or perspective, but I would like to encourage you to ask the question, what is money?

What is property? What is ownership? How do markets work? Really do try to get an intellectual framework for what is happening in the world around you. We've seen this play out many times before.

There's a whole history of fiat currency debasement, hyperinflation, warfare, confiscation, capital controls, taxation. There's plenty of history to study that can point you to where we are headed now. And I guess at the bottom of that, again, is the fundamental substrate of human civilization, which is individualized private property or individualized private ownership of assets and the means of production. When that comes under attack, everything that we build on top of it is in jeopardy. So this is not, although it is, it does venture into the abstract.

This is a very practical, pragmatic enterprise trying to learn and understand these topics and prepare yourself for the radical changes ahead. I mean, I think that this transformation we're going through, like we talked about, the hunter gatherer transition from hunters and gatherers to the agricultural age. Well, later we had the agricultural age into the industrial age, and now it's pretty clear we're going from the industrial age into the digital age, or whatever you want to call it. I call it the digital age. If you take that idea seriously.

Imagine trying to describe to an agrarian the industrial age someone that only knows farm life. All theyve ever done is farm, and theyve been an agriculturalist their whole life. Try to sit down, one of them and say, hey, you know what? In 400 years, were going to go through this industrial revolution, were going to have giant cities, were going to fly to the moon, were going to have satellites in orbit. Youre going to be able to telecommunicate with people over video calls.

You would blow their fucking mind apart. They would have no idea what youre talking about. You wouldnt even have the language. How could you communicate to someone who only knew about farming, about a Zoom call?

They would have no way of understanding what you are saying. So that is, in my mind, the significance of the transition that we are experiencing right now. We are going from the industrial age into the digital age. So the transformations that stand to happen in the next few decades are overwhelming, to say the least. And I think the best way you can respond to changes, to periods of rapid change is to engage in rapid learning and to be extremely humble in your approach, because almost by definition, the faster things change, the less you're able to know.

So you need to reevaluate your fundamental presuppositions about the world. And in every way, and in many ways, I think that's what the bitcoin rabbit hole journey represents, is people asking why? And then once you get to the bottom of that, you say, well, what happens next? And that's what we're doing on the podcast, hopefully. Trey?

John R. Miles
Yeah, I want to build upon this because what I had said earlier about the social impact theory, and as you said, hunter gatherers to the agricultural age, to the industrial age, now to the digital age, in each one of those changes, there was a fundamental shift, and these fundamental shifts typically don't happen like at the snap of your fingers. They're happening over a period of time. But I believe I could very well be wrong. But I think it's something we might both agree on, that as we're reaching this point of printing more and more money, having all these central reserves now that are overinflating the entire world, you're starting to see a decline of the power of the government. And I think in concert with that, you're going to see a rise in individual sovereignty that likens back to when we were in the agricultural age, where, as I said, people are going to become more independent operators as they do so, they're going to want to have more sovereignty over their goods, their property, whatever it may be.

And what I see, the cryptocurrencies are a huge threat in many ways to the power of government because you're going from a centralized system to a completely decentralized system. Am I thinking about this in the right way? Absolutely. My only modification to what you said would be bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies are nonsense, frankly.

Microsoft
You remember early days of the Internet intranets? Remember when that was a thing and fortune 500 companies didn't need the Internet. They could just make their own private intranet to get everything they needed. I'm sure you probably dealt with some of this in your time as CIO. Well, what happened to intranets?

Right. Do, are there any intranets today? I mean, not that I'm aware of. It's the open network inherently out competes closed networks. This goes back to Preston.

John R. Miles
Yeah, probably the only place you have intranets would be in the government or in the military, where you have to have a closed system to protect classified information. Or even in most large scale companies, the board and the senior executives who function on the board are kept on a completely different intranet from the balance sheet and everything else of the company, something that many people don't understand either. But, yes, overall, you're right. I mean, the Internet has become ubiquitous. Yes, yes.

Microsoft
And so there was this industrial age notion, right, of being able to control all of your information, keep it all inside your silo, and you own all of it. Well, the Internet just poured water all over that whole model right again, this is John Piaget. I think he talks about a equilibriated structure versus a disequilibrated structure. And so, essentially, in a disequilibriated structure, you have to actually protect the turf. So if it's a closed network, let's just think of it like that.

You have to spend resources on enforcing that network enclosure, and you have to enforce compliance with its rules. It's a small, little centrally planned fiefdom, but in an open network, that's an open free market. Users select whatever rule sets they want to run, and they do it voluntarily. So there's no enforcement cost. There's no compliance cost.

When you strip out enforcement and compliance costs from an open network, competing with a closed network, that's incurring these costs. There's an economic advantage to the open network that's almost undeniable. It's irrefutable in a way. So bitcoin is the only open source decentralized monetary technology in the world. You could possibly argue that physical gold is an analog version of that.

Technically, if you own physical gold, you are, you are a participant in an open source monetary network that no one can corrupt or change or debase. But gold is obviously way less functional as money. As we described earlier, it's hard to move gold around the world. It's risky to secure custody, et cetera, et cetera. So my only modification to what you said would be it's bitcoin that really poses a threat to centralized power structures.

I think all cryptocurrencies, which we endearingly call shitcoins in the bitcoin world, they all go to zero. They all go away. They're the intranet of crypto, basically the intranets, if you will. Maybe governments will still have their own little Internet fiat CBDC coins a few decades into the future. But the distant long run is the open network out competing all closed source networks, and all fiat currencies are closed source networks.

John R. Miles
Preston, so another way of saying this is youre saying bitcoin is the global declaration of independence from central bank tyranny. Amen to that. Preston. How is bitcoin, then? Freedom.

And I want you to go into this as someone who doesn't know these crypto technologies. There are a lot of people who are in the crypto world who have moved away from bitcoin because they feel that it was originally built as an experiment. And there are more mature technologies that are out there now, such as XRP or XLM. So can you explain for people who are in different camps. What makes bitcoin unique?

And why do you think, over time it's going to be the one that ends up the winner when this is all said and done? Yeah. There are a number of ways to approach this. Firstly, I would say for the readers out there, my most famous piece of writing ever, titled the number zero in bitcoin. I wrote that piece expressly to answer that question, why bitcoin, not shitcoin?

Microsoft
And it's about a 40 minutes read. It analogizes the emergence of bitcoin to the emergence of the number zero. Actually, there's a reason the whole world runs on the hindu arabic numeral system. Today, we all have zero based mathematics. That was not always the case.

This was a numerical system that outcompeted the other ones. For a number of reasons that I go into in the piece, I think bitcoins following a similar path. A simpler way to maybe think about this is that bitcoin is the only crypto asset project that cannot be controlled by anyone. Its rules cannot be changed. Weve gone through, theres a great book on this you could read called the block size wars 2017.

And this was in relation to the contentious hard fork of bitcoin and bitcoin cash. And it goes into the nitty gritty technical minutiae about what happened, basically, and then how it added to the credibility of bitcoin as the only truly decentralized crypto asset. Every other crypto asset, again, as bitcoiners joke, is a dyno dino, decentralized in name only. These are projects representing themselves to be on par with bitcoin in one dimension or another, and they simply are not. Now, when it comes to the technological argument, shitcoiners love this one because it's innovation theater you're selling.

Oh, we're going to partner with every bank in the world. We're XRP and we're going to be the next global reserve currency. And bitcoins, old technology. When youre talking about these things that are at the cutting edge of human understanding and necessarily looking into the future, theres just this ample space for bullshitting that these experts in innovation theatricality take advantage of. Lets say what you really need to do is strip all that away and say, this is why.

One of the answers on the show, what is money? You end up at this answer of, well, what are the properties of good money? Because obviously money changes as a tool over time, right? It's been seashells, salt, glass, gold. What makes a good money?

And I always get down to these. I narrow it down to five people, narrow it all over the place. I say it's divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. Now, I won't give you the extended argument here, I've given it many times elsewhere, but bitcoin has essentially perfected those properties. It's infinitely divisible, it has unlimited durability.

It's digital information. You can move it at the speed of light. That's perfected portability. It can be audited globally, and it's totally counterfeit resistant. You just run a node and verify it yourself.

So it's perfected recognizability, and it has a fixed supply of 21 million. We've never had a fixed supply asset ever in human history. So it's perfected scarcity. So when you look at money through that lens, you'll understand that bitcoin Satoshi has left no design space for a superior money to be introduced to outcompete bitcoin across any of the performative dimensions that make good money, right? That space does not exist.

Now further assume that I'm completely wrong. Assume that there are five other properties of money that I myself have not identified, I know nothing about. I have a total blind spot, right? XRP discovered five other properties that make money better, and this is why it's better than bitcoin. Okay, I'll give you that argument.

For sake of argument, I'll give you that. Bitcoin is still open source software. It can still modify its consensus rules. It can modify, it can add new properties or absorb competitive features that it may not currently have. It is a software, it's not gold, right?

You don't do software updates on gold. Gold doesn't change. It's the shiny dumb rock that sits there. But it was really useful as money historically. We have now taken the properties that made gold good, right?

Counterfeit resistance. Really counterfeit resistance, and we've ported those into a digital good. So even for those shit corners, that would argue bitcoin is old technology or lack some monetary property here or there, they will never adequately acknowledge the fact that bitcoin is open source software and that no matter what competitive feature you introduce, XRP introduces whatever the property privacy maybe, and it starts out competing bitcoin. Well, bitcoin can still absorb the privacy property into its base protocol. So bitcoin maintains this capacity for adaptivity in the marketplace.

So when you consider those two things in combination, that there's no design space left to introduce a better money, and that even if there was bitcoin can still adapt to that competitive monetary technology. I don't see how you disrupt it. I really don't. And again, the brief empirical history we have of shitcoins proves this out. They've all been forked, and the rules have changed, and the goalpost move and political infighting has caused them to fork and refork and collapse and this and that.

It's a disaster. It's just the history of crypto up until this point is holding a mirror up to humanity's tendency to scam. Like, we just. We have this shit coining impulse in us, and we've all engaged in it to a greater or lesser extent. Even I, as a holder of dollars.

Right, you're. You're complicit in this scheme, this counterfeiting scheme. If you hold dollars, you are. You're giving. You're enriching the central bank that exists.

So there's only one. There's only. The market only needs one money, right? Liquidity begets liquidity. Money is a universal medium of exchange.

We only need one. There are distinct economic reasons we ended up with one gold. And I think those same economic reasons hold for us ending up with one digital gold. And I don't see, given the nature of open source software and its ability to adapt, I don't see how you can possibly disrupt that. Yeah, I wanted to go into one specific property that you talked about, and that is scarcity.

John R. Miles
So as you laid out right now, bitcoin is designed against a limit, and I think you said it was 21 million. What stops someone, just as the government has been printing more money from continuing to raise that limit and thereby devaluating the value of bitcoin. Preston, this is the beautiful thing about bitcoin. Individual self interest, or said differently, the darwinian pursuit of self preservation is what creates this shelling point, is what they call it in game theory. It's the strategy that inherently antagonistic players adopt when they can't trust one another.

Microsoft
They adopt a common. What is the strategy? Like the center of gravity for the strategic selection amongst players that can't trust one another. So in bitcoin, every individual user chooses what rules they will run. They choose what language to speak, if you will.

And you could think of. I mean, you could go fork bitcoin right now, like, you and I will go make passion struck coin right now. 15 minutes on the Ethereum blockchain or whatever. We could hard fork bitcoin. That's fine.

We could do that instantly. Anyone can do that worldwide, low cost, no problem. Low barrier to entry. But that effort is somewhat like forking the rules of chess. You and I can also take the game of chess, and we make the knight.

Instead of making the l shaped maneuver, we'll make the knight have a bishop. Diagonal maneuvers. That's our new form of chess. Cool. Well, we forked chess.

We made a new modification to the rule set, and we've released it to the marketplace. What's the problem with that, though? The problem is no one wants to play with us, because who cares about our little fork of chess, right? There's an established shelling point or a point of social consensus on the existing rules of chess, and that's what people will continue to play over time. And now, if you combine this, too, and this gets a little bit more technically complicated, but when you fork bitcoin.

So, like when bitcoin cash forked in 2017, the chain, which is the chain of transactions, the blockchain, as it's traditionally called, is actually forked into two competing chains. You, as a holder of old bitcoin, if you had ten bitcoin on the old chain, well, you receive ten bitcoin cash on the new chain. And then these two competing social contracts are now each competing in the marketplace. But you hold ten tokens in each. So I've got ten bitcoin.

I've got ten bitcoin cash. So then it's just a matter of which social contract is larger and has more liquidity. And its that process that whittles down to one. Theres one money, theres one chain with the most energy being allocated towards its maintenance. It has the greatest rigidity, as some bitcoiners would say, and that money is dominant.

It out competes all of the others. Preston, one of the major principles that you laid out was scarcity. And what prevents someone to raise the scarcity limit and devalue the bitcoin? This is one of the hardest things to understand about bitcoin, is that there is the social layer and the protocol layer. The protocol is only enforcing the rules that are selected at the social layer.

So you, as an individual node operator, out of your own individual self interest, will choose to run the bitcoin that has a fixed supply of 21 million. Because if bitcoin is debased, that's your purchasing power being stolen. If someone introduces bitcoin with a 22 million supply, right, that's your purchasing power being stolen. So it's this consensus point of individually self interested network participants and market actors coalescing around a fixed supply of 21 million out of their own darwinian pursuit of self preservation that creates this unbreakable social layer. You would have to campaign for people to come off of 21 million.

And if you know anything about the bitcoin community, you are immediately suspect, no matter what. Bitcoiners are adversarial thinkers. We're going through this game theoretic process all the time. So when you're going to introduce a modification to bitcoin, you're going to be scrutinized unlike any other proposition in the world. Very unlikely to change.

This is why bitcoin is so conservative, right. It keeps optimizing for 21 million. Hard cap, new block every ten minutes, small block size, that block size, that's what I mentioned about the wars. Block size wars in 2017. That was the point of contention.

But this has been the socially emergent consensus point or shelling point. And so the idea of someone just. There's not any. This is a complicated thing with software because we're so used to thinking about software as well. What if Facebook just changes the algorithm to 22 million?

There is no Facebook, there's no CEO, there's no leadership behind bitcoin. It's individual actors choosing what's in their best interest, and that the composite outcome of all those individual choices is fixed supply money. 21 million. No counterfeiting, no inflation, no debasement. And so to break that is, by the way, thats the $100 trillion question.

If no one figures out how to break the social layer of bitcoin, then it out competes every money in the world. Thats at least $100 trillion market. Preston, when I think about it, yeah, well, I love artwork. And when I think about bitcoin, in some ways it reminds me of masterpieces. Because monets go up in value or Picassos go up in value, Dalis go up in value, because there's a finite supply of them and over time they gain in value, which is the same.

Thing I've heard for this, and I agree with you completely. There's a great artist named Fractal decrypt on Twitter. Mister Saylor has one of his pieces behind him and a lot of his podcasts. Beautiful mathematical sculpture that has a lot of bitcoin, and it's gorgeous. The best description ive heard to try and crystallize all of that into one thing is bitcoin is this vortex of positive incentives.

It rewards those that contribute to the proliferation of its network, and it penalizes those that go against it. And no one knows how to turn off this vortex of incentives. Its just paying people, it literally is paying people to go out into the world and turn stranded energy into money. So it's leveraging the individual self interest of every human on planet Earth for its success. And that's what makes it unstoppable.

John R. Miles
Trey so if you're a listener and you've gone this far on the journey with us, bitcoin went all the way up, I think, into this 60,000 range and then ended up coming down significantly. I didn't look today at where it's at. You probably know the figure. I actually don't. I don't check the price as often as many people think I'm a little bit desensitized to local price movements.

So let's say that you own no bitcoin right now, but you've seen the markets and how they're changing. When would be the best time for them to enter the market again? Always hesitate to be prescriptive. I always tell people to just study, develop a worldview and then create a portfolio construction that is consistent with that worldview. So there's not a question I can answer, but if you're asking me for advice and what I do, it's quite simple, right.

Microsoft
Bitcoin is a long term savings technology. You can consider it like an insurance policy against the debasement of fiat currency. The more units of fiat they create, the more purchasing power would accrete to money that's not being debased. I just dollar cost average. So I buy bitcoin every single day.

I have a service that does this, it just takes x dollars out of your bank every day, buys the bitcoin, sends it to cold storage. I run profitable businesses. So I will also opportunistically sweep some of that treasury cash into bitcoin, put that in cold storage. And my aim is to never sell. I never sell bitcoin.

I'm just accumulating. I think that's the easiest strategy. And that strategy also out competes, I'd say 95% at least of all hedge funds. I've seen a lot of. I used to run one myself.

I've seen a lot of different complex, convoluted strategies. 95% of them underperform buy and hold. So as far as timing into the market, its not so much about making one big buy on bitcoin. Maybe you need to make a big buy to establish an initial position. Thats for you to decide.

But its an accumulation game, right? This is a very long term asset and it could take many decades to monetize. So its just a matter of taking territory on this absolutely scarce monetary network. Okay. And then I know one of the things, my parents, for instance, that has prevented them from diving more deeply into this is that it's been pretty complex.

John R. Miles
Depending on your technical skill, understand even how to purchase, whether it's bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Are there new innovations on the horizon that you're aware of that ease? It's use. So Joe dummy can even use it? Yeah.

Microsoft
A sponsor I worked with for a while, Nidig New York digital Investment group. They've been working with a lot of banks throughout the United States for just adding bitcoin purchasing into your online banking. So I'd say that's probably on the horizon. There's also services like Swan Bitcoin. This is an exchange that I am an investor and advisor in, based in Los Angeles.

Theyre bitcoin only they have that automatic buy and withdraw bitcoin service. Its very easy. You just pick your number. How much do you buy every day? Send it to what bitcoin address, and you set it and forget it.

They have a lot of other ancillary financial services they offer as well.

At this point, there are many options out there in terms of exchanges. I think even some of the big bracket banks are now selling bitcoin in general. I would just be very hesitant of anyone trying to prevent you from at least intellectually exploring this asset, because that's usually people talking their own book. Some of these wealth advisors that can't get paid on putting you in bitcoin will tell you bitcoin is whatever the thing they say about it. Rat poison squared.

All the weird things that legacy players describe it as. So, bitcoins all about open mindedness. If you're not, if you're getting advice from people telling you not to look at it or not pay attention to it or not ask about it, then you should probably question who you're getting advice from. So, Robert, we have gone through a ton today, and if there was one takeaway that you wanted a listener to come away with from this discussion, what would it be? World War one and World War two would not have killed as many people if we had an incorruptible monetary standard.

They may have not even been called World War one and World War two. There's a direct relationship with the debasement of currency and the scale, scope, and severity of warfare. And I think the greatest promise of bitcoin is to reduce the skill, scope, and severity of warfare. Okay. And then lastly, if people want to hear more from you.

John R. Miles
What is the best central place that they can do that? You can check us out online. What is moneypodcast.com dot that has links to all of the YouTube, all my social media profiles. My biggest social media platform is Twitter. My Twitter handle is love 22.

Microsoft
That's b r double ed love 22. And thank you so much for having me. Yes, well, Robert, thank you so much for being on the show and giving us such an enlightening explanation of the past and future of money. Happy to do it. Thanks again.

John R. Miles
I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Robert Breedlove and I wanted to thank Robert for the honor of interviewing him. Links to all things Robert will be in the show. Notes@passionstruck.com dot please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Videos are on our two channels on YouTube. John R.

Miles and passion struck clips please go join, subscribe and join. Over a quarter million other subscribers, advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place@passionstruck.com. deals please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at John R. Miles on all the social platforms where I provide daily doses of inspiration.

And if you're interested in expanding your courage muscles, then consider joining the passion struck challenge. You can do so by signing up for our newsletter live intentionally@passionstruck.com, comma, where we post a weekly passion struck challenge. Are you curious to find out where you stand on your journey to becoming passion struck? Then go to passionstruck.com and take the passion struck quiz. It consists of 20 questions and it'll take you about ten minutes to complete.

And all the questions are based on my latest book, passion struck. Take the quiz today. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck podcast interview that I did with best selling author and podcaster Ryan Holiday. Ryan, who's known for his thought provoking works on stoicism and personal growth, will discuss his latest groundbreaking book, right thing, right now. Good values, good character, good deeds.

In this not to be missed conversation, we'll explore the virtues that make a fulfilled life, how stoicism can address the challenges of modern society, and why doing the right thing matters more in the world today than it ever has before. We don't control what our politicians do. We don't control where the culture is going. We don't control what our neighbors do. We don't control what other businesses are getting away with or the ethics that they're operating by.

Ryan Holiday
But we do control the decisions that we are going to make. We decide who we are going to be. And to me, that's a much more important and often much more neglected part of this virtue of justice. We spend a lot of time when we think about justice, talking about politics, how should the legal system be set up? All of this matters, but we don't often enough think of justice as a thing that we ourselves are doing and are responsible for.

We talk about these issues happening all over the world, but then we're not thinking about who are we hiring and firing? How are we forgiving or forgetting? How are we treating the people that we come across in our daily lives. And so to me, that's where we have the chance to be. The conduit for these ideas is in our own individual behavior.

John R. Miles
Most of all, the fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who's interested in learning more about bitcoin and decentralized financial systems, then definitely share today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give is just to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become passion struck.

Microsoft
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John R. Miles
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Microsoft
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Robert Breedlove on the Hidden War on Financial Freedom EP 465

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1: Introduction to the Financial War

2: The Impact of Financial Policies

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