July 8, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| This is actually where the namesake of my podcast comes from, because when you ask the question, what is Bitcoin, the very easy, obvious answer is, well, Bitcoin is money. | ||
| And then the next obvious question is, well, what is money? | ||
| And that's where this, the bottom sort of falls out. | ||
| And there are many different definitions. | ||
| And I've found that I feel very fortunate that I released my podcast when I did because I am now of the belief that the question, what is money, is becoming the defining question of our time in history. | ||
| People all over the world are trying to redefine or define what money is. | ||
| We're talking about central banks wanting to launch digital currencies. | ||
| You see BRIC nations wanting to go back to like a gold standard. | ||
| You know, you see countries like China and Russia producing a ton of gold, importing a ton of gold. | ||
| You see all this discussion about the recent wave of inflation, price inflation we've experienced from the printing of money over the past few years. | ||
| And then, you know, you've got Joe Biden on Super Bowl commercials eating ice cream, wagging his finger at the ice cream producers for increasing their prices, talking about the $6 trillion of the U.S. | ||
| Fed counterfeited. | ||
| So it's become this very zeitgeist question almost. | ||
| And I feel like a lot of this has been catalyzed again by Bitcoin. | ||
| Joining me today is a freedom maximalist Bitcoin advocate and host of the What Is Money show, Robert Breedlove. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| We did a reverse version of this at the ARC conference. | ||
| We both were doing our show from a very, very small trailer on a quiet day. | ||
| And we got to talk finance and politics on your program, so I'm glad that we get to kind of reverse this. | ||
| I feel like I should have mentioned you're also a Florida man now, too. | ||
| I am a Florida man. | ||
| That was a couple months ago. | ||
| How do you feel about the freedom? | ||
| Key Biscayne Island is good. | ||
| I don't think I'm going to be leaving a red state ever again post-pandemic. | ||
| I grew up in a red state. | ||
| I'm from Tennessee. | ||
| Lived in several blue states the past few years. | ||
| We're just talking about Los Angeles. | ||
| I was also in Hawaii. | ||
| I think red U.S. | ||
| states are probably the best place in the world to be at this point in history, so I think I'm here to stay as well. | ||
| Partly because of the finance part of your life, but also just because of the safety part of your life, the sunshine part of your life. | ||
| You're also in a particularly kind of pristine area over there. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very nice area. | ||
| But even nice areas in Los Angeles, like I was in Santa Monica when I was living there, and that place went batshit crazy, you know? | ||
| And so my revelation was, like you, I love Los Angeles. | ||
| Good weather, great food. | ||
| I was seeing also a lot of great places to date. | ||
| However, once COVID happened, I witnessed people fall into hypnosis of some kind, and my realization was that I can't be in a compliant culture. | ||
| I just had this sudden – I also had become a father recently. | ||
| My daughter was about a year and a half when COVID started, so I guess I had this parental urge to try and get to a place that was more culturally sane, in my perspective. | ||
| Now that I've made the move, I don't think I'll ever change again. | ||
| And why didn't you go back to Tennessee instead of coming here? | ||
| Well, I did actually. | ||
| I was there for a year. | ||
| I spent a year in Nashville, but then I've been living endless summer for the past 13 years. | ||
| One winter in Tennessee and that was enough. | ||
| And then you're here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we're gonna dive into a whole bunch about finances, which I don't do too much of on the show, so I'm glad to be doing that. | ||
| And Bitcoin, obviously, and a couple other things. | ||
| But for people that just don't know who you are, could you give me like the kind of 101 bio first and then we'll go from there? | ||
| Sure, so my background is accounting and finance. | ||
| I've been basically a career CFO prior to starting the podcast. | ||
| I also ran my own hedge fund. | ||
| We started out as a multi-strategy crypto asset fund and then I was sort of learning about Bitcoin during that process and becoming much more narrowly focused on Bitcoin. | ||
| So I'm what many people would call today a Bitcoin maximalist. | ||
| I don't touch or use or interact with any other crypto currencies or crypto assets. | ||
| However, I describe myself as a freedom maximalist because I think even Bitcoin, as amazing as it is, is just a tool, which means that it is a means to an end, and that ultimate end for me is human freedom. | ||
| So that's why I try to promote On the podcast. | ||
| I started the podcast November 2020 really is just kind of a hobby project and my first guest Michael Saylor. | ||
| We had several episodes together and it just blew up and immediately became kind of a full-time thing. | ||
| So I'm very grateful that I get to nerd out for a living and educate people about So we'll obviously do a whole bunch on Bitcoin, but let's start with like some basic finance stuff, because I think one of the things that has put us in this weird position we're in kind of culturally in this country is that very few people understand the basics of economics. | ||
| Do you find that to be a fairly true statement? | ||
| Yeah, I like to say we're living in the economic dark ages, actually. | ||
| I think we're coming out of the economic dark ages. | ||
| Keynesian economics, which is what's taught in universities worldwide, is a pseudoscience at best and propaganda at worst. | ||
| Basically says that government needs to monopolize and print currency to control the economy, right? | ||
| They talk about levers and buttons and policy tools. | ||
| And I think it's the wrong metaphor, right? | ||
| The economy is a complex adaptive system. | ||
| It's not a machine. | ||
| You can't press buttons and pull levers and create outcomes, right? | ||
| It's complex, not complicated. | ||
| Someone like Taleb might say, you have the danger of confusing the cat | ||
| for the washing machine, right? | ||
| The washing machine breaks, you can go in and change a few pipes | ||
| and you get a predictable outcome on how to fix it. | ||
| Can't do that with your cat, right? | ||
| Much more complex. | ||
| So if one human psychology, one human's patterns of action are difficult to predict, | ||
| imagine how difficult it is to predict 8 billion humans interacting in a complex marketplace. | ||
| There is no institution that can manage that, right? | ||
| It's like, it's as ridiculous as a meteorologist trying to manage the weather. | ||
| So I think we have a pseudoscientific economic paradigm and I think Bitcoin is spurring an interest | ||
| in Austrian economics, which is much more humble, I would say, in its approach | ||
| to how we understand economic science. | ||
| Um... | ||
| And that is hopefully awakening us from this economic dark ages and putting us back in touch with economic reality. | ||
| Do you sense that partly it was all set up to build a giant system that kind of didn't work and kept people confused about things so that a, I don't know, a certain set of people would be in power or something? | ||
| Yeah, you know, this is, it's one of those things, uh, I guess guys like us in this corner of the internet probably get, well, they call us conspiracy theorists, right? | ||
| Oftentimes. | ||
| Um, although conspiracy theorists are probably- Just means you're a little ahead of the curve. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the difference between a conspiracy theory and fact is like three months right now. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Although I like being called a conspiracy theorist, especially now that we're like 300 and 0 for the past few years. | ||
| However, I get a little skeptical when I hear that particular version. | ||
| Was it set up? | ||
| You know, you get this sort of James Bond villain-esque bunch of guys in a room plotting world domination. | ||
| I try to look at it a little more practically. | ||
| I think it's just incentives, ultimately. | ||
| I had a guy on the show named Ed Dowd, he used this term meta-fraud, where he's saying even the pandemic, although there are top-down elements of it, there's also just broken incentives that sort of create pathological outcomes in a way. | ||
| Although I think, you know, you could read a book like The Creature from Jekyll Island about the inception of the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank in the United States. | ||
| There was clearly a small group of people that were very interested in getting a central bank implemented into the United States. | ||
| However, so there's that top-down element. | ||
| However, I don't think even they could foresee all of the problems that it would create over the subsequent 100 plus years, which we're dealing with still today. | ||
| So I think And this is pretty popular in Bitcoiner circles. | ||
| You know, Bitcoiners don't agree on a lot. | ||
| We tend to be very adversarial thinking. | ||
| However, I think the one point of common agreement is that incentives really matter. | ||
| And when you start to interfere with the individual pursuit of self-interest in a way that's limited by other people's person and property, you get really Negative outcomes and so for me this goes all the way back to the 1215 Magna Carta life liberty property This is the exclusive scope of government anything government does beyond that which to be specific obviously Protect life right don't interfere with people's freedom of movement and don't steal people's shit That's basically all you want government to do anything else that it does. | ||
| It's overstepping its mandate as far as I'm concerned and But can't I have some of the rich people's money to do crazy social projects? | ||
| Wouldn't that be nice? | ||
| That would be good. | ||
| I mean, I'm very radically anarcho-capitalist, so I think there should be no violation of private property whatsoever. | ||
| That means no taxation, no inflation, and no regulation by fiat. | ||
| Consensual regulation is okay if we all agree, you know. | ||
| We have homeowners associations, right? | ||
| You agree to opt into a certain rule set, but you can also opt out. | ||
| The ability to opt in and opt out makes it consensual. | ||
| As long as consent is part of every human engagement, then we're okay. | ||
| So what would you say to the argument that libertarians are obviously confronted with all the time, that it's just a utopian way of thinking? | ||
| Like, I'm completely on board with all of that, and in my heart of hearts, in the perfect system I can create in my mind, it's a libertarian utopia. | ||
| But not everyone wants to play by those rules. | ||
| Sure, a valid criticism could be that it is idealistic, especially in the context of our current world. | ||
| However, I think Saying ideals are idealistic as a negative thing doesn't make sense to me because we have to have ideals to work towards, right? | ||
| Again, I'll go back to the Magna Carta. | ||
| It was life, liberty, inviolable private property. | ||
| That's an ideal. | ||
| We've never had a world where no one steals from anyone ever, no one coerces anyone ever. | ||
| That's never going to happen. | ||
| But it's an ideal that we inscribed in a constitutional document, right, as something to strive for and something to try and enshrine with our legal codes and our moral codes. | ||
| Yeah, maybe libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism is ideal. | ||
| Maybe it's unattainable, but what's that old saying? | ||
| Aim for the stars, land on the moon kind of thing. | ||
| And we have trended that direction, so it doesn't make sense to me to try and pull back the aim. | ||
| Something Peterson says, right? | ||
| From Carl Jung, set your moral aim as high as you can and the rest of your life will sort of organize itself around that aim. | ||
| Do you see that sort of more concretely now being in Florida, that you're in a place that, you know, we don't have income tax, we largely protect freedoms and law and order and property and things of that nature? | ||
| So it's, for me, it's been very validating to have a lot of these beliefs and then come to a place where that's respected rather than California where it was being trampled on. | ||
| Yeah, and I, again, it shows up for me in the psychological demeanor of people. | ||
| Like, people just seem to be a little less judgmental or impositional. | ||
| You know, in California, I don't know about you, but during pandemic, I got walking down the street without a mask on, people would say stuff to me. | ||
| People were harassing me about the jab and just like, what? | ||
| That's when I started to realize These people have screws loose. | ||
| I was getting yelled at because I was letting my dog go up to other dogs outside on beautiful 85 degree days. | ||
| Dog COVID is dangerous. | ||
| It'll take you out. | ||
| So let's connect this to Bitcoin. | ||
| So I think, um, sorry. | ||
| So first off, let's do like the most basic thing possible for someone that has no idea what's going on with crypto. | ||
| So let's do a little of that and then we can kind of grow from there. | ||
| What the hell is Bitcoin? | ||
| Well, I wish that were a basic question. | ||
| So this is actually where the namesake of my podcast comes from, because when you ask the question, what is Bitcoin, the very easy, obvious answer is, well, Bitcoin is money. | ||
| And then the next obvious question is, well, what is money? | ||
| And that's where this, the bottom sort of falls out. | ||
| And there are many different definitions. | ||
| And I've found that I feel very fortunate that I released my podcast when I did because I am now of the belief that the question, what is money, is becoming the defining question of our time in history. | ||
| People all over the world are trying to redefine or define what money is. | ||
| We're talking about central banks wanting to launch digital currencies. | ||
| You see brick nations wanting to go back to like a gold standard. | ||
| You know, you see countries like China and Russia producing a ton of gold, importing a ton of gold. | ||
| You see all this discussion about the recent wave of inflation, price inflation we've experienced from the printing of money over the past few years. | ||
| And then, you know, you've got Joe Biden on Super Bowl commercials eating ice cream, wagging his finger at the ice cream producers for increasing the prices, talking about the $6 trillion of the US Fed counterfeited. | ||
| So it's become this very zeitgeist question almost, and I feel like a lot of this has been catalyzed, again, by Bitcoin, right? | ||
| The fact that there's a very It's almost like gold has been money for 5,000 years. | ||
| Before I get into defining it, well, gold has been money for basically most of human history. | ||
| And the past 100 years has been kind of a weird interregnum period because we've had the Federal Reserve push this into kind of a fractional reserve banking model. | ||
| Although we've had this in the past, this is our most recent experience of it. | ||
| And then as of 1971, we've been on a fiat currency model, which is basically a zero reserve standard. | ||
| So the dollar used to be redeemable for gold. | ||
| It was fractionated where there were way more dollars, dollar liabilities outstanding than there were gold assets. | ||
| And then eventually Nixon revoked the whole thing in 1971. | ||
| Past 50 plus years, we've been on the zero reserve standard, which basically like there's a lot to say about it, but in a nutshell, it gives governments the license to print money ad infinitum. | ||
| Which allows you to have a limitless government overgrowth and no one can call their bluff or check. | ||
| No one can adequately vote against the overgrowth of central government by, you know, moving their gold offshore or something like that because governments can just keep printing money. | ||
| So, Bitcoin is a digital disruptor to this 5,000-year-old technology we call gold. | ||
| And I think really understanding why gold became money is probably the most useful way to understand why Bitcoin is so potentially disruptive to everything we know. | ||
| And so that's really one of the avenues we go down on the show a lot, is really trying to explore the history of money, why gold became money, how we got to fiat currency, and why Bitcoin is disruptive to gold, and then what the implications of that are in the future. | ||
| And, again, we can go into this as much as you like, but basically I think the entire social order is held up on a foundation of gold, right? | ||
| There's a reason I mentioned China and Russia are buying and producing a lot of gold. | ||
| There's a reason countries that go to war will only settle with one another in gold, right? | ||
| The reparations must be paid in gold, not your local paper, because you can just print the paper, but you can't print the gold. | ||
| So, if gold is disrupted, I think it calls into question the validity of every social institution in the world today. | ||
| And that's kind of exciting at a time when social institutions are deeply corrupted and trust is collapsing in them. | ||
| Bitcoin and we should go into a little bit about how its mind and what peer-to-peer actually means and all that again because I'm just trying to do some some 101 because we don't do a lot of a lot of this type of stuff on the show. | ||
| You basically see it as the way off a system that is in essence collapsing sort of the way many of our institutions are collapsing and you want you want basically a way for say the two of us to exchange goods and services and everything else directly with the two of us with no middleman Having nothing to do with the government, and that really is what you'd say is kind of the pathway to freedom here. | ||
| Yeah, so you could say that there's this term sound money, right, which gold was basically a sound money standard. | ||
| And that basically means the term sound money comes from when you drop a gold coin from a certain height, it makes a certain sound, which indicates that it's gold and not lead. | ||
| Basically, that's where we get the term. | ||
| But what it has been The meaning has been expanded to say that a standard that governments can't print, basically. | ||
| So when you're on a gold standard, you're on a sound money system. | ||
| And this means you don't get, well this is important too, when you print money, you're violating the private property of savers. | ||
| So you're just stealing purchasing power from savers. | ||
| It's taxation without legislation, essentially. | ||
| It's basically supply and demand 101, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I always like to give the Babe Ruth baseball card analogy. | ||
| If there's 100 of them and they're worth $1,000 a pop, then it's a $100,000 market cap. | ||
| But if you discover 100 more, well then the value of each of those now goes down by half, right? | ||
| It's still a $100,000 market cap, but divided by 200 cards instead of 100. | ||
| Same thing is true with money, as is true with every other asset when you hold demand constant. | ||
| Bitcoin is a return, because we've had sound monetary standard, like I said, for pretty much most of human history, not giving, you know, excluding the past 100 some odd years. | ||
| Bitcoin's a return to a sound money standard in a format that I don't think governments are going to be capable of compromising or corrupting. | ||
| And so that's really important, because when you look at civilizations historically, we flourish on gold standards. | ||
| People are able to preserve their purchasing power over time. | ||
| You can just earn more than you spend and save. | ||
| You don't need to go speculate in the stock market to become rich. | ||
| You just follow grandma's wisdom, right? | ||
| Earn more than you spend and save. | ||
| It's really that simple. | ||
| You know, now, today, if you're, I don't know, a dentist and you've got a high income, you also have to be a part-time stock trader, right, to keep up with inflation. | ||
| So Bitcoin, like, Throws out the need for us to do that anymore and just takes us back to the old ways and just lets us save and sell money and then you can take your savings and do things that you want to do, right? | ||
| Like build the life of your dreams. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| So again, I'm just trying to do the 101 thing here. | ||
| Someone is watching this going, but what the hell is it? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| That's what I really want to drill down on here. | ||
|
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What is it? | |
| I think the best analogy, and this is how we describe things that are new that we can hardly understand is by way of metaphor or analogy. | ||
| Bitcoin has several, right? | ||
| I should say, I get it to the extent that I have Bitcoin and I've traded some Bitcoin. | ||
| You'll love this. | ||
| I've never spent a cent on Bitcoin. | ||
| When I started my show about 10 years ago, I just put up, someone said to me, put up a Bitcoin wallet there, put up the address on your site, and people sent us a bunch of Bitcoin when it was worth nothing at the time. | ||
| So I have a nice amount of Bitcoin right now. | ||
| But even that, I have my wallet, I have my ledger, I got all the numbers and the passwords and all that stuff. | ||
| But there's a whole bunch of people that have it and actually still don't really understand what it is or what to do with it or how it's a storage of value rather than something that you're constantly exchanging. | ||
| Yeah, so you're holding. | ||
| Yeah, I'm holding it. | ||
| Well, that's what you're supposed to do with it, as far as I can tell. | ||
| So the metaphors for Bitcoin, one that I think is useful, the Internet of Money. | ||
| So what is the internet? | ||
| The internet is a stack of open source protocols for moving information without asking anyone's permission, right? | ||
| You can just create a website and publish things. | ||
| Now, obviously, this has become a little more contentious at the application layer, right? | ||
| Like if you're trying to publish stuff on Instagram or Facebook or certain websites, | ||
| YouTube, they will censor you, but they can't, they're not censoring you at the, you know, | ||
| HTTP layer, SMTP layer. | ||
| These are layers that are more open, they're open source software, basically. | ||
| Bitcoin is open source software, or you could actually consider it as the latest layer of | ||
| the internet protocol stack. | ||
| Again, I mentioned a couple, HTTP, SMTP, BTC would be another one, but instead of just moving information, you're actually able to move economic value without permission. | ||
| Um, and unlike the application layer, like it's, Bitcoin's not a company, so there's no headquarters, no CEO. | ||
| There's no, uh, Mark Zuckerberg that's going to censor you for sending the wrong Bitcoin transaction. | ||
| It's completely decentralized. | ||
| Decentralized. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it's an internet protocol infused with money. | ||
| So it's like if the internet and gold had a baby. | ||
| That is Bitcoin. | ||
| That's one sort of good analogy. | ||
| And then the other, another good one is digital gold. | ||
| And I think that's useful because it points you to what is gold? | ||
| Why did gold become money? | ||
| And that gets you into the properties of good money. | ||
| And you can see, oh, this is what made gold good. | ||
| It was divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, and scarce. | ||
| And then if you evaluate Bitcoin through the same criteria, you see that it basically outperforms gold in order of magnitude and all of those properties of money. | ||
| So those are a couple of good ones. | ||
| It's open source software, it's money. | ||
| You could also say it's a social institution or a decentralized organization. | ||
| I mean, there's no one that works at Bitcoin, but there are millions of people that work for Bitcoin, right? | ||
| Everyone that's mining Bitcoin, all the entrepreneurs that are building on it, developers that are writing the software and updating it, people that are holding it. | ||
| Like, technically, you are participating. | ||
| The fact that you haven't spent your Bitcoin, you are contributing to the monetization of Bitcoin. | ||
| Because you have Bitcoin that you're not selling, you're holding it, so you have supply that's been taken off the market, and the more demand is against the supply that's taken off the market, well that's what drives the price up. | ||
| So you're actually contributing to Bitcoin's price growth and monetization by not spending it. | ||
| And it's going up, so I'm doing what I can. | ||
| So you're part of the Bitcoin network. | ||
| You mentioned that you're a Bitcoin maximalist, or freedom maximalist, so what does that make of your feelings about the other coins in general? | ||
| Yeah, in a nutshell, it all comes down to that operative word of decentralization. | ||
| Like I said, I was running a hedge fund that dabbled in a lot of these crypto assets or cryptocurrencies and I wrote valuation reports on a lot of them, studied them deeply and basically none of them are decentralized. | ||
| There is a group or an individual even in some cases that controls the rules or the supply or the consensus mechanism for those assets. | ||
| So whereas Bitcoin has this And even Bitcoin starts out as centralized, by the way, right? | ||
| Like one guy, Satoshi Nakamoto, releases it into the world, but then it goes to this organic, kind of idiosyncratic path of development that causes it to become decentralized. | ||
| And there have been attacks on Bitcoin. | ||
| You could read a book like The Block Size Wars of 2017, where a very influential group and a well-heeled group of people tried to take control of Bitcoin, basically to change the block size to make it less decentralized, and that attack was resisted. | ||
| So Bitcoin kind of has this trial. | ||
| How could you take it? | ||
| How could I mean, that might be a little technical for the audience, but how would you take control of something that's decentralized? | ||
| Well, so here's the thing is, and this is where it's kind of difficult to understand. | ||
| Bitcoin has this protocol layer, which is like the Internet. | ||
| It is the technology layer, if you will, right? | ||
| The hardware and software. | ||
| But there's also a social layer on top of it, which, again, you're participating in, right? | ||
| Just by being a holder. | ||
| And so at the social layer, Bitcoiners are able to run what's called a software node. | ||
| And so they're actually, the analogy here is like, think about choosing the language that you want to speak in. | ||
| Or if you consider Bitcoin to be a game, it's like choosing the rules of chess you want to play by. | ||
| And the point of consensus between those nodes is Bitcoin, basically. | ||
| So the nodes are selecting the rules that they want to abide by, and then the protocol layer is enforcing those rules. | ||
| This is the miners and the hardware and the software. | ||
| They're enforcing the rules selected by the nodes. | ||
| So it's a little bit technical, but it's kind of like a pure economic democracy. | ||
| And so, in the block size war, they tried to hijack the social layer. | ||
| They were trying to campaign and say, hey people, we need bigger blocks. | ||
| They were saying it was for more transaction throughput, but the reality is, it appeared to be that they were trying to compromise the decentralization of Bitcoin, such that it would be less resistant to state attacks. | ||
| So are you using Bitcoin sort of the way I'm using it now in that you just use it as a storage of value, right? | ||
| So you're not doing a lot of commerce on Bitcoin, which is still a little bit complex, right? | ||
| Well, not complex, but it's costly. | ||
| It can be costly. | ||
| It depends what the fees are. | ||
| It's supply and demand driven. | ||
| It's not too complex, actually. | ||
| If you can send an email, I think you can send a Bitcoin transaction. | ||
| transaction. You're really just copying and pasting an address. The custody component can | ||
| be a little more complex, especially when you're custodying large amounts of value. | ||
| You want to have like, I always recommend a multi-key solution or collaborative custody | ||
| so that you don't have a single point of failure. You have redundancy basically. | ||
| However, I'm using it, yeah, to sort of the tried and true way of, I try to earn more than I spend | ||
| in all of my businesses, try to run profitable businesses, and then I stash the savings in | ||
| Bitcoin. I... | ||
| I do pay some of my employees in Bitcoin that want to be paid in Bitcoin, so that's really the only exception, but I'm a net buyer of Bitcoin every day. | ||
| So you mentioned central bank digital currencies. | ||
| This, in essence, would be what you're describing as sort of the people that have either screwed this up or how a system got screwed up pushing out their own version of this, right? | ||
| Yeah, but not decentralized. | ||
| But not decentralized. | ||
| So it's central bank digital. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it's got people confused because it sounds like it's sort of going to be free digital, free in that sense, but not centralized. | ||
| Yeah, it will be, you know, basically we have accounts today with commercial banks. | ||
| Those commercial banks have accounts with larger commercial banks, or if you're with one of the big banks, right, Wells Fargo, BOA, JPM, they have accounts directly with the Federal Reserve. | ||
| So it's an intermediated system today. | ||
| A CBDC would be every individual is going to be on the central bank's database. | ||
| So they'll see every transaction. | ||
| This is a precursor to a Chinese social credit scoring system, basically. | ||
| So, in China today, you say the wrong thing. | ||
| You know, first you might get shamed on the local neighborhood billboard. | ||
| You know, you keep it up, or your score gets too low, they might turn off your funds ability. | ||
| You can't spend your money on travel, for instance, and you keep it up, they might take away your ability to buy food. | ||
| I don't know how far it goes. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's literally a Black Mirror episode. | ||
| It's a Black Mirror episode, and it's an obvious and necessary tool for social engineering, right? | ||
| Like we saw the Canadian truck protests in Canada. | ||
| They couldn't stop the protests. | ||
| So what did they do? | ||
| They froze the bank accounts and they froze the contributors' bank accounts. | ||
| So- Do you see it in that that will be inevitable in the West? | ||
| That that's coming no matter what? | ||
| So Bitcoin is in essence your hedge against that. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, you know, when I look at the state, I see it's a monopoly, right? | ||
| The monopoly on violence. | ||
| It oversees a tax farm. | ||
| And it wants to grow its revenues like any other business in the world. | ||
| So one of the main aims of the state, and this is from the book Seeing Like a State, he said that the state tries to make taxpayers legible. | ||
| So it wants to know who you are, who you interact with, what your economic situation is, your inflows, your outflows, etc. | ||
| Everything you put on a tax return, right? | ||
| That's what the state wants to know. | ||
| They want to make taxpayers as legible as possible so they can tax them as efficiently as possible. | ||
| And it's kind of a balancing act, right? | ||
| If you overtax a population, well, they might leave or you're just going to kill productivity or so drastically lower the incentives to be productive, then there won't be anything to tax. | ||
| So it's kind of a parasitic relationship in that way. | ||
| And a CBDC makes taxpayers hyper-legible to the state. | ||
| You can literally see every financial transaction down to the penny, what they're doing, who it went to. | ||
| You know, forget reporting your $601 Venmo transaction via 1099. | ||
| Like, they'll just see it on the screen, right? | ||
| And then you layer on the AI tools, machine learning, deep learning, all of this, and how that could Um, manage people or socially engineer people. | ||
| And I think the Chinese government governmental model is being exported to the West and a CBDC is a keystone to that operation. | ||
| So it's coming, and the hedge is Bitcoin. | ||
| The opt-out. | ||
| The opt-out, yeah. | ||
| It's a hedge as well, and like, obviously it's going to protect you against money printing. | ||
| That's what you asked about why Bitcoin is a store of value. | ||
| Well, goods and services require work and energy to produce, right? | ||
| They are scarce. | ||
| And money is an instrument we use to exchange for goods and services. | ||
| If the money is not scarce, then it does not adequately reflect the goods and services that it is intended to represent. | ||
| So that when money printing occurs, right, you have more dollars in circulation chasing the same amount of goods and services. | ||
| That's what price inflation is. | ||
| Well, Bitcoin is this fixed supply money, right? | ||
| This is why it goes up in dollar price over time, whereas it's both people having more demand for Bitcoin as savings, but it's simultaneously a decrease in the purchasing power of the dollar, right? | ||
| This is the optical illusion so many people fall for, is they think, oh, if I had $100,000 in my brokerage account last month, and I have $110,000 this month, then I'm richer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not these days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What you're not seeing is, well, if the price of steak doubled in that time, and your portfolio value went up 10%, well, then you just got cut in half in terms of steak, or pick your food or energy or whatever it may be. | ||
| So it's the purchasing power A decrease that's being masked by the increases in nominal value. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's interesting because I mentioned that I don't do a ton of economics on the show, but when I'm asked about it, the two things that I always bring up are the price of food at the grocery. | ||
| Like that's one indicator of things. | ||
| And right now it's just very high. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| Pound of beef, dozen eggs, just way higher than it was say two, three years ago. | ||
| That and interest rates to me, because when interest rates are low and you have a chance of buying a house, I, at a low interest rate, I like pay. | ||
| I was locked in at a low interest rate, fortunately here. | ||
| I like paying my mortgage every month because I'm like, Oh, I'm basically paying myself and my house will increase in value and over time. | ||
| And, and to me that, is that like a fair indicator of what's kind of wrong with economics right now? | ||
| And then I also want to talk about the debt, but like those two specifically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this is how deep this problem is. | ||
| Interest rates, all right, this is, we've come to, well, we've been conditioned into the reality that they are centrally planned, right? | ||
| This is a price, right? | ||
| In Soviet Russia, they used to try to plan all the prices, right? | ||
| And that was a disaster. | ||
| They ended up having to emulate the U.S. | ||
| because it's a data throughput problem. | ||
| You just can't Price things centrally, right? | ||
| You need the market to determine them, and you need the market to clear where supply meets demand, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, the market for money is... Or you gotta kill a lot of people, basically. | |
| Or you gotta kill a lot of people, yes. | ||
| To get them to operate in those conditions, I mean, truly. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And the market for money is one of the largest and most important markets in the world. | ||
| And by way of rough analogy, the interest rate is the price of money. | ||
| Now, that's not exactly right because there's technically an interest rate for every form of capital. | ||
| It's a quantification of time preference. | ||
| But to be simple, the interest rate is where supply and demand of loanable funds cross, right? | ||
| There's a market interest rate. | ||
| People want to borrow and people want to lend. | ||
| And wherever that interest rate is, and there's different interest rates for different intervals, right? | ||
| 3 months, 12 months, 24 months, etc. | ||
| That should be a market phenomenon. | ||
| That should just be freely determined by supply and demand. | ||
| We should be looking at that on an exchange every day and say, what is the interest rate today? | ||
| And it should be between Private borrowers and private lenders, right? | ||
| So, yet we live in this world where that whole price is centrally determined and centrally managed. | ||
| Again, this is one of those policy tools that the central bank uses to manage the economy. | ||
| But the reality is, They're, you know, the government is the, one of the largest debtors in the world. | ||
| I think it is actually the largest debtor if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| I couldn't run my business where they're running this thing. | ||
| Oh, that's because you don't have a money printer, but if you had a money printer, you could. | ||
| And this is the core, this is the bottom of it basically is every business in the world is accountable to their profit and loss, right? | ||
| If you are not profitably solving customer problems, Then you go out of business and whatever capital is in that business gets absorbed into some other profitable business and put to a higher and better use. | ||
| And it is that kind of Darwinian pressure that drives, this is economic competition, that drives human progress, innovation, makes sure that we're efficiently allocating capital in a way that satisfies the most human wants possible. | ||
| So that is the profit and loss motive, right? | ||
| That keeps businesses honest. | ||
| Well, if you give a business a money printer, it doesn't care about generating losses anymore, right? | ||
| And inside of government, they call these deficits. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's the same thing. | ||
| It's a loss. | ||
| And when that business can just print money to paper over these deficits or losses, It destroys capital formation, right? | ||
| You're not actually solving problems that people want solved. | ||
| You're solving problems that the bureaucrats privately want solved for themselves at the expense of everyone else. | ||
| So when you see something like, you know, these bank bailouts or when Silicon Valley Bank went down and it turned out that they didn't even have like a chief lending officer, but they had a huge DEI department instead to figure out the color of the skin of the people lending the money, but they didn't have someone actually doing the math on it. | ||
| But then they get bailed out, and then they get, you know, I was with First Republican, now it's part of Chase, and, you know, this happens over and over. | ||
| That basically they can do all, the banks can do all sorts of crazy things that are not responsible, but then they just get eaten alive so that too big to fail becomes much bigger, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Heads I won, tails you lose, basically. | ||
| Like, they privatize gains over time, and if they ever have A loss event that's big enough, well, that gets socialized. | ||
| Everyone pays for it via inflation. | ||
| So I know that ultimately your answer would be Bitcoin would be the way out of that. | ||
| Or we could also follow the U.S. | ||
| Constitution. | ||
| I mean, the U.S. | ||
| resisted an implementation of central banking twice. | ||
| It took three attempts to get the Federal Reserve in. | ||
| And again, the book The Creature from Jekyll Island is great on this. | ||
| It still took this Very duplicitous kind of maneuver around the holidays and it was very shady to say the least. | ||
| If we could adhere to the U.S. | ||
| Constitution, I don't think we'd have a central bank today. | ||
| But given the nature of human greed and incentives and opportunism, we have one, and we've had one for a hundred years, and it doesn't appear that there's any legislation that can take care of that at this point. | ||
| Although legislation has been introduced. | ||
| I think Massey introduced a bill to abolish the Fed. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| But those power structures become pretty entrenched. | ||
| And this old quote from Rothschild, give me a power to issue a nation's currency, I care not who makes its laws. | ||
| When you can print money, you can pretty effectively guide the legal apparatus to your favor. | ||
| Surprise, surprise. | ||
| So yes, I view Bitcoin as a disruptor to gold, which is what the sovereignty of the central bank is really based on. | ||
| Central banks hold about 25% of the global gold supply. | ||
| So what would you say to someone who's sort of new to this conversation, they're making a little bit of money, You know, maybe they're not a total ANCAP or libertarian, but they're like, all right, I want to put some portion of my wealth into Bitcoin. | ||
| Like, how, where do you see the percentages on that? | ||
| How do you, what do you think like a sensible strategy would be? | ||
| Well, this, you know, you have to be intimately knowledgeable about that individual's aims, income, does, you know, all these things that I, I just don't know. | ||
| So I always hesitate to be prescriptive. | ||
| Like the most broad sense. | ||
| My number one piece of financial advice, you know, obviously this is not financial advice. | ||
| Well, this is financial advice. | ||
| Study the nature of money. | ||
| Study Bitcoin. | ||
| Just study it. | ||
| I'm not even telling you to buy it. | ||
| Just study it and see where it takes you. | ||
| Because ultimately, I think your portfolio construction should be a reflection of your actual convictions. | ||
| If you own something that you don't understand, you're going to have a bad outcome. | ||
| Even if you own an undervalued asset. | ||
| If you don't understand it, the market's going to move against you one day. | ||
| You're going to get emotional and you're going to sell it. | ||
| Or vice versa. | ||
| You're just going to have a bad outcome. | ||
| So I think Studying money and studying Bitcoin will get you out of the Keynesian economic nonsense. | ||
| There's a reason economics is what they call the dismal science. | ||
| It's because it's bullshit. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| It's this whole propagandistic nonsense to justify the government printing of money, and it has nothing to do with real economics whatsoever. | ||
| I'm not trying to brag here. | ||
| I have a master's degree in accounting and finance. | ||
| I didn't learn one stitch of Austrian economics. | ||
| I learned a lot of Keynesian economics and it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But when I got out of school and discovered Bitcoin and discovered Austrian economics, I found something that made sense. | ||
| So that's what I would encourage people to do is actually look into this. | ||
| I really hesitate to give percentages because that's, that's unique to each and every person. | ||
| Sure, so does that also show you how the educational layer is so connected to the political layer in a sense? | ||
| That the guys that are supposed to be learning economics to get out there and build Economies that can scale and do great things are actually learning really only the systems that will just increase the monster, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, that meta fraud term comes to mind, right? | ||
| Like, and there's a saying in Bitcoin, fix the money, fix the world. | ||
| And so if you take the, the flip side of that, it's what we have broken money. | ||
| And I would say that's the source of many of the world's problems today. | ||
| Um, Again, when you have this central government that cannot lose, it cannot contract, right? | ||
| There's examples, I think this was in Lebanon, where they had like the train authority Was still active. | ||
| I don't know if this is active today, but it was 10, 20 years ago. | ||
| And they hadn't had a track of train for like 30 or 40 years in the country. | ||
| It's like one of those things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, it's a free California where we both used to live. | ||
| They built, they were trying to build the railway from LA to, you know, to basically to Napa and it was going to go to Vegas. | ||
| And what is it? | ||
| It's like 30 billion in, or it's maybe even more 60 billion. | ||
| And I don't think any, it's like, where the hell is the money? | ||
| San Francisco spent $20 million trying to open a public restroom. | ||
| The misallocation of capital is so astronomical inside of government that it's mind-blowing. | ||
| And if you just stop and think about it, this is very intuitive. | ||
| Name one domain where government does anything effectively, right? | ||
| Like, you've been to the DMV, you've, if you've ever dealt with, God forbid, state-run healthcare, you know, banking, insurance, all the things that the state touches become very inefficient because there's broken incentives, right? | ||
| They don't have An incentive to be accountable to the preferences of their customers because they're backed by a money printer, right? | ||
| And if you're backed by a money printer, then all you want to do is keep the scam going, right? | ||
| Just let me keep printing money and to hell with how you feel about your customer satisfaction because guess what? | ||
| I don't have a P&L. | ||
| If I had a P&L, I would care about what you think. | ||
| The customer's always right in a competitive business, but the customer's always wrong in a money printing business. | ||
| So let's talk about debt in general, like sort of national debt for a couple minutes, because it seems to me that clearly the debt is never going to be paid. | ||
| We're never even going to put the slightest dent in it. | ||
| Politically, it doesn't make sense for all of the crazy incentive structures you're talking about. | ||
| Is that the ultimate argument for a strong military, actually? | ||
| That really, in some ways, like, if China just called us up one day and was like, well, we'd like the cash back. | ||
| Like, it's a good thing we have some nukes, in some sense. | ||
| Like, so this is connected to something much bigger than just money, is what I'm trying to get at. | ||
| Yeah, it's, um... Like, it's a mafia thing. | ||
| Like, it's at the end of the day, you only have to pay if your weapons aren't as big as the NSA. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| Might makes right, certainly. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| I think it's ultimately another consequence of fiat currency and central banking, though, because the reason there is so much national debt is because governments have figured out this way to borrow money into existence, right? | ||
| It's literally what they're doing with the Fed. | ||
| The U.S. | ||
| government issues this shitcoin called U.S. | ||
| Treasury Bond. | ||
| They can print as many of these as they want. | ||
| They sell them to the Fed to borrow dollars, right? | ||
| So the Fed now is already the creditor to the U.S. | ||
| government borrower at interest. | ||
| The Fed's taking interest payments right off the top. | ||
| The Fed can print dollars ad infinitum, so it's just total shell game. | ||
| And then the government can spend those dollars as it sees fit. | ||
| And that, you end up with a situation where the government has extreme indebtedness, | ||
| but it will just keep printing more money to externalize the cost of that indebtedness | ||
| onto the population via inflation. | ||
| So you can think about it this way. | ||
| The price inflation that you experience as a consumer, you are just paying for the slow motion default of your government on its debt. | ||
| You are working more hours, literally more hours, more years even, right? | ||
| You're delaying your retirement age. | ||
| If you're paying a 30% effective tax rate, that means you're working the first four months out of every year to pay the government, and the last eight months are for you, right? | ||
| And 30% is not that high. | ||
| There's countries with twice that. | ||
| This is the problem, right? | ||
| I've described this as institutionalized time theft. | ||
| And I think in a sound money world, you would not have this level of government indebtedness because it doesn't make as much sense to borrow a money that's appreciating over time because you have to pay back stronger dollars. | ||
| Whereas if the dollar is depreciating over time, you're paying back weaker dollars. | ||
| So the wars that this leads to, the conflict, You're spot on that this is it's an antagonistic force, right? | ||
| It causes countries. | ||
| There's an old saying that currency wars become trade wars become real wars. | ||
| Basically, that's the progression. | ||
| Well, if you could stop the currency war piece, right? | ||
| Stop the printing and manipulation of money, you could maybe at least Stymie that progression, maybe not stop it entirely, but you could at least slow it down or dampen it. | ||
| And so that is the hope for Bitcoin. | ||
| And then the other side of that, too, is the warfare itself is funded by money printing. | ||
| Like, there's a reason World War I and World War II were of such an extreme scope, scale, and severity, and that's because the governments weren't confined to just their own war chests or balance sheets. | ||
| When they ran out of money, they could print more, and they could steal the purchasing power from citizens using the currency. | ||
| Anyone saving in the currency, they could steal all of their wealth to fund the war machine. | ||
| And so we've seen, you know, Inflation and hyperinflation go hand in hand with, with global scale warfare. | ||
| So in some sense, that's what the, you know, people are worried about World War III or we're going to be in a war with China or Russia or some version of all these things. | ||
| And in some sense, it's like China's just looking at us like, well, we're not really going to have to fire a bullet because we'll just keep lending you money that ultimately will cause you to eat yourself alive. | ||
| Yeah, beating us at our own game in a way. | ||
| It's so funny you said that because my grandfather was a, He's a military guy and he made me remember when I was a kid, he said he had a thesis that China was going to take over the world without ever firing a bullet, just like you said. | ||
| And it's been very strange to see this kind of play out. | ||
| It just seems obvious, like otherwise why would they be lending us money at this point? | ||
| They know they're not getting the money back, right? | ||
| So you don't just keep lending someone something knowing it's never coming back unless you have some ulterior motive. | ||
| Well, they've been the biggest producer and net importer of gold globally for like the past decade. | ||
| So I think if you just keep, so they're earning more than they spend, right? | ||
| They're a net exporter to us largely. | ||
| We secure the shipping lanes. | ||
| They're recycling those dollar profits into treasuries. | ||
| But now they're starting to shift a lot of that into gold. | ||
| And we're seeing this shift not just with China, but other foreign buyers of U.S. | ||
| debt, treasury debt. | ||
| They're shifting out of treasuries and into gold. | ||
| So that's a signal that trust in the unipolar, United States-led world is falling, right? | ||
| We're moving into more of this multipolar world. | ||
| I actually don't know too much about your politics. | ||
| know who the superpower is today, we don't know who it's going to be for the conceivable | ||
| future so people are starting to swap into that age old trustless metal which is gold. | ||
| Do you think that in some ways, I actually don't know too much about your politics, I | ||
| have a sense as someone that you're a freedom maximalist. | ||
| So you're not into politicians in general. | ||
| But one of my sort of arguments for Trump would be that I think if he was to be president again, the world order that exists would just be like, oh, America has some sense about it again, or some belief about it again, or some order about it again. | ||
| And that in and of itself would at least deal with some of the problems in the system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Does that kind of work for you? | |
| It does. | ||
| I don't like politicians or politics. | ||
| I hope that one day we can evolve past having a popularity contest to elect one ape to rule 330 million apes. | ||
| I just don't think the math works. | ||
| I think it's nonsense. | ||
| I think political democracy is a scam, basically. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| We're founded as a constitutional republic, not as a democracy. | ||
| We need to go back to our decentralized roots. | ||
| All of that said, We are where we are. | ||
| The fact that so many people inside the fiat establishment hate Trump or are scared of Trump, that's a good heuristic for me to, again, I hesitate to say this, I'm not even going to vote, but I say if anyone that could be elected, I think he might be one of the best individuals to elect. | ||
| Add on to that, that recently a bunch of Bitcoiners got together and raised a hundred million dollars for Trump, and now he's shifted his position on Bitcoin. | ||
| Surprise! | ||
| That's how that works. | ||
| He's also said he was gonna pardon, I think, Ross Ulbricht from the Silk Road. | ||
| I know Julian Assange just got released. | ||
| I'm not sure if he commented on Edward Snowden, but he seemed to be more freedom-leaning on freeing some of these People that have been in asylum. | ||
| So, all of those things together, I would say, I don't want to say I'm pro-Trump, but I'd say those are things to think about if you're going to go and vote. | ||
| So my last question, are you bullish on America right now? | ||
| I do live in a red American state. | ||
| You're also on an island, that'd help. | ||
| Also on an island. | ||
| You might want to find something a little more remote. | ||
| If you find one, I'm happy to, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a question I've mulled over a lot, and You know, in one sense, no. | ||
| Like the wokeism, the level of just blatant lies that we've seen on mainstream media. | ||
| I mentioned the Joe Biden ice cream commercial. | ||
| It's like the wokeism, the gender, it just looks like a clown world 1984 nonsense. | ||
| But then on the other hand, we do have a lot of gun ownership and we do have this decentralized governance model, or the vestiges that are left of it, that seem to be paying some dividends, right? | ||
| COVID, right? | ||
| Oh, you wanted the pandemic to be over? | ||
| Well, leave LA and fly to Miami, and it's over, right? | ||
| Like, I was traveling a bit at the time. | ||
| Go to New York, go to LA, go to San Francisco. | ||
| It's a nightmare. | ||
| Go to Austin, go to Nashville, go to Miami. | ||
| It's a paradise, right? | ||
| There's nothing going on. | ||
| So, like, that was not the case as I understood it from any other countries. | ||
| It was just kind of one whatever country you're in, that's the solution you've got, | ||
| more or less. | ||
| Federalism ain't bad. | ||
| Exactly. Exactly. And that, again, is a vestige of that decentralization that we were founded upon. | ||
| So, yeah, we've got a lot of gun ownership. We've got this ethos and spirit of | ||
| self-sufficiency, independence, rebelliousness, even, right, where this country was founded on | ||
| a tax rebellion. | ||
| So there's a certain kind of type of attitude, non-compliant mentality that I think is still with us, that I am bullish on, I guess you could say. | ||
| So bullish on red U.S. | ||
| states. | ||
| And yeah, I think if the Bitcoin thesis plays out, and we're already seeing maybe the tremors for this, but we might see the United States fragment, right? | ||
| I think it's in this Texas state constitution that they can secede and become their own state. | ||
| We might see some of that, all right? | ||
| There's a great book, The Sovereign Individual, that was written in 1997, and it predicted the emergence of a number of things, like social media. | ||
| They said we'd move from a world That was defined by broadcasting and the one defined by narrowcasting. | ||
| They also predicted what they called anonymous digital cyber cash, which we think is Bitcoin, basically. | ||
| They said the consequence of anonymous cyber digital cash would be the disruption of the nation state as the primary organizing model, because it needs a money printer to get that big, basically. | ||
| And so when people figure out, oh, I don't need to be a victim of this monetary policy anymore, I can opt into a money that nobody can print, that you're basically going to reduce tax revenues roughly 50%. | ||
| for nation-states worldwide, which means nation-states will shrink about 50%. | ||
| So, in the long run, they saw us moving from a world of, say, 200 nation-states into one with more like 200 or 2,000 or even 20,000 kind of free city-states, this decentralization of governance. | ||
| And I think that's very exciting. | ||
| And I think that would probably happen here first, because we're already—the reason we're the most successful economic story in human history is because we were so decentralized, right? | ||
| We had low and predictable taxes, reliable rule of law, and you had options, right? | ||
| If you didn't like this state, you go to that state. | ||
| So I think the world will start to look more like what the U.S. | ||
| was founded as, assuming Bitcoin is successful going into the future. | ||
| And that's why I think Bitcoin is actually more American than the U.S. | ||
| Constitution. | ||
| I try to end on a positive note. | ||
| I think we did. | ||
| Good to you, man. |
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